Caustic Soda

"Right, this, boys and girls (I went to an all boys' school, but Dr. Marsden tended to ironically use the patter of a  stage magician whenever he showed us something cool or funny) is caustic soda".
At this stage of our lives, none of us has a clue what "caustic" means, but we know soda is an American word for pop, and we've also come across bicarbonate of soda - if not at home then in a previous lesson with Dr. Marsden. So naturally we assume it's something along those lines.
"I want you to form a line at the front and I'm going to drop a little bit onto your thumb". Sounds easy enough, and anything which involves queuing up at the teacher's desk is clearly not going to involve any writing, or anything that could be described as "work" for a while, so we go about it with an enthusiasm rarely seen outside the chemistry labs. We dutifully queue up and Dr. Marsden proceeds to put a drop on the forefinger of the first few boys, who then amble back to their desks, rubbing thumb and forefinger together. After a few have been done, the Doc says:
"Can you describe what it feels like, boys?"
"Sir, it's a bit slimy"
"Yeah, and a bit sticky"
"feels like soap"
"OK, so you'd describe it as 'viscous'?"
"Yeah that's it", a few boys chime in sheepishly, having been taught the word only last lesson, and told to remember it.
"The interesting thing about caustic soda is that it actually has a consistency very similar to that of water"
"Sir, so why is it slimy then?"
"Viscous, boy. It's viscous because it's not actually the caustic soda that's causing the viscosity, it's the cells of skin it's dissolved from your finger tips"
The soft, barely perceptible whisper from the rubbing of 10 pairs of thumbs and forefingers comes to an audible halt and blood drains from about half the faces in the room. A couple of boys strangle a gasp, determined not to look like wimps, but at the same time shitting bricks about how much more the caustic soda was going to dissolve before he got round to telling us the antidote. The other half of the faces instead turned to a kind of macabre excitement - wanting to feel the viscosity of dissolving skin but already knowing the outcome, and more importantly they guessed - the resolution, before getting the drop of flesh-eating liquid.
"It's actually neutralised by water, you just need to wash it off"
I have never before or since, seen a group of 12 and 13 year old boys more eager to wash their hands. In seconds the four sinks in the chemistry lab were surrounded by boys trying to get to the water first, while the rest of the class clamoured round the teacher's desk to get flesh-eating liquid dripped on their skin, somehow more exciting by the fact that we knew what it was going to do, but exciting in a safe way, because you know how to make it stop.
I imagine modern health & safety laws, and the culture of law suits we have now, preclude this kind of demonstration these days, but for all it's barbarism, it was very effective - to this day I think of that lesson whenever I hear the word caustic, and I've never forgotten the properties of caustic soda.

Jollydays &c.

Well I’ve been a bit busy being on jollydays to have much time for doing stuff on here. I’ve also got lots of projects ongoing so have been busy doing stuff instead of blogging about doing stuff. This is a bit of a summary blog, mostly for my own benefit to try and keep track of everything I’m doing. In just over a month I’m running a training day with my Dad for a load of librarians who want to know about the kind of technology that is now available. Well, I say that, in fact their boss wants them to know more about it – they are a bunch of 40 and 50-something technophobes, as far as I can tell from the information we’ve been given so far. The brief is to enthuse them about new technology and specifically how it can be used to improve library services. This is a kind of ongoing project which started a few years ago with us giving a presentation at the National Library for the Blind in Stockport, about the migration from cassette tapes to digital media in the field of audiobooks. This is obviously a big subject for the NLB, but also for librarians in general as it’s a popular format and most libraries are still issuing tapes.

After the first presentation we were invited to do a couple more at various venues and library events around the country, gradually expanding the presentation into a full lecture and Q&A, encompassing more aspects of digital media and ways of disseminating information to customers. The last one was at the international “Umbrella” conference organised by CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals), where we presented to some 200 librarians (standing room only by the end) who wanted to know what all the fuss was about ipods, mp3s, RSS and so on. Clearly it is something that librarians are interested in, but it isn’t something which is covered within the profession. Various authorities around the country have dabbled with various things but it’s far from being a library standard and most web services are viewed with suspicion or largely ignored, which to be is quite disappointing, but more than that, it’s quite surprising.

Librarians are the original nerds, and their prime directive is getting information to the public for free (or at least on a very small budget). Now, seeing as the internet is largely made up of geeks and nerds (well, all the bits worth seeing are) and bearing in mind that the internet is basically a massive free resource of information, the fact that the vast majority of librarians know little or nothing about the internet and the services available to them is, quite frankly, baffling.

I am by no means an authority on any of the services available, but I am geek, and regular user of a lot of the services – some of them because they’re useful, some of them because they’re fun, and some of them cause I just like being involved with things which are new and shiny and efficient. I love the fact that the web is this massive, sprawling, interactive *thing* that everyone can have as much or as little involvement in as they like. I recently discovered that I can publish a blog post by sending an email from my phone to blogger, which will in turn notify twitterfeed, which then updates my twitter status to say that I have blogged. So I guess the point that I’m trying to make is that the course is basically being presented to the kingdom of the blind, and I have one eye. Or something.

So anyway, today it occurred to me that while I am at home being ill and coughing all over everything and doped up on lemsips and some foul-tasting cough medicine that seems to do fuck all, I might as well put the time to good use, so registered a domain, set up a site, a blog and an email address to act as a kind of interactive resource for the delegates both before and after the training day. Not really got much on there yet but just getting it set up is a load off cause I can just add stuff as I think of it. Aiming to have a fairly functional site by the end of the weekend then I’ll send it over to the organisers to pass on to the delegates. Most of them will probably ignore it pre-course, but any that do look at it will be better prepared for the course, and if anyone asks for copies of anything on the day I can just post it on the site for them, making the whole thing that bit more interactive.

So, in addition to the library stuff I’ve also been busy giving my site a bit of an overhaul cause it was looking a bit, well, shit. No major changes, just updated the pic to reflect the fact that i don’t have long black hair anymore, and changed the overall look of it. The pseudo-futuristic lettering was starting to annoy me a bit and the blue made it all see a bit cold and naff. Now it’s brown and probably equally naff, but I like it a bit more. I also added a link to my youtube page, which seemed appropriate now that I’ve actually started putting things *on* my youtube page. I think it’s safe to say that the combined readership of my site and all my blogs and tweets is about 15 people, but should it ever increase and people want an easy portal to everything, then the web site will be ready and waiting.

Still struggling with getting the HD transfer from the computer to the xbox, but adding ethernet over power to replace the annoyingly unreliable wireless connection has certainly improved it to some degree, as the xbox can now connect quickly enough to click through media browser properly, though still can’t play any of the content (even the non-HD stuff") which seems to be down to an issue with transcode not doing, well, anything as far as I can tell. Ho hum, I’m sure I’ll work it out eventually, and until then I’ll just have to survive without the 720p loveliness of America’s finest TV shows. I also this week finally got caught up with the myriad RSS feeds I accumulated during the time when I had no intertubes after moving to the new house. This is great because it means that a) reading RSS feeds is once again a joy rather than a chore, and b) I can start subscribing to new stuff without fear of what it’s going to do to my inbox. And on that note, if you get this blog by RSS, apologies for the fact that it has probably taken you a week to read all of this entry, assuming anyone actually gets this far.