dominic hamon

It’s been a while since I’ve had any juicy stories to post, and this is a doozy. First, as always, a little background.

In the first week in this new apartment, I had an interaction with my new neighbour. He was halfway down the corridor outside my apartment, I was at the door. We were a good four metres apart. Oliver, being Oliver, strained at his leash to say ‘Hi’ to this new person. He didn’t bark, he didn’t growl, he may have panted excitedly. A few days later, we received word that an official complaint had been entered against our aggressive dog. This is Oliver we’re talking about.

I felt briefly outraged before putting it down to some childhood experience he’d had with a dog, and resolved to stay out of his way. A few days later we were vindicated as the building manager finally met Oliver and spent some time cooing over him before apologising for the misunderstanding.

Cut to today.

Between then and now, the only glimpses I’ve had of this neighbour have been as he’s been arriving or leaving in his car; there has been no interaction between us at all. Today, as myself and Mirto entered the building with Oliver and Eddie, we saw our neighbour and his wife entering the other end of the lobby. Being the considerate sorts, we stayed at the entrance to allow them to enter the elevator first.

Instead, the neighbour walked towards us in an aggressive manner before dropping some files he was carrying on a bench that runs along the side of the lobby. At this, Oliver reacts quite normally for a dog by barking. Once. Please note that he didn’t stand up, strain at his leash, growl, snarl, snap, slobber or bite. He barked. Once.

Our neighbour uttered a phrase that is about as diplomatic a conversation starter as assassinating Archduke Ferdinand:

“You should put a muzzle on that thing.”

If you don’t own a dog, that may seem like a reasonable suggestion. If you do, however, that’s akin to telling a parent to muzzle their screaming baby. I responded by telling him he was being ridiculous at which point I was informed that if I did not muzzle him, he would report my dog as aggressive.

It’s worth an aside here to note how fearsome this threat is. The power to have a government service swoop in and take a dog from an owner parallels that of having social services swoop in to take a child into care. It is a very powerful threat and should never be used lightly to a dog owner.

Sadly, at this point I lost my temper and called him an arsehole. Not my finest hour, I’ll admit, and I instantly regretted it. Well, almost instantly. First I told his wife she should muzzle her husband.

Anyway, once upstairs I realised I’d crossed a line and decided to apologise immediately. As they exited the elevator I stepped out of my apartment and offered my sincere apologies for swearing at and insulting him. I was told most emphatically that the apology was not accepted and to get lost.

Just as the initial shock of the altercation was dying down, we had some friends arrive and, three-and-a-half hours and a bottle of wine later had mostly forgotten about the incident, or at least had relegated it to the frustrating and disappointing folder.

Then it was time for the nightly walk so we left the apartment and went down to the lobby to find, wait for it, the neighbour, his wife, and two police officers. As we walked through them, I willed Oliver to be on his best behaviour and he was a shining example of well-mannered dogginess. As we got to the front door, I heard “That’s them, officer” and stifled a chuckle at the cliche.

Turning around, I was ushered outside by an officer who asked me to stay around to give my statement. I expressed my surprise and made it clear I wasn’t sure exactly what horrible crime I was meant to be describing, and he made it clear that he didn’t know why he was there either. Skipping the gory details, twenty minutes later the police were driving away as baffled as we were about their inclusion in this tale, and I’m now trying to shrug the whole thing off as the result of a sad little man feeling scared and not knowing how to deal with it.

I have a feeling this is not over yet.

This may or may not be a surprise, given where I work, but sometimes geeky questions are asked, and geeky responses are necessary. After one such conversation regarding how many ‘a’s are canon for the imperative “Khaaan!”, I decided further investigation was necessary:

It is clear that a strong power law relation is present for low eigenkhans after the initial spike at eigenkhan 1. However, above eigenkhan 100 we enter a new realm that requires further investigation. In both power law regions we have an exponent of ~-2.68 (-2.60 for Google, -2.77 for Bing), which should be considered the canonical khansponent.

This is a slightly extended version as I have more results than I did when I wrote the first email. I can now see that the extended tail above eigenkahn 100 suggests an exponential relation, however I still do not have enough data to create a conclusive model.

In fact, this data follows a distribution known as the Pareto distribution and is related to the Bradford law of diminishing returns. In this case, the distribution has x_m = 1 and α = 2.68. The expected value is, then, 1.6 with a variance of 11.12. Therefore, anything from “Kahn!” to “Kaaaaahn!” is within expectations, though there is no incorrect length.

…

Better things to do with my time? Why yes, why do you ask?

I have Google Voice set up for my phone, which is great as it makes me far more reachable wherever I am. It also provides a service that transcribes my voicemail.

Mirto has an accent that floats between Sweden, Greece and London. Google Voice is apparently confused by this which leaves me with wonderfully surreal messages that I like to imagine make sense to some parallel version of me. That or the messages have been translated to-and-from another language. Here is one I just received:

Hey, I’ve got that Boston’s in 5 minutes to take effect until about update,
I found at 12 o’clock shop. If you call me. Let me know what you want.
I was wondering. 14. I’m going to get the size of the coffee.

First, the great news: My better half has a permanent job! She’s been working on contract for a while and they finally realised, as I did some time ago, that they couldn’t possibly live without her and have insisted she stay on.

Now, the less good news: As part of her new permanent contract, our mutual friend must fly to Shanghai next week and stay there for ten days. This is very exciting, and a great opportunity for her to reveal herself as the rock star of apparel quality and vendor management that I know her to be, but I’m selfish and am going to miss her tremendously.

Finally the silver lining: NaNoWriMo starts this coming week and unlike last year, I don’t have the excuse of being new to the country, moving apartments or having a new job to fall back on and use to justify my failing to complete a novel in a month. And now I have an apartment to myself (and two dogs) for the first week.

I have also made some changes to my approach this year, which I’m hoping will improve my chances of completing the challenge:

Handwriting instead of typing
By handwriting, I hope not to get sucked in to the temptation of premature editing which should enable me to keep the creative flow going. Assuming I can get the creative flow started.

No planning
Last year, I started with an outline for a novel and a title, however once I stepped out of the bounds of that plan I became blocked. By not having a plan, I expect to be freer to just write.

Expect updates here as the month continues.