rho

I wasn't planning on doing this just yet, but the lure of the new shiny is just too strong for me.

I'm moving over to Dreamwidth. I'm rho over there too.

Or rather, I'm stopping writing entries on LiveJournal and starting writing them on Dreamwidth instead. I'll still be using my LJ account for reading my friends page and for commenting on other people here, since my LJ friends are awesome and I'm not giving you all up. I'll also still be using Scrapbook for image hosting, since DW doesn't have any image hosting (yet).

If you want to keep up with my entries, I've set up an account to syndicate them onto LJ at rho_dw. Don't leave comments on there though, because I won't see them. If you want to leave comments, your best bet for now is to make an OpenID account on DW and comment with that. (Yes, I did just write that FAQ earlier just so I could link it here now.) Alternatively, wait until mid-April (or thereabouts) when we go into open beta, and I'll probably be able to throw an invite code for a proper account at you.

Like I said, I'd not meant to move over until accounts were available to the general public, but I changed my mind. For a long time, I've been in the situation where I'm thinking of lots of things I could write as LJ entries but no motivation to actually write them. The thought of writing things on LJ is still failing to fill me with enthusiasm, but writing stuff on Dreamwidth is exciting again, so I might actually start updating more than once a fortnight again. Stranger things have happened!

And just to reiterate again, I'm nto going anywhere as ar as reading/commenting is concerned.

Life is giving me a whole lot of lemons recently, which I could deal with except for the fact that I don't even like lemonade.

My mental health is, quite frankly, crap right now in many and varied completely unfun ways. But I'm not writing about that.

My computer is also still dead, which is annoying. It's fixable, and I know what I need to do to fix it, but I lack the energy to do so because see above. I'm also not going to write about that either.

Instead, I'm going to talk about one of the few things helping to keep me vaguely sane at the moment, which is Dreamwidth. I can't remember if I mentioned this last time I posted about Dreamwidth (crap mental health means crap memory! yay!) but I've been put in charge of the documentation project, for my sins. What this basically means is that I was given an account, some admin privs and a list of people who were interested in helping out and told "go make us some documentation that doesn't suck".

This has been a remarkably good way of making me feel both useful and competent. I already knew that I could write pretty good documentation. I did a bunch of that on LJ. What I've been pleasantly surprised by is how I'm coping with the management side of things. I'm happily making decisions about how we're going to do things, deciding who I want on my teams, assigning different tasks to different people, and generally just moving the project along in the right direction.

This isn't to say that, with hindsight, there haven't been things that I'd have been better off doing differently. Of course there are. But I look back at what we've done so far, and there's a definite feeling of pride and accomplishment there. For me, at least I get a lot more pride and satisfaction out of doing something that I didn't know I'd be able to do than something that I was confident with before I started, even if the latter is objectively harder or more impressive.

It's slow progress, still, but our FAQ is starting to come together. This makes me happy.

Dear Windows,

May you be repeatedly sodomised by leprous baboons from now until the end of eternity.

No love,
Me.

Since I got my new computer, back whenever it was, I've had surprisingly few problems with Windows Vista. Give the press it tends to get, I was half-expecting an experience not unlike crawling on one's belly across a floor strewn with bits of broken glass covered in lemon juice, but it's actually behaved itself rather well. Up until today.

This morning, I was happily sitting at my computer, playing Oblivion, keeping half an eye on IRC, and so on, when Windows Update decided that that very second was absolutely the best possible time for it to reboot to install its updates. Suddenly, without any warning, all my programs were shutting down, and my computer was rebooting. This is annoying enough, except that from that point on, the little fucker has refused to boot.

It gets up to the part where it says "Windows Vista" and has the little green scrolly progress bar, and then just stops and gives me a blank screen. If I leave it on the blank screen for a Long Time, I get either a BSoD, or a message saying that Windows couldn't start because the kernel was either missing or corrupt (\windows\system32\ntkrnlpa.exe). Needless to say, this is being written from my old computer.

Stuff that I have tried:

Restarting in safe mode (same deal; tried this before leaving the computer running long enough to get the error message about the kernel)
Restarting and selecting "last known good" (ditto)
Leaving the computer turned off for a couple of hours and trying again, in the hope that the planets would be aligned differently by then
Booting with the Windows CD, and telling it to repair the existing installation (doesn't work)
Doing likewise and telling it revert to a previous configuration (first time I tried this, it said it had done so, but Windows still wouldn't boot; subsequent times, it just hasn't managed to restore)
Prayer to Cthulhu ("Oh great Cthulhu, while I know that you are entirely indifferent to both my problems and my trifling and insignificant life, I am willing to offer my services to you if you help me, in the deluded hope that I may be able to provide some tiny measure of amusement to your eternal existence. Amen.")

None of this has worked.

Stuff that I have not yet tried:

Reinstalling windows.
Attempting to copy the required file from a CD over to my HD, using the command prompt I can get at when I boot from the windows install disc.
Canibalising an old computer for a hard drive, putting it into current computer, and reinstalling windows onto that to try to make sure that none of my data gets eaten in the process.
Partitioning current drive, and reinstalling windows onto new partition, ditto.
Doing one of the above, except installing Ubuntu instead, and hoping I can get most of my games working in crossover.
Contacting the people whom I bought the computer from, and having them fix it, since I believe it's still under warranty.
Giving up computers for good, and going off to be a nun.
Giving up computers for good, and going off to be a stripper.
Giving up computers for good, and going off to be a nun and a stripper.
Sacrificing a goat.
Asking LJ what the best resolution of this problem is.

In the meantime, expect to see somewhat less of me until I get it fixed.

And because I'm feeling extra spammy (for me) today, have a Random Picture Meme!

Instructions

a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd's mosaic maker.

The Questions:

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. Hometown?
4. What is your favorite colour?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favourite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favourite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you?
12. Your flickrLJ name? (Don't have a Flickr account.)

( the result )

As a follow up to my entry from the other day, yesterday, I received a letter from Lancaster council warning me that the entire of the city may get washed away during the next drizzle, and urging me to check that my ark adheres to EU standards. Seriously. My mail only gets worse and worse.

( well... )

I am currently reading The World Without Us by Alan Weisman which is an interesting if bleak and depressing account of what would happen if humanity disappeared off the face of the planet, and just how long various bits of our legacy would take to fade away (hint: the good bits, not long at all; the bad bits, a hell of a long time).

In the chapter about plastics, he mentions that we can't really predict how long it might take for bacteria to evolve that are capable of breaking down our left-over plastics, but that something of the order of 100,000 years isn't a bad estimate.

Given that humanity is unlikely to disappear overnight, though, I couldn't help but thinking, as I read, of a totally different vision of the future. I'm predicting that some bright spark will come along and evolve or genetically engineer a species of bacteria that's capable of eating our plastics. This will then be released into our oceans and landfills to erase our past sins, but we'll also need a replacement for plastic, since the plastic eaters won't stay put where we want them. So, we'll develop a new type of plastic resistant to our super bacteria. At this point if we had any sense, we'd heavily regulate this, and make sure that we didn't end up dumping bits of it all over the planet. Of course, we wont' have any sense, so we'll fill our landfills and our oceans again and start the exact same problem over again.

I did mention it was a bleak and depressing book, right?

I take back (a small portion of) yesterday's entry.

Turns out that I have finally managed to convince the DWP to give me some benefits (after months of dealing with bureaucracy and years of "I just can't face dealing with the bureaucracy") and that yesterday's letter telling me I couldn't have any was due to letters crossing in the post. Hoorj.

I can't be bothered with the rat about how the hoops and barriers in the benefits system that are put in place to discourage false claims actually don't, since the scroungers know their way around the system like the back of their hands, whereas people who legitimately need benefit are often put off by them. So let's just assume I've put that rant here and move on.

But anyway! The Government has now decided that I'm sufficiently broken that I deserve money from them, and today they plopped £328.43 of back pay into my bank account. Which is better than a poke in the eye with a blunt haddock.

Now I have to go and decide what I want to splurge on.

Sometimes, I tend to feel that I'm only pretending to be an adult, and I'm actually still just a kid, really. Then there are times like today. I don't go out much, and since I live in a fourth floor flat with my mailbox down in the lobby, that means I don't check my mail often. From the last week and a half or so since last check – and not including "to the occupier", junkmail, fliers and assorted other crap – I received 9 letters. Of these 9, there were precisely zero that were actually in any way desirable.

Four (4) letters from the DWP and/or Jobcentre Plus saying, essentially "your claim for benefit was turned down, but we need you to come in and see us anyway, and if you don't it may effect any future claims you make". Yeah. Screw you too.

One (1) from the environment agency, warning me yet again that my home (that same fourth floor flat) is at risk of flooding and urging me that it is absolutely vital that I give them my address and phone number so they can phone me at 3 in the morning if they think the water level is rising. Screw you too.

One (1) from BT telling me that for no! extra! charge! I could get a discount on my phonecalls so long as I take up a stupidly long contract with them, even though I already spend way way more on line rental than I do on calls anyway. Screw you too.

One (1) from Scottish Power, with an electricity bill. Screw you too.

One (1) concerning home insurance, saying "yes, we're taking your money and you're now covered". You don't get a screw you, since that's actually kinda good to know, but you're still taking our money, so don't expect me to be happy about it.

One (1) from the laser clinic I go to, sadly informing me that they're having to shut down at the end of February. You definitely don't get a screw you, because I really liked you and am sad that you're closing. However, Bush, Brown, Blair, and everyone else responsible for royally fucking up the global economy? You get a gigantic screw you for making this sort of thing happen.

This sort of thing never happened when I was a kid. When I was a kid, I got naff all mail, but when I did get it, it was almost always something exciting. A mailbox full of this much shit reminds me that I definitely must be an adult. Yay me. Can I go back to being a kid again now?

As ever, I'm late to the party posting about this, but that's never stopped me before.

In case anyone managed to miss it, half of the US employees of LiveJournal got laid off a couple of weeks ago. As is usually the case, this was surrounded with a whole lot of completely inaccurate "the sky is falling" rhetoric that managed to cloud the real issues involved. This doesn't mean that LJ is about to die a horrible death, but there are two things that I think we can take from it.

1) SUP care a whole lot more about the Russian userbase of LiveJournal than the Anglophone userbase. This is hardly surprising. They bought the company based on its Russian userbase and they were involved with the Russian elements of the site before they bought the rest of it. Obviously, that's going to be their main focus. That they're getting rid of half their US staff and just keeping the Russian staff around to do the jobs just emphasises that.

I'm not saying that the Russian staff aren't going to be highly capable people who can produce some really good stuff. They may well be. The fact remains, though, that the site is used in vastly different ways by the Russian userbase than by the Anglophone userbase. Russian workers are much more likely to understand and to focus on the needs of the Russia userbase. This is a bad thing for Anglophone LiveJournal users any way you slice it. That two of the people who were laid off (janinedog and chasethestars) are long-time LJ users who really understand how the site's community works and had been able to advocate for us only makes things worse.

Now, there are still good people left working for LJ out of America. The only ones I actually know are coffeechica and markf, but I am assured that there are other Good People who Get It left among the LJ staff still. LJ as we know it isn't going to go away any time soon, but this is very definitely a clear statement of SUP's priorities, and that's not something that's good for us.

2) SUP don't give a shit about people. The laid off staff were given less than a week's notice and no redundancy (severance) pay at all. I'm a realist. I know that sometimes people need to be laid off. I even know that sometimes there are circumstances where, for the good of the company, you can't even provide any redundancy pay because you're so strapped for cash. However, barring freak occurrences, if things are that bad, then you know about it in advance and can give more than a week's warning. Doing it the way that they did just shows a completely disregard for the actual people involved.

I looked at this and I thought, if the powers that be show that little regard for the people who have worked for the betterment of the company and the site for years, how little are they going to care about me? The only answer I could come up with was "not in the slightest". That I have a permanent account, and therefore never give them money and never generate any ad revenue for them certainly isn't going to help.

I don't think they're going to go out and yank my account or anything. To do so would generate a shit-storm that would cost them far more than they'd save by getting rid of me. The thing is, I can't help feeling that that's the only reason. Human decency doesn't seem to enter into it any more, and that's a worry. LiveJournal is built entirely on people. If you remove the people and get rid of the human element then LiveJournal is nothing.

Personally, I've decided that I'm going to get behind Dreamwidth. There's more information about it at that page I linked, but the thirty second version is that Dreamwidth is a project run by people who fell out of love with LJ, and want to create something worth loving again. It's going to be based off a fork of the open-source LJ code, but with a whole bunch of neat changes and additions on top.

The two main people behind it are xb95 and synecdochic both of whom used to work for LJ, having been users and volunteers before they were staff. They're good people, and they have a whole lot of relevant experience, both technical and administrative, that makes me confident that they can pull something like this off. There are also a whole bunch of current and former LJ volunteers involved with getting it off the ground, and a bunch of people who have just been users on LJ but have got excited enough by the new project to want to get involved. Personally, I'm getting involved mainly with documentation, because I want to be able to make something that sucks a whole lot less than LJ's FAQ.

We're not trying to go back to some sort of golden age of LJ. There never was a golden age of LJ. You'd have to have pretty impressive rose-tinted glasses to long for the days when the site would often move at the speed of a tranquillised sloth and when brad was left making business decisions that he was completely unqualified to make.

Instead, what we're trying to do is to be what LiveJournal could have become. We can look back with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight and avoid some of LJ's mistakes, and we can make the site that we want. LJ used to be my home. Now it's just a site that I use. I'm hopeful that DW can turn into my new home.

It will be a site for the users, by the users. It will be run by Our People. It will be open source, open expression, and open operations. It will be and is a labour of love. Hanging around with all the other people who are busting their asses to make this real is showing me just how much of a labour of love this is going to be, from a lot of people.

To be topical, Dreamwidth is a lot like Obama. There's a lot of hope there, and everyone has high expectations, that it's never going to be able to meet entirely. In both cases, I don't care. Obama won't be a perfect president. Dreamwidth won't be a perfect website. Both of them have high potential for awesome though, and I'm not going to let the things that will inevitably go wrong sour my opinions.

The other thing I've heard is that Dreamwidth may fall flat on its face. A whole lot of startups do, and trying to create an Internet startup in the current financial climate is possibly crazy. Sure. It might fail. It'd take an idiot not to acknowledge that that was at least a possibility, but I'm optimistic. And really, there's only one thing that you can say with absolute certainty, and that's that it will fail if we don't even try. That's why I'm getting involved and volunteering. That's why I'm going to move over there once it's up and operational. I believe in it, and I'm going to do my damnedest to make sure I do my part to see that it doesn't fail.

(I'll also add that I'll be keeping my LJ account for the indefinite future. I know there will be a bunch of people who can't or won't switch over, and I don't want to lose touch. After all, the whole endeavour is, ultimately, about people. They're what's important now and what will continue to be important throughout.)

I just had to share this IM transcript, for the immense wrongness of it all. As we join the conversation, rho is playing the advanced test chamber stages of Portal, and gnashing her teeth at their unforgiving nature.

[01:02:06] rho: whoever designed these levels is evil enough for the evil league of evil
[01:03:25] sarianna: ....YOU DID NOT JUST PUT GLaDOS/BAD HORSE SLASH IN MY HEAD
[01:03:48] rho: i'm sorry, but apparently i did :D
[01:03:52] rho: (ps, not sorry)
[01:03:55] sarianna: AND YOU'RE NOT SORRY
[01:04:02] rho: (pps, plz to be writing)
[01:04:04] sarianna: ....i still love you
[01:04:07] sarianna: *snrk*
[01:06:17] rho: it could be a beautiful romance. glados applies to join the evil league of evil, and then as bad horse watches her, she watches bad horse, and... yeah
[01:06:47] sarianna: .....dear g-d, NO
[01:07:11] rho: aww, why not? :(
[01:08:07] sarianna: can you imagine the music?
[01:09:25] rho: and believe me i am still a horse. and when you're dying i'll be still a horse. and when you're dead i will be still a horse. still a horse. still bad horse, bad horse, bad horse bad horse bad horse.
[01:10:59] rho: yay! i made it up that jump!
[01:11:11] rho: now. to figure out how the hell to do the next bit
[01:11:14] sarianna: i think i'm going to fall in some acid to get that out of my brain
[01:11:33] rho: my pleasure :)

Who here is on Steam? I am lowercaserho on there, and would like to add you all, so I can stalk you see what you're playing, so I can get a feel for what games my friends think are good that I might wish to buy, and can see where there are interesting opportunities for multiplayer shenanigans.

For those of you who aren't on Steam but are gamers, you really should be. Especially since today is the last day of their rather spiffy sale.

So. 2008, then?

Yeah. I've got nothing.

I'm sure that lots of interesting stuff happened, but I can't quite think of any of it. Oh well. I'm also fairly sure that I failed horribly at all the goals I set myself for the new year this time last year. This is why I set myself goals rather than resolutions, because then I dont' feel bad for breaking a promise to myself when I faff them up.

I was thinking recently, that 2009 will be the tenth anniversary of 1999, which was a watershed year for me in many many ways. 1999 was when I became irrevocably sucked into the Internet. I started hanging out regularly on IRC, and I met Internet people in person for the first time. It was also the year that I finished my A-levels, left school and went to university, which consequently meant it was the year when I first lived away from my parents, and first lived in a city other than the one where I grew up. It was the year when Is tarted doing stuff about my gender identity issues. I came out to people, I saw a psychiatrist, I started taking hormones. It was also the year when I first had a girlfriend (of sorts).

In short, 1999 was the year when I started to become myself, and even to become an adult, in a way. Before then, I was very much shaped by my circumstances, and being what I was allowed to be. From then on, I started to be what I wanted to be, to a much greater extent.

I shan't be celebrating all these individual anniversaries, mainly because I can't remember the dates for most of them. Dates just aren't that important to me. However, in recognition of 1999 (and because I think it's a good thing for me to focus on anyway), my goal for 2009 is going to be a simple one.

For 2009, I will come as I am and not as I should be.

Or to put it another way, I'm aiming to let go of as much baggage and anxiety as I possibly can, and stop worrying about how people perceive me and what they expect from me. Personally, I think I'm pretty groovy actually, and if people don't like it when I'm being myself, well that's their problem and not mine.

I wish everyone reading this, and especially all my wonderful friends who help enrich my life, a very happy 2009. May it bring you peace, love and joy.

I have a lot I want to say, but a complete inability to put my feelings into words. So here, have a couple of quotes from second-rate pop-culture to sum up what I want to say:

Gwen: "Why? Why go to so much trouble? I...I didn't ask for this!"
Lieutenant Thackeray: "There was no need to ask, Gwen. Everyone deserves a little happiness, even you."
Gwen: "A little happiness...? But I..."
Lieutenant Thackeray: "Wintersday is a time to spend with family. We may all have different blood and different backgrounds, but the Ebon Vanguard is your family. We care about you."

 – Guild Wars, quest "Wintersday Cheer"

I didn't even know myself what it was I wanted. Sure, I had friends ad associates; but I'd cut myself off so completely from any real emmotional attachments that I didn't even realize how much a part of life was missing.

 – Mara Jade, Star Wars: Vision of the Future, by Timothy Zahn.

Think that covers most of the main points.

Since I've not actually posted about this hypocritical bigot before, I suppose I'd best give the brief summary so you can all know what I'm talking about (copied and pasted from a comment I left elsewhere because I'm lazy).

Highlights of Bindel's opinions include the belief that transsexuals should be denied any medical treatment beyond "talking therapies" to convince them that no, there's nothing wrong with them and they're just deluded. And also the time when she bemoaned the expansion of the queer movement to include the likes of trans people, and said that she as a lesbian didn't want to be lumped together with the likes of cat-fanciers and devil worshippers.

All of which is just one particularly unpleasant individual, except for the fact that she was recently nominated for a "journalist of the year" award by Stonewall, a British queer rights group.

Understandably, a lot of trans folks (and our allies) got rather upset about this and protested, including writing letters to Stonewall and also holding a rally outside the awards ceremony. What's worse, throughout the whole thing, Stonewall and Bindel have painted themselves as the victims, and demonised and belittled the protesters.

I've actually been meaning to write about the whole thing for a while, but haven't managed to find the words for just how royally it all pisses me off. Now, however, auntysarah has come up with a way. In the spirit of santorum, I am proud to pronounce my support for the redefinition of bindel to mean:

"The smegma-like mixture of dead skin cells, gynaecological lube, stale urine (gives it its distinctive smell) and sweat that is sometimes present as a white residue on the end of a dilation stent when a post-operative trans woman withdraws the stent after dilating her neovagina."

Go forth and spread the good news!

1. Open graphics program of your choice.
2. Close your eyes.
3. Draw a cat.

( Read more... )

That actually turned out better than I expected. Which isn't saying much.

Jean le Rond d'Alembert
Took a piece of camembert.
Dividing it with great urgence
He tested its convergence.

When it was summer and it was hot, I took my duvet out of my duvet cover, and just slept under the cover. It was too hot for a full duvet, but I find it easier to fall asleep with something draped over me, so the duvet cover worked nicely. Then, as summer turned to autumn and autumn turned to winter and it got progressively colder, I somehow never quite got around to replacing the duvet.

Part of this was, admittedly, laziness. Changing bedding is one of my least favourite household chores, and anything that minimises that is a good thing in my book. Part of it, though was a stubborn insistence that it wasn't really that cold, and I didn't really need my duvet, and if I replaced it too soon then I'd not feel the benefit when it got really cold.

Today, I decided that it was now really cold, and I reinserted my duvet in its cover. Mmmmm, snuggly.

I've been thinking about names recently.

Someone on my friends list posted about them the other day, and I've been vaguely pondering on them on and off ever since. For most transfolk, picking a name is a highly symbolic thing, which many can spend weeks, months, or even years deliberating over, in order to find a name that fits exactly right. For me, my first name was picked in a matter of seconds and my middle name in a matter of minutes, using the "yeah, that'll do, I guess" pick a name at random method.

I don't regret doing things this way, and I certainly have no desire to be anything other than a Rachel. At least, not unless you count the odd occasions when I feel like making my full name "ρ" just to observe the abject havoc it would cause on databases. Fortunately they tend not to last for more than a few minutes at a time before I come to my senses, and have never lasted long enough for me to find the required text for a statutory declaration, print it out, and find a solicitor to swear (an affidavit) at.

I do, however, sometimes think that I might like to change my middle name. There are a few reasons for this, but mostly because I've never really connected with it, so it doesn't feel like me. This is what I've been thinking about just recently. Various thoughts have crossed my mind. I could just ditch the middle name entirely. I could ask my parents to choose a name for me. I could ask my friends to choose one for me. I could try to find a name myself which feels right to me, though anyone who's encountered my character names in games will know that namings aren't really my strong point. I could go with more than one of the options above and have more than one middle name.

I suspect that what I will do is absolutely nothing, because changing one's name is something of a hassle, and it doesn't really bother me all that much. I'm not sure whether that's what I should do, though. Thoughts?

This is a public service announcement.

I would just like to point out, for the record, that phoenixdreaming is both awesome and wonderful.

Yesterday (or earlier today, depending on whether you want to delimit days with sleep or with midnights) I received a parcel. Said parcel contained one of these and one of these which she bought for me to commemorate no occasion whatsoever, and for no particular reason at all, except possibly because she thought they'd make me happy. If so, her cunning plan worked.

Thank you, sweetie. I really appreciate it.

(And thank you also to dazz who I am led to believe was somehow involved in both aiding and abetting her.)

(Pictures will be forthcoming when I'm feeling a little more photogenic than I am right now. Provided they fit. I haven't actually tried them on yet. I ought to do that.)

Someone earlier asked me something about electricity and how it works, and we all know how little motivation I need to babble effusively about physics. So here we have it, a primer for lay people on how electricity works.

The basic principle that you have to be familiar with to understand electricity is charge. there are two types of charge, called positive and negative¹. If two objects have the same charge (both positive or both negative) then they repel each other, whereas if they have different charges (one positive, one negative) they attract each other. The bigger the charges, the bigger the attraction or repulsion will be. This much, you'll just have to take on trust. It's one of those things that "just is"². From here though, mostly we'll be working out how one thing stems from another, and won't have to take things on trust.

If you have a metal wire it contains lots and lots of tiny particles called electrons, each of which has a tiny little negative charge. If you put something else that's charged at one end of the wire, the electrons will then be attracted to/repelled from it, and move down the wire. As they move down the wire they can hit bits of whatever they're passing through, and give up a little bit of their energy. That's how electricity powers things.

Also, let's say that we put a negative charge at one end of the wire (A), and a positive charge at the other end (B). Our little electrons will be repelled from A and attracted to B. This would have two other effects though. Firstly, since the electrons had left from A, there wouldn't be any electrons left there³ to be able to go over to B. Secondly, lots of negatively charge electrons would be leaving A, so it would lose its negative charge, and lots of negatively charged electrons would be arriving at B, which would counteract its positive charge. With nothing to power it, and no electrons available to flow, a whole lot of absolutely nothing at all would happen.

This is why, in order for electrical things to work, you need to things. Firstly, you must have a complete circuit. this ensures that the electrons going out of one end are then effectively fed back in at the other end so you never run out. Secondly, you need to have a power source like a battery or a mains socket, which will stop the charges from balancing out to zero.

OK, so that's the basics. So what are volts and amps and watts and all those other things. Amps (short for amperes) are the unit of current, which measure how much charge is flowing per unit time. One amp is one coulomb per second. So if you have a current of 5 amp, that means 5 coulombs of charge are passing through each point of the wire every second.

Now, imagine that you're told that you have a road and that cars are travelling down the road at a rate of 10 cars per second. This could be a narrow road with only one lane, with lots of cars going very vary fast, or it could be a huge ten-lane highway, with the same number of cars spread out over ten lanes and each one going at one tenth of the speed as the cars on the narrow road. Either way you'd get ten cars per second. Electricity is much the same; you can have a 5 amp current by having densely packed electrons moving very fast, or by having a thicker wire and having them move ore slowly.

Every wire has a resistance (measured in ohms) which is analogous to how wide the road is. This is partly down to the actual thickness of the wire, but also depends on what the wire is made of. For good conductors like copper or gold, the "lanes" are narrower, so you can fit more lanes in the same area.

So, let's say I know that a wire has a certain resistance, and I want to have a certain current go through it. How do I do that? Let's go back to the road analogy. If I wanted to make the cars fall down from one end of the road to the other, I might put the road on an incline and make them roll down the hill. If I had a high resistance (narrow road), I'd have to have a steeper incline to create the same current (number of cars per second) as I would with a lower resistance wire (wider road).

The equivalent of this idea is voltage, which is measure in volts. Voltage is also called potential difference, because it's the difference between the two points that matter. The absolute height of the two ends of the road don't matter; it's the difference in height that's important. I you want to make a physicist twitch, mention a "voltage through something". This doesn't make any sense! If you want to make a physicist love you forever, refer to the voltage across something which is right.

A volt is one joule per coulomb, with a joule being a unit of energy that's brought in from mechanics⁴. So if you have a 9 volt battery, this means that for every coulomb of charge that's flowing it gets given an energy of 9 joules. The more energy an electron has, the faster it can go, so if you have the same wire, a bigger voltage across it will induce a bigger current than a smaller voltage.

So what about watts? A watt is a unit of power, which is physicist speak for "energy over time". In fact, a watt is one joule per second. A 60 watt light bulb uses 60 joules of energy every second. This energy comes from the movement of the electrons down the wire; as they ass through the filament, they bang into the other particles of the wire, making it heat up and glow, and then they come out the other side moving more slowly than they went in. Now, remember that an amp is how much charge is flowing every second, and a volt is how much energy each bit of charge has. This means that the power (watts) is equal to the current (amps) multiplied by the voltage (volts). So let's say we're in Britain where mains electricity is 230V and we're using a 60W light bulb. this means that a current of about a quarter of an amp is passing through our light bulb.

You may have heard the expression that it's amps that kill people and not volts. This isn't actually true. It's actually a combination of the two. You can't have a current (amps) without a voltage. It just doesn't work. It's like expecting a car to spontaneously start rolling down a perfectly flat road. On the other hand, you can have a voltage without a current – that's the equivalent of a steep road but without any cars on it – which is the reason for the expression.

There's a lot more that I could cover. The difference between alternating and direct current (AC and DC), capacitance, inductance, electric generators, series and parallel circuits, and so on and so forth, but I suspect that anyone who's managed to get all the way through this has their eyes glazing over by now, so I'll stop.

Any questions? Any bits that aren't clear? Any other points you'd like me to explain?

[1] The + in my userpic on this entry is because the rho meson that's depicted in it has a positive charge.

[2] Actually, I think that it can be explained at a more fundamental level with gauge symmetries and quantum field theories, but "it just is" works well for me.

[3] Actually, there'd be lots of electrons still there. Most of the electrons are bound up and aren't free to flow. It's the free electrons that could potentially run out.

[4] In an uncharacteristic moment of willpower, I'm resisting the temptation to tangent off into a complete guide to mechanics here as well.