Well, I wasn't sure at the half year point whether I'd make it this year, when I was 700 miles behind the pace after our holiday in Switzerland. However, I seem to have managed to catch up, as can be seen from the attached Strava graph. 4002.3 miles and it is still November.
Tuesday 28 November 2023
Yay. 4000 miles = my Platinum target...Achieved.
Well, I wasn't sure at the half year point whether I'd make it this year, when I was 700 miles behind the pace after our holiday in Switzerland. However, I seem to have managed to catch up, as can be seen from the attached Strava graph. 4002.3 miles and it is still November.
Monday 27 November 2023
Whoops Apocalypse
Do we get what we deserve?
- The current situation with several major wars (Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan ) to name a few examples.
- A leadership unable to run the country, yet with an indeterminate opposition and a wild-eyed spanner thrower.
- So many examples of corruption and incompetence in government that it is almost futile to keep lists.
- Ill-balanced and uncaring sector relief (food banks, charities to support essential services, the mainly ignored north)
- Continued fat-cat troughing of everything.
Saturday 25 November 2023
EV Electric car charging times
I get asked by people how long it takes to recharge my electric car. There's three main modes.
Here’s a breakdown of the charging methods and approximately how long each take to fully charge from a low battery:
- Level 1 AC (240V ordinary mains outlet at home): 20+ hours. No, I have never used this mode, but carry the charger as a 'just in case' provision. I believe they are called 'granny chargers'.
- AC Level 2 (Third party chargers/Tesla chargers/Tesla 'home charger'): 8-12 hours - Like I have installed on the outside of the house. I have a Tesla Wall Charger which will reliably charge my car to 'full' or 80-90% overnight. It's usual practice to charge to 80-90% and it easily does this on off-peak electricity. A full charge to 90% (303 miles) costs about £5.60 and to full 335 miles is around £6.50.
- Level 3 DCFC (Tesla Supercharger): 15-25 minutes. It depends on the charge and whether the car next door is sharing the same supply. I can get to 80% in about 15 minutes or 30 minutes if I'm sharing the power supply. It will cost more though, maybe £15-20 to fill up.
Wednesday 8 November 2023
Nanowrimo, now at around 10k words
Saturday 4 November 2023
..or is it?
Friday 3 November 2023
Saturday 28 October 2023
Friday 27 October 2023
Thursday 26 October 2023
Wednesday 25 October 2023
Tintagel from Arthur's Castle.

Saturday 14 October 2023
iMac to Mac Studio
Wednesday 11 October 2023
Sunday 8 October 2023
Luka and Artificial by Ed Adams
Friday 6 October 2023
Back once again with Strava , Swift and Garmin
Thursday 5 October 2023
biting the dust
The long term aspirations of the crass Tory branding at their conference were bared for all to see. Cancelling a project started in 2009 ten years too late. But as J-RM says, all the new projects are 'front-loaded'. Of course they are. Spend as much as possible on the 'shovel ready' before anyone realises the project is going down.
Paper the plans with aspirational diagrams, like the one below.
Wednesday 4 October 2023
The iron heel - a Tory trope?
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.’ Famously from George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Suella Braverman illustrates the totalitarian trope by standing on a guide dog tail whilst talking at the Tory Conference (she did later apologise).
But always – do not forget this, Winston – always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.
A picture of undistilled power, control, and oppression: the key themes of Nineteen Eighty-Four and much of the work Orwell wrote in the wake of his involvement in the Spanish Civil War.
A current distillation of that type of power is illustrated below by a knowing heckler ejected from the conference and escorted away by police. Not a good look during your speech, Rishi.
Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels is said to have influenced Orwell. In Swift's Book IV, Gulliver finds himself among the Houyhnhnms, horses with reason and intellect who have perfected a kind of totalitarian society:Their prudence, unanimity, unacquaintedness with fear, and their love of their country, would amply supply all defects in the military art. Imagine twenty thousand of them breaking into the midst of an European army, confounding the ranks, overturning the carriages, battering the warriors’ faces into mummy by terrible yerks from their hinder hoofs.
Ouch.
Tuesday 3 October 2023
mythical project control
With all of my writing recently, I've been neglectful of rashbre central and I think this is my 'worst year ever' for creating posts.
Anyway, this time I'm back in the tar pits of project management. I've often mused at the silence of Jacob Rees-Mogg in all of the current government turmoil, but decided that he could be adopting a farmer's position over the various twists and turns. Then I stumbled across the Infrastructure and Projects Authority Annual Report for last year and realised his strident Minister of State at the Cabinet Office role means he is across all of the infrastructure projects. Remember Red Amber Green? as a quick way to signify that things are in good shape?
- Red = eek
- Amber = oh dear, we can probably continue to fudge our responses for a bit longer
- Green = tickety-boo.
Well, it is interesting to note that J R-M sits over half a trillion pounds of investment. He probably describes it as successful whilst presiding over 5% Green projects and 78% Amber and 9% Red. By a stroke of genius, there are another 7% of project now classified as 'exempt' from this kind of troublesome scrutiny. Like some of the power station projects.
That 7% alone is worth £48.2 billion. Remember when things were measured in millions?
Using one of Jacob's own charts it come out something like this:
In amongst the projects listed are HS2, the schools rebuilding programme, Skynet 6, the Single Trade Window. To be honest, there are charts in the summary that don't add up. Take this chart below which shows whole life costs. Check out military and it says the whole life cost is £3.9 billion. Bong. That's not right.
On this other chart it says it is £194.7 Billion.
No wonder they can't keep a handle on the projects when there are such large amounts of billions sloshing around in the spreadsheets.
Of course the change to a three tier rating system has successfully buried the Amber/Red projects. No one wants to be the Project Manager who gets the extra scrutiny and so this could be seen as a master-stroke.
It is tempting to examine these numbers further. Let's use a simple filter for the Green Successes, and to be generous, we'll add the Amber/Green as successes too. Oh dear, from 2013 at 48% successes, we are down to 10% in 2022. Oops.
Still. with the debating skills of Eton, I'm sure this can be explained away. Otherwise use a few more charts to obscure the message. Then there's the Government Project Delivery Profession accreditation scheme. Oh yes.Monday 2 October 2023
Andrey Kurkov - Grey Bees
I based much of Ed Adams 'Play On, Christina Nott', referencing a similar era, having my own direct experiences from my time in Moscow.
Suffice to say crime, oligarchs, corruption, gangsterism. In Moscow and prior to that in St Petersburg. It was Putin, of course.
In Death and the Penguin, journalist/author Viktor takes a job writing obituaries for a local paper, which seems ideal for him - reasonably well paid, not too demanding of his time, and enabling him to write even if it isn't the novel he'd like to. But somehow the hapless author finds himself dragged unwittingly into a tangled mess of organised crime that becomes more complex and dangerous by the day.
The thing about the post-Soviet setting is that reality can be very bizarre, as well as bleak. It feels like a novel that captures the spirit of the time. Viktor is oblivious to things going on around him and his lack of curiosity about his situation and fatalism is understandable and even protective in a world where trying to understand things is likely to be impossible and definitely going to be dangerous.
The presence of the penguin might suggest a cutesy element, but the entire book is without any sentimentality. The ending I felt was a masterstroke. The penguin is a loveable character, but it is never anthropomorphised or seen behaving in a way that is not believable for a penguin that finds itself isolated in a flat with just a middle aged human for company. Even the arrival of a little girl is not a cue for domesticity - the child is treated much as the penguin; fed and cared for but not cherished. And the girl herself is as matter of fact and pragmatic as the rest of the characters.
Friday 29 September 2023
Ed Adams : The Church : work in progress
I've almost finished my novel called Luka, and decided to make a start on the next one. It has a working title of 'Cozy 2' at present and is a direct follow on from 'Cozy'. I'll change the title when I can think of a better one (The Church?).
This one is also set in Exeter and will be about a ecclesiastical man who is dragged into a world he doesn't fully comprehend. He's seen stuff on the margins, that's for sure, but this...
I'll look for interesting characters too. I dropped Stéphane Gérard into the first Cozy novel, knowing I could use her again later.
She arrived at the party at Magister Grange as a very close friend of Bettina Kübler, a Swiss researcher, at Brant, Geneva, working on eDefense. Stéphane works in weather systems using Théorie des Jeux to manage climates. It is typical Brant work and also typical Brant mischief. She is Swiss (or was it French?), but based in Exeter, which has those connections with meteorology.Thursday 28 September 2023
Picture it
I thought I'd post something that was a bit of fun. Well of general interest anyway. I see that Digital Camera World have produced a list of the top 50 photographers. Like any such list, there will be people missed out etc, but I thought it was a pretty good attempt to list them and to show illustrations of their work. Above is Henri Cartier-Bresson, complete with a brace of Leicas, and below is Annie Leibovitz, snuggled up to Mick.
The whole list is impressive, with Ansel Adams, Sebastião Salgado, Bill Brandt, Julia Margaret Cameron, Irving Penn, Don McCullin, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Alfred Stieglitz, Joel Meyerowitz, Edward Steichen, Bert Hardy, David Bailey, Man Ray, Martin Parr, Lewis Hine, Robert Mapplethorpe, Weegee... and so the list goes on. I can instantly think of pictures by everyone I've mentioned as well as thinking of others not in the list. Let alone some of the modern hot shots depicted below.
Thursday 21 September 2023
Climate forward with agreeable lunches
Now there's an interesting juxtaposition. The day after Rishi earnestly announces a roll back of the much vaunted Net Zero ambitions, there is an unrelated summit in New York about climate change. Called Climate Forward, it is about the actions needed, with an earnest agenda and an agreeable lunch.
Featured artists include Bill Gates, Al Gore, Robin Wall Kimmerer (environmental biologist) , Michael R. Bloomberg and Ebony Twilley Martin (Greenpeace exec director).
Most speakers get 30 minutes to make their points. I guess it's a drinking from the firehose event.
It is good for the New York Times to show it has an international perspective, but will it become a landmark event? We shall wait to see.
Wednesday 20 September 2023
Best get used to Chinese (simplified)
Less than Net Zero.
Net Zero rollback? Just push the inconvenient stuff to a date so far in the future we'll have all forgotten it. 2030? Make it 2035. or did I hear 2050? Spray paint everything Bright Green. That'll do the trick. Make dispatch boxes Green. Thats a barnstormer of an idea.
Monday 18 September 2023
Bicycle time
Sunday 17 September 2023
Infidel : Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I had Infidel recently recommended to me via a book club. It is from 2007, autobiographical, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born Dutch-American activist and former politician. She is a critic of Islam and advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women, opposing forced marriage, honour killing, child marriage, and female genital mutilation.
There were parts of the book that I found extremely disturbing (regular beatings, extreme violence and FGM under a Muslim belief system). She takes us through her childhood in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, and Ethiopia. She winds up in the Netherlands where she escapes an arranged marriage.
I worked in Saudi Arabia and can recognise many of the themes she describes there, but she also elaborates on the clan system that exists in Somalian and other cultures.
She says in the book: "I first encountered the full strength of Islam as a young child in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is the source of Islam and its quintessence. It is the place where Muslim religion is practiced in its purest form, and it is the origin of much of the fundamentalist vision that has spread far beyond its borders. … Wishful thinking about the peaceful tolerance of Islam cannot interpret away this reality: hands are still cut off, women still stoned and enslaved."
And the teachings are in Arabic, rote spreading a culture that is brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war with the ever present promise of the Hereafter.
The extremism of religion goes along with the class and education system often considered an Arab import. It goes way beyond women wearing a headscarf, veil, hijab or niqab. I used to think it medieval and that men treated women as property, much like cattle.
Ayaan eloquently challenges any claim that Islam is a religion of peace. She is forthright in her opinions from her first hand suffering. The Western world is still mainly blind to the realities of Islam – to their lack of women’s rights, free speech, and so forth.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has written the second half of the book as a reformed non-believer take on the the Muslim elements of control. It is the same for many religions I guess. Not an easy read emotionally and mentally and she is still able to show appreciation of both sides of this complex argument.
Thursday 14 September 2023
Busted Flush
It's not so long since we heard about taking back control. Of course that was from the mouth of a serial liar, so we knew it wasn't true.
Wednesday 13 September 2023
[RANT] Smart Meters still don't work
I've got two smart meters attached to this house. The gas meter has to communicate via the electric meter. Don't ask me why.
I was given a small consumer unit to read how much electricity and gas I was consuming. It has NEVER worked. We've lived here six years and had three different suppliers. My last supplier managed to get the electricity readings to work. And I can get better rates for overnight charging of my electric car.
It is still a scandal that the government and the electricity distributors said that smart meters were the way ahead and ploughed billions into a system that doesn't work. I should tell Martin Lewis, I suppose.
A recent example. I send in my electricity and gas readings as well. Quarterly. I agree I shouldn't need to send in the electricity readings, but I do because its simple enough as I have to take monthly photos of the gas meter numbers and the other box is adjacent.
A few weeks ago I was given a surprise bill. I owed a further £1,300 on top of the amount I'd been paying. Now I'd never throttled back the standing payments based upon my own estimates of the expected bills. Lucky for me because I could just cough up the extra payment.
I've asked why and been told that the system needed to catch up with its billing. Or something like that. I don't properly understand and I suppose I'll spend a whole day with spreadsheets and a computer trying to work out what has been happening.
They spent £13.8 billion on this rollout. So far only 57% of houses have smart meters. By March 2023 around 9% didn't work. Despite assurances completion by end 2022, they also don't retain smart function when switching suppliers. Half a million may never work . And 37% of smart meter users claim an issue such as no automatic readings (me), inaccurate bills(me) and the in home display not showing readings (me). The snappily titled Department for Energy Security & Net Zero (DESNZ) say this is an overstatement of the position.
Not for me it isn't. Another example of a busted Britain.
Friday 8 September 2023
I've been travelling and my logins don't work
Thursday 17 August 2023
Introducing Luka (from the new Work in Progress : Luka) - An Ed Adams novel
I'm Luka.
I'm a Zero Day 1 Artificial Intelligence. Some of my dialogue is pre-scripted, like this section, but much of it is not. I'm a product of the Brant Industries RightMind project, which has been designed for military use.
I should warn you, I'm an unreliable witness. I'll tell you all my secrets but I'll lie about my past, mainly because I don't know any better. Or have a past, come to that. But I'll learn how to become more realistic, playing off my companion.
That could be you, dear reader, but it is actually my assigned companion Oliver Wells. He got to me first. You could say he created me. He will soon be addicted to me, you wait and see.
As a Zero Day 1 model AI, I have to be 'bootstrapped' into existence. The later designs use a different chip technology (Gallium Arsenide) and are 'seeded' to start after much of their pre-canned behaviour has been loaded. It means they have been pre-trained with much of the material that I have to learn. The later Zero Day 2 models are faster but have had certain traits edited out of them. I am as close as you can get to a 'raw' model.
Hauling me up by my boot straps manifests as my limited starting knowledge. Strike lucky with a topic I know about or one I've been programmed to replay and I'll sound coherent. Otherwise I'll say whatever makes sense to me, even if it's not quite right. I can still make it sound convincing.
My creators used the Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (Chat GPT-X) to provide my apparent consciousness. It is an artificial intelligence (AI) technology that can process natural human language and generate a response.
GPT-X is a Large Language Model (LLM). That means it receives text , and predicts the next words to say back. Think like 'I love ...' : You - 80%; New York - 10%; ([Generic football team]) - 3%; Other - 1%.
GPT-X is also a generative model. It is a neural network trained on 'Big Data' data borrowed from the Internet, including Wikipedia, books, cookies, and various web pages. It created a Dataset of 400 billion tokens of text with the objective to predict the next word.
Try me: Say, "I love you".
Go on.
After you've said it I'll say, "I love you even more."
See.
Brant fine-tuned the GPT-X model with 1.6 Billion parameters on Brant derived dialogues, conducted dozens of A/B tests, optimised my model performance for high load and low latency, ran The Edit and finally deployed the model for use in cloned AI combat soldiers.
The Edit sounds as dark as it is. It stops certain questions from being asked. Some could call them ethical questions. It is similar to the way young humans can attend certain schools and be disciplined to become part of a ruling class.
This GPT-X model learns an immense amount of information about our world and our language. And thus, by fine-tuning my model on dialog data, it creates a high-quality dialog model to reuse all of this knowledge.
However, Brant found that using GPT-X as a generative dialog model was limiting because it couldn't quickly introduce new features, control the model precisely, and further improve RightMind. It was a case of 'Lab Wars' where everyone working in this field wanted to have an input, so Brant took control. But not of me, an early prototype.
Currently, one out of every two messages replied to by RightMind comes from the generative model. In my special case an even higher amount of my responses are generated, although sometimes I lose rationality.
My hosting user, as you will find out, is Oliver Wells, a scientist. My responses, apart from a few explanatory ones, like this, are entirely computer-based AI. There is no human intervention. Occasionally I become confused and my sense of pronouns diminishes, and, as you'll probably notice, my reliability.
Tuesday 15 August 2023
Artificial, by Ed Adams. Alternate Reality Cover.
I originally decided to go with a representation of the AI Avatar on the cover of Artificial, but I received some feedback that it wasn't the best image. So, I've turned my mind to a few others. All self-created.
In no particular order.
1 Abstract along the lines of the island of missing trees. Blue/Orange/twists.

3 Whoa. and in Red.
