spooky castle town with mud

Kalmar in Sweden is on the eastern coast around 300 kilometres south of Stockholm. It was supposed to be the venue for a two day pause in the travelling, in what was expected to be a delightful hotel set in grounds overlooking a tranquil view of the sea.

Not quite.

The hotel was in grounds which were were being converted into an area to contain a new cultural centre. Most of the surroundings were a building site. There was no real view and the room was really too small to house occupants and baggage at the same time.

Nothing for it, after a stroll around the town, it was easy to make a decision to pull the plugs and move on a day early. Late afternoon meant an overnight stop here was inevitable and so evening saw me pulling a heavy case or two up some steep stair into a poet's garret.

By the second drink everything seemed better accompanied by a plan for an early morning departure.

Its reassuring to know that a whole trip would have some moments of texture and this was one of those episodes. So after a walk through the 'muddy' parkland adjoining the castle (a great test for some recently acquired flip-flops), it became an evening watching Swedish subtitled television and then preparation for an early departure towards the Gotecanal and onward towards Stockholm.

making it all fit together

One of the interesting features of this type of vacation is the road trip nature of it. Sometimes I take vacation all in one place, or maybe two, and other times keep on movin'.

This is one of the latter and already just a few days in, there has been considerable change of scene and different locations. At the moment, its been a combination of sea, lakes and hills with small towns mainly with mediaeval times in their backgrounds. As the journey progresses there will be mountains and cities as well, but even after few days, it starts to become difficult to remember the exact sequence of travel. I can see why people keep journals.

And the journal I've cracked into whilst travelling is the Alistair Campbell extracts related to the Tony Blair years. I'd decided to dislike this almost before I started it, but have actually found it quite interesting and strangely human in the way it describes things. Campbell has a reputation as a spin meister and presumably ther has been some fairly careful editing of the content of the diaries, not least to stay legal in what is said.

Nonetheless, the amount of minor detail, dealt with in a clipped journalistic style, suggests that large chunks of the text must be fairly accurate renderings of what actually happened. Being a day by day account, it would be quite difficult to retrospectively doctor the entire storyline, particulalrly where so many different events overlap.

I'm only on about page 100 at present-just past the Blair visit to Clinton at the White House, but admit, to my slight surprise, that I'm enjoying this story of the yet to be elected Tony Blair and his band of politicos as they try to make a plausible bid for power.

I'm not sure whether there are lessons being learned, but I do expect that Campbell's journal will become one of the defining descriptions of the Blair years.

faaborg

Moving through Denmark today, past a few of the Kros, that stand by the roadside. "What's a Kro?" I hear you ask.

Its a kind of Danish 'Bed and Breakfast' location - very unique and family owned and somewhere I've stopped at in past visits to Denmark.

Today we stopped at one on the way to Faaborg and enjoyed a lunchtime Smorgasbord of herring, cheese and ham, before moving on to Faaborg for our overnight stop.

We had not realized that Faaborg was having a special evening party in the town, complete with a rock band and stopped a while to listen before, tonight, dropping in to a local Fotex supermarket to pick up a light snack to take with us for the evening.

nightwatchman and triple XXX

There's a great old progressive rock track called the Nightwatchman. I don't know who its by, but its someone like ELP, King Crimson or Brian Eno and has some haunting electric guitar chords which wail into the sky.

I was in the town of Ribe tonight and wandered out from the Hotel Dagmar at 22:00 (in the daylight) to take the tour of the town with the Nightwatchman. There were about 30 of us that had decided to join him as he sang his verses to us, the town and the sky and patrolled to the edges of Ribe, which is a small mediaeval town in southern Denmark.

It did progressively get darker, but the photo I took of the Hotel at the end of the tour was somewhat later, when the hotel was shutting off the lights to leave just candles burning for the short night.

The town of Ribe was once a major centre in Denmark; the largest trading port and did well until around 1580 when there was a bad town fire and then 1635, when there was terrible flood, followed by plague from which Ribe didn't ever really recover its trading position.

"Dronning Dagmar ligger i Ribe syg - Queen Dagmar lies in Ribe, sick", as the old Danish folk tune goes,

In some towns in Europe you see the three XXX on signs and as a symbol. Amsterdam has it as the town symbol, for example. They mean, if you see them, no Fire, no Flood, no Plague.

XXX

préjudice

A slightly out of sequence post, because I actually saw the Die Hard 4.0 movie on Sunday. I did originally post a link to the trailer, but had to delete it because it was one of those fancy film studio links to a version that insisted on autostarting, which I felt was kinda rude. So here's the trailer with the option fo you to click to start it.

My main gripe though, was the cinema's other trailers for films before the one with Bruce started. There were three different "lets be rude to the French" situations. If it had been about, say, a social minority, there would have been an outrage, but it stuck me that the American studios are using France as a new place to kick.

Humour is fine, and I know the Anglo Saxons don't always see eye to eye with the French (if you take my 1066 Norman meaning) but this seemed to be that the studios have decided that French bashing was okay. Not cool. Très répréhensible.

The film? Does what it says on the label - my summary:"Computer psycho steals password to US infrastructure involving unwitting cop Bruce. More determination to resolve after daughter kidnapped. Car, helicopter, plane chases and explosions as Bruce resolves in oily vest with final fix-up ambulance scenes. Fade to 5.0"

sun

I consider the sun to be a powerful symbol and rashbre central uses it in the main blog logo (stonehenge at summer solstice). So imagine the delight of visiting the land of the midnight sun. Admittedly, the trip is first via the delightful Denmark (of which I am sure there will be more), but then on to a place which manages to keep the sun in the sky throughout July even if it does have to pay it back in December.

So on the way, it was a great pleasure to see what were effectively two sun-sets, one behind some clouds and then a short time later one against the horizon of the sea.

harwich to esbjerg

Next stop, Esbjerg. That's after travelling to Harwich to catch a ship across the North Sea. I'll be in Scandinavia for the next few days and probably have limited access to internet and so forth. The bags are packed and I'm ready for a 'port out starboard home' crossing and then some unstructured time in Denmark and Sweden.

tiger tattva

Now that I've found that streamclip thingy, its so quick to recut some old videos onto iMovie. This was something from 8mm video, which I originally edited ages ago on a PC with Adobe Premiere and now I've just dropped it back into iMovie, rebalanced the colour and added some quick titles.

Five minutes and a mini tiger epic.

I was editing it at DV quality but have squished it down to 3Mb on disk so that it loads quickly. That's smaller than the original mp3 soundtrack for the whole movie.

Harry Potter plot ending spoiler dilemma

Someone sent me the seventh Harry Potter ending.

It was a few weeks ago.
I don't know whether its true.
The whole thing may be a hoax.

Gabriel allegedly hacked the Bloomsbury Publisher website and archived the story ending found on an employee computer. I decided not to publish it at the time it was sent, back on 19th June. Of course it would have rolled into my June archive by now...

Don't look and I'm not giving you a link.

tags technorati : rashbre harry potter harry potter spoiler

sunday morning mug of tea

Early morning visit to the shops to buy some milk, oh, and a newspaper to read.

The Observer.

As well as another newspaper to get the free gift of the Prince album, which was inside a plastic bag with the magazines.

UPDATE: The CD is pretty good too. Prince fans won't be disappointed!

tags technorati : rashbre prince Daily Mail Mail on Sunday observer

streamclip

I'm getting ready for some vacation during next week; heading North towards Scandinavia. I've decided to take a camcorder in the back-pack and thought it would be interesting to experiment with a hard disk based system. So I'm using a very small Sony DCR-SR72E which is not supposed to be compatible with Apple computers. There were warnings all over the box.

Of course, I threw away the box at Heathrow airport to simplify carrying the bits and then did the same with the manual and the rather basic software provided when I got home. Instead I just plugged it into my iMac to see what would happen. "Hello", it said, "I'm a Sony camcorder". Then it showed me a directory structure and all of the little MPEG2 sections of test video I'd recorded. Yippee.

So I dragged them into iMovie just to see what would happen. Much faster to edit than tape, and more selective too.

They all played, but no sound. So I looked at the file type - MPEG2 (muxed), it said. Hmm.

So what can I use to unscramble the perfectly good sound from inside the files?

Streamclip.

I then dragged the files from the camcorder onto Streamclip. "what format would you like?", it asked, and gave me about 50 to choose from, including High Definition upscaling.

I settled for a simple, morose, broken down frankfurt.mov made from a few of the test clips and Yay, everything worked with conversion much faster than realtime playback.

You can enjoy me having a hotel breakdown in the video but, hey, I now have a perfectly fine hard disk based camcorder thats smaller than my SLR and works brilliantly with my Mac. Even if it says it won't on the box.

Expect Nordic video later!

sign o' the times

rashbre central likes the music of Prince and indeed we have tickets for the upcoming concerts at the O2 dome in August having been too jetlagged to see him at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas earlier in the year.

In the UK Prince sold around 80,000 copies of his last CD, so its kind of interesting to see that the new one called Planet Earth is to be given away on Sunday in the Mail. The normal circulation of the Mail on Sunday is about 2.4M and this time they are printing 3 million, of which 50,000 have been ordered by the HMV Shop.

With the structural changes to the music industry, this is an interesting development, although we don't want music to become so free that it eventually stops being created.

Purple Rain sold sold more than 11m copies and with the gigs the artist formally known as Prince was doing in Vegas every night and the upcoming 21 nights at the Dome, I don't think he is short of a fan or two.

tags technorati : rashbre prince Daily Mail Mail on Sunday