137 - bus of champions

Meetings in central London today, with Oyster card to the fore.

Main journey was on the bus of champions, the 137. Lets face it, the number 25 and the number 10 get lots of press for the areas they visit and are part of prime tourist London, but the 137 knows a thing or two also. From crossing the River Thames, to meandering through Sloane Square, past King's Road and all along Sloane Street, through Knightsbridge, Park Lane, Mayfair and finally to Oxford Street, it can show a sight or two.

And some of them seem to be new generation buses, too. Extra wide-windows and most of the cameras and general high-tech pieces look as if they were designed in, rather than added as afterthoughts. And they seem to be called Enviro, which presumably means they are good for the smog.

And the windows make it easier to take pictures, too. Here's a few snaps from the journey.

Older version of the same bus

Oxford Street specializes in buses and taxis.

and tourist shoppers

mainly buying Man U and Arsenal soccer shirts

Sometimes its best to know when to leave

furnishings with surrogate chicken

This afternoon I've been in North West London. Pinner and Colindale to be exact.

Visiting large furniture stores that may have interesting bibs and bobs to hide away the hi-fi and other miscellaneous gadgets.

But oh! The traffic today was mad. Both aggressive and stop-start. I'm used to London traffic and drive around in it quite a lot. Today, there were a lot of undertakers cutting up to make about a one car advantage in what were mainly gridlock style traffic jams.

So above is a picture of Colindale in the rain featuring a fried chicken shop pretending to look like an American KFC.

itsy not so bitsy?

I'm sure that little spider outside the window is getting bigger. I normally expect to see spiders indoors from around September, so if this one is thinking about it, then I may need to move.

clicky pedal

The damp weather today didn't deter me from taking a bicycle ride this morning. Instead of my springy mountain bike, I decided to take out my road bike, which is quite like an unsprung mountain bike with thin tyres and road style gears.

Neither of my bikes are very expensive although both are a joy to use. When new, they both had a wide range of "street credible" stickers on them to make them look like the price I paid. I peeled most of them off and the bikes then looked much sleeker and less gimmicky. My only challenge before today's run was that one of the pedals is making a clicking sound. I took a look and there's something wrong with the thread. So I've swapped it temporarily with the pedal from a smaller bicycle. It works fine, but does look a little odd until I can get a proper replacement.

vinyl

A background sub-project is taking some old vinyls and moving them across into digital. Purists may scorn this loss of the warmth of analogue recordings for the harshness of digital sound, but I'm rather more relaxed. With modern sound systems, adding back some dynamic range or squishing annoying clicks and suchlike is fairly easy.

I'm not going to be fanatical about converting everything, but there are some well played albums which are not even always available in digital. My dilemma is whether to record them 'as-is' (scratches, sometimes arcane equalization) or whether to clean them up in the process. I've decided to just use a basic recording program like GarageBand to transfer them because it will keep me focused on getting them converted rather than prettying up the sounds, and I may leave a few 'end of side clicks' as a concession to analogue.

rain

I missed most of the UK's rain a couple of weeks ago because I was mainly abroad. However, today is somewhat inconvenient because, like last weekend, I was planning some cycling excursions and awoke to several different varieties of bad weather.

To be honest, last weekend I cycled myself into the ground somewhat, having selected a particularly muddy and bumpy route requiring a camelback refreshment break before returning.

So this weekend the plan is for tarmac, but ideally with some moderate weather, because I consider cycling a leisure activity rather than a test of endurance. So I'm doing other things at the moment whilst waiting for the dark black above me to become at least a fluffy grey colour.

maximum exposure

I was reading Maximum Bob's adventures after he added a snake picture to his site which created a stir of extra hits a couple of days ago.

"Johanna Cardona!", I thought, "I'd better Skype a few myspace and facebook friends in case they've had similar experiences on google when talking about Ron Paul, Galilea Montijo from Big Brother in Mexico or any UK soccer WAG scandals and gossip.

I suppose my previous posts about Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and even the occasional references I make to YouTube inadvertantly add to search hits of dreamhost viewers everywhere. But then I noticed the "skype down" message and as I don't have an iPhone, blogging about it became the solution.

tags technorati : noelia eviction scandal video snake facebook youtube ron paul johanna cardona galilea montijo utube gerry skype down technorati google microsoft apple paris hilton myspace britney spears dreamhost iphone

remote possibility

Another part of the yellow sofa saga has been the other aspects of generally re-arranging the room. Unsurprisingly, there is a fair amount of technology in rashbre central, but the area with the sofas should really be a haven of simplicity. So I wonder sometimes at the large collection of remote controls that progressively accumulate. Television, DVD, Sky, Hi-fi, Remote iPod, Apple Mini, VCR(!). Even the fireplace has a remote control. I can't be bothered to count the number of buttons, but it must be over 500, especially if I count the typing keyboard for the Mac Mini.

And selecting certain lesser used functions like playing a Video Cassette becomes a short excerpt from some kind of mission control movie.

So, like I recycle the shiny boxes from CDs and DVDs, I thought it was about time to rationalize the buttonage and make it simple to switch things on to do what is required.

My current experimental choice is a little Logitech unit. I started with the cheapest programmable unit they make, because I wanted to test the idea. The first time you use it, it knows nothing. You have to log on to a website, tell the website what you want to control (easy selections like "Sony TV") and then tell the website the specific boxes needed for any particular activity (like "Watch TV", "Listen to CD" etc. I didn't expect this to work very well, but to my pleasant surprise, in about 20 minutes I had all the units programmed into the website and then downloaded the control sequences to the controller.

And amazingly, everything works and is simple to use. So to watch Sky, I press "Watch TV" and all the right controls operate to make the Sky start-up and then the buttons on the unit also control the fast forward, pause and other functions that go with Sky+. Same for recording DVDs (an old challenge) or playing iTunes using the television as a Juke-box "Play Music".

Next step is to hide all the units away.

tags technorati : rashbre television remote controls logitech audio visual sony bravia harmony

man proposes...

Several hectic moments today as I travelled around to various meetings. Along the way I found myself in a rather special Picture Gallery, which initially impressed me simply as a building, then I noticed the pictures and then i noticed, hmmm, "Some of these are quite famous".

Quite unexpected, but as an example, I've picked the rather gory one by Sir Edwin Henry Landseer "Man Proposes, God Disposes", showing the loss of Sir John Franklin's expedition to find a North-West Passage, in 1845.

This circa 3 metre by 1 metre picture illustrates two polar bears, their fierce and brutal natures uncompromisingly portrayed, tearing up the remnants of the expedition. Landseer is more known for paintings of horses and dogs, but also designed the huge lions at the base of Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square.

tags technorati : rashbre landseer painting art fierce polar bears

been a long time

It's been some time since I did any guitar strumming. A few days ago I had a bash and we had some of my usual cacophony scraping the walls, with modest accompaniment from a drum beat. Then yesterday the new version of iLife arrived for the mac and I dutifully installed it.

Casually inspecting GarageBand, I noticed the Magic Band facility, which is new. So I whiled away five minutes making the attached backing track, which can add a new dimension to my twanging.

Here's my first unadapted composition - I've resisted the temptation to add any grunge or effects so that the pristine output from Magic Garage Band can be noted - and played along to!
beats workin' southside blues
ok. a grungy version too.
beats workin' southside grunge
and a pub version.
beats drinkin' southside

enough.

tags technorati : rashbre guitar tunes magic band garageband apple mac ilife mp3 backing tracks gdec

how to dismantle an iMac

I still get a lot of hits about mending iPods (because I had to fix one once) - quick version, use a guitar plectrum to get inside the case. So I though I'd add an entry like it about an iMac.

So here's a picture of the new iMac 20 inch Aluminium Chassis version, released a few days ago. Okay, I know. the front is missing. Still, it looks pretty densely packed. My advice for dismantling... don't.

tags technorati : rashbre iMac mac apple dismantle iPod broken

blurry

After all that fun with a White Van, which had lots of special bolts to remember to close without trapping the fingers, it was back to a normal car.

Highlighted all the more by glancing around at the nearby inhabitants of the car park.

Aston Martins are not exactly commonplace, so to see two (both gun-metal grey) with a white Porsche parked in between is probably unusual even in somewhat blasé central London.

tags technorati : rashbre aston martin london cars car park