repair laptop missing or loose key on keyboard

The entry, which was originally for a Thinkpad but works for other laptop keyboards is here

the buzz of the city

Another logistically challenged day today. I have meetings dotted around and need to do some train travel. I also have some phone conferences where ideally I have my PC switched on, but it could all get quite difficult to fit together.

The theory of sitting in cafes in London on "the Cloud" WiFi and plugged into phone conferences sounds okay, but there is usually so much noise from expresso machines, ambient music and coffee drinkers that conference calls don't really work unless its a listen only kind of deal.

So I shall have to find somewhere quiet for the calls and be offline.

rashbre london noise expresso audio+conference

nearly wordless wednesday

The other fifth element is garlic

minor character about to get a speaking part

Most people who saw Gerald for the first time looked away. He normally lived in a squat around the Balls Pond Road. He called the area Hoxton - which is an up-and-coming area - but the reality was that he lived close to some deserted warehouses and by a Saturday ad hoc marketplace where mainly Polish and other middle europeans would sell minor goods directly from cardboard cartons. Gerald lived by his wits and scrounged a living from small errands and some petty crime.

He usually walked around in a grey raincoat, with a knotted scarf and a baseball cap. In a clean and well fitted version this could have made Gerald look quite respectable, but with the uncared for versions, the overall impession was desolation.

There was rain this evening, a grey, drizzling rain that had persisted all day. It had the effect of flattening the landscape, and blurring detail. Car lights were smeared and there was a deadening of sound. This was not a good rain, just a persistent one.

Gerald was shuffling back to where he normally lived. He looked as grey as the surroundings and blended well into the general misery. Things had not always been this way and Gerald had gone through a good education until the point where everything slid. He drifted South to London as a missing person. Now he was well versed in the art of street life, which was his main means of survival.

tunnel vision

I travelled to Canary Wharf this afternoon and as I arrived at the train station there I glimpsed some smoke rising from across the river. It actually looked like two separate locations and I thought someone must be having a large bonfire with some rubber tyres or something.

Then I walked to my meeting and because of the stories of people wandering around lost for half an hour in Canary Wharf before they find the right building, I'd made a mental map of where I was going. It also meant I could get there completely underground - much of Canary Wharf and Canada Square are linked with underground malls and walkways.

So I arrived at my meeting and after travelling in a lift, said by way of small talk to the people I was meeting that I was disoriented and didn't know which way I was facing. So one of them said, "You're facing towards the fire"...

At this moment I realized that the smoke I'd seen earlier wasn't just a couple of pirellis but was a large warehouse at the site of the new London Olympic 2012 (c) (tm) (r) area. No prizes for my earlier lack of observation!

back of a bus?

I learned a new phrase a few days ago - 'bus wrap'. Its the technical term for what they do with London red buses now when they cover them in a large advertisement. The smaller 'taxi wrap' is the same idea.

Londoners are pretty used to being blasted with advertising from all directions and I've noticed the emergence of animation now on the sides of buses, as well as on the backs of the pedicabs (rickshaw taxis), some of which now seem to have the equivalent of flat screen televisions attached to them.


As long as the traffic advertising doesn't start to become overly distracting, like the famous 1990s advertisement around Piccadilly which created multiple minor traffic bumps the day it was first displayed.

birthday lunch

The Lanesborough today, at Hyde Park Corner, for my birthday lunch.

The Lanesborough is in high Bentley country and there were three or four parked outside when we arrived.

A piano and double bass type of occasion, with a traditional Sunday lunch, which included a splash of fizz and took several indulgent hours.

We dined in the conservatory and then wended our way through Belgravia, past Sloane Square and into Chelsea. An enjoyable day for all of us, and for me including the gift of a CD by Bat for Lashes and a signed copy of the latest Douglas Coupland novel, complete with the almost unobtainable Glove Pond, by Roger Thorpe. More of that later.

posh bangers

Saturday has been good for bringing the novel writing back towards target. I had the main story-line and the two other sections which I'd written whilst travelling during the week. I've somehow stitched them back together and the three pieces are beginnng to form the basis for the story.

I've also managed to have a few of the characters meeting in places from some of my recent travels. There's the canal-side discussions in Birmingham, action in amongst the houses of Hoxton and a scene outside the Market Porter in Southwark, although no-one actually gets to eat the posh sausages.

Its interesting to be able to base the story-line in some real and recent settings. I must admit that when I was in the Epernay bar in Birmingham the week before NaNo started, I even started to sketch a picture of the surroundings near to the window facing the canal.

Adding my original 3900, plus around 1600 in one separate piece from my flight to Nice and another 2000 waiting at the airport on the way back, plus today's exertions has got me to around 16,000 words, which is probably more or less back on track. I'm not quite ready to post an extract, but there is definitely a story forming.

not mellow

You can tell from the double yellow lines that I'm back in the 'no parking' areas of the metropolis. Its a beautiful sunny day, but I need to spend at least part of it tapping away if I'm to get anywhere near back on track with the November novel writing. I dare not even look at the word count until I have worked out what down-and-out Gerald and the mysterious Anya are doing, let alone why the Italians decided to meet in Birmingham.

I am just getting to that stage though, where the characters seem to start to want to do things by themselves, based upon the logic of their personalities. I still don't have a clue where the plot-line will lead, but if I follow the line long enough I hope the seemingly parallel tracks will blossom into a beautiful flower.

sun, stars and you?

The last few days I have had be zipping around in France and publishing even a short blog entry has been a minor challenge. I usually blog from a mac and all of the drag and droppy things make everything very quick. Using my Thinkpad means a lot more button pushing and general futzing.

But one of the interesting things during my trip was running into a good friend from Ireland who is also a blogger. We've known each other for quite a few years "in real life" and over a few glasses of drink in a noisy bar, we caught up on what each other had been doing and recounted each others' twists and turns providing advice and good counsel along the way.

And amongst it, for a while, we flipped to chatting about our respective blogs. My 'twinkly eyed' friend is something of a political blogger and describes some situations affecting the Republic of Ireland World in an attention grabbing and deliberately controversial style. Part of the challenge with the political blogs is getting the audience and I suppose just as importantly getting a debate running. We've all seen the newspaper blogs such as Grauniad or Torygraph with their extensive comment chains on the items posted.

So I described a few of the techniques the politico blogs use to increase traffic (linkfests, trackbacks etc.) and some of the pieces of technology used to track who is looking at what. I even said I'd put it into an email at some point, so I'd better do that as well. The strange thing is, I don't think either my friend or I have really chatted 'in real life' about the technology of blogging to anyone else.

We both agreed that we'd started out almost whimsically and probably both taken about a day and a half to get our initial blogs working properly (with mastheads, links etc). After that, we interact with the blogosphere but seldom run into other bloggers (okay, Facebook is slightly different - and we know some F&F (family and friends) who read our blogs), but overall there really is a separate 'world' with which we interact.

In both cases we'd also selected a non personal image for our blog presence too - for differing reasons - and this operates in a different space to our other more visible internet presences.

So, I'm wondering about the experiences of others who started out and whether they know a lot of their audience directly, or whether it really is a separate world?

Circles

From sunny warm Mediterranean back to a rather wet England with enough weather to mean we had to fly around in circles several times before we could land.

Still, the delayed take-off gave me time to think of a few 'plot points' for the NaNoWriMo writing, including some unexpected inspiration from an article in the Economist. I just need to make up 9,000 words somehow this weekend.

OTA: Wordless Wednesday

Painting of Islamic prayers in my French hotel room today