reading other peoples' papers on the tube

The big headline tonight on the tube (ie what people were reading) was about the £23bn loan that the government has given to Northern Rock out of taxpayers' money. I can't remember how much it equates to per UK adult, but it must be around £1000 per "household".

And at the moment, no-one seems to want to buy Northern Rock, presumably partly influenced by the thought that they would need to pay back the £23bn to the government (aka the taxpayers).

But the UK numbers pale into insignificance compared with the USA, where even the BBC is reporting Wall Street banks could be hit with losses of half a trillion dollars. As a number that's $500,000,000,000, which is quite a lot of wonga.

So with the recent actions by the US Treasury and to a degree by the Bank of England, there seems to have been some emphasis on deferring a crunch-point. But if all of those bundled together parcels of bad lending crash and there's a raft of foreclosures, then the US economy could be in for an amazingly rough time over the next few months, with systemic issues that could take years to resolve.

Mr Northern Rock has gone, so has Mr Citigroup ($11bn) and Mr Merrill Lynch ($8bn). They all presided over organisations which seemed to lend to markets made up of people who represented major credit risks. During the early days of this, many dealers received excellent commissions from this window-dressed business, perhaps with little awareness for the reality of the bad and dis-intermediated bets they were placing.

So if these early estimates of the damage based upon 'fair value' and hedging regulations are indicative, one wonders what will emerge when the spin -laden "Structured Investment Vehicles" finally surface from the hidden areas of the balance sheets. There's a few lumpy carpets in the board-rooms at the moment.

All of this can effect the general bond-market and move the quality of debt question to other 'packages' invented by the financial analysts. No lending, and the wheels of commerce slow down.

So whether the low end figure of $150bn from the Fed or the bleaker view of $450bn from Moody's, theres a lot of money about to go missing. These sub-prime losses, plus the loss of confidence in other loan bundles and the consequent difficulty in borrowing, could teeter the US into a pretty tough recession.

And I wonder who will pay for it all in the end?

rashbre northern+rock tube london metro londonlife subprime mortgages

scouting for girls

One of my idle comments about the iPhone was that it would be good if it could also control iTunes remotely. I was thinking it would be good to replace the little white Front Row controllers with a way to do the same from the phone.

Well, five minutes on the Apple site and I discovered Signal, which does what I wanted in a rather clever way. It hooks via wifi into a networked iTunes library giving a controllable web display of all the albums and play lists on the iPhone.

Then use normal iPod style control to skip through the tracks and play them back through a Mac or Airport Express.

It was as simple as drag and drop to set up and I now have a Signal page in Safari on the iPhone, which can play either the tracks on the iMac where I'm sitting right now (Ok, kind of pointless) or on the mini mac connected to the hi-fi in the lounge. So remote music piped around the house over the airport express, driven from the phone.

Slightly mad, but surprisingly addictive.

rashbre signal iPhone iTunes Apple scouting+for+girls

26056

Early Sunday dropoff at the GPS reference. Scaffolding waveguides deflecting radio. Cold limiting angles. One clear route and maybe a twenty second window. Maybe a motorbike, more likely the silence of a bicycle. It won't stop. I won't know what's in the bag and I can't stay here to open it.

rashbre nanowrimo writing Clare Bigsy The+Triangle

energy

Working today. At least I can have a musical soundtrack to give me some energy.
the apples in stereo

rashbre the+apples+in+stereo energy

obsession

In between working and sleeping this week, (oops, and yesterday's imbibing) I've been trying to keep a few minutes for the NaNoWriMo novelling. I'm at the stage now where the story is beginning to converge, although I'm not sure whether I've been adding too many pieces into the mix.

As a way to blend in some content, I've been noting little items in my notebook and snapping interesting pictures which could somehow add into a scene. Hence this car. I sometime park in a swish London car park where there's always a selection of exotica which usually manages to make me smile. And so earlier in the week when I parked next to this Lambo I thought it should make an appearance in the story. And then a few days later, I was parked again and returned to find it next to me.

Its obviously the latest model and costs 'do not touch' amounts of money. I need to work out whether it becomes involved in a car chase ready for the film rights from the novel.

...hmmm, black or orange?

rashbre nanowrimo car+parks lambo

vmware running vista in OS/X

Windows ON OS/X
I mainly use Mac at home and nowadays run the super slick Leopard.

For my old-school moments, I've used Parallels for Windows in Mac and recently (pre Leopard) tried VMware, which is fairly similar to Parallels, although in my case it was rather slow.

Windows IN OS/X
In the last few days I updated VMware to the new version adn now everything seems to run quite well, with a reasonably nippy Windows Vista running inside OS/X.

No boot camp shut-downs, just click a Windows ap and a new Vista-enabled Window opens (much like a browser) with the Mac application inside. Its probably not fast enough for games, but certainly good enough for office style applications.

Though the weirdest of all is when the Mac starts to bling up Windows hassle boxes in the bottom right corner asking for updates, reboots and so forth. Its like a little separate eco-system. There... it wants to re-boot again right now whilst I'm typing this. You go ahead little vista. I'll keep working on OS/X whilst you take another nap.


rashbre vista OS/X mac microsoft vmware imac

Repair a Thinkpad's missing key

Yesterday evening, the letter 'D' just flew off of my Thinkpad keyboard.

"Oh, bother!" I thought, "What an inconvenience!" (or words to that effect).

It was actually rather late and I thought for a few minutes if it were possible to finish what I was typing without using that letter any more in any sentences. It seems to go quite a long way through a paragraph without using that letter very much. Almost unnecessary especially if one uses 'autocorrect' if it is missing (=see - whole paragraph without a single use).

So I then initially set about fixing it. Quite difficult. Other people had spent two hours and then ordered replacement keyboards. Including the key, there's four tiny pieces of fiddly plastic that need to fit together in sort of trapezoid / pantograph shape. I tried for about ten minutes and then rummaged around to find a spare keyboard to plug into the side of the laptop until the next day.

And so today:

How to replace a key on a Thinkpad

1) Don't panic
2) Have plenty of light
3) Ensure all of the pieces have been retrieved. There's four. The key, a black strip, a Small oblong piece and a slightly larger U shaped piece.

4)Assemble the pieces of the trapezoid first, on a sheet of white paper so things don't get lost too easily.
5) The black strip fits onto the large U shaped piece at one end. The two pieces should stay attached.
6) Then the oblong clips into the middle of the U shaped piece.
7) If the assembly is laid in the piece of paper it will look flat with no bumps, if assembled in the correct order.
8) If you lift either end, it will open out something like a miniature deck-chair (pantograph).
9) There are two little pins sticking out from this structure. They engage with the top metal hooks on the keybaord (at the top of where the missing key fits).

10) Clip them in carefully, and the little structure will open over the key's 'piston' and the black oblong piece willl remain flat.
11) Now is the time to push the key top back on. Nerves of steel required.
12) Align the key top with the others in the row, so that it lays on the black oblong.
13) Press down very firmly. There will be a tiny click when the key top engages with the other part.
14) Then normal typing can resume.
I wrote the above because I searched for articles about this on google unsuccessfully, although there were lots of people making the same enquiry.

:-D

...And my novel includes a computer fixing hint amongst the storyline. It could make an ideal gift and it's here.



rashbre repair thinkpad broken key keyboard

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!