camera state

The Merc had an easy grace as it slid along the motorway. The entire drive from Germany had been uneventful until he reached the British roads again. Then, a mile or two from the rail terminus, he'd been stuck in erratically moving traffic all the way back to the slow M25 encircling London.

Across France, he'd watched the mirror for the long term cars following him. It was the usual situation on this persistent drive. A small grouping of vehicles proceeding at roughly the same speed yet staying within the French law.

He'd deliberately stopped at a couple of snack areas along the way, to randomise these cars that accompanied him and now back in the UK everything was suitably mixed up again. His German temporary plates with their bright orange square did stand out from the other traffic and he knew it would take a couple of days to get them converted to British number plates.

But he was relaxed now, the paranoia from Jake and Clare was unjustified. No-one cared about him or the shiny new Mercedes.

33838.

rashbre NaNoWriMo writing Clare Bigsy The+Triangle

little noise

To set the scene for this one, I'd said I was very busy at work (true) and couldn't go to this. I was quite happy for someone else deserving to have the extra ticket that Julie has somehow obtained for the 600 person gig with her favourite Mr Young, supported by Newton Faulkner, Adele and another act.

Come the time, though, and I find myself heading in a taxi to the small church venue in Highbury. We'd not eaten and managed to grab a quick snack from one of the thousands of places along the buzzy road leading to the Little Noise venue. Arrival 7:30pm and the place was already full. It was advanced tickets only and then 'find a pew' so to speak. No problemo, we sneaked through a curtain and up some stairs to the gallery and bagged some prime seats looking down on the stage.

So with at least two of the acts normally playing in theatres and arenas, it was primed to be a strong evening. It did mean though, that once in place, it was a question of someone always staying at the seats to avoid being overrun.

So drinking a beer (okay, not so easy in church, but available in the room just behind) was out of the question. We settled for ice-creams from the lady selling in the aisles.

Then, Jo Whiley appeared and excellently hosted the evening, which was in support of Mencap, the charity.

I'll skip over the first act and start with Adele, who is around 20 years old, has already chalked an appearance on Jools Holland in the same show that featured Bjork and McCartney.

She has a great bluesy kind of voice that's probably the wrong side of 30 cigs a day, twiddles the guitar pretty well and had a winning way with the audience, including bigging up the other acts. An enjoyable mix of mainly her own material. Most enjoyable.

Then Newton Faulkner, who has a fairly naff television ad at the moment, but was a pleasant surprise when he started his set. A highly accomplished guitarist, who played acoustically with some quite virtuosic elements. This was accompanied by a beguiling line in chatter which teetered on the edge of random. Like all of the acts in the evening, he played the "unstructured" card for what, I suppose for all of the performers as a bit of a 'one off'. In addition to his own material, an acoustic version of Massive Attack's "teardrop". Performed remarkably well as a guitar only version. Then more of his own including some audience participation and finishing with (improbably) Bohemian Rhapsody also on acoustic guitar. It mainly worked as well. I was converted to this musician, whose style has a 'Roy Harper' type of feel to the guitar playing.

And then was Julie's main part of the evening, with Will Young doing his gig to 600 of whom I suspect about 550 were diehard fans. He had a small band, pretty much his regular musicians who lock together to play just about anything well and with verve. The long set was interesting. Surprisingly varied, compared with a typical touring set and certainly not a jukebox of popular hits. Most of the material was also reworked and this was quote a good showcase for the versatility of this singer and the empathy of the musicians.

After a very slightly nervous sounding start with a track from the old days of his first album, he and the band warmed to a very strong performance. Not the showiness of a set with all the dancers and lights, but a good solid performance of a wide range of material, with interesting improvisations added seamlessly into the tracks. A small moment of accidental humour when the excellent percussionist was deep in some personal reverie and needed to be flagged back into action by Will. But then snap, a new percussive rhythm started and the rest of the band just locked onto it.

The audience loved the whole performance and the atmosphere wandered from rapt attention to feet stomping and hand clapping for the loud ones. I gather Will is in the studio at present recording " Hors d'Oeuvres/Canapes" or whatever its called and he commented that being out with an audience was quite a change from singing to a wooden box.

At a gig like this, I'd have expected 45 minutes from him as the main performer, but he was on stage for probably 75 minutes. No encore, but I think he ran right up to the last minute for the audience. The verdict - excellent - and good to see an intimate and thoughtfully instrumented gig by someone who normally plays Arenas.

Then, what else but to finish the evening with a can of Red Stripe? (in the church annex, of course).
rashbre Union+Chapel Islington Highbury Will+Young Newton+Faulkner Adele Live+Music Little+Noise

now be thankful

The wires have been quiet today with our cousins in America celebrating Thanksgiving Day. Clearly an American celebration, formalised by Abe, although the roots in Harvest festival are worth noting. The Brits have been doing this since pagan times and the original haerfest is from Anglo-Saxon and means 'Autumn' (Fall). I gather the native America Indians had a similar way to celebrate the harvest.

So not surprising when a boatload of British and European religious separatists turned up on the shores of what would become Plymouth 2, that they would invoke some of the traditional festivals as a way to encourage and celebrate the harvest.

So, whatever interpretation you have for the celebration, "Happy Thanksgiving".

now be thankful

rashbre thanksgiving harvest festival

Competition : Spot the missing CD

OK, I know its supposed to be wordless wednesday, but today, "X" marks the spot.

And tomorrow's competition will be "guess the password". (Not the most common ones like password, 123456, secret, qwerty, abc123, letmein, monkey, charlie, myspace1, password1, arsenal, (your first name))

And clue : Its none of these either...

...or is it?

rashbre missing+CDs Government United+Kingdom HMRC Competition Passwords

a matter of public record

I see 25 million individual UK citizen records have been mislaid when they were sent by HMRC through the internal post on a couple of CD/DVDs to the National Audit Office. Apparently the first set that were sent by TNT didn't get through but the second recorded delivery set did.

It looks to me as if some of the records must already be out there, judging by the types of inexpensive private investigation site already available.

rashbre private investigators security privacy United+Kingdom

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