messy? moi?

Sometimes its good to look at an area with fresh eyes.

Take rashbre central's holding bay for misplaced household items.

Every so often I manage to reduce its contents to a level where I can see the floor, and then ever so slowly it somehow builds up again with new stuff that is either on its way out, or on its way in. And because it is already a bit messy, the area gets used by other friends as a temporary storage depot too. Some may recall the sizzling skip sagas of '6, when I managed to rationalize the whole area quite well. It's a little troublesome that some 15 or so months later it should already be back in a similar condition.

No wonder I couldn't find a book I was looking for a few days ago.

rashbre messy skip

i'm not bad, i'm just drawn that way

I think Jessica Rabbit agrees with me that the internet is a mysterious system.

Both in my flickr account and here in rashbre central I'm often mystified by the random 'popularity' of miscellaneous posts and pictures.

Yesterday I noticed the counter had spun around somewhat on rashbre central and I thought "what wondrous, clever post did I write to cause such interest?"

Of course, the reality was more sobering when I noticed that the hits were mainly on an ancient post called "pulp powertool fantasy bunnies" (yes that well known search term) and that there seemed to be particular interest in viewing the rather suspect video that accompanies it.

Fantasy Bunnies? ... Never mind.

rashbre pulp power tool powertool fantasy bunnies bunny black+and+decker

i need more ink

Big project, NaNoWriMo and blogging are creating a backlog of words. I need more ink.

rashbre ink NaNoWriMo

earth rush

I've been putting in very long hours over the last few days, for a current work project and I'll be back on it Sunday too. The interesting thing is trying to keep the various other plates spinning at the same time, whilst the world whizzes along.

Its kind of strange, but somehow having a lot happening seems to bend time, so that I'm still finding slots that wouldn't normally exist to do other things. In amongst shopping, laundry and even the few stolen hours to go to Thursday's gig, I seem to just be squeezing more out of the available hours.

Against the total madness of it, I seem to be keeping the wordage count tracking for the nanothingy. I admit I'm grabbing minutes of train journey and other potentially dead time to do this scripting and have written some parts into my phone or email and then sent them back to my rashbre account so that I can pipe them back into Pages.

There's less than 6 days to finish now, but as my word count is somewhere in the low 40s, I'm still hangin' in there, although I must admit its freaking me out that some people have already passed the magic 50,000.

I find the Nano process quite fascinating; this is my third year and each time its a sort of enhanced discovery journey, with characters that want to direct themselves through the action. There's also the random 'real world' things that happen to me that I insert into the story, so my various pubs, restaurants and trips, people I run into and little stories people tell me about things that are happening to them, or even tiny snippets of other folks' conversation can drift into the storyline.

I'm told that adding weather and musical soundscapes also chews through the words, although this year I think I've got enough ideas left to mean I don't need those kind of tricks. Indeed I've been pondering a couple of plot twists and a possible re-work of one setting so that certain things can happen in the right sequence.

If this all sounds obscure then it probably is, but I bet there's plenty of other Nanopeople going through the same machinations at the moment as we all prepare for the last few thousand words to get the draft in some sort of finished condition.

I'm not overly worried about quality at this stage, but at least I'll have a rough draft. That'll be two in a series by the time this one is finished - as well as last year's rather overambitious detour.

My side project to get at least the first one published continues and I'm a good way through a final, which by now is already two years old. Someone helping with a review edit even spotted that I'd used Waterloo train station for a character to go to France; a couple of weeks ago that route closed and we now need to travel from St Pancras!

Still, its all good experience and adds an extra backdrop during the season when the leaves fall and the nights get dark early.

Hollywood had better be filling their signing pens with fresh ink.

rashbre NaNoWriMo project busy hurried speed

night moves

Some kind of time warp this afternoon as I headed to the supermarket.

Broad daylight when I parked and yet, some 30 minutes later I emerged into what looked like proper night-time darkness. Somehow the shorter days are sneaking up on us and the flip from day to night is quite sudden.

And right now its still only 6pm.

rashbre night darkness sainsbury's winter

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