iPhone Oyster hack for London

Live in London? Use the tube and buses? Then you've got an Oyster card. There's an experiment at the moment to integrate them with phones and Nokia are trying it out with a pilot.

Here's the rashbre central unofficial pilot for iPhone users, but it works fine for other phone makes too.

The iPhone is great. It looks fabulous but in regular use its a bit slippy. So I bought a 'tight fittlng rubberised case' from incase.. Oooh, I hear you cry.

So as an experiment, I've added extra functionality to the phone by inserting my Oyster card into the case before putting it around the phone.

Then simply wave the phone by the Oyster touch-points.

Works brilliantly and makes me smile.

rashbre iPhone oyster london londonist apple hack Tfl tube buses

(b) log

I seem to have spent most the weekend working, apart from our little excursion to Windsor yesterday afternoon.

Aside from the upward vertical rain and fighting through mad shoppers trying to buy scented candles and single pyramid shaped tea-bags for £2.50 each, the main reason was to visit the theatre.

To be honest, it was disappointing. I've seen the same play with different direction and thought a lot of clever allusions in the previous version were not expressed in this equivalent. I suppose it was a late afternoon performance, so perhaps the cast were saving themselves for the evening, but I doubt they would be able to pull a lot more from the hat.

Then time for an early evening bite to eat and we scrambled between various busy venues along by the Windsor Castle until we reached the brasserie by the oddly festooned Christmas tree outside the castle entrance. Here a pleasant supper with jazzy saxophone accompaniment before home to more work until about 23:30.

And more work today, from the start of the day until about four thirty in the afternoon. A short ten minute shopping expedition to buy milk, and my first outdoor sighting of Santa this year, parked with his sleigh outside Tescos.

So mysteriously, a chocolate yule log fell into my shopping basket along with the milk. And that's what I'm eating a slice of right now.

rashbre xmas chocolate yule yule+log

rashbre radio 2

I'm working again this morning, but hope to be 'let out' this afternoon to head over to Windsor for a while. My 'big project' continues and is still consuming nearly all available time. I seem to have adapted back to a no sleep/little sleep model again at the moment, but I also know when that stops working is when I start to get 'sense of humour' failures - although that has not quite occurred yet.

In other news, 24 hour non-stop rashbre radio now has an overhaul to the new look. Never listened? Its always been there in the little tab at the top of the blog and it can be undocked to be a continuing companion on the desktop. And if you get fed up with my choices you can (a) skip forwardto the next track or (b) change channels!

And now back to the project.

rashbre radio last.fm lastfm rashbreradio widgets blog

Das Blinkenlighten

I finished last night very late again, probably still buzzing from the last cups of 'spresso lungo.

So as I headed for bed I became aware of the various scattered piece of technology in the bedroom blinking little lights back at me. Normally, if I am away, I can have nearby parties, streetbrawls and in room full screensavers blattering away through the night whilst my poor little PC defragments itself and I don't notice a thing. But last night I was aware of the various tiny flashing lights from phones charging, the radio, the bluetooth headset and a stray Powerbook in snooze mode.

So I slid into sleep thinking about the old, but still true Blinkenlights...



rashbre blinkenlights

Un Boxing Day

I thought I'd post a picture of the rashbre central Christmas Decorations. Er...Its still November though, so they are still in the box.

Most of the area has been stealthily adding trees, lights and baubles to the public spaces since around mid October, and in some areas like Oxford Street the surreal purple trees were already on the buildings many weeks ago. Sloane Square is lit up and Peter Jones's store has had a positive cascade of lighting all down the front for weeks. Folk I know have already been to see the "Nightmare before Christmas in 3D", and others have even returned with bags laden with Christmas goodies.

Hereabouts, I shall wait until we are into December to begin the countdown. No fancy blog based-advent calendars, but maybe a twinkling light or two, probably after I've been on a bulb-expedition.

rashbre xmas santa lights christmas

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