kings of the wild frontier

I watched the first episode of Torchwood series two last night whilst I ate tikka masala in a short diversion from my current project.

I'm not quite sure what Adam Ant was doing there, but then, you don't see many blowfish driving red sports cars either.

Its interesting that by series two they are already taking a pop at themselves (the grumpy woman swearing at the Torchwood gang) and they seem to enjoy a few Star Wars jokes as well. Not dismissing the line about 'where's the blondes?' which was a spikey reference to Buffy from the James Marsters character who should really break out into singing 'Prince Charming' or similar. And they need to be careful with the snogging too. After Niles professed his love for Daphne, Frazier's shark was well and truly jumped.

There was some fifth element gadget assembly and some improbable DNA mixing to keep things moving along, but at the end of the first episode I sort of thought the trailer for next week looked better than this first episode. Maybe its a series that builds, but some of the formula-based 'new hero/baddie in town' business wasn't, for me, as original as others seem to imply. I'm wondering if all the reviewers were sent a pack about the new fast paced edits although I didn't really notice it as much. Maybe a few 'bumps', 'slowmo' and 'r-r-rewinds' constitute clever edits.

So, I'm remaining loyal and hope the effect in Series Two is holistic and let's not forget the Doctor Who roots of Torchwood.


excuse for daft video

And several people have been hitting rashbre central for the secret Torchwood portal. OK. Its below. No Dark Talk or Grey Thoughts.

Technorati Tags: rashbre, torchwood, dr+who, star+wars, buffy, spike, Adam+Ant, marsters,DrWho, Doctor+Who, Timelord, dark talk, Tardis

plane

Miraculous scenes today at Heathrow when BA038 crashed losing its undercarriage at the end of the runway. Everyone escaped from the Boeing 777. Apparently the plane lost all power and had to glide into the airport at the end of its flight from Beijing. Prime Minister Gordon Brown was waiting to take off to fly, co-incidentally, to China.

I've been in a serious plane incident myself once, in the desert, when an engine caught fire and our pilot had to dump all the fuel and land on one engine without the air brakes. I've nothing but admiration for the aircrew in these tough situations.

Technorati Tags: rashbre, heathrow, plane, BA038, crash, China,

London Bloggers Meet Up

Technorati Tags: rashbre, london, blogger, meetup, waterloo, camel+and+artichoke

delurk and delightful

According to bobkat its delurking week. Go on...leave a comment or a blog address. I'll drop round and leave a comment and you'll get another link!

keep taking the tablets

I was reading about the Cigbook novels used as a cigarette substitute across at keyholesurgery when I realized that here was another recent blogger in need of a few visitors.
I'm sure a few passing commenteers can help 'unlock' this new site. Its a lot better than the mp3 taser announced a few days ago.
cracking up

call out the instigator

I was a little bit off a week ago with my guesses about the new apple things from Mac World, where the real answers were Mac video rentals (got that right), new apple TV unit (got that right also) and the headline act in the form of the rather slim MacBook Air (didn't get that). Its quite impressive how Apple manage to keep their new products secret until launch date and that even the better pundits seem to only get a few items right and usually miss the main one.

I'm not planning to stand in a queue for the new things anytime soon and even the new Time Capsule is like rashbre central's LAn attached Time Machine backup of any friendly macs in the neighborhood.

My sundry bits of PC kit progressively grind to a slowdown after about 18 months because of registry bloat, defragmentation problems, memory leaks and other general weirdness including a disdain to improve performance after routine upgrades. Comparatively, even my oldest Mac Powerbook still runs pretty much like new, supports most of the latest versions of Mac software and still edits video like a professional configuration.

I'm pretty sure that some of this new Apple stuff will have good general appeal and I'll be interested to see if mac manages to become more mainstream via iPhone, iTouch, MacBook and so forth rather than its still (undeserved) slightly edge position with most folk.

bumpers

Flying back on a plane from Stockholm listening to castaways and cutouts by the Decemberists on the iPod. Feeling one beer chilled after a couple of days of back to back meetings.

We started Sunday with random meetings in the late evening at a trendy boutique hotel owned improbably by Benny from ABBA. We were so late arriving that the hotel bar had already closed provoking a little excuse for us all to wander out to find a nearby bar. I asked the guy in the corner shop and he suggested a place at number 18.

Ten minutes, roped sidewalk and then inside with guitar band already rocking to an appreciative crowd. Tables and five beers ordered along with a scan for food. We'd arrived from USA, UK and Belgium on airline snacklets so the burgers beckoned as the best bet. Fifteen minutes and we are all congratulating one another on the serendipitous venue.

Next morning's seven o'clock start with the rest of the gang was suitable shock to the system with the bundle into taxis across town to the day's rather elegant meeting room coincidentally also named abba complete with plasma television showing a crackling fire as digital welcome.

Twelve hours later back in taxis to the downtown hotel then walk to the Gamla Stan old town to the five small houses for a traditional Swedish supper...

And so it has continued until this evening when I'm sitting on the BA flight back to UK, which departed early from sleek Arlanda airport to try to beat the headwinds. Which right now means I'm being bumped around at 30000 feet.

other world?

Sometimes everything clicks together well on a business trip abroad. This one has been like that, randomly spotting people I know (like three people I ran into at Heathrow) and then even a co-incidental arrival of someone in Stockholm so that we could share a cab into town.

Other times it can be wearisome, with delayed or lost bags and those accidents where someone forgets to set their alarm in the morning. So far, so good, though I have been using two separate alarms. Amusingly, when I mentioned this, two other regular travellers admitted to using two alarms on different phones and one said they used two alarms and the hotel television as well.

Reassuringly paranoid. My other fun thing was to notice that my hotel has my nationality listed as 'Other World'. Seems about right.

don't let the sun blast your shadow

Towards the end of last year I had some long working weeks, which then quietened down a few days before Christmas. Last week I was away for part of the time and also working with people in Texas, so things are getting lively again. I've spent several hours today at home engrossed in spreadsheets and various reports and then have another bunch of things to do Sunday before I head for the airport.

Then I'm off to Stockholm for a few days and as soon as I get back I've a fair amount of commitments to complete. The world spins back up to full speed quickly now after the end of year break and we've already had our 'launch session' and are getting back into the swing of things.

Different from some years when it could take a month or more to get fully organized.

So blogging will return to ten minutes per day, I suppose.

wide time

This is more about "Wide Time" than iPhones and Starbucks, but I think it illustrates the idea quite well. I consider that we can think about things over a long time and also over wide time.

Wide time is when there's lots of small things happening at once that together combine to make a set of bigger changes. Like looking back at a film from the 1980s. In theory its not that long ago, but there's so many incremental changes that everything looks sort of -er- different. Typewriters, big spectacles, payphones, small wheeled cars, large shoulders and so on.

So Phil Lu's idea to be able to remote order frappacinos is an illustration of the mental increments that create the effects making the wide time changes. Latte anyone?

Lakh, or judgement?

A cheap new car from the forecourt in the UK probably starts at around £6000 or $12000. A wheel at each corner, petrol driven, CD radio, basic wiggly mirrors, airbags, no air-con, manual winder windows, two doors and probably a hatchback shape.

So this Tata Nano just launched in India is an interesting development. £1,277, if you convert the 100,000 rupees (1 Lakh) to GBP. Add on UK tax etc and I suppose it would be about £1,800. Petrolheads say it would be closer to £4,000 by the time it got to the UK, because it would need air-con and a few other modifications, like wheel bearings that can survive over 45mph and I suppose emission control, airbags, a safety shell and maybe some welding of some of the glued parts might also be needed.

Its an interesting dilemma though. Making something which is supposed to cut down the number of full family scooter outings in India, by popping them into a car with a two stroke 33bhp engine. With the increase of the new middle class in India, the transition from scooter to car is the next thing. But there's still the gap between those in families who have some form of foreign funded job (eg in the world of outsourcing) estimated at some 200 million and the other 800 million people who survive on less than 50 pence per day. Seven cars per thousand people in India, 480 in USA and 370 here in UK.

So if Tata and Bajaj (who make the Indian scooters) start pushing out Bosch-engined, non-emission managed cars for 100,000 rupees, there's going to be all kinds of knock-on effects framed in terms of the low carbon agenda, safety, crime and traffic management. Transformational - yes - unintended consequences? we shall see.

Meantime, rashbre central's motor fleet shall continue to feature a Ford Ka.

Technorati Tags: rashbre, tata, nano, car, india, small, lakh, ka, smart, carbon, traffic, bajaj,

moving wallpaper

I've just been reading 'The Gum Thief' by Douglas Coupland. My version has the pretend novel 'Glove Pond' with it, which is written by one of the characters in the Staples store where the main novel is set. Its a clever idea wrapping a fiction inside a fiction (Midsummer Night's Dream, anyone?) and the new television drama by the folk who produced 'Life on Mars' does the same thing.

First there is a television episode about the writing of a creaking generic TV soap set in Cornwall stuffed with stock characters and a plot-line as wobbly as the set walls. The beleaguered producer decides to go after every populist drama award category in a series of tick the box episodes of a made-over version of the soap, where the ratings demographic is based upon the views of a single twenty-something female office assistant.

And then there's the show itself, renamed from Polsomething to Echo Beach now with supersaturated yellow sunny beaches and retro VW camper vans against a backdrop of hyper-fit surfers. Stilted acting reminiscent of old school soap, real soap star cameos and the money from the soundstages diverted to the producer's office furnishings.

I watched this entertaining pair of programmes thinking it was a two parter - I've just noticed they are implying a full series. It will be interesting to see whether the running joke can survive.

Technorati Tags: rashbre, soap, moving, wallpaper, echo, beach, echobeach, life+on+mars,