a spatter a scatter a wet cat a clatter

Norwich today after a rainy and blustery hotel stopover.

I drove into increasing darkness, arrived in an anonymous car park, entered a modern hotel with Eurostaff on the lobby counter and then to a room that smelled of American air-conditioning.

As is the way sometimes, I found myself in autopilot mode and was just setting my phone alarm forward one hour when I remembered I was still in the UK.

Then today's chilly, subterranean day followed by resurfacing in time to watch the big red orb of a glorious sun set during the long drive home. In a flash-back moment, it reminded me of sun-sets in Key West.

sooper

I've only just got over Super (Bowl) Sunday - which has a slightly bizarre coverage on UK television because the extensive advert breaks are instead covered by three men wearing very large headphones and talking cryptically. I think its because the two American presenters didn't always understand what the Brit anchor person was saying.

And that brings me to Super Tuesday, which I think is pronounced Soooper Toozday if I'm to get it right. Its supposed to be the next critical moment in the American election campaign which some how runs all the way through to the end of the year. And most of the coverage seems to be about the Democrats and whether gender or ethnicity affects outcome. The other guys carrying the Dubya banner and hiding the recession don't seem to get a look in - I wonder why?

It seems odd that everyone votes at different times (presumably so the candidates can visit more areas) and then the big places like New York, Califormia and another 22 States all vote on the same day. A strange dance.

Someone has worked out that a single candidate needs to accumulate 2025 delegates to be in the lead, and I guess it makes me wonder just how many delegates there are crammed into the main Houses of the US Government machine. And what's a super delegate? Do they have special powers? Can they fly? Do they get a 'by' into the next round? Its all very confusing.

Maybe thats why it seems to be mainly about two personalities rather than the intricacies of why 26 of the 53 Democratic congressional districts in California will award four delegates requiring a candidate to get 62.5% of the vote in that district to be sure to win.

I still apply my 'racing to Calais' model to this type of thing. You start in Cannes and drive to Calais to catch a ferry. At the start you only need to average 45 km per hour and can have two pit stops. Somehow, by the time you get to Dijon, after a couple of major delays, the average for the rest of the journey has become 95 km/hr. Still doable, then that big roadworks with the white robot flagman costs an hour and mysteriously you now need to do 120 km/hr. And then each time the brakes go on, the average speed for the remainder mysteriously increases. When it gets to over 150 km/hr, you finally phone ahead for another hotel night somewhere.

I guess one of the candidates will be doing that at some point near Dijon Denver, when it becomes inevitable that the lead has moved incontravertibly to the other person. Its a great tactic at the moment though, because the rest of the world is hardly even hearing about Republicans and thinks that McCain is a type of (ironically) French Fry.

blue

I've noticed flickr has been somewhat unreliable over the last couple of days. It used to be very stable, but its just started giving little times when the pictures don't display.

I recollect that its part of Yahoo, so perhaps its some kind of side effect of the planned Microhoo amalgamation. As Microsoft's influence is pretty pervasive in any case, I thought it was time to post one of those blue screen collections.

We've all seen them when we are out and about. Forlorn devices that have temporary lapses of concentration when the infamous 'blue screen of death' comes to town.

arriving on the Blue airline

Park in the Blue Zone

Don't phone a friend when you are feeling Blue

Ready for take-off?

New revenue model, with advertising?

Roger, Ready for Take off?, Over, Blue (okay, this one is a fake)

Swedish Make-over

But when I loaded these pictures, for some reason, none received any hits, except this one which got 13 hits in the first two seconds.

my manic and I

Talented singer songwriter Laura Marling has just released a first album and I thought it would be good to feature a little piece here. She's been around since maybe early 2007 and popped up on a few radio shows on XFM and even Radio 1 but I suspect is still largely unknown.

The album comes in a proper collectable box with some intriguing puzzles and artifacts, including a ticket to an upcoming gig. Those that know me know I usually throw the album cases away unless they are really good (I do keep the little pamphlets though). I will certainly keep this one. And the music is something of Suzanne Vega blended with Sandy Denny, with some ghostly, intriguing and sometimes deceptively steely lyrics. About time alt.folk had some new names.

Birds are singing to calm us down.

underground thrills

Thanks, Annie Mole at the excellent Going Underground for drawing my attention to this amusing video, filmed on the Tube.

Micheal Jackson's 'Thriller' is 25 years old and a group of dancers decided to do a commuter recreation of the video on the London Underground. With typical London commuter stalwartness, the passengers around the action stay seated and firmly looking forward at the small adverts over the seats.

unit of one marketing

A sort of marketeers holy grail is to get the right information to land at the right time, so I was slightly suspicious today when I opened a couple of emails to be greeted with pictures of refrigerators. You see, the thing is, yesterday I was out for part of the day at a kitchen appliance showroom, as part of the slow march of redecoration through rashbre central.

Admittedly, it was a first visit, so I was going through the 'education phase' which is when I have explained to me why all of the cooking and general kitchen technologies I am familiar with are no longer applicable because of induction cookers and steam ovens and so forth. Actually, the demonstration of the induction hob was somewhat flawed because it has a pin number before it could be fired up and then the light sensitive controls didn't respond after the turbo setting had been engaged. The fridge had some kind of rain-forest parrot certification and as for the steam oven they wanted to send me to get a demonstration appointment at a manufacturer's showroom. Why am I thinking this sounds expensive?

So today's mails are something of a mystery. I didn't give the showroom my email (not this one anyway) and I haven't been looking things up on the internet. So are these just random mail-shots that now seem more of interest than they would usually, or has some kind of demographic tracking system figured that I might be up for a new cooker because I bought some graphite coloured match-pot paint samples recently?

London Bloggers Meetup Blogroll

Are you a London Blogger who has attended the Meetup? The kind folk at Qype even made a movie!

Wanna add the London Blogger Blogroll? Here's the code below - just copy and paste to your sidebar. If you don't want the scroll bars leave out everything up to <script language=javascript

<br><div style="border: 3px solid orange; width:180px; height:180px; text-align:left; overflow:auto; font-size:10px;"><script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="http://rpc.blogrolling.com/display.php?r=a3a892fc5669e3ea463ba474d7f44058"></script></div>

Have you attended the Meetup but are not in the list? Just leave a comment and I'll fix.

Technorati Tags: rashbre, london, bloggers, meetup, camel, artichoke, londonist, ,

primetime tv review

this sock puppet is scarier and better constructed than the latest television series of "Primeval".

E

That E award from bobkat a few days ago gave me a panic attack.

I worked out that if everyone on the internet that receives the award then awards it to ten people, after about ten iterations everyone on the internet would have been covered. 100,000,000,000 awards is quite a lot.

So, with an average latency of 5 days per recipient, and me at least fourth in the chain, I'd only have a maximum of about twenty days to make the awards or else everyone would be saying, "thanks but I've got one". And I can only do these complicated posts with lots of links when I have more time (like watching television at the weekend).

Yikes.

Then, phew, I realized it doesn't work like that. Quite a few people graciously decline, and others accept and maybe don't quite pass it forward. Others get more than one award.

Anyway, I thought I'd have a go, and I've picked some from my eclectic reading and lurking that I've probably not 'memed' before in rashbre central. All are excellent in their varied ways, Click their icons to visit.

So in no particular order...

First up, Private Secret Diary, which I often read, but I sort of lurk on this site, which also has its own bouyant readership, who seem to be currently mainly at the builders merchants buying chicken wire.

Next, a drab lie, sir, where elby is currently feeling weak and would no doubt enjoy a few visitors.

Captain Picard is part of my weekend reading, with all manner of space-age stories, competitions and even some stellar parties.

Dance, whilst no-one is watching, creates interesting musical posts and moody photography on the accompanying flickr site.

Chez la laquet, a site with entertaining word associations in amongst the varied topics against backdrop of school.

I love the smoke covers always lively, sometimes multi chapter to-ings and fro-ings in London.

Keyhole surgery; a new london poet's muse.

Fabulous Keda and the lets, in Istanbul.

Nats the name's musical selections, including much psychedelia.

Past Imperfect, by Pat. Entertaining stories from now, and then.

Philobiblon, by Nathalie, green London arts feminist guardian.

Panthergirl's varied and interesting writings, although I do get attacked a bit over on Facebook. Last time it was Mah Jong.

Carmi's place, writing, technology and plenty of photography.

What can I say,? I have to include Christina in this list, even if the site is still a bit of a copy of rashbre central!

So, my thanks to this gang, for publishing and sharing, in all manner of wonderful ways.

sarky heart bruni and president blair

I see Europe-1 is carrying a story about French President Nikolas Sarkozy and pop star model Carla Bruni getting married - another story amongst the last 2 months of guesses. "Nicolas Sarkozy et Carla Bruni se sont mariés ce samedi matin au premier étage de l'Elysée. Ils ont été mariés par le maire du VIIIe arrondissement de Paris, François Leben". It doesn't seem to be in the google news yet, though, so remember, if finally its true, you heard it here first. And the bruni sarkozy tv blog-fest is here.

But just as interesting was another Europe-1 story, a Jean-Pierre Elkabbach French language interview with Tony Blair. In addition to continuing the 'peace in our time' initiatives to the Middle East, it appears that Tony Blair has been taking lessons in the French language reaching a credible fluency enough to sustain a 20 minute political interview. Not content with appearances on Al Ayyam about middle eastern partitions, he's been interviewed about the European Presidency, which will need a new leader next January.

So I'm assuming that Tone's new found lingua-franca is all about the job. A tide-me-over couple of half million quid advisorships until the new year and then a new way to boss Gordon, or whoever it may be, around.

Technorati Tags: rashbre, bruni, sarkozy, blair, married, l'Elysee, Paris, France, Europe, President, Brown, sarky, sarki, carla

Soft, Ya?

The Microsoft Yahoo story has been around for many months, so when I saw it pop up again today, I wondered if it was a re-hash of the last loop and therefore not really news. Then I heard Steve Ballmer on the radio talking about it, so I assume its a real bid again. I recollect the going rate was about $50 billion when the last speculation occurred, so now the 10% reduction is interesting but not exactly a snip.

Although, I suppose if Google is worth around $150 billion (I haven't checked these numbers) and Microsoft itself is probably worth $300 billion, then Yahoo for $44bn may be quite a quick way for Microsoft to catch up on the advertising and search engine revenue model.

Its interesting that Microsoft has generally stayed in the technology space up until now and let others drive the other business models. This situation would give Microsoft a different revenue stream derived from advertising and search manipulation, as well as the more conventional technological aspect to be able to support a cloud based application interface.

Maybe some of the revenue models from Google and Apple start to offer another re-invention strategy for Microsoft?

location location

I'll be honest. Sometimes when I'm working from home I don't actually wear my work clothes. Sometimes at the weekends I get up late. Sometimes in the week I'm out until late in the evening and arrive back after staring in wonder at the stars. I don't always think this is predictable, but the scientists have derived profiles for just about every living area and the way that people carry on.

So I decided to have a tinker with one of these UK systems for doing demographic profiling, to see what it said about a couple of neighbourhoods. I typed in a postcode and it produced a complete vignette of a particular lifestyle.

These people enjoy a good lifestyle. Employment is largely in professional occupations, and many of the households in this type have both adults working. Car ownership is high, with two or more cars common. Models are likely to be large, new, company owned and relatively expensive. The home computer is a key item. They use it for careers and job planning, education and reference (for example, researching cars and holidays), home finance, buying gifts and making leisure bookings online. They lead an active lifestyle, enjoying walking, playing golf and going to the gym. These consumers enjoying drinking wine which they often buy by the case through mail order. They also enjoy eating out in restaurants on a regular basis.

So then I thought I'd try another one...And this is what I got.

These people live in urban areas, where large attractive houses have often been converted into flats. Whilst many do own their home, the proportion of rented accommodation is relatively high.

People in this type are very highly qualified; one in four have postgraduate and professional qualifications. They work in professional and senior managerial occupations, with many spending very long hours at work. As one of the highest earning types, they have relatively high disposable incomes.

In the winter, this type is the most likely to go skiing. They will then take at least one other holiday which is usually foreign and often far flung. When at home they take advantage of the range of theatre and arts available to them from living in the city. They also enjoy good food and wine, both at home and in restaurants.

They are interested in current affairs and are very likely to buy a daily paper, which they probably read as they commute to work. They usually choose from The Guardian, Independent, The Times and Financial Times. At the weekend they like The Sunday Times and Observer.

Wanna Play for your area?