polaroid morning

It was still dark when I started to get ready for work today.

That's probably the first time since the summer. Admittedly a few days ago I was in darkness watching the hedgehog running around in the garden in the small hours and a different early I was looking at what seemed to be a particularly low flying moon.

But now there's that time when the sky starts to get lazy in the morning and it won't be long before I'm also making the first cup of tea with a light switched on. The day starts to need to be unpeeled before use instead of ready prepared.

Same thing now as I blog this against dusk, with a few birds chirruping to one another about the best branches.

thought less

Yesterday I was whizzing around London, to different areas, making extensive use of my Oyster card - people to see, places to go, things to do.

Today I've been sort of chained to the desk and engrossed in pretty much one topic all day, apart from a few breaks for cups of tea. What I noticed today was that the assignment has filled every nook and cranny of my head, so that I've not really thought about or done anything else.

I think tomorrow I will need to go out for a while, interact with a few others face to face and maybe walk around in order to let some fresh thinking blow though my head.

I don't know how it works, but sometimes 'not thinking' about something can actually stimulate a better way to resolve it.

standard anytime day return

I see that the railways have decided to rename all of the tickets again to make life simpler.

The old 'Cheap Day Return' becomes the new, simplified, 'Standard Off-Peak Day Return' and a normal day return becomes the 'Standard Anytime Day Return' which should not be confused with the 'Standard Anytime Return'.

Flow charts will be provided.

aspidistra

Comparing notes about George Orwell with fellow blogger Pat the other day and then Philobiblon provided the link to the orwell diaries. It's George Orwell's daily diaries being published as a real-time daily blog. Blogroll it now.

tera raid

I rescued a bricked disk drive a few days ago by bypassing its controller and slurping all of its data onto another disk. The disk was a terabyte and made of two platters in such a way that if either failed then the whole thing was effectively dead. Not a good idea.

I've moved to Raid 1 now, where the disk is effectively made of two separate drives, and everything is written to both. That way, if one disk fails, the other one can be used to rebuild a new safety copy. Maybe it sounds paranoid, but its a lot better than losing mad quantities of data. I can remember back two or three years ago when a Terabyte seemed like a lot of data.

Sunday

Rainy start created receding barbecue options, but then Sunday's early afternoon turned sunny and the tenty thing looked less necessary.

As Beijinged Leona Lewis rose bus-top slowly, in a bacofoil dress resembling an aunt's spare toilet roll cover, from within a badly cropped topiary, Jimmy's strains of 'The Lemon Song' (squeeze me baby) indicated that Boris had waved the flag of the Olympics fresh from China.

We looked skyward from our sandwiches and wraps for the red arrows (apparently banned from the actual 2012 show) and indeed, our roving reporter Julie managed a picture of the planes from her iPhone as well as a reasonable quantity of inadvertent voicemail calls to friends in the quickdial list.

I'm sure British ingenuity will ensure suitable profile for London and Great Britain and meantime the barbecue at number 100 was great!

facebook homesick blues - or - rats live on no evil star

Yes, I am on facebook.

No, I don't update it except via some feeds from other sites. So now I have wall to wall walls with flowers growing and sheep being thrown at me in between zombie and vampire attacks.

Look out kid. They keep it all hid. Better jump down a manhole. Light yourself a candle. Don't wear sandals. Try to avoid the scandals.

never odd or even...If I had a Hi-Fi - Madam, I'm Adam - too hot to hoot...

BoB

London Olympics Handover Stage

Cutting through from Pimlico towards the West End, I spotted the Olympics Stage being assembled for the handover ceremony on Sunday. Actually we were running for a taxi when I took this.

I'll be at a barbecue whilst the ceremony is happening, but there's been various London rehearsals and soundchecks throughout Friday to get things ready.

I'm amused to see that one of the songs in the handover will be "I can see clearly now".

The stage is at an angle right outside Buckingham Palace and I'm sure the positioining is partly for televisual convenience. The Mall was already closed to traffic from Thursday. I assume there will be repeater screens for the crowds on the Mall to watch what is happening, because I don't think too many will be able to get close to the stage area for this one.

Avenue Q

Starting the day with Eggs Benedict for a breakfast meeting at the Wolseley in Piccadilly, then across to Canary Wharf, back to Chelsea and onward to -er- Avenue Q for some smutty puppetry.

Avenue Q has been running in London for about two or three years and has been 'on the list' to see all the while. With muppets now in their twenties, it opens with a song about being 22, unemployed with a degree in English Lit. and moves through the trials and tribulations of living in apartments. The material is presented in a Sesame Street style linked with adult themes. Great, well paced show, slick acting and plenty of laughs. Checkout the third option below for a taste...

to control playback use right click

brown box

This could have been a wordless Wednesday. I was certainly speechless.

I arrived at tonight's hotel and was booked into a tiny can't swing cat room with an aircon stood with its hose sticking out of the window. The tired array of furniture along the edge of the bed was such that the only way to the desk was by climbing over things. I decided to tell them that I was unhappy, but it was then that I noticed there was no phone in the room.

So I called reception on my cellphone. They were suitably apologetic about everything and offered me a range of people to come to fix everything or a change of room. At 23:00, I really didn't want lots of interruptions and changes because it was already late and I had a 05:45 start the next morning. They must rely on weary business travellers to get any custom at this well known hotel and i can't imagine how they can claim a 'four star deluxe' rating.

packing density

Back to Norway for a couple of days. Car at Heathrow with clothes ready for my next trip, allowing me to operate at the hand luggage level for the rest of the week. For some reason Stavanger downtown is full, so I'm staying at an airport hotel. I call it white-boxing when I go from hotels to meeting rooms to hotels. That's me for the next few days.

batteried

A short time ago, my day to day watch battery ran down, so I put it in the pile with all of the other watches with flat batteries. "I really must get it fixed", I was thinking as I wound a trusty analogue watch as a replacement.

The previous time, I ended up buying an inexpensive watch because I was stranded somewhere 'in transit' and when I did eventually get it fixed, the jewellers wanted to charge me a large number of guineas.

So this time I spotted the rack in a store with the tiny batteries. "Easy", I thought, as I looked at all the bubble packs with little pictures of watches on them. But at £1.29, I decided to take a few different sizes of Golden Power Super Silver Oxide, thinking I'd get one to fix my watch and if I was really lucky I'd also be able use the surplus in other defunct watches.

One Swiss Army knife later I'd opened the silent watch and did manage to locate a battery half the thickness of the dead one, which has made the watch go again. But none of the other four will actually fit any of the other broken watches. I'm still 'quids in' compared with the cufflinkeried jewellers, but also slightly annoyed that there's so many different sizes. And that's before I noticed that Amazon sell ten watch batteries for £1.99.