falling leaves make horizon clearer

Crunching through leaves yesterday afternoon, after finishing one big task and before completing training modules for something next week.

Unfortunately, in addition to slamming my Blackberry in the car door by accident a couple of days ago, my recently replaced Thinkpad has developed the same fault as the previous one, in that the screen keeps cutting out. I guess the replacement one was a similar age to the one I had previously so it must be a general fault with this particular model.

My attempts to do the training modules were interspersed with calls from the helpdesk about my Blackberry "we need to move your email from the USA back to London as part of the replacement" and then blank computer screens every so often.

So the stroll to somewhere leafy was a useful mid-afternoon break from being intermittently online all day and also gave a chance to observe the changing season. Some trees have really gone for that Autumn look, whilst others are still shrugging with a kind of end of summer sunshine appearance.

I guess the serenity of the scene belies the general economic ruin occurring in the background as another squillion or two was wiped from the markets during the day. My guess is that, like the trees, there are some already affected by the coming economic season but those like the pension funds that are still shrugging at the moment, unless truly evergreens, will soon be caught in the same climate.

borrow sell wait buyback for less

I see shorting is allowed again in Wall Street and guess what? everyone has been doing it.

Today's also the day when the Lehman Brothers swaps get called in. Could be interesting because that's another little time-bomb waiting to go off.

I'm now wondering about the speed of money. How long does it take for the impact of what is happening in the skyscrapers to really impact we folk on the street? For some, with housing debt, it has already happened, but for many, the shadow of the missing money is still to loom.

I looked back and it was December last year when I first mused about the missing money and its taken some nine months until September for it to accumulate into proper big debt lakes.

Now we see the dealers continuing the shorting that catalysed the recent problems whilst they consume the billions being supplied by governments before it has a chance to bolster anything.

Hold onto your pockets.

strokkur

Perhaps Led Zeppelin were right about the icy Northern countries:

We come from the land of the ice and snow,
from the midnight sun where the hot springs blow.
The hammer of the gods
Will drive our ships to new lands,
Our only goal will be the western shore.

So now you'd better stop
and rebuild all your ruins,
For peace and trust can win the day
Despite of all your losing.

I'm not sure whether they would be accused of building coded messages into their music, but could this be a signal from the 1970s predicting the downfall of financial services as we know them? I counted Iceland's population yesterday afternoon. Its 320,000 for the whole place and everyone is quite literally on first name terms. So for the $61bn debt created amongst the Icelandic banks, that would amount to around $190,000 per head.

One a heck of a party.

work, rest and play

The London recessionary shirt shop advert reminded of the old FT model using a Mars bars as a measure of inflation. Indexation by Mars bar instead of currency. Wednesday's base rate change may have ironed out the effect on shirt sales, but I'm not sure it will sweeten confectionery sales. Something to chew on, anyway.


How much IS a Mars nowadays? Roast beef at Simpsons is £19.95 with all the trimmings.

oops - an aside

bloglines says I have 938,016 unread posts. How careless of me.

Billie Piper was here

A quick spin out to the edge of the Cotswolds yesterday (well nearly), when a few of us met at the Pear Tree in Purton for a spot of supper. Its one of those places reached via lots of twisty lanes although reassuringly my Sat-Nav actually had the restaurant listed.

Apparently Purton is Anglo Saxon for pear-homestead and certainly there was evidence of pear trees around the venue, which was once the local vicarage. The adjacent local church appeared slightly odd with both a square tower and a steeple.

I mentioned the Cotswolds and certainly there's evidence of Cotswold stone in the buildings around the area, but I gather the village goes right back to the Iron age. And in time travelling tradition, rather more recently it can claim to have had Billie Piper attending school in the village.

Enjoyable company and evening with a rather long duration trip back home at the end of it.

Warhol at Hayward

Some will remember that rashbre central is a friend of all things Warhol.

The new exhibition starts today.

I took the picture above of the Hayward on Monday whilst hurrying to a meeting. Not exactly silkscreen

It had to be done.


& thanks for the linkies, Christina (featuring the singularity podcast)

re: boots

I should have known better.

Out on Sunday afternoon, ostensibly on my way to the dry cleaners, when I stumbled upon the scene you see in the picture. Now maybe it's just me, but I've watched some ITV dramas recently like 'Wire in the blood' and 'Place of execution' and there are some quite disturbing scenes, so when I saw the assemblage in this picture I was momentarily a little concerned.

Actually it was raining heavily as well, so I moved on fairly quickly from what appeared to be a small bonfire accompanied by some all weather boots.

This evening, I'm just putting together this blog post, but couldn't remember the name of the Juliet Stevenson series, so flipped over to the ITV1 drama website to cut and paste.

"Hello", said ITV1, in a mid evening voice. "You'll be needing Silverlight, then."

I protested that I'm a mac and that all of that Microsoft wonderment isn't really part of the deal.

"Oh, this is different, we've made a special version for Apple machines."

I hesitated and then clicked "proceed".

Terms and conditions including something about automatic updates by default.

I nearly didn't click.

But I did. And so its installed something into Safari. And now, whenever I go to the ITV site, it says that the Silverlight plug in doesn't work.

I should have known better.

I suppose I'd better re-boot.

tuneranger

A yukky day of grey rain, although I've a few household tasks involving tidying and shifting boxes around whilst hoping the weather will improve.

Whilst organising things I'm listening to the freebie CD that came in today's newspaper, before adding it to the iTunes library. I've also noticed that the rashbre central iTunes library also needs some tidying. The main library is on an iMac and there is a copy of it on another mac mini which is connected to the A/V in the lounge.

Inevitably, they get out of sync and every so often I run this little TuneRanger utility to bring them back in line. Its a kind of virtual box shifting, I suppose, to go alongside the real boxes that I'm also moving.

predator

I spent some time around different parts of the middle east prior to the Iraq war, and one of the things I remember from the period was the local television reports describing escalation of American planes flying along borders and demolishing radar installations and similar. Whilst it was regularly reported in the region, it didn't seem to have the same coverage in the UK. Also, at the time it was difficult to triangulate the stories because of the possibilities of spin and propaganda, so I mainly have it as a mental marker.

I'm similarly noticing what is happening at present along the borders of Pakistan, with increases in American activity, after George Bush gave the order to allow special forces to operate inside Pakistan. Nowadays the planes are unmanned Predator MQ-1 drones flown by a remote pilot, with another different remote person responsible for controlling their Hellfire missile payload.

Some of the accounts ring similar to what I heard about pre-Iraq, where there's now reports of these American planes being used in hunting missions across the Pakistan borders, apparently without the agreement of nuclear-equipped Pakistan.

These cross border activities started early in September and seem to be progressively escalating. The US line is that the North Waziristan area is the 'wild west' of Pakistan and a Taliban and al-Qaeda stronghold. The US have sent planes and commandos into the area where they believe bin Laden is based and as part of actions to prevent a terrorist strike in the period leading up to the US Presidential elections.

The recent terrible Marriott hotel bombing, the subsequent cancellation of BA flights to Islamabad, the evacuation of UK diplomats' children and the allegedly US driven Mohammad Khel missile strike at the end of Ramadan, are all signs of the escalating situation in this area.

The combination of the current global economic tailspin and the vying for attention of the new Presidential candidates has distracted attention from this tightening situation. The George Bush sanctioned moves now effectively extend the zone of US military operations from Iraq and Afghanistan into Pakistan but are receiving far less commentary than they would at other times.

woodland

Apart from the first hour or so, my day's plans were completely re-arranged, as is all of next week's schedule. Its one of the occasions where events have actually given me back some time because a couple of things have been delayed.

Usually it works the other way around and everything gets compressed, so I'm predicting that the current gap will have to be reclaimed in later weeks.

My modest celebration of this mythically rare gain included a brief cellphone-free stroll in the afternoon crispness. Aroma of woodsmoke and something glimpsed through a clearing which could almost have been a unicorn.

circulars?

Like most people, I bulk delete most of the viral emails of fun with water, bikinis, cream, cats, skateboards, animations of politicians and similar that slither into my email inbox (mainly, it has to be said, via my free hotmail account).

Occasionally something good pops up and the trick is to find it without opening yet another graphic with a free java scam included in it. Luckily the Mac is pretty good at spotting this kind of thing and the junk folder can even display the embedded programming so its easy to tell that someone is up to mischief.

Anyway, the one I quite liked recently was the little graphic of an optical illusion with a spirally effect which is really made up of circles. Trace around one of the spirals and you'll see they go around and around, rather than disappearing into the middle.

That's from illusion sciences where the clever folk also explain how it all works, as well as a whole raft of other effects.

I wonder if they have any idea how the intriguing beans work at Lady Banana's?