crossing the alps a couple of times

Well, I'm back from Milano, after a couple of good flights over the Alps, captured here on my iPhone.

I used to work in Milan and my return trips always evoke the hustle and bustle of the place. Right from landing in Linate, walking down the old-school stairs to the tarmac and picking up a bus back to the terminal, past the vast hangar decorated with "Giorgio Armani" written in huge neon.

Then to the 'non-queue' for the passports and eventually into the terminal to be greeted by a suited driver wearing wraparound shades always with a black Mercedes that speeds through the special lanes of the city, avoiding most of the lines of traffic.

Milan's traffic is 'imaginative' with interesting manoeuvres and very advanced parking techniques.

When I left the city, my check-in was almost too late, and I had to be phoned through from the desk to the plane check-in. I sat in the return flight with that once-familiar feeling of 'powering down' after spending time in the city.

Here's one I prepared earlier...as they say.

day of the mascot

I can't help thinking of that old, but excellent, PC game "Day of the Tentacle" when I see that new Olympic Mascot...

It's probably just me, though...

hold very tight, please - ding ding

One of my ways of bringing this blog back to London topics is to post the occasional picture of a red bus or black cab. I suppose the recent Downing Street posts would also count, but I can't miss the chance to post a picture of the planned new London bus, which the Mayor of London has just unveiled.

It tips a hat to the Routemaster, with the open rear platform, but also has a glass stairway that give the outside a distinctive and difficult to draw look.

The video below, complete with its special 'busy/old school chemistry lesson music' gives more of an impression of what will be in service by the time the Olympics hit town.

time at rest

The theory of a full weekend somehow melted away. It's already Sunday evening and I'm not quite sure what has happened.

Saturday required me to work, so I was huddled over a computer until the early afternoon. Then brunch followed by grocery shopping and a pause to watch Doctor Who in a dreamlike state. An evening meal and the day had somehow dissolved.

Never mind, I had plans for Sunday, but today hasn't gone exactly where I expected. No big deal, but today feels like I've been operating in slow motion. Terry Pratchett invented that idea of the 'Procrastinator' as a kind of machine to park time 'at rest' to re-use it later. I could have used that this weekend, when I could have banked some of my 'slow time' to use on another occasion when everything has speeded up again. However, going with the flow somehow feels right at the moment.

It's the City tomorrow, then Milan, flying on Alitalia to bypass the predicted BA disputes but still dependent upon the new volcanic activity.

Windows for Mac on a USB stick

I thank maximumbob for the idea to try this.

I do run the occasional Windows application on one of my Macs, and have Parallels installed for this purpose. I considered doing the same on my MacBook Pro, but couldn't justify the disk space.

Enter a USB memory stick. I reformatted the memory stick for the Mac filing system and just dragged the windows image onto it. Then I fired up Parallels and told it to look at the stick for a Windows image.

Hey presto. Windows on a stick.

So now I can transfer the single image between the iMac and the MacBook should the need arise and I don't have to fill the two machines with surplus Windows images because everything is on the stick.

Excellent.

Now to delete the iMac Windows Image.

foxy

Yesterday evening we turned on the pub scanner. Not the type on an iPhone, but simply one based upon our collective opinions.

Would it be The Duchess, looking towards Battersea Power Station, with the Jimi Hendrix room?

Or the regular Rose and Crown on the way to Sloane Street?

Maybe the bustling Trafalgar in Kings Road?

Or that one by the red phone box near Grosvenor Bridge?

In the end we turned towards Pimlico.

To the tiny frontaged Fox and Hounds, and inside for a glug of Youngs, whilst the light evening turned to night and we talked of the barge people and unwritten adventures of Emily Jenkins.

And sure enough, as we left a real fox slid past us along Passmore Street before taking a short cut towards Holbein Mews.

new lawn mower

I said I'd need to get away from election related posts, so here's a scene from the garden today. Very spring-like as a wild bunny decides to attack the daisies growing through the grass.

This particular bunny hides behind the foliage from the broom bush in the corner of the garden. I assume there are complex tunnels leading to other timezones and continuums. More to the point, the neighbourhood cats haven't discovered them yet.

tree

It's probably time to back away from daily posts about the election now; some of the reporters are moving their cameras out and it's surprisingly easy to move around Whitehall and the various political areas of London.

The area usually has its share of protestors and banner wavers and Wednesday is no exception, with a couple of people in a prominent tree by Downing Street - but you do have to look carefully.

On that note, I suppose we will all need to look carefully over the next few weeks to see what the new leadership intends to do with the country.

Brown resigns as PM and Clegg becomes Deputy PM in new government? *

Some of us will remember that Brownian motion can be used to explain the way tea and milk mix together in a cup without stirring.

It could also be whimsically used to explain the seemingly random movement of politicians suspended in a fluid situation.

There's a mathematical model often called a particle theory but that's probably where the politicians start to diverge, because Brownian motion is based upon the universality of the normal distribution.

I'd say there is anything but a normal distribution in the recent political events we've been witnessing in the UK.

* = OK, I was guessing...

here's one I prepared earlier

Yes, I know its a bad piece of photoshopping.

That the truck is a different scale from the policeman. That I've used the bubble wrap option in filter gallery to smooth over the pixellated edges.

It must all still be fictitious then... as if they'd bring the van around to the front, when the ex-PM has a perfectly good back way out.

Eventually...

unplugged

Enjoyable tapas yesterday evening after watching the Polanski movie about an exiled ex-Prime Minister having his memoirs ghosted. Quite a reasonable plot line actually, with Ewan McGregor filling the gaps after a previous ghost writer fell into the sea, so to speak.

Of course, the UK plotline continued too, with a most entertaining interlude yesterday afternoon when the 'take back Parliament' protestors argued for electoral reform outside Clegg's meeting in Smith Square. There were some peaceful protests with people carrying speech bubbles behind the commentators doing 'to camera' narratives live.

Action then moved to Parliament Square and the Sky team's commentary box, which was heckled following two rather hectoring interviews with some of the polite but not particularly media hardened protestors. A third guy being interviewed smiled as he was overtaken by the sounds from protestors and unusually Sky pulled the plugs and dropped into a screensaver.

Meantime, Mr Brown headed for Fife, so any weekend 'power negotiations' with Clegg would have been by phone, but has then returned perhaps for a face-to-face update plea with Clegg before tomorrow's resignation news breaks?

proportional truth

I can't help wondering how cynical the offers to Clegg of anything related to proportional representation really are? The previous attempt to review this was by Labour in 1998 and is gathering dust.

It wasn't exactly earth shaking in any case, cautiously recommending that 80-85% of the elected reps should still be on the old basis and small amount of correction could then be selectively applied.

You'll struggle to find the recommendations in the report available here, amongst the waffle.

Even before this, the previous offer was ages ago from Ted Heath to Jeremy Thorpe to look at the same issue.

The big parties don't want this to succeed because it dents their own power. I suspect the latest offers are just as manipulative as any episode of 'Yes Minister' or 'The Thick of It' and in the case of Brown there could also be 'the old switcheroo' where he offers something before perhaps Mandelson stealthily presides over the rotation of Brown from leadership. We can speculate on rumours of David Miliband, John Cruddas and Ed Balls as successors but all of whom are all resolutely silent at the moment.

My own theory is that these "reform" offers have a proportionality based upon a desperation for power and an influence half life measured in days, whilst creating a distraction value measured in years.