the bells

I woke up this morning at about 05:30 and do you know what? It seemed like the middle of the night.

Anyway, I decided this time of morning wasn't a good look today and decided instead to listen to the bell-ringing on Radio Four.

But now (post bike riding) I'm facing down a long schedule of activities for the rest of the day which include a visit to one of the larger West London shopping malls.

I may be gone some time.

nearest supermarket beckons

Must optimise route today to enable more scribbling time.

disimbibery

Thursday's surfeit of Merlot probably affected my Friday performance.

I've had another six a.m. start and various hoop-de-doop meetings to jump through, mostly face-to-face.

It started erratically when the main person I was due to see didn't show at eight o'clock and the other two of us were left to chatter and plan.

I didn't have a headache at that time, just a weariness which I knew I could override for a few hours but would be difficult to manage for the whole day.

Between meetings I busied myself with non-critical tasks, mainly because I knew that otherwise I'd be making mistakes. By early afternoon I'd finished my last proper meeting and could leave to take my last calls by conference phone.

I'll admit to amiable jeers from others as I finished the evening rather early and headed for bed.

apple does apple

An amusing piece of internet hype when Apple site put up a teaser for a new iTunes announcement, which created a flurry of twitter and other general speculation.

Would Apple be introducing a subscription service for iTunes? Would the iView be released? Does the unreleased Macbook Air 15 have Firewire? etc. etc.

It turns out to be that iTunes will support the Beatles LP collection.

Jolly good.

Apple Corps.

But most people who like the Beatles have probably uploaded their own CDs to iTunes way back in the 20th Century. And the versions on sale are typically £10.99 for a single album and £17.99 for a double.

I still enjoy the Beatles and there's many a three minute classic amongst the track listings.

I'm just struggling to see any added value in the way that the announcement is being presented.

Although it will be interesting to see if any of the songs chart again.

Or get adapted...







And whether it creates any new remixes when people notice the stereo separation of the vocals.

(Thanks Beatles, Green Day, The Kinks, Joan Jett, Cypress Hill, House of Pain, Rage Against the Machine, LCD Soundsystem, Pills, Fatboy Slim and DJ Moule)

reactable compositions

I first posted about the reacTable back in 2007, when Bjork was one of the early adopters for the Volta tour.

I think I had some of the Coachella footage from the time of "Declare Independence", although the similar set she played at Glastonbury was blindingly good.

Back in those ancient days, the reacTable was a massively expensive piece of new technology and people would flock to tents in the middle of muddy fields to see it in action.

As is the way with these things, time passes and there's now both an iPhone and iPad version, which has allowed me to generate an improvised jazz track or two over the last day. For reasons of obstinacy, my camera is refusing to let me download my own sample from use, so here instead is a little (and more techno) YouTube demo.

small craft on a milk sea

On Friday evening I was staring at the weekend thinking about all the things I really wanted to do.

By Sunday I'll know that I've missed a few, partly because I still had a couple of largish piece of work to process. I managed to keep Saturday work free, so that I could do shopping and other normal activities, alongside some Nanowriting and a bout of television watching.

I've reached that point in the writing where the lack of a pre-planned plot needed to be resolved, so that I have ways to draw the somewhat diverse strings together during the next section. I'm not sure how many people do this the way I do, where I start with absolutely nothing and then see what happens. The characters somehow draw themselves and at some point I get an inkling of what kind of story is going to mature.

I now have more of plan, probably influenced by the Brian Eno ambient music collages I've been listening to whilst writing.

word challenge

Sheri was originally Canadian, although she had studied in the USA, as well as a short spell in Switzerland and was now into her second year at Biotree’s facility in Norway.

The Bodo environment was surprisingly familiar, a mix of her childhood’s Vancouver waters and the nearby ski areas, where she had spent winters ski-ing as well as getting something of a reputation for her freestyle snowboarding.

The cold end of the Pacific had first raised her love of nature. She would still think of times spent with her Grandfather out to look for whales with their tail splash, fishy snorts and the rippling radiation of the water as they would dive near to the boat.

The Pacific had also stimulated her study of marine biology and the organisms that maintained the ecology. Then her time at Harvard where the study of very small things had eventually led her to Biotree. Harvard had taught her how the organisms worked and then CERN in Switzerland had taught her how to build them, ironically by first showing how to smash things apart.

Now she was working with mechanosynthesis, construction an atom at a time. It was beyond a watchmaker’s precision, to know how to bolt the atoms together to make the tiny machines that formed the basis of the Biotree business model.

She’d learned how to build these tiny structures, how to make them operate, which parts would simply refuse to work together because of the still only partly understood and apparently tiny forces between them. Forces she knew were big enough to destroy the machines to which they were attached if they were not coupled properly.

She sometimes thought of it as being inside God’s head. If a God existed, the God would need to know this stuff really well.

This time I had to slip whales, snowboarding and radiation into the writing. It also gives me an excuse to post a picture of a whale I snapped whilst boating around Vancouver - mouseover for the caption.

11.11

Well, it is the eleventh, so a moment to reflect.

Another birthday.
I'll keep the mantra;
Fun going forward.

I can't help being attracted
by bright shiny orange.
And night-time art.

There's still so much that doesn't usually make it to the blog.
Like me writing this wearing a black hat.

Thinsulate.

Thinsulate the experiences.

Our little trip to Camden might get a mention.
But usually not the crowd surfing.
or the special sign that says 'No'.

Some rules are just for general guidance.
And there's others that always apply like:
November is my month.

writing it in

Denny glanced up.

The work division was obviously unbalanced. Suze was quietly folding some of the quaint but expensive grey hotel stationery into the shape of a swan, with her spare hand. She was already wearing the colourful courtesy gown and had now pushed two of the chopsticks into her hair, making an instantly more Eastern look.

“Was that the influence of the room service?” he quipped. They’d ordered Japanese as a sort of homage to Makatomi and been enjoying maguru tuna with nori seaweed. Suze had spotted a pineapple dessert but neither of them had expected the laser cut slices laminated with microlayers of a ginger flavoured wasabi.

“Yes it’s auto suggestive, I think,” replied Suze as she flipped another firewall. “The ginger and pineapple must be talking to me.”

Responding to the challenge to get the "ginger and pineapple talking to me" into the novel

arabica moment

I'm running on Ethiopian coffee at the moment (strength 5), whilst musing for a couple more scenes to blend into the writing. I seem to be around the 18k mark now, which feels as if I should be ahead, but is distressingly close to being 'on target'.

So back to the scenes...A couple of weeks ago we took off to the coast and wandered amongst the pretty harbours of a part of Cornwall for a couple of days of battery recharge.

Our only maps were the ones you get to show the way to individual tourist attractions and so we guessed most of our route.

It meant that as well as the more obvious sites, we stumbled into a couple of less expected views, like the one in the picture.

Of course, it makes a great setting for some kind of action sequence and just to describe it would be at least a thousand words if the old saying is anything to go by.

I can already imagine the splashes of red are coffee berries and is that a goat I see on the slopes? Oh no, it's arabica hallucinations.

raining broken glass in a forgotten part of town

My replacement car has a better iPod control than the last one so it's a lot easier to just keep the entire music collection online.

I've enjoyed working my way through "The Magnetic Fields" over the last couple of journeys (interrupted by Michelle Shocked CDs playing on the way to and from her gig).

The Magnetic Fields front man Stephin Merritt is an enigmatic writer and produces quite experimental albums. I think I have all the ones available in the UK. There's 69 Love Songs, which is 69 (count 'em) love songs, Distortion (where the songs feature various forms of Lo-Fi distortion) and Realism (which doesn't).

And right now there's a new little film about him and the band, which is going through a kind of road tour release of its own. Stephin and Michelle - both producing independent music on independent channels.

Strange Powers.

tell-tale low-tone then high-tone beeps

Another blur today, with plenty of conference phone calls at roughly one hour intervals.

I nearly missed one around midday, which I was actually chairing.

I think I got away with being a couple of minutes late to sign in, as I could hear the tell-tale beeps of others joining after me.

Tonight I'll switch modes for a while. There's a good television programme later, but before that I'll try to lay down a few more novel words.

Low tone then high tone or maybe vice-versa?