Cycling London Skyride 2011

It's the third London Skyride I've cycled, each year with a slightly different route. This time I arrived quite early (before the official start time) and that meant I could crack around the mainly flat route relatively unimpeded. An addition this time was a short spell south of the river over Westminster Bridge.

By the second loop (Westminster/ Buckingham Palace/ The Mall/ Trafalgar Square/ Whitehall/ Embankment/ Blackfriars/ Tower of London/ Embankment/ Westminster Bridge/ Waterloo/ Parliament) there were a good number of people joining in, but the route was still free-flowing.

Already there were a wide variety of cycles, from super fast carbon fibre machines being spun by Great Britain athletes to trikes and mini-bikes with stabilisers being driven by four-year-olds. Not forgetting the penny-farthings, recumbents and vintage steel frames.

There were also noticeably more of the London cycle scheme bikes being used this time. I guess now they are access for all it makes it a lot easier. Everyone was smiling and I could see proper shadows on the ground.

This was a good moment for a brief stop and a chance to take a few pictures in St. James Park whilst sipping a cup of coffee (free Gatorade for all if preferred) as well as a short listen to the entertaining (don't know name) rock band. See if you can spot the 'friends of the band' in amongst the photos?

On circuit three there were rather a lot of traffic jams caused by the reported 60,000 people attending the day. There were also a few minor spills, which seemed to mainly involve a few tearful younger ones who had slid to the ground. The general spirit was very good-natured with everyone giving way and generally enjoying the views around London.

My cycle helmet and the high viz bib provided helped keep the spots of rain away on my final lap although the sky did look as if it was getting ready for something more significant.

Great fun as London and Great Britain also becomes more bike-friendly.

I noticed my tee-shirt is looking somewhat the worse for wear as I returned home.

Thursday Thirteen V50 - back to work?

I'm back around London this week, so the September First Thursday Thirteen V50 can have more of a street theme.

1) September is Spider month Except the spiders arrived early. I think it was the disruption I caused when I was clearing space in the garage. The biggest so far have been house spiders. We've had two or three stomping around. I can tell they are all different ones as I help them leave the building.

2) September also means work: Following my adaptation of my working model, I'd set September to start wearing a suit again. Actually, I was a couple of days early with the first tie being sported on Tuesday.

3) Back in the business zones: Wearing a tie also means I'm back in the London business zones although I've been holding out until we are really into the new month before getting too busy.

4) London Cycle : Zipping around London can be quite mixed mode: walk/car/bus/tube/bike/taxi. My bike pass stopped working sometime in late August. It was a credit card change that meant it didn't auto renew. I finally discovered it after 2 or 3 racks didn't work. Fixed now so I was using the system again today (Cycle Superhighway 8 amongst others).

5) London Cycle Day: The London Skyride day is this Sunday, although I will use my own bike for that. Probably the Brompton folding bike. Of course all styles of bike will be present on Sunday.

6) And more Bicycles: Tomorrow I plan to whizz around on my 'road bike'. It's bigger than the Brompton but I suspect it weighs less.

7) Page Eight and Spooks: To encourage us all to be out in the Summer months, the television programmes are usually rather poor. I expect there's good stuff somewhere in the 400+ channels but it can be a challenge. I managed to find a couple of good spy films to watch though; one was the old "Spy who came in from the cold" - a le Carre classic filmed in great Monochrome.

And a recent production called Page Eight, with Bill Nighy and Rachel Weisz. I enjoyed both, even if the latter was quite slowly paced and understated in many scenes. It also moved around quite a few familiar places, Chelsea Bridge, Battersea Embankment, Princes Drive.

Others watching it with me were calling out the places. I also found an old series link of Spooks on Sky+ and have been working through them. There were 19 in all and I've watched 3 so far. All good.

8) Places I recognise: Sad but true that I also sometimes call out 'been there' when somewhere 'foreign' that I've visited shows up on telly. A couple of recent obscure ones were Mykonos harbour at the end of Bourne 1 (where they meet when she is running a taverna) and the US 91/US 1 intersection in Marina Del Rey, which I recognised in an end of the world movie called 2012 a few days ago.

9) A different type of leaf smell: Last week I commented about the early smell of leaves, heralding Autumn. This week its a different type of leaf as I see the story about the charity sponsored research into child smoking data has been requested by hardball lawyers from Philip Morris. Their only reason for this can be to use it to argue a contrary position. Outrageous.

10) Event season approaches: Summer is more about outdoor events. I notice I'm getting emailed about theatre style gigs again now ready for the dark evenings!

11) Helping buy scarce tickets : I was asked to help get some scarce tickets for an upcoming music event. It had a 0900 start time for ticketing and I was online by 0845. It was a pre-sales arrangement but I am suspicious that the tickets being pre-sold were the edges and back of the theatre. Mission successfully accomplished but I'm suspicious of the way this works. Update: Another request to help for a different band on Friday morning. All the 'Standing' tickets went in the first 2-3 minutes.

12) Hollywood Project : I agreed today to let my novel get represented for the Hollywood treatment. If nothing else it will make an interesting serialisation of what happens!

13) Trashed Organ project : The isn't my project but I did say I'd write about it, not least because a short poem I wrote ended up in the first issue of the magazine. I'll post about it properly when the 'shop' is open.

Mykonos windmills - 'been there'

Another Hooray for Hollywood

We were driving somewhere on Sunday and somehow had a copy of the Sunday Mirror in the back of the car. The horoscopes were read and mine (as well as another car occupant) both had to expect 'good news on Tuesday'.

Amidst the usual chortling we each promptly forgot the information we'd been given.

Then, lo, on Tuesday I received a phone call from America. Not so unusual and I'll confess the first one dropped through to voicemail. When I listened, there were a couple of keywords that caught my attention - "The Triangle" and "Hollywood".

Yeah, right.

Anyone who regularly reads rashbre central will know that my novel writing has been something of an experiment, with its origins in the annual NaNoWriMo process.

They'll know that I'm grateful for the support that I've been given as the book finally emerged blinking into the sunlight. And maybe know that the royalties are fed into a sort of low-budget gambling project.

But this latest twist adds a new dimension to the experiment. The phone call asked me about getting the book presented to "Hollywood filmmakers". I remembered the Cat Deeley quote about 'always answering the phone' in L.A.

Now I've read Elmore Leonard and so the Get Shorty blend of gambling and movie making resonates with The Triangle situation. I'll need to make a decision about this pretty quickly and let's face it, I did announce the availability of the movie rights in the opening section of the book.

A new extension of the experiment, that links well with my recent trip to Hollywood.

And if it doesn't work, there's always the Christina Nott music. Oh, that's covered in another Elmore Leonard novel.

Be Cool.

One Day Loverdose

Beyond the back to School/College advertising, there's two adverts splattered pervasively around London at the moment both with a love story type of theme. One is for a perfume called Loverdose, which I have been trying to work out how to pronounce. The other comprises Polaroid pictures all over buses and is for a film called 'One Day'.

Well. It's Bank Holiday weekend, so there's been plenty of rain on Sunday, causing us to decide to hit the cinema. The pronunciation of Loverdose is indeed, Loverdose, not l'overdose or Lover Dose any other derivation. I know this from the cinema advert. Yes it's Loverdose Diesel Perfume. Arom d' forecourt.

Then to One Day. The premise is an annual St Swithen's Day view of two people and what happens to their intertwined lives. I won't give away plot points although many have read the book and will have a fair inkling.

I actually found the movie quite entertaining. It had a good pace with a simplified story of the two people played by Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess. There have been various criticisms of Anne's accents in this film, as an American playing a Yorkshire lass. In truth the accent was all over the place - but not so different from some Americans one meets living in London or elsewhere. It's the same for we Brits when we spend time on the other side of the pond.

Beyond the accents, the movie tells a story of what happens, year by year, from circa 1980-something to the present day. I think the little band of us viewing all found it entertaining enough and were happy to chat about it over a glass of wine and some lovely food at Côte afterwards.

Novel makeover

I've taken part of the last couple of days to do some more writing work for 'The Square', but I couldn't help noticing the changes in progress on this reference point from the previous novel - 'The Triangle'.

One of the scenes near the start of the story is set in a 'pub opposite the Parliament buildings', in Westminster. I based it upon the St Stephen's Tavern, which is where Clare and then Bigsy heard the news from Jake about what had happened to poor Brian.

Well, it looks as if the exact spot is getting a makeover at present, probably because of the increased tourist traffic as people start to travel the route of the novel.

Thursday Thirteen V49 - Orange Multipass Edition

Here I go again...

1) Readership spike I just noticed that last week's Thursday Thirteen caused an interesting spike in my readership, so I thought I'd have another bash this week. Please comment if you pass by!

2) Not A Simple List : I'm not so sure about doing a simple list, such as top 13 desert highway songs or my top 13 favourite yellow items, so I tend to do something more rambling and maybe reverse engineer a theme when I'm finished, like 'orange hair'.

3) Through the Net :  Its also a great opportunity to write up a few items that slipped through the lazy cracks during the week.

4) Orange hair and repeating time. One item that I didn't manage to blog was my thoughts after seeing Source Code the movie. It was about a repeating situation like Groundhog Day. like Groundhog Day. How can I put it? I thought it was okay rather than excellent, despite all the plaudits. I preferred the humour of Groundhog Day (which I would still watch again) and the originality and editing of something like Sliding Doors. I also happened to re-watch Run, Lola, Run which also ticks the orange hair box nicely.

5) Snowmen: I've seen two early signs of Christmas already. First was the guy pricing Snowman carrier bags in the local shop. Second was the mailshot I received today. I notice the television is already talking about Autumn.

6) That leaf smell: I was also in the car park a couple of days ago and the wind was blowing from the park. I got that damp orange leaf smell which I usually associate with November. Its supposed to be Summer.

7) Unexpected Kindle effect : Another fine blogger also wrote recently about the effect of reading with a Kindle and also using it as a newspaper. I must admit I do the same to the extent it changes my 'entry to supermarket' manoeuvre now as I completely bypass the bright orange news racks.

8) Street Photography : To do or not to do? That is the question. I'm experimenting at the moment, and trying to find the ways to capture moments to make interesting pictures without crossing any lines. We all take plenty of street pictures in any case, usually with inadvertent 'civilians' incorporated. (n.b. I know that the pictures would conventionally be black and white, but this is the TT orange hair special)

9) Big world stuff : London appeared to reset very quickly after the unrest. The chain from corrupt MPs, amoral bankers through to looters still demands further repair. But the global scale confounds as the politicians get diverted to Libya and oil.

10) Anonymity : Some time ago I switched back to pure 'blogger' for rashbre central. I'd been using a different comment system and it was then ditched and the replacement was also 'stabilised' (which in this case meant it progressively stopped working). I can only now remember the main reason for moving away from Blogger comments was the amount of anonymous spam. I hate to switch on the 'no anonymous' filter and make everyone log on, but it seems to be needed as idiotic people keep putting irrelevant comments about iPhones, DSL services, blue pills and similar onto the comments.

11) Accidental blackcurrants : I noticed an extra small tree has grown around the side of the house. There are blackcurrants on it. I'm wondering how it got there. My old definition of a weed was a plant that was in the wrong place. Is this therefore a weed?

12) Little piece of Arizona : The tiny cactus in an orange pot brought back from Arizona is doing fine on the kitchen windowsill. It even has a small sign saying 'Arizona'. Do you think it misses the scorpions?
 
13) Fifteen minutes: It always take me longer to do a structured post like this one. Fifteen minutes to get to here, without adding any pictures. My usual blog post limit is ten minutes. Now back to work on the novel.

14) Bonus for Multipass Users: I wonder sometimes about the jumble of stuff in my head that tips out when I do something like this? Am I the only one?

15) Orange Haircut Multipass Edition : See, I said I'd think of a way to reverse engineer a theme. Don't forget to strike the pose.

every clunk has a silver jammer

Alongside various manual labour tasks, I've decided to take a couple of days to work on the plot line for 'The Square' which is the partially complete second novel of the Triangle trilogy.

Most of the main ingredients are there already, but I've neglected to work out an ending and I'm pretty sure that there's a few major chunks that will benefit from deletion. My gambling of the proceeds continues and I can say that I'm still significantly ahead.

I have a very short window for this writing before I get started on a new proper work project and can already feel the membrane of constrained time tightening around me.

Although often time constraint works well and favourably.

Like yesterday I was taking apart some of my fancy car to fix something minor but irritating and which would therefore avoid a trip to the dealer (save a 2-3 hour trip probably). I discovered (to my surprise but also slight suspicion) that the reason for the problem was the very well concealed tracker unit which was bumping into something else.

Everything is now working properly, but it also got me thinking about tracker jammers.

Sure enough, a google later and I've located a $20 Chinese cigarette lighter version that can go straight into the novel's plot line.

London street photography

I’m trying a few attempts at street photography (beyond simply snapping ‘the street’) and am trying to build up a few simple learning points from the experience.

1) Coffee-cam = No: At one time I tried using a ‘coffee cam’ which was a camera I’d put into a coffee cup. It was really a bit of whimsy, but illustrated the need for something with greater precision. 

2) Smaller camera works best: It also occurs to me that a smaller camera works better for what would be candid shots, compared with an SLR with a zoom lens. 

Part of the challenge is to be able to include other folk in the shot, without them ‘striking a pose’ or glaring. 

3) Go busy: I have decided at the moment it is easier to take these type of pictures in busy and touristy areas. There’s more people around with cameras, so most people are already inured to the thought of being snapped.

4) Blend in: Having also returned from holiday, I realized it is easier to look a bit touristy as part of blending in. 

5) Look like a snapper: Then its good to establish that the way of taking photographs is to point the camera at a big landmark and fiddle using the viewfinder to get the shot. It is also useful to keep the process lengthy to establish the theatre of shot-taking.

6) Switch off all the bleeps: The other thing to do is switch off all the tell-tale LCDs and clicks and beeps. I’ll call that ‘stealth mode’. And remove the lens cap (!) - I use a filter instead. 7) Go Hyper focal : What!? Beam me up Scotty. For daytime, it seems to be better to set a focal length and aperture size that creates a reasonable depth of field - somewhere between 2-5 metres gives quite a range in focus. I’m playing around with 35mm lens, f11(sunny) or f8(shady), ASA800 (quite high) and then expecting the shutter to be at least 1/150. I’m sure this could be more fancy based upon autofocus, but (especially with small cameras) I’m not convinced the autofocus is fast enough.

8) Being static: I can’t help noticing that anything I take whilst moving is more accident prone that when stationary (camera shake, motion blur, bad framing). I have not really explored this properly yet, but the act of walking, moving the camera and trying to frame all contribute to art over precision. Next step will be to find some static points.

Having started to experiment with this form of picture taking I can now start to work out the simpler shots. Silhouettes, back views, aerial shots, shots when with others, shots through glass are all somewhat easier than ‘alone to roam’. 

We shall see.

fixing Aperture performance by reinstall of Lion

I ran into my first ever significant Apple software update glitch over the last few days.

I've had plenty of Apple systems and versions of software but until this time every update has been simple and worked first time - often making the system snappier after the upgrade. Contrast that with my years of PC experiences where I'd sometimes have several goes at installing and then have to go through all sorts of device driver refreshes, registry hacks, Norton Utilities and maybe still find a couple of items that no longer worked.

This update glitch occurred with the new version of OS/X called Lion but only affected its interaction with Apple's own Aperture program. I'd already updated my Macbook air without any problems (I even did it when 'on the road' leaving it to install overnight whilst at a hotel in Albuquerque).

It was the home iMac that hiccuped. The install worked fine, but then Aperture started to show sluggish behaviour and to use vast amounts of memory.

I looked on the internet and found plenty of other similar comments and a few suggestions about deleting cache files and similar. The experiences from the PC era came flooding back as I thought about the effort that might be required to fix it.

There seemed to be two sets of users - those that thought Aperture now worked faster and those where it had pretty much stalled - to the point where it would not be sensible to leave it open on the desktop.

It was late evening and I didn't feel like a long 'fixit' session, so I decided to use a blunt instrument approach. Re-install the whole of Lion for a second time.

There were lots of suggestions about the ways to re-install Aperture but I decided to RTFM for this one. There's a note explaining this somewhere.

0) Ensure it is bedtime
1) Go to the App Store.
2) Select Purchases
3) Find Lion (it will say it has already been purchased and not give an option to install)
4) Click on the highlighted 'Lion' text whilst holding the option key
5) It will take you to the option to Install (i.e. as an override)
6) Click Install
7) Follow the prompts to re-install (2-3 questions)
8) Gasp when it says the download will take several hours.
9) Go to bed.

The next morning, if it's anything like my example, the birds will be twittering and the sky will be blue with little streaks of cloud.

The mac will have rebooted and be back to the screens that were in use before the re-install started.

The difference is that everything will now be working properly.

Happy happy.

Thursday Thirteen V48

I've been spending the last day or so doing more clearance from the garage. I can see the floor again now. There's a few observations about some of the stuff.

1) There's been some furniture there which we have been unsuccessful to even give away. That's not to say that we didn't successfully donate a few items including a bed, two wardrobes, two tables, a set of four chairs and some other bits and pieces. It even included a disassembled kit which someone wanted to rebuild.

2) The miscellaneous hand basins and similar have all gone. They were not re-usable in any case.

3) A few tools looked to be over ambitious and have resided as 'investments' rather than practical items. They have now quietly disappeared (OK except the electric plane and the dangerous flame blasting paint stripper)


4) Records and increasingly books are going digital. The vinyls are still hanging in there because of the artwork of some of the covers. Probably 75% of them are now available digitally. My most tricky acquisition was Retribution by Clark Hutchinson. There's a CD copy around but it's just not as clean as the original album. The cassette tapes I found are now all goners.

5) I realise that the various anthology books I've acquired at different times are not all that sensible. They are too big to read. My Kafka, Huxley, Orwell and Lawrence mega books have not been read although the individual stories have as separate paperbacks.

6) Despite the plaintive cries from the book publishers, I can't help thinking that more book reading will go digital over the next few years. My own recent experience of this has been much better than I expected.

7) After spending some time in L.A., where I had access to a vinyl record player, I'm sorely tempted to restore one of the decks I've found and have a small filtered selection of about 10 vinyls for casual playing.
 
8) I can't believe how much spare cabling of many types I unearthed. It was mainly for PS/2 style connections of keyboards, parallel printer cables and serial connections. None of these connections even exist on modern technology so they are really defunct now.

9) I have a large pile of Hard drive disks varying from 100GB upwards. Most have shown signs of unreliability, so I can't really use them, but I also can't dispose of them because of what they may contain. I shall have to look further into this. I realise my minimum unit of non laptop disk is now 1Terabyte, which only a few years ago would seem somewhat excessive.

10) I think I have spotted several species of spider during the clearance work. I saw plenty of pholcus phalangioides (they are the clear coloured spindly ones) a few segestria senoculata (they live in the holes that have been drilled in the brickwork) some pardosa amentata (they are the wolfy ones that run about without webs) and some enormous tegenaria duellica (they are the big spring suspension spiders that suddenly appear on walls at night). I expect there are a few more as sometimes I felt like I was in that scene from Indiana Jones. There's at least one of each type in the picture below.
 
11) There were a few previously packed crates that now Have No Meaning or Logic. I was able to dispose of them without really examining the contents.

12) I have decided that keeping boxes from purchases is not very sensible unless one wishes them to eventually be placed in a museum. As an example, the 25 inch Black Trinitron box from another era had just been filled with old broken watering cans and small segments of hose pipe. Apart from a rodent nest made from old chewed bus tickets in one corner, it didn't seem to have served any useful purpose.

13) An important stage has now been passed in the clearance project. The floor is now visible in a circle and its possible to Walk Around and Look Across the space. Testing it on others though is less convincing. They still look bemused at the amount of stuff and mutter things along the lines of "you should have shown me what it was like before."

There. Thirteen. It must be Thursday.

shortage of short cuts in central London

In case yesterday's picture gives a false impression of the numbers of visitors to London, here's one around the central area which illustrates that there are still a good number of tourists around.

Most seem suitably relaxed and law -abiding, although not everyone recognises the "don't feed the pigeons" sign displayed in Trafalgar Square.
 
Of course, another feature of the square is the countdown clock for the Olympics. 347 days to go, so parts of this same central area of London are being adapted in readiness.
 
The most noticeable areas include the entirety of Leicester Square, which is currently under wraps behind black hoarding.

The streets leading into the square are also being torn up by mechanical diggers and the garden which featured the Charlie Chaplin statue has temporarily disappeared.
 
It's necessary to pick one's path carefully through some of this central area at the moment and some of the usual short cuts (such as the Charing Cross Road cut-through to Oxford Street) are non-functional.

There's plans on display, but I'm not sure who really knows what the renovated totality of the new area will look like by 2012.

It's similar picking through the political wording at the moment. Both major parties are making reform speeches, but filtering is needed to extract real initiatives from polemic, while everyone struggles to find short cuts to the answers.

resuming a kind of normal

With all of the London news of riots over the last few days, I wondered if this weekend would see deserted streets around the capital.

No such thing.

During Saturday I was in several areas including Sloane Square, Chelsea and the West End including Oxford Street and Regents Street. They were rammed with typical shoppers many of whom had been buying, judging by the number of freshly issued carrier bags on display.

I cut through Belgrave Square at one point and noticed police presence there, but it was for one of the 'regular' protests that goes on in this Embassy laden area. There were also additional police vans running around, but the overall numbers didn't seem particularly different from a normal weekend.

Sunday sees the central area and roads to the south being roadblocked for the test run of the Olympic cycle race, so I'd expect less traffic and people in some areas as a consequence.

The debates about 'why?' and 'what should be done?' continues, but what is interesting is the speed at which 'normal' appears to have been restored to many areas.