less bait and more switch?

I had a sort of flashback to ye olden days of Windows computing today.

The situation was simple enough. I'd unpacked a fresh new laptop to be used for a specific purpose and naively plugged it in to get it working.

This was straight from the carton and the only taxing thing I wanted it to do was be able to connect with the internet. I won't go into the background use here, suffice to say it wouldn't work.

"No wi-fi connection," announced the shiny Windows 7 interface.

"Silly me," I thought - "I need to press Fn 8 to switch on the Wi-fi."

But it didn't work. It said I needed to flick the hardware switch "on the surface of the computer - or underneath it" - to make the Wi-fi work.

I looked around the unit. No switch. I pressed the Fn 8 a few more times. Still nothing.

A moment of mild panic as I wondered bizarrely if this shiny new 2012 device didn't have Wi-fi included.

I read the carton and even the user instructions. Yes, of course there was Wi-fi included.

So I found an ethernet cable and plugged it in to get internet access via a direct connection instead. Yes, that worked - but is not so useful on a laptop computer, which is supposed to be portable.

Then I accessed the supplier website - and guess what - I'm not the only one with this problem. There's plenty of other people playing 'hunt the switch'. And there isn't a switch.

Then I remembered this was a Windows computer. Inevitably there would be new drivers to replace the factory installed ones.

Sure enough, I found a long set of instructions which were not for the faint-hearted. It explained I needed to download three new sets of drivers. I must make sure they are the 64 bit ones, not the 32 bit variants. Then uninstall the WLAN driver, reboot, uninstall the TVAP drivers and programs, re-boot, run a registry cleaner called CCregistry. Reinstall the replacement WLAN driver. Reinstall the dozen or so utilities included in the 175Mb download of the TVAP drivers. Reboot. Test the WLAN driver and it should all work.

It did.

I now had a Windows laptop with Wifi. Like the one I thought was in the carton I'd opened, several hours earlier.

I reminded myself that I must really, really, really want to use the particular Windows program that this PC will support. And I hope that someone re-examines the meaning of 'Plug and Play' before Windows 8 gets released.

reset

My voicemail mysteriously went wrong today. I didn't notice it initially because the visual voicemail was still working but just not adding any new messages. Then, whilst sitting on a train, I received a text from the service provider telling me that my pin number had been reset.

It's a sign of the times now that instead of automatically believing the message, I was initially wondering if it was the SMS equivalent of those fishy emails that turn up. The ones telling us about new bank accounts that have been opened in our name or 'please reset password'.

Invariably they are some kind of hoax message and fortunately most of them get filtered away.

It turned out that this text message was genuine and I needed to phone the 'Customer Care' to get things fixed.

"Did I mind losing all my voicemails as part of the reset process?"

I agreed, on the basis that I really needed it working again. They gave me a special set of codes to write down and then type into my phone and then another number to call to restart my voicemail.

I followed the instructions and am now back in business.

A casual chat to someone about it later revealed that when they had called me earlier they had accidentally pressed the speed dial on their phone for another number.

Hmm...

cycling with a statistical edge

I seem to be keeping up with my bicycling plans and have managed to avoid revising my targets downward as well. The biggest change to my original plan was to move the start of the week from Monday to Sunday for cycling.

That gives an encouragement to cycle on Sunday at the 'start' of the week, when I can get ahead of the plan. I still have a Saturday at the end for any last minute catchup miles as well.

This week, it's only Tuesday and I notice I only have 9 miles left to finish the target I set for the week.

I shall hesitate to increase the target number though, because I'm sure there are weeks when I'm away and then it can be more difficult to find the relevant slots.

To make the counting simpler, I upload the miles from the bike speedo gadget (its a Garmin Edge 800) and the system I use lets me set the targets and will monitor them for me. Actually it monitors a wild range of things well beyond those that I currently use.

I think it's better than me trying to remember to keep notes and I only have to clip the little unit onto my bike to be fully wired and counted. Ant+ Personal Area Networks are a good idea.

I discovered that the Garmin Connect system will also let me set up all kinds of other targets too, so I've been adding some such as monthly targets and moving away from just miles to other things as well. I've included some deliberately easy ones in the set too, so that I get some positive feedback and encouragement along the way. The longest ones I've set up are for the whole year, in miles and in calories.

Update : and as I've also been for a spin today, here's the 'after' from the 'before' version shown above. Those targets with 4 days and 7 days left will scroll away at the end of the week into a history section, but a new set will then appear to replace them.

So far, so good!

shredder

Whilst on my little business trip on Friday I idly wondered if I'd spot a Staples store so that I could buy a new shredder. It's not the most exciting of purchases, but the playful little one I've been using only takes about five sheets at a time. It also makes a snarly noise if the sheets are not placed in exactly perpendicular orientation. It's party trick is to produce A4 sheets with sort of comb section after they have jammed and had to be reversed out.

I'm sure its telling me to be ecologically sound, and I do try to avoid printing, but sometimes there's no choice. The small machine's quirkiness means there has been a significant quantity of paper to be disposed of, which either means carrying it to the confidential waste bins in a main office or shredding tiny quantitates at a time.

So I was just pulling away from the car park after the meetings, when I saw the spire of a nearby Staples store. Right on my route.

I entered the store with its disorienting 4 metre high shelving stacked with office cleaning products and ballpoint pens. Then I noticed a spot-lit pile of boxes. I thought I could hear a choir singing. That spotlight was there just for me. It was highlighting an immense pile of industrial looking shredders just inside the store entrance.

Manager's specials.

Now I'm not quite that easily led, but when I'd googled 'shredders' a few days earlier the one I'd picked was a larger version of the one on offer.

Except this smaller one had a much lower price and only a slightly lower capacity.

In my shock at the simplicity of this retail experience, I looked around the store and also found the exact model I'd previously spotted on the internet. It was huge. I could park a car in it*. It was one of those times I knew I'd made the right decision to go look at them rather then hit 'buy' on the internet.

So I bought the smaller one. My old shredder took around 5 sheets. The new one takes 60 at a time. My entire pile of confidential waste has already gone.

But I do have rather a lot of confetti.


*okay, a toy car

Changing Structures at Gallery@49

Along at Gallery@49 yesterday evening to see some excellent fine art. Friend and artist Janet has a solo exhibition exploring aspects of contemporary urban society using physical structure to record the changing state of the social, political and cultural environment.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a set of seven pillars, representing aspects of society, with family, government, business, religion, education, the arts and communication. It was inspired by the civil unrest during last year.

The changing structures shown in the seven pillars and several of the other exhibits are quite sculptural and Janet describes herself as using photography as part of a mixed media practice. The work mixes photographic images with other textures and collages using many layers and textures. Another series (not in the exhibition) captures the effects of commerce in the London Underground. The inspiration for that series was the stratified effects left as a consequence of the replacement of traditional paper advertising with new electronic billboards.

Through it all there is a social commentary about the way we treat the world, the layers of experiences that, for example, may impact a simple corner of a street and an attempt to peel it back to its essence.

It's very poignant when the very gallery that is showing the work is on the crossroads of what was once a busy city centre but is now caught up in the changes as commerce and governance decide what the next stage of a cityscape development will hold.

I was fascinated by the work illustrated at the top of this post, which captures some of the ideas and narrative that Janet presents. There's a dimensionality to the work that needs to be seen on the actual work. I was staring at the piece shown, "Fears of Today" fascinated by the depth and layering of its presentation, both in terms of the depiction but also by the way it encouraged related thoughts.

Spot the Huxley text, but shiver if you feel a hand on the sleeve.

Sherlock Holmes angles and falls

The recent Sherlock Holmes TV series has a following similar to Doctor Who, with plenty of people offering theories about the "demise" of Sherlock at the end of the last episode. There's even people plotting the scene onto google maps to check the various angles.


My own theory is fairly simple.

Sherlock jumped but some of the Baker Street Irregulars (his street-dwelling helpers) had pulled sheets from the conveniently parked laundry truck to cushion his fall. He'd arranged for Watson to not be able to see ground level (check the google street view and you'll see what I mean). Then some hasty rearrangement of the ground scene and he was ready to be seen by a woozy Watson. A bit of help with ambulances and documentation from Molly the friendly medical associate and he's been made to disappear.

There, the above sound suitably definite...or were there two falls (as in Reichenbach Falls - i.e. a play on the original?)

Not so sure about Moriarty, who is presumably still around as well> It would explain the rooftop Point of View shot of Holmes, although it does also emphasise his 90 degree rotation on the ground.

The Triangle - The Trailer

I realise I've never posted this version of 'The Triangle' trailer.

travel options

Thursday evening and I'm off to somewhere in the Midlands.

It's one of those occasions where I'll get 'in position' for tomorrow's meeting.

It's worth trading a late evening saunter along the motorways instead of a 5 a.m start into the early Friday traffic.

in which the internet is greyed out

There's some new trouble at 'Mill today as we see a few big internet sites blink off the air. Wikipedia and Flickr spring to mind, with one gone dark and the other showing selectively darkened photographs. Google is running a campaign notice on its home page.

The reason is driven from new US Bills being shunted through the American system to try to protect Intellectual Property. It's supposed to be about protecting IP that is being systematically stolen, for example by cloning sites with commercial agendas. Anti piracy, which most of us would support.

Instead, in its current form, it is probably applying brakes to sensible progress and sharing of ideas and innovation. The most obvious example is the impact on social computing, the likes of facebook, twitter, blogger, flickr, wiki and so on. More controls, more monitoring and more security. Don't misunderstand that I want to have control over my personal data and access, but I don't want to prevent the evolution of new good ideas from the simple applications that mashup transport timetables or location of spare Boris-bikes in London through to the big new ways of presenting information and media online. Then there's the music applications that let people co-operate on a single work from multiple countries. Or the various ways that people can now self publish.

At one level there's the important argument about the price of freedom being eternal vigilance. The challenge is to not use such blunt instrument that it kills the spark that creates the initiatives in the first place.

And to not set up systems that ultimately get circumvented by the very organisations being targeted. A case in point is a sports streaming site which was run from a US-based .com domain. It was seized by America's Homeland Security and nowadays displays three very impressive looking badges from the Department of Justice, National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Centre and Homeland Security Investigation Special Agent.

The thing is, the site has then sidestepped the blockade in a couple of ways. One, it re-routes its operation from Spain (and a few other countries as well), secondly, it has created a variation of its name in the US market.

Now I'm not directly judging this site, but I am saying that if some sort of blanket restrictions are applied to try to stop the obvious rogues, there is a risk that the more genuinely creative and sharing processes will get caught up in it all as well.

I'm not sure how old the Internet is, but I can still remember the first time I used FTP based access, via a modem, to hook onto someone in Australia's files, as part of a sharing experiment. It was before Microsoft had an IP stack and we used to patch in something called Netmanage to get connectivity with those modems that made the weird shooshing noises when they connected.

In technology terms, it wasn't that long ago, and then, as Mosaic and Netscape evolved we started to talk about organisations using web addresses instead of street names. At the time it seemed far fetched, but of course nowadays its passé.

The innovation hasn't stopped, but any new legislation needs to be carefully thought through so that it isn't just a barrier and some kind of attempt to protect the status quo. The recent Booz Allen report on the Internet suggests it represents 3.4% of world GDP and 21% of GDP growth in mature countries over the last 5 years.

Its not about gimmicks for their own sake, but experience suggests that there's a lot more new stuff around the corner and we must be careful not to stifle its ability to surface.

unplugged without warning

I should have noticed the warnings as I arrived at the train station early today. Instead I was more intent on getting a ticket.

There was a line of animatedly talking people at the ticket office so I tried the machine instead.

I picked the right option from the variety of very similar sounding train ticket types and made it to the platform with a couple of minutes to spare.

Thats when I noticed the surprisingly small number of people waiting today. The rest must have known something that I didn't.

I looked towards the digital sign. Instead of showing train times and an estimate of how many minutes delay, it had another message.

"Bus service only due to overnight theft of signalling cables"

I started to plan an alternative route and then suddenly an overfull train appeared. It wasn't the correct one, but it was going in the right direction.

I decided to get on and see how far I could go before being turfed onto a bus. I was slowly moving my mindset back to that of a rail traveller.

The train was only about 20 minutes late at this point. By the time we arrived at the destination it was an hour and a half late.

Still, I had my Kindle with today's news on it to read whilst I stood in the train's corridor for around two and a half hours.

ever decreasing space

I've been using a few main line trains to get around over the last few days. It made me decide to restart my Kindle newspaper subscription.

The previous one just stopped after I had another one of those card alerts where they phoned me to say they thought someone had been using my credit card.

That was way back in November and I think the bank might have been right on this occasion.

I agreed to let them stop the card and ordered another one but then some previously agreed payments also stopped working.

The Kindle newspaper was one and its only recently that I've noticed it again.

It's most useful when I'm travelling and only have intermittent connections because the paper downloads itself in a few seconds and is then fully available offline.

So planes and trains are the best uses.

Trains especially because the available space to read gets smaller and smaller as one approaches a busy destination.

the glasses are not half empty

Just over a dozen miles cycling today, which can count towards next weeks's targets. In theory I could also count Saturday's mileage towards next week because I ended up at 52 miles from Sunday to Saturday. I won't though. I also know my mileage is not a lot compared with the people who commute by cycle every day, but I regard it as a worthwhile increase from practically zero at this time of the year.

The wine glasses are also mainly empty, except Saturday evening when we had a pleasant meal with some very agreeable Minervois from those naked people.

But I guess my biggest achievement from the random selection of January things I wrote down was to get moving again on the novel writing. It takes a little time to get back into it and I'm having to unpick and rewrite some parts, but I do feel as if I've got the story back in my head again.

Maybe not 1,600 words per day, but certainly enough to be serious. I may just sit in the chilly sunshine and write some now.