don't look back in anger

A last minute decision as I left home for my travels this week was to slip a DVD into my bag. It was a loose one from a box set, in one of those thin plastic space saving wallets.

It was the first three episodes of the 1996 Peter Flannery's 'Our Friends in the North' which we seem to have as a box set but I'd never got around to watching.

Well, not since it was first screened on BBC television back in the 1990s.

The original screening was one of those 'imprint' type series where you feel like you've lived it by the end. Like looking at the cover of Sergeant Pepper is almost enough to recreate the sensation of listening to the album (even as I type it I can hear the opening track). There's a cliché about 'unforgettable', but it does sometimes genuinely apply.

That's probably why the DVD had languished shamefully unwatched at the back of the cupboard. I now can safely report it is still as great to watch today as it was when it was made. What's also interesting is the 'different things I know' between the first time I watched it and now.

It is set across the decades from the 1960s to the 1990s, tracking four friends whose lives intersect mainly around Newcastle plus some story lines that drift into the Soho area of London. It's a story of England as much as a story of the friends.

It covers city hall corruption, sleaze, three day working weeks, rock 'n roll, property backhanders, a dodgy Metropolitan police force, politics, miners' strikes and more. That's the backdrop against which the characters engage and the related front stories of their intertwined relationships play out.

There's Daniel Craig playing a loose cannon Geordie, Christopher Ecclestone as the idealist Nicky seeking a better future, Gina McKee whose Mary falls into a fractured marriage with Mark Strong's failed musician the womanising Tosker. The rest of the cast provide authentic supporting roles as the story unfolds.

The whole series is nine episodes, lasting about ten and a half hours, I've had to stop the world for a little while to watch them again, in just three sittings.

I wondered if the memorable close to the series would still work. It does.

a speedy day in Wales

A quick visit to Wales for some meetings. Cardiff for a day that was one of those blurs of whizzing around office blocks and meeting rooms.

So I learnt a new word for elevator - the Welsh word 'lifti' although I can't remember the Welsh words for 'up' and 'down'.

I might not have had much time for a look around, but I did spot a few red dragons.

musing on everything's amazing and nobody's happy

Some videos arrived to add to the bike turbo. It's a mix of routes with scenery and simulated gradients. Hmm, hamster wheel springs to mind?

I've loaded the first one onto the computer but it's taking about an hour to copy everything from the DVD onto the hard disk.

There's a few things to remark upon here. The PC I'm using is the inexpensive one I bought in supermarket with the groceries. It's connected to the internet via wi-fi broadcast from the house. The bike is connected to the same PC via ANT +. The DVD has control signals that can tell the bike where it is on the video and set the resistance/gradient accordingly.

The video gives a selection of routes including the Arizona desert, some pretty French villages in the Dordogne and a route around some French mountains.

So, having listened to that old and funny Louis CK clip on Conan O'Brien talking about technology nowadays, I thought it's best to back off from being irritated about the long load time of the software.

Testing the TACX TTS4

It was chucking it down with rain this morning which was something of a deterrent to bicycling.

I know, I should go out whatever the weather, but it seemed very cold as well and a day at complete odds with the sunshine of yesterday.

It gave me an excuse to try a ride using the bicycle turbo unit, which is my alternative to hitting the streets. I'd also recently ordered an updated training package to go with the TACX Booster unit.

The software is called TACX TTS 4 (no idea what it stands for) and it provide a way to get the readouts from the bike displayed directly onto the computer using the ANT+ protocol.

My bike already has a magnet on one of the rear spokes and another magnet on one of the pedals and a little radio sensor picks up the pedalling rate (cadence) and speed. Add a heart rate monitor and the main telemetry is all provided. The Garmin Edge 800 unit I have reads all of these signals and tracks my course using GPS when I'm out on the roads. It gives me speed, heart-rate, calories, cadence, amount climbed and a few other statistics.

The Tacx unit does a similar thing although it is designed to be stationary. The extra facility is that it will simulate terrain to make the ride easier or more difficult by applying an electronically controlled magnetic brake, either from the small control unit on the handlebars or via the PC.

Anyway, I loaded the new version of the software into the PC and restarted everything. Hooray - it worked immediately. The PC software found all of the various ANT+ readouts (I had to re-introduce it to the heart rate monitor) and then I was in business.

I tried a couple of the pre-programmed rides - firstly a simple 0.7% downhill slope for 6 miles to get used to the software. It worked fine. Then a small section of a French mountain pass - which had a decent video playback including oncoming cars and people standing looking over the edge of the river valley admiring the view. This was just a demo of less than a mile but ran quite smoothly.

There's also a facility to program in one's own circuits using google maps. Literally draw the circuit and then feed it into the TACX and Google earth will render a real-time playback. I've done this before on a previous version of the software but haven't yet figured out how to copy them across to this new release. I've previously recreated local courses that I've actually cycled (which works quite well - either uploading the exact co-ordinates collected from the Garmin or drawing them using Google) but it would be fun to do some other more exotic locations.

Next was a small circuit of an Italian virtual reality village. There were three scenarios to choose; a rugged downhill mountain bike area through woodland, a series of steep mountain rides and the one I chose (chicken!) which was called valleys. There were about half a dozen different valley rides pre-programmed and I looked for the one with the least steep profile - it was about 6 miles.

So I set off through the rolling countryside, with tractors mowing fields, birds tweeting and a flock of crows occasionaly swirling overhead. The ride became steep for a few minutes but was mainly flat as it meandered around a village, along a waterside front and then up a short hill before a few more loops to the finish.

Six miles in idyllic sunny Italian countryside.

I decided to look outside before maybe doing a further 15 or so miles.

The earlier rain had turned to snow.

I knew that the turbo made sense in certain conditions.

in which i finally see The Artist

We were in Mayfair on Saturday evening and stopped off at the Curzon to see "The Artist". I know everyone else has seen it and it's won all of the prizes, but I was actually a little bit underwhelmed.

The lead actors were charming enough, the doggy was cute and the story was heavily signposted along the way with plenty of 'those bits' that you want to get from this type of film. It had clearly been made with some affection for the genre.

But I was waiting for it to add something, rather than being a very good copy with high fidelity music. Sure, there were a couple of scenes with (shock horror) sound, and some borrowed musical soundtrack too, but I couldn't help thinking I'd prefer to watch "Singin' in the rain" to get roughly this movie's plot line.

The other thing was the filming of the story. There was quite an art to some of the ways that people shot the old monochrome and I was expecting to see some of this in the film's tones. There's some of this done to good effect in the stills from the picture, but I felt that the main filming was fairly bland in nature rather than stylised - almost as if someone had just shot a colour film, desaturated it to a slight beige and then boosted the white on whoever was the star.

I know I'm in a minority here, but it isn't really a film I'd particularly want to see again, despite it winning so many awards.

Capital moment

I'm reading that John Lanchester novel called Capital at the moment. It's about people who live in a London street and how their lives are separate but intertwined.

I originally downloaded it from Amazon, after it came up as a plausible (to me) recommendation. That was before I noticed the huge marketing that the book seems to be getting, with a full back page advert in the newspaper the other day and an interview with Lanchester on Newsnight.

My motives were somewhat simpler for buying it, it was about London and originally I thought it was about an ordinary street called Pepys Road, which I imagined to be something like the North London Victorian Road I'd once lived in.

There's an immediate difference that this street's houses have all done rather well and are now worth silly money, despite the collection of 'all walks of life' characters assembled to drive the various plot lines.

There's Roger the banker, Freddy the (Senegalese) footballer. There's an anonymous artist and a corner shop run by the Kumars, sorry, the Kamals. Throw in a political refugee as a traffic warden and we almost have that card game complete. Who has got Zbigniew, the Polish plumber?

We had builders, postmen, teachers, the man who owned huskies, a Greek restaurant owner, a security alarm firm and shop assistants as neighbours in our version of the story. Before we got robbed. Twice. So we left.

I'm only part way through the novel at the moment but starting to get a feeling that the ensemble are there to play their relevant parts in a slightly predictable and caricatured way. A sort of distant pair of tweezers picking through scraps of humanity. Perhaps that is the point, but the background premise around London 'doing alright' despite the banking crisis and still the place people want to 'come to' rather than 'escape from' could be explored with more vigour.

It'll be a race against time for me now though, because such is the marketing and media interest that yesterday evening I heard it being advertised as next week's "Book at Bedtime" on Radio Four.

revenge of the auto bots

There's been quite a bit in the news today about the new T&Cs for Google and the aggregation of some 70 different sets of conditions, spread across a whole raft of intertwined software.

I've previously wondered what happens as the marketplace consolidates down to a few main players and the degree to which various things overlap.

In my case there's been another system which has changed ownership/branding/software recently. Its called Twaitter and I used to use it to drive some robotic twittering based upon a few of the characters from my novel, "The Triangle".

So @trianglejake, @trianglebigsy, @chuckmanners and @triangleclare would send each other little messages on fairly long timer loops (measured in days, weeks and months).

And it sort of worked for the last couple of years. They all got followers (more than me in some cases) and I shipped a few copies of the book.

Of course, I could't resist a couple of extra characters just for fun - Mr Bubble @bubbleOoO - which just tweets strings of OOOooos and Mr Tic-Tac, which sends occasional updates on the number of tic-tacs being consumed.

I'd originally set them all up as experiments and they happily babbled away until recently.

"Twaitter is now Gremln."

Everything is supposed to have been transferred across seamlessly (anyone remember Haloscan?)

I can see the various ex twaitter accounts in Gremln.

I can even open the special new control panels.

But that's about it. I can't stop the messages, change them and some of Mr Bubble's are even appearing as if they have been generated by rashbre central - which to me is a sort of privacy infringement.

Don't let the cute little logos fool you, I suspect there is a missing letter in Gremln.

never let me go

I'd originally started to write this post a few months ago when the Kazuo Ishiguro story called 'Never Let Me Go' was running as a movie on television. I read the novel quite a long time ago but only saw the (similar) movie recently, and then watched it again on Monday as it's flittering around again on Sky.

I think when it was first on movie release it didn't get such good reviews from the critics. Contrastingly, I found its slower pace and surprisingly accepting attitudes of the main players made for quite an interesting thought piece. The main character behaviours are just not as one might expect.

The premise is a sort of alternative state of Britain, which has made some different scientific discoveries and has developed clone humans to use for spare parts.
Instead of setting it in some sort of Total Recall/Bladerunner/Terminator-esque world, we have English boarding schools, quaint farmyards and seaside homes.

Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield play Ruth, Kathy and Tommy - three young 'donors' who have been raised through the cloning process via a special school and are on the paths to their own destruction, yet accepting it in a surprisingly calm manner. I won't relate the whole story here, suffice to say their paths are quite intertwined.

There's a few more science fiction type stories that deal with the ideas of this novel, but I was reminded by its contrasts of the scenes in "O Lucky Man" when the Malcolm McDowell coffee salesman stumbles into a science research project which involves experiments with people and animals.

It's like the ideas in "O Lucky Man" with its altogether more jarring story have morphed into something both more genteel and also industrialised. A kind of erosion of the sensibilities.

Both stories play around with the role of the state and in the case of this novel and film there's the inevitable commercialisation of the processes involves, which ominously become more production lined for the successors of Ruth, Kathy and Tommy.

in which i make a few accidental holes in the wall

A few domestic chores today, including the removal of a cupboard, which is off to a new home. The room it has been in also contains a deceptively large sofa which disguises its size by cunning stripes.

It reminded me of when we'd originally moved the sofa into its position in an upstairs room. It fitted the room fine, but didn't like our staircase on the way.

After more than an hour of trying to twist it around the bend in the stairs, I finally made a hole in the wall to allow the extra few centimetres it needed to twist around.

I can remember that we had a party a few days later and I'd had to hang some temporary artwork in an unusual place to hide the hole.

We said at the time that if we needed to get the sofa back out, we'd probably have to dismantle it.

Let's say that today's cupboard was moved with no trouble, but a short test run of exiting the sofa was much less successful. It means we'll need to do a spot of redecorating in the stairway, although today's holes were seated by accident and are somewhat smaller than the one when the sofa was moving in.

Meanwhile, the sofa is back in its usual position. The blue stripes will survive a little longer.

staying away from the key lime pie

The last 2-3 days I've been quite busy with work and some of it has spilled across into Saturday. Actually, there were some things I needed to do yesterday evening as well, although I'd set myself 8p.m. as the cutoff point.

Alongside it all I'm still keeping to my cycling plans and managing to hit the targets I've set. When I started I wanted the majority of the targets to be achievable, so I might have set a few of them too low, although truthfully in the first week of my plans I wondered if I'd be able to keep to it.

There's a mixture of factors affecting the weekly outcomes which include whether I'm at home, access to a functioning bike, whether I've got other tasks piled up and so on. I've realised that there can always be reasons why I can't do something, but its probably better to cultivate the positive mind set. After all, except when its slippery I do enjoy the cycling.

So, just for fun, here's a few of my recent completed goals, which get tracked by the little gadget on my bike.

I'm partly putting them here so that I can look back in a few months to see whether there is any difference, which could be to do with the weather, my workload or any manner of things.

If I look at the goals critically, I can see I should probably crank a few numbers north, but at the moment I think I'll stick with my overachieving.

And no, I didn't eat the cream cake at the top of the post. Although I know someone who did.

jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz

Well, they say that Jackdaws are harbingers of rain, so maybe the UK drought is about to end. This bird and it's mate were strutting around looking opportunistic earlier today.

I'm inclined to think they are more interested in shiny things than in telling the weather though, because I also spotted a red admiral fluttering around and a blackbird had decided it was time to fluff its feathers for a February sunbathe.

wine, railway arches and helicopters

Wine with a friend, in the railway arches, across the bridge from my main current work area in Westminster.

We'd both noticed today's increased police presence, hi-viz jackets, emergency services and helicopters around central London, linked to the events unfolding across the river in Aldwych.

It was the rehearsal of an emergency tube station terror scenario, one of the unfortunate necessities in preparation for the Olympics, as the countdown continues and London starts to change, just a little, every day.