what is the mince pie cycling mileage equivalence?

There's a cute little shop that I pass sometimes when I'm cutting through the back-doubles around Waterloo.

There's also some adjoining windows where you can see people busily cooking and baking.

The place is called Konditor and Cook and they have a range of secret weapons which they deploy at this time of year.

One harmless looking item is the Mince Pie.

They manage to make them look oh-so-innocent and home-made. When you get some, loosely packed in a box they still don't give the game away.

A mere nibble is enough to confirm their brilliance. Buttery pastry with just the right amount of crumblage. Aroma-packed filling that doesn't need to resort to being over-doused in cooking brandy.

I suggest these are the real deal although I'd hazard a guess that they are up around 8 miles of cycling per unit consumed.


Time for a bike ride, I think.

Update: I've just cycled around 3 mince pies worth of distance.

Hvad hedder det på dansk?

What with the #strictlysweepstake, early evening Saturday television is pre-allocated and, yes, my assigned celeb is still doing okay.

It's a conveniently early show, leaving the rest of the evening open. There's also the final series III of 'The Killing', which I've been recording.

My Danish serial watching is a tad behind. I'm still only half way through episode 4 with still another two from this evening to watch.

I'm suitably hooked and have even found myself studying certain scenes and making mental notes of who is where at which time to rule out possible perpetrators. It's twistier than a twisted very twisty thing that's been extra twisted for good measure. That's before the rødt sild/vildspor/red herrings have been thrown into the mix. I might need to bring my own notepad along for the next episode.

This series also has more daytime scenes around Copenhagen, so it's fun for me to try to spot some of the areas where I've worked.

But as I'm away again next week, it may be some time before I can catch up with the latest dark rooms and powerful Danish compact flashlights.

Drobo 5D heralds domestic disk drives dramatic decluttering

I'm removing some of the build up of small disk drives that have proliferated around the home network.

There's all kinds of drives with video, photos and miscellaneous other stuff. And that's as well as a network attached storage unit.

There's even one of those disk docking stations that can have raw drives plugged in, like a sort of 'cassette' hard drive. They all have power cables and connectors, so it gradually becomes quite a tangle. At night, one room looks a little like the inside of the TARDIS, with all the twinkly lights.

I've been using a Drobo 5D as the replacement. So far I've consolidated several terabytes of separate loose drives and I've got a few more in my sights.

The Drobo is remarkably quiet and cool running unit about the size of a sliced loaf of bread. The completely plug-and-play unit works out the most frequently used data and caches it onto a solid state drive. Behind the SSD storage layer there's a set of hot pluggable hard drives which can provide a solid RAID 6 type protection. That's the level where a pair of drives could fail but the system is still hot recoverable.

The unit is also fast on a Thunderbolt connection and even quite usable as a data server on a USB connection.

I think it's described as a 'RAID6 like' because it has an interesting additional ability (so called BeyondRAID) to mix the drives both by size and type and if needed to hot swap to a larger unit.

I suppose it raises an interesting question about where all of this data originated? A few years ago the rashbre home network would have been sub-terabyte in totality. It's the increases in binary large objects like photos, music and videos that has bumped the space consumption so quickly.

And of course the need to have a second copy of everything stored on a different system.

This little unit seems to be a very effective as a main place to store everything. I think I'll hold out on updating the networked NAS unit until this technology can be trickled onto the LAN as well. I'm guessing there will be a Drobo 5N announced before long.

splish splash

It's a "spot the anomaly" quiz today. A quiet road scene from a few days ago. What are the strange conditions in this picture?

checking for bark scorpions and Sedona gas stations

Fortunately I took some snapshots when we were wandering around the deserts a while ago.

It's meant that some of the scenes I'm writing at the moment can be at least partly based upon some form of reality.

I can even remember the boot bashing and clothes shaking rituals associated with checking for scorpions. The little itsy 2 inch cream coloured ones were supposed to be the most trouble.

Maybe it was exaggerated a bit because I was a tourist, but I wouldn't be taking any chances.

Anyway, my little cast are still out in the desert with all these creepy critters - although I've managed to keep a London angle as well. Although it's rather soggy wet and grey in the London parts of the story.

leaf less

I'm sure the last time I looked at that tree in the front garden, it still had leaves?

pen and paper time in #nanowrimo

I'd predicted that I'd have to slow down on the NaNoWriMo this week because of work, and that's exactly what has happened.

Fortunately, I front loaded the month's effort, with the intention of getting ahead, although it meant getting the word count up to 5k per day to achieve this.

The plan worked quite well and I managed to create the main story arc, but I missed a couple of major themes that I only thought of after I'd written past where they would occur.

I therefore decided to just keep going to the end. My plan would be to re-build the missing parts. At least I know that there is an end for the story; something that was a problem in my last 'completed' NaNo attempt.

Once I'd concluded the story, I printed the whole messy draft - which by now was 320 pages of typed, double spaced A4.

I wouldn't recommend this to anyone who is still trying to hit the 50k target, because of the temptation to start editing. As I'm up around 69k, I think I'm already in the safe zone.

The difference to progress since producing the hard copy is that the word count change is now minimal and probably will just about flip into 70k before the end of the month.

What is surprising me is just how much the story managed to cover in the main writing period. There's dozens of errors on every page, but it still feels like something usable.

Now for a proper pen and paper type edit.

spiking a little high

Morning and evening darkness and a very low sun yet still around a month to the shortest day.

As I returned from work the sun disappeared before I'd even caught the Tube.

Then when I emerged again, it was also steadily raining. I'd already decided that the evening would feature a spin on the bike, and by this point knew it would be a turbo trainer session.

The little graph shows that I ran out of steam before the end of the session. I'd not noticed that the last three blocks of spinning would be combinations of high effort mixed with short recovery slots.

I managed the first block's ups and downs, but then had to admit defeat. I can't really blame the depressing movie I was watching. I think I had the whole session dialled up a bit high. My tee-shirt noticed.

I'll admit I had spotted the hardest bit of the programme was the last 30 or so minutes, but not the spikiness. Maybe too much after a busy day. I bailed 23 minutes from the end.

I shall need to practice some more before I try that particular sequence again.

excuse to show a snapshot of a vinyl record

Okay, I know I was really playing around with wide aperture blurring of the background of a snapshot, after watching the sumptuous photography in The Killing III. I picked the record player because I happened to be sitting close to it.

It reminded me that we were chatting about old vinyl records on Friday and I mentioned that I still played them. A couple of others came forward and said they did too.

I've noticed the phenomenon that some new albums are available on vinyl again. I received one a few days ago actually - with its proper artwork and packaging.

I also ordered another one a couple of weeks ago, which gave me the instant gratification of a set of MP3 downloads, but I still have to wait several weeks for the actual vinyl copy to arrive.

There's still something right about the 20 or so minutes per side ritual of LPs compared with the snacking of shuffled single tracks.

the power of a bounce

The wonderful thing about this Tigger is as well as being bouncy, it can be trained to sit very still.

It's my temporary substitute for an upturned eggcup and a pingpong ball, which will become a minor project over the next day or two.

A group of us found ourselves marvelling at the effects that an Anglepoise lamp could have upon a circle and a rectangle, whilst on the 10th floor of the Blue Fin Building in Southwark.

It was a session with a gang of well-known photography types and we were all picking up tips on better ways to shoot pictures.

It was 'all about the picture' rather than about the gear, and very good for it. I was particularly struck by a suspicion that I've had for a long time being confirmed.

I've often wondered whether all those extra modes and menus on cameras were really necessary, based upon my days with film where aperture, shutter speed, ISO and focus seemed to suffice.

That was the general gist in this session as well. Simplified to 'Go manual'.

So I'll need the ping-pong ball balanced upon the upturned eggcup and an anglepoise lamp to 'play god' with the lighting of a scene, to simulate sunrise to sunset and the different positioning effects it creates.

In the meantime, its a bit of an experiment with a couple of speedlights to tide me over.

Not to mention some further experiments with that variable light source I've got access to for free. Yes, daylight.

cops and robbers

I was on a tube train today when I heard a typical exchange about the recent UK elections for the Police Commissioners.

I should note that London itself has been excluded from the voting; something to do with Boris, I think.

The exchange went something like,

"Did you vote?"
"No, not yet. When do they close?"
"What?"
"The Polling Stations?"
"Er..Yesterday."

It sort of sums it up for this piece of almost sabotaged democratic process. Hardly any publicity. No leaflets to voters in most areas. The official website for candidates gave slightly messy one-pagers from each candidate, which all said roughly the same things: More police on the street; clampdown on bad things; improve victim rights; control of finance.

And usually something about why whichever candidate is better than any other for some 'unique selling point reason'.

And mysteriously, quite a few candidates were ex Westminster politicians who had now mysteriously become experts on policing matters. Even some of the 'Independents' appear to be ex party folk too. It would surely be wrong to call the PCC a form of pension package?

So there wasn't really much to separate the candidates for a process that most of us don't understand, but which leads to the politicising of the police force.

Listening to the 'selected ones' in this 14.99% turnout process is also salutary. Instead of recognising that they have paper thin support and in some cases were only elected after the first and second choice votes were merged illustrates the point.

That they are declaring themselves 'victors', when they have maybe an average of 6% support from the electorate already illustrates a lack of ethical compass.

Trying now to search for the actual results is interesting. It reveals the people with the highest aggregated votes, but even the official PCC site and the Home Office site is keeping quiet about the actual numbers.


In the end, I did some quick digging myself and created my own graph. The average % from this graph is 5.88% of the electorate selecting the winning candidate - and remember it can use two votes because of the arcane Supplementary Voting system used - which I suspect many didn't fully understand in any case.

I know the selected candidates are calling this a triumph, but I'm not sure for what?

printing a first #nanowrimo text

Tomorrow I'm out at meetings all day and Friday I'm on a course, so last night and this afternoon were my chances to crash out the last few sections of the NaNoWriMo.

I know I'm ahead of the word target, but that was partly a self preservation thing because I have some complicated weeks in late November which could interfere with progress.

I've therefore tried to blast through the writing part at an unhealthy and often late night rate to get the main wordage completed. I'm at around 69,000 words at present, against the NaNoTarget of 50,000.

I can honestly say I didn't really have an idea about this story until I started typing the first paragraph on the first of November, so it's quite fascinating once again as a process.

I've also just printed a first copy - I won't refer to it a first draft - there are way too many errors, typos and the like, including some large sections where I decided to skip fiddly speech punctuation in the interests of speed.

So the first printed copy will be the one where I realise just how many obvious bloopers there are, as well as needing to patch up a couple of significant plot points which have gone awry. I also had a good idea part way through which I haven't managed to incorporate. It will have to wait for the first revision.

Not forgetting a few notes to myself of the type that say "Describe the ..." where I was too dazed to attempt the relevant prose.

It's also strangely different from my normal blogging, where I'll usually try to keep the text fairly short. I've noticed the blogging word count creeping up on a few recent posts.

Something about "I didn't have time to send you a short report, so I sent you a long one instead?"