far down the shining lines

Another week of travelling up and down the UK. It'll be the third week in a row.

Last week it was to the North West, this time it's the North East.

And the time before that it was kind of 'middle' rather than top.

I've been using the car instead of planes and trains, although I still seem to spend time at train stations and on tube trains bound for Heathrow.

This time I must ship a few extras along; spare sets of tree lights, feather wings and pints of customised beer.

It's all good though, and means I'm reducing the contents of the over-occupied garage.

Ever so slowly.

green day

I know, it looks like a typical day in the office.

Actually, we'd decided to go along to the Hammersmith Apollo to see that Green Day show. I think of Green Day as a sort of guilty pleasure of a band. Slews of power chords and nearly everything set to maximum, we'd decided it wasn't going to be a quiet affair.

The musical is the fourth re-incarnation of the American Idiot album (after the live gig CD called Bullet in a Bible and the live DVD from, yes, Milton Keynes).

The musical is an excuse to play all of the American Idiot tracks back to back (and a few extra ones) with a thin story-line of three bored teenagers making their way from the post 9/11 'burbs. One becomes a father, one goes to war and the third does drugs.

Add in full-on Green Day tunes at express train speed. By the end of the first half we were wondering if there could be many more songs left from that album, but sure enough, the second half didn't disappoint.

There's a rage throughout the storyline which has a kind of deliberately chaotic manner and a jagged ending (pre-encore) to an entertaining evening.

Santa - early sighting

Snapped passing rashbre central. I think he was in a hurry. Collecting up the notes from the good children. Reindeer nose was red.

twinkly humbugs

This picture of the bah humbug tree will have to suffice until Aperture finishes its mammoth vault backup.

Eventually I will be able to show a picture of the first of the lights outside rashbre central. This year we have selected a sort of yellow-white rather than pure white or blue-white.

It seems to match the themes of the surrounding houses. Of course, the timer has broken since last year, so I will need to go hunting for a new one.

At least I have managed to untangle the lights and to my surprise they all seem to work. I am less confident of the lights for the tree.

All in good time.

Price Turner Pebbles Talulah, Gosh

One of the bonkers weeks where it's been very busy every day. So many topics.

I'll go arty today and mention the Turner Prize winner - Elizabeth Price, with the exhibition that I blogged about back in May. I experienced it at the Baltic but a part of it is moving to the Tate Modern now.

It's one of those exhibits that creates a lasting impression, using an immersive mix of media and sound in very dark spaces.

The piece that has got the most press is the one called Choir, which is more complexly themed than some of it's press descriptions that I've seen.

But gosh, Turner Prizes are often controversial. I happen to think this one was a good choice.

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.