calm before a snow flurry

Anyone used to this part of London will notice the Sunday-like absence of people and traffic. It was the calm before the storm because within a couple of minutes the icy wind had given way to a bitter (although short-lived) snow fall.

I had to make a quick decision about whether to go early to my meeting or dive into a coffee shop.

My absence of later pictures indicates that I headed for the meeting room's shelter.

The 32 Stops - Danny Dorling on the Central Line

I commented a couple of days ago about being in a coffee shop in the City and running into an acquaintance.

The same thing happened again during Saturday, when we were shadows in a cafe yet through the window I could see someone waving their arms. Another friend, and another improbable co-incidence.

London may be large, but there are certainly areas with the right concentration of intersections, supported by the extensive weave of the transportation systems which help place people on the same lines.

I've just bought the one of the Penguin paperbacks celebrating the London Tube line's 150th anniversary, and have been reading some of the stories.

As a series, it's a good idea. There's one book per train line (e.g. District Line, Victoria Line and so on). The authors and stories have a relevance to the subject matter, but the writers have each completed a score card containing information about their Tube-geekiness and length of time lived in London.

The book store where I first saw the series had all of them on display. I had to pause a few minutes to decide where to start. I was tempted by the Waterloo and City Line (which is my current squeeze) but even its clever reversible format couldn't dissuade me from starting with my true loyalty.

The Central Line.

I've easily clocked more miles on that line than any other, spread over many years from living east to nowadays living west.

The narrative starts at West Ruislip and so far I've only reached Hanger Lane. It's an interesting approach with social observations about the demographics of the people at each stop. So far, the journey inwards is showing monotonic declining social conditions, lower educational expectations and reduced life expectancy with every stop.

The approach so far appears statistically driven, although doesn't read like a Professorial text book, instead projecting voices and situations onto the examples. It's clearly been researched because the last 30 or so pages are full of foot note references.

I like the idea of the book and can tell from my quick peek at the others in the series that there will be a variety of styles and themes. Maybe one a month to complete the set? Hmm, at that rate, 12 tube lines would take a year.

Meanwhile, today, I'm sure I'll get as far as Notting Hill Gate.

the temporary white car arrives

My temporary white replacement car has now arrived.

It's Spanish and the delivery person was very helpful. I don't think I've seen this type of car before but I'm sure I will see them everywhere now I'm in one, even if their advertising appears to be from another part of Europe and possibly a different decade.

It's already over two weeks since the stone pinged the windscreen of my own car and I think I've done well to use foot, bike and public transport in the intervening period.

The glass repair company did say they could provide a car sooner, but I thought I'd hold out in case my own vehicle could be fixed.

The latest head shaking indicates at least another week of substitute transport which is why I finally agreed to take a loaner until my own is ready. It's reached the stage where it is better to have the paperwork done and possession rather than need wheels suddenly and then have to wait.

Each stage of this process is getting more complicated. From the stone ping 1 cm dink, to the 15 cm crack, to the replacement glass fitting that cut some wires. Then most of the error diagnostics on my car coming on when I started it - Why the windscreen affects the Electronic Stability system is a kind of mystery? Then to the dealer who has had to order the parts from Germany. And now I have a substitute vehicle from a hire company.

In the back of my mind I'm wondering about all the money being spent on this. I'm covered, but as more cars get clever glass, this is going to get expensive for lots of people.

But then, I suppose even my bicycle has sat-nav.

a higher probability than one might expect

I'm working around the Square Mile at the moment, so every day I go past a dragon's wing on the way to work.

It's also an area* densely packed with bars and restaurants, quite a few of which have subterranean elements. It's probably possible to go to a different place every day without walking very far at all.

The trick, like in the early morning, is to know the places with shorter queues and maybe places where it is easy enough to get a table.

And that was my process today, when I arrived too early for my first session, having emerged from the orderly queues of the Waterloo and City line tube.

They say that the City is a pretty small world. Sure enough, I was sitting sipping my coffee quietly when I noticed someone arrive at another table. One of those moments of double take as we recognised one another. Then a hurried few minutes chatting before disappearing to our completely different corners of this dense area of London.

* I know, this post is an excuse to show another London bus and taxi (and yes, those shoes are orange)

buzzard acrobatics herald spring

It looks as if I'll be car-less for the whole week. The people fixing it have had to order a front facing camera(?) from Germany and it may take a few days to arrive. Don't ask.

Bizarrely, I've become quite an expert on noticing cars with simple windscreens and others with complicated electronics. My test is whether the rear-view mirror is just stuck on with a little square sticky pad. They are the simple ones.

The last few days I've been getting around on foot and bicycle and fortunately the weather has been quite sunny. Whilst cycling a couple of days ago I spotted what I initially thought was a red kite bird swooping over the neighbourhood.

I've mentioned them before because they have come back from near extinction to gradually spread back around the area. In urban surroundings with mainly smaller birds, the still relatively rare red kites have a significant presence with an almost 2 metre wing-span. I have sometimes seen one of the kites being chased by smaller birds.

When I noticed what I assumed to be the same bird again today it was doing some kind of aerial stunts, diving, spinning and making a sound like a cat. I was close enough to notice the tail didn't look right and realised it was actually a buzzard showing off to its mate. Spring acrobatics.

No decent camera to hand but I managed to snap the bird and its partner. I boosted the shadowy colour and can just make out the distinctive necklace of white.

And after I'd taken just two shots they slid away on some kind of laminar air current. In the car I'd have missed them completely. Even with the mysterious front facing camera.

raw fingers and incompatible dry cleaning

Yesterday's cycling expedition included raw fingers, simply because I thought I'd use my bright yellow fingerless gloves.

My cycling jacket with the full gloves in the pockets is in the boot of my car, which is still at the dealer awaiting the system refit.

Other parts of me that started out cold soon warmed on the bike, but my forward facing fingers needed some soothing balms after my return home.

I've been keeping an eye on my 'year to date' cycling statistics too, and making the bike more of a habit is helping me hit my various targets.

I haven't properly checked February yet, but I think it will be somewhere between 600-700 miles. With that in mind, I should be able to hit my bigger targets for 2013.

My recent hanging around in a car dealership meant I noticed that many finance deals for cars are proposed on the basis of annual mileages of 5000-6000 miles, which isn't so different from my projected cycle target for the year.

Although I did realise that today's mission to collect the dry cleaning wasn't really bicycle compatible.

space cruiser grounded after particle collision

Well, I took the car to the dealership to get it fixed. There was shaking of heads as I handed over the key. The stone hitting the windscreen has created ripple of challenges.

I'd also discovered a couple more faults on the way to the dealer. When it started to rain, the wipers would only do their very intermittent setting. The automatic lights were not coming on. The list of faults continues to grow.

Perhaps a man with a van and a hammer is insufficient to fix modern windscreen technology with its embedded computers, sensors and aerials.

I sipped a super-hot car dealer coffee and idly watched the news loop on the television. My car appeared behind the big glass wall in the spotless repair zone and studious looking technicians examined it.

I decided that space travel was going to remain out of reach for everyman. If a car is now as sophisticated as a small space cruiser, then adding flight and low gravity doesn't bode well for family use.

They told me that the repair to the windscreen had severed some wires and damaged the head lining of the car. There was also a small camera which might have been affected.

My car is only 2 years old; they said it should be put back to factory condition. They'd have to order the parts including a wiring loom which may need to come from Germany. They predicted it would be next Wednesday before it would be ready.

I shall be adding more bicycle mileage over the next few days and fortunately I'm working in Central London at the moment.

Meantime, I'll have to make do with cowboy bebop manga space cruisers.

chain reaction

Well, the car windscreen was 'fixed' a couple of days ago.

It's a good example of a chain reaction, and at the moment I think I'm the fissionable material.

Let's recap.

A tiny ping as something hit the windscreen.

Unaided, by the next day it had become a 15 cm split across the glass.

Call the fixers last Friday, who arrive with the glass on Tuesday.

Fixed but please don't drive it for an hour.

It was already late and I didn't even drive it the next day.

Eventually, on Thursday I start it up and there's a selection of bing bong sounds from the dashboard.

A range of warning messages scroll past:

"Distronic Plus disabled"
"Parktronic Plus disabled"
"ESP disabled" (seriously!)
"Read Owners Manual for more information"

And a few more that I can't even remember. I have never seen so many warnings. I didn't even know I could have so many systems go wrong at once. I'm not sure how Scotty and Captain Kirk could have coped.

Even the little steaming coffee cup symbol stopped displaying. How will I know when I'm thirsty?

Call the glass fixers to advise them that something is amiss after their visit.

"We'll call you back from the depot in a couple of hours"

Call the car dealership.

Glum sounds as I'm told I will need to take it in to be sorted out and there isn't a simple reset button to fix it all.

When the glass fitters eventually called back, they did say this kind of thing has happened before. They recognised the symptoms and said it was probably caused by a wire being cut through in error.

The car goes into the dealer tomorrow. That's a week since the stone hit the glass and I feel as if I'm still going backwards. The man from the glass fitters has said he'll pay the bill.

There's a lesson here somewhere about engineering complexity. The glass on my car is obviously too clever for its own good. And I've been without a car for a week.

cookies and chips

There was a small ping as the stone hit the front windscreen.

I've been travelling on quite a few motorways recently and loose stuff on the road surface can be troublesome.

"Look," I said, "it's made a dink."

It was quite a small star shaped mark on the front screen, about the size of a twenty pence piece. I remembered that Autoglass will fix small marks in windscreens rather than having to replace the whole piece, so decided to call them from home - but forgot that evening.

Next morning I was running an errand to the train station.

"Look," I said, "It's got bigger."

Autoglass wouldn't be able to fix it with their heat treatment now. It had morphed from 10mm to about 15cm. Overnight.

That's partly how I came to be making cookies. I'd just returned from a 25 mile bike ride, put everything away and showered. I remembered I'd intended to get some shopping on the way back. Now I just didn't feel like going out again, especially in the cracked car.

The forgotten entertainment cookies would need to be improvised from the rashbre kitchen.

Five minutes with eggs, breadmaking flour (only kind available), milk, butter, brown sugar, cocoa, broken chocolate squares, currants, cinnamon, brandy. Make around a litre of gloop. Test taste the flavour. Pour onto metal foil. Chuck in 200C oven.

Wait.

Peel the foil and make into squares.

Serve with a story.

Drobo 5N and Drobo 5D speed comparison

I usually manage to backup the varied computers around rashbre central.

We are currently phasing out the Time Capsules which spot passing laptops and back them up whenever they get a chance. I am wary of their reliability, having had two fail irretrievably also knocking out their wi-fi coverage. Pretty useless for a backup device outlasted by the thing it is backing up.

The main backup is still to a RAID disk array and we recently swapped a few components as part of tidying up the number of spare drives that had sprouted.

I thought I'd spend a few minutes running some tests to see how speeds have improved.

I used the quick, handy disk stress tester from Blackmagic. It alternatively writes and reads data of up to 5Gb and reports performance. It's informative, simple and free.

I started with the oldest RAID device on the system. It's a Lacie 5Big Network drive which is called HAL because of its big central light. It's 5x 1TB and dates from around 2008, running RAID5 with 1 hot standby disk. Until a few days ago it was the regularly used backup drive and is connected via 1GbE to the network.

Slow by today's standards, it is still fine for serving up documents but useless for editing photographs let alone video.

The second unit is a modern 2013 Drobo 5N, also network attached, in a RAID5 configuration with single disk redundancy (so one disk can fail and the show will go on). It uses 5xWD Red 3Tb (ie 15Tb total) and also includes a 256Gb SSD cache. It's named SAL after the computer that followed HAL in the Arthur C Clarke novels.

The third unit is a modern 2012 Drobo 5D, Thunderbolt attached, configured as RAID5 with dual disk redundancy (two disks could fail and it would still work). Inside it is identically configured to the Drobo 5N (5xWD Red 3Tb + 256Gb SSD).

Finally, for fast comparison a 3Tb Apple Fusion drive.

I should say it's all 'real world' and without any fancy configurations. Pretty much all of it is 'out of the packet' and part of the day-to-day network.

Here's how they got on:



What does it show?

Clearly the old 5Big Network drive is slooow, but still perfectly usable for simple routine document archiving.

The 5N is 3 times as fast for reading and 10 times as fast for writing. Backups are pleasantly fast to it, and I test copied about a 220Gb iTunes library to it in just under an hour yesterday (screenshot below)



The 5D is fast enough for routine use for video editing (Final Cut and Avid Composer) as well as use for Photo editing with Aperture.

The Fusion Drive is fast enough for anything I do, although it also illustrates that 4:4:4 video or 4K are outside of practical realms for domestic grade hardware.

I know it's not a lab test, but simply and pragmatically running a modern benchmark tool on my installed kit. I've logged it here as a reference point and possibly for quick cross checks by others.

Screen prints of the tests are here

car names ending in vowels

The rashbre central blue car is reaching the end of its usable life.

It's one of those convertibles with a metal folding roof and even nowadays gets bemused looks when we press the Thunderbird button in a car park.

I have to become vaguely knowledgeable about cars for two weeks every few years when one needs updating.

This time I'm struck by how all the smaller cars have names that end in vowels. They may not be on the shopping list, but in the types of cars that aren't denoted by ranges like '1,3,5,6,7,8 Series' or Classes like 'A,B,C,E,S' then there's apparently more imagination in the naming.

Amusingly, it also looks as if many of the names are some kind of attempt a globalisation, so creating meaningless names in as many languages as possible.

There's the twizy, aveo, mito, pixo, otigo, mii, agila, aygo. A few old timers like ka, corsa, clio, twingo, punto, micra. And even a few with real word connotations like savvy, fiesta, polo, panda, ibiza, picanto, rio, yeti.

I'm sure I've missed a few too.

I've also stayed away from the rapidly emerging Chinese marques.

They haven't quite got the hang of this naming yet and seem to use titles like the Brilliance Junjie Wagon, SAIC Roewe 550 (Rover anyone?), Great Wall Hover-TT, Geely Beauty Leopard, Dongfeng EQ7240BP, the PU Rural Nanny and my personal favourite the stylish Tang Hau Book Of Songs.

I know, it was only a concept in 2008. I bet it could get a short name ending in a vowel now though?

London crime and virtual San Francisco street racing

I saw this over on the excellent Londonist, but thought it so daft that I've decided to re-post here.

Mischievous Tom Scott and Matt Gray flaunted illegal carrying of planks and suspicious handling of salmon.

A previous adventure involved virtual street racing with Didsbury vs San Francisco in a journey from Fisherman's Wharf to Coit Tower. That's here. I've only ever walked it, so this is a whole different way to experience the journey.