skip alert before bike tidy

Out on the messy shopping bike briefly today - before switching to the orange one for a longer run. Over 40 miles today, and this evening I can feel it in my legs more as a gentle heat rather than anything worse.

The shopping bike is the one with the leather saddle, permanently attached mudguards, cyclo cross tyres, panniers and lights. There's also a big D-lock in the pannier on the back making a heavy bike. It could do with some TLC. Tender Loving Care.

There's a complicated sequence before I can sort it out properly, because the garage is full again. We've taken some of the furniture from upstairs and moved it to the garage before we redecorate one of the rooms.

I had to break up the sofa bed to move it out. It was the blue stripy one that we had to make a hole in the wall to move upstairs in the first place and now it's come down, although it's in more pieces than when we started.

That, plus a few other items, have somehow refilled all the space I'd created so I'm thinking that next Friday might need to be 'skip day' again.

I'm tied up with work things until then, and I'm wondering what the City on Wednesday will be like, what with Operation True Blue running through the area.

all the luck in the world

Sitting on a train, I was thinking about the kerfuffle around that 51 second musical tune.

Beyond the common decency and respect point, there's plenty of others to muse...

How stories get told, how points can be muted, how history's record is developed by the likes of Telegraph journo Charles Moore's supplicant biography and that Meryl Streep movie.

And now, the social media manipulation of populist information as a new form of agit-prop? Of course it also gives the media something easy and self referential to talk about.

It's drifted from folky tunes to popularise critical messaging, via punk, hip-hop and urban styles, now into a wall of digital graffiti.

I tried to think of songs related to recent-ish UK politicians by using Blair as a comparison, there's some...

• Pulp - Cocaine Socialism (1998) : Jarvis Cocker critiques Cool Britannia and New Labour's attempts to woo the Britpop gang.
• Radiohead - You and Whose Army? (2001): I loved OK Computer when it first came out and this one sings of politicians up against the wall.
• George Michael - Shoot the Dog (2002): Yes well. And that video.
• Manic Street Preachers - Send Away the Tigers (2007) : Nicky Wire on Blair's decline, post Iraq. Liberating zoo tigers may have unintended consequences.
• Pet Shop Boys - I Get Along (2002): Having donated to Labour, Neil Tennant later writes sadly of Blair's break up with Mandelson.
• Chumbawamba - Tony Blair (1999) : After that other song about getting knocked down and getting up again, throwing water over Prescott didn't help the sales of this band's tales of a double crosser.
• Elbow - Snowball (2005): the one about a hundred thousand punctured souls.
• Muse - Take a Bow (2006): asks the Iraq war creators to take a step forward.

More recently, for Cameron, it's curious. There's musicians who have stated they don't want their tunes used in Conservative events, like Radiohead's Thom Yorke, and the Smiths saying they are suspicious that Cameron claims to like their music.

Poppy boy-band One Direction managed to get around Cameron for a photo-opportunity, so I suppose he must like their music - or probably their reach into popular culture. The only real agit-prop I could quickly find was a version of Common People, about Cameron and Osborne.

It kind of makes Maggie's influence top of the pops for this, with more than 20 songs around, without even including the controversial show tune.

Of course, if we included Billy Bragg there'd be more, but for this process I'd only count one of his, like 'To have or have not', or maybe 'Thatcherites', although that last one might be more about John Major.

The same with Elvis Costello, where Shipbuilding doesn't even make buzzfeed's list.

park lane park life

In a rainy Park Lane, people watching London wrapped against the wet and cold.

Enough traffic to remind that this area of London continues at full strength, and the procession of expensive new carrier bags along the pavements sufficient to show that people were out buying.

It's the top two squares on the UK Monopoly board, so not too surprising that it seems to be recession proof.

I'd parked underground and the adjacent cars were four Porsche, a Bentley and a Roller. The adjacent Dorchester hotel entrance is a well-known spot for supercar spotting.

Judging from the noisy mobile phone calls as we walked from the car park, much of the foot traffic around the area was from overseas.

Our dining was a consequence of the many special offers in the capital at the moment. It's traditionally a February phenomenon to go to fancy restaurants on a low tariff, but this season, like the poor weather, the offers have extended right into April.

I won't describe the all the courses, suffice to say that the butter lettuce salad, avocado, shropshire blue cheese, and Champagne-herb vinaigrette topped with edible purple flowers was delicious.

And I wonder how how long it will be before Google adds an extra colour to street-view to illustrate prime celebrity viewing zones?

In London, this is a film star, rock and models area, with the Dorchester, 45 and China Tang as good spots to see people.

This Wolfgang Puck restaurant boosts the attraction for out of town Hollywood folk, looking for a familiar equivalence to Spago. It was actually amusing to see people from other tables look towards us as we left...Just in case.

Pope's Head Alley

We decided to pop into a wine bar after work, quite close to the old lanes in the centre of London's city.

The wine bar was in an ex bank head office established after the Great Fire and nowadays reminiscent of an old London coffee house, spacious and discreet.

We were by Pope's Head Alley, which is part of the labyrinthine city area where the rich and highly influential Catholic Lombardian bankers were given special dispensations to continue their faith during the reformation.

King Henry VIII had it renamed as King's Head Alley, but it later changed back in Queen Mary's reign.

Like many of the small alleys around this area, there's a ghost story too. This one is about how a catholic priest fought the devil in the alley - a kind of early P.R. job by the church.

The story now is that if it's dark and you feel the wind on your neck, it's not the wind, but someone with horns and a tail.

High up the wall a stone bust has been installed as protection. Yes, it's a Pope's Head.

the stars are out tonight

I took a look at my draft blog posts tonight, thinking I might find about 20 or maybe 30 lurking unpublished. It's those moments when I start writing something, get interrupted and then don't go back to finish it.

Or sometimes it's just that something else comes along which overtakes the original post.

I haven't checked through them in detail, but I must hold my head down in shame as I admit that it says I have 222 draft blog posts at the moment.

I clicked on a couple. The first one that intrigued me was called "You look at me like an emergency" and is about nuclear testing. There's another few that are reviews of music gigs and similar. Of course, when they get more than a few days old, they lose their currency and that's probably why they didn't get posted.

Another approach that I sometimes use is to combine two or three ideas into one post, which will kind of supersede the individual ones. I guess this post is a hasty case in point.

Since I've had my own car back, I've been listening to that new David Bowie album through the iPod, and it still has a freshness that I'm quite enjoying. I was given the album at easter as a vinyl double and it came with a CD tucked into the covers.

I used to think that the old Ziggy Stardust album sounded as if the tape had been gently speeded up on some of the tracks. It was probably something to do with Bowie's vocal register, and I still notice it on the title track.

But then, I also thought that Hugh Jackman sang quite like Bowie on some of the early parts of Les Mis.

No signs of speed-up trickery in the new album, where Bowie can still sing quite high, but generally stays in a safer vocal range. There's also a few moments among the tracks where there's little references to older material too. No doubt having some fun.

And I enjoyed the video for the stars track, with Bowie and a be-wigged Tilda Swinton playing a married couple shopping in urban America before getting to meet the neighbours.

I put it up as a this is my jam track, but I still haven't really figured out how to get any critical mass of listeners to that site.

division

I'd already left the UK when Thatcher came to power. I was living in Germany. One of the jibes from Germans was the one recent English word that every German knew.

"Strike"

Before that, I'd been living in a basement flat in Kensington, outside of which the rubbish sacks were piled to the sky because of the various public service disputes.

We'd only get power three days a week and I can still remember the regular scene of the Earls Court Road lights switching off as the next power cut was enforced.

This was consequential of the preceding Teddy Teeth regime and was around the time that I decided to see what it would be like living somewhere else in Europe.

Boeblingen, near Stuttgart, became home within the wealthy southern German Swabian area. Car manufacturers (Daimler-Benz and Porsche) and computer companies (IBM and Hewlett-Packard). Many small and medium sized enterprises and a surprising diversity of locally produced goods. There was a pretty full spectrum of jobs on offer and a managed programme of Gastarbeiter (imported) labour.

There were still the quirks of langer Samstag (the occasional Saturday when the shops remained open) and the weirdly short lunch breaks measured in tenths of an hour (you had to be clocked out for 36 minutes minimum at lunch-time).

By the time I returned to the UK, things were changing. The bins had been emptied, but the infrastructure of the manufacturing and production economy of Britain was being dismantled. The south was getting new work from the progressively deregulated financial services industry, but the 'making things' mentality was dissolving. Quick money was being made from selling things in public/state ownership back to the part of the public that could afford it.

I used to think that Thatcher was an unstable bully although the madness storyline didn't get much presence at the time. There was too much fighting in the streets/pits/factories/tax offices/oceans to allow time for that kind of reflection.

I also didn't think Thatcher had reasoned solutions, more that she was the one in position when things needed urgent change. The hardcore route she selected wasn't the only one available and unfortunately her choices cost the country decades of damage.

Most of the media has been jammed with related stories and pre-canned television shows. I decided to switch off twitter until it subsides again.

We'll get the televised event next Wednesday in Central London, with a sort of irony related to a state funeral for the arch privatiser.

Someone said the one word summary of her was conviction.

I say it was division.

tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar has given you the call

Off to the land of the sheesha today. Or the West London variant in any case.

I've worked in various countries around the middle east, where the caterpillar's favourite smoking device seems to be referred to as a sheesha rather than a hookah. Adding it as a suffix to an order for coffee seems to bring the full paraphernalia.

In London it's fairly commonplace to see them around Edgware Road, mainly in those cafes that can have a sort of sheltered outdoor section, which is a kind of weather adaptation.

The system reminds me of a sort of reverse barbecue, with the coal on the outside and the smoke going downwards into the water. I was once told that a single session with one of those pipes was the equivalent of inhaling the smoke from 100 cigarettes.

We were inside the restaurant to enjoy Fattoush and maybe some Sambousek Jebneh and even a Kafta Khosh-khash whilst chatting in the early evening.

I did think briefly about that pine nut and rose water rice pudding too, but it will need to wait for another day.

waiting for the van

Domestic chores today waiting in for the replacement washing machine. It arrived with two separate vans of fitters.

Then the phone rang to say my car is finally fixed.

So a convoluted journey through today's snow to drop off the temporary white car, and then to wait around to get a lift to the garage where my own car has been resting for the last month.

"Any paperwork?" I asked.

"No just the key; all the charges go to the other company." That's the company who originally replaced the windscreen. They've run up quite a tab with the windscreen (on insurance), the making good, which I think was quite expensive, plus the hire car fees. I waited around idly watching the snow whilst they retrieved my car from the lot. It was clean and sparkly like new again.

Then the strange feeling driving my own automatic again after a month of varied manual gear vehicles. How do I activate the wipers? Oh yes, the lights do come on automatically. All those windscreen sensors must be working.

As a side-line whilst waiting in the morning I'd figured out a small adjustment needed on the red car. It was a missing a software driver. No, not a person to drive it - a piece of software.

The little button on the steering wheel really does mean the car has an embedded Windows operating system for some of its functions. And, like a printer, there was a missing software driver. It's one of those things where a dealer would just say "it doesn't work with this model." I loaded the software and the missing function started up. When did it get so complex?

It shows what a few minutes of imposed down time can do. More productively, it's given me a chance to plan a new mini-project. But more of that later.

cross town traffic, so hard to get through to you

The yellow lines and parking bays were switched off and most of the shops were closed for the long weekend.

We were on our way to a Spanish pirate restaurant for a late lunch tapas before heading south across the river for a family occasion.

El Pirata de Tapas has that casual London thing with close tables and a buzz. We enjoyed the selection and the time whizzed by. Then to the south. One of those situations where a few wrong road choices could add a penalty half hour to the journey.

We did okay though, not taxi driver precision, but still a good route south, including through some of those areas which I'd place slightly off of my own beaten track.

As always, there's little cross town routes that work better with instinct over knowledge.

car software stacks

I'll move away from talking about cars soon, but there's a few extra things I've noticed recently because of the sudden and unexpected range of vehicles that I've been driving.

It's the increasing complexity of the software required to make them work. A case in point is that a couple of the cars I've been using have that little extra 'Windows' button on the steering wheel. It helps with phones and media control.

It mainly works, but there are also some incompatibilities.

A case in point has been the upgrade required for one of the systems so that it could recognise the various phones being used.

It's a Microsoft devised solution for end users (drivers) and involves downloading a software system description from within the car onto a USB stick plugged into the car. Then plugging the USB into an internet attached computer.

The USB stick's content is then used by a web site to determine which files to download. After that completes, take the USB stick back to the car, plug it in, switch on the car ignition without starting the engine and wait for the car to update.

An 'updating' message displays on the dashboard. It is supposed to take about 10 minutes. The radio switched on and off a couple of times and then the update finished.

It worked but was hardly intuitive.

As shown in the simplified diagram, there's quite a lot of subsystems to make it all work, and even then, some of the parts like navigation are shown 'outside' of the solution.

I got the phones working, but there were a couple of loose ends, so I had a quick peek at the full manual. I know, manuals are usually a last resort. On this occasion I was also struck by how old some of the documentation is, for items that are in 2013 edition cars. I suppose it's the lag between invention and distribution.

It's making me even more impressed by space travel.

the best apps to download to the car's dashboard?

I've returned the little red and black American car now and we have back the fully functioning Italian one. I'm still waiting for my own car to be fixed.

When I returned the Ypsilon, the chap in the dealership asked me what I thought of it. I politely answered that it had an interesting personality.

I could kind of tell that he wasn't that keen on it himself.

I mentioned that the speedometer was on the wrong side. He explained that more smaller cars were being designed with the console in the middle instead of on the driver side. I could understand this if they were really trying to drive down manufacturing costs - no need to change that part of a Euro car for the UK market.

I was less sure about the safety aspect although I assume that this quirky design has passed the necessary tests. I suppose it was also handy for my passenger to be able to easily keep an eye on my driving speed.

Apparently the current generation of cars are adding even more telemetry systems beyond sat-nav and active safety. This little one had a spot to add a further plug-in sat-nav, which amusingly also featured an additional speedometer. It was connected to the inside of the driver's mirror mount.

Naturally it also had speech recognition for hands free operation.

But the next set of options appear to be to do with social interaction and that somehow feels wrong to me. There's already a facebook option on some cars and now there's the ability to add new apps to the display console.

I still see people driving whilst holding cell-phones most days. It will seem even crazier if they could be on facebook or downloading apps.

centre weighted dashboard analytics

Okay, so I've checked out the trend for putting the dials in the middle on cars. It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, but it is allowed so long as the dial is within direct field of view of the driver (UN/ECE R39 /2439)

Citroen have gone central and even programmed a set of computer readouts which display the speed only on the passenger side in a UK car.

I see they have reverted to including some normal dials on more recent models.

I can't understand why the Saturn Ion does it, because I thought that car was only available in US markets, where the steering wheel is always on the wrong side in any case? And they've slanted the dials towards the left hand driver.

Toyota seem to have had doubts on their Scion where they have added an offset pod still outside of the normal area. Like they forgot and had to tap it on afterwards.

Another more deserving example is the Toyota Yaris, where the dial has been in the middle of what is actually quite a small car, so I guess it's like sharing it with the passenger anyway.

Although on the new one they seem to have changed back to a set of dials by the steering wheel.

So I'm not still sure about this Chrysler trend.