The Drowned Man - Punchdrunk

I've been told not to say too much about the evening. There's others expecting the full range of surprises, so I'll keep this oblique.

A visit to an almost derelict building around the back of Praed Street, where a line of people formed quietly alongside one of the loading bays. No signage to indicate the purpose, just recognition from others attending.

We were there for a preview of 'The Drowned Man', the latest production from the theatre company Punchdrunk, this time set in Temple Studios, the London outpost of Hollywood's Republic Pictures.

I've been to Punchdrunk at other venues and it's a rather unique theatrical experience. In this case a multiple story building for the multiple stories of the production.

200,0000 sq ft of space to create a series of offices, movie sets and so much more. The detail is there too, look into artists' rooms and their lives are spread out before you - blending early 60's London with Hollywood.

There were around 600 of us at this National Theatre preview performance, although the unguided nature of the show meant that sometimes I could find myself alone in a broad town square, a forest, a caravan or ... I'd better not say more. Go with friends, but expect to completely lose them for at least part of the evening.

Other times there would be action unfolding with more than a hundred masked audience following a single actor as they moved to a new scene. Kind of audience as character. Or a couple of audience sitting alone on a swing. Someone sleeping on a bench. A significant and sometimes guarded barrier. A song and dance number being performed on a sound stage for the cameras. Or two shots of happy and one shot of sad.

The walk-around (promenade sounds too structured) nature of the show means there really isn't a fourth wall to break, because it's quite possible to find oneself in amongst the Tinseltown action. Sometimes quite graphically.

It's safe to say that every visitor's acquired performance will be unique. It's a type of Dream Factory, one of the old nicknames for Hollywood. It worked, both whilst I was there, and the later present of sand in my shoes and unexpected dreams when I returned home.

I'll go again, for more and a different story, when it's past the previews.

outdoor art gallery

A few days ago I mentioned the Artworks plan to spread some art around the UK during August. Of course, I realised that, at least in London, there's already quite an array on display.

The construction site hoardings illustrated are by the Tate Britain, so it's not surprising that they would be covered in paintings, but it is also fascinating to see people slow down as they walk past, to take a look at the pictures.

Not everyone does it, there's still some people in a hurry or in a phone conversation, but others will walk along just as they might in an actual gallery.

I also spotted the Yoko Ono picture hanging outside the RFH. It's just behind a well known area, but I suspect many passing people don't even spot it.

And then, quite close by is Roa's squirrel fight mural. It's part of a set of garden impressions around the concrete of this particular area of the South Bank and just a scratch of the surface of what's out there.

The people at Artworks are asking for votes at the moment, for which UK artworks to display on the posters. It's quite fun to simply scroll through the suggestions.

I voted for the Edward Burra "Snack Bar", partly a synchronicity moment because it was also on today's billboard but equally because there's such a lot going on in this picture. Of course the original version hasn't been admired by birds in quite the same way.

why shopping loyalty schemes don't work

I know there's those fortune teller types who can predict lifestyle from the contents of shopping trollies. Along the lines of 'Busy young family', 'Office worker lunch break', 'Single female' and so on, and that there's proper industry classifications for these demographic baskets.

There's also some fun mathematics and algorithms to predict missing items from shopping trollies - surely that will become one of the next things in checkout lines ('Would you like us to find you the maple syrup to go with those pancakes?' etc.)

The last century supermarket 'shopper loyalty' systems persist, but still have some very basic flaws in use. I'm suspicious that they want to appear to be being helpful whilst deliberately failing most of the time. An unspoken collusion of the programming and the store staff.

The merchants would deny this and cite the great case studies, heavy investment and use of micro-segmentation data mining to build loyalty, but it's still mainly a faff to use these things.

My recent examples (I should really have made this a Thursday Thirteen)

• The 'Match' systems used to show that I've saved money at supermarket X, compared with the others. Sure. I get a voucher if I've been charged more than elsewhere. It's like an 'I lose' ticket. I just paid £3.47 more than if I'd shopped elsewhere. Thanks.
• Refunding the same ticket on the next shop may allow me to get a saving. Goody. Except, at the end of the next shop I get another ticket saying I've just spent £2.49 more than if I shopped elsewhere. By now I'm thinking I need to be shopping at that other place.
• Didn't need to visit the store for a couple of weeks? Oops the remaining ticket has now timed out, so the store has now retained my overspend in any case
• What about those little barcodes on key rings? It's a pretty good way to collect the points without having to do much, so long as you don't mind carrying a permanent advert for the store(s) on the keyring. In my case I thought I'd use the iPhone ap instead, which also allows the barcode to be stored and swiped. Except, after an update to the iPhone, the system forgot my number. Inconveniently it wouldn't let me log on either.
• Vouchers. Yes, I get given vouchers at the end of a shop. Sometimes for improbable purchases. I normally empty them into a bin at the first opportunity. I used to be amused by those electric machines they use in U.S. Stores that issue discount tickets at the point of decision (e.g. for shampoo). I suppose at least they are relevant to the shopping, although I suppose a sign with "Offer- $1 reduction" might work just as well.
• Voucher redemption. I can't really be bothered to carry vouchers around and fiddle about trying to use them. I get sent a bundle every so often from whichever schemes I'm in, but they also go into the bin. I've seen other people with these at the checkout and it can take some time to get them processed. A kind of anti-loyalty scheme for the fast shopper caught behind someone using them in a checkout queue.
  
• A few days ago one of those booklets arrived by post, just as I was heading to the store. Experiment time. I thought I'd see what happened. There were about twenty or so vouchers in the perforated booklet. Some were for common things, like milk and bakery products. I reached the checkout and triumphantly handed a few ostensibly relevant ones over. Even that was fiddly because of the multi page booklet and the need to tear out relevant individual squares. Epic fail. The milk I'd purchased was the wrong type. The bakery products I'd picked were excluded. The coffee voucher for two packs of coffee could only be used for one pack in a single shop. The double points vouchers were not valid until July. Yes, I had become the person in the line that everyone hates. Except there was no line of shoppers.


• Disloyally, I threw the rest of the vouchers away when I returned home. I'd suspected all along it was all a waste of time.

I could go on, but I'm clearly not loyal enough for these schemes. Maybe I'm not the target market. My simple suggestion is that instead they just send me a large value money voucher each month to persuade me to shop in their store. More a transaction than a relationship, but a whole lot simpler and it might even work.

winning ways of summer?

I can't reconcile the last few days with it being around summer solstice. Admittedly, a gang of us were together yesterday evening in a bar with a sunny balcony, but for much of the time we have seen dark skies.

There's enough bad weather for it to be inconvenient, but I've still needed to rig up a hosepipe to water some freshly laid turf.

The place we met for evening drinks was on a road close to Ascot races, where we could see a stream of exotic cars mixed with stretched limos of every hue.

The pinky purple extended Hummer was one of the larger varieties amongst the mainly American imports sprinkled with a few modified Mercedes.

We remarked that the unstretched Rolls-Royces needed chauffeurs although the equally fancy Bentleys should really be driven by their owners.

Later, on the way back home, I drove past a Ferrari dealership, and noticed a couple of taxis stopped outside, no doubt with people from the races wondering what they'd have spent their winnings on, if only they'd won.

meerkat time

My cycling mileage has just flipped over 3000 miles year to date, which means I'll probably do more than last year.

I hadn't linked my cycling mileage with my car mileage, but -duh- I've noticed that my car miles have reduced. Probably 1/3 less car miles averaged over the last 2 years since my last new car. What I hadn't realised was the effect that it could also have on my car insurance, which has also gone down slightly, even staying with the same company.

That's not what happened with household insurance, which has been quietly increasing year on year. Two years ago I didn't notice their crazy adjustments and I foolishly let the new premium go through unchallenged.

This year they shot themselves in the foot, because there was also a further increase that tipped me into meerkat territory. Yes. Time to compare the market and attain a significant saving. Of course, I phoned my old company as well and they were happy to offer various reductions to the premium, which by the end of the call was down to nearly half of the original quote.

I felt I had to say 'No' to them though, based upon the huge differential. Along the way I noticed errors in their quote produced from a perfectly good quote in prior years. They seemed to know about these 'computer errors' and I can't help notice these accidents worked in their favour.

We will never know though. The policy is now with a different supplier.

And another meerkat is on the way from Meerkovo.

The Flamethrowers - Rachel Kushner

I suspect Rachel Kushner has crashed a motorcycle. I'm reading her story about Reno, an artist conduit riding between New York, Italy and Bonneville Salt Flats.

The sweat wicks from unzipped leather as we start this mainly 1970's journey. We pause the new Italian motorcycle, somewhere near the casino lands in Nevada.

My small confession; at the start, I wasn't even sure if Reno's voice was male or female. It's a good thing.

Kushner writes with a coriandoli flourish of descriptions; whether it's glittering shards of Peroni bottle on via Corso or the scream, careen, rooster tail, float of fast boys in the American desert.

There's sparsely written incidental characters who could inhabit Tom Waits lyrics.

Reno comes from unsentimental people. Sibling Sandro, fourteen years older, photographed as an artist aloof with a shotgun slashing an X across the picture.

There's a richness from the characters that Reno meets. Quite often they get the best lines.

There's several themes dipped in seventies colour: alienation, politics, art, types of freedom.

And I'll pause right there.

I was fascinated enough to root around for back story. And there, in the Paris Review, was an issue curated by Kushner.

It's a useful read and more detailed than author puff-pieces from week-end magazines. It informs the writer's process and provides the fun of sometimes uncommented trails back to the novel like the Chia picture by Ginsberg illustrated above.

sunrise

I was up early enough to watch the sunrise this morning (04:42, since you wondered). That's a pretty early sunrise and its still getting earlier each day. Today, it has also been the sunniest time.

The sun also somehow managed to get into a gap between two houses at a very low angle, which I'll refer to as my local equivalent of a pre-solstice Stonehenge moment. I know jealous New Yorkers talk about Manhattanhenge when the sun sets at the right angle to shine along those blocky streets (July this year, I think).

Such regimented sun alignment doesn't work in London because of the non grid structure of the streets, but my local sunrise moment is still fun.

It's a good time to think of other entertaining sun rises and sunsets, hence my picture from Utah of a sunrise which allowed me to cast an extra long shadow. Yep, zoom in on the picture at the top of the post - that's my shadow with a camera.

But back here we now have the London rain, although it's still another few days until the proper solstice.

wallet

A few days ago, some of us were together in a restaurant in London. We were chatting away and probably because it was near 'bill time' the chatter briefly swayed to wallets. Or more particularly, how to keep them thin. Yep, it was that part of the evening.

People sometimes comment on my use of Oyster card holders as a substitute for a proper wallet. I see the objective to be to somehow reduce the number of cards I need to carry and therefore the Oyster card holder creates an interesting lower end design point. They are also (a) free and (b) frequently given away at places like train stations. My current groovy one is from the Tate Modern.

So I could claim that it's a proper work of art as well, although I confess that a previous version was in the colours of Sweden and advertised IKEA.

I decided to look at how professionals of wallet management would handle this and found the useful item below.

It's fair to say that I've discovered most of this myself, but it's useful as a summary.

Te tricky part is the bit about storing card info on the phone. I do that as well, using one of the keyring type applications which scans the card and makes a copy of the relevant information, optionally allowing the images of it to be stored too. There's a few of them around and it's quite a good idea.

The challenge, as we were discussing in the restaurant, is that these services also use 'The Cloud' which can create problems.

The first problem is that some of them don't keep a local copy of the image cached in the phone. That's not a lot of use if someone asks you to 'prove it' when you quote a (non payment) card number to them. The related problem is the one we've seen at plane check-in gates, when there's no phone signal and someone is trying to check in using a phone based bar code. It's a great idea but doesn't always quite work. I've also had the dedicated apps (ie Storecard apps) lose the information after being updated.

The second and topical problem is the thought that all these codes are now in the ether Cloud somewhere. The more paranoid might think it was all part of a Big Brother plan.

Norton One slows my Mac browser

Three Macs slowed down just after I installed Norton One.

An older Macbook (2009), a Macbook Air and an iMac. All were on latest OS X software.

After installing Norton One all three ran Safari noticeably slower. With one, I didn't even tell the regular user but received complaints.

The most powerful system was a 32Gb memory quad core i7-3.7.

I have now removed the whole Norton One suite from these Mac environments. They have all speeded up again.

Draw your own conclusions.

Here's a link to the uninstall page

Update: I called Norton.

They told me they had not heard of this slow running before.

They suggested maybe I should try removing the browser 'add-in' for Norton?

As a quick experiment, I reinstalled Norton on the fastest machine. I ensured the browser extension was removed. The browser ran faster, but of course it didn't then have the Norton capability.

Hmmm.

edging forward

I've had to upgrade the network security at rashbre central again. There's been someone attempting to tamper with one of the lesser known rashbre web-sites and trying to add some code into a directory. It didn't work and I think they will have burnt fingers. I've got a log record, IP address and bizarrely a phone number for this errant stranger so 'matters are in hand', as they say.

The web-site is actually hosted in Germany, although at least part of their internet journey passed through America. So like the recent reports about PRISM, it's probably fair game to provide a small notification about it to NCCIC or CERT.

It's annoying having to spend time on dealing with these negative activities. It's big business of course. There's one set of people selling pointless search engine optimisations by attempting to drop links of their client's products sneakily into other peoples' websites.

Then there's the other group (or parts of the same group?) selling the antidote products.

Facebook and twitter create another market. I'm sure I'm not the only one to get spammed by people offering packs of 'friends' to bump up the numbers. It all sounds quite saddo, were it not for the 'number of friends/followers' being used to create indices of social weighting. Of course, Google and similar systems are wise to it all and eliminate most of the spurious counts from their calculations.

It's all quite topical with the discussions of government-based spyware at the moment, but I can't help wondering how they'd have the horsepower to make it all work for more than a group of targeted individuals. There must be a lot of Chloe O'Brians around to save the day.

And of course, judging by the person attempting to fiddle with one of my web-sites, the perpetrators try to hide behind various masking technologies.

Annoyingly, it means we are all encouraged to spend time adding those defensive layers like complicated frequently changing passwords, Captcha codes, moderation for comments, firewalls, firetraps, sandboxes and so on.

So no wonder we need ever bigger computers to write our documents. It's all the edge activity.

approved for release

It looks as if I'll have a couple of weeks gap in my schedule ahead. This will be useful to help me round out a few partially completed projects.

I've also been on a couple of courses recently and it should give me a chance to put some of it into action. One was linked to side project screenplay activities, which I don't think have received much blogging coverage.

I met some excellent and experienced folk who gave great pointers about commercial storytelling.

We also picked through interesting modern material and it's given further avenues to explore. For example, changes based around modern audience sophistication and the storytelling shorthand used. Like text messages. I happen to think SMS based story progressions are overused. Check out any soap. Although, I suppose ideas travel fast and today's connectedness only accelerates that process.

As an example, yesterday there was that egg-throwing incident on a tacky television show. I idly looked at the perpetrator's twitter feed a few minutes after it occurred. She had about 350 followers. By the end of the show it was 10 times that number and by this morning it was around 10,000. She hadn't posted since Christmas Eve, so we may need to hold our breath for anything interesting.

Similar with the great spy interception PRISM expose. Guess what? Email is being monitored by government agencies. The charts (Victoria Nece redesign here) showed monitoring actions from around 2007 through to nowadays.

We've all watched some of the movies Enemy of the State, Bourne, Body of Lies, or episodes of Spooks or 24. That's where the screenplays exhibit a slickness around these technologies that I'm less convinced work so well in practice. All that on-demand repositioning of satellites in realtime and remote accessing of security pin numbers in a warehouse depot. Maybe it wouldn't work so well in practice. The wrong plug? the wrong software driver? System re-boot?

I'm not saying there isn't stuff out there. They've been launching surveillance satellites since the Gambit project in the 1960s. Back then the satellites had a short mission life, sometimes fuzzy corduroy striping cameras and a little better than 50% success rate.

The technology improved by the simple expedient of 'I think we'd better get a bigger dish' and then 'I think we'd better get a bigger rocket'.

A quick hint when trying to spot big stuff being fired into surveillance orbit is to look for the biggest rockets. Some of the next size down ones didn't quite make it.

The biggest currently seems to be the Delta IV-Heavy which is one rocket, with two more strapped onto it. There is a brilliant new design in discussion which is fundamentally the same, but with four extra rockets strapped on.

The biggest surveillance satellite on the biggest rocket so far is NROL-32 on the Delta IV-Heavy. It's still classified, so we can only guess that it's an astromesh construction, like a 100 metre wide TV satellite dish pointing back to earth. It was only obliquely referenced when it was launched back in November 2010.

I wonder how it is getting on? What it's looking at? And what else is planned?



Maybe after tidying up my current projects, there's an opportunity to practice some screenplay here? Spies and rockets instead of genre versions of folk tales? Hansel and Gretel's already been done. Goldilocks and the Three Bears, anyone?

rolling fog paint decisions

Now we've got the new sofa upstairs to go into the 'music room' we can start to work out the accompanying paint scheme.

Some might think that we'd have decorated the room before the sofa arrived, but it proved better to cross check the colour in-situ.

I didn't realise there were so many versions of a single paint colour, like "Rolling Fog", which has four variants.

That's before we add on the matt, silk, gloss and not forgetting the "Intelligent Matt", "Traditional Oil Gloss" and Floor Paint. Actually, there's 11 finishes for this colour in total, and 4 different shades.

Decision, decisions.