dancing with the moonlit knight?

I get some of those emails from political parties most weekends. I think they mail out on Saturday expecting they have a better chance of being read. Recently they feature the countdown clock for the next election. 550 days according to the Labour Party.

Enough time for the government to sell off a few more UK assets, I suppose. We've been watching Britain's remaining industries and services drift into offshore ownership.

"Selling England by the pound" may have been coined around 40 years ago, but by now it's largely 'job done'.

The privatised world created an array of new feeding troughs for the privileged. The accompanying outsourced world created offshore opportunities by removing in-country wage packets.

Emerging companies were sold and re-sold so that BA is now Spanish, London's Arriva bus services are German, the original BT cellular network became O2 which is now Telefonica, four of the Big 6 energy providers are German, French and Spanish.

Of course, globalisation brought the service sector to prominence in the UK, with London as a financial feeding centre.

With this early countdown to the next UK general election, there's already much jostling for position, as well as chatter about the futility or otherwise of voting. An ancient lyric from the Who springs to mind: 'Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.'

The catalogue of curious situations continues to develop:

• Privatising part of the Royal Mail in a way that gave the banks advising the pricing both plenty of shares and an opportunity to sell them earlier than regular punters. Ker-ching.
• Apparently allowing the largest shareholder in the new Royal Mail to be a Cayman Island based hedge fund. Surely no spivs?
• Hiding black holes of lost money in pension funds, ultimately creating smaller incomes for those that have saved.
• Paying off cavalier captains of industry who generally escape with low reputation but lottery winner sized handouts.
• Allowing a 3rd generation EPR nuclear build to strike energy pricing at around double current rates (£48 vs £92.50). Then index linking it and making it contingent upon the UK taking a second plant somewhere else. Over a barrel perhaps?
• Watching the energy companies add 10% to their consumer bills, whilst trousering profits so large that an ex Prime Minister even comments about it across his own party.
• Running the quietly understated UK Asset Resolution bad bank (Britain's 5th largest mortgage lender with some £66bn of loans), but now adding another £38bn of bad bank assets instead into a sub component of RBS.

A bit of an energy gap?

I'm sure there's plenty more examples; I picked finance and energy as starters. We could easily add education and healthcare to the list. No, wait a minute, that's what the politicians are planning.

The thing is, unlike the Who lyrics, we will get fooled again.

how to stop your brain in an accident

I remember being in the plane with the engine on fire.

We had to fly in circles to ditch the fuel over the desert before making an emergency landing on one engine.

Adopt a special version of the crash position, individually checked by the aircrew, who put on orange jackets and special hats. They call to one another during the procedure.

Hmm.

There were plenty of fire engines, but they didn't chase behind us like the movies. They worked out where we'd come to rest. Burning rubber from the tyres. No reverse thrust.

The pilot did a lap of honour after we were down.

But we were in an Arab country and they confiscated all our passports. We were now technically there without papers. Even my multi-entry visa wasn't enough.

Eventually we were put in a big room and watched various self appointed crowd leaders trying to get something done.

C'mon.

Our little gang of three quietly phoned out and rebooked some new tickets and hotel rooms. It was a good move and better than trying to have an argument with the officials in the room. Standing on chairs shouting didn't seem to be working.

Disassociate and pass the headphones.

When they eventually let us go we were already booked onto the next day's plane and had some Marriott rooms near the airport to crash (bad choice of word?).

Next night we ran into the pilot when we got back to the airport. A jet turbo blade had sheared into the engine. It doesn't happen very often.

So 'How to stop your brain in an accident' comes through on a number of levels. Yes, it's a guilty pleasure purchase from a random Fopp splurge, but even seeing the cover art takes me back to the coping strategies for unexpected environments.

witching nation

Somehow the bill poster advertisements in Liverpool seem to be very tidily arranged compared with London. Of course they are promoting the various Halloween events and will probably all change in the next 24 hours. Sure enough, tonight's street fashion seems to be witches, goblins and zombies.

We're staying in rooms at the recording studio in the centre of the clubbing district at the moment. Last night there were guitar riffs into the small hours and tonight it's mainly drums and bass-lines.

Of course, the nearby clubs have their own sounds too, which quieten just before the dawn.

espresso martini

I've decided to try an experiment using the iPhone for most of my snapshots over the next 2-3 weeks, instead of my various other cameras. I've always used the iPhone for casual pictures, like at an impromptu gathering, but usually regard it as a backup.

I suppose I still really prefer cameras with viewfinders, but I want to see how well-behaved the iPhone's camera can be, and I guess to do that I need to use it more purposefully.

I've already noticed that I sometimes accidentally switch it into a mode that overexposes everything (need to RTFM?) or flip it to video or burst mode unexpectedly.

I'll try to stay clear of all the special effects modes whilst I do this, to get a sense of the colour range and focusing. SOOC (Straight Out of Camera), so to speak. Some might say this should be a walk in the park.

cupcake sushi

I noticed that the cup cakes on the sushi belt at the chocolate studio had a Halloween theme today.

As well as sparkles.

almost witchery time

Today's fallen leaves indicate the changing season.

Around Princes Street, here in Edinburgh, we've had a rotating mix of gusting winds, rain and then sunshine. Somehow we've managed to time our City forays to match the finer weather.

I'm less sure this evening.

We've been given a weather warning before we head into the Old Town for supper at the Witchery. It's already dark, the clocks have changed and there's a mysterious look to the skyline.

haze and smoke

Another typical evening.

a traffic based north-south divide

Travelling north and finding a few problems with the roads. The original estimate was that we'd get to our destination at 18:06. The big road is the M6, which provides a 3-lane motorway link from south to north. There was some kind of major hold-up north of Birmingham. I had to give in and resort to the next big road that goes north.

That's the parallel A34, which is mainly dual carriageway and which goes north near to the M6. My sat-nav gave a revised estimate that we'd reach our destination at 19:30. Then the A34 was downgraded via cones to single carriageway accompanied by a major hold-up. I had to resort to the next big road that goes north.

That's the A51, which goes north-ish but you need to cut across to get onto it. The revised estimate moved to 20:06. Although the cut-across road from the A34 to the A51 had been closed. I noticed several cars behind me following a similar route and needing to abandon it. I resorted to another cut-across road and eventually got onto the A51 via a single track road covered in mud. Now the revised estimate was 20:30.

Unfortunately, part of the A51 also was closed and we were diverted by yellow signs onto the B-something. This was about the time that we decided to stop for a meal.

Afterwards, I looked at the sat-nav and the M6 and the A434 still showed a problem. We were able to complete our bypass manoeuvre, via the A49, but the revised estimate was now 21:54.

Yes, we arrived 4 hours later than the original estimate for what should have been our 5 hour journey north.

Could it be half term week?

chasing mavericks

I took the plunge on the new Mavericks version of the Mac operating system, OS X Version 10.9. Like others, I was slightly cautious about jumping straight onto it, but I've generally found the new Mac environments to be pretty stable. First up was the iMac27 which is, I think the phrase goes, "fully loaded".

It took a while to download the 5.4Gb update from Apple, but then only an alleged 34 minutes to install. No device driver queries or weirdness, it just worked. It hardly changed anything overt, except the desktop wallpaper which became a maverick tube of Santa Cruz water. It told me about an older program which wouldn't work, but aside from that was all pretty event-free. There's plenty of new things lurking in the revision, but the surface remains fairly clean.

Next was my MacBook Air, which meant another lengthy download. I resisted the temptation to do them in parallel, and just left the install to run overnight. Yes, by the morning it was all done although I didn't have a chance to check it before I headed to a meeting.

I was on a train when I read about another less positive experience and made me wonder if I'd return to something amiss.

Fortunately, it also works fine. The iMac27 performance for regular activities didn't seem any different (but it does have 32Gb memory and one of those fusion drives). The MacBook Air seems slightly snappier. It's a more modest configuration with maybe 4Gb of memory (I'm not using it right now and I can't remember) but it certainly works fine.

By comparison, I've still not updated my Windows 8 machine to Windows 8.1 because I'm wondering what the revised start menu will do and whether it will be worse than the utility update that I did myself to bring back "start". And my official work PC is still running Windows 7.

I think I'll call it riding the wave of technology adoption.

cake mix factor

It's ages since I watched x-factor on telly but I sat through some of it yesterday. We started a good 30 minutes behind real-time but before the end had caught up and had to watch all the adverts.

There's a few savvy advertisers now who put a brand image throughout their whole advert, presumably to ensure it registers, even on 30x fast forward. A fine recent example of this is a mid-century styled cake advert by Betty Crocker, which uses their brand on the screen the whole time.

See how easily I'm distracted from the Xfactor? Even by a cake mix advert? One that says there's no-one judging?

Anyway, I've not particularly been keeping up with the premise that each of the judges gets a batch-bake of artists and also a vote to knock someone out after the public has voted.

Duh.

In the spirit of game theory, surely the judges will want to retain whichever artist is the least threat to their own survivors? A piece of cake (sorry, Betty)

And where was the term X-factor originally coined? Game theory, by any chance?

grass

I was caught out by a neighbour a few days ago. I'd been wielding garden implements twice within the same week. "But you don't do gardening," was the spirit of the comment.

It's the restoration of some of the grass, which needed extra seed and some of that top dressing to help to get started.

It's amazing how much technology I could have brought to bear on this simple operation. Instead I used handfuls of seed and stamped them down with my boot rather than dedicated lawn machinery.

Then the weather forecast said it was going to be bright and sunny over the whole weekend, so I assumed the seeds would have to wait longer for some rain to germinate. Wrong, of course, the whole weekend so far has been marked by downpours. Consequently, I'm expecting great things from these seeds. I even used the green coloured type, which mean the birds don't just peck their way through them.

Next week I may add some 10:10:10 fertiliser. Nitrogen:Phosphate:Potassium.

After that they will have to get used to the usual neglect.

Thursday Thirteen - another case of red

I know, I originally posted this picture a few days ago.

There's an update though. I've persisted with the leather phone case for a few more days and it's kind of broken itself in. The main difference from when it was new is that it has now acquired a small amount of flex. Real leather.

This is a good thing, because it is now much more easily removable than the first experience.

I'm still waiting for the replacement car cradle for the phone, and had originally decided to jettison the case when the cradle arrived. Now I'm less sure, because the case is becoming more pliable and consequently easier to flip on and off of the phone.

Bizarrely, since I detached the old 'factory fitted' car iPhone 4 cradle, the car is properly recognising the new phone via Bluetooth and all the controls are working.

Main personal observations on the new phone, which replaced my iPhone 4.

• Better reception - holds signal better - both voice and data - like on the Waterloo train line.
• Better speech quality on incoming calls - noticeably clearer
• Better battery life - although the other phone was over two years old - I'm getting more than a day from the new one, with lengthy bizzo calls included. Still nowhere near my olden day Nokias which managed 5-10 days, but were -er- phones only.
• Slightly larger form factor than the 4 but still fits pocket etc. About the maximum conveniently portable size though. Bigger and it starts to become a pingpong bat.

• Fingerprint recognition works really well. Although I've had to use three of the 5 slots for two thumbs and an index finger. And I sometimes forget that I can use it. What do they say? motor memory?
• Snappier response than the old phone which was fine on iOS6 but seemed slower on iOS7.
• Transferring old phone stuff to new phone was easy. It re-loaded the latest versions of all the apps in the process.
• Needed a new SIM card - nano SIM now. Cutover was via web site and a couple of text messages. Very simple.
• I was already using the new iOS7 on the iPhone 4, but tidied up folders and similar on the new phone. Simplified access and better organisation through the revised iOS7 embedded folders.
• I'd already switched to the new tones, warbles and vibes of iOS7 - some of these are better and more tranquil than the old ones
• Low power Bluetooth 4 is useful working with telemetry gadgets, like Fitbits (it was also on iPhone 4s, but not my iPhone 4)
• Surprisingly good camera. I'm thinking of using it as a 'main' day to day carry-around camera now, along with a few of the camera apps.
• Siri is generally usable. To my surprise.

They say the iPhone 6 will have a bigger screen. I'm not convinced that the larger devices are not as usable, because once they fail to pass the 'jean pockets test' they start to be more like a small tablet device (aka phablet - eek.)

I'm not convinced that the form factor needs much work. There's a fashion thing about being able to recognise the next version and the range of colours etc, but some of that is mainly eye candy rather than functional. Like a pen is still a pretty good design as a writing instrument.

Other things missing still include Near Field Communications and, given that they've added a MEMS device for movement, they could have added the altimeter circuit too. There's talk of new edge based sensors for the next generation, but as they've just added the fingerprint gizmo, it would seem slightly odd to remove it again. And as the pixel counts increase, the processor power and ultimately the battery need to get bigger too, so there's a creeping size challenge to these things.

Maybe the rest of any telemetry will be part of the thingiverse iWatch, whenever it gets released? Although for me there is a flaw in any prerequisite to have the phone nearby in order to use the watch. I'm also not wild about having to charge a watch every few days either.

It's interesting though, because it starts to herald the next turn of gadget innovation.