Battersea, with cranes

First day with a regular camera again, instead of just the cellphone.

Considering how far we are through December, London has still got sunshine and generally clear skies.

Note the background of cranes as another new area of London begins to take shape between where new US Embassy will be sited and Battersea Power Station.

And it looks as if I'm not the only one taking photos.

The Light Princess by Tori Amos and Samuel Adamson

We wove our way through the crowds on the South Bank to the National Theatre to see the musical by Tori Amos. It's a sorta fairytale, called 'The Light Princess'.

One of my favourite Tori Amos albums is the one where she treks across North America. It's called Scarlet's Walk and is a road story told in songs.

I've also seen Tori live at the Apollo and now I wondered what it would be like seeing her new music and lyrics played by an orchestra and sung by the show's performers.

I didn't know the original Light Princess story, which is apparently a Victorian fairy tale.

I assumed there would be some dark spins included, and certainly, there are. The basic plot line is simple enough, with divided countries and a developing love between the divided princess and prince.

The light comes from the Princess Althea's grief at her mother's death from which she loses touch with the ground, floating through much of the performance. Perhaps expressed best as a loss of gravity, in every sense.

A darkness comes from the ways that the respective kings of the countries subjugate their politically opposed offspring.

Then there's a contested piece of land between the countries, ripe for the main action of the piece.

Musically, it's a major piece in its own right. Orchestral with lyrics sufficient to propel a sometimes complicated narrative. Maybe not as instantly hummable as a typical musical, but coming from a different place.

Of course, there's a magic from the aerial work of the Princess, often manipulated by puppeteers, and sometimes suspended on wires. Her feet hardly touch the ground in the whole show.

Add in the staging and the clever use of mixed media and puppetry and this becomes a show that really sparkles.

In honesty, I'd expected an overall darker shading from Tori Amos, but this co-operation with scriptwriter Samuel Adamson mixes in humour, spectacle and sometimes almost Disney-esque touches.

It felt like the right type of show to be watching in this Winter season.

Altogether a piece that is both unique and somehow a counterpoint to a show like 'Wicked', far away from the sometimes juke-box musicals which get pushed into parts of the west-end.

I suspect, because it's at the Lyttelton, that this show will be on a short run. I can guess that it's an expensive one to produce too, judging by the large cast and sumptuous sets.

I'm pleased I've got to see this recently award-nominated production, which I suspect may be one of a kind.

a spar of timber worth thirty bob

Yes.

Travelling.

Still using the iPhone as my sole camera, although I think it's well past a month now, so time to get something else charged.

toffee apple buche

It's another week of complicated logistics, this time fairly local, but still in quite a few different locations.

I still prefer the less structured format, but it does mean that there's random side effects that need to be considered.

Take this box (please) - it's part of the recycling by now*, but thereby lays the tale. Our collection folk changed their day to take away the content of the blue bins and I actually missed one week.

Recycling is only every two weeks, so by this week we have around four weeks of recycling accumulated. However hard we try that's still a lot of stuff. If I miss another collection then it'd be six weeks. I don't think the ship's engines can take it, Captain.

more pop tart selfies

We had a bit of a get-together in the pub and mysteriously a packet of strawberry pop tarts appeared from among the novelty gifts we were handing around.

Well, what else could we do, other than take a few more of those pop tart selfies?

Most of the pop tart pictures were the conventional type, using the pop tart like a regular cellphone.

In the interests of pushing the boundaries, I decided to go for 'Medium Format', so mine doesn't have a flash.

Eagle eyed may spot that the medium format picture still came out oblong rather than square.

We're going to try cheese next. Emmental should offer a choose of apertures.

tuning in the shine on the light night dial

Lurking in the garage of rashbre central is an old valve radio. It still gets used from time to time and despite its age it presents a very modern set of programming.

The reason I'm thinking of it right now is that I've been asked to take part in a survey.

I know...on the internet there's a survey every few minutes about things like amazon packaging, print cartridge selection, which mobile phone provider, the quality of the service from that small item retailer a few days ago, preferences in groceries, and so on and on.

I've improved my Spamsieve to the point where most of that stuff just runs straight into the junk folder.

This particular survey was intriguing enough for me to say I'll have a go. It's something to do with radio listening habits and run by Mori. They want to check what kind of stuff gets listened to in a week, both indoors and in the car.

I've completed the initial questionnaire and somehow need to keep track of what I actually listen to, starting on Monday. They have given me a handy logbook as well, although I can already predict parts of it.

• A fair amount of Radio 4 (on DAB), but never the Archers. Mainly the Today Programme and PM. Various versions of the News and sometimes Parliament. Useful because it's a walking or driving type of programming content. I hardly ever use television for morning news.
• Radio 6 Music (on DAB), random times of day and driving.
• LBC (on DAB or FM, in the car): sometimes for news. Some of the chat shows go a bit extreme.
• BBC World Service: Sometimes late at night.
• Does Spotify count as radio?
• Does Last.fm count as radio?
• KFOG: the fog head station from San Francisco. Easy listening rock. Maybe this one will throw them off the regular stats? I've still got that little internet radio in the home office.
• Other random internet channels from time to time.

And the one I still miss is Whole Wheat Radio, which used to be streamed from Jim Kloss and Esther Golton's log home in Talkeetna Alaska. I still have some of their live gigs from a variety of musicians recorded into iTunes and they pop up from time to time when I've got iTunes on shuffle.

The survey approach seems to just be interested in traditional channels.

Radio, car radio and 'online radio'. I wonder how it will delve into the mass customisation of music listening and the re-selection of prior programming through iPlayer and podcasts? It doesn't seem to handle that on the setup pages.

I'll have to wait and see.

Considering Kloss and Golton's Whole Wheat was from about 2003-2010, they had already found ways to break from commercial A,B and C list programming, and featured many CDs by emerging independent artists.

Of course, the commercial forces are not too comfortable with this wider and more multi channel listening and so we drop back to the same old stuff on many of the conventional radio channels.

I hope there'll be a few comment boxes when I do this survey.

pebble panic

I've had one of those Pebble things for a while, although I've never got around to writing a blog post about it.

To be honest, I don't really use it and am somewhat uncertain about this addition to wearable social computing.

An odd side effect is that it can send me into a phone panic from time to time.

How's that?

Well, it knows about my iPhone and jiggles around when the iPhone is ringing. No big deal if the iPhone is co-located, but when it's, say, in a different room, it can create a moment where I have to make an extra decision about whether to race to the phone in time to answer it.

Not the best use for a Pebble, I'm sure.

secret squirrel meerkat

Did I mention that the secret squirrel meerkat finally arrived?

I notice that this shadowy figure has already gone into deep cover and that maybe someone I know is wearing the badge instead of their regular security pass.

soft white lights appearing

We seem to be into the gentle addition of lights to the neighbourhood again. Of course some of the main roads have been decked out for weeks, but now its spreading into the residential areas.

I've liberated ours from the garage and thrown them around a few trees and bushes and they all seem to be working. Even the timer still works from last year, so it's been a fairly painless job getting it all set up. I'm told that the 'soft white' colour (yellow) is still appropriate, although I'm not supposed to use the 'white white' or the 'blue white' lights.

I spotted a few roadsigns that some local streets are closed at the weekend for the regular mini Fayre. I'm also guessing that Santa will make a reconnaissance appearance at the end of this week.

Pop Tart Selfie

Snapped with a pop tart. I'm not alone. The strawberry ones work best for colour. Maybe I'll try the chocolate ones for sepia.

back from a spin on the bicycle

I'd been doing pretty well with cycling up towards the end of October, but kind of slumped during November. I don't record every trip, but those I did record were a grand total of eight.

There were a few things that conspired against me, including personal and work related as well as a feeble bug at the start of November.

Anyhow, my legs were somehow telling me they needed to go cycling.

I'm not sure why, but there's a sort of reverse pain where my legs actually feel better now if they've been cycling. I should probably look for that symptom on t'interweb, because it seems to be the opposite of what you'd expect.

Anyway, I clocked about 20 miles today although I took it fairly easy until I get back into the swing. I'm also anticipating that this month could be choppy for cycling what with the weather and later with the christmas pudding.


The blue line on the little diagram of my recent activity shows a progressive increase in my TSS until mid October and then the downward spiral. It'll take weeks to rebuild to the previous level.

Still. I'm glad I took the spin - and no, the brakes were not at the angle shown in the picture. I was resetting them when I took this snap.

snappy happy

Well, I've idly been using the iPhone as my main carry around camera during November, as per my stated plan at the beginning of the month.

It's worked surprisingly well as a compact camera replacement.

I know its 'only' got 8 Mega-pixels compared with the 41 Mega-pixels of the recent-ish Nokia, but I can't help wondering exactly where marketing overtakes results. That's more pixels on a tiny sensor than on a full frame Nikon, for example.

I've tried the Nokia but noticed that both the startup time and the 'film wind' time from one shot to another seemed excessive. Measured in seconds, it appeared. A lot of processing to do 41 MP maybe?

For many social occasions that lag could mean the defining moment will have passed. It will still be fine for cityscapes and less timing critical shots, of course.

The Nokia has a proper shutter (instead of an electronic one) and image stabilisation. It means that the camera has a little bump on the back where the lens gubbins is fitted and so from the back the phone looks like a -er- camera.

It's reached a point where I start to think of the things I'd want on a proper camera again and that's where trade-offs start to play out.

I've decided I'll keep to the simpler iPhone form factor, with the smaller jpegs that are easy to manipulate onto web sites and social media.

My sense with the iPhone is that it's 'good enough' for many purposes. Maybe not to crop the pictures, but hey, this is for snaps in any case.

The iPhone camera works fine in daylight or at night in what I'd call 'street scenes'. It doesn't work so well indoors in less well lit areas, although there's a clever flash for such situations. I habitually disable flashes on cameras, but I may need to revive it on this one.

The lens is also quite good at fairly close shots and can do a reasonable job of blurring the background, as long as you don't expect some kind of miracles. The 'zoom' is digital, so the magnification is somewhat artificial.

There's various burst modes and high speed modes too, so speedy clicks are well catered for. I've decided I actually quite like using it, and even the little mode of using the volume control as a shutter button adds to the basic ergonomics.

It'll never replace a decent compact system camera or an SLR, but photographically, it seems to me that this type of phone has reached a good level of general purpose usability.

Maybe next month I'll use it for some kind of mini project.