jumping frogs and glow stick glasses

I said I'd get around to an annual picture of Sloane Square with its blue and white lights. I've even managed to include a black cab.

Part of the plot involved buying a few small items for a lucky dip type of festive occasion. Glow stick glasses. Tinsel pipe cleaners. Miniature bowling alley.

A gold tiara. A judge's wig. A propeller hat. A clockwork frog (or two). A sparking yo-yo. You know the kind of things.

All we need now is a picture of the inside of a well-known neighbourhood department store.

almond croissant

Sheltering from 45 degree rain before heading into a meeting. I've been over in Greenwich by the Dome, waiting in a coffee bar for the others to arrive.

Almond croissant and latte.

At least we'd picked a coffee bar to meet; somewhat better than a few days ago when the 'full of festive joy' somehow didn't live up to expectations.

fitbit and cycling

I'm about to go cycling, and thought I'd try an experiment with fitbit to see how it compares with cycle usage.

I've been using fitbit for a while but never bothered to check accurately what it does if I use it when on a bike. I've always surmised that it counts each pedal revolution as a step (which seems fair to me), so today I'll actually measure it properly.

Mine is the fitbit One, which is the small version that can go in a pocket rather than something on a wristband, which I consider to be rather too obvious. The Nike systems all use wristbands, but I'm not sure that I want to walk around lit like the festive season all year.

My fitbit is at 5,137 steps and 2.37 miles walked today so far. I'll check it again when I actually start cycling and again when I finish. Then I can link it to the number of pedal cycles I've done, based upon my Garmin read-out.

Update to follow...

Update
So my revised fitbit count after the bike ride is 12547. And the number of pedal rotations was 6,870 according to Garmin Connect. There's about 212 steps unaccounted for, which is me faffing around to get the bike ready and also a short false start when I reset the Garmin after about a minute. Close enough.

So, I'll conclude that the fitbit is counting pedal rotations quite accurately.

The mileage is way off compared with the amount I travelled, but I don't really care about that, which I can pick up on Garmin. It's just useful to have a fitbit count that includes a representation of cycling time. I'm also much happier to have a low count for mileage compared with my actual cycling (more than 20 miles) which could otherwise be construed as cheating.

I'll still use the Garmin for calories etc, but it's good to know that the fitbit and Garmin are consistent.

in which i am troubled by seasonal inaccuracies

One of the challenges with using London scenes in blog posts is trying to ensure that they represent the time of year properly.

Of course, when it's a recent picture, like the one above, then it's easy. Grosvenor Bridge, looking towards the London Eye.

Even if the scene looks unseasonally bright, it's still authentic.

That is not always the case with television series, which sometimes purport to be of the moment but have just the wrong foliage or shadows. That tree might still have bright green leaves, for example.

I doubt if I'd notice, if it wasn't for blogging, but nowadays I can't help spotting seasonal inaccuracies in TV shows.

Should I be worried by this trait?

Colbert Oriel

We stopped off at Colbert for a bite to eat. It reopened about a year ago, after a kerfuffle about the previous place that was on the site, called Oriel.

We used to go to Oriel which was a buzzy French style cafe. They served a good breakfast and it was somewhere you could turn up and somehow get squeezed in.

The owner of the area, Earl Cadogan, reputedly didn't like the service at Oriel and thought the food expensive and so he wouldn't renew their lease.

For probably a couple of years it was then a building site on the corner of Sloane Square. Some of us wondered what would emerge, after such a long time.

When it finally did, it was - er- another French brasserie. Similar look, reconfigured walls, similar menu, but new owners, now part of the conglomerate that runs the Wolseley, which is the place just across the road from the Ritz.

The one year old establishment has been made to look as if its been there for ages, even down to a set of slightly worn looking postcards hanging from the drinks shelves in the bar area. Vintage theatre posters adorn the walls, including shows from the nearly adjacent Royal Court.

I'm sure they've modernised something (the kitchens, maybe?) but for all practical purposes they have simply recreated Oriel with a new name.

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.