#FANS @AlnPlayhouse @thesixtwenty - Day 1 : Start of Preparations

Monday morning and the cast assemble with the script for an early read-through of FANS.

Sid James and Kenneth Williams smile on from the walls.

Alnwick Playhouse is a super theatre to start the process of creating a show about music fans.

no drama as a 6 terabyte disk fails with drobo seamlessly to the rescue

Today I'll be looking for a cardboard box and some bubble wrap. After the recent exploits of an iMac drive failure, I've now got a Drobo disk failure as well. They always say with disks its not 'if', it's 'when'.

The Drobo 5N emailed me to say a disk was about to fail and then switched into a special orange flashing light mode which stripped all of the data from the failing drive. Eventually, a red light appeared in the unit signalling the defective drive could be removed, without powering off the unit.

I did so, and swapped in a replacement. The unit is still flashing a warning until it rebuilds the defective disk. It continued to function properly as a server throughout the mishap - showed by its current uptime of 21 Days.

Next I visited the Western Digital web site to obtain an RMA, so that I can mail back the defective WD Red unit for a replacement. I have around 15 of these WD Red units which are generally excellent and nowadays they are my disk of choice.

But that's why I need the bubble wrap.

pouring cold watters on the proceedings

We see criticisms of media bias in the UK, but it seems positively righteous compared with some of the US coverage I saw whilst travelling around ahead of their upcoming election.

Fox usually gets singled out for its Conservative/Republican bias and on some occasions it looked to me as if it was rewriting and directly manipulating the various convention speeches.

For anyone who only browses all the political stuff, these channels can spoon feed opinions with alarming editorial bias.

The parties know this, of course. I noticed that Hillary Clinton published her Democrat speech on twitter in one sentence bursts, which also meant that the most re-tweeted parts (varying from 45k re-tweets down to 2.7k) could be easily harvested and recycled. The main media channels also re-edited the speeches into various orders to serve specific agenda points cut and pasted into convenient video segments.

The UK use of satire and humour comes across as fairly sophisticated compared with some of the U.S. shows, which seem to use cheap laughs at whichever candidate they don't like and then a more reverential tone for the other one.

Of course, the spray-painted Republican candidate plays an astute media grabbing game, saying anything that pops into his head and getting instant free and extensive coverage as a result. The town hall Daytona ramblings are the latest example of someone who doesn't seem to be able to work from a message or strategy at all.

The 600 strong Democrat team to support Hillary are spending huge amounts on TV advertising. By comparison the one-tenth sized 60 strong Republican team don't seem to have spent anything on actual advertising. But perhaps the empty sky boxes at the Cleveland convention tell that part of the story. These 'best seats in the house' were supposed to be filled with backers, many of whom didn't show.

The guy pictured at the top of this post illustrates the awful reporting. I've watched his supposedly amusing news show which provides ample bias. Even when he got Trump onto his show he simply fed easy questions which The Donald could smack out of the park.

The use of logic and statistics also seems to be kept as far from the coverage as possible. I did see a couple of half-hearted attempts, but the preference seems to be almost exclusively to talk about about personalities and the use of negative spin.

Actually, the one area where statistics are getting used is in the determination of which are the few swing states out of the 538 representatives that makeup the House and Senate. There's a couple of steps to this.

First work out the states where there has been a borderline majority one way or the other.

Then look at those states more carefully. Some have a much better voter yield than others.

Beyond the 'certainties' for each party, the best borderline swing states to help achieve the needed 270 votes are in Florida (27 seats), Pennsylvania (18) and Ohio (16). Together they add up 61 seats.

Add the next 3 swings and you get Michigan(14), North Carolina(13), Wisconsin(8) which would add another 35 and then its down to Colorado(7), Minnesota(4), Iowa(4), Nevada(4) and New Hampshire(2) which together would add a further 21.

My guess is that the bulk of the campaigning work will go into the top three and then the top six.

There's also the number of voters to affect in the high population per representative states, where the skew is from around 700k in the high population states down to circa. 200k in North Dakota, Wyoming and Vermont.

So does it really boil down to a few key states, some personality points and mud-slinging negative spin to select the next leader? And will the White House ever serve foreign food again? Solyanka soup, anyone?

Technical : Restoring the Fusion drive from a Drobo5N Time Machine image

My iMac now has the replacement Fusion drive.

It provided an opportunity to run a huge Time Machine restore of the system. Some would say 'Gulp'.

This is a bit technical, but useful if I have to do anything like this again

I notice the TimeMachine image would restore about 1 Terabyte of data, backed up to the networked Drobo5N RAID-style system, in a TimeMachine partition which I'd set up about two years ago. Gulp 2.

The repaired machine was returned with an initialised El Capitan image, so I set up the basic empty machine and then used Migration Assistant to find the Drobo5N and identify the relevant sparseimage. The sparseimage didn't come up automatically because it wasn't an actual Time Capsule, so I had to manually select it. Gulp 3.

Once I'd selected the image to restore, the iMac spent around 20 minutes parsing it before it was ready of the restore operation. I didn't initially realise that the sparseimage would then mount as a separate TimeMachine image, which I needed to separately select to do the restore.

Once I'd selected the correct one 'iMac27' not my other 'iMac24', it asked whether I wanted everything copied across. Short answer was 'Yes'.

It took around 6 hours across the network at between 40-80Mb per second and the machine then gave me two logons - the temporary one I'd used to get the machine running and my proper one, which had been restored from the backup. I could delete the temporary id, but decided to keep it because is quite useful to have a second admin account for unforeseen circumstances.

After a restart, my original signon screen appeared and then my desktop and all of the applications although I had to adjust the Documents name to match the original one manually. I did that from the separate userid.

Once up and running, I had to reinitialise Adobe CS2016 suite, by supplying credentials and also the Microsoft Office 365 logon.

Mail asked to rebuild its database and there's a few of the utilities that need to be reset with their serial numbers, but compared with a fresh install and all the soul-searching about which things to apply, this was a relatively trouble free restore.

Most of the machine's real data is stored on a separate Drobo5D, although I had to make sure it found the relevant index files such as the one for Lightroom and iTunes, which all worked fine. My iTunes is about 3Tb and Lightroom is about 1Tb, so it was important to get these functioning.

The rest of the Document and similar libraries were straightforward, so I'm back in business.

Phew.

Venice Beach interlude

I've driven through Venice Beach before, but never actually stopped until now.

The top photo is probably the best type of view - just slightly from a distance. Despite the potential people-watching opportunities, I decided to stick with a few quick iPhone snaps.

I expect I'd need more time than available to get a really close understanding of the tattoo bars, cheap sunglass stalls with dire warnings about no photography, areas with highly tanned men standing about and so on.

It's clearly an area popular with many and gets described it as the epicentre for the Californian counter-culture. Maybe my kind of counter culture is a bit different.

I noticed a pervasive aroma of weed, as well as spotting those apparently voluntary para-medics that specialise in drug treatment. Or at least in getting people the marijuana licences so that the can buy it on prescription. ($40 for 30 minute evaluation next to the sausage shop, plus $100 for a personal-use licence).

I'd guess there were quite a few street living folk here too, judging by the clumps of plastic bags, supermarket trollies and grouped tatty golf umbrellas.

I'm pretty street savvy but it's the kind of area I'd be wary of drifting away from the main drag and probably be extra cautious in the evening. I found myself doing that pavement weave to keep at least an arm's length from anyone else.

venonats and charmanders

A good treasure hunt makes for some fun, and that's what Pokémon seem to have achieved with their little game.

I've tried it and captured a few of the little creatures, in an activity that is somehow reminiscent of trainspotting.

The Charmander here was my first capture and apparently it can be cultivated to turn into a dragon after some Tamagotchi style nurturing.

I'me really more interested in the underlying technology, the virtual reality engine that makes it all work and the potential for its expansion in all kinds of ways. I assume it gobbles bandwidth if used continuously and maybe lays down a track of where I've been (if I were to keep it switched on). As a quick example, here's a slice of my recent 'shopping' tracked by Strava, illustrating the same point.

With some refinement this kind of tracking could be gold dust to retailers. CLD (Continuous Location Data) finally arrives.

The screen grab left is me trying to capture a purple 30 kilo Venonat in my hotel room.

It boinged to the top of the window before I caught it with a power ball or something.

Then I noticed that the bar across the street called Red (see below) is also featured in the game as a 'Pokémon gym', and the coffee bar along the street is featured as a likely hangout for the creatures.

Brilliant idea to get people to go to the bar and then play around with their iPhones.


Oh wait. They do that anyway.

an almost zero step fitbit day because of copious cakes at the Biltmore

Another part of the plan was to re-visit a favourite spot at The Biltmore, a Four Seasons hotel styled with a Mediterranean/ Spanish Colonial/ Moorish Revival look. It is right on the Pacific Ocean and provides all manner of tranquil pampering.

There's all kinds of paths and walks through the lush and tropical grounds, planted with many types of palm tree and other colourful flowers.

Their patio provides a stunning multiple hour brunch. By the end I could only manage three of the cakes.

Yes, this would have to be a fitbit exclusion day. 0 steps. Oops.

Simpsons do Trump, Hillary and that head

The Simpsons predicted President Trump back in 2000. Above is their new campaign note and below is a trip into The Donald's head.

Montecito or bust

Keeping our theme of visiting bits of the Hollywood legend, we're currently in Montecito. It's just along the coast from Santa Barbara, on the route towards Malibu and Santa Monica.

Before Hollywood, this part of the coast was where the movies were made. Eventually, all the movie production companies relocated to Los Angeles but the famous ones had first made their home in the Santa Barbara/Montecito area and it remained a major magnet for the stars to play and live.

This time we are staying in a place built in 1926 by Charlie Chaplin as an upscale getaway. The Montecito Inn became one of the most desirable destinations along the California coast. Years later, in 1943, Mr. Chaplin returned to Montecito to marry the love of his life, Oona O'Neill.

Nowadays there's still a fair share of stars amongst the residents. The area is ranked by Forbes Magazine as one of the wealthiest communities in the United States. Well known people like Oprah Winfrey, John Travolta, Tom Cruise, Michael Douglas, Bruce Willis, Owen Wilson, Drew Barrymore and Ellen DeGeneres have homes in the small town.

We've already adopted Jeannine's as a favourite coffee stop and dined at Tre Lune, the suavely Italian restaurant which has seen an epic number of stars dine.

hearing the mission bell

Once again we've followed the mission bells of El Camino Real along Highway 1 and US101, to the Spanish inspired town of Santa Barbara. It's a great place to kick back and do very little for a few days.

It was a Portuguese explorer named João Cabrillo who, working for the Spanish, discovered the area in 1542 and there's a mural of his landing displayed in the town's court house.

The entire mural was painted by a cinema backdrop painter, who worked for Cecil B de Mille and there are some liberties taken in the depiction. My picture shows a small part of the work, which is painted across all four sides of the approx 60 feet by 40 feet courtroom. Bottom left of the picture s part of one of the doors to the room.

The courthouse is fully functional but, as a public building, it is possible to explore and to see the multiple cultures that have affected this area.

For 13,000 years the native Chumash tribe, then Spain, then Mexico with 40 governments mainly lasting less than a year, and then a mercenary with 100 soldiers claimed Santa Barbara for the United States.

We visited the clock tower, from where we could see the distant Santa Barbara Mission, on the spot where the Spanish had originally raised their cross, eventually creating a string of missions spaced at one day intervals by horseback for some 600 miles, north to south. The missions' secularisation followed later, despite unsuccessful antidisestablishmentarianist attempts (I only put that last sentence in so that I could use THAT word).

balloon debate?

It's fascinating being in the USA for the two political party conferences.

Having seen last week's elephant Republican Convention, this week it's been the turn of the donkey Democrats, with a roller coaster start on Monday as they started a re-uniting of their party after the prior nomination process.

Thursday night saw a slick conclusion with Hillary Clinton's pitch to the predominantly friendly crowd in the mammoth convention centre and then enough balloons and streamers to fill the whole conference center.

The reporting is difficult to judge, because compared with UK television, there seems to be more tokenistic attempts at balance, so sometimes it will be 5 or 6 to one in the subsequent debates of a topic.

Another difference is the appeal to both party faithful and to those watching on television based on patriotism - particularly noticeable in the Democratic conference. The stars and stripes were very evident in the orchestration of the last night's assembly. Many of the rectangular cards carrying messages and slogans earlier in the week had been supplanted by the flag and simpler one word messages on vertical poles. A sea of flags. Aside from a few non-party UK events like The Proms, we just don't get this kind of patriotism appeal.

The Democrat messaging was entirely different from last week's trumped-up use of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. To be honest, I'm not sure that the Republicans would really have stood by last week's story telling, except there was really no choice by this stage.

The Democrats, instead of talking about building walls and throwing people out of a reconstructed insular USA, talked about a unifying force. Instead of last week's theme of "It's all broken and I (Trump) can fix it", this was "We can be stronger together"

I preferred the sentiment of inclusion in the second conference, but to achieve results there were some huge implied spending commitments. There were glossed over statistics about how massive new infrastructure spends and college rebates could be provided by taxing the rich and mega-corporations. Curiously the subsequent media commentary didn't really pick up on these numbers points, preferring the easier discussions around personality and more impressionistic matters. Maybe analysis is for later in the campaigns?

It's fascinating to watch some of this, but I'm not sure how most of America will weather the next three months of TV shows, based upon these two conventions. Or even whether many people watch or take an interest beyond the short sound bites.

a short detour to Mission Ranch

We couldn't visit Carmel-on-sea without a stop at Mission Ranch, which is the Clint Eastwood place. He was famously mayor of Carmel back in the 1980s.

Here's a picture I spotted at Cypress Inn, of him with Doris Day.

Oh yes, and the view and food at the ranch is enough to make anyone's day.