rewards of chaos

It is getting very confusing. Despite the quantity of meetings that Patel had during her 'holiday' in Israel, there's some pieces that still don't stack up with the news reports.

There's that minuted meeting on 22 August where Mr Oren, Deputy Minister at the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, told Middle East minister Alistair Burt and British Ambassador David Quarrey that Ms. Patel had a successful meeting with Mr Netanyahu.

It says they in turn told Downing Street. But perhaps they forgot. Or it could be a fib, I suppose? But wait, they are diplomats, so they must be telling the truth. Maybe its a symptom of the chaos.

Then there's the London meetings, back in September. There's actually a tweet with a photograph of Patel and Erdan standing in the House of Commons.

Now this would be a very badly kept secret, or maybe there's a fib somewhere in the process? Or more chaos?

The strangest one is when Patel met Rotem in New York on September 18th. It says that the meeting wasn't disclosed after advice from Number 10 because of potential embarrassment to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Apparently the FCO gets sensitive about having things happen which it feels are its own territory.

So was there a cover up, or is it a fib that Number 10 didn't know? Perhaps put it down to chaos?

I'll also take the broader view of Number 10. It's not one person. It's a full dither of civil servants, with commensurate stackable in-trays. So who knows where the isolated information has finally landed? And who bothered to forward it anywhere? Perhaps it was all chaotic?

As a slight aside, I used to travel to Israel and remember some of the weird meeting pressures. My typical post-flight hotel arrival time was around 5 a.m, and my hosts for whatever meetings I was attending would invariably have things booked for later that same morning.

Despite a main purpose there would always be extra meetings snuck in, and they'd often have sensitive connotations. Meet this security firm. Meet this supplier operating with special tax advantages. Today we are meeting the Army, but outside the barracks in a metal-detector surrounded cafe. I became wise to this after a while, but it seemed to be a part of the local culture to attempt these extra things, so the thought of Patel's 12 meetings organised by a fixer doesn't particularly surprise me, and could easily have been run over just a couple of days.

But back to the UK.

Boris Johnson has wanted his department to absorb DfID, calling it “a colossal mistake in the 1990s to divide the Department for International Development from the Foreign Office”. No great surprise if there's no love lost during the recent exchanges, then.

And behind the monied scenes, let's not forget that DfID uncovered some dubious practices about how foreign aid has been offered from the UK. There were the stolen papers from DfID allegedly used for Business Development by a well-known firm of contractors referred to in tabloid circles as foreign aid fat-cats.

Some quite complicated agendas then.

There's too many half-truths in all of it. More like a government-wide malaise. Instead of strong and stable we get chaos and lies.

Johnson makes it up on the hoof. The last few days illustrate his lack of contrition related to that prisoner situation, but it is only one of his series of blunders which are still not being brought to an end.

And Davis, with his own quoted 50-60 Brexit sector analyses which, now they are being asked for, are mysteriously incomplete.

But May doesn't need to do anything. No-one wants her job at the moment.

a roundabout route

I do use those flight radar tracking systems sometimes. In fact I'll be using it tonight when I'm at the airport later.

Today it seems to have been used with superabundance on twitter to track that inbound Kenyan 787 Dreamliner (5Y-KZB).

Some remarked upon the apparent changes of direction, but this is a pretty standard incoming flight pattern, banking around the dome, with a good view of London from the starboard window seats. It's easy to spot the famous landmarks, The Eye, The Shard, Palace of Westminster, Downing Street.

Of course, they are passed at high speed. The plane is slowing from a few hundred miles per hour as it descends towards LHR.

Then the disembarkation. It's fun to get one of those limos from the steps instead of having to go along the corridors from the jetway, mingle with everyone else and then pickup the luggage.

Although, I've never had the three car treatment, with a whole convoy of black vehicles to accompany me back towards London. I see the perimeter roads were used to good effect, which is a definite preference for me also, when there's traffic around.

Helicopters hovering over Parliament and Whitehall are quite a common sound, but there's usually something happening at the time, like a protest, or a big event. This time we may hear about a resignation, but it's still not the big oaf's turn.

Even the way May enters the building through the back garden can be something of a circuitous metaphor. Yet, outside Number 10, the media with a lower budget wait for the outcome. Will May play it for a sacking or will Patel resign? Will the noise from it be enough to quell other criticisms of the shaky and wobbling leadership?

The helicopter spin gives us an answer.

taxing problems

It's a pretty car, isn't it? Not a run-of-the-mill Cayman, but a 718-GT4. I actually prefer it in the yellow, rather than one of the understated silver colours. I know, everyone says get a 911, but I somehow prefer the shape of this one.

Since the financial crash red 911s seemed to get a bit of a bad reputation. Then Porsche playfully named their car after a tax haven. I can't wait for the Porsche Paradise.

But wait - I just remembered - my favourite hangout in Saint Tropez is Senequier, which is that red-tabled cafe on the front, right by where Porsche owners already run the Paradis meeting every year.

To be honest, it's easier to arrive by water, rather than to drive around. I'd start from Sainte Maxime and make the short crossing.

There's always a a fair share of rich folk hanging around the harbour, but no obvious signs of anything untoward. The old adage used to be that the Tories would go down through sleaze and Labour through corruption. Sitting at a table people-watching it could be tempting to try to make those classifications. The state-less jet set don't seem to be affected in quite the same way by the tussles of politics. Indeed, even with all of the current disruptions the FTSE is still doing okay.

So back in the UK, if David Davis has blown the Brexit negotiation, and Theresa May is ineffective as a Prime Minister, then it would normally be time for another reshuffle, or even another election. That'd bring even more uncertainty into the system and I suppose there is enough already.

The challenge for all the usual contenders is multiple. Take a look at the bookies' odds. So unimaginative. It really is the wrecking crew at its finest. There's the buffoon or that 18th Century pinstriped shoemaker. Another contender is the very man who is fouling up the negotiations.

I suppose David Davis might have thought he'd be in with a leadership chance and consequently have a hop-skip-and-a-jump to free himself from the negotiations. He could have hospital passed it away to someone he didn't like. Heck, at this rate he might even need to start working a full week. But then again, the November recess for Parliament starts today.

Too late for a Davis sidestep now, and probably too late to do any sort of proper Brexit recovery. Boris is also too wily to want to take on the job, unless it is presented as a full rescue mission. Like everyone else, he knows that the current position is career limiting for whoever is in charge.

But I suppose there is the usual media baron conspiracy to keep a few people out of the limelight until the deals need to be done.

So whilst the chancellor gets ready to knock a few pence off beer, the Westminster elite and even the Royals can shuffle their funds further towards the Caymans.

scaffold time?

Well, here we are in November, the point at which I've decided that loner David Davis has blown the Brexit negotiation. There's so much other diversionary noise around at the moment, with abundant sleaze oozing from Westminster, so it is becoming even easier to become distracted.

Many of the 'secret' papers about to be released have already had airings in other formats, through the consultants that wrote them in the first place. Their general tenet is gloom and doom, which was mainly hidden through the lies of the referendum.

But like a gold rush, there's plenty of bystanders prepared to take money from those intent on the original task.

Now it has taken a 'humble address' to parliament to get these various reports into the limelight so that they can be released. There's two ways to issue them as well; copy them onto a memory stick and give them to someone to manage, or to start a 12 week prognostication about whether this constitutes an opposition motion and then create a committee to redact the papers before they can be seen. Perhaps the current state of Big Ben's tower and the almost hidden clock face is a metaphor for the way that Parliament is operating?

But then, I suppose playing an Erskine May contempt of parliament card might assist the release of the documents? Although, even if it happens quickly, it would still show that those in the negotiation have little regard for transparency. The high turnover of senior ministers and even a permanent secretary in the Brexit department become another symptom of the malaise.

Until recently I'd assumed a further Tory shuffle would require new people to pick up the hot potatoes, much as the churlish Cameron, Osborne, Johnson and Gove did way back when. I suppose it could still happen.

There's under a year to get the big stuff in place now, which is shaping as either unlikely or only to be achieved in a desperate way.

no landline, but a proper dial tone

Since we dispensed with a landline, there are one-or-two aspects we've noticed that we miss.

But first of all, there's the things that we don't miss. The automated offshore incoming call centres trying to tell us that our Windows computer is broken. Or that there's another financial instrument that could be of interest. Or that we should claim for a recent accident (which we haven't had).

We also agree that the real people that dial the landline tend to be family. No-one else generally bothers; they all use mobile numbers or messaging.

What is handy, however, is being able to give a landline number to a delivery vehicle. It needs to have the right prefix, of course. Virtualised private numbers still confuse. Then, having a phone that can ring throughout the house. In the lounge, the kitchen, upstairs, even on the top floor. And the reassurance of an old-school answerphone. With a light that flashes.

I expect the days of this whole technology are numbered, but I've resurrected its use without the necessity of deploying BT. So we now have a proper area code landline number. No actual landline, instead a tiny VOIP gadget that converts the internet signal back to analogue and can then be beamed around the house on a DECT carrier.

It works fine, provides a reassuring standard British dial tone, a clearer voice signal than the old slightly scratchy twisted copper pair and includes a proper E999 service. There's also a few additional features like being able to pickup landline calls from a mobile even when away from home. Our DECT handsets all have speakerphone as well, and there's unlimited UK landline and mobile calling included.

Even with next year's projected reduction in BT landline costs, this capability is still much cheaper. What's not to like?

No links with Yanukovych, Ivankov, Algarov, Veselnitskaya, Magnitsky, Akhmetshin, Bogatin, Mogilevich, Tokhtakhounov, ?

The Halloween edition of the New Yorker may have captured the mood quite well with its front cover illustration.

It's scary stuff, and the woods may be filled with smoke and crazy clowns, but there's still no official smoking gun in the alleged Russian influence of the last US election.

I've written about some of this back in July, including passing mentions of the curious state of some of the floors of Trump Tower, which seemed to have been let to money launderers and even a Russian mob enforcer.

Oh yes, I remember, the enforcer eventually went back to Moscow and was gunned down in a street. The storylines around this are quite convoluted, and could make a great piece of jump-cut movie fiction, except that there's too much that is deniably true.

Of course there would be no direct connection to Trump for any of this. His son-in-law may have been to s Russian meeting seeking dirt on Hilary Clinton, but that situation has almost melted away. These kids. He's only 36, don't ya know. Oh, yes, I remember Manafort was also at that session.

Manafort. Officially he only ran the Trump campaign for about three months, although many would say he took over in all but name much earlier. I'm sure that is as deniable as the current string of indictments.

Now that a version of Yanukovych's Black Ledger has surfaced, we may see more of the laundering and corruption processes, although it will almost certainly only be a subset.

And perhaps Trump is wilier than we all think, putting up all kinds of weird circus sideshows whilst he goes about his conventionally self-interested money making schemes?

But I was forgetting, he's not got a very good track record at those either, at least legally/morally/ethically.

in which one of my accounts became faux Chino-Russian and sent some election noise

Like almost everyone, I have a few dormant accounts sprinkled around the internet. The kind of things that get set up for a one-off purpose, left switched on but never quite get deleted and then are forgotten.

That's what happened to an old Skype account of mine, which someone managed to hack. I first noticed it when I started getting SMS messages in Russian related to a reset. Curious, I thought. I'd better take a look.

Sure enough, the old account had been illegally repurposed. A new userid had been added, similar to mine but with one letter different. The name had been changed to something faux-Chinese and the language had been reset to Russian.

I looked back through the history and realised they'd been looking for accounts with automatic top-up, rather than my otherwise locked-down account.

The account had been one of those pwned accounts in a well-publicised hack created when Microsoft merged Skype and Microsoft accounts but somehow left the Skype accounts as an alternative form of logon. The two-factor Microsoft account verification therefore didn't work for the Skype-based login.

This isn't new information, but illustrates the perils of (my?) lax housekeeping of an old account. It is possible that the renamed userid/email account was used to send out some spam mails before it was locked down by Microsoft. I'm wondering if messages were sent last year for the US elections or perhaps later for the British ones? Also just how many others were affected in a similar way and may still not even realise it has happened?

Fortunately, the recent half-hearted hacker attempt to re-instate the account does show me that the two-factor authentication is now working. And even more interesting is that I now have the hacker's complete profile.

TEOTFW binge complete

I've been watching TEOTFW. That's not the full title, although the TV announcer did manage a fill-in-the xxxs reference just before episode one screened yesterday evening.

It's been made like a dark-humoured road trip set in a stylistically dated Britain. James and Alyssa (played by Craig Roberts and Jessica Barden) are teenagers with outlier attitudes.

Based on the Charles Forsman graphic novel, the revised UK storytelling still plays with American-style scenes. James walks along a tree-lined street carrying a skateboard in one of those classic framing shots. They drive along Badlands-straight roads, stopping at faux-American diners for food.

There's a roadhouse bar, even an isolated mobile home that could have been in a dingy trailer park. James wears a Hawaiian shirt that could almost be from True Romance. They visit houses that look like mid-century British attempts to do American decor. Alyssa even says it at one point: “If this was a film, we’d probably be American.” Much of the incidental music has an American twang.

Despite its G rating, it's not a series for a faint-hearted General Audience. More of a 'T for Twisted', if such rating were to exist. Brilliantly cast, including one of Sightseers lead characters playing a Dad which can't just be coincidence.

I won't say more, except I've watched the whole series, currently freely available on All4. Watch the first episode at your peril; it'll probably lead to binge viewing of the rest.

FCPX, Motion, FXFactory and High Sierra all running smoothly together

A spinoff from getting the main computer/disks etc back into use has been the number of updates applied since the system was last used back in early May.

The most notable change was from Sierra to High Sierra, which had the effect of removing a few old versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro from daily use. They just don't work any more on the latest operating system.

When the X versions of these products were introduced, I used to think of them as a dumbing down of prior capabilities and so, like many, I kept the older FCP Studio and Logic Pro Studio version running. In particular the lack of plugins in the early days meant that I couldn't use the new software to edit some of my existing work.

In the interim, I've tinkered with Adobe and Avid again, but now, years later, FCPX seems to have sorted itself out, so I have added back all the plugins and have used it for my latest couple of small projects.

A major help has been the small FXFactory plugin manager, which has reduced that time hunting around in directories and managing multiple copies of the same plugin across different software platforms.

I'm pleased to say my editing on FCPX is now functioning securely, responsively and with most of my day-to-day effects working across both FCPX and Motion. I'll post a small example over the next day or so.

It will probably be pre-marketing for one of next year's shows ;-)

still no jet pack

Sidewalk Labs have been talking recently about their project targeting the eastern waterfront of Toronto. It's an Alphabet/Google company pushing new ideas about ways to develop the public realm. Wrapped up in mobility and sustainability statements are more thoughts on urban space monitoring and monetisation.

The project seems to be offering a surprisingly conservative future view. I'd have expected more boundaries to be pushed but, at least from the illustrations, it all looks very safe. There's a tree-lined pedestrianised zone, with a cable car and a few bicycles. The architecture is glass-boxy and in the distance is a converted legacy building with a tall chimney. Kind of London South Bank along by the Tate Modern, maybe?

I can also remember in downtown Toronto, walking around a series of underground links between buildings. I think it is called PATH and I was told it was a way to stay cosy during the winter months. It makes it all the more intriguing that the same city should be selected for this other kind of project.

Then there's another Sidewalks illustration, this time of the walkways and tramways. A few Google driverless cars have been pasted on, implying modernity.

Aside from the cable car, it could almost be a central Manchester image, with the tram intersection and a few bicycles.

In some European cities trams can also take outboard bikes, similar to the way that ski-buses operate. Here's a Stuttgart to Degerloch example.

Another example from London would be the Airline cablecar interchange which, on both sides of the Thames, goes into a predominantly pedestrian area, with close and deliberately synchronised adjacent tube, ferry and light railway links. I know this one well, because it was part of my regular commute for a while. The cablecar would work strange hours though. A late morning start and an early evening finish. Miss the last one and it would be necessary to take a whole different route to get back. Same thing in high winds.

I decided to dig out a concept sketch of the cablecar, from 2010, before it had been built.
sketch. The glass building also housed a series of exhibits about modern multi-modal city infrastructures. Maybe the Alphabetters should take a look at some of the output?

Then there's their concept of the underground infrastructure for services. The diagram looks like a Disneyworld cross-section, but I'm thinking of my experiences in la Défense, Paris, where the underground tunnels are huge and fairly confusing.

I used to travel fairly regularly to the area's Sofitel, yet taxi drivers would regularly get lost. Of course, the scale is much bigger than the Sidewalk project, with many tall buildings creating a commensurate demand for services.

Look at la Défense from surface level and it's impressively car free. It even has some of those autonomous shuttle buses.

Okay, maybe there are only three of them. Hardly enough to support a daily footfall of 500,000. But it's the edges of the zone that also tell a story.

'It always works in the PowerPoint', as the expression goes.

Eggers - The Circle

I've been reading extracts from Dave Eggers 55 short short stories for something that I'm doing on Thursday.

They are all roughly one-pagers and are written in a compressed and non-paragraphed style which isn't that easy on the eye.

I can see what he's doing with some of them, with a thought-bomb wrapped up in homely or comical descriptions, and I've found some of the characters and voices particularly exasperating.

But that is part of his point and reminds me of reading Egger's technical futures novel called 'The Circle' a few years ago.

The novel included a few extrapolations about where technology was headed and the kind of things that could occur as by-products. I suppose many people who read these kind of novels will generally be tech-savvy and so the experience is more one of confirmation of thoughts rather than genuinely zinging ideas.

In the The Circle, the main protagonist (Mae) joined a hi-tech company (The Circle) and we see the enthusiastic, jovial, well-sounding company people building ever more intrusive gadgets to keep an eye on things.

"Yay, claps, awesome!"

It does remind me somehow of that new google camera thingy (Clips) that I mentioned recently to help spy on friends record lifestyle.

The novel plays with ideas around being liked, participation "Secrets are Lies" and the all-embracing nature of some modern tech companies. It doesn't directly mention the FANG factor (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google), which I suppose should really be the FAAA Factor (Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, Apple). However, it is all about what they represent.

And then late yesterday evening, I noticed the 2017 movie of The Circle was up on Netflix, so I took a look at its somewhat condensed version of the idea. Netflix have thrown some serious money at the production, made in collaboration with Abu Dhabi, and with Emily Watson playing Mae and Tom Hanks as the 'Steve Jobs' style company evangelist.

The movie reminded me of my time working for American organisations, with sleek campuses, the passive aggressive lifestyle immersion and the big shindigs where everyone on deadlines would still be seen to be having fun. I can honestly say that the company events were quite true to life based upon my own experiences.

It probably turned this somehow mis-firing movie into something that I could watch, despite a kind of fairy-tale startup, superficial handling of life off-campus and some crowbarred in third act moments.

Don't tell anyone, but I might watch it again.

smile for the robot camera

Now a decent amount of the rashbre central technology is back up and running, it seems like time for a technology post.

Something that caught my eye recently is Google Clips, which could have been like a camera for the selfie generation if only it had pointed the other way.

Google Clips recognizes faces and pets and records them automatically. What could possibly be creepy about that? It's wearable and compact, and although it lights up when recording, it's a bit like having someone permanently collecting evidence.

It reminds me of the Jesse Armstrong Black Mirror episode 'Entire History of You', where Jesse's Peep Show-style recording was made of everything and could be replayed to cross check detail. In Black Mirror the grains captured everything, but these Google Clips only capture shortish bursts of 15 frame per second pseudo-video without sound. At least that's all they do for the moment.

Google is also at pains to say it doesn't put the resultant footage into the cloud, and the user must select which sections get further use. Probably via one of those lengthy usage agreements that have to be accepted the first time the device is used.

The original design didn't include a push button to take a photo; the system didn't need it, being entirely autonomous. They've added a button now as a kind of psychological human factors thing a bit like many unwired office heating controls.

I'm not sure what impact this kind of device will have on photography. Smartphones can already replace smaller pocket cameras for many purposes. The innovation of this device is that it doesn't require any action on the part of the user. Clip it on and it uses artificial intelligence to look for the shot and then snaps pictures it thinks could be of interest. 'Family and pets' says the oh-so-wholesome literature - although it does show a picture of the device tucked away on a shelf.

It's another twist on the Google Glass designs, this time with a more overt camera visible. The pictures it takes are well below current smartphone quality. The wide 130 degree angle of view and unframed picture gives a totally random look to the resultant picture. It reminds me of a security camera photograph.

Then there's the three hour battery life. Hardly deigned for life-streaming. But it is the first generation, and Google probably wants to use it to track other demographic information for helpful marketing purposes.

It's also not directly supporting the selfie generation. The wearer can't take a photo of themselves. Just of other people. Or cats to share on the internet.