My cycling fitness is starting to rise again after a longish period of inactivity. I've even started to look up some of the cycle friendly routes around this area, although I'm travelling again and won't really be able to do much cycling for another few weeks.
To my astonishment, the Strava stats show I am only about 250 miles behind my 'year to date' pace which I define as 4,000 miles. I'll need to look into that more carefully because it doesn't feel to me as if I've been cycling that much over the last few months.
Around here I'm using my rugged bike to begin with, until I know more about the quality of the cycle paths. At least I've had a few flybys on Strava, which has given me some access to other people's routes.
Handy to trace the way that 'proper cyclists' go, so that I can find the best routes without too many false starts. Once I've tried one of the proper routes, expect (at last!) to see a map.
The newest IKEA in the land is now open quite close to us. We had an invitation to a preview open-day on Tuesday and late afternoon we made our way along.
I'm pretty sure that IKEA grapples with the challenges of road systems and parking, with my memories of huge delays when foolishly visiting an IKEA in Southampton at a weekend and long delays at one close to Bristol. Both times within sight of the store but unable to get in for over an hour.
I gather there's 21 of them in the UK now, so presumably the pressure on individual stores reduces, although, IKEA is still an example of destination shopping, with this one 90 minutes closer to the far west than the prior one. I think the nearest one to Penzance is in Brest.
Anyway, this one has its own slip roads and traffic lights and for these early days a series of cones to regulate traffic flow. A right turn into the site has been coned off and a way to access it from a nearby housing area has also been coned.
Our own journey was therefore easy and reminded me of the simple way to access the IKEA adjacent to Metro Centre in off-peak times. I suppose IKEA have done a soft start to the store, with a friends and family day, press day, 'locals' day and 'family card members' day all ahead of the main opening.
Sure enough, there was music and balloons as we approached, but once inside it was just like walking around in any large IKEA store. Arrows on the floor. Plenty of Billy and Kallax and the cafe just before the marketplace. A feature here, which I don't remember from other stores, was the special shortcut signage reminiscent of a tube line graphics. And there was an outdoor living area in a greenhouse. By the end there were plenty of lanes open to avoid any early rumours of excessive queueing.
So far it all seems to have worked, although there's an upcoming test when The Chiefs, the County Show, the Scouts and Guides camping weekender and the new IKEA all compete for roadspace.
I must remember to stay away from that particular stretch of road.
I was trying to dig the tunnel. Not because I needed it yet, but at the end of this academic year my language course ends and there isn't an obvious follow-up. Some people do the same course again, but I'm looking for something related but different.
Stammtisch, I thought. Perhaps there's a regular pub meeting in the area where we can converse?
And yes, there is, although when I made contact, the main organiser was swamped with other things. Would I like to organise the next meeting?
Chuckle. In sich hinein kichern. Gern.
Gladly.
That's how a group of us found ourselves in the bar at the Phoenix local arts hub, having a drink und lebhaftes Gespräch before going to see a Film.
By some strange luck I'd plucked an evening for the meetup which co-incided with the venue showing a modern German language film, with English subtitles.
First, in the bar, our group arrived and chattered away. I started learning new words as we veered around topics.
And then to Studio 74, with its excellent sound system and nice bright screen, watching "Western", an F-rated movie directed by Valeska Grisebach, her third movie and this one set in modern-day Bulgaria.
It's a culture-clash drama in which she features many of the trappings of a conventional western: a stranger comes to town. A white horse. A fight in a saloon.
Intermingle 'a Germans in Bulgaria' theme and there's room for a slow burn narrative to explore and probe the people on this edge. Formally, the story is of a group of German workers who start a tough job at a remote construction site on the Bulgarian border. Oblivious to sentiment, they fly a German flag over their encampment.
The foreign land awakens these men's sense of adventure, but they are confronted with their own prejudice and mistrust.
Grisebach’s thinking deconstructs the western and reassembles it anew, updated for the twenty-first century world of migratory labour and economic fragility.
Oh yes, and parts of it were spoken in Bulgarian, emphasising the difficulty of communication between the 'two tribes'.
I think our whole group enjoyed the movie, which was strikingly different from anything on show at the local Vue cinema.
Some of us gathered again afterwards for a follow-up in the bar. I mused that I could give better street directions than I could film reviews 'auf Deutsch'.
This council election results are tumbling in. Consensus seems to be status quo, maybe minus the 'kippers and plus a few orange and greens.
I'm still struck by how little information there was around ahead of the vote. Three of the candidates around my way didn't post any information. The other one did, but was the incumbent making sure they were retained.
In my search, I logged onto various sites to try to get information. I was at least interested to find out if the addresses given were real households rather than addresses of convenience.
Where I found some further information I neutrally uploaded it to the relevant informational web-site. To my slight intrigue, some of this information had subsequently been deleted again by another anonymous user.
My sources for information were -ahem- impeccable government web-sites so the deletions reminded me of another aspect of news management. I suppose I could, in theory, log into the same democracy web-site and put up either scurrilous information or delete factual information that was detrimental to my own candidate.
But, I suppose no-one really cares about any of this stuff any more.
Like today's minister voices recorded with bullying allegations against The Speaker of the House of Commons and then the immediately issued rebuttals, it remains pure Punch and Judy.
Putting the crazy into democracy, one could attempt to say.
I've just finished reading that James Comey book: A Higher Loyalty, which reads more as a summary of Comey's career rather than specifically about the White House in recent times.
I can see what Comey is doing, building a set of values which he recounted from other pre-Trumpian times. Comey's dealings with the mafia. Comey's dealings with people who made lies a way of life. Comey's experiences of bullies. Comey's experiences of leaders. Comey and family values. The list goes on
It set up in the reader's mind a series of inevitable comparisons with today's crazy capers at the White House.
Today's chain reaction of tweets about the $130,000 funnel from Trump to Cohen to that Daniels/Clifford woman add to the complex web. Just look at the recent tRumptweets about this and notice the style change as a lawyer prepares the exceedingly long sentences.
Comey illustrates an interesting moot point about where a private citizen's world begins and ends and therefore the boundary of an FBI Director. Given the rattled circumstances of Trump's firing of Comey, I'll go with Comey's unrestricted view of this and of his freedom to act and publish.
I've read a couple of the other books (Fire and Fury by Wolf and Collusion by Harding) which give more of the mechanics and reactions to the Trump malaise, with Comey being obtusely at arms length from much of what may have happened.
Comey's book gives more of a sense of Comey than it does of Trump, although someone who has been chasing Mafia bosses and leading the FBI may well be playing a very long game.
Around our way, a basic dishwasher-proof mug costs around £5. A fancy mug maybe £10. One of those bamboo facsimiles of a paper cup also costs around £10. I checked today. I already have a metal vacuum flask which I sometimes use on a long car journey.
Any of these could be used to buy coffee on the go, avoiding the wasted paper cup problem. But all of these shapes keep the mug and cup paradigm. (Alert! Alert! one of those danger words!)
What about a cup that doesn't take up so much space? A shapeshifter mug? A collapsible cup? I've had them before, for camping trips with a backpack, although often a plastic mug wins out in such a case.
Cue the Pokito. It may have a name that is difficult to remember, but the idea is quite clever. A collapsible cup that can be configured in various sizes. And once the beverage is consumed, it can be squashed flat again to take up the least space.
I've seen those reports of the 25th anniversary of web browser, Mosaic. The first common use browser, because it ran on Windows.
Back in those days, I remember sitting in the frequent traffic jams around San Jose looking at billboards and envisaging when adverts would feature web addresses.
Originally I used NCSA Mosaic with a self-installed Windows TCP/IP stack. Then along came Netscape which eventually became available as a retail product. The web had truly arrived when I symbolically bought the retail diskette copy of Netscape in a USA computer store. It had warnings in the service agreement about not exporting it, because it was classed as munitions.
Early days, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation was already thinking about anonymity, neutrality and the like, well before all of the Facebook malarky.
Jump cut to today. I've just been sitting in a supermarket car park and there's a whole row of spaces reserved for DOT COM vehicles.
Contrast to the planned merger of Sainsbury and Asda/Walmart. It makes me wonder like in those Californian traffic jams. Ongoing cannibalism of shopping options as consumers drift from bricks and mortar, via click and collect to request and deliver.
Continuing my recent post's look at some old technology, here's another one.
This time it's Macintosh System 7 which later came to be known as MacOS 7. This emulated version from The Internet Archive self installs on a modern Mac in a couple of minutes (subject to line speed etc). The original version came on 15 floppy disks.
A small tip is to disable any adblocker for the archive.org domain to make it work properly.
You get a functional version of System 7 (Big Bang) complete with the once revered Hypercard and a copy of Microsoft Word, complete with templates and some games including -er- Risk.
It starts up with a proper system bleep and the whole thing runs in a Safari browser window, and looks surprisingly tiny on a modern Mac.
Back at our last place, we used to have plenty of lavender in the front garden. During the summer months it literally hummed, being filled with industrious bees. I'd guess that there were thousands of them, happily going about their business.
This year, I'm beginning to spot the occasional bee, including a queen that was bumbling about on our grass. Overall, they say there's less bees around and I was thinking of the ways to encourage a few in our new, and as yet relatively unplanted, garden.
Cue the bee bomb. It's a singular initiative to #bringthebeesback. The hand-made Beebombs are a mix of 18 British wildflower seeds, sifted soil and clay. The seeds are designated by the Royal Horticultural Society as "Perfect for Pollinators". A chap called Ben makes them in his Beebomb laboratory, somewhere in Dorset. I acquired mine from an altogether more local supplier, the zero waste Nourish of Topsham.
It's also akin to zero energy waste gardening. The individual Beebombs contained in the Beebomb bag just need to be scattered onto cleared ground to create a wildflower area.
Now, I won't fib. My attraction to the bee bombs has created a slight pushback. Along the lines of "won't the seeds go everywhere?" and similar comments.
I'm more sanguine. Firstly, a few wild flowers in the garden will look good. And, in any case, I still need them to turn from little blocks of bee bomb clay into actual plants. Not to mention that I've currently only got enough for a couple of square metres.
Although, to appease doubters, I've planted the first tranche in little pots. Stand by for bees. Vroop Vroop.
I've used Acronis True Image to backup PCs for years and will continue to do so.
It's akin to a Mac-style Time Capsule backup, simple to implement, incremental and occasionally creating a fresh full copy.
I've recently tried it for the secondary backups of my Mac servers. The theory has been good, but the execution isn't. I already use Chronosync to make copies of everything to a first line backup, so the Acronis copies are supposedly another level of safety, replacing a set of Chronosync 'batch' jobs.
When the Acronis works, it's fine, even adding some compression to the files.
But, if it goes wrong then there's no easy way to put things back together. It's simplicity defeats it.
As an example, I had a circa 3 Tb backup file in Acronis. I want to add increments to it, but the backed-up entry isn't showing in the left hand pane of the Acronis system. I can still mount the image as a .tib folder to copy things out of it, but I will otherwise have to run the full backup again to get back to where this one is, but in a form that allows the increments to work properly. That's a few hours.
Separately I've some backups which started, but then stopped and restarted. They now show as Incremental, but there isn't a Full baseline copy anywhere. Can I trust these if I ever needed to use them, or would I be better to start again? That's another few terabytes to rebackup. Another few hours.
I think I'll revert to Chronosync for all of the non-cloud backup.
My voting slip arrived for the upcoming council election.
It's tribal. There's no useful documentation about the candidates anywhere.
I looked up the one I was thinking of voting for. It gave a local address and I wanted to check that it was real and not an address of convenience. That's when I thought of the old punk song.
Pretty Vacant.
I decided to look around at another candidate from a different party. Nope. Nothing there either.
"There's no point in asking
You'll get no reply
Oh just remember no don't decide
I got no reason it's all too much
You'll always find us
Out to lunch"
