waiting for the vampire bus?

Halloween is one of those occasions that seems to have grown in commercial status in England over the last few years.

It was always a distant second to the higher profile Guy Fawke's Night, where we take an effigy of the chap that tried to blow up Parliament and burn it on top of a big fire.

Perversely, I still think of Halloween as an American custom that has migrated based upon movies and sitcoms and has now entrenched itself in the supermarkets of the country.

Of course, there will be those that point out its ancient and somewhat pagan roots, and that it originally migrated to the U.S. from Europe.

I suppose the point is that the English didn't make so much of it because Bonfire Night gives a perfectly good adjacent excuse to set fire to things, make explosions and drink.

So this evening, I may be looking out for souls seeking revenge, but it will be at the cinema, watching James Bond.

leaves, colours and bags

A side-effect of my calendar getting reshuffled today was that I could make a slightly later start. With the effect of the clock change it felt doubly late. I pay it back tomorrow with a first meeting at 8am.

The clock change reminds me that this year Autumn seems to have arrived very suddenly. A few days ago everything was still green, but now it's all gone golden and chilly as the weather turns.

And in some parts of London the colours go from the trees to the pavement and into bags in a matter of days.

feet held to flames to put mudguards on winter bike

The classic procrastination situation faced me today. I'd been getting the orange bike ready for the cooler months and was well ahead of the plan until time to fit the mudguards.

I did order a set - all £9.99 worth - and they've now arrived.

As has yesterday's tiny amount of snow.

And today's white roof frost.

To the extent that I'm sitting in front of the fire warming my toes. A small confession that yesterday I walked past that builders' supply place near Borough Market and they had those 'keep toasty' type leggings and arm warmers in the window. I nearly bought some.

Instead I will be doing that biking activity known as 'faffing' later today as I finish the winterisation (?) of the orange bike.

Must.Get.Away.From.Fire.

@LondonNaNo at Mad Hatter

I've pinched today's pictures from the @LondonNaNo twitterfeed, and I can almost be spotted in the back row from today's session at the Mad Hatter.

And yep - I've decided to have another go at this National Novel Writing Month lark.

I think it will be my fifth attempt, and I've generally managed to hit the requisite 50,000 words in the month of November. Actually, I can only account for three of the stories though, so one has already received a suitably embarrassed consignment to a messy drawer.

The picture shows part of the assembled gang, which became 'standing room only' a little later. Today's launch was the second session, with a prior weekday evening one to catch 'commuting novelists'.

We also had the mix of Londoners and those from further afield including New York and Vancouver in my table's gathering.

There's something reassuring about meeting a diverse group of people about to set out on this craziness. It was also interesting to note that many had already successfully completed prior years. Most didn't know one another at this kick-off session, but it is already clear they we will all encourage one another along. The NaNoLondon web site is here and the London Regional forum is here.

Of course we won't start writing until the 1st of November. Some already have plots, diagrams and characters but I still have nothing.

Which reminds me, I must start banking sleep.

(p.s. that was about 230 words)

scary television for the Halloween weekend

I know it's not quite Halloween yet, although there seems to be pumpkins and cobwebs in abundance in some areas.

I've decided to watch something scary and am working my way through the old Twin Peaks TV-series.

It's one of those situations where someone else I know was watching it, then I noticed it was listed as one of the 'top boxed sets' in a weekend newspaper then serendipitously I found the DVDs lurking at the back of a cupboard.

I used to work occasionally around the Seattle area and managed to visit the mystical setting for the movie as part of a trip. We'd somehow got one of those stretched limos and a few hours to spare before a flight.

We headed off towards the wonderful Snoqualmie Falls, which was the main setting used for the Great Northern Hotel in the series. We also took a trail towards the bottom of the falls, right to the part of the path where it said something like "Danger - do not pass".

Anyway, as well as the humour of the reassuring cherry pie, donuts and 'cup o Joe' there's still parts of the series to make me jump right out of the chair.

why is a raven like a writing desk?

Oh dear. I received the email for NaNoWriMo yesterday. National Novel Writing Month. It turns out that there's a meeting in London at the Mad Hatter. On Saturday. I'm already doing something just around the corner near Lavington Street, so it's about a five minute walk away.

Aside from failed projects, I've got a couple of drafts at a 75% and 50% complete status, so I'm wondering if I really need another partial project at the moment.

It would be so much more sensible to finish the ones that are already underway.

But I have a few new ideas that I could make into something.

I even logged into the NaNoWriMo site today and updated my info. It said I've been a member for 7 years now. And that I've finished 4 times.

I feel that the tractor beam has somehow been switched on again and I am being sucked towards the door of the Mad Hatter.

It's only 1667 words a day to reach 50,000 words in November.

There. That was about 250 words. And I didn't even mention the weather.

Mad Hatter: “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”
“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
“No, I give it up,” Alice replied: “What’s the answer?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter

emergency lollypop

What started as a tipple with a friend yesterday later moved on to a conversation like a Black Books sketch. It was the one about the children's story. But I think I was the only one of our group that knew the scene - which has two main characters a bit the worse for wear whilst writing a children's story.

The elephant and the balloon.

Of course, their earlier consumption of alcohol may have made it difficult to remember the story the next morning.

The episode is available on 4OD, but not embeddable for copyright reasons, so the little clip from another episode will have to suffice.

I think I've mentioned before that I keep Black Books on my iPhone as emergency entertainment.

screme eggs, anyone?

Wrong on so many levels.

shiny shiny (again)

I've just seen the Apple show of all the various shiny shiny new items which will be hitting the stores in time for the end of year festivities.

I paid attention, because I'm in the market for a new iMac. A short time ago I even prepared but then cancelled an order on the basis that the new box was just around the corner.

It raises an interesting point though, because pretty much all of the Macs I've ever owned are still quite usable and have been pressed into service as secondary devices or hand-me-downs.

Not so with the old PCs, which have usually managed to develop some kind of unrecoverable fault or collapsed under the burden of operating system updates. There's still a variety of boxes and bits in the garage from various unsuccessful resuscitation attempts.

With the Macs, the main failure has been disk drives which eventually either get full or have needed replacement - oh and occasional new batteries. My relatively ancient 15inch Powerbook still works but has had a disk upgrade. It is still used for mainly music related projects but runs a very recognisable version of the Mac system.

And similar updates to a few of the other boxes right up to my current shape 'early 2008' iMac. It just won't handle the new very fast external disk for video editing.

It's still quite interesting seeing the rest of the new stuff announced. The iPad refresh was inevitable, based upon the predictable introduction of the new Lightning connector across the range. The old Apple connector - like the two I have in my car for iPod and iPhone - is now becoming a legacy connection.

The new iPad mini has been talked about for months and notwithstanding the price differential, there should be quite a tablet market share scramble leading to the end of the year.

It raises some questions though...

• Is the new refresh cycle now as low as six months for this technology? The iPad 3 only lasted 6 months before the iPad 4 appeared.
• Will the thinning down of all the devices mean that there really are no user replaceable parts? Check out the new case on the iMac and the circa 1mm thick battery in the new iPad mini.
• Presumably the new designs have considered heat? I've had a couple of timecapsules die from what seems to be heat related component fatigue.
• Will the iPad mini game-change smaller tablets - I've preferred a Kindle for reading because the iPad was too heavy, not very readable in sunlight and a bit expensive to get sand in.
• And will the iPad mini be more or less a 'consumption' device rather than one for 'creation'?

It's an interesting period for all of this stuff, because there's quite a few new possibilities and options around - including the Android and Windows 8 + Surface stuff. I'm a great fan of what I call 'quiet technology' - it just works - and where this pushes the market. It looks alike an interesting six months/few days(?) until the next tranche arrives.

lazy hazy grey sunday

A lazy Sunday, although this evening I will have some work prep ready for tomorrow. At least I'm not packing bags and driving somewhere on Sunday evening, although I have a feeling I may need to next weekend.

So today has been a gentle day, with a few home chores, a visit to the supermarket because we forgot to hit enter on the Ocado list, and a bike ride.

I'm into the last 200 miles of my revised target for 2012 now. I originally set it at 1,800. Then 3,000 (which constitutes my 'silver medal') and finally 4,000 miles, which I'll call a gold. I'm planning to use a chocolate wagon wheel to get that Olympic size.

I've realised that using targets is quite important to the process and acts as a bit of a spur. I originally set my targets back in January and have been keeping an eye on them as the year unfolds. The fancy telemetry on the bike also helps by offloading the numbers to various software. There were some dips like when I was in the USA and when I was trekking around Europe. Also the great bathroom project in March impacted progress. The so-called music room project looms and may also create a further blip.

Despite it all, I somehow managed around 800 miles back in September, which was a combination of hitting the 3k and then getting moving towards the 4k.

Of course it would be madness to attempt 5k by the end of the year. I still need to get the mudguards for the orange bike.

no snooze buttons involved

Not one of my finest photographs, but representative of the last few mornings. Those first few moments staggering towards the kettle for an early cup of tea. Awake before the dawn and leaving the house in the barely light.

The days this week I've used trains I've also returned in the dark.

This morning was different. I somehow slept well past sunrise - and it's still another week before the clocks change.

fix mac mail speed with mountain lion

A slightly technical post today because I have been experiencing some hiccups with Mac mail and Mountain Lion.

It worked fine when I first upgraded to Mountain Lion some time ago, but a two-week ago mini update to Mountain Lion seems to have created a few problems.

I noticed that the mail system wanted to rebuild its database on the iMac and the Macbook Air and I just hit yes.

I should probably come clean that I have multiple email accounts across iCloud, POP, IMAP and Exchange as well the related contacts folders and calendars. Oh and 10s of thousands of emails that I haven't archived. And quite a few smart folders. Let's say its a quite large email environment.

Anyway, that spinning beachball re-appeared - something I hadn't seen for ages. I also noticed that the Address Book was behaving suspiciously and wondered if the two were linked.

I had to go into the kind of problem solving that I'm rather familiar with on my PC, but is rather a novelty to me in the Apple world.

I will cut the long story short.

How I fixed it.

The usual caveat applies to not try this unless you know what you are doing, but simply put, it was a case of rebuilding the Address Book, which has regained the normal speed for everything.

Because I use iCloud and Exchange, all the address entries were stored elsewhere, so I had a safe copy of everything before I started. I quit mail and address book.

I then used the Finder 'Go' command to access the '~/Library' directory (which lets you see the hidden Mac folders).

I navigated to the Application Support folder and deleted the Address Book sub-folder - if you don't use the '~/Library' way to access this area you won't see the folder. A warning from me that deleting this folder will delete all of the address book entries - hence the need to be sure you have them stored somewhere else.

I then restarted Address Book - which had just one entry in it - me.

I then added the iCloud directory back in via Preferences. It took about 10 minutes to repopulate a few thousand entries and to rebuild some lists.

Then same again (in my case) for the Exchange directory. Another 10 minutes.

Restart mail - it was still slow because (presumably) it was rebuilding something.

A hardly ever done reboot (for good measure) and the whole thing was then running back at its proper speed. Fast email, fast address book. Yay.

So I've posted this for anyone else with a similar problem - I had to fix both the iMac and the Air, so I am fairly sure this is a general situation

Dear Apple - I think this needs some attention before the next Mountain Lion update.