dog deer drama

London's tube strike created a mid Sunday morning atmosphere away from the city centre today. There were plenty of professional looking office types out for runs, sitting in cafes and whizzing about on bicycles. The power of the virtual office.

I was amongst the cyclists, and caught up in an unexpected stampede of wild animals. It was simple enough. Someone had let a small dog off its leash (despite warnings to the contrary) and the dog had gone runabout near to a large quantity of red and fallow deer.

The deer were not too impressed and decided to move away, attracting others from the herd in the process.

The dog's owner then appeared in the far distance and yelled at the dog, which started running around again, some 200 meters from its owner.

The deer decided to get even further away and my handlebar camera picked them up crossing the road ahead of me and a few other cyclists. I'm guessing there are at least a couple of hundred deer. Excuse the slanted angle; I wasn't planning to make a movie and its easier to see what is going on with the video in full screen.

We cyclists all stayed well back, applying the 50 metre rule and aware that the deer could also turn and chase the dog if further provoked.

Fortunately once the deer had crossed the road, the yappy dog ran back to its distant owner, who picked it up and walked rather swiftly away in the opposite direction.

unreliably described as a British train

My lack of blog time over the last few weeks means I've skipped over a few movies that I've seen recently. My dilemma is whether to retro-post or just move on.

Some of them are already scheduled for satellite broadcast, which I assume is getting a shorter lead time nowadays.

The 2-parter movie that featured the 'Wh-questions' in an opening chapter about angling is a tricky one to write about in this blog. The movie's original blatant marketing belies dark material about addiction. The head-games of deliberately unreliable story-telling loop through a wobbly Scheherazade structure wallpapered with Checkovian premonitions of ending. There, I think that is cryptic enough.

I also watched a dysto-pic about America in 2505. The concept might, possibly, have been good but the movie was execrable. Freeze two caricatured average people for a year in a military experiment. Forget to revive them (Yeah), so they accidentally awaken 500 years later as the cleverest people in a dumbed-down America run like an X-factor losers' round. Not sure how it got made.

Ok. I'll move on. I'm guessing the 'British' train interior was German.

Schreibmaschine

One of the bloggers I read regularly has just (re) published a novel - The Obald, by R.F. McMinn. I've just downloaded it to read on Kindle.

I've a backlog of reading actually, because I recently downloaded a couple of those compendium offers - The Weird Fiction megapack (35pence - containing 25 stories) and The Sixth Science Fiction megapack (another 35 pence - another 25 stories). Great for short tube journeys.

Add in 'The Little Old Lady Who Broke All The Rules', 'The Yellow King' and The Granta 127 Japan issue and it will become apparent that I have something of a backlog. Unlike physical books, only the copy of Granta could be added to a book pile.

I might just fast track 'The Obald', though, once I've finished the amusing little old lady book (87% complete).

I gather the Obald was written on a typewriter. It's made me nostalgic for the thought of the marvellous orange portable Olivetti that I used to own. It clipped into a light grey plastic carry case.

Surprisingly stylish, I bought it in Germany, so it had a QWERTZ keyboard. It was well before blogging, but the ribbon in it got a good bashing nonetheless. I think it's long gone, unless I discover it in a shadowy recess of the garage. Looking at that picture, I get a satisfyingly haptic response imagining its surfaces.

different sipes

"You'll still need the winter ones if it carries on like this," smiled the man as I checked in.

Yes, it's post Easter and time to switch back to the Summer tyres on the car.

It's been something of an umbrella situation though. That knowledge that the best way to prevent rain is to carry an umbrella. There must be a tyre addendum to the superstition.

Today, the weather gods had sensed that I was switching from the snow and mud tyres back to 'normal' ones. Thor decided to throw all of his toys around and we had lightning and thunder as well as a deluge of rain.

My 15 minute trip to the dealer* became 30 minutes as a local roundabout flooded and the traffic backed up. Little red cars popped up all over my sat-nav, showing traffic jams appearing everywhere.

A curious fact with the tyre change is the different mileage I get from the car. The winter tyres give around an extra 5 to 7 miles per gallon. I'm pretty sure that it's the tyres rather than my driving that make the difference.

The winter wheels are a different profile from the summer ones. Apart from the obvious cosmetic differences the winter ones are slightly narrower - it's the proper factory option - so supposed to be that way. I guess it affects the rolling resistance.

I've also noticed that tyres are also all the same width for winter, whereas in summer the rear tyres are wider than the front ones. I'm sure there's a reason, although I can't help thinking that marketing plays a part.

Subliminally, the different width thing has worked though. I'd also wondered about this same thing for my road bicycle. Putting a slightly wider tyre on the back than on the front. Wider tyre areas, different comfort and rolling resistance.

A couple of weeks ago when I'd asked about it, the obviously knowledgable chap in the bike shop had looked at me kind of sideways.

"23mm front and 25mm rear? I suppose you can do that." He didn't stroke his beard or shake his head, but I could see in his eyes that he was unconvinced.

The other assistant serving me was already swapping the tyre boxes around when I asked the question.

"No, okay, I'll stick with two 23mm," I chickened out.

* Written on iPhone, whilst waiting for the wheels to be swapped over

overpowered by chocolate

Back once again for the renegade master...

Yes, back to normal, albeit with quite a lot of chocolate in the system. It looks as if some others haven't really restarted yet.

Yesterday and today have been close down from the last thing, as well as getting some material ready for another project. I didn't need my 05:40 start today, but somehow did it anyway.

Later this afternoon I also managed a few very wet miles on the bicycle, which now has the new brakes installed. Yet another reason to get black hands. Tonight I have a meeting in a few minutes, then maybe some telly.

...D4 damager, power to the people.

here we go again

A few of us were chatting about the days when we used PCs and could spend vast hours tending to these labour-saving devices.

The rashbre home setup nowadays features some Macs, which generally behave themselves. The old memories of device drivers and dozens of reboots have mainly faded. Okay, we have a machine on Windows 8, which we haven't yet tried on the free update to Windows 8.1 and another machine which is still reliably on Windows 7.

The careful tending has moved to other places now. We are all supposed to be enjoying the use of the Cloud, although we still backup everything to locally managed servers.

They say the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and that is increasingly a facet I notice when using the Cloud.

A recent example has been the buffer overrun exploitation referred to as Heartbleed (CVE-2014-0160). It allowed nefarious people to peer beyond the length of a computer message at whatever followed (the next 64k actually). In some cases this yielded other peoples' passwords. The weakness was around for a couple of years before it was spotted, so there may well be plenty of passwords compromised around the web.

Like many, I get sent the emails from various Cloud-type services asking me to change my passwords because of this OpenSSL TLS/DTLS bug.

Then over the easter break I received the message that someone was attempting to hack into one of my Wordpress sites. I'd already deleted a couple of old sites at the end of last year after someone had been probing them and this time they attempted to put a file onto the site.

There's a kind of graffiti tagging they some hackers use, where they mark the sites they have hacked with a small text file saying they 'own' it. I casually looked around and noticed a British law firm, a French film company, a Turkish metal company, an American bar and even a broadway lyricist who have all been hacked by one of these people.

It's all just time consuming to manage and fix. Curiously, today I also received an email from a service offering to provide me Wordpress support by the hour.

Hmmm.

My own care and maintenance has just made my already inscrutable passwords even longer and more fiddly.

I still see plenty of demonstrations of connected devices all talking to one another seamlessly. However, the annoyance of increasingly contorted security measures can still be a rainy lining to the Cloud.

I know, wandering lonely as a cloud requires slightly unseasonal daffodils, but they are from rashbre central.

Once at the Phoenix

We decided to see "Once" at the Phoenix Theatre and managed to bag some central seats in the Dress Circle.

I'd seen the delightful indie movie, which had been made using sometimes guerrilla filming techniques.

The stage adaptation has won a fistful of awards on Broadway and recently gained Olivier awards including for the best actress in a musical, which went to Zrinka Civitesic. The guy in the stage version is Arthur Darville, who played 'Rory' in Doctor Who.

They are both accomplished musicians as indeed are the rest of the cast for what is certainly a great night out at a show.

As we arrived in the theatre, there was already a pre-show ceilidh running on the stage, with members of the audience sharing the space with the cast, who were playing feisty folk song arrangements.

Then the show proper got under way, with the love story of an Irish guy and a Czech girl who meet in Dublin. It is a simple story, well told and including some good knockabout humour as well as a whole range of good songs.

At interval time, the stage again becomes a bar for the whole audience, and we wandered downstairs to buy some Murphy's from the boards.

The bar room is the core of the set, which also uses a few tables and some clever lighting to represent the different locations of the story. It follows a similar line to the original movie, although is different enough to be fully enjoyed in it own right.

I found the original movie charming, and thoroughly enjoyed this production of the stage version, which I'd certainly see again, given a chance.

As one of the original writers, Markéta Irglová, commented "It resonates differently within different people because, I think, it brings people back to their own stories, to the times that they've stood at similar crossroads and had to make choices that would affect the rest of their life and they would never be the same afterwards."

...And it's a jolly good evening out.

Square moment

"Which stop?" came the question, "Embankment or Temple?"

"If we get off at Embankment, we can swing past Trafalgar Square."

"What, like tourists?"

"Yes, but c'mon we are going to Covent Garden in any case."

So out of the tube, along a packed Villiers Street towards Charing Cross.

Traf. Sq. was packed with people. Some sort of event going on.

I suddenly remembered, "It's Good Friday, that'll be the Passion Play."

We watched a host of roman centurions nearby. Then a bearded man in white cloth walked speedily in front of us.

Yep, it was Him.

The story continued as Jesus reappeared a few moments later about to be recognised by Mary Magdalene.

green brake blocks

I've had so much of the above, this year, that it's created quite a few gaps in my cycling plans.

Even so, I seem to have clocked up nearly a thousand miles already this year.

Compared with last year, I'm somewhat lagging behind, but I'm slightly surprised that I've done as much as this.

I suppose I did the London thing a few weeks ago and I have a small team event coming up when a few of us get together to form a convoy going south. They are all practising and even have new bikes - no pressure for me, then.

At least I can now report that my carbon bike is back in business with decent tyres, tubes, a new chain and even a new set of brake blocks on order.

shred

A refreshingly cold coffee on a train as I finish my current spell on the eastern side of London.

Thursday will have me tying a few loose ends. This mainly involves shredding documents. My shredder is like a kind of reverse printer. It has a paper tray area, but instead of putting in blank papers, it expects to be fed with A4 printed material.

It ponderously munches them and creates paper shreds that are about ten times the volume of the incoming material. I've the equivalent of an entire boxful (2,500 sheets?) to convert.

applying new black chilli sauce to the bike

It may look like a half-hearted snake charmer kit, but was my next attempt to get the tyres sorted out on the bike.

Swap out of the mistakenly applied old front tyre with a shiny new replacement and put the wheel back.

This time it was a much quicker process. 5 minutes to get the old tyre off, another 2-3 to put the new tyre on and about a further 5 to wrestle with the last 10 centimetres. Experts claim to be able to do all this in a few minutes, but my King of Tyres Personal Best is about 15 minutes with black hands at the end.

I like the new tyres more than I might have expected. They are reassuringly grippy, despite a lack of overt tread - which I think is mainly cosmetic anyway on road bikes. My last two sets of tyres on the carbon bike have both been Continental Grand Prix, but these updated GP 4000S II do somehow feel both lighter and grippier.

It must be the Black Chilli sauce.

too early to be in the sea?

A quick spin to the seaside today, although most sensible people would stay out of the water.

Seated at a small cafe, we basked in early sunshine, although away from the cafe's shelter a chill wind reminded us it was still before Easter.