Officially rather nippy

Sunset of the week

Ironic that it should fall upon a Friday. Please excuse the terrible photography - no rule of thirds, no alignment, nothing! Still, you get the idea...

More Winteryness and some other stuff

Because it's still going on:

Yep, that's the moon in the gap (below), slightly blurred but still all crescenty. Probably a bit cold up there, too:

Icy lane, but worth it because it leads to nursery...

Other stuff - an epic version of Car Park Bingo around the corner from Marble Arch in London:

Other stuff - bit ironic for a company which deals in software to manage water pipes:

Other stuff - long scissors are very, very long!

Wintery-ness for you all

Hydrangea derrangea

Reflects my mood. Sort of. Fuck.

Karmic bus lane

Karma, or something like it, does seem to exist, if simply as a result of human intervention.

This morning, on my relatively pleasant commute to work, I was queued in a line of traffic next to an empty bus lane. Several cars had already whizzed past down the bus lane, but I refused to cut across and go where I wasn't meant to. I'm not a stickler for rules in every case, but when I can see they make sense, I'll happily follow along.

So there I was in the big queue of cars, approaching the end of the lane and ready to spread out into what had been the bus lane, but was now free for all traffic. Two cyclists (who are allowed to use the lane) had just gone past and filtered round in front of a car and a van, who had been cheeky and were now stuck in the bus lane by the same red light as I was currently stopped at.

As it turned green, and traffic moved off, one of the cyclists deliberately held up the illegal traffic in the bus lane so I could filter across, legally and easily.

Karmic cyclists made my day, or at least my commute.

People just getting things... wrong

There was, on the anniversary of Armistice Day, a protest by the group calling themselves Muslims Against Crusades in central London. They burned a poppy.

I support their right to peaceful protest, of course.

But burning a poppy is a bit of a schoolboy error, really. The problem is, if you want to be taken seriously you need to do something a bit smarter than allying yourself with the Nazis. Sounds a bit of a strange thing to say, perhaps, since as far as I know the Nazis weren't in the habit of burning poppies. However, the poppy, although it is worn in remembrance of the fallen in all military action, has a very strong association with the second world war.

To burn a poppy indicates that you don't support the people who fought against Nazism... whoops. Even if you feel that way, don't expect us to listen to anything you have to say if you go ahead and tell us! To support the Nazis and all they stood for is to abandon any hope of being taken seriously. Your call.

We must also consider that the poppy appeal has nothing to do with political issues. To burn a poppy in protest against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is rather akin to desecrating a fire-fighter's grave because you don't agree with the jail sentence handed out to the arsonist whose handiwork killed him.

Someone protesting with a match is never going to be taken very seriously in this country, even when they've already thrown petrol over you. You can't burn an ideal, just an idol. Most people in the UK tend to consider the former above the latter. "Sticks and stones...", etc.

I wonder if anyone will have pointed that out to the lads standing in the freezing cold with only the warmth of a burning poppy to stave off frostbite. A bin full of broken placards usually gives off much more heat...

Vegas, pt 2

Please, please read part 1 of this article first. Ok, done that? Good.

I didn't imagine that Vegas was perfect. In fact, I went knowing that it would be flawed, because there's no way that so much money can change hands without someone losing out. It was, as far as I could glean from the available media, a viper's nest of debauchery.

In some senses, I was proven utterly correct in this assumption. If, as requested, you have read part 1 of this twin article, you'll know that I was impressed by some parts of the city. However, there's plenty in Vegas for an anti-profligate such as myself to hate.

Wishful wastefulness is the catchphrase in the city. Why bother turning out the lights in your hotel room when doing so will only save a fraction of a thousandth of a billionth of the energy which gets wasted in the city every day? Of course, I believe in setting examples so I turned off the lights, but I was, I can assure you, in a significant minority.

Allied to this were two things which make the bile rise in me like nothing else - prostitution and destitution.

There were, I kid you not, men and women standing on every corner on the Strip wearing t-shirts and handing out flyers with the same slogan plastered across them - "Hot Girls To Your Room In 20 Minutes!". Don't even bother leaving your room, just give them a call and in 20 minutes you can be having your way with some poor girl who has to pretend to like your hairy, fat, pasty, BO-reeking body. Joys.

Let's not linger, though, there are far more enjoyable topics to discuss. Like poverty. Vegas is crawling with money. It flows through big pipes underground instead of water. It's the lifeblood of the city, it lubricates every cog in the great machine. And yet there is poverty all around you, both visible and invisible. The tramps on every street corner are an ever-present reminder of the fact that not everyone is here for a good time. But even worse that that was the run-down apartment block we passed in the shadow of one of the more impressive casinos.

We were being delivered home from an aborted trip to the Grand Canyon, and had been taken all around the houses by the driver in an attempt to avoid the Strip, the busiest place on earth. As we passed Stratosphere on one side, we also passed a run-down, dilapidated apartment block on the other side, straight out of the 1950s. Onto the balcony outside the front door of one of the apartments came a young boy, no older than ten years old, wearing what amounted to rags. In the midst of all of the money which was being spent there were children living in poverty.

I can neither understand nor stomach this discrepancy. In the world's wealthiest nation there is still room for poverty. What's worse, children living in poverty. How can the American public live with themselves when this is going on? Oh, don't get me wrong, there's plenty of work still to do in the UK, but at least we fucking try.

I've gone on too long already, and given my lead I'd go on for a lot longer. So I'll leave it there. Vegas has left me torn in two, impressed and disgusted, thankful I'd visited, even more so that I got out when I did. Now that's a trick...

Vegas, pt 1

I recently had the opportunity to visit Las Vegas, albeit relatively briefly. I've come to the conclusion that's rather a good thing, but more of that later. I'd been to America a couple of times before, but never visited the "Blackpool of the (wild) West".

Of course, it's so much more amazing than that grim northern British city. There are two sides to Vegas, and in this first of two articles I intend to write about it, I want to concentrate on the positives.

Let's not beat about the bush here, Vegas is an incredibly impressive place. It's a testament to the realisation of imagination in concrete and lightbulbs. No-one does this 'imagineering' in quite the same way as the Americans, and Vegas is redolent of an adult version of Disneyland, a playground for those who only vaguely remember how to play.

The structures which have been built, whilst they are clearly ripped off without a moment's thought for culture, have actually been lovingly recreated. All of Vegas is about taking money from your pocket, but my goodness they make you feel good about it. If nothing more, it's worth visiting for the sheer, breathtaking scale of the monuments on view. Ignore the gambling and the girls (more of that later), and go for the scene-setting, and maybe a show.

There's also an underlying level of actual class to the place. Oh yes, it's hidden behind a veil of debauchery, but some of the retail opportunities (let's not be so crass as to term them 'shops') really are of the highest calibre. My mother, gently enquiring about a rather attractive vase in one of the 'Miracle Mile' shops was mildly surprised to find the price tag running into five figures.

Of course, expensive doesn't mean high class, but there was, amongst all the fakery, a certain sense of rightness about things. I wasn't expecting it, and I was pleasantly surprised to be ambushed by it.

I had gone into Las Vegas a cynic, and come away genuinely surprised by how much I enjoyed myself, and how quickly my opinion had been modified. Well done, Vegas, well done.

Autumn

A couple of images which mean autumn to me. One is entirely natural, the other somewhat more collaborative. 

The colours in this are genuine...

This GT-R is the same one which appeared in this edition of Car Park Bingo. 

A Very Important Picture

Subconscious Editing

It's funny the way the human brain works, isn't it? I mean, quite apart from the fact it appears to work on electricity (which is quite frankly ridiculous if you ask me...), it can do some pretty bizarre stuff at times.

Take, for instance, the way that it can recognise not only patterns, but also tiny incongruities in them. The patterns don't have to be numerical sequences or geometrical shapes, either. A pattern can be a block of text, written in a particular style. One word out of place - not misspelled, just unexpected - can leap right out of the page at you. 

The example which led me to blog about this is a recent experience with a word suddenly lodging itself in my mind. The word was 'blood'. Here I was, sitting at my desk with my email open on one screen and a fairly dry, technically worded document open on the other. Neither of which should contain the word 'blood'. At all. 

And yet... I scanned through the document a couple of times, and there it was, in the phrase 'the life blood of asset management planning'. In all of the text, in a place where it really had no reason to be, was my word. Of all the words on that page, my brain had honed in on 'blood'.

Why did this happen? And more importantly, are there wider implications here? I know that I have at least a partially photographic memory - I can remember numbers I've seen written down, such as license plates on cars. Not all the time, but way more than average. And I can remember visual patterns with surprising ease and accuracy. 

Could it be that as an extension of this is my brain scanned all of the words in the document and found this one out of place? Or was because it was so wrong in the context of the words written there that I couldn't help but spot it? Or was it just a fluke?

I don't have the answers. Sometimes I wish I'd done cognitive psychology, just to answer questions like this. But on the other hand, I wouldn't have liked to be like Derren Brown. Stupid man...

Darkness and light... and a bird

Look for the extra-special free gift of a bird flying through the frame. Joys.

It's morbid, but we must have answers...

When the queen dies - assuming she's succeeded by a male heir, which seems likely - do all the QCs automatically and instantly become KCs? Would that not be a really good time for a business card printing company to launch an advertising campaign to the members of the Bar? 

Real Man Test #87: Swarfega

Do you (a) know what Swarfega is, and (b) know how to use it properly?

This summer...

... bring the outdoors indoors!

We live in crazy skies

Plowed by mutant spacemen

Tiny caterpillar...

... is tiny!

The Nature of Fortune

This isn’t an article about luck as such, but it’s writing was triggered by a piece of good fortune, the source of which I’m beginning to question. That questioning is the basis of my post.

I made a reasonably significant purchase on a website recently. Being the conscientious souls that they are, the website sent me a confirmation e-mail listing what I had ordered, how much it cost, and delivery and billing information. It’s a fairly standard procedure these days. In fact, it’s so standard that, as a matter of course, I barely glance at the e-mails these days.

On this occasion, however, and for reasons I’m still a little unsure of, I decided to thoroughly check the details of the order. Having done so, I realised that, in my hurry to get the process finished, I had wrongly specified the delivery address. As it happens, no harm was done, and the details were amended with a quick reply to the e-mail.

But what was it that made me check the details when normally I wouldn’t? It certainly wasn’t that I didn’t trust the company in question to get it right. It wasn’t that my attitudes have changed – I’ll probably move the next e-mail of it’s kind straight to the relevant folder with nothing more than a cursory glance of its contents. So, what was it?

I have a theory on this. I think it’s quite feasible that subconsciously, over the course of my night’s sleep, I realised that something, somewhere was wrong with what I’d done during the course of the evening. That triggered me to re-examine the products of that evening’s tasks, including the response to the online purchase. I scanned this e-mail not because I wanted to confirm that I had done things correctly, but rather because I was expecting to find something wrong.

How often do we attribute fortunate coincidences to sheer luck, when actually it’s our subconscious helping us out?

Just a theory…

Car Park Bingo x 4

Nissan GT-R

Audi R8

Honda CR-Z

Alpha Romeo 200

Cartographic enlightenment

I've done a bit of research (i.e. surfing the net) lately on the subject of drawing maps for fantasy novels. I'm trying to create a convincing map for one of the worlds in which a couple of recent stories are set.

One thing which strikes me about almost all of the tutorials I've found is the manner in which they suggest writing your novel. The general consensus seems to be that the first step is to create the world in which the story is to be set. One or two of the tutorials even suggest mapmaking as a means to a plot.

What surprises me is the frequency at which this idea recurs. I'm not suggesting it's wrong, by any means - after all, it's a technique, and if it works for you then it's right. It is, though, a heck of a long way from how I go about writing stories, which got me wondering if perhaps I was alone in my methods. Let me try to explain how a story forms for me...

The first thing which happens is the imagining of a scene. This is always out of the blue, and never has to be considered. I usually let it brew for a bit before committing pen to paper or fingers to 'board. Into this scene I place a character. Typically, the character's, er... character, is defined by the scene in which they have been placed - it's always going to be perfectly natural for them to be there, otherwise the scene isn't going to gel. 

Once that scene is in place, I try to expand from it. What led up to this situation? What is a likely outcome? Is this the beginning of the novel (common), or the end (uncommon)? 

This leads to placement in a world. Often it's possible to shoehorn the scene/character into an existing world, but sometimes a new world is created. If the story progresses well, the new world will expand and evolve inside my head, until I decide that it's getting a little too difficult to remember all the names of the places where people have walked/ridden/stolen things/got killed. At that point, and not before, I draw out a map.

There's a good reason this is one of the last things I do - until the story is fixed in my mind, how am I meant to draw out a map of where everything takes place? It's a bit like the reason I don't come up with full plots before I begin writing - I don't know what happens to the characters, and even if I did write something down, things evolve so tortuously in my mind that it would bear no relation to the final product. If I drew a map before I started, it would look nothing like the world I ended up with.

I don't know; perhaps I am alone here. Perhaps it's more normal to plot and plan, and know what's coming before your characters do. I just can't work that way. It's not that I find it restrictive, it's just a waste of time because it's bound to be wrong. I'm much better just getting on with things and filling all that paperwork in after the event.

The map, by the way, is going rather well, although I am having a bit of an issue with deciduous trees...

Waitrose - taking basics to the extreeeeme!!

Even Waitrose, purveyors of extremely fine foodstuffs at extremely fine prices, have admitted that a budget range is necessary. Waitrose Essentials is basically stuff which is of a higher quality than anyone else's stuff, but at a price only slightly in excess of everyone else's 'high quality' range. You get the idea, I'm sure. 

The essentials range includes such things as hand soap. This product has taken the idea of 'basics' to a strangely illogical conclusion. The product is still of good quality. The design of the packaging is still well executed, busy but simple. The saving, therefore, the very thing which makes this a 'basic' product, is in the name. They've shortened the word 'anitbacterial' to 'antibac'. Go Team Waitrose!

This is an achievement?

You mean to say you managed to achieve that vibrant, sh*t brown colour without any additives? Oh Kellogs, you have surpassed yourselves!

Hmm, Google, you know me so well... :)

It's strange what makes me happy.

I use Chrome as a browser. I'll not get into why.

On the Options dialogue, there's a tab in my version called 'Under the Bonnet', containing all sorts of fun settings. For readers unfamiliar with English as it's spoken in England, the 'bonnet' is the part of the car the Americans call the 'hood'. One the American version of the software, it does indeed have a tab named 'Under the Hood'.

It pleases me to a disproportionate level that Google thought of changing that based upon the fact that I'm in England. Thanks, Google.

'Fine, thanks...'

There was a time when I was growing increasingly annoyed by the pointless, wasteful conversation which is performed countless times around the world every single day (but is particularly prevalent on this patch of island). It goes something like this:

Person 1: "Good morning. How are you?"

Person 2: "Fine, thanks; and you?"

Person 1: "Yes, good, thanks."

How annoyingly bland. There's even an etiquette which states that even if you're far from alright, the answer should be just on the positive side of entirely average.

However, I have had a revelation. This dull, run-of-the-mill conversation is a fantastic opportunity for a bit of positive mental adjustment. I've started to find something, anything in the preceding few hours or days which is uplifting, and then focus on that.

It's great! Yes, I'm tired because my daughter isn't sleeping well at the moment. Yes, I'm still separated from my dream job by the yawning chasm of reality. But I had a lovely weekend, the weather's great, my garden is coming along nicely, I've got a summer holiday planned... There's so much to be happy about, and having that dire little conversation around the coffee machine is the perfect opportunity to realise it.

Next time, it should go like this:

Person 1: "Mornin'. How's it going?"

You: "Absolutely fantastic, thank you. Top o' the world. I personally saved the lives of a family of endangered pandas over the weekend, then stumbled across a cure for the common cold in the shower this morning. You?"

Person 1: "Yeah, fine, thanks..."

The Trouble with Opinions

I've come to the conclusion that there are two fundamental pre-requisites for the provision and acceptance of opinions. Opinion-giving/receiving will fail if the following two conditions are not met:

1) You, the asker/receiver of opinions must be willing to accept that you are wrong/the other person is right.
2) The other person, the askee/giver of opinions, must be prepared the accept that they are wrong/you are right.

Most opinion sharing failures appear to be solely due to breeches of these core conditions. There are, or course, auxiliary 'rules' which are always worth considering:

a) Do not seek opinions on websites. The human/computer interface is well known as a magnifier of gross idiocy.
b) Do not seek the opinion of anyone who is a direct rival for love/job/jellyfish. 
c) Do not seek the opinion of anyone who has recently demonstrated a tendency to violate conditions 1 & 2 above. 
d) Do seek the opinions of inanimate objects/pets/furniture/the sky. 
e) Do not seek the opinion of your parents beyond the point at which your age is greater than or equal to two-thirds of the average of theirs. They'll be losing it by this point, and will inevitably lead you down the garden path.
f) Do seek the opinion of the garden path (see point d). 

5 = Monster

I was thinking: it's remarkably easy to make the number 5 into a monster.

The 300(th)

Although only 267 posts remain (including this one), this is, according to Blogger, the 300th post on my blog*. In all that time (over 6 years now), I've been angry, confused, melancholy, and bored, in roughly equal measure. I've tried to be funny, and also made a bit of a stab at clever, but nothing seems to work quite so well as writing nothing at all. So, here's to another 300 posts - may they all be as blank as my mind!


* There have, therefore, been 33 casualties - a fairly high rate of attrition! 

Election Fever Entirely Fails to Grip UK...

There will be a general election in the UK on 6th May.

The BBC News website devoted a full-width banner headline/picture combo to the story.

The last time I checked, the story was only 6th Most Read, and 5th Most Shared.

Epic Giving-a-damn-about-politics Fail. 

About Face(book)

I'm not sure I fit in at Facebook. Although I understand that social network sites are what you make them, and I'm prepared to use them as tools with which to maintain certain channels of communication, I find myself unable to use Facebook in particular in the manner with which others seem so comfortable.

Before I begin attacking them, its worth noting that my 'friends' on Facebook are all people I'm interested in knowing. There has been no sympathy "friending" (oh, how annoying it is that the spellchecker didn't pick up 'friending', but was reticent about 'spellchecker'), and no-one has yet earned sufficient wrath that I have wished to "de-friend" them.

However, and let's be blunt about this, I really don't give a flying fuck about the fact that a friend of mine is about to head to the pub for the afternoon, or about any other similarly inane snapshots of their life. Why do people think I'd be interested in knowing this? When did it become acceptable to be so fucking bland?

I know, there are stale old arguments which run along the lines of "well, don't read it then". Rubbish; I need to read it in case something genuinely interesting happens, like the wife of a friend, who is very pregnant, gives birth, and an announcement is made through this happily convenient, widely available channel. I don't have a choice, because in among the news that someone is clipping their fucking toenails are nuggets of pure news gold.

So, what is the solution? I'll tell you what: boring flags. Every time someone writes something so mind-numbingly dull that it brings you to tears, simply ping the boring flag. Three boring flags in a 24h period and the user is banned from posting for a day.

Problem solved. Now, I'm off to close the bathroom window...

Brainzzzzz

Dogfight!

Facing south from St Mary's churchyard, Tatsfield. 

Gorillaz in 'rather good' album shocker

News reaches us today that the Gorillaz (the pseudo-artificial pop group side project of Blur's Damon Albarn) appear to have released a third album of surprisingly high quality.

Plastic Beach, featuring such delights as Superfast Jellyfish (probably the best thing since Clint Eastwood) and White Flag, is a sort of big, musical hug. It really could have been different, because the second album, Demon Days, whilst brilliant in places, really wasn't a match for their eponymous first release. The downwards trend, however, has been inverted, and their latest work grabs you in a multi-music-cultural embrace and squeezes until your eyes bulge like a hamster in a child's excessively loving grasp.

Good news, then, for those of us who like their music to wee all over genre definitions. Thank goodness for that. 

A Couple of Things

Anyone familiar with the Sterling currency will recognise the impossibility of the following, at least since the mid 1980s:

The other thing is nothing special, just a slight amusement discovered in a client's offices recently:

Formula 1 is back today

Yeah baby!!!

Lovely Sunset

The Dark Side of Car Enthusiasm

I have a problem. There, I've admitted it, and apparently that's the first step on the long road to recovery.

My particular issue? I judge people by their cars. I know, I know, I've said in the past how much I hate being judged myself, and yet I do it to others! It's terrible. But I still do it...

This morning I was behind an ageing Saab 9-5, in silver, with a tow bar and a British Bulldog sticker on the boot. We entered a slight patch of fog (by which I mean slight - visibility limited to only a few hundred metres) and the foglights came on. Oh dear.

Immediately I imagined the worst, not helped when whoever was behind the wheel decided to stop driving very slowly and drive very fast instead. I jumped to all sorts of conclusions, and these are they:

1. The driver was a man (I know what they're like, after all I am one)
2. He is northern, and in his forties or fifties.
3. He likes caravanning.
4. He doesn't hold with foreign food.
5. He begins broad, sweeping homophobic and racist statements with the words "I'm not being funny, but...". Too right mate, you're not being funny, but not the way you meant it. 
6. The Daily Mail informs his views - he especially harks back to the days when Our Lady Di was still around, though he won't entertain conspiracy stories involving the Royal Family.
7. He'd like the death penalty re-introduced for murder, homosexuality, paedophilia and Jeremy Clarkson.
8. He thinks the BNP are a reasonable political party, and although he would never vote for them he thinks they should have a voice.

All that from a few details of his car and the way he drove. 

Thing is, I can't convince myself I was wrong. Judgemental git. 

It's all in the mind

One of the things I've blogged about to some reasonable extent in the past is my tendency to have a lot more going on behind my eyes than I let on. I'm not talking about intelligence (actually, I have a lot less of that than most people think), but rather my incessant imagination, which regularly runs away with itself.

One of the real world things I repeatedly daydream about is what it'll be like if I'm lucky enough to follow my dreams and become an author. Here are a few of the conclusions I've come to:

1) I'm going to have to get a new wardrobe, since this will be part of the identity of my alter-ego. 
2) I'm going to regain a little of the individuality which has been mercilessly ground out of me by office life.
3) I'd really like to have a room with a view in which I can write.
4) I will be able to justify buying: (a) a small laptop for writing on the move; (b) lots of Moleskine notebooks; (c) more pens. I like pens.
5) I'm going to have to get better at organising myself. 
6) I'll actually have to do some writing from time to time instead of spending my days developing exciting plot lines but never writing stories to go around them.
7) I may have to learn to touch type instead of looking at the keyboard every few seconds.
8) I'll be able to justify finding the perfect keyboard.
9) I'm going to end up spending a lot of time surfing the net. 
10) I think people will be surprised. 
11) I really hope I don't have to do any signings where my friends live. 
12) I'm going to have to learn to take criticism.
13) I'm going to have to learn to edit my stories.
14) I'm going to have to learn how to play piano (nothing to do with writing. Just one of those things).

That's it. 

January 27th 2010

<sarcasm mode>

OMG! Apple are releasing a new product! OMG! I've spent weeks trawling the Apple fansites for tiny scraps of information as though the second coming was predicted. My whole day will be spent in an excited fervour, hopping from one news site to the next trying to find out what it is. Then I'm going to queue for 48 hours outside a shop in the rain just to get hold of one, EVEN IF I DON'T NEED IT!

OOOOOOMMMMMMMGGGGGGGGG!!!!

</sarcasm mode>

Isn't it funny...

I don't have a favourite Ben Folds song. The one I'm happiest to listen to changes depending on my mood. However, there is always one which always appears in the top three or four absolutely regardless of current mental condition.

"Battle of Who Could Care Less" was the first Ben Folds song I ever heard, on the radio back in 1997. It took me more than a year to find that song again, and when I did it changed me forever.

So, there you go - my first, and probably my overall favourite.

Kafer: Super-Mouserer

Our cat, despite appearances, is occasionally a fairly useful thing.

We discovered this evening that she had killed and carefully deposited not one but two mice beneath our bed. Both were gifts, that much is clear - if she's in it for the eating she'll usually take the feet.

But both were fully intact, and killed particularly cleanly, the dispatch achieved in both cases with a clinical bite to the chest, stopping the heart. They were laid out in an almost ceremonial fashion, too.

We're not overrun with small furry things, but they do tend to cause some damage, so well done, Kaf, well done. 

Three recent landscapes and a bit of machinery

Just because it's been a while since I posted any.

Retro!

A quartet of really old CG images. Dwarf is a copy of someone else's thing, drawn to get some graphics tab practice in. Could probably do with crediting someone for that, if anyone knows who did the original about 15 years ago in White Dwarf. 

Nothing of note

Just having a play with CG art, not done any for a while. Not sure this is even art.