Had a lovely birthday out in town with halcyonpoodle, fractalgeek, Phil, Zed, Debra and Alannah.
I spotted this piece of hacked advertising on the tube.

We went to the Kinetica Art Fair, which some of us had visited last year. The P3 Gallery had the same industrial ambience and the event was much more crowded than last year. My favorite piece was a suspended group of glowing plastic things connected by chains. My first reaction was that it looked like nerve cells. Faces kept appearing in the glowing things. My face started to appear in some of them. If you stand looking at it for long, facial recognition software incorporates you in the art work. I speculated that when everybody is gone, they switch the sound back on and there's all these voices screaming 'Let me out!'.
It really is an excellent show, ending today.
Young Alannah had got a bit bored, so her parents took her home. The rest of us wandered down Marylebone High Street, passing through a food and frocks fair in a churchyard. Had a very nice South Indian thali at the Woodlands Restaurant. Mike was summoned away to meet queenortart after her hat making class, while Halcyonpoodle, Phil and I found a pub down off Bond Street, where we discussed sickness, ageing (Phil is a mere child of 48), death, group holidays and the problems of a career as an occasional pub pianist.

If you go below into debit on it, you can't use it. That's fairly reasonable.
So, you go online and top it up. You can then pick up the credit by checking in at a designated station.
No, actually you can't. You get an error message because your card is in debit.
The station staff can confirm that your card is in debit and will tell you that you can't have topped it up.
The Oyster support line say that you have to use a ticket machine to put the card in credit, before you can pick up your online credit. I haven't tried this, but assume that it works. A pity that SouthEastern haven't informed their staff how their technology works.

I don't remember where this is from, but it was quoted by Steve Laudig on Club Orlov.



From Douglas Adams [the other Addams family]

"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."

"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"

"No," said Ford, ..."nothing so simple. Nothing anything like to straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."

"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."

"I did," said ford. "It is."

"So," said Arthur, ... "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"

"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."

"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"

"Oh yes," said Ford ... "of course."

"But," said Arthur, ..."why?"

"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in."

I watched Jimmy's Global Harvest - the first of a series on the farming industry worldwide. This week Jimmy Doherty, a farmer, went to Brazil.
( ... )
Altogether a fascinating program with a great Brazilian soundtrack. Still on iPlayer

SouthEastern appear to have reacted by giving themselves a lie in - a drastically reduced service is running between 7am and 9pm. Since we haven't had more than an inch of snow here, this seems rather drastic, but they're doing better than some operators.
My employers thought carefully and having concluded that actually the only task that we do that can't be handled remotely is manning our 1960s switchboard, decided that they still don't really trust us to work from home. My manager said that he's sure that things are happening, but if he can't see people and his phone doesn't ring for half an hour he starts to wonder if peoples definition of 'working at home' includes taking the kids snowballing or settling down with a pack of lager and the boxed set of The Wire. On the other hand, when people come in they arrive late, leave early and spend the time between either moaning about the trip in or frantically scanning the Net to plan their trip home.
There was a junior minister who summed up the situation with rare (unwise?) frankness the other day - the British are more willing to tolerate a few days chaos each year than they would the expenditure necessary to weatherproof our infrastructure in the German style.

From reports on the Londonist, it seems that I got off lightly yesterday.

Weird is not an insult

OK, two thoughts for the price of one - why not check out Ray Manzarek on Spotify? His Carmina Burana album is something else!

An item from The Onion on National Awareness Month

There's an interesting article on Changes in the Japanese Language in the NY Times, discussing such trends as cellphone fiction, the effects of computers on the use of kanji etc

I've just installed Ethereal Dialpad that turns my SmartPhone into a synthesiser. Far out!

BBC4 did a very good documentary the other day on the Krautrock scene of the 60s to 80s. There were interviews with and performances by some of the major players including Faust playing the cement mixer. There seems to be a common thread of "Well, think that that's what happened, but we did smoke a lot in those days." Ee, I have fond memories of working my way through Stafford library's collection of Progrock / Krautrock. It's on again live on 8th Nov and more details, samples and information are available ( ... ). Alternatively there's quite of a lot of this genre cheap on Emusic.
There is an ongoing History of Private Life on radio 4, based on contemporary accounts of life at home in letters and diaries - quite fascinating. The one I listened to was about how upper class women occupied themselves. Apparently there was a fad for the gentry to study nature and the men would collect unusual animals and the ladies would draw them, press them, stuff them or make ornaments out of them as appropriate. While marriages were normally arranged, part of the prenuptial negotiations involved the decoration and furnishing of the home(s) - one fiancee wrote 'My dearest, how I tire of writing to you about houses!'

Found on grinding.be

Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all the
Verities and Realities of your Existence.
The Bliss of Growth,
The Glory of Action,
The Splendor of Beauty;
For Yesterday is but a Dream,
And Tomorrow is only a Vision;
But Today well lived makes
Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness,
And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope.
Look well therefore to this Day!
Such is the Salutation of the Dawn!
- Kalidasa

Halcyonpoodle and I had a few days in Bruges and Ghent. Exciting adventures may be serialised here in day course, but in the mean time, here are some pictures.

I found this item on the LRB blog, giving the postal workers view on this strike.
Personally I think they'll do to them what they did to the miners.

We've just finished watching 'Electric Dreams' - a reality TV series where they regressed a household to 1970s style and technology then reintroduced gadgets at the rate of a year a day. Fascinating stuff - I remembered most of the gadgets, while Halcyonpoodle muttered "We didn't have those - we were poor!". The kids were quite shocked at having to all go into the living room to watch TV with only 3 channels in black and white, but one of them got into the spirit of things by just cycling into town, having typed out a note, but obviously not taking his mobile phone.
It does make me wonder what the reaction would be in 30 years time to today's tech.
Do you remember Twitter? You'd have to decide reach into your pocket, get your phone out, decide what to say then type it in? Young people don't appreciate how convenient and safe it is to have your implants broadcasting everything you think to your friends and family!
It seems strange to recall that at one time people actually used to not know things, before we all got Google for Brains(TM).
Those noughties HDTVs are quite useless nowadays, of course - they need electricity.

In WH Smiths, under mens interests - Model Tractor magazine
In Sainsburys - Space Hoppers!

There's an interesting item on this theme on the BBC site. When I was young, my parents had central heating to impress the neighbours, but they rarely switched it on (or maybe, given some of my father's attempts at plumbing, they were just covering up that it didn't work). As the article said, one consequence is that only one or two rooms would be anything like warm in the winter.

Do you remember the predictions in the 70's that thanks to automation we'd all be working part-time in future, if at all, and the main problem would be what to do with all the leisure? Oddly, it is the coke crazed gamblers in the financial services rather than the scientists who brought this about for me, but that's another matter. For some more misleading tips about the shape of things to come, there is now an online archive of the Best of Tomorrows World.