Blog School

Considering my options for the coming year, maybe this is where I ought to be at.

Picking one of the faculty at random, I light upon http://www.barbarajanereyes.com/ who is said to explore the translatable and untranslatable collisions of writing, self and culture. She has a large internet footprint and might be just the person to hold my hand, to get me started on the right track.

PS: in case you were wondering what an MFA is, http://www.allacronyms.com/MFA offers no less than 71 choices. Master of flux analysis?

Princess Ida

Last Saturday on a rare excursion to the Thorndyke Theatre at Leatherhead, a place which really was a theatre when we first moved to Epsom (we once had Sir P. Hall himself climb on stage to apologise in person for an underdone rendition of Hamlet (featuring a naked Hamlet at one point)), to see Princess Ida put on by the Godalming Operatic Society, a society which has managed to put on a G&S show every year since 1925, excepting only the war years. A big star in the G&S firmament. Not quite sure how the Gosport Amateur Operatic Society - which we know rather more about - rates in comparison, but they do compare to the extent that in each case a long serving member has written the book of the society.

Off to a good start as the seats have been upgraded since we were last there. In the olden days one sat on rather thin cushions sat on concrete benches, a sort of concrete replica of a classical open theatre. I wonder whether the ancient Greeks took their own cushions or whether they were supplied by the management?

Then we found ourselves sitting next to a contingent from Golders Green who were able to add spice to the performance in the form of G&S gossip.

The performance itself was a very polished affair. Costumes, for example, all very grand. Golders Green said that they would all have been hired, far too grand for an amateur costume department: another major expense along with that of hiring the music and hiring the venue. Rather more people to it than Carmen (see 28th February) and with a different mix, maybe 30 in the orchestra and 40 in the cast. A rather silly story poking gentle fun at the womens' rights movement of the middle of the 19th century - but with a properly male ending, with most of the womens' libbers dumping liberation in favour of men. Moderately good fun, but in the end rather flat and banal; I imagine that rather more fun was had from the production than from the consumption - but good luck to them. I dare say we shall go to their next effort - much better suited to our purse than Traviata at the Garden at £150 and more a pop and about which someone thought it worth sending me an email yesterday. Which, given that we would want to stay over after such a thing, would take the outing as a whole to around £500 - which for us, is not worth it by a long chalk. But I do wonder for whom it is worthwhile? What are such people like, where do they come from? Is is the sort of thing that ageing footballers go in for? Is was the sort of thing that the Czech pub keeper for whom I used to work used to take his wife to - then a small but busy Courage pub handy to both meat market and Bart's and which is now sadly decayed from the glory days when he had it, when, inter alia, the masons used to meet Tuesdays in an upper room.

Then last night we had a go at the second of the recent Lancelot bottles, this one from the Domaines Schlumberger in Alsace, something called Kessler 2006, another gewürztraminer. Apart from the cork, which went back into the bottle rather more easily than one thought proper, despite having an additional wax seal poured over the top of the cork, it was very good, but I am starting to wonder why one buys such stuff. Why does one spend £20 at Lancelot rather than £10 at Waitrose? I hope there is more to it than putting up a marker for how much I can afford to pour down the drain. Or is it that I am morphing into an armchair boozer? In any event, you can read all about it for yourself at http://www.domaines-schlumberger.com/gewurztraminer-grand-cru-kessler-2006 and make your own mind up.

But this morning a moan. For some reason I needed to remind myself about 'et in arcadio ego'. I ask blogger search about 'arcadio' and get nothing. I ask my backup copy in word and get 12th November 2013. I then ask blogger search about 'et in arcadio ego' and get the right answer. While all google search tells me is that this phrase is much used by other bloggers and which should be spelled with arcadia not arcadio. Spelling never was my strong point. But I have learned that Arcadia is a real place in both ancient & modern Greece.

Testing3...

Very bored first thing this morning, so I thought I would try posting using my Lumia phone, something which other people no doubt regard as normal, but it is not normal for me.

First step was to get into wifi, selecting a gang called the cloud at http://www.thecloud.net/, the only free one among those listed on this occasion, and which turns out to be a service from BSkyB. First thought was that I was not going to tell my mobile phone all the stuff that the cloud wanted to know. Second thought was that I did tell my PC all that kind of stuff all the time so why not the mobile phone. So I did, and after a while I find myself with an internet connection, albeit a little slow.

I was able to search for things using Google. I was able to inspect my own blog. Emboldened, I thought I might try a posting. But this was not so clever, as while some sites seem to know that you are using a mobile phone and adjust the user experience accordingly, blogger post was not one of them and it took quite a lot of fiddling about to achieve one small post, the one before this one.

By this time I have more or less woken up and realise that telling my mobile phone all about myself while connected to the internet by a wifi service about which I know nothing (although, to be fair, I had taken a peek at the 'about' page and it did look entirely OK, albeit entirely spoofable) was not the same as doing the same sort of thing while connected to the internet by BT, who might tell various people in obscure parts of government about what I am up to but who are, nevertheless, entirely trustworthy for my sort of more or less innocent activities. So the upshot of all this is that I am not going to do a lot of blogging from my mobile phone but I have given some of my account details a bit of a wash & brush up, something which was, in any event, a bit overdue.

Much flapdoodle, with some services going to quite a lot of bother to make sure that you are who you say you are before they will change such details. I shudder to think what would now be involved if either my email address or my mobile phone number were to change;  maybe even worse than changing your national insurance number with DWP or your unique person identifier with HMRC.

PS: in the course of reminding myself which branch of government looks after national insurance numbers, I find that a gang called who4 (corporate site at http://www.who4.ltd.uk/) come top of the google list, a gang who can help you to get yourself a national insurance number, presumably for a fee. At the bottom of their page I learn that 'neither WHO4 nor NationalInsurance.uk.com are affiliated/associated with HMRC or Job Centre Plus. WHO4 Ltd is registered to collect personal data under the Data Protection Act 1998 for the purposes of National Insurance number application services. ICO licence number: Z3139167'. I seem to remember that I just wandered along to some child supervision branch of local government when I wanted my first insurance card, with me being old enough to have had such a thing (with weekly stamps being licked and affixed by the pay office of whoever it was you worked for). No who4 in those good old days.

Testing2...

This the second attempt from bed, via Lumia & cloudthingy.

Rebirth

Yesterday's flier announces that TB will be back in business just about a month after it went out of business (see 13th February). There have been several vans there, not to mention lorries, most days. If we allow a gross of £500 per man per day, 5 men in each of 5 vans, on each of 25 days, we get a grand total of £312,500, the profit on maybe half a million pints of lager. How long will it take them to clock that lot up?

The upper left hand picture could well be the redecorated bar, despite all the vans still being outside. We shall see, in due course, if it really is or whether it is just a lookalike.

I don't know whether Greene King operate grades of pub grub, but some chains certainly do and this offering looks to be reasonably basic, but maybe of good Wetherspoon's style value. One wonders whether, as such, they will seek to refurbish the clientèle as well as the paint: TB was one of the few of what are euphemistically called working mens' pubs left in town and Greene King may aspire to serve some other sort of men, women even. But you chuck out one lot of clients at your peril because it can take a while to find the new ones, to replace what was one community with another - remembering that it has taken the neigbouring 'Cricketers' more than twenty years to get back to being something like a local after the last old-style landlord retired.

The second day of infinity

Some days ago I was having a spot of bother with my broadband connections and so I phone up BT about it, landing on a very pleasant and helpful young lady. Oh sir, she said. We've not been shipping Voyager 210 routers for years and years. Your's must be on its last legs. Let's fix it for now and then I can organise sending you a nice new one. So she fixes it for now - or rather she reminds me how to reboot the thing by poking a needle down the reboot hole - and then she reads off pages and pages of options and prices. Complete price transparency by information overload and I wind up buying some basic package around something called infinity, something which can cope with the facts that this PC cannot do wifi and that I do want to do wifi at home with my telephone.

First evidence of action is an email explaining what I have just bought, plus some timetable and plus some instructions. It seems that the drill is that my existing broadband will pack up at some point on the due day and that they will send me a text when the new broadband is ready and I can plug in the new stuff. Maybe half an hour's loss of service. Half an hour of disconnect from the big wide world. Will I bear able to bear the pain?

Second evidence is a text message. Which is good because it proves that BT has got the right number.

I think there is more evidence at this point. After which a slim brown parcel is poked through the letter box, its contents having been cunningly designed and arranged so that this can happen.

And then, a day or so later, on the due day, the broadband does indeed pack up mid morning. In fact it goes on the blink in a literal way with the second light from the left on the router taking to a steady green blinking and the the third light from the left taking to a steady off, with this off meaning off broadband connection.

And then we wait for the text, which they did say might be quite late. We go to bed without a text having arrived. We get out of bed to no text and decide to plug the new stuff in anyway, a plugging in which turns out to be as easy as the helpful young lady had claimed. After perhaps 10 minutes we have our shiny new infinity broadband service and I am able to read the email telling me that the service is back up. I must have misread the bit in the instructions about how they tell you the service is back up - but, given the amount of thought that must have gone into packaging infinity up for market, one might have thought that they might have worked out that the customer might not be able to receive an email once the old broadband service has been taken down. So new service delivery good, but not perfect.

Next step is to try to connect my telephone to the wifi, and after a certain amount of faffing about with passwords, I manage it. I even manage to read an email on the telephone. So that works too, but it is all a bit clunky and I can't see me doing it much. I think I could make it less clunky by getting the telephone to remember various passwords but that strikes me as a bit insecure so I don't want to do that either. Let's hope that it hasn't done it anyway when I wasn't looking.

Last step is to decide what to do with the various cables, splitters and routers that are left over. First thought was to keep the cables and dump the rest. Second thought was that one of these routers is going for near £20 on ebay. Can I be bothered to sell the two that I now have going spare?

With broadband back up and running I thought that I would celebrate by doing a full scan with Malwarebytes (see https://www.malwarebytes.org/), something that a different helpful BT person thought might help Norton keep dodgy software at bay, but something one had to run by hand from time to time if one did not want to buy a proper copy. And there clearly was some dodgy software on the PC as I was getting irritating pop-ups from time to time. One could get rid of them easily enough, but they did keep coming back. So I run a full scan, during which it finds one bit of bad software and removes it. Pop-ups vanish for day 1 of infinity but have popped back for day 2. Clearly time for another chat with the people at BT.

Horton Clockwise

Returned to Horton Clockwise yesterday morning to find two coal tits in the western hedge of Horton Lane.

It also dawned on me that, after I don't know how many of these circuits, Horton Lane had promise as a place to play the aeroplane game. The top of a low hill and a reasonably clear northern horizon. Bright sunny morning. So I thought I was in business.

As it turned out, not really. I scraped a two at one point, but most of the time I had trouble keeping one aeroplane in view. I suppose that I might have done better had I stood still, rather than carried on walking, but I also think that maybe the bright light did not help and that, counterintuitively, one would do better in a duller light. Maybe nights and lights are best?

Next thought is that what I really need is a sighting table. That is to say a tripod, the sort of thing used for telescopes, theodolites and the the like, with a disc mounted horizontally on the top of it. A disc maybe 18 inches in diameter and complete with some sort of worm screw driven rotation - worm screw providing more control than just pushing the thing around by hand. Then fitted to the top of the disc, maybe half a dozen sights, perhaps along the lines of gunsights. The idea would be that you clocked an aeroplane, then fixed it in one of the sights. Clocked another and fixed that in the next, and so on. Slowly rotating the disc would, hopefully, keep all the sights trained on all their aeroplanes. I shall give some thought to how such sights might best be organised: are they within reach of my modest DIY skills?

The point of all this being that one would know where all the aeroplanes previously clocked were supposed to be, one would know where to look to find them. Without such a contraption, by the time one has found a new aeroplane coming in from the right, one has generally forgotten exactly where the old aeroplane on the left has got to. The contraption would tell one where to look, greatly increasing the chance of improving one's score. There would be the added attraction that most of the young lady joggers who inhabit Horton Lane would feel the need to stop and ask one what one was up to, so providing conversational opportunities. I should perhaps say that Horton Lane comes with all of cycle track, pedestrian track and wide verges so there is plenty of room for such games.

Some cynics allege that all this space is just waiting for Horton Lane to be dual carriagewayed and driven through Epsom Common to make an Epsom by-pass. In which event, I might be moved to dust off my protester's boots and uniform. Maybe even go so far as to make common cause with the Chain Saw Volunteers (see, for example, December 20th 2011 in the other place) as I imagine that they would be well up for such a protest, however much I might dislike their more usual activities.

PS: I suppose that a real geek would use his laptop, plugging into one of those radar feeds which tells you where all the aeroplanes are. See, for example, http://www.flightradar24.com/. Then one would really be in business.