Day 348, LED cuts the mist

It's 5:50am.  There is some mist and a vague chill in the air.  The sort of time I used to roll home after a night out.

Today there are no foxes.

No visible bats.

There is the odd blackbird.

LED street lights attempt to cut through the gloom.  It doesn't appear to be a promising start to the day.

But this is no pathetic fallacy.  All delicate work proceeded smoothly, the sky cleared and the sun came out.  Maybe not a hot summer day but a pleasant one nonetheless.

Then home, after being filmed at the GP surgery.  Inexplicable back pain is clearly a highly attractive prospect for the purposes of training.  The film will be on limited general release and destroyed after a period of 12 months, the dialogue is excellent let me tell you, and you won't have seen a back as hairy as that since the last time.

If anyone has been affected by any of the issues referred to in this blog then please send cash immediately.


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Day 347, No fear, no thought, no footsteps

Sometimes just walking down a road is enough.

Each step an exercise in movement, not of travel.

The world is turning under your feet, yet we are stationary other than the pendulum motion of legs.

Are we there yet?

No, we aren't going anywhere.  Not for years.

And there is no need.  Inaction is enough.  It's done.

While our remnants return to take the living.

A foreign field

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Day 346, How's that listed Georgian building coming along?

Not entirely convinced this is how the Georgians would have constructed the original building.

I expect the barriers to stop urchins falling to their demise aren't really an idea they would have been familiar with given the unlimited supply of cheap labour.

And RSJs, not really their thing as the first one used in a building wasn't until 1901 - for info it's in Bessemer House on Carlisle Street East, Sheffield.

It looks more like a giant greenhouse at the moment, and still some time away from the walls returning.


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Day 345, This is no hapax legomenon, this is mind blowing

The Library of Babel website, inspired by the story by Borges, is a virtual library which contains every possible combination of (up to 3200) characters in a collection of 410 page books.

Every possible combination.

That's a lot of 410 page books.

The combination of characters might only be 3200, but that amounts to 10 to the power 4677 books.  If that number doesn't feel particularly large then consider the number of atoms in the observable universe is 10 to the power 80.

I entered my random string of text, not too long as thinking is hard and there's a self imposed grammatical limit in this house on a Sunday.

My text was:

my giraffe has space and time enough to eat the morning dew of the dandelion

And it turns out that the text is on page 370 of 410 in Volume 9 on Shelf 3 of Wall 3 of Hexagon...

The library is arranged into hexagons, there are a lot of hexagons.

I'll spare you the hexagon location for the moment and stick it at the end, here is a screenshot of the output backed by the location.

The text also appears on a few other pages, not on its own but mixed in with other text.

This is the hexagon location:

2zwntsh2xtdcak4x7v6rmynfmxoipyd06tlwkqosq0bnu1ebakws9s0r5mjl3teqxvqhiqqotmoky3eii4s5t1ev9bvan23jkuwv4uoc9utpje4yjhruy61h1xbsi93qx29wf6g5nub4je3n80c1kgvt69l6xi46gp3emsq18ix7jt7q31wtbxz2f9kxb428o4fyikzzv1r0zp2knr5wmvzxe6agm5di402k6p3ss7e4rf1ia14oalzh3w8ea1ydqdelyg6c7wu0t4ooqyqxs7cjhqctnsnz2r69gte751cuqr5s4z98c1uigb95sxghkliihg0d6d7iz03cg9t9xddpq1avdkycq50t5cs4zg5d7l56u39oc56bbsq86dwm4myzmhoywzgu3vq2hs1ghnxy5gd4kpi5x2kfhqt5eip0z3juz581a9qj8tqfvelqoxeo4yrs9br4kulr1wj9e0hb6ok6gn972ox6z28epb49no9cepmz7uikdj0gro5amfed109w5n5zhu9g02cwvinvnzoxz3n5gj3xyf4f31jhrky61yav2w59igq7qfebto7bok3p10m1of6e2vmz1e52s3l9c34xfiel8pz7mxcel0hj712n67fsavz1x5dkd5dipaunxu9pnjo6txtjnklmgmugmh98zggm9n6s468xb1k6p5u1hlrpcwtxzreba6rwavonw57epz33hbzswgsqtszzi9lh50jzw75kpuj39fvfx1912i73r9qqu7jtdtpwuq5rcwbxqq6rh6p4dyerv44uot1alp8fvxwo9inmize5cc5o6ub7zqoshyzv8vjedhkezp4ewwj78csb3cb45h3wiiom1aqf93hbzqje4d0keq7e3ebp6gqi159lept9jxcwtqhnimditxlaju3vrcuaucaff44izi6yhq77xczrf1iq3qw8l6rlbgo7rroq6rrfaphu5ufc8al5ymophh2xp34x2yf6tlo6d3roysfgnvixujoztu36koke9xgcb3rgz730mtxv54igp6tw1p2ng9v5i5ym5h16z168o4hpe7fw5aouych5ytmql150dhujsdblsbnlhlau3a6lmgxn7bxqpc0r6wncmaj0zcl2193argt9ldiryor14g4qwnx250nvxe27ycyd96ka0blqft6t6hp8if8wacwf0czc48j3pr58v686r6gu5mblu8z1b4dn9qtdaw81phsdwq12d24d74fr1xjwa4simwp4s0bzucbppitxxofoayok7f28demtchzbcb4u6q16128shu4l8k5mafhnwnir8h7gu4o8gjdpnqknutpb7fhsxrhre6gvbu6lntchxqfqycz9k8yz9v9z2cpq8a59pht5ybqtzwpy9vns7jlcnhujc8nmx52r0q3p03h1nht7hw9fysodlq4te7k9jbk5utiinq9k1yz2rty7szzh1qxqupjhyqy7jjmhmfavu656h07i9ez5s340benwu8jxrj28kk9i5omhdf3k9zmu7jlch1aai7w4cxhhyibhnc5vh0c5deyo26tqvhtfn4rgvv9jiljrgzfopbolr7im43f8ght2n798hmi6fiflukk8546mnrsar8oxd9novkn9qqng9907qjlrw4j1nv1m0xlm9s97vou1q87tbqoy7l67blw16vaq4mhks5i6dkle0ov6uq5fvlmumy2ukjv7k1yv0rlbvoqwz69nuec5vu2msyd56lbcly43lvo7h5vj92ly1hg0478kh8y06s549ufwq4dnjsydzihpp91botpu1mrjck14klujcag85cu2avkx6sl6vesaqzk2v62sygpdkc9agdqw6nipfbavz6y5zccx109jr1vzg8wa2gdz9jw1ah0k8z1q2vc1fgzc60hb8jzqlooyy6cnx7spo0vfvqtxq1hhcplvpmclh18335oc30umat6zeg7y8oqqee0hj72qxgzc53w0707hmh9q7403g9w7vcu78oaor6izbfmxtq4k5xqn6od9vymokncehftnxlsf4n47cn4m4wieo5ivub5cg5jrvz5amj6s0t10h36a6r590nflp761umtg7nk2w1lj52a2yitx04yy7utclr26iggtq7n4nmsgcjlyg4pf3nrko3fwfi79y02fn7dmzci09god3ms0t4iryc5s49lefhvk0zijzxa47tl3q2v6ro78vltzgaimsb6vomo7oifivn4v0n2xtrr6kr2b8khqm4ppmbbxq03oh19rqv1yevnxxe79rhgs2pinusmdyw413p8l244ukqadkltgz5dcbhttfggqq6jfbl7shayguaorocnwqv7uqunkefr7hct4dwjq5aubk1uie8moxigbe7i08jyobtckinb4kuextk90vwcyr8nrb4hpujfvv8ffrhlmjv7btpllzqls62miioo9nuxc65ttma85c2wufpo3te34rtl1l1cwqxo1e28zm3mwkw5awamxj3bsaf529cbx40d7orjh5mt16rewgcygihc6pgg0bw6kvbo5nu1eal1ycr12co2ecsmmmqy9tzjzgcuh77kj0yf3w8kt2uuk4ew2c5b3htlehe7vhdhsp15hg1ymxe7abrbkv46sjen1v6gl5ibe4i5kl80l6opc9wi6w5798qfanfc2ez1zb4ur6kxq7g4as7uuyozqhoac2gq0clzfefclgpagxl76fd3z0w3quunm3n7qyzlbr61gzgher33f04ss7las9tyvrd1bbovx8zwgymgk0m7e5ux73ksl7obdkuaonyoa9wmzpm9nop6exk5mvzapghl1c25yiy7ilywm7463og858sbta0lfzy3jfxtupjnm05g5xu9wxjfb7xm9cbdhk3s0wjb3oh4tg0f5to2zi2nq7ayer3lxtifhfpkm26ekmhq4pbobtj1sw7p2d49hjro8rcuydwsynhzhi3cgfayw0mag6rgmjf8ucfu38nitknxdjuzbua7dqxt6akavomn5h5cb7abeuinydx0nsk9trcloqns07hnhvgs3xfa5lq5ctzoaoafh9gn5z4fv739akpfsbii66729y6lze8e8dnx5wtyojlocdvc8l47y21q3vkpii9mclxlknxc120kyo42ev2grlndw89pvj0y0zy5gu1nw1gd9ellp8uvcj8illaef2p10y7lqaj63oa7jb5qf0uo3uagsr4xgin

My head is now hurting.

Here is the website.

And hapax legomenon, what's that all about?

It's the name for when a word only appears once in a particular context.  The context maybe the entire language, a single essay, a novel, etc.  That certainly ought not to be in the context of the Library of Babel.

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Day 344, Show me the kittens

Everybody loves cats.

Some people might claim they don't but I've heard that that's a minor psychological issue that causes them to suppress their liking - it's apparently related to a similar complaint where some people think they prefer Chinese food to Indian.

Give me vegetarian Indian food, a cat, and a super hoppy IPA, and you will see a happy human.

Since neighbour cat Che moved house the cat landscape in our garden has changed significantly.  The shape of the territory is being mapped out by new cats and we've had all sorts of less frequent visitor cats passing through.  Among those visitors are a pair of completely new ones that are barely more than overgrown kittens, and they spends ages in the garden every day.

Here's Cato, who is the most friendly of the pair of youngsters greeting me on my return from the shop.  Plenty of tickles, plenty of purring, lots of rolling and head-butting, marvellous.

Right, where's the IPA and samosas?

Happy now.



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Day 343, A quick trip round the island, motorcycle madness

It turned out that a Honda Fireblade in 1994 could go quite quickly around the Isle of Man, even with a great lump like me riding pillion.

Speed limit restrictions only exist within the towns on the island.  Outside the towns there are no limits, which also happens to be the name of the film with that ukulele playing bloke in it.

People can go as fast as they like, and they do.  To be fair we didn't go too fast, making it round the forty mile circuit in something under forty minutes.  There were some periods where we went quite quickly.  And then others where we didn't go so fast, Windy Corner for example which was very windy at the time and necessitated moderation of speed.

Summary of the journey:
Look, there's a castle
Look, there's a ... no, it's gone
Look, there's a mountain
Look, there's a ... no, missed it
Look there's a, HOLY SHIT
Look there's a, no, no idea
etc.

This picture was taken on Drury Terrace, just down the road from the TT start/finish line.

I'm on the left.

We were renting an apartment next door to Maxwell House, where our landlady had an arrangement where her guests could access their bar.  We were usually there until gone 4am, and playing on the video in the background was the film No Limits, with that bloke that played the ukulele in it.  There was also a picture of Screaming Lord Sutch on their wall, he was a regular visitor.  The owner of the place (the chap on the right) offered the opportunity of the zoom round on the back of his bike, I thought it too good an opportunity to miss.

Taking a look on Google streetview to try and find the position this picture was taken almost turned my head inside out.  The row of buildings in the original picture is hugely compressed compared to the streetview image, trying to find the exact spot made me feel nauseous.

The lamppost on the left, the drain on the right, the palm trees with the Maxwell House sign, and the 'OUT' sign on Sunnydale residence helped place it.  Although even then it didn't feel right, someone has been messing with reality and objects have been rearranged.




There has obviously been some plant growth and slight adjustment to walls in the intervening twenty years.

I feel more nauseous about the difficulty of reconciling the two images than any fear going round the TT course at high speed.  Actually the film No Limit made me feel quite nauseous too.

Here's another, much more relaxed, version of No Limit.

Game Over.



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Day 342, Just leave well alone

Mysterious things.

Faffing with ZFS and making disks disappear,

It'll be sorted out later.

Perhaps reading the documentation would be a good idea.

Backs away slowly and has a beer.


Edit - 
Success, just take a blunt instrument to it.  In this case the blunt instrument for each of the three disks was:

gpart destroy -F ada0
gpart destroy -F ada1
gpart destroy -F ada2

Then reinstall Freenas without (ahem) accidentally installing it across all drives instead of only on the USB drive.  On reinstall it is noticeable that smartd starts without error, at which point it is clear it worked.

Now drinking a Leffe, pronounced ’lĕh‐’nérd ’skin‐’nérd.
No, I don't understand it either.


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Day 341, Cruelty, right there in the open

It shouldn't be allowed, where are the RSPCA, where are the boys in blue, where is the IMF?

Right here in a street near you, cruelty is being perpetrated.  I tried to stop them but they were hiding, too ashamed to show their faces.

Our arboreal friends were shrieking and making a fuss, I imagine, as their homes were destroyed.

Yet there was still no sign of the blade wielders.

Bastards.

Anyway, good luck cutting anything with that umbrella, those days are gone.  I hope.

Unless there is some jolly decent ecological reason.  In that case then, well done.

Bastards.



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Day 340, Driven from hibernation by the spent force of capitalism

A dark morning, cold, and with a single large drop of rain hitting me every 20 metres, I walk to work.

To work, along with the rest of us who weren't so privileged as to have been born into extreme wealth, it isn't my lot to lead the country, or indeed put my privates into the mouths of dead livestock.

So there's a win-win situation.

Apart from the extreme wealth of course - should that be lose-win-win?

Obviously if that sort of money was available to me I'd be loafing about doing the things I enjoy, well, doing the things I enjoy without the judgemental view that it is loafing about.  We all fall for that crap, if what you are doing is purely for the pleasure of it then it isn't worthwhile.  Clearly a load of codswallop.

Not having pots of money shouldn't also be thought of as a losing position, that's another lot of crap.

And, it was a quite pleasant walk to work.  There was birdsong, even an owl, and it was still entertaining to think of the various nincompoops that had come out of the woodwork to defend that silly rich man.  "It's just high jinks" etc - Louise Mensch and Toby Young.  Nincompoops, they don't require any words stronger than that.

Who needs pots of cash when there's such free comedy, and free owls.

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Day 339, Standard issue, little happening, quiet, nothing to see here

With it being the silly season and effectively evert day being a no news day at the moment, all there is to look at is some steel work.

What great delight there is looking at this construction.

Geometry in practical use.

Lines, straight lines.

Not a curve to be seen.

This is not a repeat, there is more steel here than there was the other day.

Some days it is best to say as little as possible.

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Day 338, Retro computing, it's all the rage

I've built a replica of a 1970s computer, from a kit.

Why build a replica of an old computer from a kit I hear the voices in my head ask.

Well, it’s like this.

I’d always been fascinated by computers, maybe it was something to do with seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey at the pictures at an early age, maybe it was seeing the flashing lights and spinning tape reels in various ancient spy films on TV, maybe my subconscious had spotted something important and wouldn’t let go. Perhaps that's it, scary pseudo-sentience and answers produced by almost magical activity.

It was the development of an obsession. Even my cardboard egg-box car had a cardboard computer in it. The cardboard computer had a slot in it where I would put a cardboard tape for loading data, about the size of a Dictaphone tape - I’d never seen one of these things, I invented it, clearly. Where's the payout for the theft of my IP?

Maybe there wasn’t as much in the way of electronics involved as Turing and Bletchley Park had, but it was the concept. I’d prototyped the idea in cardboard but didn’t have the technology available to recreate it.

A few years after this, when I had enough money to buy an electronics magazine every few months, I noticed there were kit computers being sold in the ad pages. Eventually there were articles about them in the electronics mags, and soon this spawned a whole shed-load of magazines devoted entirely to this new area of electronic interest.

The first computer I touched was in a physics class at school sometime in the late 1970s. It was a KIM-1, we didn't do a great deal with it, in fact we weren't even allowed to touch it. It was a single board machine, housed in a fancy wooden box that someone had made which even included dovetail joints. There was a sheet of perspex on the top so that the whole of the board was visible and this had a square cut out of it so that the keypad was accessible.

The moon rises and falls, many seasons pass. And then...

Recently it occurred to me that building the KIM-1 couldn't be that difficult, so I bought a bunch of ICs, the 6502 processor and other parts, and started looking for how to go about designing a working copy and looking for a circuit board layout. It was then I discovered that the world had passed me by and the KIM-1 had been recreated already by people with much superior electronics skills to mine. So I bought one.

All I had to do was assemble the hell out of it, not zap anything with my enormous static charges, and solder the components to the board.

After assembly but before insertion of the ICs the testing amounted to:

A visual scan of all connections to make sure they looked clean, tidy, and fully soldered.

Powering up to make sure the power light comes on.

Checking the input voltage and the output voltage of the voltage regulator.

Checking the voltage at vcc and ground on each of the IC sockets was 5v (the respective IC reference sheets tell you which pins.)

Checking the output voltage on the 1Mhz oscillator.

All tests passed successfully, ICs inserted, power on - and bloody hell it worked first time.

Here's a short video of the test program, a clock, that I entered via the hexadecimal keypad.  It was just before quarter past six in the evening, as you can see.

This doesn’t mean that I won’t have a go at building a completely original 6502 based computer at some point - if it is possible for any of this to be completely original.  There are plenty of resources out on the internets to help design such a thing.  And it’s more likely that I’ll do that than ever be able to fit in an egg box ever again whilst still being a functioning human being.

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Day 337, Plan falls victim to laws of physical dimension, time, space, complexity, and chaos

This is a well organised skip.

Someone wants to get best value for their outlay by aiming to get as much in there as possible.

It is an impressive start. Experience tells me it won't last.

To continue in this way assumes that all the things presented will be the right shape and will fit in in a neat manner.

It appears to be a valid method. However before long unknowns turn up that don’t fit into the plan, the things that need to fit in won’t be the right shape, but if known about earlier would have altered the approach. So it all starts to get a little bit more tricky and out of shape.

In some half arsed metaphorical way I'm probably not talking about a skip anymore.

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Day 336, What the, Who the?

Doctor Who is back tomorrow, and by way of a weak connection here are some trading cards.

It appears that this was from before the Doctor and assistant were traded in for the new models.

And yes, that is a full box of unopened trading cards.

No, they weren't for me.

I am most definitely looking forward to the return of the series.

It is a series isn't it?

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Day 335, Disk failure, moments before disk replacement

As is typical in the world of hindsight bias it was completely predictable that one of my pair of raid 0 hard drives should fail while the replacement disks were ready to be installed.

These disks are raid 0, i.e. the whole data partition (or D: drive in this case) is striped across the available hard disks.  This creates a single logical drive across the disks with no resilience or redundancy built in.  Losing any single disk means that all the data is gone.

The disks are a pair of 1TB Seagates which created a roughly 2TB sized partition.  I say roughly as disk manufacturers are adept at counting the number of bytes on a disk in decimal rather than binary, meaning that the actual size of any disk is much less than that advertised.

So the partition was no longer accessible even though one of the physical drives was in perfect health.  Goodbye 1.5TB of data stored on that logical drive.

But, it's not all bad news.  I discovered that this physical disk was failing last week and immediately got a pair of replacements.

Why a pair of replacements when only one was failing?

Well, the failing drive and the working drive were both the same model, bought at the same time, and had the same 2 year warranty.  The drive failed two months after the expiry of the warranty.  The other drive may be as vulnerable to whatever the sudden problem that affected the wounded drive was.  Also, it was worthwhile getting larger drives as they are now not as expensive, also these Western Digital Drives have a 5 year warranty.

Hang on, what about all the data?

That's another part of the "not all bad news" paragraph.  Of course there are backups, backups taken every week, so any saved data on there will be up to date for at worst 6 days ago.  In this case as soon as it started to fail I made a fresh backup and then stopped writing to the disk.

But raid 0, why would you want to do that, I mean you could lose your data at any time if any drive fails?

Yes, but raid 0 improves performance of the logical disk as opposed to a single physical disk and as the data is always backed up it isn't a problem.  Yes it's a faff if a disk fails but they rarely fail in a data losing way - this is the first personal data losing fail from a consumer hard disk I've had in 20 odd years.

Normally my disks are replaced a long time before they fail.  Of course with disks having greater capacity then the type of failure experienced here becomes more likely so I don't expect the next 20 years to be as happy go lucky.  The more sectors on the disk the more there are that can go wrong or can be exposed to problems with data reads and writes, so the bigger the disk the greater the risk.  And many of these problems may be lurking on your disk drives, waiting to bite, because unless you regularly run disk checks you may never touch the data in an affected area for many years.  And if you don't touch the data you won't know it is corrupt and that there is a problem.

I was fortunate in that the error was discovered in a 60GB file, touching a lot of disk blocks and a lot of sectors.

Fortunate, a 60GB file?

Well if I only occasionally looked at small files I'd probably never touched these disk sectors and the disk might have failed before the next backup.  The 60GB file is a virtual machine.  The final backup struggled with the affected file so would have been a give away at least, but that might have triggered drive failure - I actually did trigger disk failure by trying to recover the file in various ways, the drive went offline and only came back after a couple of reboots.

Here are the shiny new disks waiting to be installed.

Obviously my backup system is going to have to breath in a bit if these get full.

Happy happy, joy joy.

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Day 334, A few days off, let's have some BEER!

Having invested in minions to serve a greater purpose by sending them down the IPA mines has paid off.  Here we see the results of their labours from one afternoon - 24 cans of various froopy beers.

Look, froopy beers.

Mmm, mmm, mmm.

Going to enjoy this, let me just have a moment.

Ommmmmmmmmmmm.

And rest - thanks to Atarah Ben-Tovim for those two words of advice that have been my mantra for many decades.

Let's have that again - and rest.

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Day 333, Slow going, discussions with our gastropod overlords

Taking a lunch time break to regenerate often presents opportunities for discussion.  Usually the discussion may be on football, the weather, or even the political state of the nation.

On this occasion there was an almost unique chance to speak to one of the representatives which govern our lives.  Responsible for some element of decomposition they play only a small part compared to other organisms.  That element of their input into the ecosystem is more than offset by their depth of knowledge about matters of economics.

It is widely known that snails have been used in many of the fundamental processing systems designed to produce a practical output of economic theory over the last century.  Rather like MONIAC the molluscs were used for their facility with fluid dynamics.

Unfortunately there is not infinite time available during a break for lunch and before our univalve friend could explain much, or any, of its theory of knowledge to me I had to leave.

However it will probably still be there tomorrow when I'll be able to catch up on the next couple of syllables.  I'm sure they will be worth waiting for, because no matter how limited the formal knowledge of the creature on economics might appear it at least equals that of the current Chancellor of the Exchequer.  If only the Chancellor had more than half our single footed friends actual knowledge then maybe he wouldn't be making such an utter arse of it.

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Day 332, List it, demolish it, remove it, rework it, put it back, is it the same?

Since Friday morning builders have assembled the steel framework shown below.  This is on the site of a much larger NHS construction seen behind it.  The Georgian building that originally occupied the area where the steel work now is was listed and will be put back where it was, now reinforced.

I'm looking forward to seeing the building return, and also to see how similar to the original it is.  How authentic will the building be?  I can't believe that it would be in any way authentic even if each and every one of the bricks, slates, windows, etc, are replaced in exactly the same places that they originally occupied.

This brings to mind the thought experiment about the Ship of Theseus, which asks whether something which has had all the component parts replaced is still essentially the same object.  Well it will have a steel structure inside it for a start, and then there'll be modern mortar used to glue it all together.  But it will be mostly the same bits - apart from most of the wood, and the plaster, and the...  You get the picture.

Here's the building in an earlier life, when it was real.

Expect more ramblings about this topic - you have been warned.

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Day 331, Overgrown, cut down, concern for security, cock up on the catering front Jimmy?

Tsk, honestly, you just leave some flora to grow out of control for a bit so that fauna can leap out at you and scare itself to death and the next minute the forces of tidyness arrive and chop it back.

I suppose the upside of this is that it is possible to get past dawdlers unaware that someone is walking behind them while they are in their headphone isolation zones. 

And zombies are less likely to be concealed, or trapped behind, a large pile of ivy.  Making the passage much safer for transit by those that are freaked out by such things.

What else could be lurking down there, behind the overgrowth?  Let's ask Jimmy from the Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.

What might be down there Jimmy?

"Forces of anarchy: wreckers of law and order. Communists, Maoists, Trotskyists, neo-Trotskyists, crypto-Trotskyists, union leaders, Communist union leaders, atheists, agnostics, long-haired weirdos, short-haired weirdos, vandals, hooligans, football supporters, namby- pamby probation officers, rapists, papists, papist rapists, foreign surgeons - headshrinkers, who ought to be locked up, Wedgwood Benn, keg bitter, punk rock, glue- sniffers, Play For Today, squatters, Clive Jenkins, Roy Jenkins, Up Jenkins, up everybody's, Chinese restaurants ..."

Sounds a little like 'call me Dave' Cameron with his sudden concern for our 'security', and probably about as sensible and well considered.

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Day 330, Car parking, waste of space

For most of the day car parks are empty.

Yet the land is expensive.

How much must this need for car parking space cost businesses nationally - this car park is fully occupied for only around 8 hours out of 24 for 5 days a week and is empty for almost all the rest of the weekdays and completely over the weekend.

Consider how much a well integrated transport system could reduce the need for all of these parking spaces.

Businesses could do many things if there wasn't such a requirement - expand their offices; put trees on the land; sell the land on; make better use of their investment.

This is 6am on a Wednesday morning, not a single vehicle.

There's something sinister about this picture with the gates at the end, reminiscent of something, nothing to do with car parking.

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Day 329, Peachy weather

An early morning walk into what looks like a rainstorm.

The thin streak of light sky sandwiched between the cloud and the pavement.

It doesn't promise much.  Rain coat in hand and ready to deploy at a moments notice.

Raincoat not needed, in fact it just gets warmer and warmer.

A wide blue sky develops, a spring in the step, and back up that steep slope.

Bring on the weekend.  We know what is coming...

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Day 328, The lost Loudness Button

Ambient noctules, assembled from artistes cast-off jottings, thrown into the air, then reconstructed into a new works and considered for an approach to EMI.

Sign this lot immediately, before they get accused of plagiarism.

So, broken into pieces, they watched their Rome burn.  And as the Rodneys were queuing up, it didn't take long before she knew.

She lays me down and with my mind she runs - turn my back on the rot that's been.  I got the money now.  I can't complain, come play my game, helping everyone in need

I know what it's like.  To be dead, your voice is soothing.  But the words aren't clear, and these memories...

Lose their meaning then, then what. It might not have been like this but, listen to the Colour of your dreams.  The wind is low the birds will sing now.  There's a hole in the sky since, I am told, month number three.

I couldn't wait, I came straight on the night road, walking close beside you knowing that you were not there.

Copy and paste, the shortcut for the modern lyricist, new buttons for old.

Random prunings.

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