2008 — 25 Feb: Monday, and probably raining

Definitely only a placeholder. It's 00:46 and although I don't have "miles to go before I sleep", I do have a small pile of dishes, including a crockpot, all craving my attention, and I'm determined never to go to bed with the dishes undone.

Last night's undemanding DVD, by the way, was the 1987 Richard Donner action-fest "Lethal Weapon". How can it be 21 years old already?! And this (early) morning's shock has been discovering that the BBC Radio 2 DJ Janice Long was apparently completely unaware of the "provenance" of Jabberwocky1. Tut tut.

In a galaxy far away... dept.

Good morning! It's sunny, misty, and frosty all at the same time (09:16 or so). I used to walk in such conditions to work past hedges full of spiders' webs outlined with dew. This was in 1973 when I was working in Hatfield (as a final year aeronautical engineering apprentice) in the main drawing and design office of what was, at the time, Hawker Siddeley (Aviation) Limited. Although I was confined (as it were) to relatively mundane2 tasks due to my lowly status, some of the folk there were beavering away on aspects of the wing design for the A300 European Airbus. There is a wonderful Flash movie of the cockpit of the newest variant, the A380. It takes a couple of seconds to load, and then allows you to pan and zoom your merry way all the way around. Trouble is, I can't find the drinks tray! Can you?

Wait! Only kidding. Here it is, next to the Karaoke microphone:

A380 pilot cupholder

I confronted one of my first theoretical ethical dilemmas in Hatfield. The site used a mixture of ICL and IBM mainframe computers. These ran3 sufficiently hot as to need constant air-conditioning, and (in the summer) the roof of the computer room sometimes had to be further cooled by directing the water hoses of the airfield's fire tenders on to it for further evaporative cooling. The dilemma would have been what to do had an aircraft faced a tricky landing situation, on a hot day, while the computers were busy running, say, the payroll application.

The name of one of the programs, by the way, was "FRED" — I kid you not; us engineering types have a keen sense of humour. FRED (of course) was an acronym of Filing and Retrieval of Essential Data. The chap who wrote it ran it precisely once a year, producing (after several hours of expensive mainframe time) a large printout that he lovingly filed away in a folder and never consulted again. I have my suspicions that he also used the mainframe to plot his holiday routes around the UK by train, aiming to "collect" every station on the network, but I wasn't there long enough to catch him at it. Nor would he have been unique. On October 10th 1969 employees at the IBM Hursley laboratory had already had to be warned of the penalties for similar "abuse" of these precious systems. (I don't imagine they were running ICL mainframes, but you never know.)

Eye of a rich man's needle... dept.

Here's one of those magazine graphics that initially takes your breath away and then, as you ponder it more deeply, you (I) find your(my)self thinking: "and?" — I wonder what Edward Tufte would make of it?

The original article is here.

Dismal science revisited

Although Peter Preston does what he can to lift the air of doom and gloom clinging to many media columnists, I note that his colleague Larry Elliot has a harder time describing the hard times that lie ahead. (But then I don't understand how a 125% mortgage could be "the only way first-time buyers could afford to get on the housing ladder" since, by definition, it would be a loan 25% larger than the cost of the house.) Mr Elliott outlines the four distinct stages of an economic crisis:

Neatly depressing stuff, although strangely reminiscent of the stages of a Hari Seldon psycho-historic "Foundation" crisis. Perhaps we really should base currencies, as Douglas Adams described, on tree leaves and all get really rich until the currency crisis each autumn.

I suppose it's up to me to get out there and shop as if there's no tomorrow which, on an early retirement pittance of a pension from IBM, more or less constrains me to the food sector! Crumbs, indeed. Where's that broken biscuits section of Woolworths?

Another dismal science

It occurs to me (belatedly, as ever) that marketing is another science that likes to dress up in gaudy clothes and entice hapless consumers (that would be me) to their culinary or other doom. Take today's roast duck lunch:

Roast duck

Strike out the adjectival phrase "Fruity and rich, succulent" and we might be talking turkey! Still, I added peas and potatoes to the mixture, discarded the chopsticks (in the words of the sublime Henry Reed, "Which in our case we have not got") and downed the resulting body fuel. Now, having emailed my man at Christa's bank to set a time and date for the next part of my Probate adventure, it's time (13:03) for another part of Life's big adventure. Where shall I go today, I wonder? And shall I pack the digi-pixel capturing apparatus?

Mudeford it was

I sorted out what seemed like a likely route, parked my main co-pilot in the passenger seat, and left Mrs Sat Nav on simple "just shut up and show me the map" duty. Here's one of my rewards:

Unroasted swan

It never seems quite possible that a swan should be able to fly, does it? But two of them circled us, though this was the only reasonably sharp image I managed to capture. (The hit rate can be pretty low with a hand-held telephoto in relatively poor light.) Always easier when they stand still, of course!

Gull on a chimney pot

And here's the local map showing where we ended up:

Mudeford map

I scattered a smidgen of Christa's ashes among the lobster pots, in contravention of who knows how many EU regulations. (See our new car in the background, Christa?)

Mudeford lobsterpots

Then I was treated to a slice of carrot cake and a cuppa in the Haven Café where Christa always stopped for a cuppa on our previous visits. Despite those visits (and Christa and I must have been to Mudeford about half a dozen times over the years, with or without Junior), we never did figure out quite how to get across with the car to Mudeford Sandbank, which is not exactly very far away:

Mudeford Sandbank

All in all, it was quite blustery, reasonably clear, and a thoroughly refreshing little mini-adventure. Thanks for your company, Peter!

Now it's time to shop! Get those shelves ready for me, Mr Waitrose. (Forgot the fruit, didn't I? Ho hum. Must have been bumping into Emma E that distracted me.) I've also exchanged emails with Cathy G, who's now just about to depart for Hobart from Sydney. When I told her she was missing crappy weather (not entirely true, though it's been pretty wet this evening) she said the natives are now talking about autumn down there, so she's also missed the worst excesses of the summer. Good!

  

Footnotes

1  I'm reminded that I used Jabberwocky (and a choice piece of Dickens) to show up what I can only describe as the grotesque inadequacies in the software that certain misguided chaps in the Hursley Lab once tried (in the mid 1980s) to get us to use to assess "writing quality". I realise now (far too late, of course) that I made a few enemies with my over-vigorous attack on this dreadful idea. The software was simple-minded and inflexible; perhaps that was why some of the management team seemed to like it so much? They certainly didn't like things they couldn't control!
I've long believed you can best judge a chap by the quality of his enemies, of course.
2  Perhaps the greatest incentive I had to move on into the world of computing. Who knows?
3  "Walked" would have been a more accurate verb at the time, considering the performance of today's PCs. Who knew?