2009 — 19 August: Wednesday
Last night's Prom with the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain was a real hoot — who thought to hear Hawkwind's "Silver Machine" in the Royal Albert Hall, for example? or Bowie's "Life on Mars"? — but now it's time for another picture of Christa:
Taken as she crouched by some of her tulips on the little driveway to the garage at the back of our house in Old Windsor. Yet another smile for me...
I see Richard Russo has a new novel1 out. This review seems to damn it with faint praise, however. (Russo wrote the book turned into that marvellous film Nobody's Fool, for which he can be forgiven a great deal.) Oh well, g'night, ahead of some photographic kite flying in a few hours.
Simple is good, isn't it?
Following yesterday's simplistic news sound bite, I thought I'd visit the IMF web site to see for myself, as it were. I should stick to the nice music on BBC Radio 3, methinks. I should also add slightly more sugar to the morning's batch of stewed Victoria plums — they're nearly as sour as my ripening crop of grapes. It's 09:31 and breakfast is loaded. I await my batch of (unstewed) visitor(s) with interest. Must remember to get dressed, too. ETA is 10:37 — we shall see.
I was all set to provide Mrs Google with feedback on my recent experience of shopping with Google Checkout. But they automatically create a public profile of me... No thank you, ma'am! It's bad enough that BT, in changing the phone line back from Christa to me, have managed to render me once more non-ex-directory. I'm no longer perturbed by this, but Christa had to put up with harassment from one of the overseas operators (I can't really blame anyone for finding her husky accent so appealing) so we went ex-directory many years ago.
One, long, coincidence
Alongside Private Eye young Mr. Postie proffered the new CD set from Loudon Wainwright III — High Wide & Handsome, the Charlie Poole project. (I confess, I'd never heard of Mr Poole.)
So I gave it a quick spin downstairs after my visitor had departed, made myself another cuppa, retreated upstairs, switched on NPR and guess who Terry Gross is chatting to, and guess what she's playing extracts from? Completeist heaven.
In earlier news...
Young Zeno took some shots of my house from an unfamiliar viewpoint, with his camera merely mounted on the end of a long, carbon-fibre composite, pole. Incredibly light-weight. This picture actually shows all that remains of Christa, in her little green plastic jar, looking out from her study on to the jungle that was once her garden. It also clearly shows the huge crop of grapes sprawling along underneath, and to both sides of, the kitchen window.
And here are the guilty juvenile delinquents, an hour or so later, flying a camera from a kite in Ocean Village:
Windows whinge
There's a word used to describe software that's as badly-written as the operating system I'm currently using. "All I want to do" is change my desktop's displayed image (I was using a JPEG of a certain special someone, and wanted to change it to another one). So, I right-click on a blank part of the desktop, select "Properties", select "Desktop", and succeed in changing it to an all-black background. But now, when I want to repeat the process to browse for, and select, my next image, one core jumps immediately to 50% and the memory footprint of the associated Run32dll.exe process starts climbing through the roof. And, of course, the application locks up. Pathetic. Yep, that's a good word. Abso-bloody-lutely pathetic.
Go fly a kite
Big Bro is quite keen to know a bit more about the kite photography. Following a few, erm, mishaps, Zeno uses relatively cheap Canon digicams bought off e-Bay. They are fitted to a lightweight aluminium frame that acts as a mini roll-bar and, unless I'm mistaken, houses a servo or two to swivel the camera around. There's an element of radio control! He can trigger shots from the ground, and can see enough to judge when the camera is more or less aligned with the subject matter he wants. Of course, the vagaries of the wind's effect on the kite can randomise things. We had at least two kites, one of which — as a kite — is pretty dull, but as a stable lifting platform is ideal. It had a lift area of about 2 square metres. We ended up out at the end of Ocean Village, by the "open" waterway down the Solent, thereby getting a more nearly continuous sea breeze though (I'm assured) above about 30 metres the breeze is usually reliable.
Of course, being an ace programmer cum tinkerer, Zeno has also contributed to the development of, erm, improvements to the firmware or (to be more precise) the software abilities of the Canon range. He and his chums have added scripting capabilities that can run control sequences. For example, he can set a mode that triggers the shutter whenever it perceives motion (ideal for a nesting box). Some enthusiasts mount the camera gyroscopically. Some use a video downlink so they can see exactly what to shoot. There's a tradeoff here between weight, complexity of control, and (I suspect) cost of unintended landfall. You quickly run out of hands if you have too much lift, too many controls, what have you.
Zeno's web site is here. The search acronym is KAP (kite aerial photography, I deduce). The sky is pretty much the limit. I suppose people could also use lift balloons, R-C helicopters, and so on. But the anti-terror brigade and civic jobsworths can take a dim view. One old codger actually yelled down to us from his flat that we would attract the unwelcome attention of air traffic control. We didn't, as it happens.