Fallen Angel

More photo-whoring. This one was taken in Durham before my aunt Jacky's wedding. With hindsight I wish I'd taken a proper picture of the sign on the wall - it was advertising a new hotel/restaurant called 'Fallen Angel' which was opening in that building. Here's an extract from squinting at this photo blown up.

"A new kind of themed hotel and restaurant opening August 08 with nine themed suites including 3 garden apartments with hot tubs...Live out your fantasy in the red velvet boudoir, be a star in the movie suite, sleep in the Ice Queen's sleigh and warm up in her sauna or why not sleep under the stars in the sci-fi apartment...Other themes include the Russian bride, orient express, and the cruise. Experience ultimate luxury in the garden suite and sleep under a tree with views over the river, your own hot tub and sauna...The extravagance Durham has been waiting for..."

Bizarre.

Criminalising the Nation

I was prompted by reading a Register article about the Criminal Justice Act 2008 into doing a bit of dinnertime reading into this and other things our government has been up to lately, and it's thrown up some interesting (or disturbing) info - in particular the discrepancy where it may become illegal to possess photos of an entirely legal activity.

Of course taking any photos of anything is apparently grounds for suspicion of anything from terrorism to paedophilia. A friend of mine has been stopped and searched several times for daring to hang around London landmarks at night with a camera. The Metropolitan Police seem to be keen to of anyone with a camera - although I did come across this rather entertaining response a while back.

Another revelation from the Reg article is that during the consultation for the CJA, Kent police sought to include written material in the 'extreme porn' definition, as well as images. A quick google search for 'thoughtcrime' dished up the recent case of the 'lyrical terrorist' Samina Malik, which provides some food for thought, as she has apparently been prosecuted because of something she's written rather than something she's done - on the hypothesis that she might be dangerous at some point in the future. A whole variety of better writers than I have pointed out a whole range of established literary texts and popular music lyrics which would appear just as likely to glorify or incite violence, and have reached a far larger audience than Ms Malik's writings. As a personal example, I have in front of me a pamphlet entitled "Generation Terrorists", which urges me to "fuck Queen and country". This document, written by a group of self-proclaimed 'Preachers' has been purchased by hundreds of thousands of people, mostly impressionable youths. I could continue through my CD rack (I was listening to the Clash earlier for a start) and find any number of similar examples.

On the subject of music Mac recently gave me a reminder of the Daily Mail's recurring campaign against the 'Sinister Cult of Emo'. Leaving aside the twin tragedies of a young girl's suicide and the fact that people actually believe articles like this without question, there are moments of pure comedy in there. It does however beg the question of how long before the government decides to ban My Chemical Romance, or the Manics (who were of course scapegoats for adolescent self-harm/suicide long before anyone had ever coined the term 'emo).

When they kick at your front door, how you gonna come?

Picnic in the park

Sarah in the park near our house last Sunday. Taken with my Nikon D40, cliched post-processing courtesy of The GIMP.

Itchy feet

"I'm sorry honey but I've got my sea legs again, I stand on dry land for a minute and I feel sick and then, I have to start moving again" - Frank Turner

Spring is coming, the weather's getting warmer, and my feet are getting itchy. I've been stood still too long.

Our last major trip abroad was spending four weeks travelling around Europe in the van in the summer of 2005, in that precious couple of months between being full-time students and full-time employees. By 2006 Sarah had passed her bike test and we took the bikes around SW England, spending some time with Sarah's family and seeing Muse at the Eden Project. Last year, our wedding intervened, meaning we spent a fantastic two week honeymoon in Barcelona, but flew there and back and didn't go anywhere else during the year. We're overdue a road trip.

"It is no trick to go round the world these days, you can pay a lot of money and fly round it nonstop in less than forty-eight hours, but to know it, to smell it and feel it between your toes you have to crawl. There is no other way." - Ted Simon, Jupiter's Travels

I don't like flying. That's not to say I have any fear of being inside a tin box at thirty thousand feet - my childhood was punctuated by occasional trips in light aircraft courtesy of a family friend, so by comparison a flight in a commercial airliner provokes neither excitement or concern. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I have a profound dislike of the commercial flying experience. Already this year I estimate that I have spent at least 24 hours in airports, waiting for delayed flights, filing through endless security checkpoints to 'ensure our safety' (when even I can think of several ways in which they could be overcome by anyone sufficiently determined to take control of or destroy a plane). Standing 6'4" tall an economy class flight is invariably an exercise in contortionism. But mostly, the ease with which one can fly anywhere in the world removes some of the wonder of the destination for me.

"...but if you're all about the destination, take a f***ing flight, we're going nowhere slowly but we're seeing all the sights" - Frank Turner, 'The ballad of me and my friends'

I don't particularly enjoy staying in hotels either. Any longer than a weekend and the novelty wears off and I get annoyed with knowing that someone is coming in and rearranging the room every day, with having to come and go, eat and breathe at certain times.

So we're taking it back to basics. Three people (Me, Sarah, and her brother Martin), three bikes (ZXR400, GPZ500S and R6), and a couple of tents. We're definitely going to the Sachsenring MotoGP round, and we have a few ideas of other places to go in a general loop through Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France, but mostly it's going to be two weeks with no real commitment or agenda other than being back at the Eurotunnel terminal at the end of it.

I can't wait.

It's back...

MotoGP that is. The 2008 season gets underway this weekend in Qatar, and all those burning questions that have been building up over the off-season. Will Rossi be fast on Bridgestone tyres? Will the big H be back with a vengeance? Will James Toseland manage to step up to the challenge? Will we finally have a Brit (Bradley Smith) with a decent chance in one of the smaller classes. All will be revealed under the floodlights of Qatar.

In the mean time, check out Kropotkin's 2008 season preview here.

I can't wait.

Happy New Year

So that was 2007 then.

We let New Year's Eve pass us by with the usual lack of enthusiasm (a few cans of cider and the first series of Scrubs on DVD).

Now it's 2008. There's a whole lot in the pipeline. It remains to be seen how much of it actually comes to fruition.

In the meantime, I've got to go to work tomorrow. Wahey.

Front Page Redesign

Soundtrack: Frank Turner - Sleep is for the Week

I've just updated the wildchild.org.uk front page. No other reason than I felt like a change.

The banner picture is of Sarah spinning our glow poi in Bramcote Hills park, just up the road from our house, taken using my shiny new Nikon D40. The (uncropped) photo is also on my flickr feed.

Picture whoring

This is the view I was greeted with on leaving the house to go to work on Monday morning. Good enough to prompt me to pop back into the house and get the camera.



I was really rather pleased with how it came out. Although it's ironic that I took this on my old Olympus mju:410 compact camera, then at lunchtime my new digital SLR arrived from Amazon. Of course I haven't had any time to go out and take photos since, and there hasn't been another sunrise like that either.

New Toys

I'm sat writing this post from the comfort of an armchair, courtesy of my recently acquired IBM ThinkPad X30. Yay!

I'm working on a writeup of how I set it up to run Xubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), but for now I thought I'd just express my joy!

Out of the smoke

I've been in London for about 30 hours. I've had a good time paying a long overdue visit to an old friend. But now it's time to get out. I say my goodbyes, fire up the bike, turn out of Imperial College, up Exhibition Road and into Hyde Park...and hit the traffic queue.

I'm overdressed for the occasion. Limited luggage space means I am wearing most of my clothes under textile kit, and it's hot. Onto the Edgware road and I can already feel the heat of the engine on my legs. I'm filtering but the gaps just aren't there as cars get stuck mid lane change. I have half an eye on the temperature gauge and everything else focused on where the next car is coming from. Red lights are welcomed as an opportunity to leapfrog a few more cars - and when the lights change it's 100 yards of fresh air to force through the radiator and into my visor.

The pizza 'ped catches me napping. I have him on acceleration, but he has slightly less regard for speed limits, bus lanes and his own life. We're still level as I turn off towards the start of the M1.

I make it a few junctions up before the traffic builds up again. Back to filtering for mile after mile. Another bike appears in front of me - it's Goldwing Man, scourge of filtering bikes everywhere. He's filtering as fast as his mighty girth will let him, but i'm quicker, and because he's concentrating on not clipping mirrors with his panniers, he isn't looking in the mirrors. I switch to the gap between lanes 1 and 2 to get past.

I reach the cause of the traffic - they are resurfacing the motorway, and the northbound traffic splits, with lane 3 becoming contraflow. It looks quicker so I make a snap decision to follow it. Wrong. Never, Ever take the single lane. Ever. It grinds to a halt and there's nowhere to filter. Or is there? I take to the concrete between the traffic and the central reservation. It keeps me moving but I don't dare go too fast. I see Goldwing Man pass me on the other side.

Finally the roadworks end. There's not many trucks on the road and everyone's trying to make up time, so just keeping up with the traffic flow becomes licence endangering. This isn't much fun, and feels like a waste of tyres on an agile 400. I've had enough.

Just past leicester I escape onto the backroads. I don't know exactly where I am going, nor do I really care. I'm keeping the setting sun on my left and aiming for villages I vaguely remember as being in the right direction. I cross the motorway once, twice, three-four-five times.

All of a sudden it all clicks into place. A familiar junction approached from an unfamiliar direction. I've still got about ten miles to go, but in a sense I'm already home, following a track I've practised a dozen times back to my front door.

I actually wrote this about three weeks ago, straight after the trip it refers to, and never got round to posting it up. Better late than never eh?

Computers on eBay (and item descriptions generally)

Do people selling stuff on eBay assume that the potential buyer is an idiot?

Apparently you can make people buy anything by making the description in a huge flourescent font. Apparently you can also persuade people that a computer is really good by writing descriptions like:

- Pentium 166Mhz (SUPER FAST!!!!)
- GIGANTIC 64MB RAM!!!! WOW!!
- HUGE 2GB Hard Drive!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Usually by this point I've stopped reading. But you have to wonder don't you? If I really knew little enough about computers to be sucked in by that sort of nonsense, I really wouldn't be looking on eBay for a machine, I'd be in PC World.

And as for the "VAT to be added to final price" lot....

Anyway, enough ranting!

Frank Turner - The Real Damage

Soundtrack: Frank Turner, obviously

The rather excellent Mr Turner has just brought out a video for "The Real Damage". It's a bit bizarre (but then aren't all the best music videos?). You can watch it here.

I'm off to pick up my acoustic guitar and entertain delusions of being able to sing and write songs.

Motorola V3 and the hidden advantages of Linux

I was mildly disappointed on buying my phone to find that Motorola expect you to buy a CD from them just to charge your phone from a computer (and transfer files to and fro). However I've just been pleasantly surprised to find that the phone only recognises Windows machines as computers, and is quite happy to charge itself from a Linux box.

More reasons to switch?

De-Microsoftication

Well after finally getting fed up with the grindingly slow performance of my four year old install of Windows XP, this post is brought to you by a shiny new installation of Ubuntu Linux.

I've been toying with changing this machine over for quite a while now, but been put off by the amount of legacy information (photos, documents, emails, etc) that had accumulated on the machine and which I could not afford to lose. So I decided to play it safe by buying a brand new hard disk (160GB Western Digital, about £35 from www.dabs.com). This would allow me to install Ubuntu on a fresh system, and still be able to swap disks back and get at my XP install if I really had to.

With the hardware changes done, I fired the machine back up with the Ubuntu 6.10 live CD. All ran well, with no problems detecting any hardware or the internet connection, so I hit the 'Install' button. The Ubuntu graphical installer was suitably simple, and I was happy to let it make its own decisions on partitioning, etc. A single reboot at the end and it was all up and running.
The next task was getting my email back up and running. I had been using Thunderbird under WinXP and in an uncharacteristic feat of preparation, had backed up mine and Sarah's mail files to CD before taking the old hard drive out. Ubuntu comes with Evolution Mail installed as standard, and I thought I'd give it a try. However it didn't seem too keen to import my Thunderbird mail file, so I took the path of least resistance and installed Thunderbird instead. Now it was just a case of copying the backup version over the mail file in the new installation, firing up Thunderbird, and there was all my old emails. Fantastic. I did have a bit of trial and error remembering passwords for some of my mail accounts though! Creating a login account for Sarah and importing her emails into Thunderbird was similarly easy.

This morning, I had to face the question of getting at all the information on the old Windows hard drive. Handily, this isn't the only machine we've got, so I dropped it into Sarah's XP machine as a second drive. At the very least it meant I could get at it from that machine, but I was pleasantly surprised that after sharing the entire drive I was able to get at it in about 4-5 clicks from Ubuntu. Bear in mind here that I had no end of trouble getting XP to access shared files on my housemates machines when I was at uni, its nice that things just work. So now various things are flying across the wireless connection to their new home.

Ubuntu make a bit thing of being "Linux for human beings" and how stuff "Just Works". So far it lives up to the promises.