October 2004 Archives

You may remember, if you cast your mind back, dear reader/readers/adoring fans [delete as appropriate] that I recently joined the seti@home project, or rather, I got my computer to join it and do all the hard work on my behalf. I'm sorry to have to report that despite my sterling efforts with this project, it has so far still failed to find little green men from outer space.

The reason for this is that they've been looking in the wrong places. The little green men from outer space are not from outer space at all. Or green. They've been here all the time, infiltrating themselves into our society and our lives, infuriating us with their attempts to communicate, which have so far been heard by millions yet understood and tolerated by very very few. They've been right under our very noses for decades now. They talk to us in loud wailing voices, repeating the same messages over and over again. And we listen to them over and over again, some of us more keenly than others. The alien's messages have by now been heard by almost everyone on the planet, yet no-one recognises them for what they truly are. But now I can reveal the awful truth, the horrible truth, yay even the mind-bogglingly shocking truth.

I repeat, the aliens are here. They have been here for years. They are not little, or green. They disguise themselves as men, some more successfully than others. And they bombard us with their annoying little messages which we cannot ignore until we start repeating them over and over and over again, like drones in an unspeakable alien-controlled army of unthinking, uncaring, unfeeling killing machines.

I know who you are. I know what you are doing to us. You fill our heads with Technicolour Dreamcoats, with Starlight Expresses, with Kylie Minogues and Hear'Says. You infuriate us with Cats and Boyzones and Westlifes and manufactured incessant pop drivel which you use to gather funding and numb our brains, preparing us for the big attack. By the time the rest of the aliens come to claim our blue-green planet as their own, we will be completely unable to resist, as every ounce of coherent thought will have been drianed from the mush we call our brains. We will simply roll over and lie down, adjusting the playlists and volume controls on our iPods as we go.

I'm right about this. You know I am. There's no way that Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tim Rice, Pete Waterman, Simon Cowell, Simon Fuller et al are human beings trying to make a buck or two. No, these people are the alien front line, and we've fallen hook line and sinker for it.

Mark my words.

So anyway, since seti@home is probably looking in the wrong place for people that either don't exist or are here already and taking over the planet behind our backs and under our noses (which is no mean feat in itself, if you think about it), I've switched my allegiance to the Folding@home project. I'm not going to claim to know anything about what it actually does (me? talk about things I know nothing about? Never!), suffice to say it's all to do with proteins in the body and medical research into things like Alzheimer's and Huntington's Disease. So it could benefit mankind far more then buying another Kylie record ever will. Probably.

But if you don't fancy any of that, choose something else. I think I might start one of my own - a project to rid the world of annoying musicals and inane pop shite. Who's with me?

[FX: voice fades as I wander off into the distance] We'll need a programmer or two..... a project manager...... a master plan..... some cannons..... ammo..... a bit of uranium would be handy...... Bin Laden's phone number.......

It's my birthday soon (well, sometime in the next 39 days or so), which should give you all time to club together and get me one of these as a present. Go on, you know you want to.

I'm already writing the thank you card :-)

Here's a little snippet from a conversation I had with my son this evening:

Son: "Dad, come over here and help me build a Lego robot!"
Me (reading the newspaper): "H'mmm..... yeah...... ok"
Son: "Come on!"
Me: (still reading): "Mmmm"
He then gets up, walks over to me, puts his hand to my temple and pretends to flick a switch, providing a neat little clicking sound effect as well.
Me: (looking up from newspaper): "H'mmm?"
Son: "Now your brain is switched on, you can move. Come on!"

After that, what alternative did I have?

Last week I rented E.T. - the Extra Terrestrial from Screen Select. I thought "This will be great, I haven't seen it for years and years and I'm sure my son will love watching it with me." Or something like that anyway. I had the DVD in the house for a few days before even getting it out of the packet. I wanted to savour the moment (sad, I know).

So Saturday rolls around eventually (doesn't the weekend take absolutely FOR EVER to arrive?) and at last it's time to show him the DVD. "What does that say?" I ask him. "er........ e....t......" he replies. "Oh!" he exclaims, "I've seen it! It's where he lands at the beginning, and he phones home, and he flies away at the end. It's not a very long film though."

Several things can be deduced from his exclamation.
1) He's seen the film before
2) He must have been enthralled by it, because it's actually just short of two hours long
3) He never ever ever forgets anything. For all I know he might have just been in the room and vaguely paying attention when it was on tv two years ago or something
4) I was really disappointed I couldn't share that magical moment when he saw the bicycle fly across the face of the moon for the first time.

so, I think "Better luck next time" is turning into the story of my life. First my Geocaching failure, now this. Actually this one happened first..... you know, just because I live my life in chronological order doesn't mean I have to write about it in chronological order. Or at all, in fact. I might start writing about someone else's life instead, someone who is dashingly handsome, witty, full of bravado, always gets his own way, brash, confident and an all round good egg. Hang on a minute. I'm already doing that. No, not me, you fools. I'm the one who's going to have "better luck next time" engraved on his tombstone. No, I'm talking about my son, of course, the guy who never forgets the plot of a movie. Coming soon - OffSpringBlog. Remember where you read about it first.

After my brother told me all about Geocaching the other week (detailed here) I got all excited about it, and by the Sunday had bought myself a GPS unit via eBay. Cool stuff, couldn't wait to get going. Then I got blitzed with a cold, and thought "just my luck, I'm about to do something different and exciting for a change and I can barely drag myself out of bed". I needn't have worried, however, because by yesterday my head had cleared, the GPS had arrived and had been tested, and the rain had even cleared itself off somewhere else for a while.

Armed with co-ordinates, directions and clues from the Geocaching site, and my shiny almost-new bright yellow GPS telling me where I was, how fast I was walking, where I was supposed to be going and how far above sea-level I was, I headed off all full of excitement and adventure. Let's see what's been hidden!

But alas, no luck. I got close to it, I'm sure I did. The clue made sense and fitted in with my surroundings, and the GPS told me I was within 20 feet of it, but could I actually find it? Could I buggery. I spent half an hour traipsing through mud and brambles, trying not to slide down the very steep slope into a stream. In the end I gave up, disappointed but not downhearted. I knew from reading the cache logs on the main Geocaching site that this was a tricky one to find, and other more experienced Geocachers hadn't been able to find it the first time they tried either. I know it was last found a couple of weeks ago, so it was definately there then. Better luck next time.

So I turned around and walked home again. As I approached my house, I thought I'd test how accurate the GPS was, and the answer it seems is "not as accurate as I thought it would be". While walking up the road and looking straight at my front door, it was telling me that I lived somewhere just off to the right, and by the time I actually got to my door it was saying that my house was actually supposed to be 400 feet behind me. So either this GPS lark isn't all it's cracked up to be, or else it didn't have a good idea where it was when I marked in the position of my house. Further testing is required, it seems.

Still, I walked five and a half miles and got out of the house for a bit, so it wasn't a complete waste of time.

So another Formula One season draws to a close. I used to follow F1 keenly and with enthusiasm. I never went as far as actually going to a race, but the tickets are just so damn expensive, aren't they? I did, however, get up at 3am to watch the opening race from Australia, or failing that then I'd tape it and get up at 7am to watch the tape.

But not any more. It's just got sooooo boring in recent years with Schumacher winning everything in sight that each race is pretty much a foregone conclusion. I don't like the single-lap qualifying, it's just too tedius to mention. After watching half of the first qualifying session after it had been brought in I was so mind-numbingly bored I almost went out to buy a tin of paint so I could watch that dry instead. At least with the old "fastest lap of 12" qualifying there was some excitement as the hour drew to a close and everyone was on the track at the same time trying to better their grid position.

One of the main problems with F1 these days (apart from the dominance of Ferrari) is that the cars are now so similar and so quick, it's almost impossible to overtake. Back in the 70's and 80's each car looked noticeably different, and each had different characteristics. Some were quicker on the strights, some quicker in the corners, and also the aerodynamics back then were such that getting into another car's slipstream gave you a big chance of overtaking at the next corner. These days, the car in front is 99% identical to the car behind. Aerodynamic design is so advanced now that every team knows what works and what doesn't. Manufacturing is so advanced that every team knows what works and what doesn't. The same with brakes, engines, and everything else.

However, Schumacher can't carry on forever. He's got to retire at some point and then we'll see if Ferrari's dominance continues. I don't mind one team dominating throughout a season (or two) but six years is just too much. I'm surprised some of the other teams still bother. Well, in fact, they don't, as witnessed by Ford pulling the plug on Jaguar Racing.

I feel sorry for DC though. He coulda been a contender, but he never got the hang of single-lap qualifying and is now falling into the ranks of the "also-rans". Button is still worth watching, I reckon, although it will be interesting to see how well he gets on with the staff at BAR now that the Contracts Board have told him he can't go to Williams after all.

When I first got into F1 in the early 1980's, the cars looked different, you never really knew who was going to win a race before it started, and I guess that driver ability and car reliability were much less honed than they are now. Consequently, there were more crashes, spins and retirements. The cars didn't refuel during the race, so the pit stops were a race in themselves to see who could change the tyres the fastest. Several times I remember seeing someone in the top five stop a couple of laps before the end of a race because they had run out of fuel. Exciting, nail-biting, edge-of-the-seat stuff, it was.

Nowaways three-quarters of the field finish each race, everyone's as quick and as good as everyone else, the pit stops are slower because it takes longer to put the fuel in than it does to change the tyrs, and none of the top drivers seem to make silly mistakes any more. All in all it adds up to two hours on a Sunday afternoon when I usually go and find something else to
do.

Which is precisely what Bernie Ecclestone doesn't want to happen.

I had an email from my sister-in-law eariler today asking me to make some more updates to the blog, so she's got something to read at lunchtime. She's got a point actually, two or three posts a week is just not good enough, really. I should be more attentive to it, but there are some days when I'm far too busy living my life (makes a change, heheh). Last week I was struck down with a cold, so by the time I got home from work the last thing I wanted to do was think..... a feeble excuse, I know, but it's the best you're going to get at the moment.

There are actually a few things I want to write about, so I'll be doing that very soon (he says). I want to put them all into separate posts so the archives make a bit more sense. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

The secret is to look up occasionally :-)

1/60 at F3.2, 21st October 2004 5:59pm

Ever heard of GeoCaching? No, neither had I, until my brother told me about it last Friday. It's a worldwide game where you are the search engine. Sounds intriguing, I thought, so I had a look at the main GeoCaching web site to find out more.

Basically, a cache is a box, hidden somewhere. The longitude and latitude co-ordinates of the location are posted on the web site. You go and find the cache, sign the log book, and if there is a reward in the cache you can take it and leave another reward for the next finder. You put the cache back where you found it. Sounds really simple, and it is. The hard part is actually finding them...

Currently there are over 125,000 caches in over 200 countries. Some of them contain travel bugs, which are items intended to travel from one cache to another. There's a cache hidden a couple of miles away from my house which contains a travel bug that started out in New South Wales. I doubt I'll be able to take it very far though.

It all sounds to me like a lot of fun, and something to look out for while I'm out walking. It will also give me an excuse to visit some new places, and see some new sights. There are about 1500 caches within a 100 mile radius of home, and 50 within 10 miles..... so even just finding the local ones will keep me busy!

I love the idea of this - I need an excuse to get out of the house on those cold winter Sundays! This afternoon I bought a GPS unit on eBay, so I'm hoping to be able to use it next weekend (postal delays permitting). I'm going to have to make sure everything else (housework etc) is all out of the way during the week so I can have Sundays to myself for a change. With a bit of luck I can combine all my new hobbies into one day out...... walking or cycling, GeoCaching, and lomography. Cool!

I
do
not
know
where
family
doctors
acquired
illegibly
perplexing
handwriting;
nevertheless,
extraordinary
pharmaceutical
intellectuality,
counterbalancing
indecipherability,
transcendentalizes
intercommunications'
incomprehensibleness.

Here's something to give you some food for thought. According to the latest statistics from the US Census bureau, the world population is increasing at a rate of over 200,000 a day.

So somebody out there's gotta be reading this, surely...

Last night I went to the lomodisco. It's always a bit nerve-wracking for me to meet new people, especially people who I only know from some slighty out-of-focus photos on a message board, but with a drink inside me I plucked up the courage to introduce myself. Didn't help that it was in a public bar, and I could have been introducing myself to someone who didn't have the faintest idea what I was talking about, but I managed to get the right crowd first time :-) When meeting people who are into photography (excuse me, lomography) the big clue was to gravitate towards the people who are holding cameras.

Loud music doesn't help conversation either, but I did get talking to one or two people and had quite a good night out considering. Still can't get over the price of a bottle of Smirnoff Ice in a city-centre bar though. Ouch.

Still, I enjoyed myself, and am looking forward to meeting people again next month, hopefully in a quieter environment more suited to getting to know people!

See the pics from last night (the good, the bad and the blurred) right here.

Here are a couple of pics a mate sent me. I've no idea if they are copyright or not, but I thought they were so great I had to share them here. Wish I'd taken them myself though! The first pic was taken from the Columbia shuttle on one of its orbits, and the second is, well, it's a picture of a hurricane. I've no idea which one I'm afraid. As usual, click on the thumbnail for a fill-size version.

(100K)

(322K)

Happy birthday, son!

Five today :-)

Surfing the net one evening, following hyperlink to hyperlink. That's how I found out about lomography. Lomo-what? Yeah, that's what I thought at first. Why lomography and not photography? Don't know. What's all the fuss about? Don't know. I told my cousin Sylvia about it. Showed her the site. She didn't know either. But she didn't forget about it. Ten days later she saw one of these for sale, looking lonely and forgotten in a display case in a souvenir shop in a concert hall in Manchester. She called me. "Do you want it?" she asked. "How much is it?" I asked, ever the skinflint. "Fifteen quid" she replied. "Go for it" I instructed her.

That's how I became a lomographer. Check out my first efforts here.

Photography is an everlasting memory of past events. Lomography is art. Make your own rules and learn to see the world through your own eyes again.