Usual mixed bag of material this week
in trains - a work in progress
some jottings entered as a separate blog entry
these are just random jottings inspired by the time I spend on trains, which is a lot of time. Except for the black train, which is about suffering from migraines, which has the relentlessness of an unwanted train journey.
@work
finally getting on top of what seemed like an endless volume of work, but I need to find fresh challenges, though not sure what they are. Overall getting itchy feet for some new issues to get my teeth into, it all feels a bit too quiet.
apple store
dropped in at the local apple store again. What an odd shop. I really don't think that it is about selling stuff. I cannot imagine that they actually make money. Rather they are about ensuring that Apple products are displayed to their best possible advantage, something that retailers have signally failed to do in the past. There is a long history of retailers stocking apple, then failing to display properly, or have any knowledgeable staff, then wondering why they don't sell any. Even at John Lewis, when buying an iMac, they had to call out a techie in a overcoat to talk to me about it, and even then he did not have one at home himself. Other stores were even worse, with apple computers stuck at some Sad Mac prompt - sitting there unloved.
What sold me on the iPod was when my daughter instantly got how it worked without any instruction, seeing a demo model at the local Currys. If a child can get the clickwheel, and love it, then apple is doing something right.
The perennial downside is that there is not much software, but with the growing role of cloudware, and online purchasing, then it really is not that much of a problem now. And to be honest, the off the shelf iMac now comes with a tremendous suite of software, you don't need that much more, unless you are getting pretty specialised.
I suppose that I am an apple fanboy, but would like to see them doing more to put worth back in the hands of users, some of their activities feel more like revenue streams.
I have just heard that new Apple Chips will come out in mid November, so another reason to postpone buying a new Macintosh. Perfect knowledge just makes life so much more complicated!
Note to self, I would like to get some shares in apple sometime.
mountain goat - going to scotland
from the blogosphere, and forums it sounds like my current favourite band, the Mountain Goats will be Going to Scotland.
They are very impressive live, so I am strongly thinking about getting tickets. Probably a mountain of logistics to worry about, particularly now I have a job, and children, but hey, what is life without a little mid life rebellion.
Stewart Brand supports nuclear power
I heard on an Economist podcast that Stewart Brand, one of the people I list as an inspiration, has now come to the view that nuclear power is sufficiently safe, and climate change sufficiently threatening, that he now supports nuclear power. I'll have to dig up the original quote for myself, but certainly an interesting view. I have been somewhat torn on nuclear power for some time now. I was impressed with the professionalism of the people working in nuclear power when I met them through work, and although my preference would clearly be for everyone to reduce their demand for energy to sustainable levels, I really don't see that happening any time soon. Therefore we will probably need nuclear power in the short term to help transition us to less intensive energy use. I actually see the growth in broadband and computers as a positive thing, if we start living our lives more virtually, then audiobooks replace dead tree books, downloads replace CDs, broadband replaces unwanted journeys. I don't think a world where we are all housebound is desirable, but getting rid on unwanted trips cannot be bad.
I hold a modest shareholding in a nuclear power generator, and have found it difficult to square this with my desire to hug trees, but I am coming round to it not just being a pragmatic move, but an important gesture too.
Nature seems increasingly out of whack these days, if cars were elephants, we would be petrified at the sheer number of these hungry beasts tearing up our environment, but they are not flesh and blood, but iron and oil, and we don't even notice them. My intuition is that a system will struggle, struggle, and fail catastrophically, like collapsing fisheries, we are all on that brink of environmental catastrophe.
writing losing definition - books that inspire me
I have decided to start work on another novel, with a working title of Losing Definition. The title refers to how your sight loses its sharpness as you age, and similarly issues and opinions also become less clear cut. I suppose that the temptation is to withdraw within yourself, or a fantasy world. I'll probably just assemble it as a collection of blog style entries, and then reorder them until I am happy. I'll probably take some stuff from here, but writing as fiction would loosen it up a bit, and make for more fun.
I worry that it should have more of a plot, but I'm really not that bothered with plot, characters, or dialogue, so it will just be what it is, rather than some mainstream genre. If seeking inspiration, or parallels, then I suppose my little shelf of wonderful books would be
Confessions of Zeno - by Italo Svevo
Tristram Shandy - by Laurence Sterne
Jonathan Wild - by Henry Fielding
Way of all Flesh - by Samuel Butler
Dark as the Grave Wherein my Friend is laid - by Malcolm Lowry
m - by John Cage
jPod/Microserf - by Douglas Coupland
also a dash of science fiction, that most liberating of mediums, recent reading of ten best science fiction novels, included,
the following films
the Saragossa Manuscripts
the Falls
Wim Wenders - road movies, especially the State of Things
Art films I saw at University generally
and finally a dash of Burroughs, Ballard and Sladek.
As none of these have hit the mainstream, I will write to suit myself, and aim for self publishing onto the web, rather than anything more lavish. However I have enough to live by, and would prefer to write what I want anyway.
Fonts and Clifford
I remain very confused about all the different versions of the Clifford font that you can get, but have decided to buy a couple of the individual styles for use as my default font. Until now I have used Palatino as my default typeface. Also checking out the various half remembered theory behind fonts, etc, for example how we now use font to mean typeface. It is curious how fonts seem to have gone from calligraphy, to hot metal, to digital printing, to lcd screens, without any big issues, when so many other information mediums have made such heavy weather of the issues of transition. And strange that I am coming back to a typeface based on calligraphy, for displaying on my iMac screen, or printing on an inkjet printer.
One of the words we should all know is skeuomorph
we surround ourselves with comforting skeuomorphs, are we afraid of the new.
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