Pete Ashton’s Blog

It’s funny how things turn out sometimes. My old (well, four years old) iMac died last night, or at least the hard drive did. I was trying to get it to read a dodgy CDR and it had frozen but I didn’t have a trusty paperclip to hand and after hunting around the kitchen decided to unplug the bugger. Which you shouldn’t do. But I did. And the hard drive suddenly didn’t exist. Oh, it existed and could be reformatted, but it everything on it was lost.

Now, 12 months ago this would have been a problem but it’s actually something of a blessing. That little iMac is going to get OSX in a couple of weeks, assuming it can cope, and I was going to have to spend ages backing it all up and then probably ages again putting my old stuff on the new machine. Now I suddenly don’t have to worry about this because the fates have taken that option away from me, and since I had all my photos and mp3s on CDs and all my writing online it’s not a problem at all. Okay, I’ve lost four years worth of emails but is that really a great loss?

So what should have been a crisis is more of a release. That seems to be a mantra for my life recently.

Finally succumbed to the coldy thing that’s “going around”, as they say, resulting in a day off work yesterday, losing me £45.00 before tax as I don’t get sick pay. Something of a wake-up call, this lack of benefits lark, but there you go. This actually follows a pattern - whenever I start a new job I tend to get ill within the first few weeks as if my body is having trouble adjusting to a new regime and needs to be pushed to some kind of edge to get the hang of itm, and since this is my first desk job it makes sense. It does feel a lot less alien now I’m into my fourth week, though I do have to sort out some kind of exercise regime soon.

My job has changed for about the 10th time, which isn’t a problem apart from giving me something of an identity crisis regarding airport security. Currently I’m processing invoices which is just like at the bookshop in that there’s no standards in invoicing and no hope of finding any. Fun!

Traffic congestion is, I acknowledge, a complicated subject, but for some blinding empirical evidence just get a bus on the first day of half term and see how whole chunks of minutes are swiped off your journey. Could it be that banning parents from driving their kids to school could solve all our problems? Do school busses still exist?

A nice weekend, slightly spoiled by the onset of the seasonal cold/flu thingy, but nice all the same. Started off with a brief appearance at the Birmingham comics pub meet for the first time in a few years and the realisation that we started these monthly meets sometime around 1996 and they’re still going strong. Good to be back with my old gang.

Then off the London on the tedious Silverlink train to visit chum Kath in Whitechappel to pick up my iMac which she borrowed over the summer. As I don’t drive we had some fun figuring out how I was going to carry it back on the train. I wrapped it in cardboard and a jumper then put it in a bin liner in case it rained. Then using a piece of string constructed a sling to go over one shoulder. Boy those old CRT iMacs are heavy and that carry handle on the back is a real misnomer. Still I managed it, once again telling myself I really really must learn to drive this year.

It was good to have my baby back (there’s some kind of weird attachment you make to a machine through which you live your life for a number of years) though it did feel like an old coat that doesn’t quite fit any more. OS9 is getting close to being an obsolete operating system which it didn’t feel like a year ago, although this might have been exacerbated by having only 1.5GB free space on the hard drive, again something that seemed immense in 1999 but now is just puny. With any luck I’ll be running OSX on it in a couple of month time and be plugging in a nice big portable drive. Along with the projected iBook purchase this means I won’t be going out much over the next few months, but I can deal with that. I think I’ve had an eventful enough year to make up for sitting in for the winter.

When I was a bookseller I often had to explain to people that the Amazon website is basically the Books In Print database with a shop pasted over it, so finding a book on there doesn’t mean it’s necessarily available and if it is it’s not necessarily going to turn up in a reasonable time. But on the positive side having the BiP database out there for everyone to use was interesting as suddenly the general readers became aware of the millions of books in the world rather than the usual 100,000 or so you find in a smallish bookstore. Amazon wasn’t the competition - it actually did us a favour as customers would come in with printouts from the Amazon side complete with ISBN, etc for books that quite often were off the core-stock radar.

Now Amazon in the US are starting a new service where you can search inside certain books, which is something booksellers haven’t been able to do before. And it would be utterly invaluable. An obvious and frequent use is finding which edition of ‘Selected Poems’ by A. Poet a certain poem crops up in - that was always a bugger to find. Once this service is up and running properly (only 120,000 books so far, which is a tiny smidgen of what it should be) and operating on the UK site I’d imagine many bookshops will be using the Amazon site on the shop floor. But not Waterstone’s because they don’t have web access.

Via Ben H

I see Apple have finally released the G4 iBook and, assuming I gather enough cash together, I’ll be getting one in the new year. The plan will then be to go wi-fi with my old iMac plugged into the airport basestation and cards in both the iBook and Sam’s Wintel laptop. After the farce of my last networking experiment I’m keen to get this one right, so has anyone else using the airport to network a Windows PC and was it a painful or painless process? It looks like it should work okay…

At ten past four Concorde was due to take off and leave Birmingham so we all went back out into the cold (the first really cold day of the new winter, in case you didn’t notice it) to watch. As luck would have it the plane was parked right outside the hanger where I work in perfect profile and looked a lot more dramatic even than when it landed. At first nothing was going on - Concorde was surrounded by relatively small vehicles and lots of people in yellow hi-viz jackets all doing airport things.

Suddenly there was a low murmur as the engines were fired up and a shimmer of heat, about as long as the engines themselves, emerged from the rear of the plane. Over the next ten minutes the volume gradually increased along with the length of the shimmer until it was longer than the plane itself. As the noise got so loud we had to shout over it Concorde started moving forwards and turned away from us. And this is where it got really odd. As the rear of the plane turned in our direction, so that the wave of heat blasted us like a really large hair dryer (this is from a good 500 feet away), the sound dropped to nothing. It was totally unreal. These two massive Rolls-Royce jet engines made not one decibel of sound when they were pointing right at us. Nothing. And then as the plane continues turning the noise came back louder than before. No-one there knew why this was and if anyone knows PLEASE let me know!

Concorde then began the long taxi to the end of the runway and out of out sight for five minutes, then suddenly a sound that was both familiar yet completely new to me in it’s intensity as it began to accelerate into view. It was the kind of volume that envelopes you rendering your senses pointless and overwhelmed. I imagine this is what an explosion is like, only this was controlled and extended. Flames licked out of the exhaust as the plane lifted off the runway and began the ascent, and as the noise faded into the distance it seemed to get even more intense.

Wow. Bloody wow!

All very exciting at work today. As you may know, Concorde was taken out of service recently and before it goes to the scrapheap / museum at the end of the month it’s doing a tour of all the British international airports, starting with Birmingham! So at 11.40 we all popped out to the front of the hanger and stood there waiting. After a bit someone announced it was going to be another 20 minutes so we all went back into the warm for a bit. Twenty minutes later and we’re all outside again shivering and waiting. Suddenly there’s a slightly different and somewhat louder aircraft engine noise and Concorde gently glides overhead and into the distance. We stand there for a bit longer wating for the actual landing which seems to take forever, but I guess Concorde has a wide turning circle. Then suddenly it was there, gracefully landing right in front of me. I’d never seen it in the ‘flesh’ before and while it was essentially just a plane it was still rather special. Smaller than you’d expect and very fragile looking compared to all the jumbos about the place. It’ll be here for the day and then off again at four. And, yes, I forgot my bloody camera…

BBC news report.

The cat had an epileptic fit today. Macy is Sam’s cat and comes with the house, something I’m very happy about as I’ve never been able to have a pet in while renting and my somewhat transient lifestyle hasn’t really allowed it, plus the contact with animals on the farm had awoken something in me.
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An absence of posting, indicating a reluctance to put things in words due to an inability to fully comprehend said things.

I appear, somehow and without intending for it to happen, to have aquired myself a career. I hadn’t shaved for a few weeks and was going to work in jeans and t-shirts but still my boss asked me if I wanted to stay on until the new year. I turned him down twice due to the commute, the fact of another job lined up and the general sense of brain melt derived from data entry. He asked again and I rather cheekilly asked what was in it for me. He told me. I related this to my brother in law, a worker in the computer programming industry, who implied I’d be a fucking moron not to jump at this opportunity. So the next day I said yes.
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Well, this site (along with BugPowder) is suffering from comment spam with wankers leaving link-laden comments on random posts to try and boost their google ratings. The only surprise it how long it’s taken for this phenomena to kick off and the implications are dire with commenting systems going the same way as usenet, etc.

And I don’t have the time to keep on top of it all. I’m currently reluctant to shut off comments completely though it’s a possibility.

Arsehole, the lot of them..

Although having said that it’s mainly been babies these last couple of years. Anyway, my old housemate and good mate in general, James, just let it be known he’s getting married at some point. So congrats to him and Abby.

Unfortunately I’m bloody knackered at the end of a long week to write much more. I never thought a desk job would be so tiring but because my body is doing bugger all it’s not tired so I haven’t been getting to sleep all week while my brain is fried from data entry. I’ve even been watching cable TV, it’s been that bad… Otherwise everything is fucking-A and proceeding nicely to some celestial plan of which I approve. Tomorrow I pick up the rest of my stuff from mum (couldn’t carry stuff like winter coat, spare sheets, etc last time) while visiting the niece in Banbury, and then on Sunday I’m reunited with my iMac which I lent to chum Kath in March so she could set herself up as a professional photographer. That being accomplished I can have it back, which is great as I’m suffering not-having-my-own-computer blues.

And then we’re going to get broadband…

Just finished Stone Junction by Jim Dodge, a nice thick-ish book that was supposed to last a week’s worth of bus journeys but it was too damn good. Highly recommended though I can’t really do it justice in a paragraph. All I’ll say is it’s up there with the very few books I rate very highly (Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Underworld, New York Trilogy to name but three). The other nice thing about the book was how I came across it.
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And so to work. My instructions were to go to an address on the Coventry Road leading out to the airport (and Coventry, naturally) and after an hour on the buses in and out of Brum I walked up and rang on the bell of an office block only to be told that Tony, my contact, didn’t work here, the admin office - he worked at the airport. Which made a stunning amount of common sense given the nature of my job (Stock Controller). So I phoned the agency and the sense hit home there. They phoned ahead and I started walking the three miles out to airstrip land.
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Left the house at 10.00am and four an a half hours later I was in Brentford, west London. Bear in mind I never had to wait more than 10 minutes for a bus/train because it could have taken much longer. But then the Silverlink train service from Brum to London charges a sensible fare for a reason - it spends two hours meandering around the shires before deciding it might just bumble on down to Euston.
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