Laurence

Until the end and back again
Defiant to the last man
Until there’s nothing left to fight against
No surrender

I just got the new VNV Nation album. Did I hear these lyrics whilst listening to it?

Quick review of the album: some catchy songs, but it sounds even more like the last one than the last one did. Get Grotesque Consumers by Exocet, which I did at the same time, it’s frakking awesome.

The scene in The Empire Strikes Backwhere Han Solo gets tortured by Darth Vader...

...always reminds me of raclettes:

Or should it be the other way round?

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The prize for the crap Christmas decorations for this year goes to: the temporary ice rink on Haven Green. Next year I'll get some of these printed as bad Christmas cards.

On Sunday 10 August, A Country Walk II is happening. It'll be either the Henley via Stonor Circular route or Henley via Hambleden Circular route, depending on what we feel like doing on the while on the train. The format will be something along the lines of (a) walking, (b) looking at things and (c) going to the pub. All while in the countryside.

Logistics:. Meet at Paddington Station at 1030 to catch the 1044, changing at Twyford to Henley-on-Thames at 1150. Snack food can be purchased at the M&S food hall or Sainsburys at Paddington Station. Bringing some water is recommended. We should be back for the early evening.

Sign yourself up on the Facebook event page, comment below or just turn up. Before the train departs.

_jon_: I have a map :-)

The Curse of the Pink Bunny, originally uploaded by LaurenceTucker.

With a pink bunny.

Edit: As of this morning, the bunny has gone, the curse notice remains.

A couple of interesting (to me, anyway) arts/media/music events. I've booked a ticket for the raster-noton night at the ICA, the others don't need booking.

NetAudio taster event at Shunt, 21-23 May. Thinking of going Wednesday or (less likely) Thursday.

12 years: raster-noton with Signal, Alva Noto, Byetone, Frank Bretschneider, Kangding Ray + more at the ICA on 30 May (Friday). This should be interesting, raster-noton is the label which Ryoji Ikeda is on who, if you haven't had your ear bent by me, is the awesomely cool ultra minimal Japanese musician / sound artist.

And finally, No URL for this one as pulled off the CAS email list, a talk by Anna Valentina Murch "Recent Large-Scale Public Artwork" at the Garwood Lecture Theatre, South Wing, UCL, 12 June, arrive 1730, lecture at 1800.

Anna Valentina Murch is an artist who works primarily with the medium of light and whose work focuses on creating places that lead the viewer on a sensory and psychological journey that measures time and provokes memory. Since 1980, her work has been involved with designing and building large public art projects, sometimes working collaboratively with architects, engineers and other artists. These large-scale public works incorporate ambient elements such as light, water and sound, to create experiential places. This has allowed her to take her personal creative investigations to another level by widening the focus to explore the definition of place and venues for community interaction.

Anyone?

Last weekend, on the way back to King's Cross station after the pub, jonnytuna led us to a geocache he maintained and using a combination of alchohol memory, a mobile internet connection and (at about the time we found it) Sam's GPS, discovered it with a few years of log comments in it. I knew of geocaching before, but it was more fun than I expected and combining being outside with a geeky/mappy activity may prove irresistable to me. I've found that Garmin have their own frontend to Geocaching.com which lets you dump the caches into one of their handsets straight from the website. Neat. So I've put some into the GPS to find around Whitby. Also just arrived is a 1:25 000 map of Whitby to navigate to Robin Hood's bay to with at least emperor_tamarin. There's also a suprising amount of bog & heathland around Whitby.

Also properly discovered something I vaguely knew but only recently used properly, Openstreetmap. It's a completely open source/wiki map, created by uploading GPS track logs and annotating them. London appears to be near 100% mapped which, now I've uploaded it into the GPS lets me hit 'Find', select a pub/restaurant/something and it will guide you there. That's a use of space technology I highly approve of, but the OSM project itself is quite remarkable.

The next Dorkbot London has been announced at Limehouse Town Hall on 23 April. Looks like some good stuff (see URL for list of talks), one of which is Eric Raymond (not that one) doing a talk on Schematic, organised by the Kinetica Museum. I can't make the opening night due to Whitby, but it runs until 2 June so I'll be going some time soon afterwards. Comment if you want to come. Or just turn up, I suppose.

Had a good weekend - the work in the Gothic exhibition ranged from the very good (Tessa Farmer, Liane Lang, Kate MccGwire) to the not so good, but there was certainly enough to keep it interesting. Then followed by a lovely snap meal out at Clifton and then to Unjust Deserts which was very good and all the better for being unplanned. Am feeling like I need a weekend now, thank fsck it's only a 4 day week.

The BBC needs more Perl programmers: description and application here. Short version is web application development in Perl and you'd be expected to know that one pretty well (i.e. OO and mod_perl, not just script hacking), Unix (Linux/Solaris) and relational databases. And the BBC is a nice place to work.

Mass of one paper cup = 10.1g [New Scientist]

Number of paper cups required to make 5×10⁵g of waste = 49505

Number and quantity of tea required to generate this many cups, assuming 365.25 days per year and 250ml per cup: 135.5 cups of tea, or 33.9 litres per day.

I think that's probably a fatal dose of tea, even allowing for the slightly diuretic effects of caffeine making it harder to hyperhydrate. Assuming a more reasonable 6 cups of tea per day, on a working year of (say) 200 days that's 1200 cups of tea in a year, producing 12120 g of waste using paper cups. To make half a tonne, this would take 41 years, by which time my first paper cup will be well on the way to biodegrading and I'll be 70 and hopefully retired. I don't know how long a paper cup would last as a pen holder, but at a guess it would take several centuries to produce half a tonne of paper cup waste from storing pens. Hmm.

So now I know what happens when a washing machine loses its water level detector switch, overfills the drum and then continues to attempt to fill the kitchen. Damn. Well, the floor's mostly dry now and I've got the water and my clothes out of the machine. But I really didn't want to have to buy a new washing machine; it's got to be one of the dullest things in the world.

At least I can use my iron again. Dudes, this totally SUCKS.

Seeing djsynne's post about St. Pancras, I procrastinated writing my up to date CV for a bit, nipped to the box of old photos and scanned these negatives in. These will be from about ten years ago and are inside St. Pancras Chambers themselves. Not the greatest photos in the world, but they're kind of interesting. I'd like to see what they look like now most of the redevelopment work has been completed.

( More pictures... )

I've just got these pictures back from a professional printing and graphics firm done in nice A3 sort of size and...wow. The quality...the colour...the definition. I'd only ever got digital photos printed on ordinary photo sizes on Fuji Frontier machines and they're not too bad, but these are something else entirely. Very pleased, and definitely going to do more of them :-)

Of course, it's me doing this, so something's gone wrong. The framing people put the wire on one of them 90° out, so it's got to go back. Argh!

Awesome party. Tagged up on Facebook, otherwise Flickr set or clicky...:

It seems to be changeover season for just about every gallery in the world, and I want to go and see these, preferably with enough organisation to avoid a mad rush in late December/early January to try and cram the whole lot into a single day. Anyone else interested in any of this stuff? I've even made an easy to use poll. Dates to actually go TBA...

Interested in....

Anything else coming up?