7/29/2004 12:54:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|Brought to you by Marconi I am typing this sitting at the foot of the Maroni Memorial column on the cliffs at Poldhu Point. From a small building a few hundred feet to the north east, on the 12th December 1901, the letter 'S' was transmitted out over the Atlantic. This repeated burst of three 'dots', from what was then the world's most powerful transmitter, was clearly received by Marconi himself in a small room over looking east over the Atlantic from Signal Hill in Newfoundland, Canada. With this seemingly simple feat, Marconi and his company conquered the challenge of wireless communication over long distances. It seems fitting to type this at the same site, despite the strong offshore breeze and nosey coastal path walkers, knowing that when I hit SEND in VersaMail on T3 it will transmit this post by the Bluetooth and cellular technologies that are the direct descendents of Marconi's pioneering transmissions. In doing so, I can only marvel at the man's vision and tenacity in making that groundbreaking leap 103 years ago. remotebignoseduglyguy with Palm T3 and SE T610 |W|P|109110208602365083|W|P|Brought to you by Marconi|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/29/2004 12:52:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|Sunday passed in a blur, with the usual frenetic level of activity that our family of six manage to maintain during the first week of any holiday. We have friends who live in the area, with whom we want to spend time catching up on news and events. Making contact wasn't easy at first as they were, understandably, always out and about. Given the patchy nature of mobile phone coverage in these parts (tops of hills; centres of towns; most places on the A30), we eventually resorted to the simple expedient of leaving a note on their door. A few time-lapsed text messages later and we were finally reunited with said friends, enjoying a wander on the beach at Polurrian Cove followed by tea round the kitchen Aga afterwards. Another text message from my Swiss niece reminded us that she and her boyfriend were in the vicinity on a camping holiday and that we were to meet up for the evening, before they began the long drive back to Switzerland. And so, with a little shuttling backwards and forwards, we, the friends and the extended family gathered at the local pub for extremely large and filling meals and a fair amount of foaming ale. Monday morning proved to be overcast in a light grey sort of way so the niece and boyfriend headed over from their campsite to have a full English breakfast with us before embarking on the first leg of their journey home - a short hop to Dartmoor. Rather than gamble on the beach in such weather, we instead visited the BT satellite earth station on Goonhilly Down. Goonhilly is the largest earth station in the world, one of many facts that were lost on SWMBO. That these antennae have been instrumental in transmitting groundbreaking historic TV pictures, not to mention carrying millions of phone calls and internet connections daily stirred not one sprog's soul. Whilst my inner geek railed against such ignorance, the Luddites happily shopped for, of all things, non-toxic slime ('Fun for All Ages!') or played on the jungle slide in the kid's adventure area. This area lay beneath the shadow cast by the thousand plus tons of Arthur (which can rotate an impressive 360 degrees in under three minutes), the first parabolic antenna which received the first faltering signals from the Telstar satellite in 1962. When the familial mutterings and murmerings became a roar of dissent, I threw in the towel. The afternoon was taken up with a bracing clifftop walk until the moaning from the kids became unbearable and drove us homeward. Having worked up a decent hunger, I set to and whipped up a turkey balti with a mushroom and courgette curry and piles of steaming basmati rice. This, consumed with a few bottles of red wine, proved to be a hit with all and we all headed for bed with full stomachs and light heads. After a dash for essential provisions at the local supermarket, I made a quick visit to the FireWire internet cafe in Helston on Tuesday morning. Although my T3 and T610 provide decent enough browsing for low grade tasks, I was in need of high speed access and serious processing power. Having given over half the previous week to advising on the filming of a corporate training video, I needed to download the rushes via ftp so I could view the first rough cuts of the material we shot. Firewire appears to be a new venture, being a clean, almost sparse setup in what was the town's fire station. However, the coffee wasn't bad and the service was good - helped by the fact I was the only customer. After a few abortive attempts from the regular customer setup on one of the PCs, the chap kindly booted the machine with an admin profile and I was soon downloading large mpeg files fairly swiftly thanks to the 1mb DSL connection. Reviews conplete and emails to the production company sent, I headed back to the cottage to scoop up the family and drive over to St. Ives. Despite high hopes of the weather clearing, it remained grey and unsettled so, after the long downhill walk from the car park to the very crowded harbour area, we contented ourselves with eating our packed lunch - and a Cornish pasty in my case - sitting on the harbour wall above the small sandy beach. Anyone keen to dine al fresco in St. Ives should be warned that such activities are not without consdierable hazard. Any foodstuff that is left exposed to the sky for long will become the target for the flocks of scavenging seagulls, who have refined their technique to near-perfection. The first gull will carry out an experimentary sortie, flying close to the intended victim to test their reactions. If no response is shown, it or a second gull will circle and swoop again, this time aiming for the food concerned and, more often than not, knock it from the diner's grasp and onto the sand. If successful, the remainder of the flock will swoop in to fight over the hijacked pasty or chips before returning to their perches to start the process all over again. This being the case, the harbourside is thronged with folks hunched over their food like starving Quasimodos, nervously casting glances over their shoulders for peasants with pitchforks. Tiring of watching humankind being upstaged by seabirds, we wandered back along to the western harbourwall. Here a number hand painted signs promoted the skills of the New Age artisans who now gravitate to seaside honeypots like St. Ives each year, in this case, hairbraiders, henna artists and an Indian head masseur. With four female sprogs, hairbraiding is now as much a part of our summer holidays as arguments over what to do each day, so I gamely forked over the cash and joined the other crop headed dads making lame jokes about having their crewcuts braided and beaded. An hour's labour produced some admittedly very nicely decorated hair, the comparisons of which diverted the sprogs from moaning about the long uphill haul back to the car park. Drained from the day's inactivity and inertia, we opted for eating out and plumped for fish and chip suppers in a twee little place in Mullion. The food was great and service charming if a little kooky. When asked what we would like to drink, we said 'A beer, a lager and four Cokes for the sprogs please'; which is why we were a little taken aback when we were served with a beer, a lager and four black coffees. OK, so maybe we mumbled or were misheard but who the heck gives scalding black coffee to a three year old? That aside, the meal put a smile on our faces and we departed happy and contented. Yesterday was a lazy day with a little shopping in the morning and an afternoon on the beach with friends for SWMBO and the sprogs. As previously posted, I spent a couple of hours wandering around the small but excellent Marconi exhibition, talking to the radio hams from the Poldhu Amateur Radio Club who staff the facility. Whilst I was there, a couple of American enthusiasts, who had brought their licences with them, were busy talking with friends back home and around the globe from the club's transmitting room. Watching them, it occurred to me that very few hobbies offered practitioners the opportunity to demonstrate their skill and prowess at the exact birthplace of the technology they used in their pastime. remotebignoseduglyguy with Palm T3 and SE T610 |W|P|109110192105991206|W|P|Cornish Pastiche 4|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/28/2004 04:23:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|Day Three - Settling In One of the certainties of booking accomodation from brochures is that, even when you know that nothing is ever as it appears in the publicity material, one always hopes that this place will be the one to vindicate your blind faith in the process. It would seem that this year is not the year for such vindication. Allow me to briefly deconstruct just a couple of the myriad descriptions for you. Firstly, the phrase 'located on a working farm' means that your chosen holiday home is just one of many income-generating sidelines that the farmer has to supplement the EU subsidies he receives for ploughing barren land and ripping out 600 year old hedgerows. Other activities include something furtive in a barn at the back of the farm and any landscaping or gardening that can be done from a sitting position inside a JCB digger. The second piece of hyperbole, namely that the house 'has a distinct Olde Worlde ambience', is holiday-let code for 'This property is riddled with rising damp, dry root and has been decorated in a half-hearted and slapdash fashion'. The first two give rise to a highly persistent musty odour was has not been entirely eradicated by the third, leading one to suspect that problem areas are simply painted over rather than dealt with. This impression is hardly confounded by the letting company, who have carefully inserted small 'get out of jail' caveats throughout the brochure, warning that Cornish properties are often frequented by spiders and insects and will 'seem' damp due to 'the prevailing climatic conditions' in the area. remotebignoseduglyguy with Palm T3 and SE T610 |W|P|109102820872367248|W|P|Cornish Pastiche 3|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/26/2004 01:57:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|Day Two - Somerset to Cornwall After a monster breakfast, more chat and fond goodbyes, we skirted the edge of Taunton and rejoined the streams of like-minded souls on the the M5, heading towards the sunny South West. Not long after slipping across the county border into Cornwall, the inevitable happened and we rolled slowly to a halt behind a few thousand others queuing on the A30 to get to the far south of the county. It took all of two seconds to decide to cut across to the next exit and head across country and, having done so, we pottered in the direction of St Austell until the lure of a pub lunch. There is something particularly English about a pub lunch and the need we have to differentiate it from any other lunch. The phrase immediately conjures up old staples such as ploughman's lunch (Cheddar, Stilton or Ham), steak & kidney pie (with Chips or New Potatoes) and scampi and chips (with garnish & lemon). However, these days, with pub chefs inspired by the likes of Jamie, Nigella and Gordon, one is more likely to find the menu sporting exotic fare like Thai green curry (with fragrant lemon grass rice), Japanese-style (sic) tempura and Cajun chicken gumbo. Being fairly adventutous home cooks ouserlves, we eschewed such fare and stuck to a variety of '...and chips' dishes that filled us up nicely - though, I noted, at more than twice the cost of the previous day's Little Chef binge. The remaining hours of the last leg of the journey consisted of fast stretches on open roads, interspersed with slow crawls through the towns en route before we, at last, turned down a narrow lane and started looking for our holiday home. remotebignoseduglyguy with Palm T3 and SE T610 |W|P|109084662026535228|W|P|Cornish Pastiche 2|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/25/2004 01:56:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|Day One - London to Somerset Driving through London and out onto the M4 was easy for, whilst the late morning traffic was heavy, the route is one I commute every day. After a Little Chef lunch - often the highlight of the journey for the sprogs - we continued to Bristol and swung left onto the M5 - and straight into one of the monster tailbacks that the motorway is known for. As our overnight stop as just off a junction further down the same route, there was little to be done except grin and bear it. After a couple of hours of what I call 'concertina' driving, where cars repeatedly bunch up and then spread out, we turned off the motorway and headed across the Somerset Levels. Five miles of narrow roads following the tidal dykes and rivers past small huddles of houses built with burnt orange and red brick brought us to a beautiful looking house surrounded by lush gardens and over looking the river. The home of friends who had fled North London a year back for a quieter, more relaxed life in the countryside surrounding Taunton, the house was straight out of a painting. A 300 yearold cottage that had been added to and altered over the years, it was idyllic and we made suitably jealous noise as we flopped around the farmhouse table slurping Earl Grey whilst the kids vanished to various parts of the house to get acquainted. More friends pitched up shortly after and so, with a total of 17 people, the hours that followed were filled with catching up on news, eating too much, drinking even more and generally winding down and getting into the holiday mood. The gathering was not planned - we and the other visitors had called to ask to stay over on the same date within a day of each other - but the mix made for interesting company. Between us, we could count a GP, a middle manager, two hassled mums, a well-know session musician and a hand therapist, so the conversations ranged far and wide until the small hours and then some. Not surprisingly, sleep came very easily. remotebignoseduglyguy with Palm T3 and SE T610 |W|P|109076017163244159|W|P|Cornish Pastiche - Part 1|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/25/2004 09:34:00 pm|W|P|Blogger Kenny|W|P|I did that drive once straight off a transatlantic flight. Never again.

And I hope you took in an all-day breakfast at the Little Chef; that is the most quality breakfast ever.7/22/2004 09:58:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|Bags are packed. Coolie box is chilled. Flat has been cleaned and tidied. Directions, maps and traffic info printed. Parents not talking after arguing for days on end. Kids are pretending to sleep but are too excited to do so. Tyres have been pumped up and the fuel tank filled on the 806. Just one more restless sleep and we'll be on the way to our summer holiday. Two last things to mention:
  1. Any criminals planning on exploiting our absence should know that we have friends flatsitting and pet feeding whilst we are away.
  2. I would ask anyone who appears in my Bloglines bloglist to the right, to cease posting for 15 days so I don't have to wade through a veritable backlog mountain when I get back.
The next post you're like to read will be from Chievely Services on the M4, where we'll be either:
  1. Cursing each other for having left the luxury accomodation details on the kitchen worktop or
  2. Waiting for the man from Green Flag to deal with something expensive like this.
Now, where's that Saint Christopher? |W|P|109053318202299005|W|P||W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/22/2004 06:08:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|There were red faces at the offices of Cycling Plus magazine following a typo error in the May edition in an article outlining a cycle route.
"There is the option to dismount, wank along the pavement and cross the main road at a safe point."
Cycling Plus claim the fault occurred at the printers and not with them. From a discussion about pedestrians on cycle paths on a mail list I read.|W|P|109051611583640779|W|P|Not the Tour de France|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/22/2004 07:33:00 pm|W|P|Blogger Jason|W|P|OMG! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

It reminds me of the time when the local paper printed the headline: "Prostate Cancer Most Common in Men" on the front page.7/20/2004 10:49:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|I shall soon be heading off for a little rest and recuperation in a quiet hamlet in a far flung corner of this fair land. One benefit of the location will be the lack of on-tap internet access. I say benefit because I desperately need an enforced break from my online activities to give my arm and wrist a real chance to recover from the increasingly frequent bouts of repetitive strain injury. However, I am a realist and know that I'll be wanting to send a few mails, check out the weather reports and look up information to help plan days out. With this in mind, I thought it would be wise to check my new mobile + T3 + Palm Portable Keyboard combination before I leave - just to make sure that I can post 'postcards' here if the mood takes me. The fact you're reading this would seem to indicate that my new mobile setup works a treat. -- remotebignoseduglyguy with Palm T3 and SE T610 |W|P|109036014033123383|W|P|Downtime|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/22/2004 12:18:00 pm|W|P|Blogger zoe|W|P|have a great time!7/19/2004 11:30:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|DefaultMail is an 11kb app that allows you to do something that Windows XP won't let you do - set the default email client on a per-user basis. Hats off to Ramesh.|W|P|109027624939749418|W|P|DefaultMail|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/19/2004 07:11:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|As a kite flying father, I can only agree with Robin - and add that, if you take kids kite flying, you'll have no time to fly your own super expensive kite - you know, the one SWMBO doesn't know the real cost of.|W|P|109026068196072453|W|P|Been there, done this|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/20/2004 09:34:00 pm|W|P|Blogger zoe|W|P|i am afraid of kites - but not the birds, strangely.7/19/2004 06:02:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|With a highly capable team at work and the family vacation looming, I have decided that, for the first time in years, the company cellphone will be ceremoniously switched off and slung in a drawer for the duration of the holiday. Along with the family, I am looking forward to lazy days paddling on the beach, long pub lunches, gentle walks in shady valleys and all things stress-free and bucolic whilst staying near friends in Cornwall. However, as a fully paid up geek, blogger and all round connected bloke, the thought of surviving two weeks without a phone, let alone internet access with my T3 via Bluetooth and GPRS, was really too much to contemplate. There is always the option of borrowing one of the three Virgin Sendos that keep SWMBO and the sprogs connected for the odd call but, as they entry level models, I'd be lost for any sort of data connectivity, let alone Bluetooth so it is a bit of a non-starter. When I factored in the realisation that I hadn't bought a geek toy for over six months, there was only really one course of action left open to me...
Well, after what has been a fairly difficult month for various reasons, I thought a small spot of retail therapy was in order. All things being equal and given a fair wind, the courier should have my new Sony Ericsson T610 to me by close of play tomorrow. The six-ten comes highly recommended by my good friend and fellow blogger, Roger, which is doubly comforting as he also use his 610 with a T3 so I need not worry about compatibility issues between the two units. Having arranged delivery to my office, I then remembered that I shall be 'on location' tomorrow at London's Heathrow Airport, overseeing the filming of a corporate training video. So, hopefully, it will be in the safe hands of Hamish, the security officer, by the time I've finished. - unless he's faked my signature and eBay'd it by then.|W|P|109026004313210052|W|P|Answering the call|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/20/2004 10:50:00 pm|W|P|Blogger bignoseduglyguy|W|P|I'm liking it so far - especially the seemless integration with my T3 - bliss after the shitty SPV Windoze phone.7/17/2004 06:05:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|"Hindus who would normally burn the bodies of their dead relatives have buried them tonight. Some parents are saying that cannot bear to put these burnt bodies into fire again." As a parent, I cannot begin to conceive of the pain, distress, anger and utter dispair that will inhabit every breath and heartbeat of those who have lost their children in the Indian school fire. Having read the accounts in today's news, I find it hard to shake the eyewitness testimony. "Parents are looking at their dead children. It is heart-rending. Thousands have gathered here ... it is a grave tragedy." "Parents were crying, beating their chests and calling out for their children," "Parents are wailing as they try to identify their children's bodies" "The parents are rushing through the last rites as they cannot bear to look at the charred bodies any more." Periodically, I make my kids run through fire and escape drills in our house and I encourage you to do the same - can they (or you for that matter) find the keys for the back door or slip the anti-burglar latch on the doubleglazed windows with their eyes shut? You'd be surprised how unfriendly your home is when you're robbed of sight and a fire alarm is screeching in your ear. This may strike you as bordering on the obsessive so I should explain why I do this. Some years ago, I spent two days with Hampshire Fire and Rescue training as a fire and rescue marshal. On the second day, after much fire hosing, extinguishing and coaching on escape techniques, we were given firefighter's tunics and taken to a room in the middle of the top floor 'flat' of the training tower below.
Once there, we were left on our own. Over the next few minutes, the temperature was raised to close to unbearable (imagine extremely hot sauna and then some), artificial smoke swept through the rooms as sorched air was pumped through the tower...and then the lights went out. The subsequent minutes, when I and a couple of colleagues tried, and barely succeeded, to find our way out of the 'flat' and down to safety, made a significant impression on me. Despite knowing that I was on a training exercise overseen by some of the best firefighters in the world, I was extremely frightened, convinced the exercise had gone wrong and the fire was real, such was the impact of the noise and heat upon my senses . Controlling the urge to panic and instead focus on systematically shuffling and searching until finding the exit was amongst the hardest things I have ever done. It is for this reason that tonight, whilst making sure the keys are in the same agreed spot and the smoke alarms are working, I will have a good thought for the lost children and bereaved parents and relatives of Kumbakonam.|W|P|109008513705971718|W|P|Unimaginable|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/18/2004 06:59:00 pm|W|P|Blogger zoe|W|P|following your post i think that i'll move our sledgehammer closer to the kitchen door ... but are we ever safe ?7/17/2004 03:49:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|Blogger has introduced a WYSI-M-WYG or "What You See Is Mostly What You Get option. This means that you can now embolden, italicise, do a whole range of colours, create
  • unordered
  • bullet
or, if you prefer,
  1. numbered
  2. bullet
  3. lists
not to mention add
blockquotes
and format text in fonts like Lucida, Trebucet, Times, Verdana and Georgia in sizes ranging from tiny to huge, all without a scrap of HTML or CSS knowledge. For those like me who are set in their ways and are used to or prefer to hardcode their posts, the Edit HTML function remains. A lifesaver for such folks is that regardless of whether you hardcode or use the WYSI-M-WYG compose feature, Blogger remembers which interface you last used - or so it seems from my tests so far in Firefox. This is just as well, as the comments here would seem to indicate that there are a few compatibility issues to be ironed out. Another heads-up for Firefox users is that there is a known bug that causes the 'Publish' progress page to display 0% even when your post has successfully uploaded though I have found that judicious cache clearing helps. Another issue apears to be a clash between the two options where one knocks out the text wrapping set by the other, which requires manual intervention to correct.|W|P|109007579324572360|W|P|New full fat Blogger|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/17/2004 12:24:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|London, or this part of London at least, has just had a sudden and fairly impressive hailstorm. Big ploppy rain turned to marble-sized hail and for a full 5 minutes, it hailed with varying intensity. Ever concerned for the livestock and crops - OK, the rabbits, guinea pigs, tomatoes and chili plants - I bravely sheltered in the bedroom and took pictures.
Sprog Two, without a thought for her own safety, dashed outside and retrieved one of the icy meteorites for further analysis.
Must stop there as I'm off to panic-buy gluten-free penne and balsamic vinegar at Asda in case Monday proves to be The Day After Tomorrow, if you know what I mean.|W|P|109006349730267033|W|P|All Hail!|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/17/2004 04:05:00 pm|W|P|Blogger pigpogm|W|P|There's something splendidly funny about panic buying "gluten-free penne and balsamic vinegar".7/14/2004 01:37:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|
According to the caption above from this BBC story, the gentleman above is not a millionnaire actor and right wing politician but is, in fact, Alyn Hockey who is the technical director of Clearswift, the company behind MIMESweeper. A case of separated at birth perhaps?|W|P|108980865708535596|W|P|Caption fatique|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/13/2004 04:52:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|Can someone out there, who has read the whole of this news report please explain to me how the sentence represents justice in any way, shape or form and how, in the light of that sentence, one is to maintain any faith in the judiciary whatsoever?|W|P|108973395368836547|W|P|Tipping the scales|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/13/2004 06:15:00 pm|W|P|Blogger Kenny|W|P|I saw that and was incredulous too. Beggars belief.7/10/2004 05:00:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|We have good friends heading over for a meal tonight, so I decided to prepapre the majority of a select handful of our favourite Indian dishes early. With this cunning plan, I can concentrate on the talking and drinking this evening rather than slaving away in the kitchen. Assembling the ingredients for roti, prawn puri, chicken hariyali, masala khumbi and Afghan chilau, I discovered that I had run out of my usual red chili paste. A quick dash across the road to my local Bengali soon solved this problem and I returned with a large bunch of fresh coriander, a bag of fiercesome green Asian chilis and a small jar of red chili paste. I must admit that 99.8% of my buying decision was down to the simple Anglo-Bengali label which simply proclaims: Very Hot with no fuss or exclamation marks.
Having dipped a finger to have a good taste during cooking, I can verify that, in a similar fashion to a certain brand of woodcare products, Mr Naga's paste is exactly what it says on the tin...and how. Very rich and very hot. If you are partial to cooking food from the Indian subcontinent[1] or simply a chilihead, it is well worth seeking out. If you are unable to track it down, fear not because it can be bought online here. [1] If you are and you haven't stumbled across the UFDI newsgroup yet, I can thoroughly recommend the group as a great resource and forum for all things related to food from the Indian subcontinent and Indian restaurant cooking. |W|P|108947637853940796|W|P|Respect to Mr. Naga|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/10/2004 02:32:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|Those with long memories will recall that I trialled and raved about Oddpost's innovative webbased email client back in September last year. Although I later dropped it due to the fact that it was incompatible with Firefox (it requires IE to function), I liked the functionality and wrote to the developers encoraging them to take the idea to a wider audience. Well, it seems that Oddpost are doing just that, though not quite in the manner I had anticipated because they have just been acquired by Yahoo! and seem delirious with the union. Given that Yahoo! have just revamped their mail service in recent weeks, one wonders how long it will take for the Oddpost innovations to see daylight again.|W|P|108946634305279240|W|P|YaOddHooPost|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/10/2004 12:00:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|As someone who is interested in personal productivity methods and techniques, my eye was caught by the picture of a 'mind map' type image whilst surfing local news stories this morning. It would seem that 'Britain's worst stalker', who has just been jailed for his crimes, used a rudimentary mind map to plan his campaign against the 'Fascist Horde', those legal and halthcare professionals he imagined were plotting against him. I can't help wondering what Tony Buzan would make of it. Whilst one accepts that the Buzan Centre's assertion that mindmapping will help 'unleash the remaining 99% of your brain' is, to some extent, marketing hyperbole, the possibilities of those with sociapathic or stalking tendencies using such techniques to further their own ends will not offer much comfort to the subjects of their obsessions. Move over Minette Waters and Ian Rankin, I feel a novel coming on... |W|P|108945723452003430|W|P|(Unsound) mind maps|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/09/2004 08:48:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|Fellow productivity practitioner and blogger Ian has collected together a select clutch of quotations concerning procrastination. You could go over there now...or you could maybe do it tomorrow.|W|P|108940249987123895|W|P|Smart quotes from a messy desk|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/06/2004 11:25:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|Watching the BBC4 documentary John Martyn: Johnny Too Bad, I wondered how on earth I'd ever lost track of John Martyn and his music. A little careful mental backtracking brought the realisation that when my last turntable died and didn't get replaced, I simply stopped listening to vinyl. The programme was as entertaining as it was enlightening and was a very pleasurable way to spend an hour - rediscovering old tracks I half remembered and hearing earlier work I'd never heard. As someone who is usually labelled a folk artist, Martyn is ten times more rock and roll than any of the usual so-called hellraisers. Although being pissed, wrecked, argumentative half the time and in possession of a schoolboy's sense of humour the other isn't meant to be big or clever, there is a part of me that sneakingly admires him for this. Wanting to fill in a few gaps after the programme, I Googled for his website which is, much to my delight, not some slick A&R person's wet dream but a lovingly downbeat site tucked away on Freeserve. There, amongst the fan's Top 40 tracks, quotes and the photomontage, you'll find a great page called 'Stories' where folks have submitted their JM-related tales. One you won't find there concerns the time when Martyn verbally harangued and abused a bloke who was delivering beer to the Hammersmith pub whose bar he was barely standing at one fine evening back in the mid-eighties. Having given him a right earful, Martyn proceeded to 'let' the bloke buy him a drink in order to make up for what ever transgression he had unknowingly committed. Two pints were duly served and a barely coherent conversation ensued. I still have no idea what he said but he went for a piss and never came back so I never got a drink out of him. As I still have no turntable on which to play vinyl, I purchased a few of my favourite JM albums, erm, CDs over the weekend to enjoy all over again. The only problem is that I am now wondering what other essential albums are buried in my vinyl collection that I have forgotten about. This could be expensive.|W|P|108915274214901986|W|P|John Martyn redux|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/05/2004 10:03:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|Grahame's post about his new kitten over at tptb dragoon brought to mind another bit of cat and computer interaction involving Jessie, one of our cats. Jessie was wont to sleep on top of the monitor of my PC, curled up on the warm casing. So, when she wandered in to find me setting up a new PC earlier this year, her feline nose was put out of shape for a while. Job done, I sat back to admire the new screen and speaker setup and by doing so had a grandstand view of Jessie leaping up to reclaim her spot on top of the screen, only to disappear down the back of the desk in a tangle of cables. I had swapped the old monitor for a new flat screen. Given the sharpness of her flailing claws, I was extremely grateful that I hadn't yet removed the protective film from the screen. Jessie has never really trusted me since.|W|P|108906138869035820|W|P|Cat capers|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/04/2004 09:59:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|In the year that sees the Olympics return to Athens, it somehow seems fitting that Greece wins Euro 2004.|W|P|108897475621590723|W|P|Five rings...and a cup|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/04/2004 12:24:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|Last night's acting school get-together was a hoot. Top marks to Martin for getting us all in the same place at the same time and Lori for the venue suggestion. With his story about his Mum at the premiere of 'Chaplin' - or was it the one about going for a curry with Robert Downey Junior in Haringey - Lawrence reminded me that he truly is the Jackie Mason of Finsbury Park. Craig was gracious enough to gloss over the fact that I called him Mark for half the evening whilst Robin cruelly reminded me that I once died a thousand deaths performing Bowie's Andy Warhol. Helen saved my blushes by entertaining my opinions on Anglo-American relations before went on to recall Angie helped us recall a selection of the romantic entanglements that we had all put ourselves through. Someone, I forget who, pondered on the absence of others we knew, corresponded and worked with over the years - too busy? too famous? too shy? too aloof? - and I suddenly found myself thinking of the Britpack mawkfest 'Peter's Friends', a film about a bunch of actors having a reunion. Whilst their Oxbridge-fuelled country house reminisences were in no way reflective of our more down to earth East End flashbacks, I felt a little like one of those characters - more than happy with my lot in life but always harbouring a small desire to still be in the business. This, in turn, reminded me of the best line in Peter's Friends, where Emma Thompson, naked except for a candlewick dressing gown, implores Stephen Fry's bisexual Peter to "fill me with your little babies." Fry responds with a great line (penned by Rita Rudner): "You'd be at the top of my list, along with Michele Pfeiffer and River Phoenix." Talking of films, last night's festivities have been rush-released in .avi format for your viewing delight here and here.|W|P|108894352732651290|W|P|Didn't you used to be...?|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com7/03/2004 01:00:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|Two events this week are united by the common uses of i) the internet as the catalytic medium and ii) curry as a focal point for social interaction. On Thursday evening, I met three of those who also post regularly to the UFDI newsgroup, serving those with a burning desire for the food of the Indian subcontinent and its restaurant equivalent around the world. We all met in a great pub, The Good Samaritan, that keeps good beers properly and mostly serves the medicos and nurses of the Royal London Hospital and curryholics heading for Brick Lane. After a couple of foaming ales, we headed off, away from Brick Lane to my favourite Pakistani kebab house, The Lahore in Umberston Street, E1, There we ate heartily of the reknown lamb chops, sheek kebabs, masala fish, chicken and mutton tikka, chana, dhal, rice and roti, choosing to drink water as no-one remembered to bring their own booze - The Lahore has no drinks licence. This blowout, which can be witnessed here, cost us just £12.50 each. If anyone knows of a place which can match the quality and the value, I'd love to hear about it. Tonight, after ending a stressful week with a quiet night off yesterday, I am back out again tonight. I'm off to a small but select reunion of folks that I went to acting school with twenty two years ago. When I say select I am talking about folks that I want to see again rather than those I'd rather not bump. Reunions are usually the work of the Devil, where one has to swap life stories with folks who, it transpires only half way through their monologue, you recall you didn't particularly like back then. Tales of broken arms ("We do Val d'Isere every year"), broken dreams ("That Senior Deputy Assistant Manager job was mine until she came along with her Nino Cerruti suits") and broken marriages ("We'd been together since the third year school trip to Wales - funny that, cos now she's living with a vegan in Rhyll") abound at such events so I usually steer clear - but I digress. Tonight will see me supping more ale in the Queen's Head in Denman Street, which has an excellent comedy club upstairs, before moving a few doors down to Chowki, for 'home style' food from India. I haven't been to Chowki before so I had a look at diner's reviews on the web and found that they range from the rave to the grave. Far from being a put-off, this is a good sign for me, because The Lahore gets similar love/hate reviews. Should I survive the beer and the balti, I will report back.|W|P|108885902067754251|W|P|Curry as social engineering|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com