Flying The Flag

A couple of months ago, a lamp-post appeared outside our house. But one with nothing on the top.

I asked the guy working on it - he came from Thames Water, and was putting in a smart water-meter to monitor the new water main on our street. the meter is in the plastic bollard next to the pole.

The meter is supposed to signal back to Thames Water HQ any leaks or problems - but we have poor mobile phone signal in my street.

So they put up a tall antenna, using a normal lamp-post stem.

It looked sort of unfinished, so I put a flower-pot on the top sith a hook in it, and now we're flying a flag (it's the Cornish flag).

We'd like to fly different flags - any suggestions or offers?

Raise The Roof Singers, Horniman Museum

Raise The Roof practices at the Horniman Museum in South London. This is from their public concert, which we stumbled on, on Sunday (5 April 2009).

From the balcony, I couldn't see the choir well, but I had a good view of the energetic leader and conductor, Melanie Harrold, and couldn't resist taking a video.  

The video isn't here or on Youtube any more. Melanie got in touch to say that a film of her conducting an invisible choir didn't really get the event across properly. 

Comics: Ex Machina, Fables and Promethea....

I've been reading some comics lately. I have missed so many, and Lambeth Libraries has such a good selection - at Brixton, Streatham and West Norwood at the very least.

So, what's good?

Ex Machina, written by Brian K Vaughn, and drawn by Tony Harris, is very nice.

Like Paul Chadwick did with Concrete, Vaughn leaves the details of where Mitchell Hundred's powers come from a mystery. The main story is the politics, but the super-stuff is central to what happens.

"How would it be if you had that power?" it asks. The answer is, if this particular man could talk to machines, he'd be a rather average superhero, and then a much more interesting mayor of New York - one who says "Up and away" to lifts, and "Jam" to guns.

There is more than a nod to Paul Chadwick - Vaughn names Hundred's friend Bradbury after a science fiction writer, just as Chadwick's Concrete has a friend called Vonnegut. The drawings lose by comparison with Chadwick's style - Harris is determined to be real, making Hundred's outfit lame, and basing everyone on photos (the models get credits in volume 1). I'm three volumes into this, and want more.

Fables is a winning concept: Fairy tale beings live in exile in the Mundane world - mostly, as tends to be the way, in New York.

The good here is the way Bill Willingham plays with the characters. Prince Charming is (as we should have realised) a serial charmer, divorced from Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, but still working his charm. Beauty and the Beast live happily ever after - except he is only human when she loves him, and tends to revert when she's cross. That's not convenient after hundreds of years, when you are living in hiding...

There are at least 11 volumes of this saga apparently (and I only just heard of it!). The two I've read are pretty good.

Finally, Promethea is Alan Moore's take on myth. The other two series are comics for entertainment's sake. This one has ambitions and Moore's mighty writing mojo pulls it off.

Promethea is a story - she's from the realm of story, the Immateria. In our world, she is embodied by writers and artists. Literally embodied. Student Sophie Bangs "becomes" Promethea by writing a poem.

When people say comics are mythic, they are saying what they wish was true. In fact they are normally debased, broken myths. This one is the real thing. Moore plays the metaphors brilliantly, nodding to all the misguided pretension about images and ideas in comics, but doing the only thing that should be done: telling a story.

On one level, Promethea is as fatuously simple as Billy Batson shouting Shazam to invoke Captain Marvel, or Diana Prince turning into Wonder Woman. But in Moore's hands it's way better, with multiple threads of woven with the complexity of his Watchmen, and a contrast between reality and the unreal that owes something to Joss Whedon's Buffy. Characters dance in and out, from fairy tales and comics - to take one example, "celebrity omnipath" the Painted Doll is a better, scarier Joker.

And, magically, by taking this story so very seriously, Moore turns it into something far, far more. In volume two a goddess has sex with a magician. For a whole chapter (a whole issue of the original comic series). Before our very eyes. For me, that is a high point in comics - and fairly unusual in any sort of literature. What follows reminds me of the psychedelic comics Marvel tried to do for the whole of the 1970s (Steve Gerber and Jim Starlin, from memory), only done right.

Watchmen is a great comic from more than 20 years ago. It may also be a worthwhile movie (but Alan Moore doesn't want his name on it). Now's a good moment to see what else Alan Moore has done since. We're amphibious creatures, living in the worlds of mind and body, he says. In Promethea (up to ten years old), we're swimming in the deep end.

What are my friends like?

A bit stereotyped from the look of this...

I won't be at MWC

I'm starting full time on eWeek Europe, there's a soft launch happening, and it's half term. Have a lovely time, everyone who is in Barcelona for MWC09. I just cancelled my hostel booking.

A water rail in Brockwell Park

How rural was this? I needed to read Lark Rise to Candleford. Why? Well the series is delicious, and I love to drool over the hats and late Victorian ladies. But there is actually more to Candleford. The book is a living breathing social history. Every so often a spark of the real thing livens up the TV series, but the mother lode is essential reading - or so I've been told many times.

Lambeth Libraries has a copy, and it's in the Carnegie Library. Like so many of Lambeth's libraries, this is a beautiful Grade II building, built with late 19th century charity, generosity and style. It has a calm light atmosphere and a reading garden out the back.

On my way home through Brockwell Park, our local bird watcher is transfixed, peering with her binoculars at the lower frozen pond. "It's a water rail," she says. "You won't see one in London again." She shows me a picture on her camera and I wait.

Soon enough, a dainty little bird (like a moorhen but more sophisticated looking) emerges and shily potters about, pecking seeds from the ice.

Back home after that, to enjoy the rural rememberances in the book.

Recipe: Slacker Chicken Soup

I don't really do recipes, but I often make this very easy soup on a Monday morning, the day after we've had a roast chicken meal. It's thick, juicy and spicy.

Ingredients:
- remains of a roast chicken
- a large onion
- two large potatoes
- frozen sweetcorn
- cumin, ginger, chilli powder, pepper and salt



Dismantle the chicken. Tip the juice from the chicken's roasting dish into a pot, take all the remaining meat off the chicken, and boil the bones and skin in a couple of pints of water.

This is the one bit where it pays not to be lazy. The meat comes off best when it's still warm, so do it right after the meal, before you wash up. Put a bay leaf in the pan if you've got one, put a lid on the saucepan, shut the kitchen door and simmer for maybe an hour. don't overdo it or the whole house will smell of chicken stock.

Leave the chicken meat and the pot of juice in the fridge. Drain the stock through a seive and bin the bones. Do this before you go to bed, if you remember. Again, it works best while the stock is warm, otherwise it sets and seiving it is messy.

Next day, you have all the components of a soup. They are on the counter next to the cooker in the photo.

The juice you poured off has turned into jelly, with fat on top. Free range chickens have better jelly and a lot less fat. Chop the onion up small, and sweat it in some of this fat.

Scoop off the rest of the fat, and save it for other jobs. I'm told chicken fat makes a good skin moisturiser, but I think it smells a bit odd for that.

While the onion is starting to cook, chop up the potatoes into little cubes. Add them to the saucepan, and when they have cooked a bit, add spice. I use a teaspoon of cumin, half a teaspoon of ginger, and a quarter of a teaspoon of chili. Use more, or less, as you like.

Then add the chicken. Chop it up into smallish bits. I save the best bits of chicken for people in the family who don't like soup, to have in sandwiches.

Pour the stock in, and add the jelly. Turn the gas up till it boils, then turn down, and simmer. You've now got enough time to do today's washing up, have a coffee and put a loaf in the bread-machine.

When the potatoes are cooked, turn the gas off and pour in a good big handful of frozen sweet corn. The hot soup will thaw it out, and it won't overcook when you heat the soup up later. Add pepper and salt as needed.

Playing (Jenga) with my food

After three days in China, my chopstick skills were good enough to take part in a game of Turnip Jenga.







It came to the table in a stack that was so suggestive of the game, it was the only thing we could do, really.

The big rubber band ball

It's approaching 4lb in weight, and contains more than 4000 ordinary post office rubber bands.

We've been collecting for a few weeks, including some donated by a postman (yes, even above the ones they drop, they gather some up and re-use them) and some from Freecycle (thanks Krissy, Sara Jane, Barbara and anyone else).

This is an obviously pointless exercise. It's not even heroically pointless, as there are bigger and more destructive rubber band balls out there. '

But I believe that bending down to pick them up is good exercise, and twanging them on the ball keeps the fingers supple. I'm moderately interested to see how many bands can be got on one ball, before it's too large to stretch them on. It's already taken more bands than I would have expected, and we've reached a stage where it takes a lot of thinly stretched bands to increase the dimensions of the ball even slightly.

Some people are outraged at the number of these bands dropped on the streets - particularly since the Post Office changed to red ones, supposedly to help the posties see them and pick them up, but actually making the number more obvious.

I can't muster outrage. In my sad little way, I'm enjoying picking them, and the feeling of weight and energy in the ball. I'm toying with the idea of getting more creative: why not make rubber people, or rubber octopi, or rubber dogs to befriend the postmen?

The Post Office won't discuss how much it spends on them, but two years ago owned up to buying 342 million a year, and "re-using the vast majority".

The Post Office has also suggested that the bands might be bio-degradable, which is a pointless thought. The bands are organic, so I guess they must eventually decompose, but I can't see it happening very quickly. And would it help? Dog droppings and chewing gum are also biodegradable, but we don't like to have them biodegrading on the pavement.

There are also a couple of older pictures here (though none of these are as old as my faulty camera date suggests). And a cat for scale...






(the date on the camera has gone wrong BTW)

Summer Holiday

It was a bit blowy in Mullion this August, but we enjoyed it.

For anyone still looking at this blog, I'm not putting much here. I get paid to blog on open source at ZDNet, and on wireless at Techworld.

I'm also putting stuff on the London Pride blog.

An Angel shook my hand...

This chap grabbed me by the hand, near Tower Bridge last week.

I was in Morris gear, bells and ribbons and all, waiting by the pier for some people I was supposed to be dancing with. I had to walk past a film crew who were setting up their lights, mics and so forth - and as I walked past, this guy beamed at me and said "Hey, you're a Morris dancer!" and shook me by the hand.

Afterwards I thought - he was the only one in a suit, he must be an actor. I asked the crew what was filming, and they said Bones.

Any one of my Buffy-crazed family would have recognised him instantly as David Boreanaz (or Angel), and I'm pretty embarassed not to have recognised him myslf.

Still, at least they way it went I didn't make a fool of myself. Apart from the whole Morris dancer thing, of course.

And I'm pleased to say he's a charming man who spontaneously talks to eccentric British people. And no, he didn't seem the least bit worried by the wooden stick I was carrying...

My first-class cricketing namesake

How have I been unaware that among the handful of Peter Judges in the world., there has been one with a career in first-class cricket? Born in Cricklewood in 1916, he played for Middlesex, and recorded the fastest "pair" in cricketing history. This means, according to Wikipedia, he was dismissed by two consecutive balls in the space of a minute, against a visiting Indian team in 1946.

I was looking myself up in Wikipedia, because PR man Andrew Smith mentioned a couple of other journalists' Wikipedia entries in a post about researching journalist backgrounders.

I don't have a Wikipedia entry, and really, I don't think I have any achievements worthy to stand against my illustrious namesake. And I hope all PR profiles of me mention the highly-relevant fact that someone with my name - along with plenty of better cricketing performances - once got two ducks in a minute.

That was cold!

The Saturday before Christmas, I went for a swim in the Brockwell Lido. I think that makes me officially, one of the Brockwell Icicles.

It was cold. Expect more of this in 2008 - I just joined the Outdoor Swimming Society.

Image by James Purssell

Best ever local paper headline?

I saw this placard for the Helston Packet, in Mullion.

I think it's the "20 MPH" that turns it from a good local paper headline into a great one.

Other places people break 60 MPH or 30 MPH limits. Only in Cornwall is it news when they break a 20 MPH limit. And not just news, but headline, out-on-a-placard-on-the-street news.

In London, things are faster and more dangerous. The best I've seen here is "POLICE PIG BITES BOY"

Sorry for the poor angle on the photo. I was carrying presents from the car, and couldn't crouch to get it lined up better....


Happy New Year to you all, anyway!

And now - a physical impossibility?

It's a week for strange science. For two years I've been following a company which claims its radio system can deliver information faster than the physical limits described by the Shannon-Hartley theorem. This is stranger than D-Wave's quantum claims, since what it's claiming is a physical impossibility by existing science.

The company also has a much higher valuation: its share price puts the company's worth at more than a billion dollars. And it still hasn't shared its technology, or delivered a service. This month, phones using the technology will apparently start trials in Florida, and in advance of that, a financial company has given it a glowing assessment.

I think the comments following on from Techworld blog on the subject tell you what you need to know about this one.

Quantum computing - keep waiting

D-Wave, the quantum computing company I wrote about in February, is back, this time with a Google scientist in tow.

They've got Google's image-search expert, Dr Hartmut Neven, showing an algorithm on their new quantum computer, at SC07, a supercomputing show in Nevada. I've written it up for ZDnet and the Guardian.

But unfortunately, the quantum computing research establishment is even more sceptical this go round. "The interest of D-Wave for me is mainly one of psychology, business and the margins of science," professor Andrew Steane, of the centre for quantum computation at the University of Oxford, told me. "My conclusion is that I suspect they are misleading themselves."

While people like me still understand the original naive view of quantum computing (millions of computers in parallel universes), real researchers who have now spent twenty years trying to produce more qubits and keep them isolated from the world for longer have moved onto subtler considerations.

I have a suspicion that "proper" quantum computing may be impossible for somewhat similar reasons to perpetual motion. We can see a theoretical possibility that we might exclude interactions with the outside world long enough to keep the qubits coherent, but there's an eventual interaction with the outside world which, like friction in a proposed perpetual motion machine, imposes a limit which might turn out to be not as far beyond conventional computers as we had hoped.

Real quantum researchers say there is a distinction to be made between an "experiment" and a "computer". A computer takes an understood process, to work out new results. In an experiment, the results themselves don't signify anything except the extent to which they confirm or deny the theories behind the experiment.

My feeling is that quantum computing experiments may not in the end produce vastly more powerful computers, but they will push forward our understanding of the nature of reality.

A step forwards for NetEvents!

I'm at NetEvents, the network industry press gathering. It's in Malta this year, and as you'd expect, the hotel is nice.

But that's not what you want to hear about. I'm in the conference room now, hearing about the networks that support the CERN particle accelerators.

I'm telling you about something else. For the first time in my ten years of NetEvents, we have Power to the Conference Tables!

At the start 0f every NetEvents, we all scour the hall for signs of a power socket we can use.

This time I spotted cables taped to the floor.





And sure enough, we all have (UK!) power sockets under our tables.











There's an irony though, We're all using Wi-Fi laptops. on a LAN provided by Trapeze Networks.


So the wires are actually a by-product of the growth ofwireless networking.

A Segway angel at the Canal Festival

I've seen a Segway with a purpose, five years after the much-hyped scooter first appeared.

This angel glided round the Islington Canal Festival - near the Angel, playing harp music and distributing blessings. I later saw him standing on top of a canal boat, lying flat to get under bridges and standing up the other side.

Very well done, and good to see the Segway still trundling along in the realms of eccentric technology.

Visual Spam at the Petrol Pump

A breathless email from a US PR offers me a depressing opportunity.

"Hi Peter, Gas stations are one of the few places remaining where consumers stand still long enough to actually see advertising - so it better be good."

Yep, he wants me to hear about TV at petrol pumps. And he's really excited.

"Novatel Wireless and the Internet Connectivity Group (ICG) have joined hands to offer gas station owners and advertisers state-of-the-art content management, distribution and display technology for maximum impact at the pump - to the right people, in the right place. Are you interested in learning more about how Novatel and IDG are maximizing advertising ROI [return on investment] for gas station owners?"

In a word, no. It's moving, visual spam.

It's already everywhere. It's on London Buses buses and makes people travel sick.

It's been in Post Offices (but I think they may have given up on this one as it just draws attention to how long the queue is).

picture found at MarketingBlurb.

Heard the one about the wooden PC?

A supposedly zero carbon PC is being developed by PC World, featuring wood casing for keyboard, screen and mouse. Use of recycled materials and low electricity needs will reduce its carbon footprint to 85 percent of a standard PC.I only mention it here because, ages ago, I heard about a wooden PC. Apparently it "wooden" work!!! Sorry. I'll go now.

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