Category: Uncategorized

Supposedly, I’m down to three days a week, from around now. It’s not going to happen in practice, of course, but I do need to start nicking bits of time from the TV project to write a couple of conference sessions for later in the year, and to get back into the schools/web video project that starts up again in April.

The trouble is, I have – and always have had – a serious problem coping with shifting contexts. My brain feels like it turns to mush, and I end up being entirely incapable of focussing on either the project I’m switching out of, or the one I’m attempting to switch into.

My suspicion has always been that this is to do with the complexity of the projects, but I may be flattering myself there. Certainly, the conference things really aren’t that hard. Well, OK, one of them is an overview of copyright law, but most of the content is stuff I sorted out for SciCast last year, so its not…

Er…

What was I talking about?

See, I can’t even construct a coherent blog post. Bleurgh.

The attached may give you an idea of why posts here have been rather sparse of late. That’s the production schedule for last month, as it finally ended up – it changed on a more-or-less daily basis. Managing it is starting to get a little easier, in that we’ve now only about nine days’ filming and about six/seven shows in progress to juggle around. That said, March is looking rather similar, and… I’m supposedly down to three days/week. Yeah, right.

Anyway – if you were wondering what TV production looks like, this is what it looks like from my desk, when it’s not looking like a backlog of scripts to review or when I’m not in one of the edits or dubs or whatever.

Fun!

Finally, a use for UGC: a cash cow for creative types. Genius.

Ever had that ‘oh monkeys, I’ve just reset my router to factory defaults and now I’ve no idea what the admin password is’ moment? This handy-dandy list of router passwords would helpfully bail you out… if only you could configure your router so you could reach it.

(as an aside: from my work desk, a MacBook can see between six and nine wireless networks. Three or four of them use the default ssid (helpfully ‘Linksys’, ‘Netgear’, or ‘Belkin’), and are still on the out-of-the-box administrator login and password.)

Sorry to break this to you all, but I’m still here. Had a top weekend in Chester, but otherwise just a tad busy. More soon, when I can.

I’d always thought the ‘Deltic’ was a type of British Rail diesel locomotive from the 60s and 70s, but tabbing around Wikipedia today I find the loco took its name from an engine, made by engineering firm Napier & Son. I’ve long had a bit of a soft spot for Napier, partly because in the popular imagination they and their magnificent Sabre played second-fiddle to Rolls-Royce with their flashy Merlin and Griffin – pity Bristol and the workmanlike radial Centaurus – and partly because, in my book, engineering firms should be called things like ‘Napier & Son.’ ‘Bristol-Siddeley’ was pretty good; ‘Armstrong-Whitworth’ one of the best company names of all time. Who wouldn’t rather have an Armstrong-Whitworth toaster than, say, a Tefal? But I digress…

Turns out, the Deltic wasn’t just another big diesel engine, it had an entirely radical piston arrangement. Pistons were arranged in pairs, opposed in a shared cylinder, then three such piston pairs were coupled in a triangular arrangement via three shared crankshafts. Timing issues were resolved by having one crankshaft contra-rotate, geared into the common output shaft.

The design allows each valve to be unidirectional. It’s not entirely unlike a Wankel Rotary, but retaining pistons rather going the whole hog and adopting a rotor. There’s a nifty little animation on the Wikipedia page, but what I really want to know is – what would a small one of these sound like?

(other Wikipedia finds of the day: a list of Rainbow Codes for British military projects – my favourite remains ‘Blue Circle,’ but that’s a bit of a cheat – and details on Miss Shilling’s Orifice. Which, perhaps surprisingly, is entirely safe for work. Why we never covered the eponymous inventor for Local Heroes is beyond me. Also: I never knew it was possible to fly to Ascension Island and the Falklands via RAF Brize Norton, though it’s still unclear quite how one goes about booking travel; mentions from RAF Mount Pleasant entry, Ascension Island entry. Oh, and this part of the entry on the F-4 Phantom II jet fighter:

On 10 May 1972, Randy “Duke” Cunningham and William P. Driscoll flying an F-4J with the radio call sign “Showtime 100” shot down three MiG-17s to become the first flying aces of the war. Their fifth victory was believed at the time to be over a mysterious North Vietnamese ace Colonel Toon, now considered mythical. On the return flight, the Phantom was damaged by an enemy surface-to-air missile. To avoid being captured, Cunningham and Driscoll flew upside-down (the damage made the aircraft uncontrollable in a conventional attitude) and on fire until they could eject over water.

Emphasis added.)

The MySociety gang have been at it again; their latest elegant contrivance is a neat little mashup called ‘Neighbourhood Fix-It‘. Whack in a postcode, drag the map around, and click to add a report of something amiss in your local area – graffiti, broken paving slabs, dead streetlights, that sort of thing. The site then scurries off and messages the appropriate bit of local government for you. And, of course, allows you to look at other local issues flagged by other users, with per-problem RSS feeds and so on. I’m hoping there’s a back-end for councils to track problems in their areas, but even if there isn’t they could presumably build that relatively straightforwardly.

In my few minutes’ playing, the only thing I dislike is the apparent inability to zoom the map. Otherwise, this is a classic MySociety project – deceptively simple, approachable, and positively reeking of ‘how things should be done.’ I think I’m most impressed that they continue to dream this stuff up. While the site is apparently ‘obvious,’ there’s nothing obvious about imagining it.

Downloadable print-cut-out-and-assemble plans for a maned sloth model, from… er… Yamaha, of all places. I’m also fond of the pelican, the ring-tailed lemur, and the giant armadillo. The models have a curiously chiseled style that looks like they belong in a low-rent cartoon series, and are hence rather oddly charming.

The devoted reader of this blog will recall the magnificent photograph posted last September, of my father standing proudly with the new familial kettle. Tragically, he today reports:

“Yes, another kettle has chilled out. The pretty blue lights still worked but the water stayed cold.

So we went back to the Russell-Hobbs “traditional” style kettle, remember it’s the one that parboils your knuckles every other Thursday.”

He continues to relate that, in addition, he & mum bought a new lavatory seat, “just in case.”

In the office, a few seconds ago, talking about births:

“My grannie had my mother in a bucket.”