Author: Rex Wickham

KL trip

Sleepy Head
Sleepy Head

With travel chaos in Britain and north Europe, it was always going to be touch and go. Late leaving Heathrow, we caught the connecting flight in Amsterdam with minutes to spare. Our luggage was not so lucky and took a couple of days to join us.

We flew KLM and it was a night flight. An interesting touch was the hot noodles and ice-cream served at about 3am.

1984 BAC

thanks to lovely Stephen Moorhouse, Jeannette and I had a night out at the theatre this week. we went to see 1984 at the local Battersea arts centre, and very good it was too. it was a mix of live action and puppetry, which never got in the way of the fast pace of the story.

the play runs: December 02 – January 09, 2010

tickets cost: £10 – £16

Thunderbird 3

I’ve used Thunderbird for a couple of years and recently moved to TB3. It’s not been without pain though, and here a couple of the issues and my workarounds

Indexing – lots of talk about this on the web. Despite leaving it going for over 24 hours, Thunderbird 3 had not finished indexing all my folders. I discovered the location of the index file. Mine is currently over 2GB in size. Not good for Windows! I’ve therefore disabled indexing.  However ideally, I’m happy to have the index in place for my main folders, so I’m using the GlodaQuilla extension to selectively index folders. Update 01/2010. Given up on indexing altogether.

Calendering. No built in support, but nightly builds are available for Lightning (and the Google provider).

Activity Manager. At last I thought, a way of seeing what Thunderbird is doing at any given time. But no, it only reports after the activity is finished.

Update 01/2010. Chief gripe now is that search box doesn’t have any kind of pause/delay built in, so as soon as you type the first letter of your search term, Thunderbird grinds to a halt while it list every single email with that letter in it. Having to cut/paste search terms as a workaround.

Lambeth Motorbike Parking

Motorbike Parking
Motorbike Parking

Near where I work, Lambeth have added a rail to the motorbike parking, which allows us to lock our bikes more securely. Great – but why does the locking bar have a full height railing attached to it?

The result is, the only access to bikes is from the road, not the pavement. How safe is that? Not to mention when the bikes are parked closely together (there are never enough motorbike parking spaces in any given area), it can be very hard to reach inner bikes.

You wouldn’t put a railing along the pavement where cars are parked, forcing the drivers to enter their cars from the road, so why do it to bikers?

The Animation Studio opens

Just published my first test video onto Youtube. First try was with blue material but the video camera I’m using didn’t pick up the colour at all. Not sure if this is a common problem with consumer video cameras or not, but I did read that green is preferred for digital video.

Star Wars Lego flying through the flat.
Star Wars Lego flying through the flat.

Coming back from lunch I walked past a textile shop in Clapham, the fabulously named “Jeanette Fashions”. As luck would have it they had some lovely green felt, with a very saturated appearance at under a tenner a metre. On the video camera screen this looked a lot better. The results can be seen in the YouTube clip – what was missing was some decent lighting of the green backdrop. In fact it was just a 60W ceiling light.

On the next test I aim to use a 500W worklight, which having angle-grinded (ground?) the padlocks off my shed, I can now get access to!

Not dead after all

Just in case the last post made you feel depressed, think of the case of the twice-buried monk.

Oran, a sixth-century monk on Iona: having presumably been declared dead, he was buried, but was dug up again the following day and found to be alive. He is said to have subsequently been re-buried for heresy when he claimed that after his first burial he had seen heaven and hell.

Remember London Beer Flood

This week is the anniversary of the London Beer Flood. Please bow your heads.

The London Beer Flood occurred on October 17, 1814 in the London parish of St. Giles in the United Kingdom. At the Meux and Company Brewery on Tottenham Court Road, a huge vat containing over 135,000 imperial gallons of beer ruptured, causing other vats in the same building to succumb in a domino effect. As a result, more than 323,000 imperial gallons of beer burst out and gushed into the streets. The wave of beer destroyed two homes and crumbled the wall of the Tavistock Arms Pub, trapping the barmaid under the rubble.

The brewery was located among the poor houses and tenements of the St Giles Rookery, where whole families lived in basement rooms that quickly filled with beer. The wave left nine people dead: eight due to drowning and one from alcohol poisoning.

Whilst we  pause to reflect on this tragic waste of beer, check out this list of unusual deaths.