A place to park those random thoughts, stolen images, hidden conversations and incoherent babble from beyond the wall of sleep. Odd bits of music and so-called worldly wisdom may creep in from time to time. Don't expect too much and you won't feel let down.
Day out by the bridges. The skyline, broken up by various designer chimneys. Pedestrians looked up. It was that kind of sunny evening. Over by the water two large bridges seem to have appeared from some early morning mist now long evaporated and there are some things we'll always agree about, others not so. Later, much later and after sleep I settled for two poached eggs on toast and surprisingly strong coffee. Being served strong coffee in weak crockery is unexpected these days. Bland and over processed is the normal, taste and tang are mostly managed out of things to create as dull and experience as possible. The softest of drugs measured by uneducated testers. Then without any warning Google once again interfered with some random photo stock and turned it all tasty and panoramic. I'm still in very mild shock.
This lovely tribute to an old school friend of mine came up in my Facebook feed. I've not seen him for over 40 years but we communicated somewhat clumsily via social media. He passed away very recently. Now I regret failing to meet up for a pint and a blether. I didn't know that he was ill or that he'd gone until this morning when I saw this thoughtful, heartfelt FB post from his daughter which is worthy of sharing and far better than anything I could write.
Today I visited a place which a lot of people perhaps have never heard of or maybe don’t even realise exists. But, to me it’s a place that I have forever wanted to visit...Wilmington, North Carolina. And today, especially, it lived up to its expectations, and here’s why...
I received a phone call this morning telling me that my Dad peacefully passed away in Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary in the early hours of the morning.
Getting told the worst possible news when you’re half a world away from home is devastating. In February we came to learn that my Dad had been living with cancer. Since being diagnosed he fought an incredible fight, defying all doctors odds and seeing through a couple more months to spend time and see his family again.
I wanted to visit Wilmington thanks to an American television series called One Tree Hill. Some people may find this stupid or a little extravagant (I know my dad did) but I can’t even begin to explain to you how much a simple TV programme has helped me get through some pretty hard times; a long distance relationship, heartbreak, anxiety/depression and now...loss.
When you are given such heartbreaking news it’s hard to know what the best way to react is. You instantly want to break into a thousand pieces, but you know that the person you lost wouldn’t want you to do that.
My dad was the best man in the whole world and someone I always looked up to and pestered non stop for advice. I have an emptiness inside me now which will never be filled but I know that I made him so incredibly proud and I will make sure I continue to do so.
I left a little part of my dad in Wilmington today. By writing who he was to me on a bench situated in ‘One Tree Hill’s’ most memorable locations - The River Court. For me, this made me feel that tiny bit better and I know that’s exactly what my Dad would want.
I love you Dad, so much ❤️
“It's hard when you miss people. But you know if you miss them, that means you're lucky. It means you had someone special in your life, someone worth missing”
Only available for a very short time, the exclusive impossible song's "There's no law against love" T Shirt in a fetching blue shade of blue (various styles also available). Don't delay, think too hard or hold yourself back on the grounds of fashionista dystopia or doubt. This is a once on a life time chance, unlikely to be repeated (until the next repeat), anyway hurry up and buy one here.
You can't really blame previous civilizations for thinking that our world was at the centre of the universe, it's just bad maths, poor astronomy and some over active egos. Nothing unusual there. As a self confessed follower of daft ideas I'd have bought in, seems reasonable. Here's a drawing that some such believers did back in the day. Quite nice really if somewhat inaccurate. Had they actually been right I wonder how our self perception and actual politics and exploration strategies might have changed. We could be fairly confident that, here at the centre, on the hub planet there would be no other (off-world) civilizations to top us. The consequences of that idea filtering through might be significant, it would certainly help the Hebrew-like belief systems and republicanism in general. Then there would be the warlike battles and contests (constant and bloody) to be the one true master of this universe revolving around us. Nothing new there then. Stop the world etc.
...but I'm going ahead with it anyway. The same could also be said for this:
What is the point of anything if you can't just try out stuff once in a while? So buy this limited edition, highly experimental, teetering on the brink of oblivion T-shirt here! We have a quiet, unassuming but almost interesting sales campaign running for the next few days and all at a reasonable price (so we think).
To all the many Russian bots and readers out there, I know you're up to something but I'll let that pass. It was a slog at times but we made it through series one of Ekaterina, a clunky Russian biopic of Catherine the Great's rise and rise (I presume). With stilted dialogue, odd production values, feeble sub titles and strange transitional scenes (to move the story along I guess, hand written notes were also a favourite device to progress the tedium). It was a guilty pleasure of an experience. In dramatic terms it could have been covered easily in two one hour episodes, Russia managed to stretch it out to ten. But in those ten there was little or no sex and violence (only by implication) and no dramatic battle footage, it was a 50s BBC drama but shot in colour and with a 50s budget. It's there, residing in Amazon Prime like a strange Soviet ruin, a relic of a golden age that never existed and you can explore it at your leisure, don't blame me.
Is this the real life or is it fantasy or just some dumb robot filter effect? No escape from reality. Cats don't really understand much about the world or how grass is cut and collected. The sound of lawnmowers and strimmers, their presence in the garden, their sound and mechanical movement send cats either to self imposed hidden sleep or to slide under low slung furniture seeking refuge. They have no stomach for this seasonal attack. It makes no sense to them. Animals have a low threshold of normality, one that's easy to disturb. A sneeze, a cough, standing up too quickly all create grounds for panic. There is always some threat lurking nearby. I seem to have lost this natural awareness and succumbed to a much more dopey and quietly restrained lifestyle. Violent attack and major disturbance in the home or garden doesn't cross my mind too many times a day but that's not how it is for the scary and wary cats. Bless them.
The grass is growing, waving and pointing, circulating like some crazy ocean we can leave footsteps on the surface despite the constant threat of wet feet and sinking. Life support system. It's a green machine, it's a carpet and another world. It has a magnificence about it, a depth but it will be cropped back and into order today (I suspect). Humiliation for the grass.
Forget about the TSB's troubles, Brexit, baby boxes, Big Ben's renovation and Donald Trumps day of prayer fiasco...just pull up a nice garden chair, relax and enjoy the weather (not the weather today) but the weather to come. There are always sunny days, blue skies and warm breezes waiting someplace out there in the future.
The computer glitch that led to quite a muddle: Just parked this ex-BBC material here without any silly comments from me so that come the day I can recall what was reported / said.
Mr Pester argued that the migration of billions of customer records was successful "to the penny".
The underlying engine of the bank was working well, he said, and most customers could log in normally, although there was an immediate angry reaction from those customers who could not make payments or get into the system.
He said that he could be trusted to carry on the work of the bank, and MPs heard that he would not be quitting.
"They should trust me because I will ensure I will bring TSB out of the problems we're in. I have promised customers they will not be out of pocket," he said.
"[The buck] stops with me. Of course I take absolute responsibility for what has happened to TSB customers."
Mr Pester gave evidence alongside TSB chairman Richard Meddings, and Miquel Montes, chief operating officer at TSB's Spanish owner, Sabadell, who also sits on the TSB board.
During evidence, the TSB bosses said:
The IT work was not rushed through owing to financial incentives
Tests before the switch were "misleading" as they did not foresee the problems with the system's capacity
A law firm has been called in to carry out an independent review of the saga
Waiting times on phones was "very, very poor"
Mr Pester said that the "accessibility" problems for customers would "not be simple to fix". He admitted that only just over half of complaints had been "acknowledged".
Nicky Morgan, who chairs the committee, said: "What we are hearing is the most staggering example of a chief executive who seems unwilling to realise the scale of the problems that are being faced."
Image copyrightI
What the IT issue is all about
TSB shut down services for two days from the evening of Friday 20 April to move customer data from former owner Lloyds to a new IT system managed by Sabadell.
As soon as the new system was switched on during Sunday evening, customers reported seeing other people's account details alongside a range of other difficulties.
Access to accounts via online banking and the bank's app was patchy in the following days, while those who did manage to get into their accounts encountered some extraordinary errors.
In a letter to MPs, Mr Pester also revealed the extent of "widespread" failures of technology in the branch network. Problems were still experienced in 40% of branches by last Friday.
Frustrated customers also faced average waits of up to an hour for those telephoning the bank.
Last Thursday, experts from computing giant IBM were called in to try to help solve the crisis.
Smart phones are not so smart, for one thing they cannot organize their own memory. Perhaps it's because they don't actually sleep and so are denied the REM moments whereby memory and brain files are quietly sorted, edited and put away on their proper shelf in a well managed location that's easily found and recovered. That's how I imagine it anyway. Phones, being stupid (despite the hype) have to be tended and constantly prompted to do things, things that actually prolong their life and operation. They are worse by far than small children. So every so often my phone and I sit down and do a deal whereby I removed various clumps of shit, move whatever files I can persuade to go, (that's onto an SD card) and delete great swathes of unnamed, unwanted, unloved cached data. After this enema has been served up it's back to normal operations and the usual sluggish, slightly reluctant performance. A bit like a SKY box that's been left untended for too long and suffered abuse. Technology is at times almost wonderful, then at other times it's wonderful...almost. Another thing, why is it that the memory details that the phone displays never add up to whatever final total is shown?
"We live in a cruel world where some things cannot be unseen and some unseen things can sometimes be seen and some things are somewhere in between those scenes and the serene but still remaining unseen". Said the umpteenth Dr Who.
I spent an interesting morning in the company of Cowndenbeath's Doctor Who. A would be TARDIS repair man and traveller in time and space. Of course I'm sworn to secrecy as regards his exact location and the full nature of his business. Having listened to his testimony and seen a few of his inventions I'm forming the theory that nearly every Scottish provincial town has, somewhere in it's housing estates, council flats or maisonettes a Doctor Who figure busy working on unravelling the secrets of the universe and at the same time keeping us safe from alien predators and bandits. These unsung heroes come in many guises and versions, they go about their business without much fuss and we (the general public) are the ignorant beneficiaries of all the effort, ingenuity and good will that keeps us safe and able to live humdrum and useless lives tapping phone screens and necking energy drinks. Their illumination is masked from plain sight by plain sight itself, such are the workings of the universe via clockwork. We can indulge ourselves and safely walk the streets and trip over loose paving slabs and pot holes thanks to their endeavours and their shield of hidden protection. It's a crazy, mixed up world and it's closer to you than you think but then again not quite.
In no particular order (because nothing ever is), just trying to re-imagine some fragments from my lost record collection, fashionably incomplete but with all of those glossy, shattered pieces like painless splinters of memory, inconveniently gathered back together from some wispy, unclear time when I was a slightly younger man with better hearing but less equipment.
Actually that was last night's TV musical wallpaper, closely followed by an episode of Thelonious Monk, Series 1. Everything is free and floating, we are living in some strange cultural Utopia but we call it something else because we lack the language.
Sad when your financial certainty comes crashing down and you're left with...uncertainty. TSB's enormous own goal of upgrading their website and systems without properly telling anyone continues to cause pain and frustration. Seems they've bought into some software and black boxes full of Chinese chips that are not quite fit for purpose. As IT developer careers float down the river like dead bodies their help line(s) just repeats an apologetic but unhelpful message, complaints go in but are unanswered and customer service has taken a step back about 50 years. It's always going to be a problem when you rely on automation, as I do, to carry out the tedious and routine bits of everyday life and then one fine day the service disappears up it's own arse. AI doesn't look so good to me. I may start writing cheques again and keeping an open ledger of my spend on sweeties. I may actually visit a branch, talk to a human, pull out a wad of cash and then simply return to having a fat wallet/empty wallet on a monthly basis. I don't know. Attempts at logging into the supposedly working online bank (says their CEO) means you're put in a virtual queue (the message is that you're on a holding list*, that's a neat new term for "don't bother us, we've fucked up") and have to stare at a frozen screen until it times you out. I'm losing the will to pay my bills, thanks TSB. *I wonder what other on line businesses will adopt the "holding list" concept to manage customers, can't that ending well for anybody.
Today I learned that ASMR was a thing. Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a term used for an experience characterised by a static-like or tingling sensation on the skin that typically begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. It has been compared with auditory-tactile synesthesia. There's a lot of it about, channels on YouTube and so on. Everybody's in on it, even IKEA. I'll just leave it here.
I've joined the anti-rust league, a non political organisation that's hell bent on bending the hell out of and rustproofing various metal objects that live mostly outdoors. Without any special training, coaching or counseling I've been wire brushing, chemically treating and applying black paint to some sorry items that have been over exposed to the elements, elephants and adverse weather. I am the personification of their iron fisted saviour and also a good person. I've still to get them hung up and screwed back into the masonry from whence they came. That'll be another story for another day.
Here's an angry owl windscreen washer nozzle that I encountered whilst driving. It was there, perched on the other side of my windscreen, eyeing me up. From time to time it exhibits a tendency to squirt water in my direction but never actually hits me because there's piece of laminated glass between us at all times. A rather fortunate design feature on the car and I will feel safe as long as that glass holds up.
