Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Penguin Cafe Waiter's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
10:31 am	The answer is YES Last night I went to see 70s prog rockers YES in concert. An odd lineup of YES, which for the 2nd time in their history has a different vocalist. Jon Anderson is ill and can't tour, so they've hired a Canadian chap called Benoit David to sing in his place. He does a fine job, and the packed out Symphony Hall didn't seem to mind - it also gave the band a chance to perform songs from their "controversial" 1980 album DRAMA in which they they replaced Anderson and Rick Wakeman with THE BUGGLES, Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes. I wasn't expecting much as the core trio of Steve Howe, Chris Squire and Alan White are, to be blunt, getting on. What a dumb assumption as they were pretty spectacular. Oddly, Rick Wakeman's son is their keyboard player. This is the 2nd time I've Wakeman Junior play with a band that his father was in (The last one was 70s folk-rockers, Strawbs, in the grounds of a mansion house about 10 years ago.) On the job front, I have a potential interview with a large automotive firm - it's for a software team leader. I'm not I want to do that. Been there, had the T-shirt, and preferred to be more "consultant" type of role or doing R&D. I have little patience with bad software and bad software engineers (i.e. hackers) who don't fix problems but fix the symptoms and wonder why it all collapses later. I have even less time for idiot customers who can't write specifications properly! We shall see, but it seems the job market is actually not as dead as you'd think. One issue is that where I am now is pretty cushy and we have a lot of freedom to do stuff outside our normal jobs. And this other company seems to be very low level controllers, which doesn't really offer much scope for anything interesting. And I don't get a kick out of fiddling with electronics and stuff like that. In fact it bores me stupid. I've been plugging away at the novel about the archivist on my "Hackintosh" and also just finished a short story that came to me one day while daydreaming at the office. With the two kids time is not enough anymore, and getting to the YES concert involved a lot of tears from Talia ("Can Talia come with Daddy?")... Still, it was well worth it. They just need to produce a new album. It's been a long time. It's been even longer since they produced a good album. (Comment on this)
Sunday, November 8th, 2009
8:37 pm	I was going to say not a lot going on, but there is always something going on, usually involving the children. Talia is driving us loopy, but she's learning fast and talking a lot now and asking questions ("What's that, daddy?" and "Why?"). Christopher, meanwhile, has two teeth already and is pulling himself up to sitting and then up to standing if you hold out your hands for him! He's not even six months old. Uh-oh, I think we're in for trouble here... Work is work. Despite the recession, we're still busy on projects, and I've submitted a fairly hefty proposal that ended up being a full blown component based system for our systems - all linked by a domain model that can be used to generate hefty amounts of code for the interface to the "Presentation Layer" (i.e Widgets)...  Bearing in mind that our department has been using a horrible "object C" type of thing, this proposal is somewhat confusing to a lot of people who still don't understand why having global variables is wrong. On the writing side, the "archivist" novel is over 31,000K now. Progress has been slowed due to laziness. I've started another one in the meantime called "Antony and The Big" which involves time travel, nazis & chavs and redemption. Something like that. It was one of those sudden moments that happened and the whole synopsis pretty much came out in 10 minutes. It's based on real historical figures, and was originally going to feature the real characters, but I decided not to do that. I don't feel comfortable speculating on what people might have been like or might done, so I shall use biographies of the real people to formulate some fake ones! Today I managed to watch  a film I've wanted to see for years - Land and Freedom, by Ken Loach. It's about the Spanish Civil War, a subject I find particularly interesting [And don't really know why]. It's an excellent film about a Liverpudlian who goes over to Spain to fight for the militia against the Fascists, but ends up finding that the politics is getting in the way. I notice that it was a critical success, but veterans have slated it - mainly because they feel it focuses on a small part of the work done by the foreigners, and is set in a certain battle. I don't think it's supposed to be a war film - it's more about the situation that led to the war (Landowners annoyed that the government was passing reforms to end poverty) and the desire by the militia to implement a system of collectivism. There's a fantastic scene where the militia, having taken control of a town, squabble with local people about how the land should be worked. This is what the film is about, really, and the divisions between the allies against the Fascists. It's not heavy handed in the slightest, and there's a touching framing device...  A few years back when I went to Mum's place in Spain, we were wandering around Alicante's maze of back streets when we came to the Cathedral (It was nothing special, typical of the Arabic looking churches in Southern Spain) and town hall. It was riddled with bullet marks. Alicante was the final town to fall to the bastard Franco, and refugees assembled on the port could not get out because the bastard nazis had blockaded it. A British cargo ship took on thousands and carried them out of the port (Dodging subs) to get them across to the Algeria, where the French refused to let them in. The captain threatened to ram the port. [Although it must be pointed out that British cargo operators made money by supplying the republicans with goods, and that is why the ship was there.] The captain of this ship was killed a few months later during WWII when his ship was torpedoed, but he is commemorated in Alicante. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
9:38 am	The Blitz! Last night I watched a documentary about the blitz on Coventry in November 1940. I wasn't expecting much as I've read fairly extensively about it, but it was very good indeed and managed to touch on a whole host of other issues such as the psychological effects and how the Nazi techniques were later used on allied bombing raids on cities such as Dresden - which I'm still not certain was justified [It was perhaps a strategy more aimed at preventing the Russians from siezing a viable city.] Some of the "talking heads" had some harrowing tales about that night, including a policeman who confessed that he wanted to cry at what he was seeing but had to keep it together as his job was to help and reassure the policeman and a man who, as a nine year old, was trapped in the family air raid shelter and split up from his family with no idea as to their fate - it turned out that his Dad had died when the bomb went off near their house, but his mother and brothers and sisters survived.  Although other UK cities experienced more bombs during the blitz, Coventry was the first to undergo an intensive raid [Really the 2nd time such tactics had been used by the Nazis, the first being Guernica] and its small size at the time and the loss of the Cathedral made it stand out more - the image of the Cathedral in ruins was used as propaganda to bring the US into the war and apparently managed to change attitudes over the pond.  On a similar subject, I am 25,000 into a Coventry-based novel about an archivist trying to save an old building, one of the last remaining topshops (Special cottages built for weavers) in an area of the city. My plan has 25 chapters and I'm currently up to chapter 5. I was initially worried I'd not find enough to write about - I usually write "fantastical" stuff [i.e. horror, sf, weird monster stuff] - but it seems I'm finding plenty.  Even though I have very little time to sit down and do it, those odd half hours here and there add up over the weeks...  (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, September 13th, 2009
3:16 pm	Organic! Yesterday it was some sort of heritage weekend, which meant lots of old buildings were open. Nothing that I hadn't already seen was open, so we skipped that and instead took advantage of free entry to Ryton Organic Gardens, just one the outskirts of Coventry. It's apparently some sort of centre for organic things. Due to the heritage weekend it was free to get in. We've been to the restuarant there before, but not looked at the garden. Not that we're that interested in Gardens (I find them stupifying boring) but this is a sort of working garden full of foods. They use the stuff they grow in the restaurant. Well, I hope they do. I'd be pissed off if they nipped down Waitrose instead. We didn't see much of it. I spend most of my time making sure Talia wasn't pulling things apart (Turned my back for 5 seconds and she was climbing over a greenhouse!). She was fascinated by a huge slug that she called "Christopher Slug". Christopher (The real one, not the slug) cried and had to be fed. Daddy had to make Talia fly. So we didn't see much of the organic garden, but could sure smell the herbs and spices. The have a cafe with a play area and Talia spent an hour in that with another little girl she met. Christopher cried and sucked boob in public. I had a nice organic coffee... And the weather was boiling. When we got back I noticed our garden smells of fennel. In between all the chaos of trips around block with Talia on her bike (Which end up with her walking back and Daddy - Muggins here! - carrying bike and helmet. And sometimes Talia!) I've managed to get about 20,000 words into the novel about the archivist. The odd couple of hundred words here and there has made what feels like no progress actually into some progress. What's even better is I'm enjoying it perhaps more than the other stuff I've written. I'm hatching another idea as well - an Afro-Caribbean immigrant who brings some joy to a city destroyed by the war, but slowly rebuilding itself, sweeping away the old for new. How does he do this? Simple, he starts selling exotic caribbean food locally... Actually based on a true story I read recently about someone in Coventry who has recently passed away. That's the basic idea. Now I need some story to hang off it! (Comment on this)
Friday, September 11th, 2009
1:13 pm	Japanese Fun! No,not dubious rope bondage, but one of the Japanese staff in our building arranged for JapanCentre to come up and open up a shop for the day. They brought with them a pile of Japanese Crunchy Pork curries, which after 2 minutes in the microwave were absolutely delicious. I also tried some "Melon Pan", which was a sweet bread, and something called "Curry Bread" which was a hollowed out sweet bun with Japanese curry paste in it. I also tried some Green Tea and Bean Roulade, some Hi-Chu sweets, and some delicious Wasabi Peas - all washed down with a Green Tea. They're still in the building and there's the Sushi, but I'm not feeling in the fishy mood. In fact, I'm stuffed. What was quite surprising that virtually everyone in the company flocked down to buy... (Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
11:08 am	Musicians in Oblivion I bought a book called "Galactic Ramble" that is a huge volume detailing albums released in the UK between (Roughly) 1965 and 1974. It's aimed at the collectors of the obscure and people who collect LPs. I don't collect LPs [My record player has just been stored in the attic] but do like to find something a bit different. Amongst the obscurities I've so far splashed out on are bands like Spriguns, Oberon, Tudor Lodge, Jody Grind and solo artists like Simon Finn [Has to be heard to be believed!]. A lot of these albums were on small labels or even private pressings - perhaps only 50 copies exist. Most of the albums are prog, psych and folk, or a mix of all three. My favourite so far is by a chap called Mick Stevens [Sadly, he died in 1987] who released two albums in the early 1970s. The first, See The Morning, was recorded in a bedsit in Nottingham when Stevens was a student and is a quite beautiful mix of acoustic songs with the occasional pysch guitar on top and some woodwinds - and some brilliant lyrics. Stevens had 50 copies pressed up on the "Delroy" label, which was basically a company in Lancashire that would make albums from a tape. The second album, No Savage Word, adds drums and sounds a lot more jazzy, but was recorded in the same ad-hoc way. Both albums are available on CD, along with two others he recorded in the late 1970s. It's very much like John Martyn, with good command of English & a lot of jazzy guitar riffs and snippets of flamenco guitar... What a shame something so good spent so long on obscurity - I wonder what sort of music Mick Stevens would be making these days? No more struggling with  tape recorders and overdubbing - the whole lot could be done on a PC. http://www.mickstevensmusic.co.uk/ Current Music: Mick Stevens - No Savage Word (Comment on this)
Thursday, August 6th, 2009
4:49 pm	50 Gigs It's doing the rounds on Facebook, but I'll do it here.  List 50 acts you've seen live in concert. Don't pick the cool ones, just the first 50 you can think of. ( Read more... ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 2nd, 2009
10:18 am	The Swine Flu Yesterday we decided to take Talia to Stratford Butterly farm to see the flutterbys and various large spiders. In the shop she picked up the biggest toy spider she could find and ran up to a random stranger, yelling, "I got spider!" Anyway, the atmosphere inside the place was pretty humid, and I could start to feel my throat going sandpapery as we walked round. By the evening, I could barely move and then spent the night with a thumping headache and hallucinating about secret signals that were being beamed at me causing me to wake up. This morning the Boss filled in the online form with all this information (including paranoid hallucinations!) and was told to go and anti-virals straight away... I feel dismal, I've never had anything like this before, certainly not an illness that makes me hallucinate and think the bright stars in the sky are alien invaders! The tamiflu has yet to arrive yet, but I hope it makes me feel better... (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
11:51 am	Talia has taken to waking up at 6:30 in the morning, crying out and then when I got and see what's up, she wants a toy to play with and her milk. Her current toy is a stretchable frog that she took to nursery and insisted on holding it up to everyone she saw, saying, "I got a pog!" Work is a bit more relaxed at the moment - after 18 months of hell getting a big project finished and out in vehicles, it's time for some research. I am creating an application framework that's platform independent - which means modelling the semantics of the application using ontologies or something and also modelling abstract interfaces that can be used to generate a mapping from the presentation to the application. So far I've digested tons of papers and am about to embark on a first high level desig & some hard coded examples as a proof of principle. Oddly, people here tend to leap in with hacking code and wonder why they're endlessly rewriting the same code. I've also been working on the "archivist" novel, but have been designing it using - don't laugh - the same method I use to design software. Start at the high level, work down the levels - gathering ideas at each level, occasionally going back - iterative novel writing? It's easier to go back a small distance than it is to go back a huge distance (Waterfall method.)  It's actually how I tend to do these things, but this time I'm actually writing down the thoughts at each level [Mainly because time is scarce, and what with children and stuff, I struggle to keep on top of the ideas!] Wonder if UML can be used to design a novel... MMmmm. Current Music: Barclay James Harvest - Welcome to the Show (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 25th, 2009
4:48 pm	Harry Patch "The Last Tommy" has gone: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8168691.stm (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 18th, 2009
3:42 pm	A Glorious Weekend and Sapper Shortly after my Grandma died, I ended up with some of her books. One of them was an old Bulldog Drummond novel by Sapper. In the front page was a note: To Rene, in memory of a glorious weekend! It was dated sometime during WWII. My Granddad tried to join up, but was turned down because he had flatfoot. His brother, Leonard, died in Burma [He vanished on partrol], his Dad was killed in WWI trenches and his mother died of a broken heart shortly after that. My Grandma worked in service in big houses in Buckimhamshire. I don't really know how they met, but the book and the note conjured up images of a "date" in which the book was bought... But what if my Grandma and Granddad met someone on a date, got embroiled in some wartime espionage with a mysterious "figure"... resulting in a victory for the dashing young couple of the mysterious figure (Who they presumably saved from a fate worse than death as part of the adventure.) Anyway, shortly after the war, they're now married, and Grandad is met one day by the mysterious stranger who hands him a book... The plot of which is strangely familiar to their wartime adventure. I'm sure this isn't what happened, but they're both long gone and you don't think to ask your grandparents questions about when they were young and how they met... So I have to let my imagination fill in the gaps. (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 12th, 2009
5:34 pm	The Archivist and the Cottages I decided to start the story about the cottages and the archivist, and have been frantically reading through my scarily large college of local history books to try to find some dramatic events in Coventry's history as well as some ideas of what life was like in the early 20th century and during the post-medieval decline that lasted until the early 20th century. ( How the creative mind sometimes works...  ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
10:03 am	Christopher is a happy little baby - unlike Talia, who was a misery guts. He smiled and coos and is quite chilled out. He'll happily sit there and watch us for ages. Unlike Talia, who just cried. Now she's just made. On the car in the way home from nursey last night she said, "Mummy at home with chocolate cake." She's starting to put sentences together. Like this morning, "There's cat over there!" She could see a cat on a windowsill of a house we were passing. Then just up the street. "Where's cat gone?" It's bloody hard work though - getting up early to sort of Talia, sorting her out in the evening. She's usually in bed by 7:40 and then it's time to think about cooking... Before I know it, it's 10:00 and I'm too knackered to move. ( Rambling about writing and Coventry ) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
9:34 am	Old Technology Whilst going through boxes of old junk, I came across an old Psion Series 5 that I bought from eBay a few years ago. I don't think I even used it, just turned it on, played with it, marvelled at the age when Britain used to make things [And good things, unlike in the past] and tossed it aside for a Windows CE Jornada [Also eBay] that I quickly grew to hate due its useless keyboard. The Psion Series 5 is far from perfect - the screen is dire - but it's an excellently designed device. The keyboard is usable, and I don't know why I never used it more. Anyway, it's now found a fair amount of usage as a replacement for the notebooks (Paper) that I fill up with ideas (And then lose track of). Psion were probably ahead of their time - producing netbooks (They own the name) ten years ago. Their only crime, I suspect, was not using some variant of windows... They must be looking at the piles of "netbooks" in supermarkets these days and wonder where they went wrong... As far as I'm aware, no other company came up with a "palmtop" that's as usable as the Series 5. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 20th, 2009
8:23 pm	Neon Kettle Knights I've been on the Amazon Vine (They sent me newsletter. I select free stuff. I review it.) for a while now, and mostly get to the newsletter late, when all the expensive goodies have gone - leaving books and software behind. This week I was at my PC having a look at the Vine site when it updated to the new newsletter. So I selected a Breville Kettle with Brita water filter built in and another Kodak HD pocket camera. The kettle arrived this morning. As a kettle it's fine. It's quick, the water filter is quick, and it does all the things a kettle does. Well, it boils water. It's also overloaded with LEDs that change colour even when it's not in use. I've been trying it out for a day and already the constant neon is irritating me. When you boil it changes from blue to red to indicate - hey, guess what, children, the water's hot. I guess slack jawed morons who still think it's amazing that day changes to night might enjoy this kettle. They can sit there and marvel at the pretty lights. For me, it may well be going back in its box and up on eBay. I'm astonished in this day and age a manufacturer comes up with a kettle that uses power even when it's not in use... And to make their stupidity even more astounding, they didn't include an off switch. You have to turn it off at the mains. I felt vaguely guilty getting another Kodak HD camera. I got one a few months ago from the Vine. It wasn't very good. So I'm hoping the newer model is an improvement. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
5:03 pm	Not a lot I was amazed this morning to read that Coventry's "famous round market" has been listed by English heritage and this has put a spanner in the works to try to make the city centre usable. I don't get it. It's not been listed because it's a nice building (It's an absolutely nasty concrete mess connected to equally dismal bits of post-war precinct) or because it's architecturally important. It's because people used to meet there after the war and go shopping. It's pissed me off because Coventry is an almost complete example of just why 20th century planners and architects should have their decaying corpses exhumed and be hung on the miserable shopping precincts they created as a warning to other architects not to create such things. It also means that may well have to keep it, even though it's just not really wanted by many people (Including, it seems, the traders, who want to move into a new building.) Apparently, it has some socialist German murals inside which is also another reason for the listing. The mind boggles. I suppose it's easy for some idiot with a text book to come up and make these decisions when they don't have live with the utter disgrace that Coventry city has become - post war dream... PAH! (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 4th, 2009
9:21 am	Hacked In Tosh So, in a rash moment the other night, I decided to build an Apple Mac. Or to be more specific, a "Hackintosh." That's off the shelf hardware cobbled together to form a PC that can run MacOSX. Made possible due to Apple using Intel platforms for their hardware. All you require is a motherboard/graphics card/cpu that's compatible and away you go - you need to download various kernel extensions to get hardware working, or add strings to something called the EFI (A replacement for BIOS) to tweak your particular hardware. The m/board I used was a cheap 31 quid Gigabye (GM31-ESL2) board and a cheap dual core pentium CPU. With hard drives/CD-Roms/Power Supplies being reusued, I just needed a 20 quid case. You need to boot from a special disc (boot-132) that contains a linux bootloader that will allow you to start to MacOSX install, and once you've got MacOSX installed, you need another bootloader on your hard drive (Chameleon is widely used) to allow MacOSX to boot - I believe it emulates the special chip that Apple use to boot the OS. Surprisingly, it worked first time - MacOSX installed in a dozen minute and was up and running with my sound card, USB wireless network adapter all working fine. I just need an improved video card, really - the one on the motherboard works, but just as a basic card with 1024x768. There's a plethora of documentation out there (Google Hackintosh) and lists of compatible hardware and hints and tips - but it's a typically disorganised "Project" that is not for the faint hearted... Especially if you need to get down to configuring the EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) with cryptic strings. There are people out there producing kernel extensions (Basically the same as Linux's dynamic module, not surprisingly, as MacOSX 10 is a mix of bits of Unix variants with other things bolted on.)... (Comment on this)
Monday, June 1st, 2009
11:44 am	The Terrible Twos Christopher is two weeks old, growing rapidly (He's put on almost a pound since he was born, and he was a big baby!)  and is so far a mellower baby than Talia, who cried constantly for six months. When not feeding or sleeping, he lies there having a good luck round and a faint smile (Wind, we thought, but he does smile when his cheek is stroked.) on his face. Talia has to see him every morning and has been going round nursery telling everyone about him. She also likes to hold him and stroke his face... No sibling rivalry yet, but the midwife who does house visits tells us you don't generally get jealousy issues when the sex is different. Back to work tomorrow, which is a paint. I could get used to this "home" life. I've also bought all the parts to build a "Hackintosh" - 30 quid motherboard, 40 quid CPU, 20 quid case, and a lot of other bits being re-used. I'm bored at work, and can't be arsed to write PC applications, so am going to tinker about with apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch. The SDK only runs under MacOS... (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 17th, 2009
5:46 pm	A long week & a happy ending! This week has been, um, long. On Tuesday the boss went to UHCW (University Hospital Coventry and Warwickshire) for a ante-natal appointment - just a check up. They checked, and said, "You're not going home. You're staying here." High blood pressure, possibily a fairly unpleasant condition called pre-eclampsia. The due date was Tuesday. Nothing happened. Tests followed, and they decided on Wednesday to induce. This is common in cases like this. So she was stuck on a noisy ward filled with pregnant women all wanting to use the loo every two hours... So Dad and Talia enjoyed some time together (Which involves Talia running around like a lunatic with Dad in her wake sorting out the mess she's making.) Induction "began" (I won't go into it) on Thursday evening, and I hung around the labour ward reading Arthur C Clarke's "The Songs of Distant Earth" (Which reminded me how much I like SF and really should catch up with some more modern authors) while the Boss slept and we waited for something to happen. By 3 it hadn't happened, so I went home - and in the morning got Talia up and went off to work as usual, feeling absolutely wretched. 10 O'Clock I get a call - they'd moved on to the next step of the induction and she was in labour. 5.5 hours later... well, a little boy pops out. Accompanied by much swearing. Second time round it was fast. Talia's labour was 13 hours. Stage 2 of the delivery was 2 hours for Talia. This time it was five minutes. Gruesome details spared. The NHS staff were excellent - the midwife and the student working with her chatted happily about things while Celine screamed down the gas and air pipe - but they were really on the ball, knew exactly what they were doing - and this time round the same midwife was there from start to finish. We also had visits from doctors checking up (As she was a high risk case due to the blood pressure ) on progress in case they had to intervene with emergency operations. Our midwife was with us all the way through, and she had a dry sense of humour. I guess you need it in that job. So it's been a long worrying week, but as George Formby would say, "Turned out nice again!" Anyway, the little blighter was 8 pounds, and in perfect health. We're planning to call him Christopher after my late Dad. Talia is fine as well - seems totally unbothered by the new addition and is at the moment carefully placing a cover over him to keep him warm! (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 2nd, 2009
4:18 pm	If the recession doesn't get you, swine flu will... Or maybe not, as this morning someone in Mexico said that that deaths due to swine flu were really no more than the deaths due to the seasonal flu anyway. In the meantime, I've got the whole family wearing sealed in masks and we're busy digging an airtight bunker underneath the back garden equipped with air filters and a year's supply of dried food. I've seen "Survivors", you know... ... or maybe not. A switch appears to been flicked in Talia that says, "I'm two, now act like a madam all day." This morning I put together her other birthday present (A slide; a small house and a water/sand activity centre) and she spent most of the morning using all three, plus her bike, and then a small football that we got for her in a local shop (She appears to have learnt to say "Football", and I don't know who's taught it to her...)  after she demanded to go out in her pushchair. Now she's having her afternoon nap, so I'm taking advantage of this by finishing a story... and slacking on the Internet. In the meantime I'm finishing a story about a battle, a man with a plastic head and a Lovecraftian monster from Cumbria. And accompanied by a CD called "A is for OX" by a group called Steve Harris's Zaum. It's an avante-garde jazz group consisting of lots of weird tape loops, parping sax & other wind instruments, guitars, disembodied drumming and clattering sounds. File under "Difficult." I have ordered two more CDs from Amazon. It's all improvised on the spot as well. Current Music: Steve Harris Zaum - A is for Ox (Comment on this)