Yesterday I was at Frenchay Hospital in Bristol for most of the day with my mother, who had an accident at home over the weekend. Thankfully no further treatment was required.
Just a small query: why don't they have WiFi in the waiting rooms?
This morning Aquamain came round to fix the leak in our water supply pipe just outside the house. They located the leak by injecting a mix of Nitrogen and Hydrogen into the pipe and detecting where it surfaced. After digging a big hole next to the path, they triumphantly cut out and exhibited the damaged segment. It looked like something you see from a diseased heart: all corrosion and a small hole like it had been pierced by a nail.
As soon as the water was switched back on three fountains erupted from an adjacent length of pipe: the whole length has succumbed to old-age from its fifty years of lying in the clay. So now we will have to have the whole lot yanked out and replaced by plastic. I doubt we'll have much, if any, change from a thousand pounds.
I wonder what news Friday will bring?
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Tattoos in Taunton
Foregoing the habits and intentions of a lifetime, Clare is now a tattooed woman. This is necessary for the alignment of the X-Ray machine: her five weeks of radiotherapy start in a fortnight.
We shopped in Taunton's M&S afterwards. The streetside parking meter swallowed 50p and refused to disgorge a 30 minute ticket. Clare wrote a plaintive note to any putative traffic warden and put it on the dashboard (this was at 2.30 pm). My shopping experience in the Food Hall was ruined (ruined!) by the thoughts of some bulldog warden, not a believing bone in her body, duly ticketing the car. I had visions of us in the county court, Clare in tears, as we vainly protested we had paid but had not received a ticket. The stern and utterly cynical judge sentences the two of us to years of hard labour (we stick to our cause - it's a matter of principle!).
We were back, clutching our laden shopping bags, at ten to three. Not a traffic warden or ticket in sight.
We shopped in Taunton's M&S afterwards. The streetside parking meter swallowed 50p and refused to disgorge a 30 minute ticket. Clare wrote a plaintive note to any putative traffic warden and put it on the dashboard (this was at 2.30 pm). My shopping experience in the Food Hall was ruined (ruined!) by the thoughts of some bulldog warden, not a believing bone in her body, duly ticketing the car. I had visions of us in the county court, Clare in tears, as we vainly protested we had paid but had not received a ticket. The stern and utterly cynical judge sentences the two of us to years of hard labour (we stick to our cause - it's a matter of principle!).
We were back, clutching our laden shopping bags, at ten to three. Not a traffic warden or ticket in sight.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Time in the block universe
In March 1955, Einstein wrote to the widow of his oldest friend, Michele Besso: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.
Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.
Saturday, June 25, 2011
The Sheep Races at Priddy
After a morning spent collecting three for two offers at Tescos (the pantry now boasts 17 boxes of cereal products) we took a walk this afternoon along the puddled and muddy paths of the Priddy Mineries to take the air. In desperate need of refreshment we then repaired to Priddy itself, where the sheep races were about to begin. Putting my beer to the ground, I managed to get these action snaps of the runners and riders.
Here's Clare at the races. As an inveterate gambler on the gee-gees, it was only with great effort that Adrian and myself could prevent her from betting £40 on what would have been a classic losing sheep.
Is that a sheepish smile?
Here's Clare at the races. As an inveterate gambler on the gee-gees, it was only with great effort that Adrian and myself could prevent her from betting £40 on what would have been a classic losing sheep.
Is that a sheepish smile?
Friday, June 24, 2011
Tourism in Clifton, Bristol
Today we pretended to be tourists in my native city, Bristol and decided to visit Clifton.
And here's a bonus picture of the author.
The Clifton Suspension Bridge
We started in Clifton Village, home to boutique shops, fancy restaurants and pubs, and walked the few hundred yards to Royal York Crescent, a Georgian terrace of 46 houses reminiscent of the Royal Crescent in Bath. It's one of the most expensive streets in Bristol.
Royal York Crescent in Clifton
Clare taking a rest in the Crescent
We then strolled up to the Suspension Bridge and examined the anti-suicide wiring at the edge of the pedestrian walkway. The bridge noticeably rocks as cars go by and I, at least, was feeling twinges of vertigo as we exited towards the Roman Catholic Cathedral.
Clare in Clifton RC Cathedral
On the way we passed the traditionally-spired evangelical Christ Church (1841) which was locked - the Cathedral was, as you can see, open.
A Bullfinch in our front garden
As the Portway was blocked by an earlier incident, we drove back across the Suspension Bridge and this new route seemed just as quick.And here's a bonus picture of the author.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
More Water
Just an update on the supply pipe leak outside our house (yawn! for everybody else, a real hassle for me).
We got our second quote today and I decided to go with Aquamain. We'll see how it goes next week, assuming our house hasn't slid down the hill and onto the Cathedral Green in the meantime.
---
I'm reading about Bayesian inference at the moment. It's a page-turning book which is big on the academic infighting, the personalities and the issues while telling you next to nothing about the actual mathematics. It can be turned into a piece for sciencefiction.com over the next few days, though.
We got our second quote today and I decided to go with Aquamain. We'll see how it goes next week, assuming our house hasn't slid down the hill and onto the Cathedral Green in the meantime.
---
I'm reading about Bayesian inference at the moment. It's a page-turning book which is big on the academic infighting, the personalities and the issues while telling you next to nothing about the actual mathematics. It can be turned into a piece for sciencefiction.com over the next few days, though.
Monday, June 20, 2011
Ultra-Intelligence
In Iain M. Banks’ Culture books, the Culture Minds are AIs possessing an intelligence far surpassing our own. Many people have speculated that we might one day meet ultra-intelligent aliens, or that our own descendants might be genetically-engineered to have very high IQs. So what would it be like to be an ultra-intelligent entity and is ultra-intelligence really going to happen?
Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.
Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.
Review: "Who is Mr Satoshi" by Jonathan Lee
Posted at amazon.co.uk (Amazon Vine).
Forty-one year old Rob Fossick has fallen into deep depression following the death of his pregnant wife in a tragic accident. Formerly a successful society photographer, he now shuns company and pops pills, while occasionally visiting his semi-coherent mother in her care home. The story opens with her tragic death following a fall on the patio. Her last wish was to have a mysterious parcel delivered to a ‘Mr Satoshi’ in Japan.
His mother’s best (female) friend, Freddie, is also a resident, and after the funeral she confirms to Rob that Mr Satoshi is actually English, a Reggie something, who was a post-war boyfriend of his mother who had travelled to Japan to work with the Occupation forces. Somehow they had lost touch.
Fossick’s publisher is coincidentally also keen for him to go to Japan, hoping this will re-ignite his appetite for photography and turn the revenue taps back on. So despite Fossick’s self-absorbed apathy, he nevertheless finds himself in Tokyo on the hunt for Mr Satoshi. Eventually he will locate him and in the last pages the mystery will be revealed.
Author Jonathan Lee took a first in English Literature at Bristol University, and later as a solicitor worked in Tokyo: naturally enough, the settings in the novel are Bristol and Tokyo. In the course of his studies, Mr Lee absorbed the rules of literary writing, the need for inventive description and vivid metaphor. I imagine him diligently working on his draft text, clause by clause, trying to turn matter-of-fact descriptive prose into something more ornate. Occasionally this results in infelicities such as: “I felt my heart beating hard in my head.” (p. 5).
Lee’s other main character is the twenty-something English-speaking student, Chiyoko Kobayashi, daughter of a prostitute and part-time receptionist at a Love Hotel. Slightly inexplicably she takes a shine to Fossick and ends up doing all the leg-work in the hunt, as Fossick speaks no Japanese. The subsequent plot unfolds at a somewhat leisurely pace and the revelations, when they eventually come, are unsurprising.
In Fay Weldon’s taxonomy, this is a ‘bad-good’ book. Mr Lee clearly has promise as a writer but this underpowered first novel must count as his apprentice piece. The plot is slow-moving and ultimately rather unengaging; Lee spends time and effort trying to establish and paint his characters but they end up rather stock and shallow; finally, his descriptive writing, while often inventive, can overwhelm his narrative.
I found the most exciting and authentic writing was where Lee lets his characters off the leash a little, giving them sardonic, wisecracking lines: humour can be so much more refreshing than earnestness. I would encourage Mr Lee to persevere, to find his own voice and to let raw technique retire to the servant-role where it belongs.
Forty-one year old Rob Fossick has fallen into deep depression following the death of his pregnant wife in a tragic accident. Formerly a successful society photographer, he now shuns company and pops pills, while occasionally visiting his semi-coherent mother in her care home. The story opens with her tragic death following a fall on the patio. Her last wish was to have a mysterious parcel delivered to a ‘Mr Satoshi’ in Japan.
His mother’s best (female) friend, Freddie, is also a resident, and after the funeral she confirms to Rob that Mr Satoshi is actually English, a Reggie something, who was a post-war boyfriend of his mother who had travelled to Japan to work with the Occupation forces. Somehow they had lost touch.
Fossick’s publisher is coincidentally also keen for him to go to Japan, hoping this will re-ignite his appetite for photography and turn the revenue taps back on. So despite Fossick’s self-absorbed apathy, he nevertheless finds himself in Tokyo on the hunt for Mr Satoshi. Eventually he will locate him and in the last pages the mystery will be revealed.
Author Jonathan Lee took a first in English Literature at Bristol University, and later as a solicitor worked in Tokyo: naturally enough, the settings in the novel are Bristol and Tokyo. In the course of his studies, Mr Lee absorbed the rules of literary writing, the need for inventive description and vivid metaphor. I imagine him diligently working on his draft text, clause by clause, trying to turn matter-of-fact descriptive prose into something more ornate. Occasionally this results in infelicities such as: “I felt my heart beating hard in my head.” (p. 5).
Lee’s other main character is the twenty-something English-speaking student, Chiyoko Kobayashi, daughter of a prostitute and part-time receptionist at a Love Hotel. Slightly inexplicably she takes a shine to Fossick and ends up doing all the leg-work in the hunt, as Fossick speaks no Japanese. The subsequent plot unfolds at a somewhat leisurely pace and the revelations, when they eventually come, are unsurprising.
In Fay Weldon’s taxonomy, this is a ‘bad-good’ book. Mr Lee clearly has promise as a writer but this underpowered first novel must count as his apprentice piece. The plot is slow-moving and ultimately rather unengaging; Lee spends time and effort trying to establish and paint his characters but they end up rather stock and shallow; finally, his descriptive writing, while often inventive, can overwhelm his narrative.
I found the most exciting and authentic writing was where Lee lets his characters off the leash a little, giving them sardonic, wisecracking lines: humour can be so much more refreshing than earnestness. I would encourage Mr Lee to persevere, to find his own voice and to let raw technique retire to the servant-role where it belongs.
Breaking Up
Having gone to all the effort to acquire BT Vision and the Sky Sports channels for the cricket, it has been a disappointment that the picture so often breaks up. For days we blamed the weather, but today I succumbed to an outbreak of rationality and called Dave from Wookey Aerials, a TV man of ten years experience.
I liked Dave. He was a stoutly-built forty-something with the odd tattoo - maybe ex-military - but he knew his transmitters and his multiplexes. The problem apparently is that on the digital auto-scan both the TV and the Vision box search from low to high frequencies. This means they pick up the Plymouth transmitter first (which is miles away) and then ignore the higher frequency Mendip transmitter which is on our doorstep.
However, we are so low in the sight-line of the Mendip transmitter that ever close proximity isn't giving us much signal strength for the low-power Freeview multiplexes, which include Dave (19) and Sky Sports (41, 42). As a consequence, Dave suggested I buy a Tesco signal booster (£9.97).
Then he showed me his trick. He set each device in turn on auto-tune, but with the aerial coax pulled out of the wall. He waited until the scan passed 50% (and was safely past the Plymouth frequency band) and then plugged it back in. Voila! The TV/Vision box acquired just the Mendip transmitter channels. It works better already.
As a bonus, he explained that both our SONY TV and our Vision box were HD-ready. All we needed to do was to buy an HDMI cable to replace the SCART one we're currently using and then we'd be able to watch the Freeview HD channels!
Sounds perfect. When I got back from Tescos this afternoon, the first thing I did was to plug in the signal booster pre-amp to improve Clare's already good Sky coverage of the England v. Sri Lankan test.
It made the picture worse.
I liked Dave. He was a stoutly-built forty-something with the odd tattoo - maybe ex-military - but he knew his transmitters and his multiplexes. The problem apparently is that on the digital auto-scan both the TV and the Vision box search from low to high frequencies. This means they pick up the Plymouth transmitter first (which is miles away) and then ignore the higher frequency Mendip transmitter which is on our doorstep.
However, we are so low in the sight-line of the Mendip transmitter that ever close proximity isn't giving us much signal strength for the low-power Freeview multiplexes, which include Dave (19) and Sky Sports (41, 42). As a consequence, Dave suggested I buy a Tesco signal booster (£9.97).
Then he showed me his trick. He set each device in turn on auto-tune, but with the aerial coax pulled out of the wall. He waited until the scan passed 50% (and was safely past the Plymouth frequency band) and then plugged it back in. Voila! The TV/Vision box acquired just the Mendip transmitter channels. It works better already.
As a bonus, he explained that both our SONY TV and our Vision box were HD-ready. All we needed to do was to buy an HDMI cable to replace the SCART one we're currently using and then we'd be able to watch the Freeview HD channels!
Sounds perfect. When I got back from Tescos this afternoon, the first thing I did was to plug in the signal booster pre-amp to improve Clare's already good Sky coverage of the England v. Sri Lankan test.
It made the picture worse.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Water flowing underground
It was the Talking Heads, wasn't it?
On Thursday we had to go to Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton for Clare to meet with the radiotherapy doctor and plan her schedule: I have been to more upbeat meetings.
Yesterday, Clare went out for a walk. I, meanwhile, was waiting for the inspector from Bristol Water to come round as we had discovered, from our water meter in the road outside, that we have a leak somewhere in the garden.
Just before lunch Clare returns and is in quite a lot of abdominal pain. At half past one I've called the doctor out. She duly arrives about an hour later at which point there are odd "Doctor Who"-like bleeps and squeaking noises coming from just outside the house (the doctor gives me an odd glance as she leaves). The water man is tracing the pipes with a metal detector.
Clare has an infection acquired, the doctor believes, at the hospital. Meanwhile, the inspector has located the leak somewhere beneath the concrete path running alongside the house. 'Maybe two or three feet down, at the junction with the internal pipework. Plumbers used to be notorious for getting that connection wrong leading to corrosion.'
I didn't have time to get Clare's prescription: too busy calling home insurance and various contractors to get quotes. The water man rubbed his chin judiciously and estimated that in excess of £1,000 a year was escaping under our garden. I believe we will get it back.
The BBC news last night was in a full flood of moral indignation over a Conservative MP who had proposed that the laws of supply and demand might apply to people with mental deficiencies when it came to getting a job. (He thought they should price themselves at below the minimum wage to give themselves a comparative advantage when applying for the simple jobs which they were capable of doing).
It's not so much that there aren't arguments (albeit not especially good ones) against his position: it's the intolerable smugness and self-righteousness of the 'do-gooders' which irritates. Patronising smiles, economic illiteracy and the spending of other people's money: an inseparable trinity.
On Thursday we had to go to Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton for Clare to meet with the radiotherapy doctor and plan her schedule: I have been to more upbeat meetings.
Yesterday, Clare went out for a walk. I, meanwhile, was waiting for the inspector from Bristol Water to come round as we had discovered, from our water meter in the road outside, that we have a leak somewhere in the garden.
Just before lunch Clare returns and is in quite a lot of abdominal pain. At half past one I've called the doctor out. She duly arrives about an hour later at which point there are odd "Doctor Who"-like bleeps and squeaking noises coming from just outside the house (the doctor gives me an odd glance as she leaves). The water man is tracing the pipes with a metal detector.
Clare has an infection acquired, the doctor believes, at the hospital. Meanwhile, the inspector has located the leak somewhere beneath the concrete path running alongside the house. 'Maybe two or three feet down, at the junction with the internal pipework. Plumbers used to be notorious for getting that connection wrong leading to corrosion.'
I didn't have time to get Clare's prescription: too busy calling home insurance and various contractors to get quotes. The water man rubbed his chin judiciously and estimated that in excess of £1,000 a year was escaping under our garden. I believe we will get it back.
The BBC news last night was in a full flood of moral indignation over a Conservative MP who had proposed that the laws of supply and demand might apply to people with mental deficiencies when it came to getting a job. (He thought they should price themselves at below the minimum wage to give themselves a comparative advantage when applying for the simple jobs which they were capable of doing).
It's not so much that there aren't arguments (albeit not especially good ones) against his position: it's the intolerable smugness and self-righteousness of the 'do-gooders' which irritates. Patronising smiles, economic illiteracy and the spending of other people's money: an inseparable trinity.
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