In just a couple of hours time, we’ll find out if A Plague Requiem has been selected for this year’s National Student Drama Festival, and if we have to do the whole thing again in Scarborough at Easter.
Either way, I’ll let you know.
[ Update: the show wasn't selected. It's a shame, and I'm sure it doesn't necessarily reflect the quality of the piece - but it is actually quite a relief, since my Easter is quite full enough already. Never mind, eh? ]
What an interesting day: thanks to Cory (himself something of a fan) my The System of the World @ The Tower of London Flickr set got BoingBoing’d. Woo!
Already there are several more photos tagged with baroquecyclelondon from Flickr user Tarquin Binery, and glenelg has tagged photos of The Hague (which makes an appearance in Quicksilver) with baroquecycle.
But perhaps it’s easier to keep track of all this in a group? The baroquecycle group should do nicely! It’s a public group so anyone can join and post pictures, the more the merrier.
And there’s more! While I’ve been typing this, nairb1 has been establishing the latitude and longitude of each photo to allow them to be geotagged and, I think, sucked into Google Earth somehow. Potentially, there might be some way to visually connect the dots of Stephenson’s London…
To wrap up, here’s a snippet from Warren Ellis‘ latest column:
If you also glean from this that a reverse-engineering of sorts is possible: that a print-first book can generate its own interweb shadow structure, like, for instance, a wiki… well, that would be kind of interesting, wouldn’t it? That an URL printed on the back of a book, when typed into your browser, could take you to a place that provides an entirely new dimension to the work… that could be the eventual optimum way in which a print object interacts with the internet.
Of course, the Quicksilver Metaweb is exactly that sort of added functionality – especially given that it can auto-generate a PDF of the current annotations to form a handy printout – but I’d certainly like to see how far this can go, too.
A few bits and pieces as things get updated:
1. There’s a new version of my CV available for download – it’s been nipped and tucked a little, with much more of a focus on lighting and theatre.
2. After a year with this third major version of notlikecalvin I’ve finally converted this weblog to the same style as the rest. Obviously it’s nowhere near finished, but putting it up now is great motivation for doing more work on it. At least, that’s the idea.
And a couple of tips from recent experience:
1. If, for some reason, you have to survive without your computer for a couple of weeks, you can charge your iPod off any powered USB2 port – including a PlayStation2, although it’s fiddly. Sometimes the PS2 won’t behave, but try unplugging any memory cards and going into the system browser – it seems to be entirely random.
2. If your fridge smells a bit, just get a new one. Much easier.
[Edit: comments are still bobbins in my new CSS, so I've switched back to the Green Marinée theme for the moment.]
I had some spare time in London a couple of weeks ago when we had a school trip to see The Anderson Project at the Barbican: why not photo-document one of the pivotal locations in The System of the World, the Tower of London?
Possible spoilers ahead!
When reading the rather lengthy invasion-of-the-Tower sequence, I didn’t get a clear mental map of what-went-where inside the Tower, so that was my main focus. On a very dismal, grey day with no direct sunlight I found myself in the ancient fortress complex – it was freezing cold and I didn’t get to spend as much time there as I would’ve liked: my photos and notes, cross-referenced with snippets from the Arrow Books 2005 UK paperback edition, text copyright © 2004 by Neal Stephenson, can be found in my Flickr space.
Those photos are all tagged as baroquecyclelondon, and it would really be cool if anyone else wanted to Flickr-ise any of the many other London locations of Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle and tag them similarly (or maybe just baroquecycle if they happen to be near the Massachusetts Bay Colony of Technologickal Arts…). Perhaps someone might like to document the top of The Monument and the view that Jack would’ve had of the Tower, and tag it?
I guess I was hoping that this could be a visual annotation to TSotW, in much the same way as the Quicksilver Metaweb, but perhaps that’s too grand an ambition. (I’m also hoping that extracting small snippets of text that are, of course, copyright © 2004 by Neal Stephenson, can be considered as fair use.) Any Londoners out there feeling Baroque?
[Edit: forgot to mention that this was slightly inspired by Tantek Çelik and Eric Meyer's obsessively detailed Matrix location Flickr-ing.]
[Edit2: use Google Maps for a great overview of the Tower complex - compare it to the description on page 199.]
It was two years ago that I posted the first image to my moblog, Light & Dark. I’m stupidly sentimental, particularly with numerical significance, so when I noticed that I was on nine hundred and ninety-eight pictures, I knew that I’d have to wait until this second aniversary before I could post #1000.
I started off with a Sony Ericsson T610 – lovely phone with a really rugged feel – and switched a year ago to a SE K700i, with a camera resolution of 640×480 pixels! Hopefully I’ll upgrade to a K750 sometime in the next week, and those 2MP should prove satisfactory for use as a basic, but capable, camera. It almost worries me that phonecam’ery will become too much like ‘normal’ photography, and lose something of its rustic, blurry charm.
Anyway, here’s to the next two years of low-res snapping!
Tranquility is back.
I rang Amtrak this morning: it’s a national number which, when you press the right button (itself something of a mystery) puts you through to your local depot. The nice lady radio’d the driver and I was reassured that he knew where campus reception was, even if he had his “Monday morning head on”. Strolled down to reception and let them know I had a parcel coming so they could give me a call when it arrived. Which is what happened.
Once again, Amsys shipped my Mac on its side and densely wrapped in brown paper, and this time there was a letter inside with a brief summary of what they’d done. Which was nice.
First startup was okay, even though it booted into the other OS X installation on the other startup partition – that was fine, since it showed that all the hardware was working. Startup again, using the option key to select the correct drive and the most agonising wait: first only the cursor, faint and translucent; then after a couple of minutes the usual loading screen but incredibly slow – “waiting for local disks” alone took two or three hand-wringing minutes; eventually (five or six minutes?) the login screen, and then everything seemed fine.
Except for all those little bits and pieces, of course. Reinstalling Witch and Quicksilver into startup items after AppleCare got me to turn them off two entire weeks ago.
And a new logic board is essentially a new computer, so those very few tracks I’ve purchased from the iTunes Music Store wouldn’t run on this “new” system. Theoretically, you should deauthorise a machine that you’re sending away for repair, but since it was dead I couldn’t do that, could I? If I somehow were to acquire four other Macs (or Windows boxes…) my only option would be to deauthorise everything and then authorise again from scratch, something you can only do once a year. DRM sucks.
I’ve run TechTool a couple of times, and everything tests out fine. But then again, I did the same thing during the intermitent fault period two weeks ago and nothing showed up. This new logic board was once again built in Shanghai, in production week 39 – September – 2004. Let’s see how that compares:
| Logic board | Year | Week | Lasted |
| Original | 2004 | 43 | <3months |
| #2 | ??? | ??? | ~8months |
| #3 | 2005 | 40 | 3-4months |
| #4 | 2004 | 39 | tbc… |
If I’m reading this right, the logic board I have now is of very much the same vintage as the original one, and is also in the range of serial numbers included in Apple’s iMac G5 Repair Extension Program for Video and Power Issues. So, hopefully, this should last for another few months, enough to get my degree finished. I’ll keep you posted.
Right – barring some sort of serious incompetence, I should get my “repaired” iMac G5 back tomorrow. Apparently it’s spent the weekend in my local Amtrak depot. Of course, living on a not-very-well-signposted campus in the middle of nowhere doesn’t make sending/receiving items via courier all that easy, and I’ve had several problems with TNT and the Royal Mail in the past.
So I’ll give the depot a ring tomorrow morning, and see if I can give them some specific directions. I don’t want to be running ’round the campus and the entire Yorkshire Sculpture Park searching for my randomly-delivered computer. Again. It’ll be fine.
In other news, the Surprise Good Thing Of The Week Award goes to Greggs, for selling an actually-plain-and-simple ham sandwich: lovely, malty wholemeal bread, some sort of margarine and tasty ham – no mayo, salad or other bobbins. And at the ideal pricepoint of £1.30. Fantastico.
An early call from Darren at Amsys this morning: the replacement logic board has been fitted and has tested fine. They’ll be using Amtrak to ship it back to me (not friends with TNT anymore?).
But, of course, tomorrow’s the weekend, and since The Ruler Of The Universe likes us to all stay asleep for two whole days no work is allowed – especially from courier companies because they get so tired from running around all week: no shiny-fresh iMac until Monday at the earliest.
Boo and hiss. Still, if this one can deign to last three entire months (which only logic board #2 has managed so far) then that should be enough to finish my degree with. Here’s hoping, eh?
Another call to Amsys today: the replacement logic board is apparently now “available”, but whether it’s actually being/been fitted I don’t know. If it hadn’t been repaired and retested by today then it isn’t going to get back to me by tomorrow – and then the weekend gets in the way.
[Why are our weekends still rooted in the Dark Ages?]
So maybe – maybe – I’ll get my Mac back at the beginning of next week. And that’s starting to edge into not-quite-good-enough territory.
The story so far: last Monday my iMac G5 started freezing, and although it initially seemed like a software problem – not too serious – after a call to AppleCare, on Tuesday it wouldn’t start up at all and was exhibiting exactly the same symptoms as the previous two times. So, another long call to AppleCare and TNT arrived to ship it down to Amsys, Apple’s contracted service provider. On Wednesday, Mark called from Amsys: it was working fine, even after several restarts. Fantastic.
The iMac got left “on test” over the rest of the week and through the weekend. I called Amsys this afternoon and agreed that they may as well ship it back to me, if they couldn’t find anything wrong with it.
Half an hour later Mark calls me back: one last start-up to gather some system information and – guess what? – it’s dead again. And, surprise-surprise, it’s the logic board! A replacement is on order (why don’t they have spares – it’s the faulty part) so that’s another couple of days, plus another for transport: hopefully I’ll be back to full power by the end of the week. Hopefully.
Still, I was a single failed restart away from getting my bugger-up old logic board back. Thankfully I’ll be getting one of those shiny new ones which can’t possibly go wrong. Just like the last two times.
