On The Coastal Path: Fishguard

Ancient cannons defending the port of Fishguard; foxglove; that chrome yellow moss I don't know the name of but is beautiful; the view inland; turn round, the view out to sea.

It seems so long ago, but that's the effect August has on me: the year is divided into Before August and After August, and right now, I'm in the doldrums that is August.

Moving to Ubuntu 11:04 (2): compuwiz and the Subsequent Re-Install

Yep, I re-installed. It didn't take as long as the first time, partly because I decided not to put Open Office on. 11.04 comes with Libre Office, which is an Open Source fork of Open Office and not so very different. I can work with it. All I really use is Writer anyway. (If I use a spreadsheet or presentation programme, I think I'm in the office and I get the shivers.)

Why did I re-install?  Because setting up a computer to be the way you need it takes time. It's not just about installing your favourite browser, cloud and office applications and like that. It's about turning off tap-to-click on the trackpad, which I have to do because of the way I take my finger off the pad when scrolling, which I have to do because I slow the trackpad / mouse down because then I don't have to do lots of cramping fine muscle control to get the pointer where I need it, and consequently need to take my fingers off the trackpad when they reach a side, move them to the other side and replace them, which causes a click if I have tap-to-click set on. There are a lot of little tweaks like this and everyone has different settings. Not all of which you get to control from the stock GUI.

So after some Googling, I wound up installing compuwiz to make some adjustments. Big mistake. It doesn't play so well with the new Unity desktop and for some reason I ended up down to one application workspace. Now on a Windows machine I accept one workspace, but on a *nix machine "I want my work-spac-es". I use four on the Macbook Pro, set up the exact same way that Andy Hunt (of Pragmatic Thinking and Learning authorship) has his set up, which I found a little spooky when I read it and maybe goes to show that a) great minds think alike, b) alike minds are equally great, c) everyone does it that way because it's the best way to do it. So I was not going to shrug and settle for one workspace on Ubuntu.

At some point afterwards, I found out how to boot into Gnome (aka Ubuntu Classic) at log-in, and when I did, I got my four workspaces back. I uninstalled compuwiz and went looking at the settings via the Configuration Editor to remove anything attached to the uninstalled program. I did that, after figuring out how, and logged back in to Unity.

Oh dear, oh no. Don't do that. Utter mess. Now I had the Gnome interface with the Unity Dock appearing and disappearing like a frightened mouse. And I lost the Ubuntu Applications menu. Logging in to the Gnome interface, I had... the Gnome interface with the Unity Dock appearing and disappearing like a frightened mouse. And I still lost the Ubuntu Applications menu.

There are of course no books on this stuff and I decided it would be shorter and simpler to re-install than go Googling and manually un-pick the damage. So that's what I did. I now log into Gnome and set the menu bars at the top and bottom to auto-hide. Unity isn't quite ready yet and compuwiz certainly isn't. I can understand why Apple are obsessed with controlling third-party applications.

But, but, but... Windows stopped doing stuff like all that a long, long time ago. Amongst the many things they understand in Redmond, it's managing backwards compatibility. The program base for Ubuntu is now large enough that they need to address that if they ever want it to move out of geek-land to the normal user (i.e. someone even more clueless than me).

And don't get me started on networking, or I'll write a whole post on that.

I'm going to persevere. So far it seems to run everything faster and smoother than Windows 7 Starter does. And using any Linux distro is cooler than using Windows 7 - if you care about that sort of thing.

The Joy Formidable: The Big Roar

I have written about The Joy Formidable before. I will doubtless do so again, to say "I told you they were going to be huge".

Their first album, The Big Roar, came out on July 11. I have been listening to nothing else on the commute for the last few days, and that's the first time that's happened for a long time. For three people, they make a hell of a lot of noise and it's all good. There's the awesome Greatest Light Is The Greatest Shade,which makes the hairs on the back of my back stand up every time. Check out Whirring, with an enormous finish...



... and A Heavy Abacus, which proves that they as soon as they decide to move on from the indie/quirky lyric thing, their proven ability to write massive anthemic tunes will net them a serious Big Song...



They are touring the US and Canada in August, and they could be one of those bands that makes it bigger across the Atlantic than they do here. This is one of the best bands around right now. Really. Get with it before they do a breakout set at Glastonbury or wherever. And before the first DJ/dance remixes, in about six months...

South Bank Thursday Evening August

Thursday evenings this August is a Yoga class, an ice-cream from Scoop on Brewer Street and a walk back to Waterloo past the ICA and over Hungerford Bridge. The crowds are out, the skies are perfect and sometimes it's just time to take photographs with a camera phone.

White Riot, I Wanna Riot....

The Bank told us all to go home early Tuesday afternoon, after a Facebook posting that encouraged people to go to the West End and get the shareholder's money back from The Bank. It had already closed a number of branches in various dodgy parts of London - though Bexleyheath isn't my idea of anywhere anyone is going to riot.

After a quick stop at the gym for a run, I proceeded home. And passing through the Cineworld complex, which on cut-price Tuesday is starting to get full right about that time, saw this lot instead.

The green doors are to an amusement arcade. They have shoved a large drinks fridge, seats and a games machine against the door. The Burger King has never looked so clean and tidy. The car parks never so deserted and the point of the last shot is that while this area is, well, doesn't have the same proportion of graduates as Richmond-upon-Thames, it's not an urban grime-hole like Mare Street or most of Peckham. The unemployment rate round here is actually quite low. And it is a long way from the nearest enclave of, errrm, disaffected youth. The riots haven't been in Hounslow and Southall, but Brixton and Tottenham. Any rioters would need to be imported and there are plenty of nicer places between them and me. Like Richmond, or Twickenham, or Putney. But perhaps when the nice places start boarding up and closing, everyone else has to.

This won't last to the weekend, if it isn't stopped by a couple of nights of 16,000 policemen on the streets of London. This isn't a real riot, there's no political motivation behind it, and my guess is that the opportunist anarchists who were probably the one putting things like the Facebook message out will have found that the disaffected youth aren't up for being guided.

If you really want a conspiracy theory, try this: these riots were inflamed by MI5 provocateurs to provide an incident for RIM/Blackberry to either provide GCHQ with the cryptography keys to the BBM kingdom or to have it shut down in this country. Or try this one: it was inflamed by the wide-screen smartphone makers to ensure that the Blackberry image was moved irrevocably down-market in the eyes of people who aren't disaffected youth.

It doesn't matter if either of those are false, because you can bet that MI5's lawyers drafting that request, and that the Nokia / Apple / HTC / Samsung marketing departments are all currently lighting candles to the God of Happenstance and ordering in more for the copycat white kids to buy or contract. That's the thing with Capital: when it loses, it wins, and when it wins, it wins.

Things I Saw Where I Lived and Walked: Part 42

The skateboard graveyard on the downstream southside pontoon of Hungerford Bridge; Anna in front of the Lloyds Insurance Building during a fam trip to the new offices - sometimes I wish I was twenty years younger; yes, cup cakes at the office, we know how to live large (and very tasty too); two views of the crowds Tuesday evening at Piccadilly Circus, when it was really hot and I was finishing a two-scoop ice-cream from Scoop after my SCS class and before descending into the tube; the Cycling Horde on the north side of Waterloo Bridge waiting for the green light; what happens to your Silhouettes when they fall out of your bag and you don't notice for a couple of hours in the meantime a car ran over them.

It's Too Quiet In Here

A few weeks ago, our CEO announced that 15,000 jobs would be "saved" over the next three years. Not from the poor bloody infantry in the branches and telephone offices. There were promises to leave the infantry alone and noises about "reducing layers of management" instead. Even in an organisation which hands out "manager" titles too easily, 15,000 is a big chunk: someone worked it out as 1 in 4. During the internal announcement, they mentioned en passant that The Bank hires 12,000 people a year, so a hiring freeze would do the trick. Maybe it does, but it doesn't hire 12,000 managers a year.

And if anyone is worried, they aren't showing it. There are no rumours, except that we should be hearing something in the next couple of weeks, and that the Director-level people know what's happening. There have been no mysterious project groups or secondments and if the angels of death from HR have been flying (they were roosting in senior managers' offices every day during the last re-organisation) it's been at night. Nothing. Which could mean everything (no change, just a recruitment freeze) or nothing (the evaluation and redundanc... err... rationalisation process will be announced).

Because of size of the company and the numbers involved, an actual cull would need minimum 30-day notice for At-Risk letters and a public process to get rid of people. This deflates morale faster than a pin in a balloon, and they did it to us a couple of years ago. The feeling is that with a major IT integration due to happen in the next month, management don't need us distracted by re-applying for jobs within the company, looking outside and generally feeling like crap. They don't need us feeling like that, but they might be willing to live with it.

I'm guessing everyone is thinking that it will be everyone else. A large number of people have been working full-time on integrating The Other Bank into The Bank, and yet the business has carried on. Those people are wondering if they aren't rather disposable. My bit of The Bank went through a blood-bath (sorry, rationalisation) a couple of years ago, when they really did get rid of a bunch of... less-performing... expensive middle managers. (And I got stuffed.) Other bits of The Bank dodged that, so many people in my bit think the axe will fall elsewhere. Everyone is hoping that Operational Risk will vanish in a puff of smoke to some central office, never to be seen again.

The City, of course, is expecting 15,000 pulses to be stopped. The internal announcements made it sound like it would be 15,000 positions, a decent proportion of which are already un-filled already, so what we were looking at is a hiring freeze. I don't think so.

Earlier this year, the new CEO held a meeting in Birmingham of all the managers and head office folk involved in the businesses. It took the largest conference hall in the NEC and the trains to and from London in the morning and evening were rammed. I'm guessing he took one look at the assembled crowd and said to himself "We do NOT need this many f....g people to run a frigging bank".

I think we're going to get a really nasty shock.