Those In-Between Days

Sunday Evening; I'm watching Celine and Julie Go Boating - though I may have to do it in two parts because I'm going into work Monday. If you haven't seen this film, do so and you will understand something has been missing from your life.

 

Also I've spent a couple of days immersed in complex analysis and Riemann-Roch and finally found the simple proof. Not a holomorphic one-form, divisor or sheaf in sight. Well, there is for the projective case, but that's another proof.

Next post will be 2015. That is not a real year. For the first twenty years of my life, 2015 was a different world. Where's my interstellar transport?

Ruby Rose: Transformation

(Props to Fashion Copious)

Ruby is supposed to be "genderfluid", which only make sense if you think that gender is determined by where you buy your shirts. Basically. 80-proof nonsense, but who cares? If only the average British TV drama had these production values and photography.

Happy Christmas.

Why You Drink

Someone circulated this at work.

It could also be why you buy lottery tickets. Or it could be a good example of how capitalism uses humour to disguise victim-blaming. You shouldn't need to drink because you're not scrambling up the greasy pole. You should have a meaningful, satisfying life instead. But you don't, because capitalism, commuting and socialist-state level taxes. But it's still your fault you drink. Because you could put up with all that shit sober, and therefore have a choice.

But I think they thought they were being funny.

It's Carl Jung's Colours Time Again!

Every now and then, we do Colours. It’s supposed to make us aware of each others' differing personal styles and so help us work better together. It was invented by C G Jung and is based on two scales: introversion – extraversion and intellectual – feeling.

It looks plausible and it’s fun. But it’s also based on a misleading concept of human action and personality. Here’s my take on it:

If I’m Cautious it’s because this is the kind of stuff that can wind me up in the shit , and I want to be sure I’m not going to wind up in the ….

If I’m Meticulous, it’s because wrong details will wind me up in the shit

I’m not Deliberate

If I’m Systematic, it’s because it saves effort when I have to do it again

I’m not Formal

If I’m Candid it’s because that’s what I think it might take to get the results I want

I’m Straightforward, because I’m a man

If I’m Single- minded, it’s because I want to get this shit done and out of my life

I’m not Purposeful

If I’m Persevering, it’s because this shit won’t go away so we may as well get done with it

If I’m Diplomatic, it’s because I think you’ve got thin skin or a bad sense of entitlement

I’m Nurturing, Supportive and Patient it’s because I’m a decent person, and you deserve it

I’m Dependable, because I’m a man, and you haven’t done anything to disqualify yourself

If I’m Impulsive, it’s because the sun is shining

I’m not Energetic, I just grind this shit out

I’m Optimistic when the odds justify it, which is not often

I’m not Lively

I’m Persuasive when I think you can be persuaded and I give a shit about whatever it is

People have styles, but these are superficial. The transition into adulthood is about living a life that is about achieving results, in a broad sense that includes raising children, making and nurturing friendships and having fun. So our actions are directed towards those ends, and the style with which we do them reflects the people with whom and the circumstances in which we’re doing them. We do what’s needed to get the job done. People who say “I can’t do that” or “I can’t be like that” might be having a childish moment, but mostly we say things like “Really? Is it worth it?” which is about risk/effort vs reward. That’s a very adult view of the world. So I’m meticulous when I need to be, but not otherwise, as are most people. Some people are just super-control freaky (I am meticulous, you are a little obsessed with details, he/she is a control freak) most of the time, and they have psychological problems. That’s why you need to be careful round them, not because they are detail freaks.

In other words, being an adult is exactly not about being at the mercy of whatever whimsical character genetics you were born with. It’s about transcending those to be someone who gets the shit they need doing, done. And Colours measure the residual stuff that we do when we’re not thinking about how we’re acting.

Sitting in Soho Square One Afternoon

Someone please tell me WTF is it with those huge tubs of nasty smelly noodles from Wasabi? The fuel of choice for people who treat food as fuel. She looks like such a nice girl otherwise. And when she stood up, those legs were very good.

Why I Stopped Drafting Resolutions for 2015

I started to jot some New Year’s Resolution during a particularly optional meeting. When I looked at them again after half an hour, I realised they were all fiddling wound with the basic shape of my life. NO. If I’m not prepared to set something like “Move into flat in Soho” or “Approach 30 girls” or “Visit (exotic location)”, I’m not going to make any resolutions for 2015. The previous year's resolutions have been fine-tuning. I can fine-tune my life on the fly just fine. I'm lacking ambition. I can live with that, but not with pretending that fine-tuning is actually ambition.

This photograph has nothing to do with anything. I just like the red flowers. Click for enlargement.

Blanca Bar, Leicester Square

Explanation: I'm posting these single pictures with cod captions Terry Richardson style because I keep drafting long posts I think mean something and then turn around and think it's a load of twaddle. So until I get back in the writing groove, this is what I'm doing.

Jersey Boys, Leicester Square

Piccadilly Theatre, Soho

September - November 2014 Review

Usually I have no problem writing these monthly reviews, but clearly something went on in September and October that I didn't want to look at, or at least took away the motivation. Sometimes I just have a duff few weeks.

I started September with some food poisoning over the first weekend. That always sets me up for a good week. I got another bout at the end of October, and had a couple of days off in November with the autumn cold that has lingered since. One Wednesday morning I coughed and put my lower back into spasm, and wound up with a £70 visit to the osteo. My left hamstring decided to tighten up, to the point where sitting was actually slightly painful, and that lead to a £55 visit to Petra the sports massuese. After the last episode of food poisoning, I'm no longer drinking coffee, or eating cheese or eggs. Breakfast is suddenly a lot simpler.

My trusty six-year old 15" MacBook Pro developed Flickering Graphic Card Syndrome in September. The guys down in the basement at Mac1 Spitalfields gave me a quote of around £350 + VAT to fix it. So I didn't do that. I have an Air, and that's enough for my needs. My Marantz CD 6003 decided it would throw a fault so obscure - “Sub Q error” - that nobody had heard of it. Since these faults cost almost as much to repair as an upgrade, I went for the upgrade, the Marantz CD6005, and very pleased I am as well. The £300 or so did get me the amazing CD6005. I collected a new pair of Silhouettes with varifocal lenses that cost £800. That's an indulgence, but a) the glasses look sharp, and b) the lenses are fantastic, especially when I keep them clean. I got round to finding a gardener to fix the back fence, re-cover the shed and remove some old grass that had become infested with moss and lay in some new stuff and fill in the vegetable patch I never really grew any vegetables in. VAT, Labour and materials came to about £600. And this time of year brings all the insurances, as well as the annual review of where to put my meagre money for the least awful return on it.

I spent about two weeks in September wading my way through Lee Smolin's book Time Reborn. Things like that make reading feel like a drudgery. Neville Shute's Round The Bend make it a pleasure again. I also read Horror in Architecture by Comaroff and Ong, Cortezar's Hopscotch, Hemingway’s Men Without Women, the Foundation Beyeker’s book on Odilion Redon, The Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucuses, Daniel Lieberman's The Story of The Human Body, A Scream in Soho, Gil Scott Heron's memoir The Last Tour and his novel The Nigger Factory, the Edie Sedgwick biography Edie: An American Biography, Esther Perel’s Mating in Captivity, plus The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 Book, Reproducible Research with R and R Studio, and A Man's Guide to Healthy Aging.

Movies were: A Most Wanted Man, Maps to the Stars, Human Capital, Life of Crime, The Equalizer, Gone Girl, The Judge, Mr Turner, Interstellar, The Imitation Game, Nightcrawler, The Drop and Citizen Four (which brings me up to date). My new Go-To Cinema is the Everyman Baker Street: not the cheapest in town, but pretty darn comfortable. I probably watched the first two series of Game of Thrones as well in this time. I also saw Sequence 8, Triz and Parabelo, the Thomas Ades See the Music, Hear the Dance, and Plateau Effect at Sadlers' Wells, with light suppers at Moro beforehand.

Sis and I dined at Ham Yard and Rules.

What I remember from this period is that I was still scuttling home after doing whatever it was I had gone out to do. I used to go out, for walks, to see films, go to meetings, or just for a coffee and a slice of cake and a browse round a bookshop, out of sheer restlessness. I am now, of course, no longer restless, and I miss it a little bit. I could blame the years, or I could just admit I'm getting lazy. And let's face it, if I hadn't had two bouts of food poisoning, it would have been a pretty darn good autumn.

Mr Turner vs Topsy-Turvey: Basquiat Wins

Ken Loach’s Topsy-Turvey is one of my favourite films, and one of the best films made about the creative process: in that film the creation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado. I came away feeling as if I understood more about the theatrical world of the time, the men who created those quirky operas, and with more respect than I previously had for their work.

So I was looking forward to Ken Loach’s Mr Turner. And sure, it’s lovely to look at. The performances from his troupe are surpassing excellent. And Timothy Spall gives the best performance of a man-as-a-pig as you could want, if you wanted such a thing. But by heaven’s it’s lazy.

A ton of research went into it, and it’s all up there on the screen, but little of it is in the story and even less in the character of Turner. In Topsy-Turvey we meet Gilbert and Sullivan as established figures: Sullivan already has his knighthood. Similarly, we meet Turner when he’s already a success. Except for the life of me, I can’t see why. He’s an oaf. A big, fat, ugly oaf with an unconvincing line in insincere flattery. In 1838, when Turner was in his mid-50’s, and a year covered by this film, the King of France, Louis-Philippe presented a gold snuff box to him. Watch the movie, and then try imaging that porker being admitted to the Court of Louis-Phillipe.

A film about a successful artist has to explain to the viewer why the artist was successful, and what form that success took. Loach does this very well in Topsy-Turvey, with some to-the-point scenes with their impresario, and even touching on their investment in the Savoy Hotel. It’s clear that Sullivan was talented, charming and raffish, and so dealt with the press and society, while Gilbert was a dour, detail-freak who dealt with the production. And why do we know they are good? Because Loach shows us...


Loach dodges this completely with Turner. Turner's business partner was his father, and he’s a bent-backed inarticulate, obsequious creep. Customers are shuffled into a dark room, made to wait, then lead into a studio filled with Turner’s paintings arranged to no special effect and lit by natural light through a layer of muslin. I’m pretty sure that’s not how Jay Jopling shifts his Gilbert and George paintings, and I’ll bet that Whistler was a pretty smooth operator. The buyers we see are gullible and not very bright, or aged landed aristocrats of such a seniority that everyone has to stand when they enter the room. And John Ruskin. The Ruskin in the film is such a lightweight little git that I kept thinking there must have been another John Ruskin who was the most influential art critic of the time. If i didn’t know any better, I’d think that Loach was trying to tell us that people who bought Turners then were as artistically insensible as people who buy Hirsts now. But Loach can’t be saying that, because Great Painter.

Great Painter is why it’s odd that not once do we get to see one of Turner’s pictures up close and sensual. You’d think that, on his name alone, Ken Loach could swing some decent rostrum camerawork on the Tate’s collection, let alone on the chance of a movie tie-in. But seemingly no. In Topsy-Turvey we got performances of the songs in the Mikado, but the most we get in Mr Turner is Turner dashing back from some expedition and knocking off the next Famous Painting while being a boor to an increasingly weird housemaid. Loach should have watched Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation to remind himself of how to show art to inspire awe and respect.

And then we see Turner having himself lashed to a mast so he can sail through a storm and catch pneumonia? Where did that come from? He just did it on a whim? Or was I supposed to know that story as well? Episode after episode without the joining thread of character.

Watch it by all means. But if you want to see a commercial movie that’s really about painting and the art scene of its time, and yet still about a person, watch Julien Schnabel’s Basquiat. That’s how it’s done.

Helena Christiansen in Men's Health, December 2014

Helena Christiansen? A role model for men? Really?

I’m all for articles that feature photographs of the 5’ 10” Danish-Peruvian size 6 (!) supermodel that is Helena Christiansen, though I can imagine many men thinking “45? That’s a bit on the old side.”

What got into Men’s Health editor Mike Shallcross with the December 2014 issue, no-one will ever know. But with the silly suggestion that Helena Christiansen could be a role model, and that I need the 60 year old overweight tubby that is Angela Merkel in my life (I really don’t, outside work, no-one over size 14 or over about 40 is allowed into my life), Michelle Shallcross created The Mangina Issue. I get the damn thing delivered free because no other special offer was remotely acceptable, so I’m not giving them my money.

Anyway, let’s get on with the serious business, which is a bunch of scans of Gergory Derkenne's shots of Helena Christiansen in boxing gear.

(Click for the enlargements. My apologies to Mr Derkenne if copyright issues, but not to Miss Shallcross or his employers.)

I was going to explain to Mrs Shallcross just why she’s created The Mangina Issue, but decided against it. Either he knows what he has done wrong, and is making daily, nay, hourly Acts of Contrition, or she doesn’t, when debating her feminised ass would be a waste of time.

Tattoos and Notch Count: Why You Shouldn't Care

Matt Forney recently wrote an article that has so far gained an astonishing 33,000 comments on RoK, explaining why girls with tattos and piercings are broken and make bad partners. It was based on his personal experience, though a follow-up article citied some academic studies that suggested his experience was not unique. As one commentator said, however, you can find an academic study that provides evidence for pretty much anything.

I'm not going to discuss whether Forney's views are right or wrong. There are pleasant young ladies in my office who have small and discreet tattoos, and in the limited world I inhabit, there are no girls with large and vivid tattos - well, until I get to the gym.

(Abby Lee Kershaw modelling a talking-point tattoo. If you live in her universe.)

I’ve never understood the heat that tattoos on, and sexual experience possessed by, women in their 20’s raises on many of the Manosphere sites. Depending on their visibility and aggression, tattoos are either a deliberate talking point (the barely-visible kind, it proves you were looking closely) or (the vivid on-display kind) a sign that you should probably leave her alone because if you were her type, she would have acknowledged you already. It all sounds like those young Indian men in the UK who want a “nice girl” from the village, not a thoroughly Westernised third-generation girl from their mixed comprehensive down the road.

I keep thinking “What are you guys worrying about? You’re not going to marry them, for Christ’s sake”. And that’s the point: those young anti-tattoo men do want to marry someone. Their complaint is that everywhere they look, they see tattoos and girls with more than a couple of notches on their belt. And in many cases, sure, if there was divorce insurance, those women would be un-insurable. Those young men should be glad those girls are disqualifying themselves as wives. And with such clear signals.

Because as far as I’m concerned, you’re not supposed to marry them. Any of them: tattoos or plain canvas, virgin or experienced, career girl or possible SAHM, sweet Polish girl or tough Yorkshire chick. You’re supposed to have sex with them, go to the movies and the ballet with them, talk about nothing over Sunday breakfast with them, go on holiday with them, and generally let them let you live a more varied life than the narrow sleep-commute-work-gym-commute-sleep cycle you would otherwise live. It’s reciprocal: without you, she would be doing the same. No-one’s using anyone. While they are with you, you should feel that they are fascinating, attractive, someone special and a general bonus to your life (that’s what men are supposed to feel about women, and if we didn’t, the whole thing really would be a business deal). After a while, she will realise you’re not a long-term prospect, or you will get tired of her faults just like the slogan says. Then it’s over.

(Original sentiment by Charles Bukowski)

I did this for a long, long time. It played out against the background of my drinking and generalised frakked-up-ness, so it wasn’t as much fun as it could have been, but I would have still “played the field”, as the phrase was, if I had been a genuinely self-confident man. Some girls didn’t stay as long as I would have liked, and I stayed with some longer than I should have. Some left me, and some I had to leave. All of them went on to other relationships and I never heard from them again.

That’s how it is supposed to be. Until, like me, your declining hormones, retreated neuroses, and sense of personal ease make it easy to retire from the fray, and live quietly as a self-sufficient bachelor. You’re not supposed to marry them. Marrying or even relationship-ing them is for the guys who can’t read the signs.

 (Reading the signs: probably not interested in a guy who blogs; also Photoshop-ed to within a millimetre of her torso; and apparently, she’s engaged.) 

Because there is no sign that says “good wife material”. Never has been, never will be. Time takes its toll on everyone and today’s good wife might be tomorrow’s shrew, just as today’s fit-and-attentive husband is tomorrow’s overweight workaholic. Equally, there’s no sign that says “will make a bad wife for you”. The most we have are probabilities. Read the signs, apply the probabilities and you will never get married, but you can still have some good relationships.

Sunday Morning - Brewer Street - Rain

The Fox Now Arriving on Platform 18

So I take my seat on the Sunday 13:09 Waterloo-Reading via Richmond (because no District Line), look out of the window and grab my still-not-familiar-with-it Lumix TZ-40. Because this...

It disappeared into the space under the platform having had a quick look first (second to last shot of fox emerging before going back in). Utterly unconcerned, much like the foxes that used to sunbathe in my garden under the tall grasses.

Dirty Dicks, Bishopsgate

This Post Delayed...

... because food poisoning. The germs / viruses / whatever are so small and so few in number, and yet the effect leaves me weak through and through, barely able to get upstairs or stay awake. Six flat teaspoons of sugar, half of salt, one litre of water. That's all I had for twenty-four hours. I ate some rice at lunchtime and fell asleep for an hour and a half. If I am able to leave the house Tuesday morning it will be some kind of surprise.

Migrating Your iPhone to Another Mac

You plug your iPhone into the Other Mac and open iTunes. iTunes enforces monogamy: an iPhone can only pair with a single Mac. (I understand the latest version lets you be poly-Mac-amous, but I’m not convinced.) Attempt to use another Mac to manage your iPhone music and iTunes will first delete everything on your phone. Even if you are just changing the setting from Sync to Manually Manage My Music. Hit that Apply button the first time and your phone gets wiped. I hit the button and then cancelled the job by clicking on the cross in the progress bar.

I kept the music on the phone, but iTunes totally lost it. Restarted the phone and iTunes, still no recognition on iTunes of the music on my phone. I looked through the Forums, I called Apple support next morning and I even got told by someone at the Regent Street Apple store that the only way to handle the problem was to book a Genius Appointment. By the time he suggested that I talk to my carrier - who supplied the phone - in case it was a hardware fault, it clicked. Those guys don’t understand how iTunes works and how Macs and iPhones sync. It’s all a black box to them. I downloaded iTunes 12 like the phone support guy suggested and tried again. Nothing changed. By the next morning, I had it figured out.

A Windows program would have an option to “Transfer my iPhone library” or something similar. It would read the music directory on the phone and re-create the computer's view of what was on the phone. It would also have an option to “Re-Sync my Phone Library", which would compare the view on the computer with the music on the phone and prompt for removing or making up the differences. Easy, if a little slow. So if anything goes wrong, a Windows program could read the directories and start over.

iTunes doesn’t work like that. iTunes doesn’t read the file system on the iPhone. It probably can’t read the filesystem, for reasons that Apple thought made sense at the time. (Never drive yourself mad trying to understand crazy – that’s why they call it “crazy”.) What iTunes does is read a special ‘library’ file on the phone, not even the one used by the Music app because, don’t forget, my Music app still had a functioning set of menus and pictures. This is why Apple makes you go through iTunes, because iTunes needs to keep the two catalogue files - one on the Mac and one in the iPhone - in sync.

This is part of a deeper difference between Apple and everyone else. Apple’s approach is to keep the user away from the filesystem. It’s quite amazing how many people don’t really grok file systems, and the UNIX filesystem is especially horrible. Apple’s approach is that the user shouldn’t need to understand the mechanics of the computer, that the user should interact on the symbolic level and leave the messy business of directories and the like to the OS. Apple is like automatic transmission, while Windows and Linux / Unix are for people who like to drive a stick-shift.

iTunes wants me to Sync. Apple wants me not to mess around at the filesystem level. It’s why Spotlight is so fabulous. I decided to get with the program. Here’s how you do it.

Download and install the latest iTunes. This is for version 12.
Make sure you have your music directories connected - mine are on NAS and I have to remember to re-connect to it
Set up a playlist in iTunes called “iPhone” (or whatever) and drag-and-drop all the music you need into it
Connect your iPhone and click on the icon to bring up the control screen

Now do this is exactly this order...
Select the Music Tab...
tick Sync Music at the top left...
tick the playlist you just created...
and only then click the Sync button at the bottom right.

This will delete all the music on your iPhone, copy across the songs in the playlist and re-build the iPhone’s iTunes catalogue and its Music app catalogue.

From now on, to manage the music on your iPhone (or other device), edit the playlist first and let the Sync do the rest. That’s what Apple and iTunes really want you to do. It's just as flexible and you can do it without needing the phone connected. The connect, press Sync and go do something while it does.

Why they don’t just tell us that in the first place, I have no idea. “If you’re from Windows, you’ll be used to manually moving files and re-building the catalogue in your media player. Now there’s no need to do that. Just set up a playlist for your device, edit that and Sync on just that playlist. Here are the exact steps to set that up…”.

Christine McVie On Tour

This was not supposed to happen.

Stolen from The Guardian 13/10/2014

Like Sis says: for Christ sakes we were all supposed to die before we got old...

How Not To Lift A Heavy Object

We have to do “Mandatory Training” every month at The Bank. Year after year it’s the same old stuff. Every year there’s a health and safety thing, which includes instructions about how to lift heavy objects. Here are the photographs of the approved style.

I know. Seriously. This is a bank with… a lot of employees. So let’s go through what’s wrong here.

1. Remove the high heel shoes. Because you see lots of guys lifting in high heels.
2. Feet level and hip width or more apart. Because you don’t want to put rotational stress on your hips.

3. How about using the holes in the side of the box as handles? Which is, you know, they’re there for. 4. Holding the box by the sides means she must generate enough friction to equal the weight of the box. It’s very inefficient and not good for long distances of say, ten yards or more.
5. Just try lifting anything in this pose. Let me know how comfortable your right leg feels.

The point is, if they can mess up something this simple, how much confidence can we have that they are doing the complicated stuff right?

Managing Photographs: Making Choices

There are three decisions to make in this process: culling the boring and just plain bad shots; doing stuff to turn the maybes into definites; and then displaying the stuff I keep.

Some photographs - like this one - are just great on their own. Others need a little context: this one

works better if you know it was taken from St Pauls, and that the Shard is about a mile away. Then there's the photo-essay, which has more or less disappeared from print, but still exists on the internet, and back when Colin Sokol was her photographer, Rumi Neely used to do things like this. The point of an essay is that the overall effect is greater than the sum of the parts: the parts are good-but-not-striking-or-memorable images, and together they make up something memorable. A photo-essay has a narrative structure - even if it is borrowed from a Georges Perec novel. Each image should follow from or contrast with the ones before. The worst kind of photo-essay, or photographer's book, is one that has a series of similar shots. You know: face, face, face; wasteland, wasteland, wasteland; bridge, bridge, bridge; crowd, crowd, crowd. Repetition only works where there's a certain amont of fetishism involved, as in: Ferrari, Ferrari, Ferrari; Mica Arganaraz, Mica Arganaraz, Mica Arganaraz; sunset, sunset, sunset.

(Not a Ferrari or a sunset)

When we are taking snaps for ourselves, rather than for clients or projects for publication, it's of an event, or place, or journey. There's a built-in narrative, even if it’s a walk round a part of a city. So one thing that guides the final selection process is the narrative that we make from the photographs. Another is keeping images that fit into a longer-term project (I'm doing signs on buildings at the moment).

So I am going to keep everything but the clunkers in an archive is that I might devise new projects or themes, and can start by raiding the past. This helps me understand how to organise my photographs. I photograph places and so that will do for a directory structure. Themes can be handled with tags.

Finally, there’s the presentation issue. I’m not a pro, I’m not going to find a publisher for a book, and any thoughts of gallery or exhibition are out of the question. I don’t do the kind of photographs that photography club types do, and anyway I’m not a joiner. So it’s going to be the blog. And the Picasa album that Blogger uses to store pictures in my blogs.

Chasing the Blahs Away

Recently when I wake up, at 05:30 each weekday morning, I murmer to myself: can I stop now? Do I have to carry on slogging through each morning prep, commute, day at the job, commute and/or gym? Can I retire and do whatever it is I think I'm going to do when I retire - learn K-theory and the Bach Cello Suites on plectrum guitar.

At least, that's what I think I mean. And if I had a thumping final-salary pension from years of service with the company and could afford to live on it, then I might well chuck in the day-job and find something else to do. But I don't, so I can't, so waking up at 05:30 it is.

The last week off work let me realise that it takes my body three full days to recover from the kind of workout I gave it on the Tuesday afternoon, the highlights of which were 2x6x70kgs on the bench press, 3x10x24kgs on the dumbell chest press and 3x8x60 on the deadlift. (I know, you can do that standing on your head. Call me when you're 60 and doing better.) A huge part of the "Can I Stop Now" comes from that physical reaction.

Then waking up at 05:30. My natural times are bed between 23:00 and 24:00, wake up some time after 07:00 and lie in bed for 20 minutes or so before getting started on breakfast. 05:30 is un-natural and it's followed by a commute by public transport. I know everyone else does that, and guess what? Everyone else wants to stop as well.

The drab office with its half-assed aircon, meeting rooms in which I and many others struggle to stay awake, furniture that was tired when it was bought no doubt second-hand, don't mention the toilets, and the truly awful computers and internet access does not help either.

Then there's my superior moral fortitude, so I can't do what old men my age do, which is let themselves go to the point where they think that three brisk 30-minute walks a week counts as exercise, and watching some vapid documentary on BBC 3 counts as intellectual challenge. When I ask if I can stop now, I'm asking as well if I can just let myself go now please?

Of course I can't. I know what happens if I stop exercising: I put on weight, my blood sugar goes up as a consequence, my legs break out into blotches and I lose the fine edge of thinking ability that makes me a demon at my job. I get tired, irritable and lose my charm and confidence. Seriously.

I could no more start watching mainstream TV than I could pull my hair out. I'm fed up with the movie scene in London because I want it to be something more than the same five films in the Curzons, Everymans and even at the ICA. Could I really stop reading philosophy and mathematics? I did stop with the philosophy, and I'm happier now I read it again, even if it's sometimes so waffle-y it hurts (I'm looking at you, Isabelle Stengers). As for reading and understanding mathematics (or physics), it's how you know you haven't woken up brain-dead from one too many meetings where people talk non-stop management babble as if it makes sense to them.

As for dressing well and eating at the bar (at Moro, Exmouth Market as I type), that's only going to stop when I can't afford it. And it isn't that expensive to dress with anonymous style, thanks to the fact that all clothes are now made by child labour in Chinese factories that spew the pollution from the carcinogenic dyes into the water.

I'm doing all this sober - something you have no idea about - and drug-free and with practically zero chance of getting off with any kind of female - which some of you may have an idea about - and while it's all terribly virtuous and vastly preferable, for me, to being drunk, high or involved with some needy screw-up, it lacks edge and part of me would like to stop doing it, and let go, stay home and watch crap TV, eat high-calorie food junk food and turn into a self-pitying mess who gets asked to retire in six months. That's the self-pitying part of me talking. I don't want to do any of those things. Especially the part where I stop being good-looking.

What I want is to live the way I do but without the sense of effort, effort, effort. You know why so few people are real menschen? Because it's hard work, and it never gets to be a habit, and it never gets easy, and very few people support you in your endeavour to be so.

What’s left is a case of the blahs, that boredom and dissatisfaction that can make me retreat to the house instead of going to do something, because doing whatever it is isn’t going to make me feel better so why should I spend the money? A quick look round the web finds people treating the blahs like a cloudy day, and as having no ontological significance, but that’s a tad lazy. If I’m bored and dissatisfied it’s because there’s something missing from my life. Maybe I need to find an interesting book to read, or please god a decent movie to watch, or do some housework (alcoholics will remember that one: cleaning is very distracting, therapeutic and rewarding. Many alcoholics in early days have spotless quarters). The blahs can mean I’ve read some tedious books, or been tired, or done something to run myself down. There’s nothing that says the blahs are more common amongst the older folk, although we do have more cause to say things like “I saw the original” or “I read Proust already”. However, I haven’t read lots of John D McDonald or any of Hopscotch. It’s up to me to find something new and interesting, and there’s always something out there.

So I am going to tell my waking, aching body to shut the frack up, and take it to the brisk morning exercises involving light barbells with Fatgripz on the handles. I am going to do my best to be in bed by 21:30 five days a week and get seven hour's sleep. I am going to keep dragging my sorry ass to work, to the gym, to restaurants, movies and wherever else I think I should show up.

This Post Intentionally Left Blank

Because I was on holiday last week and have too many threads dangling.

Managing Photographs: Software

So we were at the point where the trusty MacBook Pro was no longer trusty. And I had my iPhoto library on its hard drive. I managed to export all the files to a network drive - I think that's easier on the early version of iPhoto I had - and that took the time it took. Suddenly I had around 10,000 files to sort out. I know that this is almost how many a rookie professional wedding photographer takes on their first assignment, but I’m not a pro, so for me, 10,000 is a lot.

I experimented with using iPhoto on a new Mac Air with the iPhoto library on the network drive via wifi. Because, you know, I didn’t know any better.

Just.

Don't.

Or you will tear your hair out waiting for iPhoto to fetch the files over your wi-fi network and make copies and do whatever else it does. Macs just don't do well over networks, especially with a Windows drives on the other end.

This is a shame, because for a simple person like me, whose idea of editing a photo is straightening out the unaccountable but consistent 0.5-2.0 degrees rightwards tilt in every photograph I have ever taken with a digital camera, iPhoto does a nice job with a minimum of fuss. Imports, creates events, lets me edit, and exports. All in a pretty interface. But it really wants its Library on the hard drive or maybe an external drive connected by Thunderbolt for preference (I haven't tried). Not on a network drive. What to do?

I was also reading pro photographers' blogs at the time, and one of them mentioned Irfan View.

Heck, yeah, Irfan View. Irfan View laughs at displaying 2,000 image directories it’s never seen before, creating thumbnails from any image format file faster in a blink, and then giving you all the bulk handling facilities you want and some you didn't know you couldn't live without. You have to see it in action to believe it. It's ridiculously robust and stable, and it's developed, seemingly, by a single man called Irfan Skiljan. It's free, though after a while, you really will want to donate. Along with Evernote and Dropbox, it's on all my (Windows) computers. So on a Mac that means WINE. Tried it. With Winebottler. That worked fine though I had to hack round the fact that Wine bottler wants the 433 version of the install exe, and the current download is 438. And suddenly I had Irfan View up, except... wait... I had more images than that in that folder. And that one. For some reason it will only show me 45 random images from a directory. Nothing on Google about this, which makes me think no-one else has used this on larger directories. So that's that option.

So Picasa. I know. Google. The Evil Empire. How can anything written - actually, acquired - by Google be good enough? By now I had learned not to do images over wifi, so I downloaded it and started slowly. And actually, it’s not bad. It’s better than that. It’s good enough for the job.

And that’s the point: for the job. moving away from iPhoto means I had to think about my “workflow”. "Workflow" is what replaced "developing and printing" when everyone went digital. In the Days of Film, photographers developed the negatives, made up contact sheets (analogue thumbnails), and then looked at each one through a loupe, and indicated the keepers with a flamboyant - and presumably removable - pencilled circle. These they printed full size - being professionals they wanted to keep the costs down. They kept the contact sheets and the negatives. All of them. Forever. Often un-marked in boxes, draws and faded brown envelopes that filled every inch of their tiny Manhatten apartments - the latter years of many famous photographers’ lives are a study in obsessive picture taking.

That’s kinda what happens now, but digitally. I return with a camera full of images that...

1. have to be copied onto my computer, which gives me a directory full of images most of which won't be worth keeping, so I have to...
2. delete the ones that make you say “Meh”...
3. and archive the rest after putting some rudimentary tagging on them. From those I choose the obvious goodies plus those that might work if cropped, processed and re-worked in whatever image editor I have...
4.work on those ones that could be tweaked...
5. add in tags and ownership details data to the image files for the spiders to crawl...
6. because in the end I’m going to publish them even if it’s only on this blog.

A real pro follows the same system, but better. And for money. To do all this, I need software to import the files from the camera and a library manager, which iPhoto and Picasa do, and an image editor. Lightroom is for advanced image processing, not library management, cropping, rotating and applying a few neat tricks. That’s what iPhoto and Picasa do.

Plus I’m cheap, and Picasa is free. Except for it’s Google’s way of paying for all that valuable information in my searches and e-mails and calendar. Because I’m the kinda person you really want to sell things to. Or I’m not, so the advertisers don’t waste their money advertising to me.

So that brings us to the culling and filtering process. The artistic vision thing. I’m not a pro, so the only client I have to keep happy is me. And this is another subject again.

Changing the Computer Stock

My trusty six-year old 15" MacBook Pro developed Flickering Graphic Card Syndrome in September. The guys down in the basement at Mac1 Spitalfields gave me a quote of around £350 + VAT to fix it. Then you're left wondering how long it will be before the next thing fails. My first thought was, of course, "need new MacBook Pro". Yeah. At £1,300+ for a 15" screen. Retina only. The 13" non-Retina is still £899 for the base model. Faced with decisions like this, the best thing I can do is keep looking until the right answer appears from all the obvious ones.

My current stock is:

Asus EE PC 1000P netbook (about five years old) Win 7
11" Mac Air with 128GB SDD (nearly two years old) OS X Mavericks
17" Samsung desktop replacement (about five years old) Win 7
15" MacBook Pro (see above) OS X Mavericks

I've been using the Air as my walk-around computer, and the Asus as a cheap internet media centre. The real issue is that the Samsung will be next to go, and I'll need a replacement Windows workhorse. These get cheaper and better all the time, but right now...

Windows 8

Wow. Just. Wow.

Windows 8, like Vista, is proof that a building full of geniuses can still produce a camel in response to the spec for a horse. So the whole buy-a-15.6"-Wintel-machine-for-next-to-nothing option is on hold.

After a great deal of gazing at Mac Pros and other kit, I thought "Let's look at Chromebooks". Because I never have and of course you'd replace a MacBook Pro with a Chromebook. Right?

Except that most of my computing now is browsing and Evernote. Evernote runs in Chrome. If I need to use a Latex editor / compiler or maybe use Lightroom to edit stuff (this is another post) I can use the Mac Air or the Samsung. The blogs of a number of pro photographers sing the praises of recent Mac Airs using Lightroom. What I need is a computer with a decent size screen to browse, play media, and use Evernote. That's a Chromebook.

See what I mean about waiting until the right decision appears from all the obvious ones?

So the new stock looks like:

Portable: Asus C P1000P netbook (about four years old) Win 7
Serious Computing: 11" Mac Air with 128GB SDD (nearly two years old) OS X Mavericks Windows Workhorse: 17" Samsung desktop replacement (about five years old) Win 7
Normal Stuff at Home: 14" HP Chromebook

When the Air packs up, I will get whatever the entry-level MacBook Pro is: by then it will weigh nothing and have the computing power of a Cray mainframe from the early 2000's. When the Win 7 machines pack up, with luck Win 9 will be out and be something people would actually want to use.

Done.

Why You Should Get A Santander 1-2-3 Account

(Disclosure: I work in retail banking. I do not now nor ever have worked for Santander or the companies it bought. This is a public service announcement.)

Savings rates are a joke right now. The banks and wholesale markets can get cheap money from the Government and Bank of England: they don’t need to pay us a decent rate of interest to attract our funds. The Government is schizoid: it wants us to save for our pensions, but it wants us to spend, spend, spend so that the economy will recover, and preferably on VAT-able items so its tax take will go up. Good luck squaring that circle.

Very few people have large amounts (more than £50,000) of cash-based savings. I have nothing like that and still shuffle my money around once a year, with the main aim of trying to get as much as possible into an ISA so I avoid tax. 1.5% tax-free equates to 2.5% gross. Go find 2.5% anywhere.

Well, first there's 4% on up-to £5,000 from the Club Lloyds current account. You need to pay in at least £1,500 every month (which puts it past about half the population), but you don’t have to leave it there, so you could transfer it from your present current account and then spend it. Push £5,000 in, set up a standing order and you’re done. You may think it a bit too much fuss for £5,000.

So then there’s Santander’s 123 account, which gives 3% up-to £20,000, and cashback on Council Tax, Telecoms, Water, Gas, Electricity and other bills. If like me you’re living in a former People’s Republic of London, getting cashback on Council Tax alone feels like some kind of symbolic revenge. Santander’s web site has a calculator which you should look at as soon as you’ve finished reading this.

You need to transfer in at least £500 a month, set up five direct debits and have at least £1,000 on deposit before the benefits kick in. My guess is that those five DD’s are a carefully-chosen obstacle - it feels like a number someone researched. Santander offer a current account transfer service, and my guess is that many people will prefer to do a full transfer than go through what they think is the trouble of changing the details on five DD’s.

Changing the bank details on your DD’s is as simple as calling the council / water company / electricity company / telco etc and telling them you want to change account that pays the DD. They will ask for identification – I didn’t have my account numbers with me and it still all worked - and the 123 account sort code and account number. Done in a couple of minutes, though you may need a headset to make it easier to wait until an operator becomes available. My telcos even let me change the DD account details online.

You need to delete the DDs in your original current account once they have been paid for the current month. That doesn’t take long to do online. If you are the last person left in the UK who doesn’t do online banking, now is a good time to start.

Applying for a 123 account online takes about 10 minutes and Santander do an electronic credit check. I got an e-mail confirming my application about ten seconds after I clicked Submit and a confirmation of getting the account about a minute later. As part of a security process they send the account details and multiple-part security letters over a period of about two weeks.

It sounds like a lot of fuss, but it’s a couple of hours at most and will gain you about £200 or so (depending on how much money you have and the size of your bills) over letting your money rot at 0.5% somewhere. When was the last time you were paid £100 an hour?

It’s incumbent on as many of us as possible to remove money from savings accounts and toss it into a high-interest current account. Until lots of us do, banks won’t raise their savings rates.

The Best Things In Life Are Free - Janet and Luther

Every time, and mean every time I hear this, I’m smiling and singing along. So play it and do the same.



Happy Days....

August 2014 Review

Do you know that feeling when your state of mind shifted, but you’re not sure how and with what results? I took a week off in August, and that happened.

For one thing, I deliberately stayed up late, so I’d lie in (07:30 is a lie-in for me) each morning. I noticed it made me feel... calmer? more mellow? less desperate? the next morning. I still got 6-7 hours sleep. So I do that Friday and Saturday night.

I decided to go to the gym every other day, so I do the spinning and yoga classes every other week, and get a decent run of weight-training in the other week. I get to go straight home and have quiet evenings with a clear conscience, which is restful as well as giving me a day’s recovery in between training days. Then I resurrected the brisk 5-8 minutes or so of very light weights exercises first thing in the morning - and I mean before coffee. Gets me moving and stirs up the hormones. Shower afterwards.

I decided to experiment with what I eat, because it’s still a little too much, and I’m still doing that. I went back to eating meat at the weekends, stopping the fish thing I’d been on since reading a book on nutrition. I feel better.

The To-Do list got busy, as I ordered a pair of Fat Gripz - comments later - and started looking at watches - my take on that later. I found a gardener to do the heavy work involving fences and shed roof, and he will start sometime way later. Gardeners are always busy in autumn. I added a bunch of dance events at Sadlers Wells to the dairy as well. And changed up the work shirts: I have been wearing plain blue and slightly heavy regular fit shirts, but started getting a unhappy with the look, so I spent a while in Tyrwhit and found some fitted, single cuff, cut-away collar shirts with thin vertical stripes in blue, green and red. Nice change of look and it makes me look slimmer (it’s all about my vanity, oh yes). The idea of a subscription to the Economist suddenly seemed sensible, though it took awhile to get it past the purchasing committee, and I’m now a subscriber. Why? Because I’m fed up with even the online broadsheets: they’re free for a reason.

There was also the eye-test thing, triggered by an arm on my Silhouettes breaking: this is expensive. The updated replacements, which have amazing lenses, are even more so.

I started taking more photographs with the Lumix, though I still need to read the whole of the manual. I found the line that turns green when the camera thinks it’s level, and that helped me adapt to the hold-it-at-a-distance manner of digital cameras. That was before I got the shots of the steam train at Hammersmith station, which just happened to be there on my way back from breakfast in Notting Hill. Unlike the dozens of overweight and weird-looking Trainspotters taking pictures, for whom it was the highlight of their week.

I made excellent progress with the cohomology section of the Riemann-Roch paper, and I’m back in the groove with that. I read Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, John D MacDonald’s The Key To The Suite, Warren Ellis’ Gun Machine, Peter Pettinger’s How My Heart Sings: Biography of Bill Evans, gave up on a lousy Kindle edition of Hegels’ Science of Logic, did the first 450 pages of Sergio de La Pava’s A Naked Singularity and Alex de Campi’s Smoke / Ashes. At the movies, I saw Step Up: All In, and Lucy at Cineworld; All This Mayhem, The Congress, Welcome to New York, Finding Vivien Meyer at the ICA; and Art Party, Two Days and One Night at the Curzon Soho.

You see what I mean about changing things up?

Sis and I had supper at the Union Street Cafe, and I ate at Picture, Rowly’s, House of Ho, Clos Maggiore and Arbutus during the week. All my holidays start with a visit to the guys at Picture. 

Delayed 19:20 to Reading, Platform 20, 31st July

Pictures of July

Bishopsgate road works; excellent haul of DVDs from Fopp, Covent Garden; Flag; Garden Chair on my back patio; Signs in Covent Garden; Stansted Express on Bishopsgate.

More Editorial Models (NSFW)

I have written before about how it's all about the editorial models for me. Here's another ten from the posts of various blogs and flickrs. Mica Arganaraz and Helena Severin join Eniko Mihalik as Girls I'd Most Like To Find Myself Sitting Next To On A Plane.

Freja Beha Erichsen

Helena Severin

Jenna Klein

Larissa Hoffman

Lola McDonnell

Majorie Levesque

Melaine Smith

Mica Araganraz

Raquel Zimmerman

Sabrina Ioffreda

Thanks to fashioncopius and GoSeeMag.