California Dreaming at the Crossroads

The other Sunday I was about to leave Ed's Diner in Soho, after an American and vanilla shake, which was itself preceded by watching The Nim Project at the Curzon Soho, and before that a run and swim at my gym, and was to be succeeded by an expensive browse round Foyles and a drive home (that's what I call a Sunday morning), anyway, I was about to leave when on came this track...



I had to stay. I was singing the harmonies under my breath as was the lady who had ordered a milk shake without the milk earlier. I wonder...

When they listened to the playback, did they look at each other and know they had crossed the line from being a decent vocal band to the creators and performers of an immortal song? That their lives would never be the same again, and that they had a place in the world? Well, maybe not that last bit. Did they know it was a masterpiece?

There are many occasions when people cross the line from being an ordinary Joe or Susan to being Someone with a Stake. Clifford Stoll describes this process in his classic book The Cuckoo's Egg. I imagine it happened to Joe Strummer and the clash when they holed up in Chelsea for six months composing London Calling. It's like that Robert Johnson Crossroads myth: you make a commitment to something, and if it takes, it changes you.

What I want to know is, does it feel on the inside what it looks like on the outside?

The Great Paula Ostrowska Mystery

So the other day I got a random Facebook request (I'm on it to see who else is on it, and because I saw the movie and had some time spare to fill stuff out, but I'm on as my real name). It was from Paula Ostrowska. Which the last time I looked was an Eastern European name. There is a real Paul Ostrowska you can find on the Internet - she's student at the School of Social Psychology in Warsaw and she looks classically Eastern European.

This is what my "Paula Ostrowska" looks like...

Look carefully. See how long and rich her hair is? The smooth and tanned-looking complexion? Those cheekbones, and those lips, not to mention the way that green eye liner doesn't look slightly sickly, which it would on an Eastern European girl? Because this girl is Indian, with a decent probability of being born in the US or England.

So... huh? Of course the profile is private, which should ring alarm bells, and she only has 18 friends. Just maybe ol' Zuckergerg's code has assigned the wrong photograph to the account, and it really is the Polish student, who happens to be a friend of Anna who was in the blog a few entries ago, but I don't think so.

I'm assuming this is some kind of scam - for who could resist being befriended by a girl who looks like this? Well, I could, but my hormones are under reasonable control these days.

Now We've Had The News, It's Even Quieter

A couple of weeks ago I said that it was too quiet in here: no-one was talking about the upcoming re-organisation. Soon after that, we got the news. Or rather, we got our little bit of it.

The division was divided into grey and yellow positions. Grey positions were assigned - "blueprinted" is this month's word - to people; yellow positions are up for grabs by anyone within the division on the same grade as the position - "preferencing" is the word.

I have a grey position and working for the same manager as I am now (sigh of relief), but there's no place for our supervisor and that's a damn shame. About six other people are in grey jobs, everyone else has to preference.

Preferencing is where you fill out a form explaining what jobs you would like to do and why you should get one of them, and then they give you a job you never even heard of. Everyone who is bored or unhappy applies for anything as long as it's out of where they are: in the last round two years ago, everyone in my team applied to get out (except me, not because I liked where I was, but because anywhere else was even worse). Our Director carefully explained that a position and its accompanying person were grey if they matched seventy per cent or better: otherwise the job was yellow. The catch is that if the incumbent applies for their own job, they are pretty much the best-qualified, most-experienced for it, so they get it. Look at the new chart that way and you can put names to about half the positions.

The general feeling is that the re-organisation has been done to look strategy-friendly rather than practically useful. A perfectly good team of cross-brand analysts, product development and pricing people is being split into two by brand, so that there are two competing brands within the product. That reduces the support the brand teams can call on and when the people who aren't happy leave, one of those teams won't have any senior-level analytical support at all.

No-one is really talking, because everyone is competing for the same jobs, or isn't happy and doesn't want to let on that they will shortly be looking outside.

The real silence is from the rest of the organisation. I'm gathering that some areas are being cut with a blunt and bloody axe, but you wouldn't know it except from the rumour mill. Apparently the Unions were involved in this, but nothing came from them to their members, of whom we have a few. As yet, no real pattern or intention has emerged from what we've heard, no "getting rid of all the central / product / twenty plus years in the pension scheme / with red hair / from Wales / without at least one Sicilian parent / whatever" criterion. This silence is really quite spooky.

Books Waiting To Be Read (August 2011)

(This is what happens when you have Foyles and Waterstones less than two hundred yards from your office.)

A History of Illuminated Manuscripts - Christopher de Hamel
The Klee Universe - various
Photography: A Cultural History - Mary Marien
Notations 21 - Therasa Sauer
Dreamworld and Catastrophe - Susan Buck_Morris
This Book Is Broken - Stuart Berman
A Hole In Texas - Herman Wouk
Hegel's Aesthetics (Vol 2)
Hollywood Cinema - Ricahrd Maltby
The Philosophy of Money - Georg Simmel
Improvising Jazz - Jerry Coker
Totality and Infinity - Emmanuel Levinas
The Book of Symbols - various
Model Theory and Algebraic Geometry - Bouscaren (ed)
Chocolate Wars - Deborah Cadbury
The Making of the British Landscape - Francis Pryor
The Real Global Warming Disaster - Christopher Booker
Olives: The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit - Mort Rosenblum
One and Other - Anthony Gormley
Dark Matter - Gregory Sholette
How Well Do Facts Travel - Howlet & Morgan
Go Ahead John: The Music of John McLaughlin - Paul Stump
The Jazz Ear - Ben Ratliff
Text-Me-Up - Tracey Moberly

I now buy books when I think "this will be interesting" rather than "I want to start reading that tonight". I bought The Memory of Pablo Escobar about three years ago and read it recently: I'm glad I waited, because I was reading a fair amount of "True Crime" stuff at the time and would have expected that, rather than the art project it actually is. There are also books that get bought and read the same week, giving me a break from stuff that I know I need to read but is a real slog, like this.

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...