Blue Sky Day and Data Usage

Today started grey and rainy but things took a major turn for the better and by the time I left work it was actually very hot . I don't know if feeling good in myself affects the weather or it's the other way round , but a very difficult day  was dealt with and things just improved and got better throughout the day. So this is one of those blog posts which actually about nothing , there will probably be no tags unless it's about the terrible phone signal I had on my journey from Darlington to Newcastle, quite often dropping out making things unusable. It was a Cross-Country Train and some people hve said that they scramble the mobile signal so you have to use their extortionate and flakey wifi , though I'm sure that is just some kind of urban legend.

On thing though is that a signal along a main railway line should be reasonably strong , although ironically it does disappear as you approach London's Kings Cross station. These days Mobile Phone companies are heavy on the data sell , but if are going to use data you need a signal. My first desk top PC had a hard drive capacity of 10 Mb , that would store a pop song these days. My phone , a Samsung Note 2 has 48 Gb of memory and you will use 20Mb of data browsing Facebook for 15 minutes. You're gobbling and you don't realise it.

Anywa I am home now and probably have about a thousand time more processing power than what they used to  put a man on the moon. We live in privileged times and it's only going to get better. The music is appropriate and Nazareth cover of a Yardbirds song. Ended up rambling on and managing to fit one or two tags in.

Chestwigs in the Night

This morning was the first time for months where when I got up it was still dark . Admittedly it was 5am and had not slept well due to a very mild tummy upset , but it's still a bit disconcerting to think that the days are drawing in once again . Not that it stops you doing anything and it does mean you get to see the sun rise.

Also it means I get to write this blog post and have a look see what's happening in the world today before I make my way to work.

I am looking forward to this weekend with a great gig on Sunday with The Star Spangled Chestwigs supporting Big Ray and The Hipthrusters at The Schooner and lots of other secret Bank Holiday fun. Enjoy their version of By The Rivers of Babylon (s Burning)

Anyway time to do what I need to do before another day doing what I do.

Blue for You

This morning one of my favourite albums came into my mind , and I fancied posting a music video on Facebook. I thought a quick youtube search would return one of the songs I wanted , but no , no sign. Maybe it was because it was ten to seven and my bus was at seven. Then I got to thinking how much in life gets taken for granted. We expect the sunto rise and set , that's a given. We expect the light to come on when we press a light switch , we expect water to flow when we turn on the tap, we expect our buses and trains to turn up and deliver us safely to our destinations , when we get in our cars we expect it to fire up and go in whatever direction we point it. Anyway that the sort of deep stuff.

In relation to the internet we are used to searches returning us what we want , or at least something relevant (unless it's Bing or Ask,com). Then I remembered certain bands such as "A" and "!!!" (pronounced chk chk chk apparently) who are unsearchable on most search engines so you need to know exactly where you are going. The song I was thinking of was "Another Night Time Flight" from the eponymous album by Blue . You can sample it here. I was listening to the album on the way to work and posted a couple of comments asking iof people could get what I was listening to. Despite a few clues and one fairly close guess no one got it so I will be making a donation to St Catherine's Hospice unless someone has worked it out while I am writing this post. Their Wikipedia entry is here fronted by ex Marmalade guitarist Hugh Nicholson , so the answer is out . One of mine and the late John Peel's favourites. Well worth a listen.

No one guessed so , St Catherine's Hospice will get the donation.

About The Weather .. And Newcastle

I seem to have been posting a lot about the weather recently, mainly to report biblical deluges. It's funny how the bad things usually get people's attention, while the good stuff is taken for granted and not remarked upon. We've had an excellent summer, plenty of sunbathing opportunities and I haven't needed a jacket to go into work. When you point this out the good summer seems to have passed people by. It's the best we've had for years .

I've been to several music festivals and all have had great weather . Not only that we've had overnight rain which has meant that the hosepipe has not come out for the garden. This morning the sun is shining again boding well for another great day.

Last night Newcastle started their season with a 4-0 defeat at Manchester City. The result was not unexpected , but Newcastle fans see it as a disaster. They were playing a team who are tipped to win the Premiership , on their own home ground and due the Stephen Taylor's red card played half the match with ten men. I didn't watch it , but don't see it as a disaster either . Write that off and start with the next match at St James' Park against West Ham.

Don't Give Me Space(s)

There is one thing , well there are a lot of things , that so called data suppliers and system designers seem unable to grasp. The one I'm on about is the processing of leading and trailing spaces in data strings. While this may be required for data formatting in say a Word document or on a web page , it should never be treated as an integral part of the data. At this point to have to remember that computers are essentially dumb and just do what they are told ...... perfectly  ..... too perfectly at times.

So at work I find that on certain systems , searches and comparisons are unable to take into consideration spurious leading and trailing spaces , when the simple application of the trim function (preferably on data entry , but also in the actual search / comparison)  would save a lot of messing about. To me FIVE = FIVE  . Doesn't it? Oh no the second on has an extra trailing space! The n there's also case sensitivity which should be i the control of the user but often isn't.

Anyway the thing that got me going on this was the changing of my iTunes id. Fairly simple I though, until verification of the new email. Then I kept getting password doesn't match error. Tried the old . the new and my nick name. Nothing worked. Then thought , no , it can't be , there was a space at the front of the email field but because of kerning it was hardly noticeable. Removed it , and it worked. Why couldn't Apple trim the input ? Or are leading and trailing spaces allowable in a name?

Thought this gave me an excuse to post Space Is Deep by Hawkwind , featuring one of my favourite saxophone solos of all time, starting with some brilliant drone guitar about 3:20 , though listening to this it sounds more like a synthesiser , but who cares it is brilliant.

Early Morning Rain

Well a trip to Penrith today , and hope the weather turns out better that it is looking now. Yesterday was like that a deluge during the night followed by early morning rain and then by home time blue skies. Check out my Instagram feed here . Hope the light will be good enough to take some photographs and I'm takeing both my cameras and my iPad just in case I get the opportunity for some good shots.

I will be traveling along the route of the River Tyne from Newcastle parallel to Hadrians Wall , which I helped light up in 2010. Check the link above and you will find some video . One thing about taking photographs and videos is that you never actually appear in them , although then again I could not afford to keep replacing the broken lenses, I think I've only seen a handful of acceptable photographs of me and the current profile pic is over five years old , so need to replace that soon .

Anyway , I know today will brighten up , there are lots of good things happening , and I will see some wonderful scenery, but will leave you with the excellent Gordon Lightfoot song eponymous with this post:

More Rain

Last night at 2am I was woken up by a huge downpour. The upside is that I don't have to water the garden , but as my contact lenses settled in my eyes , focusing slowly on a magazine ensuring the right lens in the right eye, I could still hear the rain coming down , admittedly not as bad during the night. I had been tempted to video it as deep rivulets streamed down the road outside, but decided not to (it was 2am).

Hopefully the trains will still be running on time and the tracks haven't been washed away. We shall see. Not sure if the song is appropriate as it's now after the deluge, but there's still a lot of rain in the sky , so who knows I may be boating home and it's and excuse to play the wonderful Jackson Browne. 

Oh I managed to export a picture from Artrage, amazing how an unconnected event can stimulate the mind into working out how to do things. It's definitely not intuitive , but that's down to Apple's super intuitive interface. Thing is generally iPads are mostly for looking not doing , but I can actually start working on pictures in Artrage. It's very primitive but this is the first one I've done , mainly to test that I can actually get stuff out  of it!

Tara