Personal Information Stack
On Saturday morning I awoke in a hotel in Ascot to the worst hangover and heaviest snow of recent memory.
By 1pm leaving the hotel became an inevitability so we checked the train times from Ascot. With conflicting information, stale websites saying one thing and local people saying another we were torn between driving and taking the train. I had a hired car and a determination to get back to Oxford, but also a determination not to get stuck on a dual carriageway somewhere with frostbitten toes.
A34 Snow Chaos by Ash Matadeen
The traffic layer of Google Maps decided it for me. The dark red sections told me something was seriously up with the roads around Oxford so I didn’t want to risk driving onto dual carriageways and getting stuck (which is exactly what happened to many on the A34 for about 8 hours).
People on my Twitter stream said it was chucking down with snow in Oxford, how many centimetres/inches, how close to snowpocalypse we were, marks out of ten. The travel news, having been reconstituted into 140-character updates and localised by county/motorway was appearing in my Twitter stream and told me that things were descending into chaos on the A34, M40 and local roads around Oxford. As if to verify this, Dale Lane’s bLADE traffic app on my Android phone calculated my route and showed it beset on all sides by cold water in varying forms.
National Rail Enquiries’ phone service just about managed to get us enough information to discover we could catch a train from Reading, assuming the roads were clear enough to get there from Ascot, and off we went.
We parked at Reading and got to Oxford on what appears to have been the last train into town before they all started to get cancelled. I felt really well informed the whole time, but my interface to this information was rarely via the official outlets. The times I did put the radio on all I got was reports about football and moaning about gritters and quickly turned it off. So it was a surprise to me to discover I’d been using my own personal information stack.
Personal Snow/Road Information Stack - Conceptual Model
RIPE Atlas using XPort Pro
The RIPE Atlas project appear to be using (at least for the prototype) an XPORT Pro as a very lightweight, widely distributed performance monitoring network.
The XPORT Pro is essentially a programmable, USB-powered ethernet interface with brains, and formed the basis of the Botanicalls Twitter circuit for talking plants. This is a really very interesting mass monitoring system, giving extremely low-overhead performance measurements, which means the uptake will be much higher than a rack-mounted power-hungry black box.
Find out more at: http://labs.ripe.net/atlas
The Age of the Train. My favourite is still the Police Train.
Boys' Life Magazine, June 1984
Distantly-recalled but I never expected to see them in their entirety on Google - what appears to be the complete set of Boys’ Life Magazines, a magazine for Scouts in America. I was a scout there for a few months in 1984, initially dressed in green English uniform when everyone else was wearing dark blue.
Shortest Path First
When a major transport link changes in a city, the topology of the city’s links changes like a dynamic routing protocol in a network. Areas which were previously hard to reach suddenly become accessible at very low cost (ie. time) to the user.
The London travel times map (http://stamen.com/clients/mysociety) was originally made in 2006 by the late Chris Lightfoot, and the work lives on as a “London 2012 Olympic Stadium in Stratford, East London” travel times map.
Far from being a calculated crow-flies radius from your start point, the time to reach each area of the map is tailored to your individual location, calculated and displayed as contours. As the slider moves it masks the areas of the map which are no longer accessible in the time given. The end result is that you can accurately estimate travel time between two points, and perhaps use it to decide where to live.
Although this is a very clever new approach to least-time routing, I don’t think most people see the city as contours when they calculate their commute. This may be because nobody’s really mapped the city in travel-time contours before, or it may be that we see the world as links to traverse.
Thoughts on Bletchley Park
I visited Bletchley Park again this week and again was left with the impression that it misses an opportunity to explain itself.
There have been press campaigns, fundraising, petitions, even “donate a day’s salary” for Bletchley Park, and they’ve certainly come a long way and done a lot to preserve it, but when you get there it all seems a bit shambolic. I appreciate that gives some of the charm, but given a bigger budget I suspect they could really bring it alive.
When you Visit Today
- You’re greeted at the gate by a man in a booth who opens the barrier and gives you a ticket to redeem, or possibly pay for, later. I couldn’t work it out.
- Find your way to the peach melba coloured building where they sign you up for a year’s season ticket, ask you about gift-aid, make you sign things, tell you in person where everything is and send you on your way. Very helpful and friendly. Perhaps not very efficient.
Staxx
As you approach London Heathrow Airport you could be put in any one of four stacks by air traffic controllers, (clockwise, starting top-left) Bovindgon, Lambourne, Biggin and Ockham. Your flight slots into the top track and descends in a spiral until it’s ready to be called for final approach, like in Flight Control.
http://planefinder.net lets you see these tracks in near-real-time and look at the history, giving you the snail trail of flights approaching LHR.
Today there’s a broadly Easterly wind, so planes are approaching from the West.
Jakks Pacific “Real Construction” kits are toy kits made of plastic which looks a bit like real wood.
Today’s kids hate wooden toys. They’re colour-supplement-friendly nostalgic anachronisms which parents buy to feel like they’re fighting Christmas consumerism. But when they’re made out of plastic that makes it OK. For who? I don’t know who to feel more angry or saddened for. Head asplode!
Congratulations, crouchingbadger, you are now an administrator of Cats That Look Like Hitler.
Thanks, flickr. I think.
Boom Boom Acka Lacka Lacka Boom
It was a night like this, 22 years ago…
Picture the scene… October 1987. I lived and breathed the Sinclair Spectrum. I read Sinclair User, Your Sinclair and Crash. I used to exchange Sinclair User POKE cards at school. I had a stack of C15s with copied games that would clatter about in my bag. For my birthday it’d (recently) become tradition that I went to the PCW Show at Olympia. This year it was so popular they’d had to move it to Earl’s Court. My dad took me on one of his annual access visits (my parents were married & lived together, it was just that unusual to go anywhere with only my dad) and we drove from Gloucester to LONDON.
Although I lived in London from 2001-2006 if I ever took a clunky old district line train with a wooden floor anywhere near Earls Court, I was transported back in time to the 80s. A distant, slightly wistful look would spread across my face, and inside my head Was (Not Was) would open the door, get on the floor and walk the nostalgic dinosaur.
I have to say this nostalgia trip is the main reason for my liking this song. It doesn’t fit the pattern. But what it does have is the spirit of a one-off novelty song, and if there’s one thing I liked it was a novelty song.
Things I learned at the time: The band members were brothers. The name Was (Not Was) was a reference to how to pronounce their family name.
Things I learned since: Neither member was called Was, nor were they brothers. They reappeared in 1992 with “Shake Your Head” produced by Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley and featuring Ozzy Ozbourne and Kim Basinger. Were it not for the Internet I’d have thought I dreamt this.
Date: October 1987
Highest Chart Position: 10
Read through my misguided seven inch collection over at http://seveninches.tumblr.com
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