Life has been humming along here, fairly uneventfully. In fact, it's so absolutely uneventful, I'm struggling to come up with anything to say. I'm on holiday next week, for an entire week - how I managed to pull that one off at such short notice I'm not sure. I'll probably end up in Wales.
I've re-started my project to back up all my DVDs at home, so that I can browse through them with the aid of something like MythTV. So far, it's working pretty well, but I anticipate that I'll run out of space some at some point soon. Given the number of DVDs I have, I may need storage of the order of Terabytes, but I'll think about that frantic-buying issue when I get to it.
As far as projects go, I'm a bit swamped. Hence no updates to my photos site. I'll sort it out soon, if I get round to it.
Now, it doesn't normally do this here in London, but it's snowing again. Amazingly, those clever weather predictors got it right and there is a significant amount. Well, I say significant - 2 inches is quite a lot for London, but it's not exactly lose-your-car-until-spring Newfoundland snow.
All this meant I decided to get an early (7:18) train in, which results in it currently being 8:05am, and being only one of two people on my floor at my desk. A fairly surreal experience. Also, the LSE just opened (I think) so watching the little numbers tick by as the overnight trades are filled was quite fun.
I've just spent the last week in the wonderful lake district. Despite being February, the weather wasn't too bad at all, and I got to see some nice hills and things. Lakes too if I remember correctly. The whole trip was great, until I noticed that my camera lens was broken. It seems to work perfectly, but it won't focus shorter than about 0.8-0.9m. Considering it's a pretty reasonable macro lens, this is very very annoying. What is also very very annoying is that it's 13 months old, and therefore very conveniently outside of it's warranty period. I'm thinking I'll just live with it for a few months and then buy a Canon 24-70L f2.8 when I've saved up. Hopefully nothing else will break in the next few weeks - I can't really afford it.
I'm in Manchester now, and will be back in London tomorrow. There's a large pile of stuff to be ebay'ed which is both good and bad - bad because it's work, good because it creates both space and money at the same time. Once that's all gone, I can go back to buying new things to fill up the space with. :)
Well, craziness has won the day, and I've killed off picsie. I had revived it a while back after the Extensis Portfolio fiasco, but now I really do believe that I've found a good piece of software that is a) already written and b) works.
That thing is: Adobe Lightroom!. This thing is really good - it's a complete photo management thingie. RAW images from the camera go in one end, some tweaking, cropping etc goes on in the middle (with the option to go work on it in Photoshop if need be), and then you can send it straight to the printer or output a web gallery which it will upload over FTP for you. I'm rather impressed. I just need to import the few thousand photos I have lying around and then I'll get around to actually uploading something. Until then, the photos bit might not work.
Of course, what is now likely to happen is that I actually buy it, and then I'll hate it in about 2 months for whatever reason. Still, nothing like living in the present.
There's been a disturbing set of events which has happened over the past few days. A train came off the tracks in Cumbria, killing one person, which is fairly disturbing in itself, but not what I'm referring to. I'm more worried about the great media bandwagon that has now inevitably churned into action.
What prompted me to be worried is the news in this morning's paper that one of the crash survivors has "demanded answers" and wants the world to "prove that rail travel is safe". Why is this headline news? Why is this person being listened to? He, along with many others, survived the crash, which I agree is a good thing, but how does this give him the right to "demand answers" from the enquiry? Personally, I'm keen for the enquiry to actually come up with some reasons behind what happened, because that's where the "learning" bit of the "learning from mistakes" comes in. But I don't have a throng of reporters outside my door waiting to hear about what I want. Why is this? It's because I'm not a railway expert and therefore not really qualified to comment on the railway, it's management structure, it's processes etc.
But wait a minute, this guy in my morning's paper isn't an expert either. Somehow, he's managed to get the press to listen to him, just because he was a victim of the accident. Now, I agree that questions like "What was it like" and "How are you feeling" are valid questions to ask a crash survivor, because I'd argue it's questions they're qualified to answer. Random demands for "proof" that the railways are safe and that the enquiry produces "answers" are nonsensical ramblings. Does this person (and the rest of the world) honestly think "Oh, well, we were just going to bungle this enquiry and say nothing much, but now a victim has demanded answers! Better pick up the phone and actually try and figure this thing out then."?
Of course, there are industry commentators and analysts (for example, Christian Wolmar whose columns I was reading years ago) who are in a good, non-biased position to take an objective view of what happened and what should be done about it. No doubt such experts are aware of rail standards and guidelines, as well as other technical things like how points actually work. So please, great media, report on what people with a clue are saying, not on the fact that a person who was involved in an accident (and therefore has an emotional involvement with the entire subject) is suddenly "demanding answers" and may the god of the earth strike down every living person unless he gets them.
Whilst I'm being cynical, I noticed this article on the BBC site, which seems to be nothing more than a solicitor who has previously made money representing train crash victims trying to drum up business around this particularly incident. Why is this news? "Solicitor who makes a living from train accidents demands inquiry (probably involving lots and lots of solicitors/barristers/whatever) into train accident!". Shock horror. Who'd have thought?
So please, can everyone stop being excited about the fact that people are demanding things? The general public does care about the answer to the question "What happened and why?" and there are groups of people who will work for months trying to figure that one out as accurately as possible. Lets just wait for the facts to come out and then get excited. Victims and lawyers jumping up and down saying "OMG trains aren't safe someone must be to blame for this who can we get money out of!?" really doesn't help anything.