2014 and J S Bach

I have been rather slow to follow up my last post! So many things to write about that a state of fugue set in and nothing actually emerged in print. I am trying to catch up on myself now.I am currently writing this listening to the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle performing Bach's St John's Passion, a wonderful piece which I love to bits. The amazing thing is not that I am listening to it but that I am also watching the performance on my iPad through the Berlin Philharmonic's digital concert hall. The subscription to this amazing app was my birthday present from Rebecca and Henry. The performance is brilliant both musically and visually. The choir start off lying on their backs on the ground and gradually rise to seated and then to standing. You have to see it to appreciate the effect this has. It's surprisingly gripping. It's actually semi staged but is far more powerful to watch than those words suggest. The photography is in full HD, beautifully lit, filmed and edited. It is really quite distracting from my work but I can't really get too worried about as the improvement in my mood brought about by the beautiful Bach far outweighs the distraction! If only I didn't have to work.....

2012 has come and gone

What more can I add? I meant to post more and failed.Doing better wasn't even one of my new year resolutions. Maybe it should have been. Why start again now though? Well, it's a grim, wet and grey day out there so I decided to edit my blog and make the layout a little fresher. That turned out to be relatively easy. Writing something interesting is perhaps a little harder. SO, that follows over the weekend.

Catching up

Well, my excuse is a second knee operation and lots of physio. Two operations like that in a year makes for poor blogging. I am going to try to rectify that from now on. So much has happened that makes me incensed that I have to put fingers to keys somewhere and grumble about it all.

Where to start? Suggestions on a postcard please...

Kicking Horse Canada

Well it's nearly 4000 feet up. The roads are interesting, up hill and down Dale(well mountain) and there is still snow on the verges and fast moving meltwater in the streams. It's 20c outside but the breeze has a sharply cold edge to it and in the shade the temperature drops 15c instantly. Wildlife on the roads round here includes 2 young black bears grazing oblivious to the cars roaring by and to the row of cameras held by mesmerised photographers scarcely able to believe their luck. It's amazingly quiet everywhere. Parked cars are all unlocked and bikers roar up on their Harleys, take off their helmets and leathers, leave them perched on their bikes and, revealed as normal late middle aged couples, walk to the supermarket. I suspect they are buying gin and tonic....

More of the same

Well, the accident in Japan has been upgraded to a 7, the same as Chernobyl. More and more people are being moved away from their homes but despite the 7, all we hear is a comforting gush of PR saying that things are under control and its just a matter of time. Time before what?

Well, I suspect most mean before it falls out of the journalistic target zone for good stories and becomes a once in a while "whatever happened to..." update. After that I suspect the nuclear brigade are hoping that we will all forget that the most basic rule of big engineering has been broken once again.

What do I mean? Well, in the Challenger disaster, the Columbia disaster, Texas CIty, Macondo and now Fukushima, the engineers were not quite as confident as management, didn't want to jeopardise their positions or weren't consulted and the unthinkable happened.

Key ingredients:

No assessment of the impact of very high impact, very low probability events

No Plan B

A corporate culture lacking focus on process safety

Poor management information and weak reporting structures

Unnecessary corporate complexity

Arrogant management used to getting their own way or politically influenced decision makers

Who next?

How fast things change.

Just a week ago the word Tsunami was linked in the public mind with the Boxing day disaster. Now it is far more likely to be remembered as the word that led to a wholesale rethink of energy policy. Yet another unplanned for high impact ultra low probability occurrence has done just that, occurred. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Macondo, and Fukushima. It seems that we don't want to learn. It's hard to have a plan B for a 9.0 magnitude earthquake offshore and a massive tsunami wiping out reactor backup systems, so we didn't. So, 3 reactors are probably melting, one is hot and all three will never work again.

By the way the Chinese are still going to build their planned 155 reactors....

New computer, new post

After 5 years of use my old macbook pro has finally reached the point of no return on a cost benefit basis as its screen has gone walkabout again.

So, greetings to the new macbook pro. 17" screen again and not all pretty and shiny but matt and ready to go for photo editing after only a smidgeon of colour correction. After the 17" screen and the similar size, almost everything else is different. Quad core processor, heaps of ram, and a video processor that once would have graced a laptop as the main processor and been feted in the nerdy magazines, probably not that many years ago. But, the piece de resistance is the the thunderbolt port. mega-times faster than USB 2.0 and multiple times faster than firewire 800.Finally, HD video editing may be a real time activity rather than a ho-hum I wonder how long it will take to render that - shall I have supper, a drink, a bath, go to bed and have breakfast the next day before checking or is that premature?

I just love techno toys....