Long, Hard Climb

The Staircase

These past few weeks have been very busy, combining long hours with too much pressure.

Trying to get a fund-raising underway, help close the Q, sort out all the materials & plans required to get the year started, manage the board and generally try and keep things all heading in the right direction is driving me to 12 or 14 hour days.

Yes, we do seem to be making progress, but it's hard to find the time to stop and reflect where on that staircase we're all climbing we have reached. We can report once benchmark worthy of note though: the company is about to hit its 10 year anniversary, which is a quite remarkable achievement just in itself. It's also noteworthy - to me least - that I've been there 3 years already, which I suppose means I get 30% of either the credit or the blame, depending on who is keeping score!

Have we made progress in those 36 months? Hell yes. But I'd have to claim it's really only now that the time and energy invested over the past three years is showing signs of paying off.

Glancing up, still seem to be a lot of stairs overhead though .... and I have no idea what's at the end of the climb.

Oh well, head down and back to one foot in front of the other.

Taking Hackers To Heart

From The McGovern Historical Collection, Texas

Very interesting post from the New Scientist team relating some experiments that demonstrate you can indeed hack a pacemaker. The team involved used the built-in radio channel designed to allow doctors to pull out data for patient monitoring or to upload new hardware settings. Not only were they able to convince the device to shut itself down, they were also able to hack the monitoring function to extract data about the owner, presumably implying you'd want to know something about the poor individual you were about to pull the plug on?

Probably no immediate cause for alarm as the transmitter used was placed 2 inches from the device and likely had quite a large foot print associated with it (laptops, coils, geeks in sandals, that sort of thing.) Still, expect to see this kind of scenario appearing in a James Bond film heading your way soon where it's all built into a hair brush. (Seriously, do secret agents travel with monogrammed hair brushes in this day and age? Be a dead giveaway if so. No wonder the Iron Curtain fell, probably ran out of badger bristles and so the Stasi couldn't make any more secret devices. Also be worth checking to see if spies suddenly started sporting bad hair grooming too just before the Wall fell ...)

Consolation Prize

Marin Hills From Fort Mason

As predicted, the show wasn't great, and so here instead is a shot of Fort Mason itself. There were a couple of pictures I should have taken but missed, including one of the stern of some unknown wooden ship mounted on a retaining wall ... but they'll just have to wait until we find ourselves back there again some day. Probably won't be in early March next year though!

Art - Tough Way To Make A Living

Not yet sure how today will work out but sounds like sales yesterday weren't wonderful at least. There was a bit of a rush when the doors opened Saturday morning but come around 12:30 then things basically fell away. Haven't yet got an update on sales weekend-to-date but I somehow suspect that, no matter how you count it, I won't be retiring tomorrow on the proceeds.

Still, the weather has been glorious and the venue - Fort Mason, up in San Francisco's Marina District - is itself interesting. As you may have guessed, it's an old military base and part of the Golden Gate Recreation Area. There are a few shops or small businesses that have opened there but in all honesty then unless you are in the area anyway I wouldn't make a special detour.

Now for the no-fun part: taking everything down, packing it up and getting back through the city. Let's see, it's 3 pm now so with luck we'll be home by 8:30 pm earliest?

We Are Officially In A Rut

Wave Jumper, Parasurfing, California Coast

One more shot from last weekend, just to show that I've not taken pictures of much else recently!

This work thing really does get in the way of having fun doing other stuff ...

Artistic Weekend

Well, of a sort anyway. Am helping out at a craft show S is doing this weekend up in the city. For me, that means mostly hefting and carrying in order to set up the booth, lights and all the rest of the stuff before the show, and doing it all in reverse when it closes on Sunday night. In addition, I usually end up manning things during the day in order to give her a break. Ends up being a lot of work and so not sure how much time I'll get to post; we'll see but I'll try to write something at least.

Wave Jumper

Wave Jumper, California Coast

And here's the third picture from Sunday's outing. The wind was pretty strong that day, gusting from the north (this shot faces west, of course) allowing the guys to really get some height. Great stuff.

More Surfing ...

Surfing With Sails, California

Here's another shot from yesterday. I think I prefer this one. The picture with the last post might work better with a different crop (the sail from the other surfer unbalances things) but either way this one gets the nod. One more tomorrow.

Things You Could Have Done On A Sunday

Parasurfing on the California Coast

Worm the cat; walk the dog; iron a shirt; wash the car; clean the house; tidy the dishes; paint the bedroom; weed the garden; hang yourself.

Or, you could get out into the great outdoors and do what these guys are doing.

In my defence, although I did none of the above, at least I was at the Pacific coast with a camera, and that's not a bad compromise.

Starlings

This is a wonderful film clip, from Dylan Winter, a professional documentary maker, capturing the quite remarkable behaviour of flocking starlings. I grew up watching these birds flying around the fields and trees in southern England. It's hard to describe just how they manage to twist and turn seemingly completely synchronized with each other, but this video does a great job of capturing the grace and beauty of these birds. As day turns to night, the way they fly in co-ordinated waves, folds and ripples is like nothing else I've seen, making them seem more like some kind of computer animation that a group of individual birds exhibiting instinctual behaviour.

Watching the display again quite makes me feel almost home sick. In Brighton, starlings would swarm back into the trees around the Royal Pavilion as well as to the remains of the old West Pier. I can still almost hear their screeching calls at dusk, though thankfully I can't smell what I remember as being the results of several hundred birds all roosting in one place! Locals knew not to park their cars under those trees opposite the Theatre Royal when they were in full cry, but visitors didn't .... turns out starling guano is particularly corrosive to the paint finish on cars!