Author: jon

Jon Curnow writes on curnow.org about things that interest him. The site has been around for many years in various forms and he always wants to write much more here than he does.

Eurovision 2004

James Fox is Britain’s entry to the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest.

And so it comes to pass that another year has passed, and tonight is the Eurovision Song Contest. James Fox is our entry, but I don’t hold much hope based on the fact that voting is so political these days. I wasn’t aware of him on the television show that brought him to light (I think it was the BBC’s Fame Academy), but I got to hear him last November when he supported Liberty X at a charity concert I went to. He mainly performed cover versions (with a couple of original songs thrown in), which were fine but not fantastic, but he had charisma and a small but very vocal fan base (they probably sounded loud because I was stood right next to them).

I haven’t heard his song for this year’s contest, so it will be a first for me. As always, I look forward to the event for its more ridiculous elements. I’m sure Terry Wogan will have plenty to be sarcastic about. I do wonder if I will watch it (if anybody will watch it) when he stops commentating. PY and I are visiting friends to watch it. I think I will end up overeating and undoing all the benefits of the gym.

Travelling from Central London to Heathrow Airport

Off to Rome again.

Heathrow Airport

This is a note to myself. I must remember that for a journey from Central London (in my case Piccadilly Circus) to Heathrow you should allow a good 45 minutes. Heathrow is in Zone 6 which means I need an extension to my travel pass for that (thank goodness for Oyster as the pre-pay option which means you don’t have to think about buying a ticket while you are rushing for a train). The Piccadilly Line was quite a pleasant journey.

Office Alone

I’ve been in the office alone all day today – with Radio Four as my only company.

Today has been a very strange day. I have been alone in the office; all of my colleagues are on the road or on holiday. Despite previous thoughts of working alone and/or from home, I can categorically say that I like the stimulation of the office environment, and I am pretty certain that I won’t be looking for employment from home in the future. I currently work in a small four-person office space, and even that gets very difficult at times. Since early 2002, I have worked with three other people in two different jobs. I think next time I will be looking for something larger. If you work alone or from home, how do you manage it?

While sitting alone this afternoon, I started listening to Radio Four for a little bit of company and was reminded how good PM was as a news show. I don’t believe there was anything that stood out today – apart from the obvious talents of Eddie Mair – but I can recommend it if you’re in need of company! Also, while I was working through my tasks earlier, I got a call, which means I will be attending a hastily organised meeting in Rome on Friday morning, so I will be spending this evening trying to get as many of my belongings into the smallest possible bag that I can. It is at times like this that I wish my employer had purchased a lighter laptop for me.

Tate’s Anniversary

The Tate Modern is celebrating four years this year.

turbine hall at the tate modern

I’ve mentioned before that the South Bank is one of my favourite areas of London. Although I am not a big gallery goer (can I say that?) I do like the Tate Modern – basically because you can wander in and out as you wish and, for the most part, it’s free. I have always been a big fan of the exhibitions/installations in the turbine hall. There’s something about the sheer size of the art that is appealing. The turbine hall allows for some huge installations or just a lot of space in which to interact (or lie on the floor as we did for the weather project). They are celebrating their fourth anniversary this year and BBC News has some great pictures from some of those bigger exhibitions.

Celebrity Gardening

I visited the Urab Gardens show at Olympia this weekend.

Over the weekend, I brought Man of the Moment into the new look. It was pretty easy, so once again, I’m understanding the value of style sheets. I also changed the naming convention of the individual pages, which was made very easy by Movable Type and a little harder when I decided to try lots of URL re-directing.

Reading through today’s web-reading, I hear Blogger has also had a face-and-feature lift (here,here and here). It doesn’t interest me a great deal as I don’t use Blogger, but then I went to the new site and found that my browser had a username already populated. Lo and behold, I found an account I created in 2001. It does appear that the new blogger has some nice features, but I’m going to sit and wait for Movable Type 3.

picture of matt james - the city gardener
Matt James – The City Gardener

The main event of last weekend was a visit to Olympia to look at the Urban Gardens show. As we were there early, we managed to catch the first ‘celebrity’ presentation. It was Matt James on things to look out for when planting an urban garden. As it turned out, he’s a good speaker, and I found it really interesting, which is a little more than can be said for a lot of the rest of the show. It was full of stands offering a lot of hard landscaping, garden ornaments and furniture and very little about plants – although there were some fantastic ferns and Canadian Maples on display. Matt himself is very good-looking in the flesh so I imagine he was a very big draw to the show. We didn’t get the chance to see Colin McAllister and Justin Ryan on the Sunday but I guess that might have been fun.

All of this home-style probably explains why I spend part of Saturday afternoon glued to UKTV Bright Ideas(or whatever it’s called now) watching lame home shows. Still,Wild & Fresh(which seems to be a Canadian/UK co-production) has one of the most amusing title sequences of any show I have seen for a long time and a would-be Jamie Oliver in the form of chef Danny Boome. It was kind of fun, but, as the Why Don’t You? used to say, I should have got up and done something less boring instead. Sadly, I started to watch the Coronation Street omnibus to catch up on the latest Todd and Karl storyline. Wish I hadn’t.

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Originally posted at musak.org | Wayback – original | Wayback
Posted May 10, 2004

Fantastic London

Peter Ackroyd’s London is one of the best TV programmes I have seen for a long time and I caught it by accident.

Last night, the BBC aired the first part of Peter Ackroyd’s London– a totally fascinating history of London. Yesterday’s episode was Fire and Destiny, which, according to BBC Two’s site, went “From Boadicea’s torching of the city to recent bombings”. In the programme, Peter Ackroyd traces London’s extraordinary ability to survive and grow stronger every time it burns.

Actors re-created historical figures talking about their time in London; Charlotte Brontë, Samuel Pepys and a Roman historian were among the characters featured last night.

Of course, the main features of the programme were September 1666’s Great Fire (officially, only 4 people died) and the German bombings of World War II (6000 people killed in the first 30 days of the bombing), but it seems that London has burnt many times since its founding in 50AD.

It was a thoroughly fascinating programme and well-made. It was not your typical history programme, for Peter Ackroyd gives London a real personality. I wholeheartedly recommend the other couple of programmes in the series. I’m quite interested in taking one of the walks that have been designed to work with the programme.

PMOS Says Nothing At All

Reading what Downing Street says makes you wonder why they bother opening their mouths.

One of the sites I most visit is ‘Downing Street Says‘, an unofficial site recording the official opinions of Downing Street and, I assume, the Prime Minister. One of the real benefits of reading the transcripts of the briefings rather than a journalist’s interpretation is seeing how the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman tries not to express opinions. It’s no wonder people have a disregard for the political process in the country when you read,

Asked to explain why the Prime Minister was willing to express a view about the pictures relating to alleged US mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners when their investigations had not yet concluded either, the PMS pointed out that the Government’s view had been set out very clearly by General Sir Mike Jackson last Friday night when the pictures had first emerged. [source]

What I think most right-thinking people won’t understand (and I am sure the civil servants can explain it away very well) is why disgust can not be expressed every time the question is asked. If the British pictures are real, then such treatment should be strongly condemned. If the pictures are fake, then the actions of those who made them should be discussed in the same terms. Why do they have to hide behind the diplomatic speak?

Really, there doesn’t seem to me to be much point in having a ‘Big Conversation‘ with the people if you don’t understand what one half of the room is saying.

It’s May

After a relaxing weekend for the bank holiday I was about to rant about parking fines.

I had a really relaxing holiday weekend. To the extent I don’t want to be back at work (but we all have to try to make a living), and I didn’t want to be in front of a computer. So I haven’t written anything for a few days.

I had a nice email from somebody in Poland, thanks to my entry welcoming the new countries to the ‘New Europe’ (can I trademark that?), which was welcoming, and Marek, I will reply (reasons for not as above).

Just when I thought I had nothing to say but to moan about the rather strange weather we are having here in London, I read ‘Booked in 60 seconds‘ from London’s Evening Standard newspaper (by way of thisislondon.co.uk) and became all irate with the AA stating ing that ‘There should be leeway’ when it comes to parking fines. It appears – and here’s where I go all Victor Meldrew – that I am the only soul in London who believes that parking rules are here to serve us and should be enforced. If your time is up, it’s up. Give up the space, you selfish moron. No leeway for parking. Rules are rules.

Anyway, I was going to compose a nice long rant about it, but then I found Ab Mania and felt – instantly – better by laughing.

The moral of this tale is that laughing is good for you (and the weather is still very strange in London).

On Browsers

A quick look at my browser usage over time.

I have always been pretty loyal when it comes to web browsers. I own, somewhere, a fully licensed version of Netscape 0.9 (or was it 1.0) on floppy disc. Since that day, I have been a Netscape user and turned to Mozilla when that became the non-AOL-enabled version. Netscape/Mozilla has also been my mail program of choice for most of the time, although I did use Eudora for quite a while until multiple accounts became available in a Mozilla release.

Over the years, I have had to use Internet Explorer. Primarily, I use it for work where the software we develop has an interface optimised for IE.

I had a brief spell as an Opera user (and licensed a copy) but I never grew accustomed to the interface. Yesterday I received an email from Opera announcing the beta release of Opera 7.5. So, I downloaded it and two things struck me about it. Firstly, it’s fast. Despite the claims on Mozilla’s site about 1.7 Opera won (I haven’t run Firefox yet to compare that code). Secondly, Opera’s full-screen mode really is full-screen. No address bars. No scroll bars. Just full-screen browsing. I really must remember that because at times it’ll be very, very useful. And, what’s more, I still like Opera’s small-screen rendering option!

Mayor Of London

June 10th 2004 is the date that we’ll all be voting for the mayor of London. Ken, Simon or Steve are the main candidates. But then there’s Darren, Ivan and – erm – Frank.

The race to be the Mayor of London is on again, and it appears that some big names are trying to run the Capital for next few years.Ken Livingstone is, of course, the current Mayor and – I think – stands a good chance of getting in again. For the first few years people wondered what he had actually done (apart from give us bendy buses), but it all seems to have come good for him recently. The Liberal Democrats are fielding Simon Hughes and Steve Norris is standing as Conservative. The Green’s candidate (Darren Johnson) is gay and my financial advisor –Ivan Massow– is standing for some reason. The UK Independence Party pops up every now and then, and their candidate is Frank Maloney who, according to this story at The Gay Vote, won’t campaign to areas where there are too many gays. Maybe London isn’t the city for him then.

Honestly, I am torn between a couple of the candidates. Of the three main players, I think they all represent the best bits of their respective parties which is interesting. Still some time to go until I have to make up my mind. Vote for the London Mayor on 10th June.

What Version Control?

I have decided to launch version 5 of Listen to Musak. Why can’t I ever settle on a design that really works for me?

So, I have finally done it and had another redesign of this site Listen To Musak. The grey is the new green (sorry Jase), but green may become the flavour of the day again as I am not *sure*. I’ve tried to reduce the amount of effort Movable Type needs to make this site happen, and I think I have succeeded in that bit. All the same stuff is here for now, but I want to add some new ‘features’ by playing around with Movable Type, so now is the right time to do it. I have not updated the templates for Justin, Andrew, Dermot, etc. in the Man of the Moment section. That will come too.

While working through the final stages I discovered that this wasn’t the third version of Listen to Musak as I had thought but it was about the fifth. If you use Mozilla on the main page of the site go to ‘View’ –> ‘Use Style’ where you can apply the older style sheets. As I have tweaked the templates a little bit they do not render exactly as they used to but it was interesting to see anyway. I have decided that you can not have too many IDs or classes in style sheets and re-using elements where it isn’t the same content is a very, very bad idea.

One downside of this look is that the individual entries really do look better if they are of the lengthier format. Ah well, I really wish I was a designer!

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Originally posted at musak.org | Wayback – original

Can You Say Verulamium?

It is quite hard to say Verulamium – the Roman Theatre that I visited last Saturday.

sign at the roman theatre in st albansLast Saturday, PY and I went to St Albans to meet some friends. While we were there we went to the Roman theatre of Verulamium (which, I am reliably told was found in 1847).

Built in about 140AD it is the only example of its kind in Britain, being a theatre with a stage rather than an Amphitheatre. Initially, the arena would have been used for anything from religious processions and dancing, to wrestling, armed combat and wild beast shows. From about 180AD the stage came into greater use and the auditorium extended. By about 300AD, after some redevelopment work, the Theatre could seat 2000 spectators. [Source]

The sign amused me – I got to imagining lots of chariots rushing past with urgent messages from the Emperor at some distant end of the road until I was reminded it was a thoroughly modern sign aimed at us!