Future Shock (by sarah)

A cold frosty morning with delineated skies of faded ice cream colours, we look out over Gloucester with it's historical buildings as they puncture and frame the ancient landscape around them. The air is misty cool and I feel sick at the sight of a frost covered sleeping bag hidden in a corner, the occupant is alive and I sigh in relief, the air tastes of ozone and fumes and rotting food until it is all over lain by the sugar-fat smell of the doughnut van cooking their first batch of the day.

The progress of time marches on, we seem to have been stuck for a long time, at least ten years we failed to roll with the waves of advancement, we barely noticed them.

Before that we thought we'd march singing and triumphant into a future of virtual reality and medical advancement and the healing of our societies and nature. We are 80's childs though Alaric was born in the 70's - just.

When the mysterious x-box was sent to us for Christmas a couple of years ago and we found we could do physical games with it, we knew the future had arrived and we had somehow missed it.

We think on these things, we park our car... we plug it in.

We have FUTURE SHOCK.

When we drive we can plug in and charge our books, my friend charges her cigs. My mum is in hospital but she is alive, alive because of amazing medical advancements made in the last twenty years, made in my lifetime. My dad is the same, a hundred years ago he would have died in his early 30's, he turns 70 this year. I am alive, one of my children is a c-section babe, we walk paste the homeless on the way to dance classes and I swollow the bile that rises. The future is being good to us but it is rather too threaded through with cyber-punk dystopian chords than I would like. Our eldest complains that people live in apartments with all they could want and swimming pools on balconies that over look slums.... how could they?

I frown how different from that are we?

But we do stuff she insists. Yes we do, we don't know what others do or do not do. The Future is full of mental and moral pit falls I never saw coming, like Brexit... like finding myself on the side of the haves and seeing what it would do to the have nots and despairing as I knew which way they would vote and why and neither side would listen, dipolling themselves further.

The divide is growing. But uneven.

Sometimes it overwhelms me, all the thinks to think about, all the interconnect facets of our time and world and society. The environment, housing conditions, health, respect for others, not becoming an oppressor when you have been repressed but not slipping in the victim mentality, stopping cruelty, allowing freedom. Sometimes I can't process it all and I have to ignore it to function and do anything and that maybe selfish but if I don't then we can't do anything. When overwhelmed we can not organise fundraises or gather supplies for food banks or try and remember to shop ethically when we can afford to do so.

Adaption is key and not being judged for buying primarny when there is no time or money but looking nice is an imperative and the way our society works yes you do need to sometimes look nice... like job interviews etc... I am not saying that is right, but it is a reality.

We are lucky, having had times of not being lucky we are acutely aware of the contrast and how fragile that can be. Yes we've safe guarded ourselves this time - as much as we can - because we can. But we are more determined than ever to make a good future - the future maybe here but that doesn't mean we can't improve it and more importantly it is not here for everybody.

So we change what we can where we can, sometimes the difference is so minute we can not even appreciate it and sometimes it is for many and sometimes it is just a packet of sani pads sent to the food bank or a conversations with someone.

Sometimes it is saving up money to try and pay for surgery privately for a parent and not getting there before the nhs sorts them out and then having a deposit and luck to get a new car on lease, a car that will help the environment and our long term spending as it is cheaper to run. Sometimes it is then giving the other car, the old polluting the air car, to your parents because they no longer have a mobility car because... austerity and the damage it causes especially to older folk who drastically go down hill if they can't get out and about, ending up in hospital costing the tax payers more money than their mobility allowance ever cost.

To miss-quote Terry Pratchett - we can't make everything better but we will make the little bit we can see and touch as bettererererrrrr as we can. Granny Weatherwax says it better in The Shepherd's Crown.

It took us ages to work out how to unplug the damn car so you know the future is never going to be plain sailing.

Coming up Trumps. (by sarah)

An inauguration of an argument nation
Security guards are stationed
Protecting Towers of Guilt
How long before first blood is spilt?
Highlighting Golden hair
A lapdog caught in it's very own snare
Showered and showered and gleam
But never clean
Because underage sluts are keen
To be queen with key to the plantation
Or so they say
They girls say...
No one cares what they say
No one cares
Everyone ware the new wares
The fashion accessories, dress and bow You can never bow too low
Sow the seeds of trepidation skies
Bombs flying high
Impact zones
Tweeting inanities from unsecured phones
Furry moth with micro dick
Is sick at it's new name
Humans? Are they all insane?
This ones... an orange ball bouncing
Flouncing to some anthem
But which Super Power is singing?
Who's conducting?
Who's leading?
Blonde fluff, golden stuff...
The tribble aint the trouble
No no that is piggy eyes
'Cos money buys
Apocalypse rise
And divides with fear and hate
Such bait awaits
Social media waits
Workers in the grave
Again, again
Broken dreams, smashed, who bleeds?
The people of no consequence
Shuffled off their coils
For not being faux Royals
Sitting up high
In thrones of...
An inauguration to split a nation
Remember the klu klux klan Think - His the MAN

Places I Forget Exist (by sarah)

Yesterday as we went to take Mary to a friends birthday, we pulled up to part in Gloucester but the bits around were we normally park where full so he tried to pull down to the bit that always has parking. I feel a slick in my mind, it is an unpleasant sensation - I do not want to go there. It is a silly feeling so I am quiet we are only parking.

Mary on the other hand starts wailing, "I don't like it here!!!!"

Without thinking I say, "yeah Mary I don't like it here either." Al turns around and drives the little way up where a space is now avaliable where we'd originonally looked - lit a on the same street.

As he is turning he mutters, "yes I know why that is."

I go, "er?"

"For many it was the last place they saw."

And then I remember... there was a house there once, but it is gone because a couple where enticing kids/young people in and killing them and hiding the bodies.

Now I knew this because it came up last year when a similar thing happened but I had blocked it out. I kind of forget this bit of Gloucester exists.

So I never looked up where the family lived but I knew about them and when we were buying our house I told Al to make sure that we didn't buy somewhere they had been. That was pretty much my only proviso with buying a house.

Where the house was is a short cut, I spent almost a decade here not knowing that that was where the house had been. But I had somehow also spent most of a decade not using the short cut or venturing anywhere near there. If I think about it, it is just a shadow there in my mind, not a place, a thick greasy shadow.

Not long after the head injury Al also tried to park there but I got really distressed, it was just us, he asked what was wrong and I told him it felt wrong. A sense of immense danger loomed at me from that bit. That was when I found out where it was.

It is a silly thing I feel and I tried to ignore it. So there was another time we parked there - this was the point at which Mary freaked us both out. She did not get upset and cry like this time, she was younger... instead she pointed and said, "I remember this place! This is where I died! Before when I had a brother."

Now at the time she was always saying such things but always in uncanny situations so like she'd point to a building site we'd walk past to go to the Climbing Wall and she'd say, "My dad and brother are buried there, they died a loooooooooong time ago." This was the same dad and brother she insisted where on the fresco thing on the same streety bit. It shows Romans fighting. Turns out that whilst they were building they found about 200 Roman bodies.

Friends who have taken Mary out have commented on the fact she says these things and she says them in away that makes your stomach drop, she is so sincere and it sounds true.

No I am not saying we a psycic, we are scientists but being scientists I also what to get to the bottom of the miraide of ghost stories and unexplainables we have.

So I posit that local people all know what happened there, and I knew it was somewhere in Gloucester, peoples body language would tell me that something was wrong. My brain rejestered it as a "bad" place and we are social animals, we learn from each other. I then passed this on to Mary who is incredibly sensitive to how tense I am. I forget that that bit of Gloucester exists because lets face it as a teen it was one of the worst nightmares because it could happen to you and as a parent it is a worst nightmare because you have to let your kids grow up and that means it might happen to them... and though it is low probability that area of Gloucester proves that it can and did happen and it is horrible.

However, it is also not the strongest (nor the weakest) of these sorts of reactions I have to places. I don't normally tell people because... well I went to Imperial College and discovered in my first year that people laugh at you when you tell them about your near death experiences. So you don't mention the road you don't take because it just never occurred to you and that when you followed everybody else it seemed wrong and slow, like the air and shadows where pulling at you. When trying to push yourself through the stupidness coming home late from the Student Union in your second first year you see a Woman in big heavy dress, you see a woman but she has no colour and she is sad, just so sad and scared and you run... around the block to get to the door that was just the other side of the woman looking at you.

Panting you cave and tell a fellow housemate who is like, "yeah the victorian lady, my mum's a medium don't tell anyone. I researched it and I think she's a Ripper victim." Then another house mate appeared, he didn't like being in his room alone, he was worried... turns out he kept seeing a woman in some sort of filly old formal nightgown in the garden from his window. When we looked it was the other side to where I'd been so if a real person had been standing there we would have both seen them.

I'm blaming mass hysteria for this one, because we used to sit and talk about ghosts and magik and all the taboo things in the science world late into the night.

Then there was the way back to Alaric's flat in Ealing, it was like hitting a wall of dense air, (in Kenya I found there was a name for such things and they were thought to fire/sand demons? because yes me and another girl had a terrifying experience which I think was actually a natural phenominia of a warm air vortex causing air pressure changes resulting in us being trapped in different rooms, a scary noise and the doors refusing to open - this would also fit with the locals description of what the demons where). It was a short piece of path, but to me it felt like something jumped on my back and was weighing me down, like the shadows were pawing and dragging at me.

In the end I caved and asked if we walk the other longer way, through the scary alley way. That was when I found he didn't like the same bit of road, that he always felt watched there and that it somehow seemed to take forever to walk that one small bit.

Then I saw an Elephant, a white elephant but I am not sure now if it was late night or a dream, I told Al, "when ever we get to this road and look at that tree I can't help but imagine an elephant here!"

Turns out there is an actual elephant buried there - WTF??! No seriously in London there is an elephant buried. I must have over heard something about it in a pub or something. Still no idea what was going on with that stretch of road.

I could go on, I feel I should write them down, they make good stories but I think they are also important for understanding how the human mind works, how we pick up ideas for each other and also - as a good scientist I have an open mind, I think it unlikely that I've been seeing ghosts but I don't think it's impossible, but even if it is impossible I and many others are seeing, hearing and feeling things so what is actually going on? If we don't share our accounts for fear of being seen as nutters then we as a species will never get to the bottom of what is going on.

And so I am going to share with you the most powerful experience of this kind I've had as a grown up, dubbed The Marble Arch Incident.

I went off to university with plans to see all the landmarks and museums I could... I found money and time where a barrier but I still motored my way through a fair few. One which was right there, one which everyone else went to and I somehow had just avoided including taking longer to get to places was... Marble Arch. I did not do this knowingly but I managed it.

As some of you know Alaric had an uncoventional upbringing with this sort of stuff, his dad is Chaos Magician and his mother was heavily into the Occult. Issue I had at the time was trying to be a good scientist but having come from a Christian background that believes in mediums and ghosts and fortune telling as well I was very edgy about occult things. But people I met at parties would come up to me and just announce I was psycic or a seer and so on.

Alaric observed this. Alaric is a scientist (though his degrees engineering). Alaric decides to run an experiment on his new girlfriend. Alaric is a git.

From conversations with his friends he decided Marble Arch would be a good test. I knew nothing about this but wonder if I picked it up via his body language.

Anyway, we are out on one of our little explores - Marble Arch. I didn't like the area but didn't want to ruin things, we went through a tunnel, I got sick, he had to help me walk. I was being crushed, like the pressure above me and increased drastically, despair, so much despair and cruelty, it seemed to stretch up and up and up and all of it was pouring onto me and it made me ill, Al thought I passing out. Maybe this was just my first migraine because yeah I have migraines now.

But the key factor for his experiment was that the point this happened was where the Tyburn Gallows had been. It was the point at which many many people had died, executed and jeered, I've never been back.

So not particullarly impressive ghost stories because it's not really about ghosts - what's frustrating me is that I kind of loose places. Like that bit of Gloucester, like marble arch and so on. My mind edits them out as if I am a sat nav with a very specific setting.

A Mix of Things (by sarah)

Today has been lovely and annoying, destructive and creative in turn.

Mary Elf and the Tinsel Dragon Cat have been up to shinanigans - I wonder which of them decided to poo on the table cloth this morning - the nice white one with shiny white flowers on it that snags easily that my aunt bought us? I assume it was the cat, it smelt like cat - I was not happy but here they are being cute - the sequence will be storyfied never you fear.

The Tinsel Dragon Cat was lonely and felt quiet rightly that it did not have enough tinsel so it called to the Mary Elf, a little rainbow of a thing that hopes here and there and everywhere and never EVER stops talking.

The Mary Elf attended the great Tinsel Dragon who was once again in it's most comfitable of guises as the young cat Lithium. Mary Elf listened with care to the instructions of the Tinsel Dragon Cat.

The instructions where simple... go forth and fetch all the tinsel that abounds across this fair and mighty land and bring it back for a snuggly bed was to be crafted.

So the Mary Elf went and had many adventures over great lakes that others called puddles and scoured vast deserts of "the super market", onward the little rainbow bounce trekked until the was a montain to scale of stairs scattered with toys which she had to tidy.

Until she bought home much tinsel for the Tinsel Dragon Cat to sleep upon. So pleased was the dragon in it's guise as little Lithium the pusskin that with paw and claw Mary Elf was Knighted most valiant in all the land of Front Room. There was much rejoicing.

The End

But not of our day. Unwanted turd cleaned up Al's cousins turned up and we did presents and things and had tea and headed out for a lovely greek meal in Gloucester Docks.

Except our car wouldn't start - this has increasingly been an issue we need to take the battery out and top it up (or that was our first thought anyway). So we headed out in the van after we'd moved all the tents and greenpeace signs I picked up at the wood recylcing project to turn into something for the garden - if we ever get stopped by the police (happens a lot when you drive a van) then we might have trouble convincing them that we are not militant activists or something!!!

The meal was lovely though Mary did not like the octipus tentical that was served up to one of our number - she loves octipi and talks to them when she sees them. She almost tried a prawn.

I felt guilty that all the presents we handed over where home made and embarassed that the scarf and hat that glow in light where knitted using the looms and not just on needles - I kind of feel it's cheating but I am getting neat results with the looms and still struggling about with needle knitting.

I got a lovely wooden bowl.

I hear there is a computer game and things too and Mary is excited about knitting the little mouse that is her present 🙂

The resturant we were aiming for was actually closed so we ended up the opposite side of town to where we had parks, there was a cunning plan of Al and Maurice getting the car and van and picking us up. It went abit haywire as plans often but all was well with a bit of twoing and throwing.

We said goodbye and headed back home, it was getting dark, the sun set was a beautiful striation across of the city and sea scape of the dock, I failed to take a photo I'm not sure why.

There were swans.

Our car was clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking when we got home, it had been locking and unlocking itself continously whilst we had been out. Roll on car madness involving origami, welding and drinking straws.

The moon was a finger nail sliver and venus (I think) was bright and garish.

I used Jean's head as a camera stand. I also had to help her with her homework by taking photos of her in posses from some famous artist. His drawings look like Mary's, no honestly they do!

Back to fixing the car... we needed to take the battery out but a terminal cover was needed and there wasn't one on the battery so origami came to the rescue!!!!

I am so proud of this that you are going to see it in action from three different angles!

It was to stop accidental contact and sparkage!

It is folded from half a page from a very old and battered copy of an Enid Blighton book. It was beyond salvage and has been used in three different craft projects and now fixing a car.

The contacts were all pretty corroded - enough that I am wondering if that is part of the problems we've been having. We have like a spare jump start battery - the car reset itself with that and stopped the damn clicking which must have been driving our poor neighbours made as it was outside their window 🙁

The fault also left the car basically unlocked, there was only really some loom knitting and survival tools and some cuddlies and colouring in books of the girls in the car but still I'm sure we would be grumpy if they got stolen!

Turns out there's a battery bracket/brace with a slightly inaccessible bolt.

I held the torch and after accidently getting Imperial and Metric round the wrong way Al got his long bolt undoing tool firmly in place and turned, all locked home and good seeming there was a crunch and then the thing went round and around.... because the force had broken it :/

The bolt had not moved.

Other tools where got but would not fit or reach etc...

Queue the welding and adapting of a screw driver to make an undoing of the bolt tool. The new belt sander I got Al for Christmas was also used, the go pro failed to record sadly so there will be no funky video 🙁

He tried it... it needed further adapting.

And again. He was resigned and cold.

Back out in the ice he went and... the damn thing broke and the bolt was still firmly in place.

Kids fed and in bed, we ate our Christmas pudding - it's a gluten free one so it fell to pieces but we had some special brandy butter and it was nice and warm and filling.

We decided to add penetrating oil but the reason we had not already done this is that the little tube for getting into narrow spaces was not long enough so a drinking straw had to be used to extend it so that we could actually get the oil down to the bolt. A special tool will have to be got to get the battery out. We used the jumpstart battery to lock the doors and packed up for the night. School run in the van which will be interesting as car share kid has a broken leg so will need help getting in and out 🙁

But it should be possible, other down side is that Al will have to pay for parking as the free carpark for his new job has a height restriction (£8 a day and it obv. ates fuel).

He is now PC minecrafting it to calm down.

I've been doing more origami...

This is what I mostly made 🙂

Muse Monster Book Corners or origami bookmarks, they are a variant on the hats I used to fold out of newspaper 🙂

I am making them to go with The Monster Blog Zines and Wiggly Pet publications that I make. They will be making a debut at the Ok True Believers Comic Book Festival in Cheltenham this Feb.

And then I wrote this post.

Cool things I have worked on: Clustered analytic database (by alaric)

In my last blog post, I talked about how I was involved in building a database optimised for low latency on single-record reads.

So it was a bit of a change to later work on a database optimised for high throughput on bulk querying! Rather than getting single records, it was all about finding all the records that match some criterion and doing something with them as fast as possible, where "fast" is measured in "records per second". When I started there, the minimum time to perform a trivial query (eg, SELECT 1) was about three seconds, let alone any that fetched any data. However, on the right hardware, it could process untold numbers of gigabytes of data per second once it had gotten going. That three-second minimal round trip time was negligible when dealing with queries that processed hundreds of terabytes of data in ten minutes. That said, one of my first projects was to fix some low-hanging fruit, which brought the minimal round trip time down to around 300 milliseconds. Read more »