Author Archives: Alan

“What time is it, Mum?” I’m sure I must have asked with irritating frequency.
“About five minutes after the last time you asked?” a patient answer would probably return.
“What time are we going?” a change of tack, cunning.
“Not for a few hours yet!”

It was torture for a young’un still steeped in a level of selfishness and desire for instant gratification perfectly natural for the age.  Coupled with me having a brother probably mithering and hassling to the same degree, unaware of the not inconsiderable preparations underway in terms of preparing the next days dinner, not to mention the shifting of presents (possibly the wrapping of them too), the coaxing of the guinea pigs to nibble on the carrot left out for Rudolph and friends.  No, blissfully unaware, we wanted to go out.

When I look back at it like this, it becomes all too clear why my parents introduced an ‘early present for Christmas Eve’ policy, presumably to try to provide a suitable distraction to us whilst we awaited the moment when we finally got to leave the house.  Remember that as a child particularly time drags sooooo much when you’re looking forward to something, much more so than the sickly John Lewis advert will have you believe.  An hour seemed liked an age – a few? Well it might as well have been days.  A strategically given toy car or similar was probably a genius ploy to at least confine our waiting to some kind of playful productivity.

That was our routine for Christmas Eve – and it’s easy to rose-tintify the past when you look back, but it was magic – and if I try to describe it, it won’t seem it.  We used to go to our friends John and Andrea’s house for a party in their basement bar – we’d eat, listen to music (usually music that Rich and I didn’t like), as children we’d make ‘cocktails’ out of a mixture of different soft drinks, sometimes adorned with miniature umbrellas, novelty stirrers and straws – one year we hit the jackpot by finding a cache of mini sparklers to add some real pizzazz to our creations.

There’d always be a gigantic Christmas Cracker that I can remember Rich and I pulling with Alan, John and Andrea’s son, I can remember John sneaking to the stairs outside adjacent to the bar and simulating sleigh bells (not that we knew it was John at the time, of course!) to ease our departure to make sure we got to bed before Santa arrived at home.  As we advanced to adulthood I spurned developing traditions of going to the pub near our school to be with family and friends – and don’t regret it for a minute.  Naive mixed cocktails would graduate to alcohol, I probably went to some as a smoker, others with a girlfriend – but would never want to miss it.

One year when John and Andrea spent Christmas in South Africa I joined my friends in the pub instead – it was nice, we were into our second or third year of university and it was a nice reunion of sorts – I genuinely enjoyed myself, but it wasn’t quite the same.  It was good to have normal service renewed the following year.

Since John passed away the routine has been understandably broken – Andrea spends Christmas with family in Luton and, in truth, I have generally spent Christmas Eve without any particular plans and feeling rather out of sorts – so it’s quite sad but I’m actually really quite pleased to have something to look forward to this Christmas Eve.  Rich and Em have just moved into their new house and decided to have a couple of casual nights of drinks last night and tonight – I’ve opted for tonight, because whilst perhaps (no offence Rich) it doesn’t give the buzz of those childhood anticipations, it gives something to look forward to.

I’m such a maudlin sod.  However, have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year – and perhaps be a little more receptive to the inevitable march of time and that in life things will change, and perhaps allow for the fact that sometimes those changes might just be for the better.  And of course, appreciate the good times whilst they’re there, too!

I was only thinking about bullying the other day, and pondering a blog post about it, and then that awful news regarding a young girl locally deciding to take her life amidst suggestions that playground abuse might’ve been the cause.  It’s spooky when that happens, and I honestly can’t recall the reason the subject popped into my head prior to hearing the news bulletin.

At our primary school there was a girl in our year who endured a torrid time along these lines, and to my shame when I think of it whilst I wasn’t particularly enamoured by such antics I suppose I was complicit in my negligence to stand up to it from my peers and friends.  Of course, at that age – between 8 and 11 or so – you are incredibly influenced by peer pressure and acceptance – one being singled out by a baying mob ensures negative attention isn’t bestowed upon you.  I suppose in some ways we retain more subtle machinations along these lines into adult life.

So what is the purpose of writing about it?  I’m not sure really.  Catharsis?  Residual guilty feelings from all those years ago?  A reminder that whilst I’m feeling this way now, some twenty-plus years on – imagine how those kids in the class of the girl in the news must be feeling, wondering whether they are responsible or not for the straw that broke the back of the camel.  There will be those who contributed more directly, those that stood by and let it happen – there but for the stronger mental fortitude of the girl in my class at school could go I and my old schoolmates.

It makes you think, doesn’t it?  Well, it makes me think.  I like to think that I like to generally treat people kindly and follow the old adage of doing unto them as you would have them do to you and all that; but perhaps we could all take a little time out to do better.  It is the season of goodwill, after all.  Should it really be confined to a season?

Bonus points if you spot the clumsy pun in the headline!

Download Piper’s Mountain in PDF Format

I mentioned rediscovering this slightly sinister music book from my Primary School a few weeks back.  Along with these reminisces I dangled the carrot of scanning and uploading the songbook rather than just posting the lyrics to the song in particular that had been nagging away at my subconscious.

Well, thanks to me finally getting over my habitual procrastination (and thanks to the excellent Genius Scan app on my iPhone) I have finally gotten around to it.  So I’ve made a PDF file containing the whole songbook, which I’ve uploaded to this Rapidshare location.

You can tell I was a child of Thatcher’s Britain – the whole premise of the songbook is clearly designed to gear up a generation of children to not want anything much from life!

Now who can remember the one involving a song competition where the hero of the piece fooled the baddy (who was trying to copy his song) by creating a spoof song about a Blackbird?  C’mon… somebody else in the world must remember it!!

Hmm, after a brief resumption of a reasonable frequency of blogging I appear to have lapsed for a month.  I’m not so sure what was so busy about October, but apparently I didn’t have much to talk about.  In truth, I’m not sure that do now – but felt compelled to at least break the silence.

Work’s been pretty busy lately, but mostly good busy (as good busy as being a sell-out corporate whore can be, of course), which I guess is a factor.  Of course, in that other great waste-of-time in my life Nottingham Forest, there has been rather a lot going on too… a frankly shit start to the season, overseen by an absolute shitcake of a manager – now replaced with the initially underwhelming but increasingly shrewd appointment of Steve Cotterill.  Still, it wouldn’t be Forest if it were (a) easy or (b) predictable.

Of course, now we are in the merry month of November.  Or, more accurately speaking, Movember.  I like Movember – last year you might remember that I sported a moustache to celebrate this event, this year I’ve upped the ante a little – with a little preparation I’m on course to have a curlable imperial ‘tache by the end of the month.  This necessitates bending the rules of starting the month clean-shaven, of course, but I think it will be worth it.  Generous sponsors have already pledged a chunk of cash – should you wish to do the same you can do so here: http://mobro.co/AlanFisher 

I even have moustache wax in preparation (eventually the sub-mouth sections will be shaven off).  Depending on how donations go I might pick a threshold at which point I’ll agree do to some crazy moustache dyeing or something.  I shall see.

The other good thing about the eleventh month is Children in Need falls within it.  It’s a great charity, obviously – but the reason it’s particularly dear to me is because of the involvement my esteemed employers have with them – and the fact that they make available the call centre on our site to take pledges.  I’ve worked out that I think this will be my ninth year of taking calls, starting at around 6pm and finishing at 2am.  That sounds a bit like I’m claiming martyrdom, but it’s not like that, honest.

It’s too easy to think that people aren’t nice – and I’ve yet to find a better cure than spending an evening talking to people at their very best.  Undoubtedly charities like this shouldn’t have to exist if humans in general weren’t self-serving profiteers, but whilst of course raising money for the charity is the principle aim, I don’t underestimate the good the process does to me – not in terms of some kind of redemption but because it really reminds me how bloody great so many people are.  Chatting to people moved to help those less fortunate is a fantastic tonic for the world-weary.  I heartily recommend it.

This year our team have some great plans during the day in the office to raise money which is always great fun to be part of – so we should have a day of hard-work-but-fun followed by an evening of chatting to awesome people (plus, of course, it would be futile to deny that there might be what has become the annual tradition of a local TV appearance or two – but, and this is the cunning part – I think I’ve found a way to make sure I won’t be seen, even if it does happen! Muhahaha!  I guess having a moustache does give one a certain air of cunning!

Red alert: This is a wholly and unapologetically geeky post.  Yes, even more so than usual!!

This is one of those things that might never help anyone, but it might.  Given that I have encountered random snippets to fix problems on unexpected corners of the Internet, I decided to be magnanimous and share a solution with potential future problem-sufferers, because I’m nice like that!

The problem
I recently bought an ASUS rt-56u router.  I like it a lot.  It gives me gigabit wired and wireless-n, as well as two USB ports to which I can connect either storage or even printer/scanner type peripherals.  The reason I did this was in preparation for my acquisition of a Macbook Air – I didn’t want to clog up a quarter or more of the storage on the laptop with my iTunes library, so wanted to store it centrally.

So I set it all up, plugged in my gigabyte USB drive in (formatted to NTFS – the router doesn’t support HFS+ plus we have numerous Windows things on our network too).  The Mac was happy to see the drive, but wouldn’t write to it – quite a dent in my plans.  With some help from a friend and some investigating, I discovered I need to adjust the settings on router – a setting not made available in the web-based router admin in the latest firmware release.

What a headache!  This all refers to a router using 1.0.1.7c firmware – as ever, things might change depending on which firmware you have (earlier versions had the option to enable telnet access without hacking!).

The solution
First up, you need to gain access to the innards of your router – you can’t enable telnet access from the web-based admin.  Well, not by design anyway, if you’re using the latest firmware as I write.  But there’s a hack, and you can do it quite easily, to do it you need to make sure you have Firefox installed, and if you don’t already have it install the Firebug extension.

Got all that sorted?  Then we can begin…

• Open up your router’s admin page in Firefox, and navigate to the LAN settings under the Advanced section (or click on this link: http://192.168.1.1/Advanced_LAN_Content.asp)
• Right-click (or double-finger tap if you’re Mac gesturing!) on either of the two text boxes on the main screen, and select ‘Inspect Element’
• In the Firebug section that opens, select the option to Edit the html
• Add a new line to the code that says:
  <input type=”text” name=”telnetd” value=”1″>
• You’ll note a box appears next to the text box with a 1 already in it, click Apply in the browser window, and it will enable telnet access to your router.  Now is perhaps not the best time to remind you that changing the default password might be a good plan!
• Test the connection, use your telnet client of choice and point it to 192.168.1.1 and log in with username admin and whatever your password is.  You should be able to access it, if not, then – erm – bugger, sorry!
• Now you are ‘in’ you need to be careful if you’re not au fait with using command line access to Linux systems, or you might break something.  The file we need to edit is the configuration file for Samba, the protocol by which the hard drive is shared.  My editor of choice is vi, which is a complete clusterfuck to the uninitiated, in fairness.
• Here is an attempt at a very noddy guide to making the changes you need to:
  – Type: vi /etc/smb.conf <enter>
  – This will open a text editor window displaying the config file
  – Use the arrow key to scroll down to where it says ‘use sendfile = yes’
  – Press the I key – this puts vi in insert mode
  – Press enter to add a new line, and type:
  unix extensions = no
  – Press ESC to exit Insert mode, then hold shift and press the semi-colon (;) key
  – This will bring up a prompt, type wq and enter (this means ‘write quit’)
  – Type exit and press <enter> – this disconnects you from the telnet session
• That’s it.  If you remount the drive now you should be able to both read and write to the volume – job’s a good ‘un!

The only pitfall with this is the smb.conf file is dynamic, so it gets recreated when the drive is mounted – so you might need to repeat some of the process (the enabling of the telnet daemon on the router should remain – although obviously if you don’t undo this it does pose a potential security risk – albeit no more so than somebody being able to gain access to the web-based administration should your password not be strong enough).

The cleverer solution would be to have some kind of script that auto-runs when you start up that edits the configuration and then mounts the network drive – that’s a bit beyond me but hopefully something that’s in progress by a friend!

It’s funny the things that pop in to your head when the only option on telly is The Football Factory.  The painting in this picture is by René Magritte, and it lives in the Tate Modern in London.  I remember seeing it on a school trip there and being fascinated by it for some reason.

Indeed, had my hapless school not lost swathes of art folders in the immediate aftermath of our GCSE examinations I might even still possess numerous interpretations of sections of it I did myself in a variety of mediums.

Even now the image flits into my mind on occasions, if it does so when I’m sat near a device that can access the Internet (which is increasingly all-the-fricking-time!) then I’ve been known to search for it – except I could never remember what it was called.

I searched for things like ‘René Magritte Man in Box‘ or ‘René Magritte lead tablet‘ – more desperate attempts like ‘list of René Magritte paintings‘ or ‘René Magritte paintings with a bowler hat‘ – there’s a lot of those.

Why I thought about it today I’m not sure – but a simple tracing of where I’d seen it saw me search for both artist and location – ‘René Magritte paintings in the Tate Gallery‘ on Google Image search will yield the very image I had pondered.  It’s the number one result, no less.

As yet I remain undecided as to whether this rediscovery has released literally years of mild frustration, or eroded the mystique of an unattainable memory that – now unlocked – doesn’t really have masses of merit or impact on my every day life.

It still is a really fascinating painting though, so I’m happy to reacquaint myself with the details of it that had become distorted in my mind.  I do like Rene Magritte – and I can be a reckless sleeper, hell, I’m typing this at 12:55 in the morning and I have to be up and ready for work in a few hours.  Is that recklessness or simply a bit of insomnia?  Who knows?

Whilst expanding my search I found an interesting interpretation of the symbolism utilising the wondrous and generally perverted medium of Freud.  That brings about a whole new memory set in itself – jeez, as someone who didn’t study psychology until sitting in one of my first lectures at university to be told be delivered a rather startling summary of basic Freud was, to my innocent mind, rather shocking.

Then again, it would be reckless to sleep over assorted genitalia, a portal between the conscious and unconscious, knowledge, enlightenment and emasculation.  Incidentally, the blog I stumbled across that had also referenced The Reckless Sleeper / Le Dormeur téméraire is a personal account of a sufferer of Narcolepsy, and makes for really interesting reading – one in two thousand people are thought to suffer from it.  That’s not all that uncommon.

As well as fulfilling the main aim of satisfying my own selfish curiosity – at least now if somebody else searches on the kinds of keywords that I was using to try to identify the painting, once Google unleashes the spiders on this blog post, they might actually find what they’re looking for.

If this whole exercise has proven a little too self-centred and uninteresting for you, then the picture below will cheer you up.  If it doesn’t, you have no soul.

I wish our birdies did this!

I suppose it was only ever going to be a matter of time before I made the switch from a PC at home to a Mac.  I’ve been flirting with Apple fandom for a number of years – perhaps following the classic route of iPhone/iPod – then graduating to iPad before finally taking the plunge this week and – after a spell of saving I might add – getting my grubby mits on a Macbook Air.

To say it’s pretty and lovely and a delight to behold and use kinda goes without saying – but it has actually been a steeper learning curve than I expected given the legendary “so simple to use” rhetoric that follows OS X around with it.

I’m a pretty experience Windows user, I’ve dabbled with Linux too – whilst not an uber-geek, I do know my way around computer systems.  Command line exercises don’t scare me, and I do quite like getting under the skin of things to make them work (within reason, and less so these days compared to when I was a bit younger and perhaps more time rich).  So to be honest, I didn’t think I’d have too much trouble getting to grips with my new toy.

In truth, it’s not been that tough – in fact, the only serious hacking I’ve needed to do has been hacking into my router to make a change to the samba configuration to make sure that my Mac can both read AND write to the NAS (which is in NTFS format).  Since we have Windows machines at home too we need the NAS to co-exist with them too.

A bit of preparation time before getting the Mac saw me move my iTunes library to the NAS, so transferring this over has been a doodle – keeping my playlists and play counts intact.  Moving my iPhone and iPad backups over was painless too – both are now merrily associated with the new machine, the old Windows laptop reauthorised and awaiting some new function I’ve yet to decide.  Currently the iPod – newly Macintosh formatted – is having the entire music library copied to it – surprisingly quickly!

The biggest learning curve for me I think will be the assorted gestures and keyboard shortcuts – for somebody who is used to trackpads with assorted buttons and maybe the option to tap it, the idea of just a blank pad was a bit daunting – until you realise you can scroll with two fingers, drag with three, pinch like on an iPhone to zoom in/out as well as a myriad of other commands.  Little things like having no delete key are a headfuck at first, then you realise fn and backspace does that – and you do kinda thing, you know what? That makes sense!

I do think I’m going to enjoy the transition – if nothing else, the sloooooow syncing from the Windows laptop with the iTunes library on the network is no more, it’s a speedy process now.  Job one was sorting out iTunes and my assorted iOS devices – now it’s a case of acclimatising and learning the nifty shortcuts that I suspect are lauded as intuitive because once you do become accustomed to them they become second-nature.

That’s okay though, I spend a lot of time fiddling around online so I’m sure I can develop those skills – although I remain unconvinced of the claims I’ve heard that things are so intuitive that even a complete computer novice could get themselves up and running in no time.  Maybe that’s because I’m so engrained in the world of Windows in its various recent iterations?

Interesting mix of things… on Friday I found out I could potentially save someone’s life – which is a bit of a no-brainer really, isn’t it?

Back in May last year our local BBC ran a feature where a young lad called Joel Picker Spence had been taking the mic and presenting. It was quite heartwarming to hear a precocious and articulate 6 year old do such a great jib whilst I was driving to work.

It wasn’t until later it transpired that Joel had died back in 2008 – taken by Leukaemia – a suitable donor had been found to help him, but too late – meaning he never reached his seventh birthday. A really moving and brilliant piece of broadcasting from the local BBC team.

Tagged on to this was an appeal in Joel’s name to register as a donor with the Anthony Nolan trust – with a sign-up session in Nottingham’s council house. I duly went along, as did 127 other people, and signed up. I felt good to have done so, but must admit that it had passed from my mind.

Until Friday. I had an email informing me I’m a likely match for a patient – I obviously got back in touch to initiate the next steps, and the Anthony Nolan team have sent me a kit to take to the Queens Medical Centre a week on Monday. This basically gives them suitable samples of my blood to absolutely confirm a match.

In semi-amateur style I then get my blood back to put in a special delivery envelope and post back to the Trust – which is no problem, but you’d kinda expect the hospital to process it wouldn’t you? So fingers crossed the match turns out to be positive. If you read this, click here and get registered on it too.

The rest of the weekend has involved me grappling to get my iTunes library to be hosted on our NAS – my laptop’s secondary partition has been a little bit dodgy of late, and pending a bit of saving up I am planning on replacing it, so this step will stop the intermittent short- term problems I’ve been having, and hopefully make the eventual switch-over a little less painful. It’s proven a complete faff so far, though!!

Also popped to see The Terminal Five Experience – one of whom is my colleague, Simon. They played a cracking set including newly-added Cult and Dandy Warhols numbers which went down well with the Sherwood crowd. They’ve got a few gigs coming up so look ’em up on Facebook if you like a nit of eclectic cover versions!