Now westlin' winds...

... and slaughterin' guns, bring autumn's pleasant weather, according to Robert Burns. I didn't hear any guns this afternoon but a walk along the Trent and the Grantham Canal certainly provided very pleasant, bright and breezy weather. A glorious afternoon for a few miles along the waterways, in fact, although as ever at this time of year there's a tinge of melancholy at the year's turning. The trees are never so beautiful as when they are on the verge of becoming bare for the winter.






















A slightly whimsical train of thought entered my head as I walked along the canal. A day or so ago I was praising the plan to invest heavily in new transport infrastructure for Nottingham - a forward-looking and bold investment in the future. Such was the Grantham Canal in its day - the end of the 18th century. Nearly £120,000 was spent - a very significant sum and one which stretched investors to the limit. However, once opened, the canal provided the fastest way to move goods and people between Nottingham and Grantham and it was a success. For a time.

The autumn of the canal's life was marked by the new-fangled railway, and indeed by 1845 the canal was owned by a railway company. Unsurprisingly, it fell into decline through neglect, and traffic stopped in the 1920s.

Over recent years, a lot of work has been done to make the canal an amenity for walkers and cyclists and a haven for wildlife. There's another post waiting in the wings to do with the short-sighted stupidity which very recently has probably put paid to the dream of re-opening the canal to water traffic, but that's for another day. Today the canal is sleepy, beautiful in a restrained way, and still an asset to the counties it passes through.



But not the asset its creators envisaged. I wonder how our descendants in 200 years' time will view the investments we're making now?

I'll leave you with that thought, and with the song referenced at the start of the post. One of my all-time favourites, performed by the mighty - and evergreen - Dick Gaughan.

Some things are too tempting to be resisted

But quite apart from my views on red wine, strong coffee and Tabasco, the big temptation for headline writers today has been how to flag up the story that Nottingham railway station is in line for a major refurb without writing "Full steam ahead..."













A couple of artist's impressions. Let's hope the architects are a bit more inspired...

All quite nice, yes, but good value for £60 million? Well, we'll have to see. I'm right behind the development of the station as the public transport hub for the city, I should say, being an enthusiast for getting cars out of the city. Cities are for people, not for cars, and one of the best things about how Nottingham has changed over the nigh-on 40 years I've been wandering around the city has been the steady increase in pedestrian zones. For more on a similar theme, see fellow blogger Alan-a-Dale's story here.

I read that part of the plan for the railway station is a 950-space carpark. A better solution to my mind would be to increase the amount of space dedicated to new retail space and 'public realm' around the site, and encourage people from outside the city to leave their cars at the various park & ride sites on the outskirts - and hopefully that would include the proposed new park & ride at Clifton as part of the tram extension. Let's hope that the funding for that can somehow be ring-fenced.

A promising sign in that regard was today's other big public transport announcement: that the Government want to go ahead with HS2, the high speed rail link between London and the north. The favoured plan is a line from London to Birmingham with two lines then going off to link up with the west and east coast mainlines at Manchester and Leeds respectively. The latter would run through the East Midlands; it would be nice to think it went through our new station, but I suspect it's more likely to be a new station serving the whole region.

Good news, then, and it's encouraging to see capital investment still possible in the age of austerity. While we're at it, could we puh-leeeze make sure any new trains are electric? As we contemplate the run-down of fossil fuels, it's plain embarrassing to be travelling to and from London in diesels.

Not permitted

Good news reaches the Observatory this afternoon: the proposed residents parking scheme has been scrapped in the face of widespread protest from the neighbourhood. I gather over 90% of residents who responded to the proposal consultation were against, and the County Council will not be pursuing the idea.

Excellent. A complex and expensive solution to a non-existent problem will now not be imposed on people who don't want it.

To celebrate, here's a pic of a part of the area you wouldn't park on anyway.

What is a fair price?

Warning: more nerdish stuff follows...

Further to the previous post, I've spent more time working on this new Mac getting it to the point where I can actually produce some chargeable work on it, as opposed to just having fun in iTunes and Skype. I must admit I'd taken my eye off the ball in terms of developments in Mac hardware and Adobe software, and it's become sadly evident that I can't install my old copies of Photoshop and Acrobat on the new machine. They plain won't run, no matter what. End of.

OK, both are still available on my old Mac and indeed on the old Powerbook. But it's far more convenient to have everything you need on one machine, isn't it? So let's have a look at whether we can have a word with those nice people at Adobe and upgrade the software.

A few hours are now spent browsing the Adobe store website and various user forums.

OK, forget that. Maybe, as far as Acrobat goes, if I can persuade Adobe to allow a cross-platform upgrade. Yuh-huh, like that's going to be so easy. Given that I'm approaching 50, I haven't got the time left to call Adobe and go through the necessary routine to upgrade my PC version of Acro 6 to Acro 9 for Mac. It could take years and cost thousands of lives. No, we are looking at buying the latest versions. Fair enough, let's see what they cost these days.

Baise-moi. Now, I can remember the days when Adobe were every graphics pro's favourite as they were hungry for business, very cost-effective and much more user-friendly than those psychotic bastards at Quark. Those days would appear to have gone. The full version of Photoshop is around the £600 mark and the full Acrobat is over £500. Jeez.

I think I'll muddle along as best I can using my old machines. And investigate alternatives to Adobe software. For example, Photoshop is acknowledged to be the best photo manipulation software, but how about Gimp?



Having tinkered with this for a couple of hours, it would appear to do everything I need except that it doesn't handle CMYK colourspace. Well, that doesn't matter as much as it did a few years ago. In terms of everything else I regularly do in Photoshop, it's got it sorted. And guess how much it costs? Zip. Nada. It's free. Go read about it here if you're interested.

As for Acrobat, well, Quark's pdf export function is much more sophisticated than it used to be, and at first sight the new version I've got appears to be up to what I will need. If I get pdfs in from clients that need some work, I'll tinker with them on the PC - or send them back to the client with a politely rude note - until such time as the open source community sorts that out as well. The days when you had to spend vast sums of money on software may be drawing to a close. For example, instead of Micro$oft Office, why not try OpenOffice? I can thoroughly recommend it. Yes, it takes a little while to get used to, but then so did MS Office the first time you saw it, and OpenOffice is free too. You know it makes sense.

Right, no more techie nerdspeak for a while, I promise. We return you now to the usual mix of facile commentary and sweeping generalisation. It's what I do best.

Nerdvana

Now, I've been using technology long enough not to get unduly moist at every new gadget that comes along. I must admit, though, that today's arrival has been very gratifying.


Pretty, isn't she? The new iMac 3.06Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4gig RAM, wireless keyboard and mouse. No tower, everything is packed into the 21.5 inch screen housing. It's all sexy as hell, to be honest. Ooooh, Matron, come and see my new computer...

It was - of course - strictly a business decision. For nigh on seven years I've been meeting clients' needs with a trusty old workhorse of a G4 dual processor, stable as you'd like, never a moment's problem. However, the clients are all starting to get uppity and wanting to upgrade, and if that's the way the business is going, I have to follow. So the new machine was but part of the investment - upgrading of software doesn't come cheap, I can tell you. Fortunately certain monies have been put aside over the years for this moment, so it's been do-able if painful.

I have spent most of the day installing and configuring software, and have several niggles to sort out. And some major bloody aggravations too. Getting Quark and associated graphic and font software up, running and fit for purpose is not the most trivial of tasks. But no matter, doubtless solutions will emerge. Since, however, it's Friday night, I'm not going to do anything further that might be remotely useful, and will goof off by surfing aimlessly and enjoying this ludicrously large screen.

In the north country

The weekend was taken up by a frustratingly short visit to Mrs QO's esteemed parental units in the high north-west of England. This part of the country is stunningly beautiful, yet rather quiet - so many only make it as far as the Lake District, or stay on the motorway and pass by up into Scotland. The opening up of the Hadrian's Wall walk is bringing a few more people in but thankfully it's not on the mass-tourism trail, and long may that be so.

Some say the north starts at the Trent; some think of the South Yorkshire border as more like it. To my mind - having spent three years up in County Durham and 30 years visiting Cumbria - the north starts at Scotch Corner. Take a left onto the A66 and head up and over the moors...



I've enjoyed driving this road for a quarter-century or so. It's been considerably improved in that time, but not yet completely tamed - they're difficult to see in this pic, but there are still striped poles up by the side of the road to show how deep the snow is. And, of course, where the edge of the road is. This is valuable information, given the rocky drops on either side. This road still bites back in winter.

Having safely reached Penrith, we turn north again on the M6 and half an hour sees us at journey's end. Around here are sights like these.


Thanks to Backpacking in Britain for this one.









Mrs QO's brother and his family live up here. The views more than make up for the lack of mains water, I think. They get red squirrels on the bird-table...

I'm very fond of Nottingham, and we have some quietly beautiful scenery in the county. But if I didn't have to get to London so regularly, I'd really think seriously about being up in the true north for more than a few snatched weekends here and there.

Seasonal adjustment

Well, that's it for the summer's festivals. The camping kit is stacked in the hallway, waiting for a spare day to do the fettling that should be done before it's all carefully stowed away (OK, brutally and carelessly shoved) into the attic. The central heating has been on. Sweaters are being retrieved from drawers and previously undetected moths being sworn at in foul and intemperate terms. The Stoats Brewery is contemplating putting a winter ale on. Conkers are all over the pavements. No more this year shall we enjoy this sight:


I don't indulge myself, you understand, but you have to admire a pastime which combines fine old English tradition, healthy outdoors exercise, and so much beer. Well, OK then, my libertarian streak admits that you don't have to admire it, but I think you should. Just saying.

So we stand at the threshold of autumn. In fact, the chilly nights in the tent last weekend made us feel as if we were well over the threshold, but as I'm fond of saying: 'It'll get a lot colder yet.' (This saying drives Mrs QO up the wall, for some reason, which obviously enhances its worth as far as I'm concerned.) But I like autumn for all sorts of reasons. The Robin Hood beer festival will soon be upon us, for one thing. Last year's was excellent and Super-Disreputable Friend and his appalling wife will be beating our door down again demanding a bed for the night to sleep off the excess. Autumn's months give much better walking weather than sultry high summer, the rowan tree across the road will be a fiery riot of red, copper and bronze before long, and the bloody wasps are turning their little toes up. The child in me looks forward to Christmas; the blogger in me wonders if I can remember where I got the falling snowflake gadget I loaded on last year. Sod the salads, let's get a slow-cooked casserole on. Hearty food that sticks to the ribs is required.

And Strictly's back. Last year we were utterly determined not to get hooked on this trashy, superficial nonsense. What a waste of time and energy, we said, surely there's something better on BBC2, something enriching about Etruscan pottery?

Further this deponent sayeth not. It is for you, members of the jury, to form your own judgement.