Hazy Tuesday

Whoo! Finally got my stream ripper working :-) Downloaded myself a copy of Linkin Park's 'Breaking the Habit' as proof. Excellent music video, gritty CGI anime, compliments the track perfectly. Probably the best music video I've seen this year. One of the things I like best about Japanse animation is the way good anime and mangas have such cool symbolism. This one has lots of gears and spinning circles (continuity?), gasses, pulsing fluids, steam, mists, haze, bubbles (breath/life?).

I'm not an expert on anime or Japanese icon, and this won't be everyone's mug of beans but it's an excellent piece of art in an authentic style. And a very motivational song. Go see it.

Otherwise, its been a good week. The weather's been lovely so I took some time off to go climbing last Tuesday and Wednesday. Alderney's directly in the way of massive tidal movements between the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay, the whole sea's always moving in one direction or the other against the island. This makes for some very powerful currents in the narrow stretch of water between here and France.

So, how the island disposes of it's trash is to incinerate what it can and then push the ash and what's left over a cliff into the rough, racing water of the Swinge. Around the neap tide this water can go way, way down, exposing a rocky wash.

One of my regulars once told me about how his father used to collect old coins and medals from this beach under the impot (municipal facility). So that's what I went to go see. You'd think it would be foul, with all the crap they push off the cliff from the tip, but it isn't. The tide tears away all but heavy pieces of metal and ceramic. It's actually really cool, it's like a pebble beach but with lumps of metal worn smooth by the sea. Brass goes orange, copper goes pink or dark green, aluminium weathers into smooth pieces and steel rusts into dark, pitted forms, sometimes black, sometimes orange with rust. Bits of very stained stainless steel. Drifts of little opaque sanded glass pebbles.

There's supposed to be a band on this wash where the physics of it all are right for small pieces of metal to accumulate, where it's good for coins etc. The water wasn't far enough out when I went there, but I did see some neat things. I'm always astonished at school art classes giving kids fake-o stuff like plastic glitter and white copy paper to be creative with when such beautiful materials are quite literally being bulldozed into the sea. Vivid things, like when pyrex goes irridescent from being battered by rocks. But then I'm a charcoal on brown cardboard sort of guy more than a crayon on white paper sort of guy.

Anyhoo, what I did get down there was a brass boule and a length of thin copper tubing that had been rolled into a tight ball. Both now live in my fruit bowl. The climb down took about an 45 minutes, the cliff's steep but chunky so it's easy climbing. Getting to the face involved a lot of blackberries, just coming into fruit this time of year. The trick to moving through blackberries - without ending up like that creature from Event Horizon - is not to be in a hurry. For safety I would have preferred to have someone climbing with me, but as it was I had to make to with someone at the impot knowing where I was. From the bottom I could see a much easier way up, so getting back only took about fifteen minutes. It's always easier to go up then down.

Other than that, mostly uneventful. Spent three days and nights fairly solidly wrestling with this stream ripper, I can get a little carried away with things like that sometimes. In the end I didn't use RTSP/RTP but went with using MMS framed streams over HTTP, turned out better for what I'm doing. So it's working, but it's not a finished product yet.