Wednesday, January 28, 2009
One o'clock in Banglalore
Having now consulted the record, it seems that the broadband last went awol just about a month ago. So a much shorter time between failures this time than last time.
Just had another conversation with Banglalore, this time with an efficient lady who was very apologetic about my not having been phoned back before. But we are all learning. She says have you done the moving the cables about thing? Have you done the changing the microfilter thing? And rather than taking me through it all again, she just ticks that one off. Then she does another line test, just to make sure. The DSL light, having been mostly off and out for the duration, springs into life. We get a connection. Make the mistake of opening up Internet Explorer and it vanishes again. The DSL light keeps trying. After a few minutes it gets there and goes steady, along with the internet light. Efficient lady says not to be impatient and go into Internet Explorer. Give it a few minutes to settle down, which we do. And now all is well and has been for the last half an hour. I am to leave the router on all day to allow it to be monitored and efficient lady will ring me back tomorrow morning to confirm that all is well. All in all, everything a help desk call should be. And it is one o'clock in the afternoon in Bangalore and she has just come on shift. Maybe that is why she was all bright and cheerful!
Nearer home, FIL is well into his second jigsaw now. The first, a Christmas present to him from sprog 2, was a cunning aerial photograph centred on his house in Exminster. We first thought that such a thing would be easy if one knew the area, but this did not prove to be the case. Some days before we finally got there. I think it would be a lot harder in a solid area of suburban housing; at least in a village you had the edges of the village which were easier and in this case there were enough odd buildings - like former mental hospitals - and bits of green space to get a grip on. Plus a couple of big roads running across the whole scene.
Then we got to wondering about how the thing was made. Understand the aerial photograph bit. Those on Google Earth probably good enough for this sort of thing - although you would not want the joins between pictures that you sometimes get there. But how do you cut the thing out? Does the jigsaw company have a single steel die which stamps out the jigsaw in one go, every jigsaw the same? That is what I deduce from looking at the edges of the peices. But then, how do you make the steel die? Perhaps nowadays you can have some computer controlled grinding tool to make the thing out of a blank from a digitised drawing. Sledgehammer to crack a nut but it would work. Perhaps you make a plasticine one, take a cast, take a cast from that, clean it up and job done. I learn in passing that plasticine is the name of a particular product from a particular company, rather than the name of a particular material, which has been generalised in general parlance, rather like hoover. Used to be made in a factory in England but now made in a factory in Thailand (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasticine). The plasticine version would need to be made a bit bigger than the finished product so that you had material to grind and polish down. But how would you get the thing as neat and regular as most jigsaws are, with a regular rectangular array of essentially quadrilateral peices, all meeting at the corners? I think I would find it a bit hard to do that in plasticine. Maybe somebody has posted the answer to wiki.
Each side of the quadrilateral having the option of lump in or lump out, giving a total of five permutations if I have done my sums right. At the end of a jigsaw, when I am doing a stretch of sky perhaps, I tend to sort the relevant peices into the five types and get methodical about the whole business.
The second jigsaw is a painting of a heritage street scene, properly but informally borrowed from Epsom Library, for whom jigsaws in part of the service. By informal I mean that there is no checking in and checking out. You just take the thing away and take it back when you are done with it. Remarkably simple arrangement for a local authoritarian.
Horse drawn carriages and gas lights. I am finding this a lot easier than the photographic equivalent, the painting having been chosen for its profusion of visual clues. Easier perhaps in the way that a diagram of an amoeba is easier to understand than a photograph of one. Half the work has been done already. And I have been reminded how important colour is. Finding a peice with a colour that matches the bit one is working on is often quicker than finding a peice with this or that feature on it - which often turns out to look rather differant on the peice than one was expecting. Well on the way to becoming a jigsaw bore. That apart, not a bad way to spend a winter's afternoon. Keeps the brain ticking over in a pleasant way.
Just had another conversation with Banglalore, this time with an efficient lady who was very apologetic about my not having been phoned back before. But we are all learning. She says have you done the moving the cables about thing? Have you done the changing the microfilter thing? And rather than taking me through it all again, she just ticks that one off. Then she does another line test, just to make sure. The DSL light, having been mostly off and out for the duration, springs into life. We get a connection. Make the mistake of opening up Internet Explorer and it vanishes again. The DSL light keeps trying. After a few minutes it gets there and goes steady, along with the internet light. Efficient lady says not to be impatient and go into Internet Explorer. Give it a few minutes to settle down, which we do. And now all is well and has been for the last half an hour. I am to leave the router on all day to allow it to be monitored and efficient lady will ring me back tomorrow morning to confirm that all is well. All in all, everything a help desk call should be. And it is one o'clock in the afternoon in Bangalore and she has just come on shift. Maybe that is why she was all bright and cheerful!
Nearer home, FIL is well into his second jigsaw now. The first, a Christmas present to him from sprog 2, was a cunning aerial photograph centred on his house in Exminster. We first thought that such a thing would be easy if one knew the area, but this did not prove to be the case. Some days before we finally got there. I think it would be a lot harder in a solid area of suburban housing; at least in a village you had the edges of the village which were easier and in this case there were enough odd buildings - like former mental hospitals - and bits of green space to get a grip on. Plus a couple of big roads running across the whole scene.
Then we got to wondering about how the thing was made. Understand the aerial photograph bit. Those on Google Earth probably good enough for this sort of thing - although you would not want the joins between pictures that you sometimes get there. But how do you cut the thing out? Does the jigsaw company have a single steel die which stamps out the jigsaw in one go, every jigsaw the same? That is what I deduce from looking at the edges of the peices. But then, how do you make the steel die? Perhaps nowadays you can have some computer controlled grinding tool to make the thing out of a blank from a digitised drawing. Sledgehammer to crack a nut but it would work. Perhaps you make a plasticine one, take a cast, take a cast from that, clean it up and job done. I learn in passing that plasticine is the name of a particular product from a particular company, rather than the name of a particular material, which has been generalised in general parlance, rather like hoover. Used to be made in a factory in England but now made in a factory in Thailand (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasticine). The plasticine version would need to be made a bit bigger than the finished product so that you had material to grind and polish down. But how would you get the thing as neat and regular as most jigsaws are, with a regular rectangular array of essentially quadrilateral peices, all meeting at the corners? I think I would find it a bit hard to do that in plasticine. Maybe somebody has posted the answer to wiki.
Each side of the quadrilateral having the option of lump in or lump out, giving a total of five permutations if I have done my sums right. At the end of a jigsaw, when I am doing a stretch of sky perhaps, I tend to sort the relevant peices into the five types and get methodical about the whole business.
The second jigsaw is a painting of a heritage street scene, properly but informally borrowed from Epsom Library, for whom jigsaws in part of the service. By informal I mean that there is no checking in and checking out. You just take the thing away and take it back when you are done with it. Remarkably simple arrangement for a local authoritarian.
Horse drawn carriages and gas lights. I am finding this a lot easier than the photographic equivalent, the painting having been chosen for its profusion of visual clues. Easier perhaps in the way that a diagram of an amoeba is easier to understand than a photograph of one. Half the work has been done already. And I have been reminded how important colour is. Finding a peice with a colour that matches the bit one is working on is often quicker than finding a peice with this or that feature on it - which often turns out to look rather differant on the peice than one was expecting. Well on the way to becoming a jigsaw bore. That apart, not a bad way to spend a winter's afternoon. Keeps the brain ticking over in a pleasant way.
# posted by Jim @ 12:07 AM 
