Week of 31st October, 2016

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Monday, 31st October

Halloween, or All Hallows Eve

Ziggy the Polish decorator has started work on Katy's flat. Judging by past experience, the work will be well and (fairly) quickly done, but I haven't heard a prospective completion date. $ky are booked to attend next Thursday, the 10th, and Katy wants me to supervise the installer. This was arranged around my sole freelance shift this coming month. I hope that the fact that it's just the one shift currently can be blamed on an outsourcing deal, which comes into effect tomorrow. I hope all works well for my former colleagues, and continue to believe that I'm well-off out of permanent employment.

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Tuesday, 1st November

The latest book in David Weber's Honor Harrington series, Shadow of Victory, is officially published today, by Baen. Of course, due to the way Baen operate, an ARC (Advance Reader Copy) ebook has been available for a month or so, now. But that ARC is unproofed, and costs $5 US more than the final version. So I've followed my previous habit, and not splurged on the ARC. Although my liking for Weber's work amounts almost to addiction, I'm not so addicted that I pay 50% over the odds to get my latest fix. Not quite.

Anyway, I logged in to Baen's website, and purchased the ebook today. Baen are almost unique in modern publishing - their ebook releases are available in multiple formats (I got the .epub and HTML versions) and without DRM. Now to sit down with it, and also Robert L. Forward's Rocheworld, which is an expanded version of the orignal Flight of the Dragonfly, and which I also purchased.

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Wednesday, 2nd November

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Thursday, 3rd November

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Friday, 4th November

Well, I've finished both ebooks, and there is considerable point to the complaints by denizens of the forums at Weber's personal website - Shadow of Victory does not advance the series timeline by more than a few hours. Instead, the narrative gives extensive details of happenings in the Honorverse over the last 18 T-months or so - all of which action is no more than glimpsed in previous books. It reads more like filler, well-written filler, but still filler. That said, we learn mch more about the breadth of events happening all over the known Galaxy, from Talbott to Maya (regions that are the better part of 1000 lightyears apart, which in the Honorverse equates to about 4 months travel time, even for the fastest ships - and there is no faster way to get information from A to B than to physically carry it. The bad guys are operating on a very large scale, but using minimal resources - agitators preying on the dissatisfaction (to put it mildly) of subject worlds, and using this in an attempt to discredit one of the main protagonists, by promising help that, of course, is unknown to the heroes. Of course, they don't succeed, and the book ends with an invasion of the bad guys' home star system.

The other book, Rocheworld, is the story of a one-way scientific exploration mission to Barnard's Star, an M5 red dwarf about 6 light years from Earth. The science fiction here is about as hard as you can get - Forward is a highly-qualified pysicist. He's also a reasonably good writer, and the story reads well. It's much expanded from the version I read 20-odd years ago, and there are some glaring continuity errors beween the two versions - mostly character names. But the carpentry is careful, and if you hadn't read Flight of the Dragonfly you'd be hard-pressed to tell where the added material is.

Both good reads, but I was a little disappointed with Shadow, due to the aforementioned sense of filler. There's also some additional grit in the gears - two of the planets we spend considerable time on were colonised by Eastern Europeans (specifically Poles and Slovaks) and the current inhabitants have not forgotten their heritage - many places and institutions are described by their vernacular names, complete with all the accented characters that are endemic in Slavic languages, despite the fact that most dialogue is impeccably American. Which causes me to stumble somewhat. A second read should improve the flow, as I get used to it, but I'll leave that for a week or so

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Saturday, 5th November

Guy Fawkes' Night

Tonight we celebrate the foiling of the plot to blow up Parliament in 1605, which the plotters hoped would restore a Catholic monarch to the British throne. It was, of course, unsuccessful, which is why England, and, by extension the whole of the UK, is still a, nominally, Protestant country. Non-Britons should note that this does not apply to the Irish Republic (the southern part of Ireland) since Eire has not been part of the UK since 1922, after the 1916 Rebellion. The division is, basically, on sectarian lines - Eire is Catholic.

Comes now news that Katy's $ky installation dates have been set. She's getting triple-play - phone, broadband and TV. The phone and broadband will be on the 16th, and TV on the 10th December - although that last will have to be moved. We all have the Steam Dreams excursion to Bath Christmas Market that day, behind 6110 (46110) Royal Scot. Not a loco I have travelled behind,so far, but she is the former LMS's equivalent to Gresley's A1/A3 and A4 Pacifics for the LNER.

She is well-seen in this image from February, 2016, taken at Crewe, and posted on Wikipedia, to whom thanks are due

6100 (46100) Royal Scot at Crewe, February 2016

Only two of the class survive in preservation, Royal Scot, and her sister, 6115 (46115) Scots Guardsman, which was featured in the GPO Film Unit's Night Mail, which features the poem of the same name by W.H. Auden, with music by Benjamin Britten. Wikipedia has more details, here.

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Sunday, 6th November

London Radio and Electronics Fair, aka Kempton Rally

This is the third, and last, of the radio rallies I routinely attend each year.

I got there late, about threequarters of an hour after opening time, but that didn't matter. As usual, the supply of mathoms appeared endless, but I did manage to pick up a new dual-band mini mag-mount antenna, from Moonraker. This has an SMA male plug on the end of the cable, which is ideal for the VX-8 and the TH-D7, but fails miserably for the FT817, because BNC. So I need an adaptor - which was like hen's teeth. But I did, eventually, find one. So I'm sorted for that.

Other than that, I ordered a new callsign badge from the RSGB stand. These are colour-coded by length of membership - I joined in 1977, soon after I got my licence, so the new badge will be colour-coded red. I suspect the latest design has coloured text engraved on the bar, the colour representing seniority (39 years for me) The badges are, of course, custom-engraved to order, so a few days time. But the RSGB staffer who took my order gave me a couple of RSGB lapel pins - no charge - colour-coded for length of membership, so a red field behind the symbol.

Food was, of course, larcenously priced (so what else is new?) but I ran into, and had pleasant chats with, several old acquaintances, so the social side of amateur radio came to the fore.

All-in-all, a nice outing,well worth the UKP5 admission, even though that's a bit steep...

Talking of badges, I'd like to put my hand on a badge bar - a metal bar, with a brooch-style latching pin on the back, supporting a strip of cloth onto which I can affix various lapel pins - like the Guide movement uses to carry badges. Or, alternatively, a patch of hook-and-loop Velcro, military morale patch size (about 3x2 inches) Sew the loopy patch onto my travel vest, affix lapel pins to the hooky side, and press the one onto the other. Ta-Da! Easily removed pin display, and much less risk of losing the rear clips - the which has happened a number of times, which is awkward because the clips are like hen's teeth. It's very difficult to find them in the shops, without the badge they are designed to fix to your jacket.

 
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