Dom Davis (The Blog)

So first there was Sooty, The Zozos Brazilian Black tarantula which I got for her when I said she could have a tarantula for Christmas. Sooty was soon scheduled to have two friends to join him, although these have yet to arrive due to cold weather (one rather suspects they’ll be pitching up soon though given it’s getting warmer). And now we have Ozzy, the latest addition to The Zozos menagerie. Ozzy is a 2+ inch Pink Toed tarantula who just so happened to be available for sale at the tropical fish place in North Walsham where we’d gone to purchase… actually, what we’d gone there for was never really defined, we just happened to leave with a spider and bits for this spider.

Like Sooty, Ozzy is black which prompted The Zozo to name him (or her) after Ozzy Osbourne. Unfortunately for The Prince Of Darkness our Ozzy also has pink feet (hence the name Pink Toed) which I’m pretty sure would elicit a tirade along the lines of:

“Shaarron!!! What the fuck is this? I’m the Prince Of Fucking Darkness, not some fucking pansy with pink fucking shoes!”

A few things are beginning to worry me. I was sold the first tarantula on the basis that it was slow, docile and calm. Ozzy is arboreal. Ozzy can jump. Ozzy can jump quite a considerable distance given Ozzy’s size.This is something I’ve only just found out, after Ozzy was brought home. The Zozo has also bought a pair of tweezers for feeding. These are about a foot long. Why does she need to be a foot away from this thing when feeding it?

Thankfully, looking at the available space for the spiders once the last two come there won’t be any more space for any more… for the time being :S

The Zozos new spider

Since it’s now December we can happily start talking about Christmas¹ and preparations for same² without fear of jumping the gun³. This weekend, given we are only a few weeks before Christmas⁴, it was time to go purchase a tree and erect it in the living room.

Now, if we’re going to do Christmas, we’re going to do it properly. No gaudy fake tree for us resplendent with fibre optic lights, fake snow and pre-decorated, oh no. We want a real, honest to God, hand decorated, needle shedding live tree. We had one last year and we were not about to sully Little Cottage with fakery this year. There was, unfortunately, a tiny problem.

Last years tree wasn’t the largest in the world and required some rearranging of the living room to accommodate it. Since then we’ve rammed more furniture into the room to house the mice and ever growing arachnid collection. Careful examination of the room and much careful planning later we managed to free up some space… about 400cm square… on the windowsill. Still, this isn’t the end of the world, the tree would just have to be… diminutive.

Measurements in hand we headed to Homebase for to buy Christmas. As can be imagined Homebase was geared up for supplying many variations on Christmas, with trees of all shapes, sizes and levels of tackyness, including 3 sizes of diminutive real tree: the tiny (less than 6″), the small (1ft) and the not so small (2ft) each in it’s own pot and, for the two larger sizes, pre-decorated. We went for a 1ft tree, bought it a nice red pot to hide the plastic pot the tree was in and then bought some tinsel strips and little baubles to replace the existing decorations and make it our own. Job done.

Gift storage “under” the tree will be handled by simply moving the heater Christmas eve and putting the presents on the floor under the windowsill. The lights… well, we just trailed them over the mirror above the fire.

¹ Please note that this blog will not be masking the fact that it’s Christmas. There will be no “happy holidays” euphemisms and certainly no “happy happy!” which can only have come to being when the fundamentalist PC brigade discovered some people work over the “holiday period” and therefore it can’t be referred to as a holiday for fear of offending anyone. Incidentally I’m waiting for them to realise that not everyone is happy over December so I can watch them disappear up their own arseholes trying to come up with a new euphemism to bandy about.

² Beyond prudent early purchasing of presents which The Zozo seems to have sorted for me already.

³ We are, after all, onto the 6th window in the advent calendar.

⁴ For the anal among you, I am well aware that historically you’re supposed to erect and decorate the tree on Christmas eve but I’m getting into the spirit of the mass consumerism version of Christmas brought to us by Coca-cola Inc.⁵, not the Christian slant on a pagan festival.

⁵ A company who invented Santa as we know him and who’s advert all but hails the start of Christmas but who daren’t actually say “Christmas is coming”. There is a deep, deep irony in there.

The Zozo, it would appear, has been bitten by the tarantula bug. While much less painful that being bitten by an actual tarantula it is slightly more expensive. If I am reading her latest Facebook status correctly I’m not just buying her Sooty for Christmas, but two, possibly larger friends.

I really shouldn’t be surprised, the Zozo loves animals, especially ones that others tend to shun¹ (spiders, leeches… not wasps though, everyone hates wasps). The other hint I should have picked up on was the forums she’s been visiting. The vast majority talk about their tarantulas plural. Owning just 1 seems to be the exception rather than the norm and it would appear many people have quite a few of varying sizes.

As I’ve stated before I can’t say no to my wife, however, I’m not a carpet either. ‘Yes’ can come with strings and conditions. ‘Yes’ can buy brownie points which, despite their short half life, can be redeemed for things I want. Time to find out what 3 tarantulas is worth

¹ My working theory is that’s why she married me given she is waaaay out of my league

If you read the tales of Shelob you’ll have worked out that I am not overly fond of spiders. Small spiders (a few millimetres total leg span) I can cope with, any bigger and we’re entering phobia territory. Shelob had, at a guess, a body that was a quarter to half an inch big and then legs that gave it an overall size of 2-3 inches. A monster… for this country.

The Zozo is not afraid of spiders (or leeches, or, indeed many things). In a previous job she had to look after a Mexican Red Knee (the ones they always use in films) which is, apparently, one of the more docile tarantulas and about as deadly as a bee¹. Recently her current workplace also acquired one of these eight legged beasties and her previous experience means she is best placed to look after it. The problem is her job means she can’t spend much time with Felix² and that means she’d like a pet tarantula of her own. At home. Where I live.

I should perhaps explain a few things at this juncture. The first bring that I cannot say “no” to my wife³ so if she wants a tarantula for Christmas then she shall jolly well have a tarantula for Christmas, phobias be damned! Secondly there is a very big difference between Shelob, a wild, giant, fast, unpredictable spider lurking in our house, waiting, lurking; and a docile pet tarantula living in a locked enclosure made from toughened, bullet proof glass surrounded by laser motion sensors coupled to an alarm system and a fully documented containment strategy complete with “Hammerdown” protocol⁴.

Despite being ostensibly for Christmas I know very little about Tarantulas and their upkeep so me going out and buying everything, setting it up, wrapping it up and putting it under the tree wasn’t going to work. For starters there are 900 different types of tarantula ranging from the merely big to the insanely large (25-30cm!), the docile and slow to the mean and fast. There are arboreal ones, terrestrial ones, old world ones, new world ones, ones from arid climes, ones from humid areas and there’s a rainbow of colour schemes to choose from. No, this was something The Zozo was going to have to pick out herself.

After much deliberation she settled on a Brazilian black. This is supposed to be the most docile tarantula, slow growing, long lived and ideal for beginners. As the name implies they’re jet black and quite attractive in a “keep that thing away from me” kind of way. As fully grown specimens are incredibly hard to come by The Zozo chose a “grown on spiderling” which arrived yesterday.

Sooty⁵ is only about an inch big but already his body size is the same size as Shelobs. In toughly 5 years time, when Sooty is fully grown, he will be 6 inches across and Shelob will be but a snack to him. At that size spiders can just look at the business end of a Dyson and laugh. The Zozo seems to think that, in time, I may become brave enough to handle Sooty. I suspect this is her being overly optimistic. One thing is for sure though, I am secretly looking forward to photographing him

¹ i.e. not very… unless you’re allergic to them so best get yourself down to hospital just in case, but you’ll probably be fine.

² Yes, Felix. Hard to take a beastie seriously, no matter how large and how many legs, when they’re called Felix.

³ This is, of course, unless I’m answering a question that’s starts with the words “Did you remember to…” in which case the answer is invariably “no” said in a small voice with downcast head.

⁴ The exact security arrangements are yet to be thrashed out. It would seem various non-proliferation treaties stop me from using a nuclear Hammerdown option despite it being a well known fact that taking off and nuking the site from orbit is invariably the best option (c.f. Aliens, Cloverfield and point 1 from yesterday’s post if you don’t know what I’m talking about)

⁵ Yes, Sooty. Sooty the Brazilian black tarantula.

Given I tend to listen to fairly alternative stuff it can make finding new music a bit challenging. I can’t get recommendations off my friends, the radio doesn’t play anything remotely close to the genres I like and I no longer go clubbing very often (which was a great source of new bands).

As with most things in life my problem is one that can be solved by the Internet, in this case with last.fm. Bung in an artist or genre you like and it creates your own personalised radio station with similar tracks for your listening pleasure. Links through to iTunes let you purchase any tracks you like and sample other music by the same artist.

One particular track that took my fancy was only to be found on a pretty obscure compilation. Figuring there might be some hidden gems on the rest of the album I bought the whole thing. A wise purchase as it turned out.

One of the tracks that I rated highly on this new album claimed to be Bring Me Violence by Tactical Sekt. Now I’m a bit anal with music and like to have it rated, correctly tagged and resplendent with lyrics so I decide to grab the track lyrics off the web and then investigate Tactical Sekt in more depth.

It’s here I hit a brick wall. It’s not that I couldn’t find the lyrics, it’s that they were completely different. A quick visit to YouTube confirmed that this wasn’t so much a remix but a completely different song. I left it at that and went in search of other artists on the album who were less problematic.

Yesterday during lunch the song popped onto my iPod and I decided to go all out and pin down this track once and for all. Armed with Google I plugged in a quoted search using great chunks of the lyrics. Google returned a result, but for a different band and song entirely: Existence by Solitary Experiments.

Off to iTunes again, turns out that this track is also on the compilation. My search stalled here. I only had part of the album on my phone so I couldn’t tell if it was on the version I’d downloaded.

Fast forward to last night where I was able to sit down in front of the desktop with my master music library and continue the investigation.

First things first, Existence was on the album I had and it was the track before Bring Me Violence. Next I asked Shezam to identify the tracks for me. No luck, too obscure. My next trick was to find Bring me violence on YouTube and compare it against both tracks in iTunes. Bingo! What claimed to be Existence was in fact Bring Me Violence. The track names had been transposed by whoever put the album on iTunes. A further check confirmed the song I like was indeed a heavily remixes version of Existence. Meta data updated I could now rest easy and can now go and instigate Solitary Experiments to see if they have any other ditties I might enjoy.

Shame I hadn’t worked this out before my stag do. The music was such that it would have fitted in nicely if I’d been able to request it. Next time maybe

I’ve always been an avid computer gamer, from Elite and Repton on old 8bit home computers (BBC Micro in my case) to X3 and Starcraft 2 on modern 64bit multi core behemoths. It was actually gaming that got me into programming. Back in the days of yore games would often come as printed listings you entered by hand. In those days the game descriptions were works of art that would raise expectations far beyond what a few hours entering code could achieve. One particular listing which was supposed to be for a lunar lander type game took me a week to enter and when I’d finished it didn’t work. 2 years later I finally fixed it and taught myself to program while I was at it.

Fast forward 15 years and I was at the peak of my gaming. I had a rabid World of Warcraft addiction (that stuff is digital crack!) and would think nothing of dropping 5 grand a year on hardware to keep ahead of the curve. Thankfully the fact I could program had landed me a job that could fund that level of expenditure. During that time there was never any doubt if a game would run on my computer. It was a given that I’d get a rock solid 60fps with all the settings to maximum. I even had the hole in my wallet to prove it.

These days I’m slightly less cutting edge with my gaming. My iPhone gets used as a gaming platform more than my big computer, laptop, ps3 and wii combined. I just lack the time (and, in part the inclination) to play as many computer games as I used to and lack the cash to throw at staying on the bleeding edge. That said I still enjoy a few hours a week on my big games machine at weekends when Zo is at work (and many hours on the iPhone when she’s not :S ) and I’m beginning to find myself in a quandary.

When I say big machine I mean big. My budget when buying it was astronomical, not least because of the monitors. These beasties are both a blessing and a curse. They were bought for photo and video editing and, for that, they’re fantastic. Unfortunately in the machines secondary role as a games platform they’re a pain. It all boils down to frame rates. A nice 1080P widescreen 19″ monitor runs at 1920×1080 so at 60 frames per second you’re moving roughly 124.5 million pixels about per second. On my monitors it’s closer to 246 million. I need double the processing power just to match the smaller screen. Add a graphics card that, despite being the best Apple offered at the time, was a generation out of date compared to what I’d be putting in a custom PC gaming rig and you end up with a machine that struggles with modern games unless I turn the settings down.

Recently Apple announced the new shiny i7 MacPros which came with, among other things, current generation graphics cards. Even better these cards will run in my machine. For £300 I could breath another couple of years of quality gaming life into the machine, and when you consider In the past I’ve paid over double that for a single card, and put two of them in a machine, its quite a reasonable price. Once again, though, my monitors are being a pain.

With the number of pixels that need to be driven I need a special type of output on the card. Two in fact, one for each monitor. Driving two monitors is quite hard work for the card, very few people actually need two of these outputs and newer outputs are being pushed by Apple so, for whatever reason, Apple and/or the card manufacturers have stopped putting two of the outputs I need on the cards, replacing the second with something that is useless to me. Now, if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to buy a shiny new card and plug one monitor into it and leave the second monitor plugged into the old card. But this might not work. And I may need to by 2 cards. All of a sudden my £300 cost, which I could probably sell stuff to raise, might become £600. Not so easy to cover.

I guess I’d better start ebaying stuff

On my incredibly long¹ wedding to-do list was ‘get haircut’. Seeing as how Larry, my barber, had said I should get my hair cut two weeks before the wedding to allow the hair to settle and, seeing as how it is two weeks until the wedding, I decided I should toddle into town and get said task completed. There were a few other things I needed to do in town too so it seemed the sensible thing to do.

Getting my hair done these days is a quick and cheap affair. It’s your traditional barbers insofar as you pitch up, wait your turn, have a quick chat while your hair is trimmed, pay, leave. Job done. Hair done I needed to tick another item off my list³ so I ventured further into town, only to remember that Cromer during the off season doesn’t really open until 10 (or 11 in some cases) meaning I needed to kill a bit of time until the shops I wanted opened.

Whilst wondering about I passed, on a couple of occasions, a man who has some form of physical disability which required him to walk with a stick. The disability was such that he has to walk slightly sideways and with a swagger which was reminiscent of the type of walk effected by African American pimps in the 1970′s. All he needed was a white suit, platforms and an ivory cane and no one would know it wasn’t being put on.

Another errand to run was the posting of something for one of my many many step mothers. Said something was in a padded A4 envelope and contained a slimline CD jewel case as well as some A4 bits of paper which, under the Post Offices new simplified pricing system, was obviously going to require me to get it weighed and measured to work out the postage. The Post Office clerk applied the measuring tool to ensure it fit within the dimensions of a Large Letter, weighed the item, checked it’s destination and added these and countless other factors into a pricing algorithm that determined how much I was going to pay. After payment was made a new king size type of stamp was then put into the printer, the information printed onto it and the stamp applied to the letter. It makes you wonder how we used to cope when we had to find and fish out a first class stamp and apply it to the letter at home and then take it to a post box.

Errands done it was time to head home. The weather was such by this point that I could simply relax and have the wind blow me home. There were a couple of occasions where sudden gusts caught me unawares and my bags nearly felled other pedestrians or swiped cars. I think I managed to get everything home in one piece.

¹ and by incredibly long we, of course mean short, and by short I mean now has 3 items² on it
² and one of those items is ‘turn up’
³ I can’t tell you what this item is as it’s a surprise for The Zozo which will no doubt drive her nuts as it’s sitting (wrapped and concealed) in the bedroom ready to taunt her for 2 weeks until she can open it

Shopping in London is not a pleasant experience. Yes, all the flagship stores are there, but then so are 60 billion people, most of them tourists. Once I moved to the Suburbs of London I ceased going to Oxford Street very often, preferring instead to shop at Bluewater, which is a far more pleasant experience.

When I moved to Colchester both London and Norwich were pretty much equidistant, but Norwich was much nicer so I’d go there for shopping that I couldn’t so locally. These days I work in Norwich so it’s a bit of a no brainer that I still shop there.

Last time I was at Oxford Circus was one of my visits to the Apple Store there which, to be honest, involved surfacing from the tube, heading directly to the Apple Store, getting what I wanted and heading back down the tube again.

The last time I was at the Tottenham Court Road end of things was… God, whenever it was Appocalyptica played the Astoria. At least 2 years ago, probably 3. It was also dark then and I didn’t take much notice.

Today Jason and I took a stroll down Oxford Street from Tottenham Court Road to Oxford Circus. It’s an absolute dump. The massive Virgin Megastores above the tube is dead. Since Zavvi went tits up they’ve obviously not been able to re-let the space. The lack of such a huge anchor store that end shows and other businesses have closed down. The work for Crossrail has made the crossroads and surrounding area a building site which doesn’t help. They’ve also demolished the Astoria!

This last nugget of information came as a bit of a shock to Jason and I. We don’t cope with change very well and while we were prepared on a logical level, if not an emotional one, for the loss of the Virgin we had no idea that one of Londons iconic venues had gone. I was forced to pause and ask “er… where the fuck did the Astoria go?” A question Jason was, it turned out, ill equipped to answer. He had also only just discovered that Lonely Plant has closed, moved or otherwise ceased to operate from it’s usual location and I think it was all getting a bit much for him.

As we neared the Oxford Circus end of things the old Oxford Street began to surface more. The new crossing that allows pedestrians to walk every which way is very swish but the whole area is beginning to look tired. Will be interesting to see if the end of the recession and the arrival of Crossrail gives it the facelift it needs. I guess I’ll find out next time I go, whenever that’ll be. In the mean time: we’d like our venue back please.

It turns out Camden doesn’t do mornings at all on a weekday so I buggered off to other parts of London to perform errands, see friends and eat food. Recharged and refreshed from a lovely meal I didn’t pay for (the tastiest kind) involving raw dead fish, no rice and some very tasty chops I returned to Camden in the afternoon to find it alive and kicking.

First stop Cyberdog to spend far too much on tshirts for Saturday (couldn’t decide which I wanted, got two), and to wonder what The Zozo would look like in some of the girlie tee’s they do (hint: damn hot!). Pressing purchases done I then set about looking for a present for The Zozo, and some hoodies for me, all the while wishing The Zozo was with me because there’s a load of clothes I’d love to have bought her (or at least seen her in ). In the end I settled for a bizarre hand made animal thing for The Zozo because I’m always worried about buying the wrong size with clothes. I also located a couple of hoodies for the stag do which were appropriately alternative yet suitable for general wear should the claims of “high quality” actually turn out to be true and they last for any length of time.

Having handed over more money than I’m comfortable admitting for very few goods (at least the stall holders in the market are cheerful about ripping you off) I headed to Lock 17 by the lock to remind my body what alcohol is (I won’t be drinking too much on Saturday but it’s still going to be a bit of a shock to the system so best to cushion that), check my email (to conserve battery I’ve had my phone running in a low power mode and been quietly downloading emails over a slower connection during the day to read at my leisure later) and blog about the day (resplendent with many unnecessary sentences in parenthesis making a single line last a paragraph) while waiting for The Zozo to finish her exams.

By my watch she’ll be done in 5 minutes which gives me enough time to finish my drink, toddle over to London Zoo and meet her before heading out for dinner with her.

All in all a good, if expensive day

Long ago I used to live within easy striking distance of Camden. It’s been a haunt of mine for both shopping and going out for a long time and it’s good to be back, albeit as a tourist.

Due to The Zozos exams we were up and about at 6:30, dressed and breakfasted by 7:30 and enjoying the rather nice view from the balcony doing last minute revision while London slowly woke up.

I’d dropped The Zozo off by 9ish and was back in Camden after a nice walk along the canal from London Zoo by 9:15.

From days of yore I know that Camden does very early mornings. Many a time I’ve walked it’s streets at 3, 4 or even 5am, normally drunk, normally talking to a bunch of strangers while waiting for a night bus or taxi. It would appear, however, that Camden doesn’t really do normal mornings. Not on a weekday at least. The Market stalls are still being set up, Cyberdog is shut and I am sat in Costa, enjoying a hot chocolate and waiting for Camden to wake up and provide me with shopping opportunities.

Now, if there was only somewhere I could charge my phone…