Fibre optic to the home finally on the way?

It looks like we might finally start to see Fibre To The  Home (FTTH) in the UK, looking at reports here. BT have got their way, and OFCOM will not regulate the wholesale price they charge competitors for access to their network. Depending on how the retail pricing turns out, this could be a problem. Competition obviously drives prices down, and this makes it a lot harder for the smaller ISPs to enter the market. Continue reading →

Recent EnglishRussia.com posts.

Just a quick round up of some interesting links from English Russia (a blog all about stuff that happens in Russia).

Russian Antarctic Station. Pictures from a Russian research station in the Antarctic, especially like the first picture with the light through the ice.
Miss Atomic. A beauty pageant featuring women from Russia’s nuclear industries. Posing in front of a nuclear cooling pond and the like.
Georgian Electric Buses. Running off overhead powerlines, look like something out of Fallout 3 brought to life.
Soviet Russia in 1977. Strange to see how it’s changed over the last 30 years.

Name

Just thought, I meant to post something about why this blog’s called “The Hope and the Glory” (at least for now – I might change it). They’re a couple of things I’ve noticed about the way I try to think, and the things I enjoy. When it comes to an outlook on life, or things changing, I try to remain hopeful. Things can go sour in any number of areas of life, but over the long run those sour patches don’t tend to dominate. Assuming that they’re unchangeable, and that you will never see the good times again seems to me to be a pretty defeatist way to look at things, as well as being self-fulfilling. The second part is down to one of the consistent themes I enjoy in various media (music/film/writing) – I like things that come across as feeling triumphant. Not necessarily areas where they are triumphant, but where you get the feeling that there’s the hope there. That no matter how remote the possibility of victory is, it’s still entertained.

Getting up…

I’m someone who categorically is not a morning person. Left alone, I’ll happily sleep through till the early afternoon no matter what I’ve been up to the day before. This is just part of a larger problem I have with sleep – I can fall asleep far too easily in the day, and struggle to get to sleep at night. Leads to all kinds of fun situations surrounding this, and it’s something I have to plan around.

Obviously, getting up in the morning is something that is pretty necessary to hold down a job. Turning up is a pretty basic requirement of staying in employment. Bearing the problems I’ve got with sleeping pattern and the like, I’ve got a pretty large array of stuff dedicated to waking me up in the morning. Here’s the current count of what I use, and some positives negatives of each. Continue reading →

Seeing as I can’t see the ‘About’ link on the main page…

I’m Matt White. This blog’s pretty much here so that I have somewhere to share interesting links that I find, and to post any random thoughts that I have. One nice and easy thing to include in here is something that I have to answer reasonably often  – what does WPBS stand for? Years ago, I put on a couple of gigs at the Agincourt in Camberley. One was a great success, got to pay everyone more than they asked for, all happy. The other one was a disaster, I think 7 people paid in and I lost around £300.

That could well have been the end of my involvement in putting on gigs, except for a few people from the B6K Collective in Guildford moving away and others wanting to keep doing stuff there. Originally, it was Tom Ellis, Ken Eakins, Matt Knell and myself, with others such as Rob O’Donnell getting involved later on. The all important question was obviously what to call the collective? I believe Protected By The Ejaculation Of Serpents was thought up by Ellis, and it’s a quote from The Wicker Man. Edward Woodward’s charachter is passing through a graveyard, and finds a stone with the inscription “here lieth Beech Buchanan, protected by the ejaculation of serpents.” Unfortunately, some places were a bit iffy about having posters with “ejaculation” on them, so it got shortened to Protected By Serpents.

Two Matts, so add the first letter of the surname, and you get MattWPBS (Matt White Protected By Serpents). The collective broke up finally a few years ago with people not being as interested or moving away, but it was a blast while it lasted. I’ll probably post some stuff about goings on when I get a chance.

This blog might develop a theme as we move along, or it might remain as a random amble through what’s crossing my mind.