Iain Cameron's Diary
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2002-04-11 - 7:44 a.m.

Yvonne suggested we go and see a film last night - it turned out to be Monsoon Wedding. They say it is a view of India from the US but whatever the truth of that I can recommend it to make you feel better. Brilliant acting, fine script and a view of Indian music that you won't get from anywhere else.

Yesterday morning I followed a new rail route from Guildford to London - east and then north rather than north and then east. This means up the Wey valley for a few miles and then east along the Tillingbourne and then a tributary which might be called Lawbrook swinging north to run under the scarp of the North Downs to the river Mole and Box Hill. Still east to Reigate and Redhill. This is now mostly the first bit of real countryside as you go South from London - and how pretty it is just now. Its more a vision of countryside than anything else - suburban countryside protected by planning laws and dotted with delectable late 19th century and early 20th century houses for succesful professionals. The landscape of E M Forster when the narrative isnt in India or Italy. As you go north through the North Downs you go through Purley and rather pretentiously as I did so I picked up P Ackrord's slim volume of poems with Purley in the title. In the office I mailed Paul Wheeler to ask him if he lived in Purley at the same time as PA.

Today I am going to Birmingham - one of my many topics to bore you to death is how to get from here to the M40. In Medieval times the trip might have been virtually all through the Kings hunting grounds surrounding Windsor - what has shrunk now to be Windsor Great Park.

Today I think I might go along the Hogs Back to Farnham (castle rebuilt in 1138) and then via Odiham - castle built at 1210 to Basingstoke - Basing Castle is Norman at the core. From there up over the Hampshire Downs past Watership Down and Greenham Common onto the famous Newbury bi-pass which was the scene of great eco-battles when it was built to cross the the River Kennet; then over the Lambourn Downs to cross the Ridgeway near Castle Hill Iron Age fort. Then down into the Thames Valley past Oxford to cross the Thames up stream. (Another way to get that far would be to walk down to the River Wey to the Thames then go upstream - it might take a week to walk but it would also be fun.)

From there the M40 goes up the Cherwell Valley to Banbury and then past Edgehill to Stratford on Avon and Warwick. I wish I knew the canal system well enough to do that journey by waterway - I am pretty sure the Cherwell Valley has a canal and the Midlands is a dense network of them.

There's a point beyond Warwick on the M40 when even in the car on a clear day you can see all the way south to the Chiltern Hills (and the Ridgeway). England is so small - from the hill behind my house you can see south to South Downs behind Brighton say and north to the Chilterns. So weather permitting with three beacons you could get a warning from the English Channel to Warwick which is really the heart of England.

I am going to listen to an expert on a way of thinking called six sigma. Sigma is the Greek letter which stands for the standard deviation measure of the variation in a population measured away from the average. Normally we think of tolerances in terms of just under two sigma each side of the mean ie a total four sigma span. The six sigma philosophy is about processes or systems where variation is down to a fewer than single figure parts per million or less outside tolerance. This way of thinking has become popular in the US in the last few years. The person I am going to hear has thought through the relationship between this approach and the Japanese "lean" philosophy which was first realised by Toyota. Lean involves very low inventories and low waste - single piece flow through the production system.

My CD fund raising system for South Africa is lean in the sense that there are few areas of cost waste between say identifying a prospective sale in London and the money actually being applied in rural South Africa (margin of 1500% say) - but the variation aspect of the process is high - not necessarily a bad thing. But it will be interesting to find out more today. One of the axioms of people in this area is that you can always squeeze out more waste.

Yesteday I listened to a 1980 Joy Division album which I discovered I had and the 1982 Tom Verlaine solo album. I think the Joy Division singles running up to that are more to my taste. I think 1992 Television also has the edge.

I must write about my Behringer chorus - its changing my view of that process - also about the trouble I am having accessing virtual synths in Cubase. Meanwhile I have linked my Sony condenser mike into the Minidisc and put down the flute line from VW Woodsong on Plundafonix - "We'll to the woods no more - the laurels are cut - the bowers are bare that once the Muses wore". Pushed this in the direction of John Lee Hooker after I rooted the MD through a guitar patch on my little Korg multiFX. Started jamming from the written violin line on D-Horn sax. May also have found a new impro/compo algorithm on the emerging thing - using Debussy's Syrinx - where our hero faun can see his Muse adorned but can't catch her in the marshes. I must go and chase those castles now.

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