(The hyperlinks are to the Baltic online archive pages as photography of the exhibits was prohibited)

David expressed an interest in revisiting the Baltic by the Tyne and there was a lot to see.

The headline event was the A-Z Project by Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara who had constructed a sort of seaside shantytown in the biggest gallery space on level 4. Several ramshackle looking structures linked by walkways housed variations on his trademark cute small girl with big eyes. There was also a mini-castle doghouse with a dog inside and a dog on top. Beyond the exhibition was a huge head known as Puff Marshie. From the gallery, you got a different perspective of the roof lines and could see that the tallest building (based on the Newcastle Keep) was “To Let”.

On level three,an exhibition called Double Agent interacted with the visitors in a mildly uncomfortable way. A large projection screen had a series of real-time scrolling sentences generally commenting on what was actually happening in the gallery, aided and abetted by a woman at the back with a Mac. She commentedsomething on the lines of:

The boy is handsome.

The one with the stripy green top.

Someone has  a long thin package.

Perhaps a musical instrument.

Or maybe a monopod.

The stairlift is empty again.

There is a new watcher in the gallery.

Someone has come for a look.

(You get the idea).

There was an interactive exhibit here, a stairlift that went up the wall about six feet, being projected onto. You rode it up (after having put on your seat belt) then lifted a cloth on a box at eye level and looked inside. When I did it I found a video playing of two old wrinkled women of unspecified national dress (dark smocks and bonnets) sucking each other’s finger and laughing a lot. Yes, it was slightly disturbing.

David and Karen declined to give it a go on the basis that I looked like a right Div when I did it. The sacrifices I make for my art…

Kenton School was initially built as two Secondary Modern Schools in a mirror image, one for boys, the other girls. It actually opened in 1961 as a larger co-educational Comprehensive and the buildings were joined together shortly afterwards.By the time I went in 1969, there was a brand new Lower School for the 1st & 2nd formers but we were segregated and visited the old school for Physical education.

PE was probably the least interesting subject I did at school, as I wasn’t any good at it. As Mr. Blyth, Head of Boys PE wrote on my 1LN end of year report:-

“Grade: D Ian has no aptitude for sport, but he tries hard.

Our very first lesson, we didn’t actually do anything physical, we were just talked to. Then at the end of it, we were told that after every lesson we would be taking a communual shower so as we had all brought our towels, we may as well do it today as a practice so we all traipsed into the big shower (which had about twenty shower heads). Oh, and by the way boys, the valve is faulty so I’m afraid we can only have a cold shower this time!

We did all sorts of sport although I recall rugby, cross-country runs (across Cowgate moor in the snow, we had to break the ice on the horse trough to have a drink), athletics, vaulting trampoline and cricket. The one thing that struck me though when I walked into the Gym was Pirates, the annual near-Christmas game where all the kit was put out and we had to take ourselves around the Gym, not touching the floor, whilst being chased by whoever was “it”. When we were tagged (or fouled) then we went up on to the balcony to cheer the others on.

One year, climbing to the top of the ropes then crawling along the RSJ Girders was declared out of bounds. (With good reason!)

Three other memories surfaced from there, not entirely pleasant. The first one was what a freak show some of us boys were naked in the changing rooms, with odd deformities, unexpected dints, hair in strange places and webbed toes. The second one was being slippered by one of the teachers whilst I was tying my lace, presenting my bum in the direction of the staff room. The teacher immediately apologised, saying he just couldn’t resist it. The third memory was pumping and following through during a fairly energetic game of 5 a side. I went and hid in the toilets until everyone had left…

The boys gym looked pretty much the same, other than florry lights replacing the original tungsten ones and the cork floor being replaced with a more regular semi-polished timber one.

The Girls Gym was always lighter and this is still the case. The only time I ever came in here was for dancing lessons before our Christmas parties, which we all pretended to hate but liked really. Here we learned how to do the March of the Mods, the Dashing White Sergeant and various Dosi Dohs.

Notice that the safety elf has been visiting, cutting off the ropes in the process.

One aspect that I did enjoy was swimming lessons. We had our own six lane pool that was heavily used, including for canoe lessons and the like. (Not that I did any of that.) It was looked after by a little gadgie who tended to the boilers and was very broad Geordie. I don’t recall his name now, but he was known as 84, because whenever you asked him how warm the pool was he always said “atey-Forwer” (& we asked him a lot just to hear him say it).

Our first swimming lesson was fairly unremarkable, except that we got the hygiene talk. No verrucas, no open sores, no elastoplasts, no infectious skin conditions otherwise no swimming. He also didn’t want anyone to leave anything in the pool, especially that substance with chemical formula “Ess aitch one Tee”. On a subsequent occasion I can also remember him commenting that he didn’t want us to do submarine impressions whilst doing the backstroke. When we looked at him blankly, he said “you know, up periscope”. (We were adolescent boys, of course…)

The pool wasn’t open for the inspection, although I did take a snapshot out of the window. The lower block with the roof domes is the changing room block, boys to the left, girls to the right. The plant room was at the far end and the caretaker cottages are by the trees.

Talking of caretakers, I bumped into the site manager and asked him about Mr. Earnshaw. He was called Cliff (I had forgotten that) and went on long term sick in ‘75, dying a year later. I asked him about the “Chicken Knocker” rumour and was advised that it was indeed true.

As they say in Yorkshire, Nowt so queer as folk…

We went to the Kenton School last lesson yesterday, along with hundreds of others. It was an upbeat occasion, very professionally organised and full of smiles. All over the building there were shrieks of recognition, as ad-hoc mini reunions happened. Even people who didn’t know each other were sharing recollections.

The evening performance was also very good, but it didn’t flow as well as it could due to overlong breaks between some of the numbers whilst the stage management happened. In the interval there was wine and strawberries & the VI Formers were selling off old school ties for £1 each. I still have my own VI form one at home (which has a red Prefect stripe) but David was happy to wear one loosely.

Lots more to come…

The First Post says we are in big trouble in big red letters.

‘If we don’t do anything in the next five years to stop CO2 emissions, it’s probably too late’

Actually, what the person quoted said was this:

“If we don’t do anything in the next two to five years to change our behaviour and stop carbon emissions, it’s probably too late.”

she also says:

“You’re sitting in your canoe in open water, nowhere near land, and it springs a leak, and you sit there and argue about whether to plug the hole with a piece of wood or cloth, and only one thing will happen unless you fix it: the canoe will sink. We’re just arguing about what we might do and not fixing it.”

What if the water is only 2′6″ deep? You end up on You’ve been framed then looking rather silly and someone gets £250.

You can read the full article HERE.

David Bowie said we had five years back in 1972.

Enjoy.

I have been in a lot of technical facilities over the years and they always fascinate me, particularly the scale involved in the really big ones.

When I was at GEC Telecoms in Coventry, we had a visit to GEC Turbines in nearby Rugby. This huge facility had lathes the size of houses in order to make massive turbines and generators. BT was GEC’s main customer (apart from an export market mostly to Nigeria) so I got to visit quite a few BT sites as well.

Now the telecommunications approach to apparatus rooms was based on solid floors, wide open racks a cabling grid above and travelling ladders to access the higher equipment. Meanwhile, the computer industry needed to go for a clean room approach with raised floors (to accommodate cooling and plumbing), shiny equipment cabinets and anti-static treatment.

Gradually the IT and Telecoms approaches have combined into what we now call Data Centres, vast temples to the manipulation of the byte.

I have been into several Data Centres over the years, varying from small purpose built rooms to vast computer halls the size of sports centres. Some of them have a layered approach to resilience, others are just thrown together ad-hoc. Standards have gradually emerged for robustness of the facilities, from tier 1 (basic, no resilience) to tier 4 (Highly resilient, mission critical). I have visited places that claim to be tier three but aren’t any more because they have expanded so much and their N+1 or N+N resilience no longer meets the design brief (where N is the requirement and the +1 bit is spare capacity for fault tolerance.)

(If you wonder what level our Data Centre is, I tell people it is a tier three…quarters!)

The really big constraint on a Data Centre is available power. Servers gobble up a lot of electricity and it can be hard to persuade the Electric Companies to provide it unless your site is on a former smelting works, for example.

All of that power generates a lot of heat which has to be removed. As there is rarely a nearby swimming pool, it is classed as low grade heat and isn’t much use other than for heating warehouses, or more commonly simply expelling into the atmosphere. (Notice the cooling towers to the right of the two large buildings at Google’s massive Dalles Data Centre here).

Now UK big business is getting worried about power and several big Companies have moved their facilities out of the City of London as the infrastructure is at capacity. Where do you move it to though? It takes a lot of time and money to get a Data Centre up and running so there is mileage in getting it hosted in another facility.

Sound the fanfare, because Wales has the answer. Buried amongst the presentations linked to yesterday is one from Next generation Data called “thinking outside the circle“, the circle presumably being the M25. NGD Europe 1 is described as the UK’s largest and best-equipped secure data centre. It has up to 180 MVA of power available, enough to power a City (and about 5% of Drax’s output). It has room for 17,000 equipment racks in eighteen separate data halls, each one totally autonomous. It has connections to three separate telecoms carriers, has state of the art environmental systems and is very secure indeed. It also has a Bistro, a Gym and Bunks for the Engineers. They also boast in their brochure (pdf) of “Conference Suits…”

Watch the flash video, which takes you on a computer generated walk-through of the building. It is very funky and It reminds me of the Starship heart of Gold, although the doors don’t talk to you and are there are no robots sulking in the corner! The long trek through the security doors also brought the opening credits of  Get Smart! to mind.

There is a small catch though- it isn’t actually ready yet. It will be open for business later in the year but I was surprised that I only heard about it recently, when something like that would normally take years of planning. However, NGD have taken on a former white elephant, a massive factory built in Newport, Gwent for the LG Electronics Group at vast expense, propped up by the public purse and never actually opened (You can see the whole sorry story in the sidebar of this story on the BBC) . the site has stood empty for ten years and is a suitable shell for its new use, with the power & cooling souped up for its new role as a monster data centre.

It is an impressive specification and it is likely to appeal to Corporates if the price is right. It is not subject to flooding, away from flight paths and at low risk from chemical hazard. Of course, it is vulnerable to being hit by a meteorite but is far enough from Cardiff to avoid the collateral damage from enemies of Doctor Who!