Sounds like a version of an Arabic greeting – Middle Eastern language meets Italian food item. Eat and greet.
March 21, 2013
March 20, 2013
Jeff Brown and his band at the Phoenix Artist Club
Jeff did us proud at the trefor.net xmas bash held in December 2012 at the Phoenix Artist Club. Cool photography by Nick Pickles.
March 19, 2013
Station announcements
I have just invented two new and different ways of making train announcements at railway stations. The ideas came to me when standing around at Kings Cross station waiting for my own train to be announced. Announcements for other trains came and went but not my own. I found myself saying to myself “that’s all well and good but it’s not my train and I am therefore not interested”.
The first idea is that you should only be able to hear the announcements that affect you. I have no idea how to go about implementing this idea but that’s not my problem. I’m the ideas man – someone else goes away and makes it happen.
The second idea is that the accent of the station announcement should reflect the destination of the train and each of the stopping points along the way. This came to me when I noted that “Hull” was pronounced with a decidedly “correct” English accent rather than saying “Ull” as they do in that part of the world.
So a train going from London to Aberdeen via York should have announcements that start in Cockney, flow through a Yorkshire brogue and end up with a strong Scottish lilt.
Och aye!
Pudding
Can’t quite remember now where I took this pic though I could probably work it out from the metadata and a look at my calendar if I was that bothered. It looked good. It tasted good. By golly it was good.
March 18, 2013
March 17, 2013
Queenstown, New Zealand
I travelled to Queenstown back in may 2008. It was also the same time that I started screwing around with stitching panoramic images from multiple exposures.
It wasn’t until recently that I revisited the original raw images and decided to re-stitch them, and the results are much better than they were the first time, I have definitely come a long way with photoshop.
I took the cable car up to the top of the hill and took 55 images, 45 of which make up this stitched image. The mountains in the background are the Remarkables and the town in the middle ground in Queenstown itself. At the bottom right is the camper park that I was staying at.
Queenstown is a beautiful town and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes snow and extreme sports.
The blog has a maximum uploaded file size, so I’ve put a lower-res version of the image here. If you’d like to see the larger one click here. Be warned, it’s a 21MB Jpeg image that will require you to download it.
The river god and the god of the bridge
The river god lives under the old bridge at the narrow stretch of water just after the river comes out of the trees and meanders into the pleasant meadows of the valley below. The river god should not be confused with the god of the bridge who coexists under the bridge but is a different deity. The river god can roam up and down the river but the god of the bridge has to stay in the same spot.
The bridge was built by the villagers many years ago. It was well built of stone and brick and has stood the test of time. If anything its aged and weathered look improves the aesthetics of the bridge which is popular not only for the convenience it provides as a river crossing but as a picturesque addition to the head of the valley. The bridge god is quite content to live under the bridge and is equally happy to share the space with the river god who could live anywhere but likes the feeling of enclosed shelter the bridge provides.
There is no animosity between the two gods who as well as sharing the same space under the bridge also share the same community of worshippers, the descendants of the good folk who built the bridge.
The gods that live under the bridge have a limited set of responsibilities. The god of the bridge is solely responsible for the safe passage of people and animals across the bridge. The god of the river has a wider though similar set of duties. He looks after the wellbeing of the river, the animals and fish that live in and around the river plus to a certain extent the fertility of the meadows either side of the river. This duty to maintain fertility is shared with the rain god and the sun god who are mutually exclusive and do not talk to each other.
The river god is not always a nice guy and has been known to flood the village causing distress to its inhabitants but these occasions are rare and quickly disappear from the communal memory. Most of the time he is a good god.
The villagers have many other gods that they worship. We will from time to time take a look at these other gods so that over a period of years Philosopherontap will become a useful resource for those needing to know about the gods of various places. Although some gods have names the river god and the bridge god are not in their number.
Into the arms of Gonzalo Garcia
Now these are words to light up the imagination. Who is Gonzalo Garcia and who or what went into his arms?
He sounds like the hero of Mexican romantic novel. Picture him in his high-waisted jacket, tight fitting trousers and wide sombrero pulling his horse up below the window of the object of his affections; the beautiful Rosita, her dark hair falling in ringlets over a heaving bosom, denied to him by a strict and disapproving curmudgeon of a father. She climbs down a rope of knotted bed sheets and into his arms, riding off on the back of his horse, the outline of a tall cactus plant silhouetted against the full desert moon.
Nope, that’s not our Gonzalo. I know but I’m not going to tell you…
scones
This is a photo of a tray of scones taken during the Durham Food Festival. Simples.
March 16, 2013
sleeping woman on tube
We shall probably never find out who she is. She was asleep when I got on the tube and still asleep when I got off. For all I know she woke up in Cockfosters or some such last stop on the line. Her story is hers to keep.
March 15, 2013
Domestic scene in the Davies kitchen on a Saturday night
Domestic scene in the Davies kitchen on a saturday night – good music, good company and simple home cooking
Horseguards en route to Whitehall, London
Funny to consider that the horseguards need a police escort.
K²day: De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da
16h18-18h15, 15-March-2013
A thousand words on multi-tasking…OK, go!
I don’t remember when the first time was that I heard the term “multi-tasking”, but I can say that for me it required not a lick of explanation. And yet…what is multi-tasking? What? Doing more than one thing at a time? Big whip! Of course, time is relative (No shit, Sherlock…er, Einstein), and whether it is even possible to do more than one thing at at time really depends on how “time” is defined in context. For instance, at this exact moment I am typing, but less than a minute ago I was checking both Facebook and my Twitter feed and my email, and before that I was looking in on my torrent downloads (kinda hot to test-drive some disk utility software today after having read Joe Kissell’s Macworld article Do you need a third-party disk utility?), all immediately following a round of click-click-clicking to establish my place on the free wifi network at my Black Market Café perch. Is this multi-tasking? The answer is both “Yes!” (if “time” is defined in increments of 5 minutes) and “No.” (regardless of one’s level of keyboard prowess, even at the proverbial speed of light it is simply impossible to simultaneously perform any of the tasks I just described).
OK, science geek. Get over yourself, bag the theoretical and pedantic, and move on.
Juggling is often used to as a metaphor for multi-tasking. However, still I consider myself to be the one of the original multi-taskers, despite my absolute inability to keep more than one ball in the air at a time. And although I cannot play the piano with more than one finger (and slowly with that finger, at that), I can play a keyboard like nobody’s business, all ten fingers working in tandem to accomplish individual tasks towards a common goal. So can touch-typing be considered a form of multi-tasking? No, that’s just silly. Are you really so desperate to get down a thousand words on multi-tasking, Kory? Come on.
One of the sharpest insults heard during my teenage years was the labeling of a person as someone who couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. The line is decades-stale today and is seldom used, but that doesn’t mean I don’t continue to hear it in my unspoken thoughts…except these days I tends to ascribe it to uncooperative computer operating systems…Hello, OSX! Yes, Windows, I’m talkin’ ’bout you!
It used to exasperate my Mom when in high school I would do my homework while watching Late Night with David Letterman and talking to friends on the phone. And as glad as she no doubt was that my grades didn’t suffer, I think it irritated her greatly that said formula worked so well for me. Poor Mom. What was she going to say? “Just imagine how much better your A in English would be if you concentrated harder on your work!” Later, when I struggled during the first semester of my Freshman year at Yeshiva University, Mom saw her moment. Harping at me (lovingly, of course) that college was so much more difficult than high school and that it was time to bear down and concentrate on my studies, she was quite gratified when my grades rebounded in second semester. It has been nearly thirty years since then, but I am reasonably certain I gritted my teeth in a smile and swallowed the response I no doubt ached to offer, that being that my letters were back up due to my having recovered (somewhat) from the first semester breakup with my first love (we’ve all got ’em) and had as a result returned to watching David Letterman while studying (and whatever rerun whatnot WNBC ran after that).
One man’s concentration is another man’s desolated desert of distraction. Oh, somebody please poison me slowly for not editing that sentence out!
Hopped away for a moment to check Facebook and Twitter, track my Raspberry Pi order (how cool it would’ve been if the darn thing — which I ordered back on 12-February — had shown up yesterday!), send a couple of iMessages to My Missus, grab a glass of water (writing is thirsty work!), gab with Yusef about his terrific decision to fire up some sweet Chet Baker, and to wag a finger at The Boy for doing face stuff (imagine things 11-year-olds do unconsciously that involve fingers, fingernails, noses, mouths and you’ll have enough information to go on). A multi-tasking fiend, am I.
I want to write here that following university my work habits matured and that I no longer required distractions to achieve my best work, but that would be akin to saying that I no longer enjoy comic books or dig good sci-fi or organize my music collection. No, not only do I still need to have a glorious mess of various-and-sundry going on that has nothing to do with work to have any hope of doing my work and doing it well (e.g., a documentary running on the screen to my left, social media humming away, some kinda music running underneath, an article open on Pocket, 25+ Chrome tabs open…), but I remain a world-class procrastinator. Rough estimate? To get in my 8-10 daily work hours I only need 12-14 hours in front of AppleKory, with sleep paying the multi-tasking freight.
Just resolved to drop “multi-tasking” from my vocabulary and to replace it with “multi-tracking”. This new term — during this introductory period please feel free to use it at no cost — benefits from the shedding of the connotation of simultaneousness that the now-replaced term shouldered for so long (and badly), and it also sounds way cool. Bit of a feeling of movement and kinda music-y at the same time. Got a “one-track mind”? No multi-tracking for you! Got an eight-track mind? Wake up and smell the digital.
The ten fifty four from Newark Northgate to London Kings Cross
Karen Duffy,
Head of Performance,
walked the aisle
with a pleasant smile
and then she was gone
to the next carriage
to serve another.
Logs at Fillingham
Logs at Fillingham. Taken when visiting the Christmas Shop. On that trip we saw a buzzard in the plantation. Didn’t get a decent photo though I did get some sort of low light video. Magnificent creature.