the valley of lost things

moving to a new home

2006-08-24T12:28:00.000Z

That's it. I've had enough of this beta blocker Blogger business. This blog has now moved to The Valley of Lost Things. Please come on over and join in.

blogger blooper

2006-08-23T18:32:00.000Z

Switching to the new beta version of Blogger is proving to be a rash decision. It's probably fine for new blogs starting out, but the legacy of old posts is creating all sorts of difficulties.

Because I'm still having problems uploading images, and specifically the drop caps for the Alphaphot project, I decided to switch over to Wordpress and host the blog on my own site. This is something I've been toying with for a few weeks now, and today I tried to import my posts from Blogger to the new one, also called The Valley of Lost Things. Unfortunately, the import wizard in Wordpress doesn't recognise my blog now, presumably because it's been transferred to the beta version, and won't let me log in.

I briefly considered cutting and pasting every post since I started the blog back in July 2005, but that would be painfully laborious and I can't see a way in Wordpress to change the apparent posting date to reflect the original dates. It's probably possible to do it directly in the MySQL database, but I don't really want to meddle with that if I can help it.

Perhaps I'll just leave links between the old and new blogs and start anew at the new address.

gainful employment once more

2006-08-22T14:18:00.000Z

(I still haven't worked out how to get those drop caps to appear.)

Since my last post, a lot has happened: I've attended two interviews and accepted a job offer from one of them.

Both interviews were remarkably positive experiences, which contrasts strongly with many interviews I had when I was starting out about twenty years ago. (Strange interview experiences could make an interesting series of posts...)

The first of the two recent interviews was particularly stimulating, comprising an observved group discussion between the three candidates followed by individual interviews.

We didn't complete the set task for the group, which was to produce a prioritised work plan for the first three months of the job, mainly because the discussion revealed widely different assumptions about the job, but it led to useful (though polite) challenges to those assumptions.

The whole atmosphere of the event was friendly and relaxed, and I appreciated the opportunity to see the list of questions fifteen minutes before the individual interviews.

For the second interview, there were six candidates, each interviewed for an hour, so we each arrived for our set time rather than all wait around all day. I therefore only caught a glimpse of one other candidate, and the event felt more isolated.

Nevertheless, the questions asked were interesting ones, with several parts, and I found that I had plenty to say in response to each. I may even have answered too fully, because I suspect that at least some of what I said was irrelevant, but never mind. I was assured at the start of the interview that there was plenty of time, so I used it all.

It was this interview where I was offered the post, and I gladly accepted. I hadn't been completely sure beforehand that I would, but it became apparent from the discussion that the post is in an exciting area of development, and I'm looking forward to starting.

web 2.0 reaches the World Service

2006-08-18T05:47:00.000Z

I've posted occasionally over the last nine months or so about Web 2.0. Originally it was in connection with a research project I was undertaking at College, with the final posts on my conclusions in June, but my interest in the subject continues.

It was exciting to research a subject as it developed, watching the types of articles change, from discussion and disagreement about whether there really is such a thing as Web 2.0, through concern that this was merely repeating the Dot Com bubble, disbelief that Web 2.0 sites could generate sufficient income to remain viable, to long lists of new services starting.

Almost all of my research material appeared on the Web or in newspapers, but as I neared the end of the research, some of the monthly computer magazines publised articles on the subject. Now the BBC World Service has broadcast a section on Web 2.0, and it is available on the BBC website until 22nd August (thanks to Dave Wood for the link).

It's a really good introduction to the topic, with interviews with people in different areas, including Jeff Jarvis, a professional blogger, and the person in charge of the Guardian's website. They not only explain how Web 2.0 is challenging traditional media, not necessarily in the short term but over the next few years, and also suggest that some of the social networking sites such as MySpace, which Rupert Murdoch paid $60m a year ago, could soon be out of date itself.

more on blogger 2.0

2006-08-17T05:16:00.000Z

Continuing yesterday's musings about the beta version of Blogger, I find that there are definite improvements to the service. Publishing (at least so far) is much quicker, since the whole blog is no longer updated, just the most recent post. The interface is clearer and no longer has to be refreshed to avoid strange arrangements of post headings.

I started to investigate the new drag-and-drop methods of changing the blog's layout, but was informed that I would have to update the template which it is based on, and this would mean losing most of the changes I had introduced. The message tried to comfort me by saying that a backup of my changes would be taken, but I'm concerned that restoring might not be straightforward.

I also searched for the promised use of tags, but so far haven't found them, which is a nuisamce since I can no longer use the Greasemonkey script to generate tags myself.

My conclusion about the Blogger upgrade has to be that, when the problem of uploading images is fixed, it will be great for people setting up new blogs. Exisiting blogs, however, should not make the transition until the final version is ready, and only then when the implications of change are clear.

blogger 2.0

2006-08-16T12:30:00.000Z

Following soon after the launch of Microsoft's desktop blogging tool Live Writer (PC only), a lot of web commentators such as Mark Evans have pounced on the news that Google has released a beta version of Blogger, the first major update since acquisition in 2003. Just about everyone, such as Wired, is impressed with the new features, though favourable comments are usually accompanied by the suggestion that it's about time too. On the downside, Steve Rubel found problems with the privacy settings, and the software isn't fully compatible with the Safari browser yet.

Techcrunch says that the beta version is still too unstable to be reliable, but in a spirit of adventure, I switched my blog over to the new system anyway, despite the fact that once you make the change, you can't go back to the old one.

Visitors may not notice much difference at first, but the benefits include a better publishing system and a drag-and-drop method to change the layout. Other changes include privacy settings and the ability to use tags without workarounds like the Grease Monkey script that I've been using for a few months (though it sounds to me more like having categories that are specific to each blog rather than tags which can be searched at Technorati, but I may be wrong).

There is now integration with Google accounts. I'm not sure what the implications of this are, though it's probably part of Google's plan for world domination.

I've had a GMail account for a while, but never used it. I visited it today and found lots of messages from a weekly news group that I'd apparently joined. I might now use the option in Netvibes, my RSS reader, to link up to my GMail account so that I can automatically see when I have new mail.

Update: Presumably because of the change to the new version of Blogger, I'm having difficulty posting drop cap images from Flickr. As a result, the Alphaphot project is temporarily suspended until I can resolve this.

Further Update: Other people also seem to be having problems posting images with the new beta version. Some have found that using a different browser helps, others suggest posting images before posting text, while still others found that disabling cookies can help. Unless this is resolved quickly, it might be enough to prompt the move I've been secretly experimenting with in the background, preparing to move this blog to Wordpress...

worth a thousand words

2006-08-14T00:50:00.000Z

he Visual Dictionary is a collection of images of words photographed in different locations. Anyone can submit, and already there are over 3,000 images of over 2,000 words.

new services from banks?

2006-08-11T13:03:00.000Z

artoon double-takes have always amused me, almost as much as the dynamic poses often struck in cartoons immediately prior to dashing off screen.

There was therefore a hint of humour in the otherwise serious business of announcing the names of nineteen people accused today of plotting to attack passenger planes, because it took me a couple of seconds to react to the fact that it was the Bank of England that was publishing the names, not the police or government.

The Bank's role in this affair is to freeze the assets of the suspects, on the instructions of the Treasury. Indeed, the Bank's website has a list of several hundred individuals and organisations in different regimes who are the subject of similar sanctions.

I understand the argument for doing this, but I still think it odd that Scotland Yard should have 'no immediate comment' to make. Shouldn't the police take the lead in such circumstances? What precisely does it mean for the Bank of England to be an agent for the Treasury? Is the Bank in the private sector now? If some or all of the suspects are found not guilty, could the Bank be sued for libel? What might other private sector organisations end up doing?

tiled and fractious

2006-08-10T13:48:00.000Z

hile looking for tiles for our bathroom recently, I overheard several squabbles and disagreements. One young couple, complete with small child in pushchair, were attempting to calculate the cost of some tiles in B&Q.

She: How big is a square metre?
He: It's about this big (points to a tile about 20cm by 30cm).
She: Are you sure?
He: I think so.
She: Well, this is no good. You should have measured the bathroom before we came out.
He: Look, firstly, I didn't know we were coming out. Secondly.... (the couple grump off down the aisle, muttering acrimoniously...

Elsewhere that same day, in a specialist tile showroom, an employee was speaking on the phone...

He: ...But I haven't done anything!... Well, I didn't know that... Look, I'll sort it out... I told you, I haven't done anything!...He's my brother, I'll talk to him...

And this all before trying to reach agreement on which tiles to buy.

Is there something about tiles that generates discord? Are their cold, sharp, hard characteristics also reflected emotionally or psychically? Just think what they could do to someone who spends a lot of time fitting them... What do the theories of feng shui say about tiles, I wonder? Surprisingly nothing at this feng shui bathroom site, despite having a lot to say about energy, light and mirrors, and the obligation to modernise every six to eight years.

global viewpoint

2006-08-09T15:16:00.000Z

ome Dutch students have come up with the neat idea of Globe 4D, where animated films are projected onto a sphere, and visitors control the playback either by rotating the sphere to get a different viewpoint or by turning a disc around the middle to get a different point in time.

Their website shows the movement of continents over millions of years, but equally the data could reflect current weather patterns or predictions of future trends. I'd be interested in seeing the ebb and flow of empires and civilisations. That might help to remind us that we're not the pinnacle of anything on this planet - just a brief moment in constant flux.

never mind the buzzards...

2006-08-08T13:36:00.000Z

ut at a garden centre late in the afternoon at the weekend, Lisa spotted a huge bird of prey flying round a tree in the near distance. We only got a brief glimpse, but could see that it was mid-brown and had upturned feathers at its wingtips. For quite a while after it disappeared from view, we could hear its distinctive keening cry, and other birds continued to flutter about in a dither.

We wondered whether it might be an eagle being flown in an organised demonstration, but after talking to others who know more about such things, it seems more likely to have been a buzzard. Not that I'm complaining at all - I've never seen a buzzard in the wild before.

the other side of shopping

2006-08-04T11:56:00.000Z

y apologies for writing little over the last week or two. I've been distracted by evaluating two rival software packages for creating an online shop for April Young. As part of this, I've had to upgrade my webhosting package to allow the use of PHP and mySQL databases. (That means I could switch this blog to Wordpress - more on this another time.)

The first option, called easyGen, has the main benefits of being cheap and highly configurable. The drawback, however, despite the many claims of ease of use and various tutorials, is there are no explanations of the principles of how it works, so I find it impossible to apply the techniques to my own ends. I think you would have to be a programmer to get the most out of this.

(Actually, that's the polite version. I felt that I ought to be able to understand the easyGen packgage. I've developed relational databases in the past, so this shouldn't be beyond me, but I was beginning to wonder whether my brain had stopped working.)

The other option, called Actinic, is much more straightforward but has less potential for using your own designs and is far more expensive - £1,500 + VAT for the developer version.

I was reluctantly coming to the conclusion that developing an online shop was beyond my skills and budget.

Yesterday, however, I received a phone call from Actinic. They had already sent me a letter by post after I'd registered for the 30-day free trial, so my initial reaction was one of caution against heavy-handed pressure selling. The conversation, however, turned out to be very useful.

Version 8 of the software is in the beta testing stage just now, and may be ready for release as soon as next week. The pricing structure has been drastically changed, and is much cheaper now, and there is much more opportunity to incorporate the shop into web pages designed elsewhere.

I've downloaded the beta version, and will investigate further, but this looks promising.

come to my arms, my bee-mish boy - L Carroll

2006-08-01T16:53:00.000Z

umblebees are quite common in our garden just now, investigating the flowers on the buddleia and lavender, but yesterday's honey bee was a first. Bees are generally thought to fly up to three miles from their hive to find food and water, so it could have come from anywhere in a wide area.

A recent test however, suggests that it could have come from much further away, perhaps up to eight miles. Relative to their size, I estimate the human equivalent to be about 570 miles. And then they have to find the hive... Amazing.

who'd have thought it would last this long?

2006-07-29T07:01:00.000Z

appy birthday to you.
Happy birthday to you.
Happy birthday dear blo-og.
Happy birthday to you.

open that box

2006-07-27T08:08:00.000Z

've written before about Pandora, the free internet radio site. Yes, I know that most if not all radio stations are free on the Web, but with Pandora, everyone can set up their own styles of stations, then refine them by telling the site whether they like or dislike each track played.

I have four stations so far, each for a particular mood or time of day. The first is based on Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno, Talking Heads and the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. The next is on 'Garden of Paradise' by Steve Hillage, and the third on Sarah McLachlan. I'm still experimenting with the fourth, using it to try out various groups I know little about.

Due to the licensing agreements arranged with publishers, however, you don't get complete control of playlists. Instead, you specify one or more tracks or artists, and the site selects similar music based on a detailed analysis of between 200 and 400 possible styles and attributes for each track. For example, the summary of 'Four Ever Rainbow' by Steve Hillage is 'idm influences, electronica roots, ambient soundscapes, downtempo influences and intricate rhythmns'. (I'd never even heard of 'idm' until now. Apparently it stands for Intelligent Dance Music.)

This level of analysis of indivdual tracks means that surprising connections are sometimes made that introduce you to groups or artists that you would never have thought of.

puzzle

2006-07-25T01:52:00.000Z

n the fine tradition of Samorost and Samorost 2 (reviewed here in October and December 2005 respctively), comes another point and click puzzle game, this time from Germany. It's called Wogger, and while it's not as interesting or polished as its forebears, it's intruiging enough to fill in an hour or so should you have one to spare.

creatures of the night (well, late evening)

2006-07-24T08:18:00.000Z

ildlife seems to have been emerging round us recently, with little effort on our part. First, there was a dragonfly down at the allotments, darting back and forth by the privet hedge late one evening.

At sunset the following day, while we were out for a walk at Tittesworth reservoir, a heron flew low overhead and shortly afterwards a barn owl swept by, pale and silent. That's the first owl I've seen in several years, and my closest sighting ever.

Finally, in this recent batch of sightings, a humming bird hawk moth fluttered around the buddleia in our garden, again late one evening. We've seen this creature in the garden before, but not known what it was.

a scanner darkly

2006-07-23T14:08:00.000Z

otoscoping is a form of animation where someone traces over live action film, and it divides opinion. Some see it as merely a cheat for the unskilled, while others feel it achieves an atmosphere unlike any other form of animation.

The technique has been used widely in the past, including Prince Charming in Disney's Snow White, but is less common these days other than for specific elements within films. It is therefore surprising that it has been used to create the whole of the futuristic A Scanner Darkly, a film of the book by Philip K Dick.

Several big budget films have been made from Dick's work - Bladerunner, Minority Report and Total Recall - so it is interesting to see a new slant on the strange worlds created by the author.

As a taster, you can see the first 24 minutes on the web, but spare a thought for the trials and tribulations of the director and his staff during the making of the film. Personally, I like the resulting style, though, as with the graphic-novel look of Sin City, it's probably best if done rarely. Anyway, the film appars to have far more serious weaknesses which mean that quibbles about rotoscoping are missing the point.

at last

2006-07-20T02:38:00.000Z

Yaaaay! It's raining rain!

I woke up after very little sleep because I was so hot and came downstairs. I started checking my RSS feeds, and at 2.23am I heard a peculiar sound. Rushing outside to see what was wrong, I found heavy raindrops bashing down. The shower only lasted seven minutes, but there's now lighting. Perhaps it will be enough to cool things down just a little.

norman and the oscar people

2006-07-19T11:23:00.000Z

y coincidence, following yesterday's post about Norman McLaren, comes the announcement that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (the organisation that awards the Oscars) will hold a tribute evening to the man himself on 18th August. Thirteen newly restored and remastered films will be shown, for the grand sum of $5 per ticket.

norman mclaren

2006-07-18T07:52:00.001Z

eturning to the recent but unintentional focus on animation, I've discovered a wonderful site for the National Film Board of Canada, which contains five films by Norman McLaren (four are listed under his name, with the fifth under Claude Jutra), as well as the stunning 'Two Sisters' by Caroline Leaf.

Norman McLaren was the first animator I discovered after Disney and cartoons. It was sometime in the mid-1970s, and I'd wandered into the Fruitmarket Gallery, as I occasionally did in those days, just to see what was going on.

A temporary room had been set up in the middle of the gallery, with walls draped in black cloth. Not very confident and feeling like an intruder, I tentatively peeked round the corners designed to exclude stray daylight, and found a jumpy, crackly, nonsensical world. It was the precise opposite to the smoothness of my much-loved Jungle Book. Abstract shapes, drawn directly onto film, leapt shakily around; solid objects moved of their own accord and with personality, while people seemed to float through the air while their legs blurred below them.

I watched all of the films again and again, and returned to the gallery several times before the exhbition ended.

fingered balloons

2006-07-17T15:27:00.000Z

hile I was in Edinburgh recently, I took some photographs as contributions to a couple of websites designed by Dave Wood. Dave was my tutor at college, and a great help to me in my studies, so I wanted to return the compliment where I could.

One of Dave's interests is encouraging other people to participate, to see what happens when control is relaxed, so he's set up several sites with different themes.

The first, I took it here, asks people to print out an image of a hot air ballon, take it somewhere, photograph it, and e-mail the result.

The next, Where's your finger been? is similar, but the theme is a face drawn on a finger. I hadn't appreciated that a series of photos forming a story or adventure was what was wanted, so I submitted only the one.

The others, which I haven't contributed to yet, are Fabulous Buildings and Strange Semiotics.

Why not visit some or all of these sites, and contribute your images?

i'll be your dog

2006-07-13T16:09:00.000Z

ere's a blast from the past. I remember this advert as a highlight of going to the cinema as a child. I used to wish it would last much longer.

just an illusion

2006-07-12T06:55:00.000Z

ometimes it's hard to convince people in animation workshops how little change should take place between frames to create the illusion of smooth movement.

As if to prove me wrong, here's an example, admittedly quite an extreme one, of just how big the steps can be. There are two short clips from a Bugs Bunny cartoon. The first is at normal speed, and the second is an extract of the first one, in slow motion so that you can see individual frames.

I particularly like Bugs with three heads...

film in Edinburgh

2006-07-10T07:04:00.000Z

dinburgh has some wonderful cinemas which are almost the direct opposite of soul-less multiplexes all showing the same films.

There's the family-owned and run Dominion, which has adapted over the years to keep up with changes elsewhere, and has a warm, welcoming atmosphere. The Cameo looks a bit run down from the outside these days, but it's still a magnificent building inside. Plans to demolish it were withdrawn after public protest.

I didn't visit either of these on my recent trip to Edinburgh. Instead, I went twice to the Filmhouse. This has grown over many years from a small, makeshift affair to a three-screen venue for the annual Edinburgh Film Festival and has a large resturant/bar area.

There are plans for a complete rebuild of this too, but as they're highly ambitious, it may be a long time before anything takes shape.

The Filmhouse programme is very varied. On consecutive days I saw the wonderful 'Where the Sidwalk Ends' from 1950, shown as part of the 'Good Cops? Bad Cops!' season, followed by the charming 'Lost Embrace', from 2004, an Argentinian film set in a shopping centre full of interesting characters.

For the rest of this month, the Filmhouse is showing a selection of films from Film Festivals over 59 years, showing just how much has been introduced there.

Rembrandt at 400

2006-07-09T11:41:00.000Z

hile in Edinburgh last week, I visited the excellent exhibition of etchings by Rembrandt at the Scottish National Gallery, organised to mark the 400th anniversary of the artist's birth.

It's a relatively small exhibition, with about 30 etchings, and although the labels repeatedly reminded us that Rembrandt was a master of mixing techniques in the his work, there was no detailed explanation of the effects of this.

Nevertheless, it was a wonderful collection, ranging from gentle landscapes etched while standing in front of the scenes, to portraits and biblical scenes. These latter were the most dramatic, with heavy contrast between light and shade. A few were shown in different stages, so you could see how much they had been altered.

Radio 3 has a programme about Rembrandt tonight to mark the anniversary, but the prospect reminds me of Steve Martin's comment that "talking about music is like dancing about architecture".

standing in a doorway

2006-07-03T15:29:00.000Z

ompletely mis-reading the clouds yesterday afternoon, I set out for a walk. A gentle rain started almost immediately, but it felt pleasantly cool and refreshing so I carried on, ignoring the gradually increasing intensity.

Eventually the rain passed beyond the point of definite downpour and reached the stage of thunder and lightning. Despite having passed many pleasant-looking cafes earlier, I couldn't find one to shelter in, so I stood in the ample doorway of an estate agent's office.

First to join me was a young Australian woman on a brief break from work. We chatted amiably for a while, and the conversation veered towards her former fear of lightning. As if to prove a point, she put up her umbrella and returned to work.

Shortly afterwards, three young people took shelter beside me, speaking a language that sounded like a recording played backwards. Not entirely convinced it was genuine, I would guess, if I had to, at one of the Baltic States. There was no spoken communication between us but we exchanged smiles.

They soon moved on, to be replaced, albeit momentarily, by someone waiting for a companion to catch up. No contact at all between us, turning this into a series of decreasing interactions.

Watching the torrents run down the streets, interrupted only by cars attempting to turn across them, I wished I'd brought my camera on this visit to Edinburgh so I could have captured the peole leaning out of the windows on the upper floors opposite to get a better view of the soaked pedestrians below, or the man attempting to enter the restaurant without collapsing his rainbow-coloured umbrella.

No doubt, though, that if I did have my camera with me, I'd be fretting too much about protecting it from the rain.

alphaphot review, part two

2006-06-29T22:23:00.000Z

ou've had the dry statistics about the Alphaphot project - now for the conclusions.

A drawback of using images as drop caps is that my posts all have the first letter missing when read in an RSS feeder. Personally, I don't see that as a big problem. I've set Blogger to send the full post as a feed rather than just the first few words, so people can get the sense of what I've written. Anyway, according to Feedburner, there is still only one person subscribing to the RSS feed from my blog so far and that's me, for test purposes.

On the plus side, I've not come across anyone else doing this, which in a place as big as the web is quite amazing, but then, since it is such a big place, maybe I just haven't found them yet.

Most of the time I refrain from tweaking images in Photoshop other than simple crops and boosting the contrast to compensate for the flaws in my phone's camera. Sometimes I adjust the sharpness and saturation to make the letter clearer, and occasionally I rotate the images slightly.

The big question is: has the Alphaphot project changed the way I take photographs? Well, it has when I'm specifically taking photographs for the project, but I have to remind myself to look for relevant images.

This evening, for example, I was down at the allotment watering plants when a hot air balloon flew low overhead. I realised only as it was floating away that it would have made an excellent letter. On my recent trip to Southport, I brought only one drop cap image, probably because I was busy concentrating on work. The image really stood out for me at the time, though it's hard to see why when looking at it now.

I suppose my conclusion is that it's good to force myself to look at things in a different way, so I will continue with it, but perhaps I need a new project as well. Something brief, perhaps. A theme to work on. Any suggestions, anyone?

giving back just a little

2006-06-28T09:06:00.000Z

This bee was lying on the kitchen floor yesterday, seemingly exhausted, possibly because it was a cool day. Lisa gave it some honey on a teaspoon, and eventually it flew away.

Technically, this is a very poor photograph. There was little light in the early evening and I was using a 300mm telephoto lens (on a macro setting) with a maximum aperture of 5.6, so the exposure was 1/6 of a second. I used a tripod, but couldn't find my cable release in time, so there is still some camera shake. I also failed to spot that the camera was still set at a low resolution and small file size from the stopmotion animation workshops a couple of weeks ago. All in all, a poor effort, and I've had to sharpen the image in Photoshop far more than I would like.

The experience has taught me an obvious but valuable photographic lesson - be prepared at all times - but I wanted to share the image despite its flaws.

old fashioned values

2006-06-27T17:50:00.000Z

ot that long ago, most houses in Britain didn't have an indoor toilet. This was partly the result of large quantities of low-quality terraced housing built before 1914. Most of this housing stock has now either been extended to include a bathroom or demolished. There have been waves of such demolition, alternating with refurbishment. Sometimes the refurbishement costs more than the resulting housing is worth, and sometimes the destruction of established communities is realised to be a hidden cost.

Justification for the current phase of demolition, at least in Stoke-on-Trent, is that people no longer want terraced housing. They skip over the traditional first rung on the housing ladder and go straight to a modern suburban semi-detached house. This means that it is not worthwhile for owners of the terraced property to invest in the maintenance of their houses so the buildings are left to deteriorate. It is then uneconomic for government intervention to refurbish, and so they are cleared.

Given the ridiculous increase in house prices, however, which are still on the rise in this part of the country at least, it won't be long before first time buyers will wish that there was still that traditional first rung.

None of the above is new or original. What's brought it to mind, though, is the replacement of the bathroom suite in our terraced house this week. The task took twice as long as expected, due to various complications from the age of the house (lathe and plaster walls, old and no-longer-standard floorboards etc).

We were therefore lucky that by some quirk there are two feeds from the mains water supply, so we at least had cold water in the kitchen sink while the work was carried out. Jason the plumber worked well in the adverse conditions, but Lisa decided to clear out the junk stored in the outside toilet and restore it to working order.

The old coat of whitewash is flaking off the walls, and many surprised and probably offended spiders had to move out, but I'm glad that we've had this brief reminder of what life must have been like for many people for many years - no light, no heat, no sink. I'm also glad it's not the middle of winter.

unlikely sculptures

2006-06-23T09:30:00.000Z

s a bit of light relief after the previous post, how about trying to get your head around some painstakingly intricate carvings? First up, there are the Japanese pencils. How could anyone have the skill and patience to do this?

Secondly, there are the seemingly impossible metal convolutions and infinite loops of Bathseba Grossman. Thankfully, she provides an explanation of the technique, which involves three-dimensional printing.

if never alive, then not dead

2006-06-22T07:46:00.000Z

ore4 is showing a series of "taboo-breaking" programmes on death this week, which I have been avoiding. In comparison, the Dead Puppet Show is not macabre at all, though at other times it might be.

The parallels with humans are explicit, but the final connections are in the viewer's mind, not in the images themselves. I suggest that, when given the option, you select 'follow the trail' to see the short version with captions. At the end, you will be able to see all of the images.

alphaphot review, part one

2006-06-21T07:13:00.000Z

he Alphaphot project started in November 2005. That was the task I set myself to try to look at things around me in a different way. I also wanted to try a quick and dirty alternative to photography, rather than spend hours adjusting and tweaking images in Photoshop. Now that I've been using the results as drop caps in this blog for over six months, it seems appropriate to review the project.

Thoughts of a review started when I found myself unable to start blog posts with particular words because I didn't have any images of the required letters. It seemed ridiculous to allow the images to dictate the words, and I began to wonder whether the idea had run its course.

I'm sure you won't be interested in the detailed statistics, so here's a quick summary. So far, I have a total of 200 images, of which I have used 85, although occasionally through absent-mindedness and a couple of times through desperation, I have used a few images more than once.

Admittedly, of the unused images, seven are for the letter 'Q" and eight are for 'U' which I have never yet used as initial letters, while I have very few for some of the more common ones, so the distribution is uneven. The most common initial letters in my posts are 'I' and 'T', so recently I've been concentrating on finding more of these.

I'm surprised how easy it can be to see letters in everyday objects, though I still have to make a conscious decision to look for them. I also find that the attitude I need for taking 'proper' photographs automatically excludes the search for letters. There is definitely a limit, however, to what can be found, so remembering to look when visiting new places is now essential if I'm to continue with the Alphaphot project.

(to be continued - perhaps)

games

2006-06-20T16:29:00.000Z

tumble Upon has been expanding recently. I've been using it to look round the Web to see what's been going on while I've been concentrating on other things, and the range of sites it covers seems to have grown enormously in the past few months. It used to offer up same sites over and over again, but now there are very few repetitions.

In amongst all the dross and stuff that I'm not interested in, I've found a couple of intruiging games. Firstly, the telescope game. Initially, the site I found coyly refused to say where the game was from, but after you solve the first fifteen levels, it takes you to the website for Dyson vacuum cleaners where you can download the whole thing and try many more levels.

Secondly, there's a marble in a maze game, but the twist is that you have to manouever several marbles simultaneously to the targets, which means you have to trap some ball in corners so that they don't move while others do.

Finally, there is peculiar Godtower, where you have to interpret cryptic clues to discover passwords. I've been keeping hold of for a while because although there are apparently many levels and hidden levels to this, plus a whole second game, I'm embarassed to say that it took me a long time even to get past the first level. Now on Level 12, I've managed to access some of the preceding levels only through hints provided on message boards elsewhere. Still, it's completely different from anything else around. Can you do any better?

animation workshops

2006-06-18T10:36:00.000Z

'm back. The project I've been working on for the last week was organising and running some workshops for pupils at Churchtown Primary School in Southport as part of an Arts Week.

There are thirty pupils in each class, and although the school is far better equipped than many others (with Apple Mac computers rather than PCs - hurrah!), lack of time and space made the workshops particularly difficult. Nevertheless, the pupils were all enthusiastic (verging on boisterous, but that's OK - it was the end of an exciting activity-filled week) as well as polite and well-behaved, and the staff were all welcoming and helpful, so it was a pleasure to work there.

Two Year 3 classes used Comic Life, a programme to create comics from drawings and photographs, and three Year 6 classes used iPhoto and iMovie (two parts of iLife which comes as standard with Mac computers) to create slideshows and stop-motion animation.

I based all of the activities around photographs I'd taken on the envoronment, the theme of the Arts Week, and the pupils seemed suprised that they were my images rather than downloaded from the Internet.

The image of Chloe the cat seemed particularly popular. Many of the younger children added speech bubbles, while a lot of the older ones added transformations that made him look even fatter than he already is. One girl apologised profusely when a transformation between two images got stuck part way through, substituting the top of foxglove for the top of the cat's head.

The only element I failed to get across to the pupils, despite repeating it many times, was how little movement is required between frames of an animation. I'll have to think about how to improve this next time. Still, they all seemed to enjoy it and soon got the grasp of the software, so they should be able to make further attempts another time.

stuff going on

2006-06-12T15:25:00.000Z

ver the last ten days, it's been too hot to do much more during the day than the absolute essentials, and my evenings are usually spent down at the allotment, watering and weeding. As a result, I've given little thought to this blog recently.

Another reason, however, is that I've been working on something exciting for later on this week, and it's occupied a lot of my thinking time. I'll let you know how I get on, but I'm unlikely to post anything more at least until the weekend.

del.icio.us links (continued)

2006-06-08T09:11:00.000Z

mong the sites I wrote about in the previous post, there seems to be a common threshold. If a site can somehow slowly clamber up to having about twenty links to it, then the number of links starts to increase significantly. And how do sites reach that magic number? I don't know - this blog crawled from 0 to 2 after one week then stayed resolutely at that level ever since.

I've tried adding a link at the end of my e-mails (not to everyone - I didn't drag my work e-mails into this), and I've tried leaving comments on other people's blogs (both popular and unknown ones) in the hope that they would reciprocate, like what they saw then add a bookmark.

There are obvious flaws in this approach. I only tagged a few of the blogs I discovered at random and I didn't tell the authors that I had done so. Perhaps it would have encouraged other people if had done so. More fundamentally, perhaps the people I left comments with don't use del.icio.us. Is it sufficiently widespread to warrant the drawing of conclusions?

Perhaps the answer is to develop a focus for the blog, so that people interested in that particular focus would consider it worthwhile to make return visits. That focus might be a topic (like the Animation Archive or Puppet Vision) or it might be a style of writing (like little red boat or Johnny B's private secret diary).

But I don't want to change the way I write, just for the possibility of increasing readership, even though that would be encouraging. At least I've got two links, which is two more than one of Scotlands' principal newspapers.

web 2.0 part ix

2006-06-05T14:13:00.000Z

recently submitted my final (apart from the End of Year show) college assignment, an essay for the Research Techniques module. I'd chosen to adopt an on-going study of the potential implications for designers of Web 2.0.

I've posted about this topic at infrequent intervals (Web 2.0, doing my bit for Web 2.0, the benefits of an RSS feeder, more on RSS, further thoughts on RSS, the good and not-so-good of Web 2.0, becoming a geek, and I'll tag the high road), and, indeed, I included these excerpts from my blog as an appendix to the essay.

If I'd written this post about my conclusions earlier, I could have included it as well, but the assessors may read it anyway if they choose to look at this blog. By voluntarily opening up my blog to them, I'm contributing, in a very small way, to what I see as a future phase of the Web, but that's the subject of another post.

So what did I discover about Web 2.0?

Let's start with del.icio.us. For six months, I kept a weekly record (well, most weeks, except towards the end when I became distracted by other assignments) of the number of other people linking to sites I had bookmarked as favourites using del.icio.us - 79 sites in total by the end of the process.

In the vast majority of cases (61), the number of links increased, usually steadily and often by significant amounts every week. The highest percentage increase was the Guardian's Technology site, which jumped from 10 to 66 links, while the highest absolute increase was the Web Developers' Handbook, leaping from 3,483 to 9,337.

17 of the remaining 18 sites stayed at 0. Only 1 site ended the survey with fewer links than at the start, and that was a decrease of only one, though six sites peaked then declined slightly.

This was by no means a statistically valid test, but it would be interesting to do this sort of thing again then run some statistical analysis to see if there is an underlying pattern.

To be continued (possibly).

brian in bath

2006-06-04T10:06:00.000Z

nnoyingly, I missed the second part of the recent interview with Brian Eno on BBC Radio 6, both live and on the Web. I managed to remember, however, the recording on Radio 3 of his performance with pianist Joanna MacGregor and Bath Camerata in the Bath Music Festival. You can listen to it on the Web for the next few days.

Brian laughs nervously a lot, and says right at the start of the programme that he doesn't like performing, but it's an interesting mix of pieces, actively defying people to like everything. The two new pieces by Brian weren't to my taste, but the rest were enjoyable, especially the choir.

The live performance of two parts of Music for Airports was particularly intruiging, since it was originally produced by overlaid tape loops of different lengths rather than by musicians. In this version, members of the Bath Camerata were arranged in groups throughout Bath Cathedral, each listening to a CD, and they sang when 'triggered' by their own CD.

The concert ends with a beautiful piece of choral work by Thomas Tallis.

promises, promises

2006-06-03T11:17:00.000Z

should learn not to promise that I'll write about something specific here. My previous entry ended with the declaration that I would write about my experience of handling bees, and ever since, I've been struggling with what is probably the hardest post I've tried to compose so far.

I don't understand why I should find it so difficult. It's not as if handling bees was an unpleasant experience - quite the opposite. It wasn't an intensely private or personal experience either.

My only suggestion is that the contrast with the complicated discussion in the classroom, especially the video on rearing queen bees, was so strong that it feels beyond words. Not much use, I know. Sorry. Perhaps when I've more experience of handling bees I'll return to the topic.

eric the half a bee - m. python

2006-05-29T11:00:00.000Z

he second, and final, part of the introductory bee-keeping course on Saturday started badly. Lisa couldn't go because she was starting a new job, and I was still feeling the effects of working very late one night.

The person on the course who had annoyed me on the first day by repeatedly interrupting and laughing loudly at her own comments was there again, and the delegates, including her, who already have bees, kept sidetracking the lecturers with questions on more advanced subjects. Above all, the weather was again poor, so a visit to the apiary was unlikely. I found myself feeling grumpy and resentful, not wanting to be there at all.

It started to rain at lunchtime, so afterwards, instead of seeing the bees, we watched a video on rearing queens - advanced stuff, and delivered in monotones. I was close to falling asleep in the darkened room, having decided that beekeeping is far too complicated to bother with. And then...

Then the weather brightened and the lecturer stopped the video to announce that it was worth going to the hives after all. We all got kitted up, some, like me, in old, borrowed veils, and others in crisply-white, newly-purchased jackets, trousers and gloves. To my great delight, we split into two groups, those who had already handled bees going with one lecturer, while we complete novices huddled somewhat apprehensively round the other.

This is turning into a long post, so I'll tell you all about it next time, but let me reassure you that it was a wonderful experience, and I now know why people might devote many years to learning about bees.

april young fine art

2006-05-28T10:19:00.000Z

y redesign for April's website isn't finished yet, but it's nearly there. We're in the process of transferring her domain because of difficulties with her current webhosting company. That will take a while, but, in the meantime, you can see it in its current form on my own website. I'd welcome any comments.

clay art

2006-05-25T06:46:00.000Z

spent the weekend near Denbigh in North Wales, working at Clay Art, a gathering of seventy ceramicists of vastly different styles and techniques. Despite the relatively remote location, the event draws many of the country's big names in ceramics. I was there helping April Young sell her sculptures of horses and other figures.

The event was held in a large marquee in a field, and by the end of the weekend, the downpour of rain had turned everything to mud. Clothes were splattered with it, vehicles sank in it, and people fell over in it. There were many comments about the similarities between mud and clay.

I was already petrified that I would trip and smash someone's work, and the slipperiness underfoot multiplied that fear many times over. I had one close shave when transporting display stands on a trolley over a bump in the grass, and someone else nearly knocked a bowl over with the child harness on their back, but amazingly I didn't hear of a single breakage.

Despite the rain, there were many visitors on both days, but for all exhibitors, most purchases were made on Saturday. That must be when the serious collectors attend, to find the best pieces.

nothing but the facts, ma'am

2006-05-24T07:16:00.000Z

here was a time, long ago, when you could buy a newspaper knowing the general view it had of politics and the world in general, yet be confident that television news, in contrast, was impartial. ITV would usually take a more populist stance than the BBC and Sir Trevor MacDonald, knighted though he is, would take a particularly condescending tone, but generally speaking they would both stick to the facts.

Then Channel 4 news started its frenzied trailers with Jon Snow, teasing potential viewers with frantic snippets of outrageous goings-on. Various other news programmes descended to including summaries of viewers' opinions phoned in or sent by e-mail during the programme as if the proportion of people for or against a simplistic question were statistically valid and counted as news. Yes, there is a role for vox pop, but it isn't news.

The BBC certainly isn't immune from patronising its viewers, and it seems to be happening more and more frequently, but this week I saw the worst example yet on ITV. I caught the lunchtime news on Monday, and was flabbergasted to hear them introduce the lead story about immigration. The arrivals were described as an 'unstoppable wave' of people coming from Africa. Irrespective of one's views about immigration, that seems to me to be not only unbalanced reporting but also highly irresponsible panic-mongering.

'don't worry, bee happy' - bobby mcferrin

2006-05-23T07:30:00.000Z

he two tutors for our introductory course on beekeeping are very friendly and welcoming, and they both know an enormous amount about bees. One is a university lecturer taking a more scientific approach, while the other has more practical experience.

There was something very refreshing about their unpolished style of delivery. They are enthusiastic practitioners rather than slick educators, so they made many mistakes that are rarely seen in these days of OFSTED inspections and quality control: the classroom was too small and poorly laid out, the slide projector was hard to reach in order to focus the images, some slides were wrongly labelled and the lecturer kept referring to topics for which there were no slides.

Yet somehow it didn't seem to matter. We were all fellow enthusisasts at different stages of experience rather than teachers and pupils.

In the afternoon, however, perhaps because we couldn't go to the apiary to see the bees, I became less tolerant. Indeed, some fundamental problems in the course began to emerge. I'd expected to leave the classroom with a simplified (possibly extremely simplified) overview of beekeeping, so that details, complications and exceptions could be added and understood later.

Instead, I left with a long list of questions. If it's best to get hold of a swarm in May, when the bees have the whole of the summer in which to build up a supply of honey, why is the course held in May? Shouldn't it have been a couple of months ago? Perhaps it's because there would have been little to see in the apiary in March. But does that mean that those who are thinking of starting should wait until next May? What do they do until then?

If using the honey is the main reason people start to keep bees, why was nothing said about how that's done? They said that some honey granulates immediately, and some, which has been at too high a temperature, will never granulate. Is that the same as 'set' and 'clear' honey? Neither has anything like what I think of as granules.

Perhaps it will all make sense once I've thought about it, or possibly it will slide into place next Saturday.

'the bee-stly bee-attitudes of balthazar bee' - jp donleavy

2006-05-22T09:29:00.000Z

isa and I recently attended the first day of a two-day introductory course at Keele University on beekeeping. The weather was cold and damp, unfortunately, so we weren't allowed to go to the apiary and see the bees who would have been tetchy, but the subject is fascinating and bizarre. There was so much to take in that my head was spinning by the end of the day.

I'd heard about the waggledance, where bees tell each other about the type, quantity, direction and distance of food sources, but what I didn't know was that the bees not only take account of the sun's apparent movement, but they can work out the direct line between food sources and the hive even if large buildings are in the way.

One of the tutors referred to experiments to determine what exactly the bees measure. Is it duration of flight, the effort required to get there or possibly the number of objects passed on the way? I'd like to know more about how these hypotheses could be tested.

I also had no idea about the subtleties of bee reproduction. Queens mate only once, and can then choose to lay either fertilised eggs, which become workers (female), or unfertilised eggs, which become drones (male). The workers choose which female eggs become queens. They can also lay eggs themselves (which would become drones because they are unfertilised), but they don't because the queen's pheromones prevent them.

The final session is on 27th May, and I'm looking forward to it.

the magic of twilight

2006-05-19T06:54:00.000Z

'm glad I got yesterday's rant off my chest, but now I'll return to more pleasant topics. There's a lot to catch up on from the last fortnight or so.

Lisa and I went for an evening walk to Central Forest Park recently as we sometimes do, though on this occasion it was slightly later than usual, and the sky was nearly dark. A few dog-walkers and skateboarders were still around, and there was a pleasant, relaxed atmosphere.

We wandered down to the lake and followed the path round behind it, past the mysterious new large shapes wrapped in black tarpaulin. (My guess is 'public art' about to be unveiled, but let's hope my fears are not confirmed.)

Anyway, at one point, the path nips through the narrow space between the lake and a group of trees. As we entered this short stretch, we suddenly found ourselves among bats flying back and forth, feeding off the insects. It was such a constricted space that the bats flew very close, sometimes only inches away. We stood, entranced, for a long time.

worrying tendencies

2006-05-18T05:59:00.000Z

f course, after deciding yesterday that I would do nothing, I went on to catch up with at least some of the many tasks waiting for me.

I should have anticipated yesterday's feeling of anti-climax. After all, it's happened when I've completed previous major assigments. Yesterday, however, was exacerbated by what I learned at the presentations the day before. I've been careful to avoid commenting much here about other students on my course, but today I'm going to abandon that restraint.

Two out of the nine other remaining students didn't turn up at all, and two more failed to provide any visual material. For a visuals-based course, that's appalling, and also short-sighted, since the presentation is worth 30% of the mark for that module.

One of these ill-prepared students and another both confessed that their work-based placements hadn't been successful because they'd been too lazy to get out of bed. I sat there fuming to myself, remembering getting up at 5.30 five days a week, spending £20 a day to travel two hours each way to Liverpool, and working a full day in the studio for no pay. We lived in a paper bag and still had change from sixpence.

What is up with these people? Do they have no idea? Am I turning into a Daily Mail reader? (Please, no.)

nothing

2006-05-17T08:50:00.000Z

I feel slug-like this morning. The past fortnight has been focused almost entirely on completing college work for yesterday's deadline. The digital portfolio is burned to disk, the presentation on my recent work placement is over, and all of the associated paperwork - learning agreement, self-assessment form, reflective log, evidence portfolio, student feedback form, employer appraisal, tutor appraisal, company report - has been printed, assembled and submitted.

All that remains is an essay to complete for Friday and the End of Year show next month.

Of course, that's not really all that remains. There's all the stuff I've been neglecting for so long, plus work to find and job application forms to complete. But this morning I'm going to do nothing. I'm not even going to look for a drop-cap image to start this post.

the bookshop

2006-05-07T11:14:00.000Z

enelope Fitzgerald's book The Bookshop is sparse yet it portrays its characters with comic effectiveness. It makes subsequent books, which I might otherwise have accepted, seem bloated, convoluted and self-conscious.

a perfect day

2006-05-03T21:58:00.000Z

here is a precious freshness in the air these days, though it will last only until the end of the blossom. A ladybird resting on a leaf, a butterfly fluttering past, geese showing off to each other, leaves emerging from buds, vibrant greens on greens. And above and around it all, the sun shines brightly through air that is still refreshing.

Graham Griffiths

2006-05-01T21:46:00.000Z

here are still one or two snippets to catch up on from those hectic Liverpool days. Today's post concerns a fantastic meal last week at the Arch Chinese restaurant in Newcastle. Graham Griffiths, who I used to work with before returning to student land, retired from Stoke-on-Trent City Council last week, and, in an amazingly generous gesture (amazing because Graham wasn't very high up the corporate ladder), hired the entire restaurant for his farewell celebration and paid for everyone's meal.

I'm sure the fact that over eighty people attended is a testament to Graham's popularity as a colleague and not just the generosity of the evening, but what made the gathering even more remarkable was the number of people who, like me, had previously left the Council but returned for the evening.

It was odd enough for those of us who had left, seeing all those familiar faces one more time. How much more odd must it have been for those who hadn't left, seeing a sudden host of ghosts among those they still work with. One revenant, who had retired twenty-five years ago, was, fittingly, the person who had hired Graham over thirty-one years ago. Two others present had seen Graham arrive and leave at the Council.

It certainly beats my seventeen years there, with five off in the middle for ~~good behaviour~~ I mean, a secondment. This is hardly the end of an era like pre-1914 Edwardians (cf 'The Shooting Party'), but with so many changes in employment these days, there can't be many people still in the running for long-service awards.

Brian

2006-05-01T12:11:00.000Z

In trying to juggle everything last week, I totally forgot about the first part of Tom Robinson's interview with Brian Eno on Wednesday, even though I'd posted about it only the week before. Fortunately, the BBC website retains programmes for a week, so I managed to hear it this afternoon, and you can too, for a short while, on the Tom Robinson page for BBC 6 Music.

Brian talks so fluently and engagingly that the interviewer merely has to guide him gently, starting with his unusual family, through the days of Portsmouth Sinfonia and Roxy Music, to his early solo career and the development of ambient music, ending, for this part of the interview, with his work on 'Heroes' with David Bowie and Robert Fripp.

It's mostly familiar ground, but still interesting, and there were several anecdotes I'd not heard before. Part Two is at 7pm on Wednesday, 3rd May, and for a week afterwards on the BBC 6 Music website. I'm hoping that he will cover his recent work, includuding 77 million paintings, and the talks he gives on vastly different subjects, from perfume and the 'clock of the long now' to the invasion of Iraq.

macba

2006-05-01T11:59:00.000Z

he photographs I posted recently without comment (This Way, Green Man, The Opposite of a Dark Corner, Narrow, Living on the Ceiling) were all taken in the Museum of Contemporary Barcelona Art (English translation available) located, not surprisingly, in Barcelona. At first I found it hard to believe that photography wasn't forbidden as it is in most if not all galleries and museums in the UK, but once I overcame my trepidation, I took a huge number of shots.

The building has a large glass wall at the front, apparently to encourage a 'dialogue' with the residents of the nearby area. This was a controversial approach, because it is located in a run-down part of the inner city, and there was considerable resentment at what some saw as arrogance.

On arrival, I thought the outside of the building - largely consisting of chunks of concrete shapes - ugly, and I wasn't looking forward to going inside. Once past the front door, however, I was stunned by the light coming through that glass wall. A series of ramps take you up three floors, allowing views into the atrium. Not only that, but there are so many intruiging shapes, and light plays an important part in helping to create those patterns.

I didn't care much about the exhibits, but the building certainly grabbed me.

allow me to elucidate...

2006-04-30T22:17:00.000Z

ou may have spotted a recent trend in this blog, of posting photographs without description or comment. I'll tell you about these images soon, perhaps tomorrow even, but first a few words of explanation for those of you who missed the explanation I wrote before the start of the hiatus. (It could also be for anyone who's forgotten the explanation I wrote. I fully accept that remembering my previous posts probably isn't high on your list of things to remember.)

I resorted to the approach of posting images while I've been working in Liverpool. I haven't felt it appropriate to write about my work placement (but I will, as promised, point you in the direction of the website to which I contributed, once it's up and running), and there's been little time for anything else, either doing or writing about it. Still, I didn't abandon all thoughts of you completely, as I put some effort into the choice of images, as I shall explain next time, after I've finished today's explanation. (Perhaps I should also explain that I've succumbed to the cold being shared around the studio in Liverpool, and I may well be feverish. Or if not, at least a bit sniffly. And that may be why I'm rambling slightly.)

My days of commuting are now over, however. I certaainly won't miss the early starts, but the train journeys were more enjoyable than I expected - reading the newspaper on the way there and working on my laptop on the way home, either college assignments or freelance design work.

But now I can return to this business of blogging. I've misssed it, you know. Can you tell?

Buddy Holly and the Rabbits

2006-04-29T23:19:00.001Z

e all know that spring has been late this year, but on Thursday, it felt like the first day of summer. Young rabbits hopped nervously in the grass verges, people wore sleeveless tops and, as the train trundled between Alsager and Kidsgrove, I saw a man sitting on a canal lock gate in the sunshine, feet dangling over the water, and playing a guitar. (No, his feet weren't playing the guitar. Don't be so pedantic.)

I don't think he was singing, but he may just have been playing the opening section of a song. There was no-one around him, just fields. Perhaps he was trying to calm the rabbits down.

living on the ceiling

2006-04-22T20:51:00.000Z

narrow

2006-04-21T22:44:00.000Z

the opposite of a dark corner

2006-04-19T18:16:00.000Z

77 million paintings can't be wrong

2006-04-19T18:13:00.000Z

rian Eno, long-time hero of mine, has now done for painting what he did for music - established parameters then ceded control over the end result to software. Koan generative music software from Sseyo has been available, in various forms, for quite a few years; now the visual equivalent is an exhibition of slowly changing paintings.

It was on show in Japan earlier this month, and Eno was interviewed (badly) about it on The Culture Show on BBC2 on 6th April. Tom Robinson, however, has recorded a two-hour interview with him, for broadcast in two parts on 26th April and 3rd May on BBC6. The programmes are likely to be available on the web for a week afterwards.

The DVD bringing the software to your home goes on sale in June.

(Brian will also be collaborating with others for two performances of a different work at the Bath International Music Festival, both on 24th May. Radio 3 will be recording it for future broadcast.)

ages of man

2006-04-18T21:07:00.000Z

had a great time on Saturday night, meeting up with some friends who I haven't seen for a couple of years. It turns out we've all independently reached the fourth age of man: a combination of grumpiness and gardening. Buying garden furniture seems to be an intrinsic part of this, something akin to the irresistible urge of salmon to return to their spawning grounds.

"feed me, seymour"

2006-04-17T22:11:00.000Z

spent a couple of glorious days this holiday weekend in the garden and the allotment, planting, hoeing, digging and planning. I'm still new to this growing lark, and some aspects of it seem odd (washing flower pots, for one), but knowing that sun, soil, seed and rain are combining to do all the hard work makes the weeding seem less of an effort, especially when using crops and mulch to suppress a large part of the unwanted species.

My limited experience is revealed by my determination in an impossible task: eradicate dandelions. There's something about the way those developing flower heads hide in full view (as well as deep down), so that you can remove every single one, turn away and back again to find there are plenty more in plain sight that I take as a personal affront. Also, the buds look like a bit like the shoots on Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors.

(I hadn't realised, until looking round the web, unsuccessfully, for images of Audrey II's buds, that the 1986 film originally had a completely different, and much darker, ending that was closer to the original stage play but removed after audiences at test screenings reacted badly. You can read all about the big budget out-take on wikipedia.)

green man

2006-04-16T19:24:00.001Z

This Way

2006-04-09T19:13:00.000Z

Don't Look Now

2006-04-08T20:58:00.000Z

You can see more of my photographs from Barcelona at my Flickr pages.

This one was taken in the Sagrada Familia. The shot looking downwards in the sprial staircase is a common one on postcards, so I tried it myself. Leaning out over the long drop felt precarious, so I took the shot as quickly as possible. I didn't even notice the arm in the red sleeve at the time, but it's what saves the shot from being nothing more than a grainy mess.

If the shot was taken in Venice, I'd be worried it was the mysterious woman in Don't Look Now with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie...

Vis unitas fortior: Strength in unity

2006-04-02T18:02:00.000Z

nity House is no more. For most of you, that will mean nothing at all, and those who live in the area will already be aware of that fact, for it was infamous. It was built with dark brown bricks and was extremely ugly. It cost a lot of money to repair and maintain, then it lay empty for years after a new civic centre was built during the early 1990s. Its demolition has been widely desired, demanded, heralded, postponed and re-scheduled for many years.

It used to house most of the office workers of Stoke-on-Trent City Council, and for several years I was one of them. It was the tallest building for miles around, so it seemed that, wherever you went in North Staffordshire at weekends, even into south Cheshire, it was prominent on the skyline, an inescapable reminder of the Monday to Friday routine.

My desk was on the top floor, the 18th. That's not high by many standards, but it was enough to make you dizzy when going down stairs in fire drills, and it was enough of a climb whenever the lifts ceased to function which they seemed to do regularly. But on the whole, the benefits of such a location outweighed the disadvantages.

As an energy-saving exercise, all of the ceiling lights in the building were fitted with timers and individual string-pull switches so that you could turn them back on when they automatically switched off. The building was designed to sway gently and imperceptibly in strong winds, but you were made aware of the motion by the oscillation of the string-pulls building up in a natural harmony, so that many people added sea-sickness to the claims of Sick Building Syndrome.

One morning I went to work in thick mist, only to discover from the top floor that I was above the cloud, and I could see the hills also breaking through in the distance, all the more beautiful for the surprise.

Unity House was too close to other buildings to be demolished by controlled explosion, so it was dismantled brick by brick. Some of these bricks remain in a large pile, but most have been taken away, and the site, on the edge of the city centre, will eventually be developed. Current plans are for offices.

It somehow seems fitting to end with the old joke: how many people work in the City Council? Answer: about half of them.

The illusion of life

2006-03-31T18:51:00.000Z

ou may have noticed that I haven't been posting much recently. As I suspected, travelling to and from Liverpool every day leaves me with little time, energy or inclination to write.

Nevertheless, I'm really enjoying my work placement. The people in the studio are friendly and encouraging, and so far I've mostly been drawing small frame-by-frame animations to add little points of interest in the background of a website that has a hand-drawn feel to it. I've done very little of this sort of animation before, and I'm learning a lot.

This is ideal training - the animations won't be the main focus of attention, so they're to be kept short and simple. The website won't go live for a while yet, but if any of my work survives the final cut, I'll let you know when it does.

The studio produces some marvellous design, and it's inspiring even to be a tiny part of it.

Barcelona images

2006-03-26T22:08:00.000Z

Batlo001
Originally uploaded by Alec_M.

The first batch of my photographs from Barcelona is now available for viewing on my Flickr account.

This photograph is of the Casa Batla, designed by the Catalan architect Gaudi.

You'll never guess what I've been reading

2006-03-25T18:42:00.000Z

he bookshelf at the design studio where I'm currently working has the expected range of books about software. It also has an intriuging mix of books about different subjects, which I assume have been required in the past for reference material.

By far the oddest tome is the 'Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia', available from all good booksellers. It contains photographs and drawings of complex tattoos, usually accompanied by a translation of any text. Superficially, it seems odd that someone would want to attach a permanent confession to his or her body, but look further and there is a whole sub-culture at work.

He knows what you're thinking

2006-03-23T23:56:00.000Z

erren Brown received a warm welcome at a full Victoria Theatre in Hanley tonight, and left with a standing ovation from about half of the crowd, with the remainder cheering enthusiastically.

He specifically asked journalists and anyone writing about his show on the Internet not to reveal any details, so I won't. He must put in an enormous amount of preparatory work, but he's also a showman: charming yet forceful, funny but disturbing.

His powers of persuasion are highly impressive, and the evening, with the exception of a couple of physical routines that didn't blend well with the rest, was very enjoyable.

Quarter century

2006-03-21T19:51:00.000Z

ot only is it twenty-five years since I previously went to Barcelona, but not a single one of the other students on this trip was even born then (and even one of the lecturers was only a year old.)

I had a great time, ate well, saw lots of things, and took lots of photos. It will take a while to sort through them all, but I'll post some eventually.

I'm back now, and I start my six-week work placement tomorrow, which means commuting between Stoke and Liverpool every day. I may not have much time or energy left for blogging, though. We'll just have to see how it works out.

Ye canna change the laws of mathematics, Jim

2006-03-15T08:42:00.000Z

o posts for a few days: I'm off to Barcelona. I've been once before, a while ago in fact, but someone must have changed the rules of arithmetic, because it can't be possible that I did something, as an adult, that long ago. 2006 - 1981 is how much? And I'm not talking Euros, either.

Best in Breed

2006-03-14T23:11:00.000Z

rufts has never interested me as I know little about dogs, but this year, for the first time, I watched some of the programmes the BBC broadcast from show. Instead of the immaculate professionalism we've come to expect from Auntie these days, largely because she keeps telling us about it in connection with programmes like the beautiful but empty Planet Earth, it was hugely enjoyable amateurism.

Voices echoed alarmingly, and a commentator spoke to camera but forgot to pick up his hand-held microphone, so we heard nothing until a fellow commentator picked it up and handed it to him. Shortly afterwards the producers cut back to Ben Fogle in the studio, revealing a stage hand in shot who paused briefly then scuttled out of view. It was as though they were pretending to be atrocious.

Ben himself, however, was the best. His boyish enthusiasm in Animal Park is perfectly placed and his endurance in running across the Sahara and rowing across the Atlantic Ocean is admirable. Wearing rimless glasses at Crufts, however, gave only a spurious sheen of intelligence that was quickly tarnished when talking excitedly about wolf hounds, deer hounds, otter hounds and elk hounds:

"These dogs all have very specific roles. What do elk hounds do?"

The owner of the elk hound could only look bemused as he replied, "Well, Ben, they hunt elks."

(By the way, did Rodney, the champion black miniature poodle, have a mad glint in his eye or are all poodles like that?)

"Time Goes By. So Slowly" - Madonna

2006-03-08T09:20:00.000Z

ersonally, I disagree with Madge as much as it's possible to do. I can't believe how ridiculously fast it disappears. Heartless and relentless, that's what it is, and distressingly hypnotic. I pointed some good clocks out to you a while ago. Here are some more.

The first is based on bar codes, while the second is someone constantly writing numbers then erasing them. The third is a simple design with changing curves linking the hands.

More Shakespeare

2006-03-07T12:59:00.000Z

ontinuing yesterday's theme of Shakespearean plays, I also walked out of a performance in Stoke of Romeo and Juliet. It was an English Shakespeare Company production, where Romeo was an alien, and he arrived at Juliet's balcony by dangling upside down from his spacecraft.

In contrast, I've seen some wonderful productions. Illyria's outdoor production of The Comedy of Errors was excellent. Minor costume changes at each side of the performance area weren't really needed because the actors were so good at differentiating between the various sets of twins.

By coincidence, I came across this list of "Things I Will Not Do When I Direct a Shakespearean Production", which is quite amusing. There must be a lot of bad productions out there. The list continues on another page, but it's becoming quite tired by this point.

The Scottish Play

2006-03-06T21:16:00.000Z

recently helped Lisa prepare for some lessons at her school by writing a short essay comparing and contrasting the language in Macbeth's "Is this a dagger..." soliloquy with his monologue starting "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow...".

I enjoyed writing the essay. For a time, Macbeth was my favourite Shakespearean play, and over the years I've seen many productions. Some have been mundane, but some have been highly imaginative and effective.

One low budget production in a small, hot room in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival kept the witches on stage throughout the performance, implying their pervasive influence over the story. Even when they had no lines, the witches would take part, for example by tying ropes round Macbeth's wrists and pulling him in different directions as he struggled with decisions.

A production in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, with a slightly bigger budget, started with trees on stage. There was no curtain in the theatre, so the house lights went off completely before the actors came on. In complete darkness, there was a sudden, bright flash and a loud bang, then the stage lights came up. All of the foliage had disappeared from the trees, and the 'blasted heath' was a World War 1 battlefield of tree stumps and mud.

Less successful productions have included a performance entirely in Polish, again in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which ended with Macbeth dressing himself in a huge suit of Japanese armour then standing motionless. Few, if any, of the audience, could understand Polish, so it was a while before we realised that the final confrontation between Macbeth and Macduff had been cut.

I've seen two poor productions of Macbeth at the New Vic theatre in Staffordshire. One had a futuristic setting, where Macbeth's castle was made from scaffolding, and the porter and Macduff used video phones and television screens to communicate when the latter knocked at the castle door.

The other was much worse - Lady Macbeth was a vamp. She had apparently borrowed her dress from Miss Scarlet, and she shrieked her lines from the start, so there was nowhere for her to go when things started to get tense. In contrast, the witches, who are surely some of the most melodramatic creations in fiction, stood motionless and intoned their lines with no feeling. We walked out of that one.

Lost e-mails

2006-03-05T09:56:00.000Z

ere's another instalment in the irregular series of posts on items ending up in the Valley of Lost Things...

There is an unfortunate person who receives vast numbers of lost e-mails and mobile phone text messages for the past five years, all thanks to his choice of address. Using the word "null" meant that thousands of improperly addressed messages defaulted to his phone. The problem worsened when the technology spread to cars, then he started to receive sports news, exam results, even test messages for a new medication reminder service...

All alone

2006-03-04T16:54:00.000Z

In a strange continuation from yesterday's post, Lisa and I were out today when we saw a single footprint on the road. It wouldn't mean much normally, but there seems to be a strong link to the events of Tuesday evening: the training shoes arranged in the toilet, the barefoot people, and the barefoot statue. What does it all mean?

Left behind, but why?

2006-03-03T21:22:00.000Z

In a brief break from tradition, there is no drop cap photograph today. I want to reserve the image for a photograph I took, with the camera on my mobile phone, after the reading by Hugo Williams on Tuesday evening.

On its own, it was merely slightly odd, but, coupled with several barefoot people in the corridors and a statue of Icarus, also barefoot, the shoes seemed to grow in potential significance. What is going on here? Who do the shoes belong to? Why have they been left so neatly in the toilets? Let me know your thoughts on the subject.

Hugo Williams

2006-03-01T00:02:00.000Z

isa and I went to hear Hugo Williams read some of his poetry last night. It was part of the season at Keele University where we heard Fleur Adcock last month.

I was a bit worried for a while, as I was sure I was missing something. His poems are undramatic, uneventful even, with little overt emotion. Beforehand, I'd read about all of the awards he's been given, including the Queen's poetry award, so I was surprised at how straightforward and enjoyable it all was.

During the questions at the end, however, Williams accepted the description of his poems as entertainments, the way Graham Greene described his lighter novels. That was quite a relief, and I felt free to enjoy the poems without searching hard for deeper meanings.

Williams writes about his past in an open and engaging way, at times surprisingly frankly. It must be odd standing in front of an audience and revealing so much of yourself.

I'll tag the high road

2006-02-28T00:05:00.000Z

he geek in me has kept quiet for a while, but has finally burst forth once more. Those of you who are fleet of foot and astute of eye will have noticed that some tags have appeared at the foot of this post.

"And what is the point of that?" I might hear you ask. Well, Steve Rubel says that it helps to bring your site to the attention of people searching such terms in Technorati, and is thus likely to increase the number of people visiting it. He points people to this tutorial on tagging, which among other things explains the difference between categories (internal and structured) and tags (external and loose).

I'd been feeling slightly left out of this tag business, not having a Wordpress or Movable Type blog, but I found these instructions which work with Blogger (but only in the "Edit HTML" panel, not the "Compose" panel). Also, it only works with Firefox 1.5 and you have to install the Greasemonkey extension before installing the user script. I was slightly daunted at first, but it all went smoothly.

I'm also going to start promoting this blog by adding a link at the end of all of my e-mails. If I'm at a loose end one day, I might go back and add tags to old posts as well. Of course, all this presupposes that other people might be interested in what I write, which is a pretty large supposition.

Let's see what happens to those visitor numbers...

Another Place

2006-02-27T16:16:00.000Z

t's taken much longer than I expected, but I've finally finished re-working the interface I designed for College using my photographs of Anthony Gormley's Another Place. It's now uploaded for people to test. (It took a long time because I felt I had to re-vamp my website as well before encouraging anyone to visit. It's not complete yet, but the general design is there.)

My Anthony Gormley piece was created for a module on Interaction Design, but the module was too short for any user-testing. I'm sure it could be improved in all sorts of ways, so I'd be grateful if you would have a look at the piece and send me your comments - on any aspect, but especially on the navigation system. And please don't be polite. Constructive criticism will be welcomed.

You gotta work hard to keep up with them

2006-02-26T22:48:00.000Z

norr has done it again. I wrote a while ago about the advert that asked us, in what some people might consider poor taste, to treat stock cubes as though they had been abandoned like neglected children. The effect was heightened by broadcasting this immediately after an appeal by the NSPCC.

This time the Knorr ad, in a way that will offend far fewer people, refers to a different icon: "All we are saying is, 'Give peas a chance'." What would John and the other Fab Three say?

Waiting for No One

2006-02-25T09:01:00.000Z

isappointing. That's the only word for the Andy Goldsworthy exhibition at Tatton Park. Goldsworthy was born in Cheshire, so it makes sense that he should play such a large part of the estate's art and landscape project called "oneplace". In my opinion, however, the exhibition does the local man few favours.

Goldsworthy created six pieces at Tatton during November last year, using ice, wood and leaves. Display boards in the centre of the small room show some photographs taken at various stages of construction, while a short film in a nearby room shows Goldsworthy at work, collecting sheets of ice from the pond and assembling some of the pieces.

This meagre offering is supplemented on the walls and in display cases by about twenty large photographs of other work covering the years 1982 to 2005. The small number of images with no coherent theme and taken over such a wide timespan suggests that they have been variously begged, scrounged, found under cushions and otherwise scraped together.

All of the work, both old and new, is temporary and outdoors, and ranges from the intruiging and enigmatic to the downright hauntingly beautiful. An essential part of each piece, however, is its relationship to its surroundings. The effects of light and wind will change frequently and rapidly, while the work itself will change as it gradually melts or disintegrates.

How, then, can Goldsworthy's work be adequately represented by one, or at best two, photographs?

"Each work grows, stays, decays - integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its height, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expressed in the image. Process and decay are implicit." - Andy Goldsworthy

I don't know when Goldsworthy said that, but I'm not convinced by it. It sounds to me like justification after the fact from the days when video recording was ludicrously expensive. (Sculptures that last a long time would also require repeat visits.)

If so, the film at the Tatton Park exhibition contradicts it. Watching the artist at work is interesting but it's such a shame they didn't go that little bit further and record the work after completion. Apparently, Goldsworthy gave a talk at Tatton Park on 24th January. I wish I'd known about the event and asked him about this.

(A DVD called Time and Tide was released in 2004, but it's a Region 1 disc and in NTSC format, which isn't compatible with most televisions in this country.)

Despite my criticisms, I'm glad I went to the exhibition. It reminded me how much I like Goldsworhty's work, it stimulated me to think in new ways, and it gave me ideas for several multimedia projects of my own.

Tree tops glisten, and children listen...

2006-02-24T10:15:00.000Z

now doesn't fall here often, but it did today, albeit briefly and thinly. So perhaps it's appropriate to point you to Snowdays, a website where you can create your own snowflakes, attach messages, and see those created by others. It's slow and gentle, perfectly relaxing.

Germaine Greer in the 21st Century

2006-02-23T12:15:00.000Z

went to see Germaine Greer the other night at the Gatehouse Theatre in Stafford. She was as amusing, witty, challenging and forthright as you would expect.

Her talk was structured around a proposal she had received (for the second time) for her to present a television programme, where the central argument was that the current problems of society are largely the result of too much sexual liberation in the 1970s caused by the victory of the feminist movement.

In a prolonged and scathing attack, she proceeded to demolish this premise, and the various steps contained within it, with controlled anger. There was no victory by the feminists, she said, merely equality to be victims of capitalism, and there will be no sexual liberalisation until everyone and everything have ceased to be seen as commodities. (I think I've summarised her main points accurately, but I could well be wrong.)

The audience, for the most part, seemed impressed. Laughter at all the right places, and complete silence at the particularly challenging parts.

Questions aftwerwards included "Where do you see organised religion in this?" and "How does this compare with primitive socities?" (She didn't like the word 'primitive', and talked with awe about the resilience of the Aborigine people.) There were also less intense questions, such as "What was Celebrity Big Brother like?" and "Do you like men?"

The last of these was asked by a woman who, on questioning by Germaine Greer, said that she and her friend had been happily married for over forty years, had never felt exploited or mistreated by her husband, and thought that everything Germaine had said that evening was complete 'tosh'. That was a refreshing end to the evening, though it was a shame there wasn't more time to explore that view.

Take part in the largest climate change experiment ever

2006-02-20T13:35:00.000Z

he BBC has just joined a research project set up in 2003 to predict climate change, and we are all encouraged to donate the idle processing power of our computers. This will allow the processing of vast numbers of calculations to test different models of prediction and thus find which are the most accurate. There will be a programme about this on BBC4 on 20th February.

This approach is called distibuted computing, and the most famous example is SETI@home, which now has 5 million participants around the world helping to analyse data from radio telescopes to look for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence. That project is coming to an end for various reasons, and the participants are being encouraged to join other distributed computing projects. A useful article elsewhere describes some of these projects, and lists some of the issues to consider when getting involved.

The climate change project works by giving each participant a unique mathematical formula that attempts to explain changes in the world's climate. The model runs in the background, attempting to predict what the climate would be like from 1920 to 2000. If it's reasonably close to what really happened, then in the second phase, the model will attampt to predict what will happen up until 2080. You can watch progress on your monitor if you wish, in the form of a screensaver showing the rotating Earth, using colours to portray a choice of rainfall, temperature, cloud cover, sea temperature, air pressure or sulphur.

The software you download to take part in this research only runs on PCs, not Apple Macs. Although the film on the BBC website which explains how to install the software shows people using laptops, the small print suggests that laptops are not suitable because they can get too hot. On an average computer with average use, the process will take about three months. You are encouraged not to leave your computer running just for the sake of this research as that wastes electricity.

Intriguingly, the BBC website doesn't stress why accurate predicition of climate change is important. Do they assume that we all know why already? Or are they wary of overstepping what the organisation is supposed to do with the licence fee? Perhaps they don't want to appear too political.

Anyway, whatever form of research you choose to take part in, it makes sense to use that idle processing power to achieve something big.

The greatest living English language poet

2006-02-17T08:54:00.000Z

isa and I went to hear Geoffrey Hill read some of his poems last night at Manchester Metropolitan University. Lisa, who knows about these things, considers him to be as great as Tennyson, and the Guardian has called him the greatest living poet in the English language. This was one of only three readings in this country, so it was an event not to be missed.

I'd never heard of the man before, but clearly others had because the audience was large - I estimated about five hundred. Indeed, it was too much for the lecture theatre booked, so we had to move to a bigger one. There was an definite buzz in the air, a combination of academic seriousness and undergraduate excitement.

Superficially, the readings were deadly dull. Hill has a dry, donnish, monotone voice, whether speaking or reciting, and the pitch would fall inexorably towards the end of each line, conveying no emotion other than an impression of fatalistic gloom. The sound system and acoustics of the room seemed to emphasise this too. The little I could pick up from his words suggested that melancholy and confirmation of anticipated disappointment permeate his work.

And yet... and yet...

Hill said little between readings, and didn't once look up at the audience, but what he did say was remarkably funny, all the more so for being delivered in that same miserable tone of voice. After one poem, he commented that it had prompted A N Wilson to describe him as "a silly old git". He confessed to feeling like a "stand-up comic manque", who modelled himself on Hilda Baker and Frankie Howerd, and hoped that that came through in his work, though appreciated that it probably didn't.

He even admitted that when his work was compared to Jimi Hendrix, he bought every CD and DVD he could find of Hendrix and grew to like the music. On re-reading the article later, he discovered that he had, in fact, been compared to U2, but by then it was too late because he'd written the next poem he would read out about Hendrix.

I didn't appreciate the poems as much as Lisa did, but I'm glad I went.

Update

2006-02-16T11:58:00.000Z

ood grief - I hadn't realised quite how long it's been since I last posted here. I haven't lost interest in the blog, just far too busy even to think about it. First there was the website to build for Xlither Films. I wouldn't have designed it like that myself, but the director had a clear idea of what he wanted, so I put it together for him, and enjoyed using Photoshop extensively. I also learned a fair bit in the process about slicing graphics and using parameters when incorporating Quicktime movies in .html pages.

There will be a few tweaks to the site in the next few days, but at least it's ready for the people in Hollywood to look at. The film which the site promotes, The Xlitherman, is currently in post-production, and it will be entered in European and American film festivals over the coming year.

Then there was my portfolio to complete in preparation for an interview for a work placement at Smiling Wolf in Liverpool. I really like much of the work they do, and it seems a small, pleasant company, so I'm delighted to say that I was offered the placement, and will start there towards the end of March for six weeks.

Finally there was the Interaction Design assignment to complete for college. The brief was free-ranging - all it asked for was a threee-level interface, with the choice of content left to us. I picked Another Place by Anthony Gormley, having visited it rececntly to take photographs with Penny and Tony. You can see their photos on their photoblog, and they've kindly given me a guest gallery displaying six of mine. I'll be putting more of my images up on my Flickr account in a short while.

Penny asked me to put the Anthony Gormley interface up on the web when it was complete, which I will do over the weekend. I know that I could improve it greatly in so many ways, but I'm at least pleased with the underlying structure.

All we need is the disco mirror ball...

2006-02-06T08:39:00.000Z

very so often I find a logic or puzzle game that grabs my attention. Previous ones have included Hyperframe, Samorost 1 and 2, and Quest for the Rest. The latest one (discovered courtesy of Stumble Upon) requires you to bounce a laser beam off mirrors and refracting lenses to light up a number of bulbs. The challenge, of course, lies in efficient use of the limited number of lenses provided and the need to avoid hazards.

I've had a cold recently, and the game has helped me pass the time while I haven't felt up to doing anything important. So far, I've reached level 17 out of 25, though I've forgotten how I managed to solve levels 12, 15 and 16. Any help you can offer would be gratefully received.

4 holidays, Part 1a (subsection A1.i)

2006-02-03T15:33:00.000Z

hen I left univeristy in 1985, I was lucky enough to be able to visit parts of South America for four months. It was an organised tour with Encounter Overland, now known as Dragoman. We travelled in a large truck and camped in tents, except when we were staying in towns for a few days, when we would sleep in cheap hotels. Our route took us from Rio de Janeiro through Paraguay, Bolivia, Chile and Peru to finish in Ecuador. I also spent a couple of days in Caracas in Venezuela on the way there and again on the way back.

The highlight of the journey, and the principal reason I wanted to go to South America, was walking part of the Inca Trail to see Machu Piccu. That story, and many others, such as a friend needing oxygen on what was, until recently, the world's highest railway, will have to wait for another occasion. Instead, I'll tell you about the day that was at the same time the best and the worst of the whole journey. Today's episode is the bad part.

It was a long-awaited relief to get off the truck for a change. We knew little about what was planned, other than that we would spend the night on Amantani, an island in Lake Titicaca, which is the world's highest navigable lake. (There's a lot of height in Peru - something to do with the Andes. Getting dressed in the morning when camping at well below freezing point wasn't much fun.)

Having set sail from Puno, we soon stopped at one of the Uros islands. These islands are in a shallow part of the lake and are made of reeds, so that, although they're joined to the lake bed, they float in an initially-disconcerting way. The Indians were well-practiced in receiving tourists. Children immediately ran up to us demanding sweets, which were distributed by members of my group with condescending largesse while most of us stood in the tiny clearing in front of the huts taking photographs of women weaving and a mand making a reed boat.

We easily out-numbered them, and behaved like the abonimable tourists that we were. (Checking on the Internet while writing this post revealed that several companies are still offering this tour, so the horrible charade continues.)

OK, that's the bad part over. Next time, you'll hear about the happier part.

It's a Wrap!

2006-02-02T19:47:00.000Z

t's over. Filming for my Hamlet stop-motion animation is now complete. It was quite intense, since I only had use of the drama students for an hour yesterday morning.

The lighting in the TV studio had changed completely since I was last in, which took me by surprise, and the set-up I inherited was quite dark at the front despite the addition of a floor lamp. Matt helped me again, and Nick took over image capture from the second camera. That left me free to direct the action, which was just as well since the masks I'd made were too thick to have eye holes, so the drama students had to move blindly. I filmed a few extra shots which I'll need to edit in, then make the DVD case cover sheet.

I can't tell yet whether or not I'll like the end result. If I do, I'll post it on the web.

"War - what's it good for? Absolutely nothing." E. Starr

2006-02-01T20:36:00.000Z

n Manchester yesterday on a college trip to look at interactive displays (the Clore Gallery in the Manchester Art Gallery and then the Museum of Science and Industry), we went to the Imperial War Museum in Salford Quays.

The quays are a wasteland of hideous architecture. In the case of the War Museum, I can understand why the building is so harsh, but the rest exemplifies everything that's wrong with urban regeneration ( and I write as a former proponent of the profession).

I can't make my mind up about the museum. First impressions were poor. Huge blank walls seemed to imply sparse content, backed up by the large volume of the building which is far greater than it need be. Every hour, on the hour, an audio visual presentation starts, but this is on a scale I've never experienced before. The entire hall goes dark and images are thrown onto the huge, fragmented walls from at least twenty banks of projectors, so that faces tower over you from all directions. No single viewpoint lets you see everything, which encourages wandering around, though few visitors yesterday were doing so.

There are three presentations in all, and the one that had just started when we arrived was Children in War. Considering the power of the subject and the depth of immersion in the presentation, this could have been very moving, but I felt the presentation lacked impact and I was left cold.

The other presentation I saw was War at Home, about the impact on civilians. Like the first one, most of it dealt with the Second World War, which linked neatly with my recent reading of Our Hidden Lives, but there were parts about wars in other countries. This was more effective than the first, but I was told afterwards that the third, about combat, is the most powerful of all.

I used the time between the two presentations to explore the displays hidden in what are called 'silos' behind the blank walls and on the walls behond the silos. The build-up to the First World War is the earliest conflict covered and the first Gulf War is the latest. That's still a lot to cover, and much of the content is superficial - one paragraph on the conflict in former Yugoslavia and two sentences on the genocide in Rwanda - but the complete failure even to mention the recent invasion of Iraq is staggering. Doesn't it count if we do the invading? (And what's with the 'Imperial' in the museum's name? What's that about?)

Cheesy peas

2006-01-31T22:01:00.000Z

n the other hand (continuing a post about television from the other day), sometimes watching cheesy programmes is a good way to unwind. Fortunately, there are a lot of them about, such as Invasion and Surface, but occasionally there are times when not a single slice can be found.

I often wonder whether the makers of these programmes know how cheesy they are. Perhaps there was a clue in Star Trek Voyager on Saturday (apparently the last episode of the current series), when Captain Janeway urgently ordered, "Get this cheese to sick bay!"

Plague!

2006-01-29T11:12:00.000Z

ow, lots of people are contaminated by the '4 Things' meme. I'd seen others come down with it, such as Hellsbells, then Yclepta passed it to me. Even Jason Kottke, one of the big names in blogging, has been brought down by it, and it's mutated strangely in little.red.boat, becoming five and a half.

Jack Schofield of the Guardian has also been infected, though he's only a carrier, linking to seven others. He reckons that over a million people have been touched already, and he predicts (hopes) that it should be over by the end of the week.

It's intermittent on my blog, making it a long, slow, lingering experience. I tag blueshawk, just so I can say I've done my bit to pass it on, but only if he wants to be tagged. What will he make of it, I wonder?

Hooray for Freeview

2006-01-28T13:09:00.000Z

atching some of the Freeview digital channels in this house recently has overtaken the mainstream terrestrial programmes. Admittedly, many of the programmes have previously been shown on the big four and there's a lot of repetition, but if you're careful, you can dig up some real treasures.

Grand Designs and (older and better) ER can be found on More4, but it's UKTV History that I watch the most. It has The World at War and gems like the programme recently on the last debutante season before WW2. Since Christmas, there has been the series Inventing the Modern World, which is good, though with a touch too much dramatisation. On the down side, though, there has also been a surfeit of Fred Dibnah.

Nevertheless, I've been enjoying A History of Britain, Meet the Ancestors, and What the Ancients/ Romans/ Stuarts/ Tudors/ Elizabethans/ Victorians Did for Us. In the last of these, I particularly liked the reconstuction of the Tempest Prognosticator, a Victorian machine that used leeches to warn of impending storms by ringing bells.

Overall, though, what I like best about the digital channels is that they show old programmes. The static cameras and slow pacing of dramas such as Brideshead Revisited and The Jewel in the Crown are thoughtful compared to the hurried wobblings and part-dramatised frenzy that programme makers assume we need nowadays to maintain our attention. Unfortunately, although ITV2 was broadcasting these as part of its celebrations of 50 years of ITV, its lukewarm commitment to these triumphs led to scheduling late them on Sunday and Monday nights, so I missed most of them.

4 cars

2006-01-27T13:36:00.000Z

his post is a continuation of the 4 xxxx meme...

The first car I ever owned was an EH Holden. My friend Tony and I were travelling in Australia in 1980 and wanted to drive through the outback, so we bought the car in Sydney and set off to Melbourne and Adelaide via the Twelve Apostles, then northwards into the desert. We visited some wonderful places - Ayers Rock, Mt Olga, Simpson's Gap and Stanley Chasm.

The most dramatic episode happened when we were driving without a windscreen. In those days, the road between Adeleaide and Alice Springs was just a dirt track, so car wheels sent stones flying, which was particularly dangerous when you were being overtaken. One such stone smashed our windscreen, so we stopped to punch out the glass. I think I was driving when it happended, but Tony took over when we set off again.

I don't remember who first spotted the two large birds standing on the road ahead. I'm sure they were some kind of eagle, but we'll never know. They watched us approach but didn't move until we were very close. They eventually started to fly up, but we were so near by that stage that I was convinced they wouldn't clear the car in time and would be scooped in through the glassless windscreen. I didn't like the idea of two suddenly irate birds of prey struggling inside the car, so I reached for the door handle, ready to leap out of the still-moving car.

This all happened in just a few seconds, but it seemed much longer before Tony stamped on the brakes, and we stopped just short of the birds who continued to flap slowly away, annoyed at being forced to move from their comfortable spot.

That journey took several weeks, during which we hit and killed, on separate occasions, a kangaroo and a sheep. The car was solid enough to suffer little damage, and on our return to Sydney we sold it to someone who had helped us out during our stay.

Subsequent cars have been practical and reliable, but not very interesting: Fiat Uno 45, Vauxhall Astra, Rover 213 and Peugeot 306 (twice).

There are more things, Horatio, than I can keep track of

2006-01-26T16:50:00.000Z

esterday I took charge of eight drama students to rehearse my 'Hamlet in 10 seconds' stop-motion animation. By 'taking charge', I mean shouting a lot and being heard about a quarter of the time, but the noise, on the whole, was the result of enthusiasm, though I did occasionally lose some of them to boredom when there were problems to resolve elsewhere.

I hadn't really planned to have someone from my course to assist me, but it's just as well that Matt came along because I couldn't have managed without him quietly and calmly getting on with practical tasks. I'd intended to film the latter half of the action from an additional camera so that I could choose when to cut from one viewpoint to the other, but I was so engrossed in directing the action that I simply forgot. Another assistant for that camera in the final shoot would be very useful.

When I asked Matt if he would help, I didn't take into consideration the raging hormones of my teenage coursemates. Judging by their reactions on sniffing the scent of young female drama students, I could easily have auctioned off the role of assistant to the highest bidder, though I would then have had a continuously distracted assistant.

I'll review the different takes over the next few days, and storyboard the changes carefully, ready for the final shoot next Wednesday.

Fleur Adcock

2006-01-25T22:46:00.000Z

isa and I heard Fleur Adcock read some of her poetry last night. She concentrated almost entirely on one small corner of her work: her various relations. Much of what she read concerned the apparently trivial, and was written in a simple style that must have taken considerable effort to achieve. It took me a while, therefore, to catch on to the frequency with which just a few words, often in the last line, would dramatically widen a poem's significance.

I have no idea what other topics Fleur covers, but I'm convinced that the minor details she records in those few poems last night are just the sort of things that would be lost to our collective memory if she didn't write about them in such an interesting way. There are so many words written each day now, in print and on the web, that it's easy to believe that nothing will ever be forgotten again. The sheer number of words is precisely the problem, however. Between the sheer quantity and the low value of many of them, I fear that we won't make sufficient effort to keep what's valuable, and we will lose much that we will later miss.

The event was one of a series at Keele University. The next one is Hugo Williams, on 28th February, and we'll be going to that too.

4 Jobs, Parts 3 & 4

2006-01-24T23:03:00.000Z

y third job, in 1980, was a cleaner in Sydney. I helped Carlos, who came from Colombia, clean an office and a nightclub on alternate days. (I've no idea who worked the opposite pattern.) It was tedious but it helped with the money.

My fourth job was in 1984 and 85, during the fourth year of my five-year university 'sandwich' course: temporary trainee planning officer in Bromsgrove District Council. Bromsgrove is situated in the Green Belt to the south of Birmingham, so a large part of dealing with applications for planning permission involved saying "No".

In the vast majority of cases, this was straightforward, even when people appealed against the decision since the policy was clear. In one or two cases, however, the applicants used their imaginations to try to find a way round the system.

Someone started to build a bungalow without permission, and was told to stop. He repeatedly tried to justify the development by submitting applications for activities on the adjoining land: the building was, at various times, a stable for a stud farm, residential accommodation for a trout farm and, most impressive of all, the manager's house for a nuclear fallout shelter.

The applicant even submitted floorplans for the shelter, showing three columns of rooms underground, each split into twenty floors. One column provided dormitories, one was for dining, and the third for recreation. Presumably everyone had to move from one room to another at the same time. It was almost a shame to refuse such an unusual application, but that was what happened, yet again.