Monday, March 21, 2005

A busy week

Well I've now done a week's work on the java contract and that seems to be going reasonably well. We've also had a French Exchange student over from Douai via Tytherington - took some photos of trips around the Macclesfield area. And today's the piano exam, and Clare's return from University. I expect things will get back to normality after Easter!

Monday, March 14, 2005

Another funeral

.. maybe it comes with getting older but went to another funeral this morning of Mavis Adams, she led the Mothers Union here for many years, led a dance group, many other things. It was a pretty raw event, I suppose because of all those things, someone read Lord of the Dance the Sydney Carter hymn that was also read at her husband's funeral nearly 20 years ago. Because it is so associated with primary school maybe you think it is superficial but it isn't. Ending with 'The day thou gavest, Lord is ended' another one for stirring the emotions!

Before that there was a hurried trip the the Job Centre to sign on (and off!!) as I'm now experiencing the joys of self employment for at least the next month and beyond that who knows!
This afternoon is a time for getting down to the nitty-gritty of java development after nearly 4 months of limbo.

Friday, March 11, 2005

Bizarre..

Searching using MSN for st trinians film clips gives - on the first page - lots of Derek Jarman and my machine's page of the current state of the videos I've recorded! Joyce Grenfell as a boy in blue.... I think their ranking algorithm needs work! Google gives far more sensible results

J-Walk gives this rather good photo link

Thursday, March 10, 2005

Scaling

As I blogged a bit back I had a difficulty with the examiner for Grade 8 piano, now sorted out someone else at a later date!! It was originally going to be today - and the time has been useful even the minor scales in 3rds and 6ths are beginning to sound respectable. I've carefully forgotten the name of the new examiner but I don't think it meant anything to me.
New exam on the 21st March - wish me luck!

How to prevent theft of your html

read here, from j-walk, as the page says it can't be done

Latest book meme

Via Storyteller's World comes an invitation to see how many banned books you've read:

Here's a list (I'm told) of the top 110 banned books. Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you've partially read. Underline the ones you specifically want to read (at least some of). Read more. Convince others to read some.

I suppose it depends what's meant by partially read, I've read a couple of paragraphs of Joyce's Ulysses!

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Qur'an
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire (listened to the Opera!)
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius (again, it was a very good movie)
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Looks as if Steinbeck was a popular target!

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

blackbox 0.70.0...

.. is released - get it and enjoy!