Teaser Tuesday - Sept 29

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

With the mark-up in the club, he would make thousands of pounds from reselling it. Yes, it had been a good day, but he knew the best of it was to come.

Another teaser from Victoria Hislop's The Sunrise, after what I felt was a stilted start I'm getting on rather better with it!

Mutterings - Sept 28

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Well :: Spring
2. Validation :: Field
3. Robert :: Marshall(!)
4. Host :: ssh (software for getting login sessions on remote hosts)
5. Stage :: Landing
6. Bulky :: Rucksack
7. Exclamation! :: Point!
8. Fluffy :: Kitten (or there's Karajan allegedly)
9. Left :: Wing
10. Inspire :: Prophet

Teaser Tuesday - Sep 22

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

'Look at our father, Christos! He's crippled .. Who gained from that?'

From Victoria Hislops Sunrise a story of Cyprus in the 1960-70s. At the moment it's reading like a travel guide and the characters don't feel real - you may gather I'm not enjoying it but I hope it will improve! This is our book group book of the month.

Mutterings - Sep 21

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Resist :: Useless (bad scifi or was it hitchhikers guide?)
2. Procrastinate :: thief (of time)
3. Stimulate :: Economy
4. Secretary :: Bird
5. Buffering :: Double
6. Overcast :: Sky
7. Grinder :: Angle
8. Amateur :: Pornographer (probably from the Amateur Photographer magazine)
9. Flaw :: Crucial
10. Aloof :: Haughty

Cake and Bell

We've been away (well we've already been back a week!) down to Cornwall to some friend's 50th anniversary party - of their first meeting in Kampala - the relationship and eventual civil partnership came a lot later. A bit of a circular tour staying in Mevagissey for a few days either side of the party. On the way there *and* back a visit to a cathedral choral evensong(!) - it wasn't planned. Unfortunately there aren't any pictures of Gloucester - but alas our Friday afternoon in the city seemed to be dominated by drunks (not us!). There's a full album here with pictures of the rest of the week and other pictures of the party at Trebah gardens.

Mutterings - sept 14

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Annoyance :: Niggle
2. Vague :: Nouvelle (!)
3. Styrofoam :: Cup
4. Hold up :: Highwayman
5. Cards :: Pack
6. Thread :: Life
7. Manhattan :: Project
8. Calories :: Count
9. Fuzzy :: Thinking
10. Supervisor :: Project (again!)

Mutterings - sept 8

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutteringsare

1. Personal :: computer
2. Altruistic :: motive
3. Human :: league
4. Nude :: model
5. Online :: security
6. Oh oh :: beware
7. P@ssw0rd :: dictionary (avoids temptation to insert a similar dictionary search avoiding password here!!)
8. Sunbathe :: lounger
9. Waste of time :: trolls
10. Management :: evasive

Teaser Tuesday - Sept 1

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

In anticipation of this consultation we busied ourselves, in the final weeks before Christmas 1997, with setting up an expert working group to engage with what we thought would be a detailed consultation process with the civil service. Up until this point we had no formal dealings with government and so could only guess how it might unfold.

from Christine Burns Pressing Matters (vol 2) the tale of Press for Change's campaign for recognition of the rights of trans people. A story of setbacks and triumph written by someone closely involved in Press for Change. From her wikipedia page

I realised something had changed in 1997, when I realised it was more embarrassing to admit to being a conservative than to being a trans woman.

Her website is here complete with podcasts - I think she's retired from doing them but the archive remains!

Terragen and wine - a speed comparison

I commented last week about the difference in speed between running Terragen natively in windows and using wine to run the application under linux. Here's 2 screenshots, the first shows the render output from my Vista installation,
as you'll see from the title bar the render finished in 45m55s. Here's the incomplete render in Kubuntu/wine

so that's 17 hours 57m44s (!). When I've tried before there wasn't quite this disparity between the 2 environments. Most of the time on Ubuntu was overnight - and I was asleep so it wasn't due to system busyness. I haven't used XFrog plants previously maybe this is a cause but wine claims to be of a similar performance to the native app - clearly that's not true here.