Wine Label Collages

loved this art made from wine labels, again via Ursi's Blog - the picture depicts Carmen.

music:Chopin Editions

Hat tip to Ursi's Blog for the link to Chopin Early Editions - I need to do some exploring - though I'd really like to find a similar resource for Schumann - having had some discussion with my piano teacher about the pedal marks in his Album für die Jugend - Winterzeit II

The Interloper

The elderly cat from along the street has found our fridge and waits and hopes (our cat doesn't know what a fridge is for)

Guardian RSS feed

What was going on the the Guardian RSS feed last night? Or maybe it was Google's fault - or maybe it was the fun going on with NTL's DNS servers (must get named running on my home network so I have an alternative to fall back on!).

[edited to include the screenshot directly]

Checkout: IPM

The measure that Sainsbury's use to determine my efficiency is Items per minute - a count of the number of items scanned - not including the time taken dealing with payments or when logged out. The official line is that under 17 is unacceptable - I've never managed the 17 yet let alone the - mentioned in dispatches - 19. As you see from a screenshot of the spreadsheet I maintain at least it is pretty consistently increasing.
Last week I was given a basket - by a supervisor with 19 items and told I'd be timed on it - I said that it was pretty artificial thinking that it would be a breeze but I managed 9.5 items per minute!

(what a flurry of postings - there must be something else I'm avoiding doing?!)

Polishes glasses...

I've spent some time over the past few days trying to keep out referral spam from my home webserver by editing a .htacccess file - I've only just spotted the typo when I was comparing it with a properly named file in emacs and swapping between the buffers - I was having a hit every 30 seconds last night from the spammers and nothing I did seemed to make any difference.
I do publish my weblogs but deliberately don't include the referrer stats so you can see that the traffic has gone up but can't see what the nasty bots are trying to advertise!

Links: Restaurant menu

May I take your order? - there's some goodies there:

• Cowboy leg beautiful pole
  
• Coconut braises the bamboo chicken
  
• Gold silver lotus root silk fries shrimp fucks
  

no doubt this is all over the blog world already...?

Look down the comments to about the 13th comment for a useful - and funny explanation of some of the dishes.

Festina Lente

Must get to a Lent Group this Lent as it is soon going to be over! St Peter's were showing Millions as part of their series and I really wanted to see it....have so decide whether to go to the discussion on the Matrix tomorrow - a bit Pseuds Cornerish - though I see I have cited that film in a sermon - so I can't talk!

A mixed economy

This is a bit close to my current sphere of work but all of us need competition:
George Monblot writes this week in the Guardian about the way
The competition authorities have been taken over by the superstores.The way that the Blair govenment has not touched:

The policy imposed by Margaret Thatcher's administration - which later came to be known as the Tebbit doctrine - determined that the public interest could be reinterpreted as "the consumer interest", and even this could be defined in the narrowest terms.

I vividly remember Tebbit sneering at those who supported Fairtrade on Panorama. And now we have a culture of intimidation of some suppliers and the extinction of small shops and thier associated support environment:

Even the OFT recognises that the wholesalers who supply the small shops are approaching the "tipping point", beyond which they go out of business. This would trigger a chain reaction through the independent sector, pulling down thousands of businesses. The network of small farmers, wholesale markets, dairies, auctioneers, news distributors and small abattoirs, with all its expertise and investment, is collapsing at an extraordinary rate. It is hard to see how it could ever be replaced.

The colleague discount card for us is a wonderful saver of money - but it ties us to a particular shop even more..

The 4 meme

Borrowed this from Good in Parts though tracing back the taggings was interesting and led me to Elizaphanian which has gone into my bookmarks with some very interesting articles including this one on those cartoons. With this bit:

Thus, for a Christian, it is wrong to take offence. To take offence is to play the devil's games, to enter into antagonism between the righteous and the ‘unrighteous’, the 'sinner' and the 'saved'. In letting go of any sense of offence, one is released from the mythological pressures embedded in all stories of them and us, and is set free to become the sort of person that God originally intended - living in peace and loving the neighbour. This is what lies behind the striking language in Matthew's gospel (5:29, where Jesus commands us to pluck out our eyes if it causes us to sin language taken up by a great many moralists seeking violent self-harm, as it is, of course, to scapegoat a part of oneself). The original language used in Greek, however, is related to this word skandalon and the passage means 'if your eye is scandalized, pluck it out' in other words, do not see offence.

Anyway, back to the meme:
Four jobs I've had:

• Checkout operator
• Deputy head of kitchen
• stock taking in an engineering works
• numerical analyst

Four movies I can watch repeatedly:

• Au Revoir les Enfants
• Cinema Paradiso
• Manhattan
• Ma Vie en Rose
• The Italian Job

hmm - lots of sentimentality and childhood there!
Four places I have lived:

• Birkdale (Southport)
• Cambridge
• Kettlewell
• Leeds

Four TV shows I like to watch:
(difficult)

• Mony Python
• Bill Oddie Naturewatch
• Have I got News for You
• Ski Sunday

what's happened to Ski coverage - the season hasn't finished yet(grrr!)
Four places I have been on vacation:

• Siena
• Valais (Switzerland)
• Southwold
• Royan

Four favourite dishes:

• Spaghetti with broccoli
• Steak au poivre
• Plateau de Fruits de Mer
• Crepes with cider

Four websites I visit daily:

• Google
• The Register
• J Walk
• Maggi Dawn

Four places I would rather be right now:

• Up in the Swiss Alps (even in this Season!)
• Back in a computing job
• Comfortable restaurant with a bottle of red wine
• Back in bed

Far too revealing....

Categories

Created some categories - bit of a hack with blogger - along the lines of this suggestion but it will only apply properly to new postings! I'd like to base by blog on Movable Type like the ones I run on my home computer but I need to find a suitable host!
(now do I need a categories category!?)

Power cuts

We seem to have had a few of these recently - one cause is the huge project to combine all the doctors surgeries in Macclesfield into one building. Last Wednesday we lost power for a few seconds - enough to cause a reboot of the computers.
One came up ok, the other was seemingly ok but connections to the other machine and the internet were painfully slow. I rebooted the router, restarted the machines network connection ,rebooted the machine but no improvement - the other m/c's network speed was fine!
Eventually the following evening, I stuck a Knoppix bootable dvd in the drive and rebooted and with Knoppix the speed was also fine (I'd been wondering if the power cut had broken the network card). So I was more puzzled and booted back into Mandriva and it was now working! I can only assume that Knoppix tested something - in order to set up a network connection - that normally doesn't get tweaked and that got whatever it was (network card? router connection?) back working normally.

Knoppix is wonderful for diagnosing machine problems especially when they won't boot any other way, back at PTI ,I managed to pull a CD's worth of data off a pretty dead disk by putting it in the freezer and then booting Knoppix and using it to burn a CD (the machine belonged to the administrator and was therefore rather important). There were backups but...

Then yesterday St Michael's had a power cut just an hour before the organist was married! On resumption the organ didn't work! And with the choir and organ lined up to do various important things very shortly.
Normal organ maintainer lives a good journey away so someone local was rung, conversation went (roughly):

Wedding in 45 minutes? - well you can always sing unaccompanied!
But it's the organist's wedding!!!
Well he can hardly be playing and getting married!

more armtwisting and he (the electrician) dropped his current job and sorted out the small problem before the organist discovered the the carefully planned music for her wedding was in peril!

The Cakes

Following on from the last posting, here is a picture of the three cakes and a link to my photo album of the event.

The wedding of all weddings

-- to quote Graham Turner who took the service.
Today Arthur Marshall (no relation) and Karen Gedd were married. I've known Karen since the early 1970's. She's currently St Michael's choirmaster and organist (as well as holding down a good job), the service was at St Michael's with an open invitation to the congregation, reception at Church with all invited and a lovely occasion - people I've not met since 1980, the local church enjoying with family and friends a joyous event. Photo of Kath stalking choir and the couple, more photos to follow.

St Michael's reordering really came into its own as a splendid setting for the ceremony and the reception. Arthur is a folk dancing enthusiast so there was a band, he has a narrowboat - so there was one on one cake, the other had a double-bass (Karen's other instrument), oh and there was another cake.
I hadn't met Arthur before yesterday when he happened to come though my Sainsbury's till and I guessed who he was:

You're getting married tomorrow?!
Err, possibly

.. more to come!

The Cat Basket

Hecate enjoying a winebox/basket

Umm

That's crotchet = 100 not quaver (sorry non-UKans), you can stop hyperventilating now! Reminds me of the Poulenc Mouvements Perpetuels No 1 with a tempo indication of crotchet = 444 - and a printed insert with a publishers correction.

What is it about Macclesfield

Someone also local (don't know him) has been made redundant more times than me! I've only managed 4 so far

Chip and run

I've had a number of customers give me their husband/wife's card - at least that's what they claim when their card says they're Nigel , when they're probably not!
On Monday night someone claimed that Chip and Pin is secure because it means that no one can use your card without your permission(!) - so if you know the pin that means you're a licit user. I refused the card but said they could use the local ATM machine and then pay for their order. They weren't happy - I said someone could see their number when they were using a cash machine and steal their card so it couldn't be totally secure - they weren't convinced. They went to get the money - 5 minutes went by - and they didn't return - obviously off in a huff - unless it wasn't their card?!
Luckily the other person waiting in the checkout was understanding.
How widespread is using your partner's card? - I'm seeing one or two cases a week when I'm working. To my mind it's just like forging your partners signature because you know they won't mind...

Proofreading complete

Now completed the proofreading of my Scherzino, feel free to download and enjoy?! (I see blogger has some interesting spelling correction suggestions for scherzino...). Inevitably there was an error in the screenshot of the previous example - also added the missing slurs.

Image doesn't look as high quality as the previous one but I think that's a fault of the screenshot.

Wow!

The Queen of the Night aria (Mozart!) Thank You. . . Do you have anything in English? - hairs on the back of the neck stuff.

Intelligent design

Interesting critique of the whole intellectually dishonest farrago from a Christian POV. Very welcome at least from my POV!

About time too!

After tussles with Lilypond and denemo I now have a pretty printed score of a piano work I wrote ooh - only about 30 years ago. Bit more polishing and I shall put it on the web - need a few precautionary accidentals and a fair bit of proofreading! The midi file that lilypond sounds a lot better than the piece ever will at my hands! Just including a few bars here as a preview..

I always knew...

vi was evil! :-)

On the roof

Nearly finished now! I've added some of the other pictures I took this morning to my webserver in this album

Brokeback

I found the New York Review of Books article on the movie helpful for picking up some things I missed..just read the short story which was also useful. I don't think my ears could quite cope with the accents and on the evening I was there Cinemac had some problems with oil getting into the sound system which made it even worse. The Silk Heritage acoustics seem to have problems with American accents!
A beautiful film but so sad.

Dum. dum. dum,dum,dum,dumm

Loved this comment from Gert:

Were the Religious Hatred Bill to become law could people be prosecuted under it for bringing their own religion into disrepute?

The scaffolding is still up....

Chimney sweep appears tomorrow and we hope that will be the beginning of the end, meanwhile Hecate is enjoying the fireplace now that the television is temporarily on the floor!

The Untouchable

The Guardian is currently doing Banville's The Untouchable in its book group, comment can be made here. Our book group BATS did it last year. I thought it very reminscent of Waugh's Brideshead Revisited with the main character marrying the sister of the man who was his real love. Articles for the next two weeks in the Saturday Guardian.
I had my own near run-in with illegality last night when at 5:30pm I was too tired to work out what I should do with a lad buying champage who said he was 20 but didn't had ID... The local Tesco's was shut for a bit last week due to a fire (I believe a fire in their generator which kicked in when there was a power cut) and everyone seemed to wander up the road to Sainsbury's - a great opportunity but it led to Christmas style queues! Not found a link to press coverage yet..

Beautiful China

Hat tip to Geoff Coupe, this collection brings back memories of the medieval Chinese poety that I still love full of nostalgia. I think I've seen some of these as a set of postcards brought back by a friend from her own trip to China last year.

Politics test

from mad musings of me comes this test:

You are a Social Liberal (63% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (15% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid Free Online Dating Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

.. my result looks pretty similar to hers too, though the discrimination on some of these tests is pretty bad!

Washing up liquid

I don't think I've sold one of these fortunately!

Fixed terragen album

Rather than hand coded html I'm now using JAlbum generated code for my terragen album - see my previous entry for technical details. Above image is a screenshot of one of the pages..last nights render took 4 hours which more than covered a trip the Macclesfield's Silkscreen cinema. I seem to be alternating at the moment between gold and blue landscapes!

..a new measurement of noise?

From this week's Macc Express comes this quote:

The end came after the car – latterly on just three wheels after losing one on route – ploughed through several gardens, hedges, fences and a lamp-post and crashed so violently into the three-year-old two-bedroom detached bungalow that it dislodged the bathroom tiles and woke up the local vicar half a mile away.

Loud enough to wake the local vicar - I'm sure they're not know for being asleep. Has echoes of a certain Monty Python sketch.

Sorry Janet - if you come across this post!!

Also note the 'on route' eggcorn

Calling all structural engineers?

Next door neighbour is having the chimney rebuilt and ours is a bit dodgy but I've also been shown the crack in the picture! It's not visible from our garden and looks expensive! The wooden top to the side passage has been used to support the next two stories.

Macclesfield to Goostrey via Warsaw?

Googled on this and was amazed to find as the second and third hits, links to a Polish form of British rail enquiries! Can't find Macclesfield or Goostrey in the source of that page and if I try to get a timetable it wants an intermediate station (well it does need one!). The Google summary reads:

Tablica przyjazdów/odjazdów dla stacji Wilmslow
... 9:10 - Goostrey 9:25 Holmes Chapel 9:35 - Sandbach 9:48 - Crewe 10:05 Kursuje 5.
Sty do 21. Maj Pn - Pt; oprócz 9. Kwi. 8:45, Bus, Macclesfield Macclesfield 9:15 ...

Beth suggests it is for the benefit of Polish agricultural workers coming over here.

The number one Google hit was a rant about when the Macclesfield - Stoke line was closed in 2003 by someone at Jodrell

Of course by the time you check the google it may have changed the hits given to make a more useful site higher in the rankings but that would spoil the fun!

Huh?

Someone at Sainsbury's bought £4+ of root ginger and a sandwich yesterday, it apparently wasn't involved in drink making but he didn't volunteer any more.

Andrew Hemingway

Via Finking Out Loud I've found this gallery and the art of Andrew Hemingway, now I just need £10000 or so! The above picture is `Still Life with Figs in a box'

The White Spider

Remembering Heinrich Harrer who died this week. Mountain climber and explorer. The Independent obit copied to alt.obituaries. He was one of the first party to ascend the North face of the Eiger. His book on the history of their climb and of other failures made me want to learn to climb back in the 1960's when I read it - and a family holiday that year(?) in Grindelwald only increased the impetus.
He was a member of the SS - the Guardian obituary claims that he hushed this up:

Harrer omitted to mention that as a young man in Austria he had joined the Nazi party, and, with his fellow climbers, had been congratulated in person by Hitler after making the first successful ascent of the north face of the Eiger.

but I seem to remember a picture of the handshake in the library copy of `The White Spider'.
The Eiger link has some of the old photos - and made me want to dig out and scan some of my climbing 35mm slides - just need to acquire that scanner first!!

Goldnem Wein

Screen shot of my latest terragen render used as a background in blackbox. Blackbox is a Linux window manager but there is a version that runs well under Windows which I used to use at work - I see that it now says that bb4win is no longer under development but there are other lookalikes on that page. I have made the goldnem Wein style accessible from my home machine. Title of the style is from Georg Trakl's poem Verklärter Herbst

Terragen

Took advantage of the Terragen New Year sale to register my copy. It runs very nicely - in spite of being a windows application on Linux using Wine. The above picture is with the registered version, some with the unregistered copy are on my home machine. I hope that new better images will soon appear there. Alas the sale is now over.

glaring!

What are they glaring at? Our cat is just out of shot enjoying a leisurely wash in their garden. See here for the full picture.

More on Sigrid/Sylvia's civil partnership

Story in the Macclesfield Express. I've again nicked the picture...

Sussex

A post-Christmas trip down to my mother and a trip to her favourite restaurant at Amberley the Boathouse - can't find a sensible web url or picture so one of mine will have to do. Good if you like carveries but I was left queasy by the custom of dressing waitresses in what, to me, were schoolgirl costumes. The area is full of John Ireland reminiscences for me - even the placenames. It is very close to the Amberley Working museum well worth a visit - was it used as a location for one of the Tom Baker Dr Who's The Deadly Assassin?

Blogger spell check suggests replacing Amberley with umbrella..! Currently I'm enjoying the Sainsbury's glazier mints and Milk Chocolate Orges.

Shuttlingsloe

New Year's day walk up Shuttlingsloe along with most of Macclesfield (it seemed), much easier to reach than the last time I walked there when I don't think there was a proper right of way. A walk which always brings Alan Garner's Weirdstone to mind. Some photos of the walk and of the cat at Christmas(!) are on my home web site

Just when you thought it was safe..

after Christmas come these patisseries. Not found any prices yet - which is probably as well.

Christmas letter

If you've not been lucky enough(!) to get our semi-annual Christmas circular, I've put a pdf version on my home webserver. Made the photos b/w for printing maybe I should have replaced them with the originals for this version...

Congratulations!

Sylvia and Sigrid outside Macclesfield Register Office this morning following their civil partnership. 'The law has caught up with us at last'. More pictures on my home machine

Tales from the Checkout - 2

Following on from the first
Was reflecting in a talk recently about control in the various forms of employment I've had. The cartoon version is that in software development you're in control - any mistake is your fault - work at your pace. On the checkout there's continuous interaction, far shorter segments and then you start again - though there are knockons - people get aggravated if you make a mess of the preceding customer and take ages.
To some extent you are in control there's all kinds of things that you see that the customer doesn't know about, but it's far more of an alliance you can work together - or not!
Scanning rate still increasing monotonically and by (usually) more than 0.1 per week!

What are the churchwardens doing?

via Google Earth comes this satellite image of All Saint's car park (and Church). It must be Chris and Roger - the churchwardens - but what are they worrying about? Suggestions?

(Boringly I suspect it is really two cars)

Wrappp up your penguins

Australian news has a story with a knitting pattern and picture of penguins in wolly jumpers. They just need a hat and scarf!
I got it from Geoff Coupe who got it from Improbable Research. .. channeling Tom Lehrer ..
Especially for Sigrid!

Further local coverage

From Today's Macc Express, picture nicked in case the Macc Express page vanishes. Coverage in the paper has been uniformly positive so far.

It didn't even ask about my cookery skills...

Feminine You scored 46 masculinity and 73 femininity!

You scored high on femininity and low on masculinity. You have a traditionally feminine personality.

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 16% on masculinity You scored higher than 74% on femininity

Link: The Bem Sex Role Inventory Test written by weirdscience on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

From today's Macclesfield Express

Lesbian Lovers first to Marry - eugh on the title but I'm not working that day.....

In our little corner of Macclesfield it has been a very stable community as it has been the same people living here since we moved in.

We have never regretted living here as the people of Macclesfield have always very supportive and generous.

BATS - the full list

Well it is intending to be the full list of books we have read as part of the BATS book group to date.

Working backwards - because that's easiest! And with some blanks towards the beginning, linking either to what I wrote or the best webpage on that book!

• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon. No blog entry yet!!
  
• The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith.
  
• Bad Blood - Lorna Sage
  
• Franzen's The Corrections
  
• Cold Mountain - Charles Frazier
  
• Now You See Me - Lesley Glaister
  
• The Untouchable - John Banville
  
• Astonishing Splashes of Colour - Clare Morrall.
  
• Falling - Elizabeth Jane Howard
  
• The Underground Man - Mick Jackson
  
• Bel Canto Ann Patchett
  

2004

• Dog Days Glenn Miller Nights - Laurie Graham
  
• Miss Garnet's Angel - Sally Vickers
  
• The Reader - Bernhard Schlink
  
• The Bonesetter's Daughter - Amy Tan
  
• The Last King of Scotland - Giles Foden
  
• The Road To Nab End - William Woodruff
  
• In Siberia - Colin Thubron
  
• The First Man - Camus
  
• ...
  
• Larry's Party Carol Shields
  
• My weblog stops here!
  
• 
  
• 
  

And to be filled out later and others added as I remember them:

• Music and Silence - Rose Tremain
  
• Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood, good pages here - natural born quilter - hmmmmm.
  
• Love and War in the Apennines - Eric Newby
  
• Quarantine - Jim Crace
  
• The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
  
• The Red Tent - Anita Diamant
  
• Northern Lights - Philip Pullman
  
• White Cargo - Felicity Kendall
  
• Cod - Mark Kurlansky
  
• The Surgeon of Crowthorne A Tale of Murder,Madness and the Oxford English Dictionary - Simon Winchester
  
• Last Orders - Graham Swift
  
• Wait till I tell you - Candida McWIlliam
  
• The Soldier's Return - Melvyn Bragg
  
• Sea Change - Robert Goddard
  
• The Falls - Ian Rankin
  
• Park and Ride (Adventures in Surburbia) - Amanda Sawyer
  

2002

• 253 - Geoff Ryman
  
• Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
  
• Ingenious Pain - Andrew Miller
  
• Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned - Walter Mosley
  

In case you're wondering, BATS stands for Books And ThingS - not a lot of things so far!

Tales from the checkout - 1

The first -I hope - of an ongoing series!

Last week sometime, I was asked 'are you a student' - unfortunately we don't sell glasses. Then at the end of the week, 'is this your retirement job'. I think the truth lies with Mister Inbetween!

On Sunday a colleague passed on to me a customer question - 'Where is Bali?', I said Indonesia, got the response 'But where is Bali in the store' which puzzled me no end! It was about 10 minutes later that I re-parsed the statement as 'Where is the barley' and things started dropping into place.

Then there was serving Neville Holder who quietly went through spending his royalties - not much if I remember his letter to the Guardian Notes and Queries a few weeks back!

Get a reasonable number of items per minute scanned in my first week and thought it should be much better next week and yesterday I saw it increased by 0.1 item/min. Ah well slowly and steadily!

Checking in (or out)

I seem to have survived two weeks at Sainsbury's - from a customer POV it seems a mind numbing job but I've found it fairly enjoyable, you have to keep pretty alert and it keeps my mind busy. Staff are friendly and it seems to match what I need at the moment. Was there dressed in a sombrero and a chunky jumper on Friday for Children in Need!

.. and another

Entish


To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
brought to you by Quizilla
.. looking at the results you can't be Orcish, or indeen anything really bad.

YAQ

You are Julian of Norwich! It's all about God, to
you. You're convinced that the world has a
happy ending. Everyone else is convinced that
you're a closet hippie, but you love them
anyway.


Which Saint Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Hunt the (grey) squirrel

According to today's Independent (link will only work for a few days)

Well, it is our fault. Reds frolicked happily in the forests of England undisturbed (more or less) until one dread day in 1876 when a Victorian landowner thought it would be a jolly wheeze to import a couple of those unusual greys from North America. The guilty man can now be named as Thomas Emmet Brocklehurst of Henbury Park in Cheshire. A time traveller with a shotgun could save a lot of trouble.

We have a lot of grey squirrels around here on ground that used to belong to the Brocklehurst family - now we know the reason for all the local squirrels. We hope the cat will get around to reducing the numbers!

Also I see that a lot of web pages claim that it was TV Brocklehust (rather than the above Emmet), but apparently there are mentions of a Thomas Unnet Brocklehurst in the local Silk Heritage Centre which suggests that the Independent has it wrong and that the rest have confused their V's with their U's. Google gives me one relevant hit for Unnet Brocklehurst (apart from suggesting Uunet :-))

Brocklehurst, Thomas Unnet, Mexico To-Day: A Country with a Great Future, and a Glance at the Prehistoric Remains and Antiquities of the Montezumans, 1883

which appears to confirm the Americas connection.

Cowers...

You Aren't Scary, You're Scared

Probably even scared to see how this quiz came out!

How Scary Are You?

Definitely another rank

From news:436ef000@clear.net.nz quoting 'Brian' in alt.folklore.computers:

a British Army Major, who retired in '62, told me that in their computer section, the programers were corporals, because they were really just clerks, but the operators were officers, because they were in charge of very expensive equipment. Of course, the operators were required to wear dress uniform, including swords, after 8pm on the night shift.

says it all really!

.. a new chapter..

Well this past week I've been training for working on the tills at Sainsbury's, I hit them for the first time (general training so far) tomorrow - watch this space! It might be a useful culture shock for me! At least it will be a continuous - though small - source of income, and get me out of the house and meeting people again.

Spirituality test

You fit in with: Spiritualism Your ideals are mostly spiritual, but in an individualistic way. While spirituality is very important in your life, organized religion itself may not be for you. It is best for you to seek these things on your own terms. 60% spiritual. 40% reason-oriented.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

Looks odd in preview...

Cat on a hot plastic roof

Yes it's Hecate again - threatening the photographer!

Food for thought

Via Maggi Dawn's site comes this post

evangelicals often use the phrase ‘authority of scripture’ when they mean the authority of evangelical, or Protestant, theology since the assumption is made that we (evangelicals, or Protestants) are the ones who know and believe what the Bible is saying. And, though there is more than a grain of truth in such claims, they are by no means the whole truth, and to imagine that they are is to move from theology to ideology.

Not only evangelicals I think! That quote comes from NT Wright - evangelical and Bishop of Durham How can the Bible be Authoritative?

Disgusted of Durham

I enjoyed this letter from today's Guardian (David Lindsay 3rd letter down) too much to not quote some of it:

No wonder Cameron's supporters want the Tories to merge with the Eurofanatical, anti-family, pro-drugs, pro-crime Liberal Democrats.

Only slightly hysterical!

Terragen updates

Created a new page on my home webserver for some terragen renders

New sleeping place

Hecate has a new favourite sleeping place...

Boggle

Giant Italian pink rabbit via J-Walk

Gone Phishing

I enjoyed reading this too much not to share it...

Hello Hotmail and yahoo users. There have been many attempts to hack hotmail or yahoo.com. Unfortunatly all of them have failed, EXCEPT this one. I though have found out a revolutionary way to hack hotmail and yahoo accounts. And might I add it's az easy az ABC. After 8 months of
research we have found the broken link. soi_manbot to be exact. somewhere@yahoo.com is a bot, an auto bot. You send it a letter and within 24 hours it will send you one back. The ULTIMATE hack for hotmail and yahoo is as follows:

Send a letter to somewhere@hotmail.com, within the Subject heading place the word "Password" (not in quotes but has to have a capital P) this way the automated bot recognizes what you are after. Then in the text field place the name of the person at hotmail or yahoo that you
want to hack (Do not put @hotmail.com or @yahoo.com after their name). No capital letters are to be put in this place. Then skip one (1) line and place your own hotmail or yahoo account information such as: My login:My password (a smeicolon makes it easier for the bot to
recognize). This way the bot can verify that your account actually exists. And then supplies you with the password for the person's account that you want it for. Here is an example:

(details deleted)

This IS the only way to hack hotmail. Use it with care.

As they say, you can't cheat an honest man. The expample i've deleted doesn't follow their instructions either.

What's a soi_manbot?

Elitist - moi?

Your CD collection is almost as big as your ego,
and you can most likely play an instrument or
three. You're a real hit at parties, but you're
SO above karaoke.
What people love: You're instant entertainment.
Unless you play the oboe.
What people hate: Your tendency to sing louder than
the radio and compare everything to a freaking
song.


What Kind of Elitist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

oboe!! what's an obo (original text of above). 'song' - grrrr, all music does not just consist of songs.
But that result is not a surprise!

Back to househusbanding

- well at least on a solitary basis as Beth has another temporary job out in Goostrey.
Meanwhile I'm trying to address the continuing saga of my daughter's machine. Having worked perfectly over the Summer, just before Uni restarts it decides to sulk.
Definitely memory problems so a new stick acquired from Crucial but now it appears that the disk (a Maxtor) is sulking - no partitions found - recreated and then (sometimes) the same error again - unless I just can't do wiring?!

Germany 1929

Wonderful pictures via Boing Boing

Vegetarian Engineering

Oh those wacky google ads! I think some words have been concatenated there...

Have I said that blogger's spell checker can't spell google (or indeed blogger)?

The Looking Glass

Read this last night:

The nuns always warned against storytelling and day-dreaming, which they said meant lying, an escape from the truth. To me it was the opposite. Those bright pictures were the most real thing.

...

Nothing could be too difficult if the sea was nearby. I fell down that last stretch of road as though I were being born.

From Michèle Roberts The Looking Glass

Speaking fluently

Job advertisments keep on asking me 'Do you speak fluently English?'

I think the answer is 'better than you'! Google suggests it is fairly common, though in some of those links punctuation and the phrase continuation makes a difference.

(there's bound to be a grammatical howler somewhere in this!)

Back from Holiday..

Been away for a week - photos have been processed, good stay at Seagull Cottage Llandudno - but don't attempt to use the official tourist guide site, what's the Welsh for accessibility?!

Where's the cat?

Kill, Kill!

More on holiday club

It's now over but I've copied the pictures over to an external server rather than have my local server handle the load!

A level results!

Just found the page at Macclesfield college recording the A levels results and there's a photo of Beth having got her A in Italian

Beth Marshall (on the left, who achieved an A grade), Susan Neville and Lesley Howard who both gained Bs. All of them chose to study just for the pleasure of learning a new language and to be able to put it into practice on foreign holidays. Beth has already put her new skills to use, “I've been doing some research work recently that's involved speaking on the phone to Italians, so the course has been a real benefit.”

Holiday Club

Working at the All Saints' holiday club this week run by the Rhema Theatre Company on the theme of Gideon. As we're missing our usual photographer, I'm taking some pictures

BATS

Maybe I should mention the BATS (Books and Things) weblog that I also have, if nothing else it will encourage me to update it more often if I get more hits. Went to the local library yesterday - they have a book sale and walked off with 12 books for a £1 - including Maugham, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Susan Hill, Mary Renault and others - now just have to read them! PIcture is of Hecate enjoying the use of the BATS box.

Activity

Five posts in a day - whatever next! Uploaded webcam picture looks ok, maybe it's this m/c or apache or png or a combination...
But I need a few more lines of space, so that the right hand stuff isn't obscured - bit more attention to the html and I needn't be doing this.

But at this stage ona Friday afternoon, I feel lazy!

Checking the webcam

Let's put a picture up here to see if it is ok - it will also push the previous post down a bit so the whole thing looks better! Having problems with the real webcam pictures getting truncated!

Geek vs empathiser

Another test - bet it will mess up blogger's layout! Seem to have done well on both bits!

Much More Scientific You have: 77% SCIENTIFIC INTUITION and 47% EMOTIONAL INTUITION

The graph on the right represents your place in Intuition 2-Space. As you can see, you scored about average on emotional intuition and well above average on scientific intuition.Keep in mind that very few people score high on both! In effect, you can compare your two intuition scores with each other to learn what kind of intuition you're best at. Your scientific intuition is stronger than your emotional intuition. Your Emotional Intuition score is a measure of how well you understand people, especially their unspoken needs and sympathies. A high score score usually indicates social grace and persuasiveness. A low score usually means you're good at Quake. Your Scientific Intuition score tells you how in tune you are with the world around you; how well you understand your physical and intellectual environment. People with high scores here are apt to succeed in business and, of course, the sciences.

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 99% on Scientific You scored higher than 99% on Interpersonal

Link: The 2-Variable Intuition Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid

webcam

Webcam now in operation - at least when I'm logged in on this machine! The image seems not to be transferring fully, but works fine for me using the same webserver - looking into it. Rather unexciting and blurry at the moment, some difficulties getting it work with Linux but I installed the spca5xx kernel module and it worked. I need either a longer USB cable or to move the computer and then I can feed images of the traffic situation at the Hibel Road traffic lights in Macclesfield - the Hibel Rd station is long gone!

Pubs and smoking

According to today's Guardian

As many as two-thirds of pubs in the most deprived parts of England could be exempt from a ban on smoking because they do not serve food, according to a study by doctors....Leeds topped the league, with 88% of its pubs not serving food and therefore likely to be exempt from the smoking ban, followed by Stoke, Lambeth, Chesterfield, Sunderland, Bradford and Macclesfield.

Interesting that Macclesfield is up there, not really a deprived area, I assume this survey covers the borough as a whole (it's from the BMJ but I can't find it on their web site). Here I think it's more cultural, a very large number of pubs - back in the 1960's I remember counting 50+ in Bollington - so competition constraints don't encourage the serving of food.
It's annoying though for us non-smokers in the area!

I'm sure the blogger spellcheck needs a tweak, place names are always problematic but it suggests misclassified for Macclesfield and Cinderella for Sunderland!

Mo Mowlam

Died this morning, not unexpected but still a great loss to politics and principle - Robin Cook and Mowlam in a month I shall miss them. What with Brother Roger's murder on Wednesday it has been a week of loss.

Non-negotiable

Rowan Williams via Hopeful Amphibian

You're constrained, you're hemmed in, you're sat on, but you're not trapped. Whatever happens to you, your value is in somebody else's hands, God's hands. Not your achievement, not other people's approval, but something utterly, utterly non-negotiable.

Tripping out

Into Manchester for the evening to have a drink with Greg and Bryan at Taurus, Canal St seems to have changed rather a lot since I was last there, new bars, changes of names, fairly quiet as it was a Monday in August. Lots of folks having an evening meal when I arrived but it then got rather thin until the tap was turned again and there was a sudden influx at around 9:45. Their Montepulciano d'Abruzzo is fairly pleasant - bit strawy though. I'd eaten but Greg ordered a Meze Platter (£12.50) which was huge so we both picked away at it. Mental revisits of cycling in Cambridge back in the 1970's - for me! - pulling up Castle hill, fighting to keep going on country roads when the wind - straight from Siberia was blowing against you. Strange moment early on when some folk appeared in overalls and toolboxes (think Village People!) and opened up a cupboard and started adjusting the lighting, wondered whether they'd stopped paying the bills!

Left at around 10:15 - the train service to Macc is replaced by a bus for the last train (and gets back at 1:15 or something) so didn't want that death march. The next-to-last train wasn't bad seems to be mainly female - maybe it's women who high-tail up to Manchester on a weekday evening, maybe the men are happier drinking and driving...

Had the camera with me but forgot to take any photos!

Glimpses of Macclesfield

from Glimpses of Macclesfield in ye Olden Days published in 1883

From a paper read at a meeting of the Rosicrusian Society, held in Manchester, on the "Historical Memorials of the Church of Prestbury," we find an entry in the churchwardens accounts for the year 1745. "Item - Paid for umbrella for a carriage, 03 00 00." It is hard to imagine the Guards under fire and using umbrellas at the same time. Such a thing, was seen once. During the action at the Mayor's house, near Bayonne, in 1813, the Grenadiers under Colonel Tyling occupied an unfinished redoubt near the high road. Wellington, happening to ride that way, beheld the officers of the household regiment protecting themselves from the falling rain with umbrellas. This was too much for the great chief's equanimity, and he instantly sent off Lord A. Hill with the message, "Lord Wellington does not approve of the use of umbrellas under fire, and cannot allow the gentlemen's sons to make themselves ridiculous in the eyes of the army."

I was actually looking for information on the history of weavers cottages..

The J-Walk Blog Link Experiment

As commanded!:
The J-Walk Blog: "All you have to do is post a link to this particular blog item (i.e., the one you're reading now). Just call it J-Walk Blog Link Experiment or something like that. After a few days, I'll post a list of every blog I found that linked to this item. If you're not on the list, I'll invite you to send me the link to your entry. I'll post these unfound links, and we'll try to figure out why I didn't find you."

The walks (again!)

I suppose I ought to note that the walks are over and the photo log complete. There's various other albums accessible from that machine the index being here, including the recent barbeque and a trip to West Chiltington

The Myth of Marriage

Thanks to Maggie for drawing attention to a write up on Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage - recently published.

Geek test

oh dear!

Colin Dutton

.. photographer. I was looking for some more of his Vespa photos - found when I was sorting though an old Independent on Sunday Magazine and found his web site, alas there's only one composite but maybe there's more - ah I've now found the Solomango site which has this page, there's also some nice photography at the Tethys Gallery.