Alta 2014

Thanks to Flickr, and specifically El Charro Negro, we heard about a mariachi competition in the centre yesterday and arranged to meet up in La Fuente to go and see the spectacle. It fully lived up to expectations. Each band came and played just one song and then wandered off. Groups came from all over Mexico and most wore the traditional local dress. I still haven’t got the hang of the settings on me camera. Sachiel pointed out that the ISO’s too high on most, I didn’t even know how to change it. Still I’m extremely happy with me zoom lense. Well, the set’s over at Flickr and here are some faves, that will probably end up in the photoblog…

See review two posts down then click for a review from a Scottish farmer here: Private Eye

Bath and Taunton and Quantocks

Speak Spanish? Looking for affordable, quality daycare / primary education for your offspring. …and live near Plaza del Sol in Guadalajara? Well you may want to check out Centro Educativa Nueva Era’s spanking new site. Another fine product from the offices of plaza bonita.

If you thought getting domain names and hosting sorted out is easy, you’d be right. However, just you try it if your domain ends with .MX (the mexican .uk). I’ve made more phonecalls in the last 2 days than in all my time here… You can either pay with PayPal (I hate PayPal) or in a bank and then fax the receipts in to the hosting service. Sometimes Mexico is right up there at the cutting edge of it all, and other times it’s like some Kafkaesque third-world state. Mind you, so’s the UK. Still all appears to be v.well now.

Came across an interesting (somewhat subjective, but hey ho) site this morning with animal noises in different languages (on the University of Adelaide’s Engineering page (¿?)) This bloke didn’t get all the English noises right, “lap lap” is the noise a drinking dog makes apparently, so there may be a fair few mistakes. But it features the classic Cock-a-doodle-doo versus ki-kiri-ki cockeral noise conundrum so I’m happy. Neither really do justice to what is self-evidently “rackalackaooey”, to coin a word.

Alright back to work. My mouse forgot itself at me at home I forgot to bring my mouse to work and now I have to spend 7 hours fiddling around with a touchpad. Arse. NOT good for graphic design, even with the nimblest of fingers…

Yesterday was busyish with translations, webdesignery and the nascent stirrings of an Oklahoma property listings service website that may be in the offing using Open Realty open source software. Also There’s a fancy new element to the site here you may or may not have noticed courtesy of snap.com. If you hover the mouse over links on the page you’ll get a preview popping up that shows you a thumbnail of where the links go. If it says check back later, try again in 15 seconds or so so snap has a chance to screengrab that page. Muy fancy as we say round here…

I’m thinking of organising a Flickr meet up for Tapatian photographers this weekend, it’d be nice to meet some of the folks who share their photos round this way and swap favourite places around Gwod. More news as developments become more solid…

Also, Atticus might well be coming to live in Gwod for a few months, as carry-on luggage in March. Sally and Martin deserve a break from him after 18 months or so…

Spanish phrase of the week: “Ganar la rifa del tigre” to win the tiger raffle. Whereupon it seems like you were very lucky to win the raffle, but the prize is a tiger. Which eats you. So ganar la rifa del tigre means seemingly good luck which turns out to be very bad.

It dawned on me yesterday that I generally write me blog with a lot of piratisms. The personal pronoun ‘me’ instead of ‘my’ fr’instance. Makes sense, given the number of pirates from the West Country…

Anyroad, I’ve been working like a good’un the last couple of days. Between fixing OSCommerce to work on the latest version of PHP on the server, actionscripting away at the Flash site which is now weighing in at around 2.7meg, even knocked off a Sp-En 900 word translation last night. And still had time for a bit of scrabble and played a fine few games last night on SINGLE mode. There are various options for choosing your opponents. Which dictionary you’re going to use. SOWPODS is the one for Brits, Aussies, Kiwis and the occacional Canadian and TWL is the American one. Then the type of game you’ll play, VOID, where the computer checks your word is valid and if it ain’t then you get another go, SINGLE, where you can put any word you like unless you’re challenged by the other player, and if it’s not valid you miss a go and variations on those themes. And of course the length of game. Anything from 3 minutes a side (which I can usually do, but need my caffeine) to 1hr. Anyroad, I prefer VOID but last night had a really enjoyable 5 SINGLE games with DrJen, an Australian. SINGLE can be a bugger because I have the American words stuck in my mind from playing on my PDA and so you think everything’s hunky dory then you’re challenged and you end up losing. Surely ‘oafing”s a word… apparently not, though. Anyroad, I’ve still got a 4 figure rating at the end of the day so all’s well and that…

Not sure what today will bring, but I’m guessing my laptop will feature prominently. I still try to get out even if it’s just to get tacos or coffee. Maybe a jaunt downtown. Back to LALAland in the v.near future for a week or so I’m going to enjoy walking while I still can…