Stuff

I was looking around friends’ blogs for inspiration today (cos I promised to post more often even if I’ve nothing much to write about) and I remembered Flash had recently unearthed the Things you love beginning with… meme. Way back in 2006 I got W. This time (via Skype chat)… 

[8:37:38 AM] Gwyn says: Oy, Flash! Give us a letter for that meme. You gave me a W last time and I need some inspiration. (thanks 🙂 )
[8:37:59 AM] Flash says: you want a different letter?
[8:38:05 AM] Gwyn says: yep
[8:38:11 AM] Flash says: *thinks*
[8:38:17 AM] Flash says: P
[8:38:20 AM] Gwyn says: yay!
[8:38:20 AM] Flash says: ok?
[8:38:21 AM] Gwyn says: thanks
[8:38:24 AM] Flash says: np!

10 things I love beginning with P:

Parents, Phoning home

If it weren’t for skype, cheap international phone calls and the internet I wouldn’t be living so far away from home. Hi Mum & Dad!

Photography (+Picasa)

Here’s one from the other day. It looks like an apple, but is actually an acorn.

Chose focal black and white in Picasa’s options menu, waved my magic mouse and uploaded it to Flickr.
Photography is one of the most rewarding hobbies I have, not just taking photos but admiring and being inspired by other people’s too. Also it brings you little moments to treasure like Atticus finally overtaking “Dead Horse” in the LA Times and being the 2nd Best Animal at time of writing…  I promise I only voted once. The votes have nothing to do with the judges so here’s hoping he gets printed in the LA Times paper edition this Sunday…

Potatoes

I could live on these exclusively for months. Like I did through most of university. I reckon the antiscience hicks have it all wrong and that spuds, rather than bananas, are the real “Atheist’s nightmare“…

Planting stuff in the jardin.

I won’t call it growing veggies just yet. That would be premature. I enjoyed the actual planting, even if the resulting rows of slug-eaten greenery is not (and may never be) fit for human consumption. The herbs’re doing grand though and the dandelions are thriving. 

Peep Show

The facebook group has it about right: “If you don’t like Peep Show, you’re probably not worth knowing.” Harsh, but fair. 

Pratchett, Terry

and his lovely discworld series. I started reading them when I was 13 or so and have read them all in order ever since. They’re enjoying a bit of a renaissance at the minute round here as Powells Books has a fair few used copies on sale. I’m still patiently waiting for Making Money to come out in paperback Stateside. 

Pasties & al Pastor, Tacos

I’m going to have to get back to Mexico soon if only to gorge on Tacos al Pastor again.

Pasties are also missed, though we had the Chilean version round a colleague of Sarita’s house the other day, empanadas. Lighter pastry, an olive, egg and raisins got added to the recipe when it travelled south. Wikipedia has some handy pasty facts… “It is said that a good pasty should be strong enough to endure being dropped down a mine shaft.” 

PCs

Yeah, they crash occasionally. Yeah, some of my drivers stopped working with Vista. Yeah, Microsoft… But when PCs go wrong I can usually fix them, swapping out some part for another cheaply bought one, or messing with the registry. When your Mac goes wrong, it goes wrong. Usually in spectacular/ expensive fashion. 

I got my first PC from Drsita’s dad, Martin when I started at UMass in August 2000. I’d probably still be trying to teach Spanish to spoilt teenagers now if it wasn’t for him.

Parks

Parks are good. They used to be for drinking cider and playing guitar in, now they’re for being dragged through by a 25lb + schipperke. 

Pubs

Though it turns out it’s not the place, it’s the company. Still working on finding some Portland pub peeps.

Posters

I seem to be making lots of posters lately. Here’s today’s…

(Thrills youtubery) 

That feels like 10. Maybe more. If anyone would like a letter, comment away.

Thanks for wading through all that, though the biggest news of late is we’re well chuffed to be having some Mexican mates over in January.

It’s been a busy week for me and Drsita, though I think S worked harder than I did. She’s had her usual lectures, meetings, office hours & job applications going on and also yesterday gave a 45 minute presentation on tequila and gender involving various Lucha Reyes clips.

And we’re glad it’s the weekend…

So last Friday I had an interview for a job as a UK English localisation tester and that came through. On Monday I was testing a training program about EU Competition laws and Thursday and Friday I was recording all instances of organization (rather than organisation) and suchlike in a proprietary course management system. A lot like Moodle but infinitely more expensive. There’ll be more on Monday then it may well dry up for a bit.

I’ve been making DVDs for Drs. Sudarat & Sita. Working on theming a Volusion e-commerce site (I’ll post the link when I finish) and a 12′ banner for a friend selling camping gear for festivals. Putting together the first non-WordPress site I’ve done in years (link soon “Marketing Gestalt”…) Updating nourishingnutrition.com , lorrainepursell.com , comfortmattressfurniture.com . Finalising pink-caterpillar.com. And all the while clicking over to the LA Times site (which appears to be down today) to see how Atticus is faring in the popularity contest. He needed 3 votes to overtake the picture of the dead horse last time I checked…and watching my adsense pennies pile up.

Here’s my logo for the camping thing…

Cusifer’s in the dog house after his behaviour over the last couple of days. First off, on Wednesday we barbecued some veggies and while I was sorting them out inside, he made off with two thirds of my baked potato with cheese that was sitting on our garden table. And was very reticent to give it back. I wrested it off him and he sulked for the best part of 3 hours. As punishment, rather than his usual treats I gave him slices of said potato for the next 48 hours (If my baked potato is all that you want, baked potato is all you shall have…) Which may well have been the trigger for finding he’d been unable to contain his bowels on Friday night and gave me a fine way to start Friday.

Changing the subject… I finally finished watching The Wire Season 4. I think it’s been noted before, but it’s the best damn drama available on the planet. I can’t stop thinking about Bubs. Bless him. After season 5 it’s going to be hard going back to normal telly. I’ve found there are presently 4 reasons to subscribe to basic cable. And 2 (possibly 3) of them are freely and legally available online. The Daily Show, Colbert Report, The Soup and America’s Funniest Videos. The first two package US news in a palatable form. The Soup reminds me why there’s no point in watching anything but the aforementioned 4 programmes. And America’s Funniest Videos is perfect for watching while eating. Zero plot, zero thought, and 100% people falling over/hurting themselves. The cream of a country of 300 million all with easy access to a camcorder.

Here’s a picture of the sculpture by the PGE stadium next to where I’m working…

I’ll try not to let a week go past again before the next post… Here endeth the stream of consciousness.

First picture I ever uploaded to Flickr? It was this one 3 and half years ago.

Mexico’s having a national Flickr convention in Guadalajara tomorrow. Flickrites are flying/bussing in from all over and converging on GDL. All my mates’ll be meeting up, wandering round with cameras, meeting interesting people, sharing photo ideas, techniques, badges, possibly T-Shirts… and trying to sort out hugely complicated bar tabs. I wish them all the best. And am just a little jealous.

A whole new browser and Picasa 3.0 beta, all in the same week? Didn’t they just launch a spy satellite too?

People don’t come here for tech reviews, so suffice to say Chrome is fast and well worth installing. Picasa continues to be a delight. I’ve got it tied up making a video slideshow with music and automatically uploading it to YouTube, but apparently there’s all kinds of other stuff too. Collages, proper image editing (removing blemishes), erm, slideshows again. I’ll edit this and post the youtube thing in here in a minute.

What else? Well, ever been in a cybercafe, desperately wanted to see pictures of Atticus and find out what I had for breakfast, but then forgotten what the address was of this site? something to do with tequila, spiders and logs? well, now gwynf.com will get you here in half the time. I found a coupon for godaddy (TEST99 if you want to try it), $1.19 for a domain for a year and it had to be used up soon, so there you go.

[flickr]photo:2834539328[/flickr]

Above collage made stupidly easily with Picasa 3…

Nanny’s house is on the market. After a lot of work from Mum, Dad, Gill, Geoff & Rog, here’s the site: maycottageksm.co.uk

Here goes an ill-advised dip into politics after being force fed 3 nights of none-more-patriotic speeches from the democrats’ conference. Obviously, Obama’s the one to vote for. McCain getting in is too depressing to contemplate, but the Daily Show came up with this fine effort last night that hit the nail on the head for the tone of the entire proceedings.

Now that Monica’s officially broken the news I’m thinking it’s okay to link to M & D + 1. I’m guessing there won’t be many more posts about kitchens…

Special Portland CONGRATULATIONS to the pair of you, I can’t believe should have know Daniel would be reading him Linux manuals…

Look it! I made a poster…

Went to the zoo today with DrSita, but buggered up the directions and ended up arriving too late to meet most of the assembled L&C staff, and missed the food too. Packed the place was. It’s the last Sunday of the school holidays and it isn’t raining so any family worth their salt brought their children to Portland Zoo so they could shout things like “Can I ride the zebra” and stare into cages trying to find the animals.

As zoos go it’s not bad. They just had a baby elephant born two days ago so there was all kinds of talk about that. I learnt that Indian Elephants are called Asian Elephants in America. Though maybe they are in England too these days. I can’t be PC in both countries… The bat cave was grand though my pix didn’t come out cos I was tripodless. I might go back one day. On a school day. In the rain. Maybe the polar bears will have come out of hiding by then…

After seeing no cheap BBQs at yard sales, charity shops and Fred Meyer’s we went to Lowes for a new one, then spent the best part of 2 hours assembling it in the garden. Things went faster once I found a hidden bag of screws under the dog.

Leif and Sudarat came round later and we had a well pleasant evening of Sita’s cooking, local veg and tales of squirrel hunting up north.

We ended with an ’80s music trivia DVD game, which I got for $4.99 from Goodwill (seemed more fun than Bibleopoly)

Hope our neighbours were okay with screams of Kajagoogoo at around midnight…

We’ve been round various garden centres of late trying to find an agave plant. DrSita ruled the first place out as she asked if agaves would grow in this climate and they answered “Well, it’s a cactus, it should do okay”. One of the first things you learn about agaves is that they’re not cacti.

Several other garden centres haven’t had anything more adventurous that Aloe, but we’re not giving up because a few miles down the road there’s a place selling Pulque (only open on Saturdays and only in bulk).

Anyroad, yesterday at the aforementioned Fred Meyer (pronounced Maya) while BBQ shopping we found this…

Very much a last resort.

When you comment on this blog (any many others) it displays a little personal graphic (avatar if you will) next to your comment. If you’ve signed up for a Gravatar then the blog will recognise your email address and display the Gravatar you uploaded. If you haven’t signed up for one you just get the default picture, Atticus looking forlorn with the legend “I need a Gravatar”… Out of the dozens of commentators in this blog only César (AWOL) and I have signed up though…

1. Get yourself a gravatar at: http://en.gravatar.com/
2. Enter your email address, check your inbox, click on the confirm link
3. Choose a nickname, password etc, enter your details…
4. Click “Add an image by clicking here”
5. Choose where you want to add the pic from (My computer probably)
6. Upload and crop your gravatar
7. You’re done.

Ah go on, personalise yer comments

but it’s too bloody hot. I’ve been playing me guitar in the basement and had to stop.

Today’s new song to play, Art Brut, Emily Kane…

And I bet it’s the .4444444° that makes all the difference… Luckily there’s an air-conditioned cinema nearby so we’ve been watching all kinds of nonsense. Pineapple Express, has its moments but is still nowhere near as good as Knocked Up. Tropic Thunder last night cracked me up a fair few times. Mark Kermode says if a comedy makes you laugh five times or more, it’s a success and thus it definitely qualifies and is worth watching for the panda scene alone. Hellboy II is an option for this afternoon…

There are all kinds of small, independant cinemas dotted around Portland, our nearest however was showing Mamma Mia for 3 weeks and has now moved on to The Sisterhood of the Traveling (sic) Pants II, so we’ll have to go a little further afield.

We also found a Fred Meyer down the road, a huge, air-conditioned superstore stocking everything from cider to sweetcorn holders to trees. If they let you take your dog in it would be perfect. As it is ‘Cus and me just head down to the park at the bottom of the street, stick to the shade and paddle in the river. Even the basement’s starting to heat up. Righty, I’m off to shut the windows and blinds. We’re adopting Andalucian living habits. Siestas included. Hasta pronto…

Or somesuch, let’s see if a) this link works and b) you can read it…

Didn’t work, so… click here and shove this site’s address in the box: