Stuff

…sounds a lot like Lilly Allen, but that´s not necessarily a bad thing:

Martin, Ana´s bloke has been here for the last month or so and today sees him heading back to Belgium. It´s been grand having him around and not just because he bowls as badly as I do… Don´t be afraid to leave comments, Sr. Devos 🙂

In other news, this video is painfully funny and comes from Sita via Notorious Fig…

…and can´t wait for the next series starting in February neither. But… this Lost teaser…is nowhere near as disturbing as Look Around You´s explanation of the Helvetica Scenario. Shudder… I live in fear of Calcium´s Queen Atom breaking loose.

..but since I was talking about camera settings yesterday, note what a difference there is when you take a photo without flash and then with… I’m tempted to do one with Mrs. Bristow…

I was having a fine old time today in Tequila. Sita’s contacts are paying off nicely and we were “gifted” all manner of tequila-related multimedia on everything from mp3s to a set of vinyl records from the 70s. Including a VHS of “Tequileros” which had parts filmed in Columpio, my favourite Destilado de Agave factory.

Anyroad, driving back we noticed there were workers close to the road in the field jimando, ie harvesting and chopping the leaves off the agaves, so I leapt out with my camera and started photoing them. They posed and everything. Naturally, when I got home I realised I had me camera on the wrong setting which has led to some very grainy shots, still it was a great experience. And I’ll not make that mistake again. With highly configurable cameras comes great responsibility it appears.

Here’re me faves (that’ll probably find their way to my photoblog soon):

There´s a chain of chemists in Mexico called Farmacias Similares. They sell generic medicines at bargain prices generally because the main brand´s patent has expired. They’re a fairly large corporation that competes with independent chemists. Visit their godawful website here. Their main method of promotion is having someone in a Dr. Simi costume prance around outside their shops to a reggaeton beat or worse. I snapped a photo of Dr. Simi a few days ago in Gwod:

And here he is again in Zacatecas:

Mario alerted me to an extreme sport sweeping the nation, flooring Dr. Simi… It’s like Mexican happy slapping. On YouTube there’s several videos of Dr.Simi being run at and knocked to the ground by young naco scoundrels with nothing better to do. I felt sorry enough for the poor buggers sweltering in their costumes for 50 pesos a day before seeing them have to contend with these antics.

Anyroad, just a quick post to say support your local chemist and be nice to Dr. Simi.

Plans for tonight? Bowling…

Siteground, who i´m well chuffed with have various advanced stats systems. That means I can see which sites out there are hotlinking or stealing images and using up agaveweb´s bandwidth. Turns out lots of young scamps have hotlinked to a picture of “American History X” as their favourite film. I couldn´t resist a bit of mischief and swapped the image for another movie. With amusing results….

Spot the odd film out on these people´s MySpace pages: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. There´s scrolling to be done. Looking forward to seeing how long it´ll take for them to notice.

That´s the thing with hotlinking pictures, the people serving them up at their expense can change them to whatever they like. I think I´ve been relatively benign with the swap. Word.

Fellow Flickrite Mario has a blog (usually in Spanish) and he posted a Divine Comedy song to accompany a piece about his folks which led me on to browsing more of Neil Hannon´s YouTube output…

This song, Something for the Weekend reminds me of listening to Radio 1 while working for Four Winds Landscape gardening for minimum wage many summers ago in 1996…

Dodgy´s Good Enough is another one. And Boo Radleys´ Wake Up Boo though it was released a year earlier… Ah the UK in the 90s… good times…

A nice weekend all in all. Saturday night Aranza invited us all round to bid farewell to one of the Tapatian Flickreros, Laura who´s off to France for a good while. There was much singing, toasting, guitarring and even Atticus danced… Colibrí has some photos as does Elias which capture the spirit nicely…

The Hitatchi thing finally $orted itself out… * edit Cheque bounced…. * Finished another translation of subtitles for an upcoming film presentation…

Yesterday we had a nice lie in then I bussed it to the baratillo street market. If you go late it´s extremely crowded so I ended up buying nothing (I even passed on Crochet World’s Book of Slippers, yours for 5 pesos…) and just went off photographing things in an area I hadn´t really been (on foot) before. Then a few raindrops fell so I ended up getting the bus the last few blocks to protect me camera… Anyroad here’re the photos from there and below, a couple of faves… And there’s another one over at my photo blog.

After that we nipped out to McDonalds, cos I was starving then rented a couple of videos on the way home. I’d not seen the 6th Sense before, thinking that if you know the twist there wouldn’t be much point, but it turned out to be eminently watchable all the same. Then a quiet night in front of the telly and a few quesadillas and surprisingly good red wine from Washington state. Red Diamond. Recommended…

This week… web designery, more translation, and a trip to Tequila on wednesday I think. I’m looking forward to hitting the agave fields with DSLR in hand.

I didn’t like aubergines / eggplants before seeing these pictures, but now I’m not even going to try them every once in a while to see if my tastes have changed…

B3ta’s last competition was to illustrate misheard song lyrics. My faves? This one, this one (requires UK pronunciation) and this one.

If you’re on Facebook and liking the Scrabulous application, why not go the whole hog and download the game from here it’s not as pretty as Scrabulous, but I’ve yet to see it go down for 48 hours. Create a username, install the app, play a few games to establish your rating then watch your social life swiftly disappear over the horizon. My handle’s gwynfisher, and rating somewhere in the mid 1000s. Strictly SOWPODS.

All Calvin and Hobbes ever written online. Love it.

and finallly if you have a blog, this is enlightening: 13 blog clichés.

Plans for today, mooching around with my lovely camera then a pachanga round Aranza´s house off of Flickr at 8. Which means “any time but 8”. Aranza came round yesterday for a scanning session of old-school photos and discussed the respective merits of US/ Latin American academic endeavours. I was largely lost as I can barely maintain my side of an academic discussion in English let alone Espanish, still it was lovely to see Atticus make another new friend. I love the tags she put on his photo here… “el galan del barrio” indeed…

…on the blog front, some posts and comments have gone missing in the server change and there’s the usual accent fun that comes from writing apostrophes on a Spanish keyboard, but it looks like all most is right once again with the world of agaveweb.

Coming soon:

1) Proper posts that don’t go on about the state of my hosting
2) 7 reasons why I’ll take Guadalajara over New York each and every time
3) 7 day trips around Guadalajara
4) A run down of our last trip to the states
5) In praise of Pentax DSLRs
6) And much, much more…

We’re leaving this wonderful country towards the end of October, plan your visits now, folks…

Just working out how to change the name servers for AgaveWeb.com then I´ll be up and running again and posting like never before…

In the meantime, Laura from Flickr was kind enough to write this brief hagiography for my profile:

playabalandra74 dice:

“Definición de Gwyn: Un Inglés tapatío con estomago de acero que resiste tacos, tortas ahogadas y demás antojitos mexicanos, afinicionado fiel a las luchas y magnifico fotógrafo del paisaje rural de Jalisco.

Gracias por mostrarnos lo nuestro desde tu muy particular punto de vista atravéz de tus fotos :D”

Read More “Where to start”

Me iPaq is famous for its high quality, low light camera… Who was that masked man? That´ll be Fernando. And Javier´s Groucho…

How many times have I been to the Lucha Libre now? I´ve lost count to be honest. I´m starting to get a bit lucha fatigued, maybe cos of the inordinately long queues at the bar and the bloke who managed to tell me he wasn´t pushing in in front of me at the same exact time as ordering 2 beers with his nationally understood Mexican Hand Gestures… Git.

So anyway, I´ve got my computer back and it´s actually running better than ever. Thanks for your support and kind words during this trying time (Annelise & Dad 🙂 ) I spent a large part of yesterday watching progress bars crawl from left to right, but now I´ve more or less got the system as I wanted and can start working properly. It still sounds like a fridge with the temperature dial on -50 ºC though, but I´m going to get the parts on Ebay and after about 200 bucks should have a well behaved lappy back once again.

Alrighty, back to the grind. Hopefully in a few days I´ll be able to post a link to the fruits of my labours, and you can pick out some of the most expensive handcrafted jewellery Mexico has to offer.

PS Flickr tour #5/#6? to the Guachimontones on Sunday, meeting at 9am by the Arcos… Contact me for details!

Just want to tell the world that I got “ululate” and “anointed’ in a game of online scrabble. And still lost.

As you were.

So once again my laptop has died. I won´t go into details but suffice to say I´ve lost a fair amount of work. Sporadic posting once again will be the flavour of the week. Check out Flickr for some uplifting photos of people hawking their wears on a Sunday market during 10 inches or so of rainfall…

Slowly getting there with me latest ecommerce project… the PHP classes are coming in very hand though I don´t think my code
bares bairs bears close scrutiny… It’s taking up pretty much all of me time though hence the grinding to a halt of blogging this week after an auspicious start. Hey ho.

So it’s Friday so here are some three links to enjoy over the weekend:

Have you seen Cat Face yet? He’s got the body of a cat and the face of cat… There’s 3 episodes that’ll take about 2.5 minutes to look through.

Vector game thingy.

“There are two things that one can a director can add to absolutely any movie to make it at least three times better: zombies, and Gary Oldman”

Alrighty, back to the artisanal jewellery shop…

I finally managed a new minor film review (in the sidebar if you’re using a decent browser), and I’m trying to get back into my blogging groove, but I’ve got a fair bit of “chamba” on at the minute- translating movie scripts, site updates and getting my head around a WordPress e-commerce site.

This is also a test post to see if I can get a LightBox plug in going. Sorry if it screws up the RSS feed as I might need to keep editing this entry.

Yay, it appears to work. Click on John Craven to see another John in a balloon. Make sure the entire page has loaded first mind for the full ajaxy fun.