This is Herman Dune, they were the support band at last night’s Jolie Holland gig. Right now I’m going through the pics from the concert and editing some from our jaunt out to Peter Kerr island this afternoon. Brilliant place, it is. Plenty of colour, the (unrealised) possibility of bald eagle spotting and Atticus even got a wander around off his lead.
No, not for me…
For DrSita: You’ll need our dog’s name again.
The password for link below of DrSita’s latest posters is the name of our dog. No capitals.
I applied for 1 job and 2 gigs today… The job is for temping with more localis(z)ation stuff with UK English for which I’m eminently qualified. The gigs are for web design stuff which I’m qualified for but competing with hundreds of other people locally and internationally in the middle of a deepening economic disaster. Fingers crossed one of them’ll bear fruit.
Also picked another radish from the garden and took some pix…
Righty, off to Starbucks for a coffee. I just received my latest $5 from filling in surveys on how much I hate US Cable TV at epoll.com …
Photos on flickr from yesterday’s refreshingly dog-less walk. Gorgeous Autumn weather we’re getting now…
One of the sessions I enjoyed at WordCamPDX last week was on “Tying your tubes” about funnelling all your internet activity into a “lifestream”, a list of your activity on various social sites like Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Google Reader and the like. The main thrust of it was how to include it in the sidebar using a couple of plugins, but I reckon this blog has enough going on in the sidebar without any more clutter… so, if there’s nothing much to hold your interest on this page, try the brand new LifeStream link on the top right to see what I’ve been uploading/favouriting/sharing around the interwebs. There was all kinds of things to do with Twitter too, but I still can’t work up the energy to tweet regularly. It’s all I can be arsed to do to tell Facebook what my “status” is every few days.
Also, if you were thinking this blog is taking even longer to load these days, it might be because I added a weather widget to the left sidebar. So if you’re wondering how wet it is today in Portland, scroll down a bit and on your left you’ll wonder no more.
This morning we went to the Farmers Market on the PSU campus downtown. I think Mum and Dad were doing something similar in North Petherton. But I’ll bet there weren’t any monkey heads on sale there…
Does anyone know why Flickr has rolled out this page?
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:
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!
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…
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“…
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.
The facebook group has it about right: “If you don’t like Peep Show, you’re probably not worth knowing.” Harsh, but fair.
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.
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.”
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 are good. They used to be for drinking cider and playing guitar in, now they’re for being dragged through by a 25lb + schipperke.
Though it turns out it’s not the place, it’s the company. Still working on finding some Portland pub peeps.
I seem to be making lots of posters lately. Here’s today’s…
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.
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…
Washington Hills
…but without the equipment, technical nor local knowledge.
Yesterday Sudarat was kind enough to invite me along on a trip and picnic out to the waterfalls just north of here as a friend of hers is visiting. Incipient rain proved not to be a problem and instead gave me plenty of material for dramatic sky pictures, long exposure pix of falling water and it brought the sturgeons out to play. Sturgeons? Yep, we went to a fish farm where they had a pond full of the buggers. I skipped the museum before going to take pictures of them and saw the mother of all fishes gliding around the pond. Doing the museum first is too much like reading the manual before playing around with your latest toy for me… Anyroad, a stranger struck up conversation with me as one of them, about a metre plus long, glided into view- “Is that Herman?” she asked. I said I’d only just arrived and wasn’t on first name terms yet. The recording in the museum bit explained that Herman the Sturgeon is the biggest fish in the water, 25 years old or so… and an uglier customer you’d be hard pressed to meet. My fisheye lense seemed appropriate…
We’ve had a fair bit of rain lately too so the waterfalls were even more spectacular than usual… I can’t wait for how they’ll be in a month or two’s time…
We drove over “The Bridge of the Gods” into Washington too. So that’s another state to cross off. Lovely day it was, shame DrSita missed it because of her training schedule. We’ll be back though. We’ve also sourced a great ice cream shop for you, Dad, just round the corner from the trails.
Other news… translations and web design finally seem to be coming in and I’ve an interview next week for another web gig. Today I’m going to make a promotional poster for Sita’s course because since it was advertised late there aren’t many signups just yet. That’ll change once word gets around. Carmen Miranda is going to feature prominently
