I won’t write too much about the interview, ‘cos there’s a good chance I’ll be googled and they’ll find this post if it went well enough. On Facebook I put in my status that I was wondering what to wear and received sartorial advice ranging from optimal tie patterns to clingfilm with strategically placed Sarah Palin stickers. I then announced I was going to wear my Ghostbusters T-shirt and got these words of encouragement…
The best thing was the ghost GLOWED in the freakin' dark
Alan: Best of luck, Gwyn.
Stuart F: Who they gonna call?
Joop: Did someone give you the questions?
Paul: dont get slimed
Alina: You gonna be a ghostbuster and all?
Emma: definatley the best choice of attire for, well, any occassion. be sure to mention in the interview that you “aint afraid of no ghost” in your best english accent
Annelise: Good Luck!
Ricardo: Are they going to ask you to take the TOEFL?
Facebook is often a lot of fun…
Other news. DrSita’s in North Carolina right now. Apparently in the airport there’s a mexican restaurant called La Tequileria or somesuch. News of her adventures soon…
Cut and paste: agaveweb.com/tequila to see a site in progress for some mates of mine in Guadalajara and their new language school.
I’m starting a new photoblog just for my Through the Viewfinder photos. I’m at the design stage right now. Because of the number of strange looks I get when I’m wielding my dual camera contraption and the occasional person asking me what it is, I’m thinking it’d be handy to have a business card with the site on it so they can see (buy??) the photos and learn more about the technique. Might take a while though, but I want to get something up because the other day I won 1000 free business cards and I need a domain for it. Any suggestions for a domain name? IsThatAPeriscope.com …
I’ve been posting about some of my latest projects over at agaveweb.com in the hope of drumming up some business and lending a bit more colour to the CVs I’m sending out to temp companies.
Other than that, it’s been pretty quiet this side of the pond/Rio Grande. It was frosty this morning and has since given way to glorious sunshine. I can see it through the little window in my underground bunker… I nipped out to the park yesterday with the PenDak Chimera and took a few longer exposure shots. I think I’d need some kind of retort stand to properly keep everything still enough for anything longer than 1/5th of a second, but I liked this one…
Exposed
The next step is learning how to focus more ‘into’ the image, rather than on the border and dust particles. I might have to re-engineer the cardboard and I’m guessing there’ll be something to do with the aperture too.
Sally & Martin arrive tomorrow night. Driving from LA to here in 2 days is quite a trek.
and a quick way to put a couple of thousand miles on the odometer. So we’re thinking of things to do (expect yet more waterfall pictures…) and where/what to eat.
Judging from the pageview stats, no one cares in the slightest about my lifestream… I’m not taking it personally, FSM knows I’m happy enough you keep coming back to read this nonsense. But give it a go, cos if this page hasn’t been updated there might well be something of interest over there. There’s a distinct bias towards photography tutorials and flickr activity, but once I find out how to put my reddit faves in there as well, there’ll be a lot of good stuff.
Our friends Gina and Evan had us round for dinner the other night and showed me their dual lens camera. Since they don’t make film for these things any more the idea is you take a picture with another camera Through the Viewfinder (Ttv) of what it sees. You end up with slightly distorted, vignetted, dusty, square images that are really pleasing to the eye. I was inspired and bought the first camera I saw on eBay. It’s been a while since I used eBay and my original bid of 5 dollars was soon outbid and I got caught up in the competitive bidding and finally snapped it up (pun intended) at the last second for 20 bucks and it arrived today. You can probably get them cheaper, but what the hell…
The next step after cleaning the lens and mirror a bit was making it light proof, there’s a tutorial on how to make a perfectly fitting tube, but I couldn’t be arsed with all that… I ripped up the box it came it and went into a sellotaping frenzy… 10 minutes later… behold!
The Kodak Duaflex IV/ Pentax K110 Chimera
Next step is wandering around seeing things from a waist-high angle for a while and getting used to the mirror image while Drsita and Atticus look on bemusedly.
To make a long story short, I’m very happy with me new toy.
Other news… we’re looking forward to Sally and Martin’s visit in a few days. Had a lovely weekend and met the neighbours properly. And still no major news on the work front.
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.
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…
Im in ur economic downturn, stealin' ur cheez
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 …
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…
Ingredients from Trader "Giotto's" and New Seasons...
Seriously, anyone need a poster, bespoke powerpoint presentation, a logo, translation…anything dammit… huge discounts for friends. Since the answer to that question seems to be no (at the moment), I’ll keep perfecting my house-husband skillz.
I noticed George has published a photo of the banner I made t’other day, in action at the SF blues festival: (I’ll just link to the picture cos the site’s not live yet I think)
Yesterday seemed as good a day as any to make some bread. Drsita was out earning a living, Atticus was uncommonly mopey (he’s not big on low pressure fronts). So I downloaded a recipe, printed it out, decided it was wrong and thought to myself, well I can make pizza dough, I reckon bread’s probably the same with more yeast. So I nipped to New Seasons round the corner and assembled the ingredients. Flour and yeast, and some ‘erbs from the garden. A bit of mixing, kneading, prodding and one minor burn later…
Behold: Basic Portland, Oregano Bread…
The sous chef looks on expectantly
Needs more salt, but it’s alright. The last time I cooked bread was probably in Kingston St Mary Primary School circa 1982. Now there’s someone whose site needs a makeover… even if it’s just replacing the MS Comic Sans with a real font…
It’s great seeing the photos on Flickr of Lake Chapala. Ten years ago the worry was it was going to dry up completely, but after a couple of years’ record rain, it’s back to the highest levels I’ve ever seen. Combine that with high winds and it takes on a whole new aspect. One of my Flickr friends, FerdeSanta has published a series of photos and also posted this video to YouTube:
My kind of recipe Posting direct from Flickr… Here’s Nostromoo‘s 2nd batch of Welsh Cakes… and evidence of probably the first time anyone has printed my blog out on paper.
