• All the news that fits

    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
    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.


    View Larger Map

    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.

    I won’t mention it again.

    Gwyn’s (For-the-love-of-all-things-holy,-Get-a) LifeStream

    Probably.

  • 18 posts till I hit 1000

    It's 4:25pm...
    It's 4.25pm. Luckily I don't get up till 8ish these days

    Though ones like this one shouldn’t really count.

    Any suggestions for Post 1000?

  • Through the Kodak Duaflex IV Viewfinder…

    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
    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.

    Here’s the set on Flickr from today and here’s me favourite below:

    Eats, shoots and leaves
    Eats, shoots and leaves

    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.

  • My Home is Nowhere Without You

    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.

  • Heron in the autumn

    I liked the foliage, then the heron gives it that stock photo touch 🙂

  • Autumnal in Oregon

    Posting at a rate of about one a month I’m afraid… Autumn in Oregon is a special time though.

  • Shhh

    The password for link below of DrSita’s latest posters is the name of our dog. No capitals.

    Click here

  • Rat dish

    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…

    Rattish
    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 …

    Photos on flickr from yesterday’s refreshingly dog-less walk. Gorgeous Autumn weather we’re getting now…

  • Follow me…

    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…

    Please don't handle the Monkey Head
    Tribbles

  • Anyone need a website?

    Bread
    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…

    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…

  • Chapala’s full to overbrimming

    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:

    Chapala Tus Olas- by FerdeSanta on YouTube

  • My kind of recipe

    My kind of recipe
    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.

    My kind of recipe

  • Unlucky in photo competitions, lucky in radishes

    So Atticus didn’t win a prize on the LA Times contest… I don’t know what he’d have done with a Nikon D300 anyway. But the 170+ “Best” votes are reward enough, t’was a fun journey and thanks, once again, to everyone who voted 😀

    Yesterday I went to WordCamp Portland and it was a very useful day out. Normally when I go to a conference it’s to see family and friends doing Sociology presentations, or further back, about the finer points of managing a non-profit organisation, but this one yesterday was all about WordPress and blogging and I’ll probably write a techy what-I-learnt-thing post over at the business end of agaveweb.com when I get a moment. It’s definitely spurred me on to developing a couple of free themes from scratch and releasing them into the wild. Maybe a plugin too. It was cheap, cheerful, informative & well-organised. I am proudly wearing my free T-Shirt today. More conferences should have kegs of beer available from lunch time onwards too. Talking of which, I learnt about a Portland institution called Beer and Blog with weekly Friday meetups in PDX, so I might investigate that too. (actual group photo)

    WordCamPDX
    Me in the group photo. Looking a bit knackered. It's the first time in ages that I've been up at 6.30am without air travel involved.

    Despite my disparaging remarks about my allotment a few posts back, I was thinning out the radishes today and pulled up what, to all intents and purposes, look like actual, edible, undamaged radishes. And they taste okay too. Most of them ain’t ready (ripe?- do radishes ripen?) yet but this bodes well… Have a photo:

    Home-grown radishes
    Simply radishing.

    Also last night we barbecued, then finished off the last season of The Wire.

    Today: heading out of the city to see if the leaves are looking properly autumnal yet.

  • Easy Welsh Cakes Recipe

    Mum’s been making Welsh cakes for various civic occasions and passed on the recipe to me….

    You’ll need:

    UK Ingredients

    		US version or what I actually managed to find
    • Milk, Semi-skimmed
    • 2 x eggs
    • Raisins
    • Sugar
    • Marge
    • Mixed spices
    • Self-raising flour
    • Milk, 2%
    • A splash of whatever the merry hell ReddiEgg in a carton is.
    • Raisins
    • Sugar
    • Canola 0g Transfat Harvest Margerine
    • Cinnamon
    • Self-Rising Flour
    Ingredients
    Certified organic ingredients.
    • Mix up flour and marge. Half a pound of marge to a pound of flour…
    • Blend it.
    • Mix in 4 Tablespoons of sugar.
    • Add mixed spice, cinnamon.
    • Beat the egg and milk & mix it into the flour/marge/sugar stuff.
    • Add your raisins/ dried fruit.
    • If it’s too wet still, add more flour.
    • Roll it out to about 1/4 inch thick.Cut it with a shape cutter, or something round.
    • Heat an ungreased, non-stick frying pan up to around 3 (out of 10 on the dial)
    • Heat each side for about 3 minutes till golden brown…
    • Test them on the dog.
    • Wait 10 minutes. If the dog’s still okay. Try one yourself.
    102_2862-1
    Go on, have a welsh cake.

    I’m wondering what’s going to be served up in the ads that accompany this post…