From the Guardian’s media blog:
Before Dumped it had never really occurred to me that when you throw something away it actually goes somewhere.
It made me feel suddenly very very tired.
(Yep, Channel 4 is running a show about rubbish [AmEng: trash]. Stop laughing at the back.)
Go to the farmers’ market and buy good things. Eat a lot. Drink wine.
Watch Buffy season 2.
Listen to a lot of XTC albums.
Consider the urgent question of what to watch after I’ve eaten my curry goat: a) Buffy 3; b) Spaced series 1; c) Freaks & Geeks?
Who says blogging is a trivial, self-indulgent pastime?
Yesterday I went along to Sheffield Farmers’ Market, which seemed surprisingly small considering that it’s August Bank Holiday weekend and the weather was lovely. A little disappointing.
It wasn’t just the size. I don’t know whether this is just Sheffield or whether there’s a more general trend in farmers’ markets, away from being places packed with lots of great quality and relatively cheap raw ingredients to cook for yourself.
There were plenty of stalls selling pies and pasties, tubs of interesting ready-cooked dishes, cakes (some very good cakes!), bread, preserves and sauces. But fresh fruit and veg, meat, cheeses, what I’d think of as the essential ingredients of a farmers’ market - these all seemed a bit thin on the ground. I’m not saying the former type of stall shouldn’t be there - it was all good, interesting, local produce (and I’m looking forward to trying out my tub of curry goat) - but the balance between the two types of stall seemed different from what I’ve been used to in the past.
Are farmers’ markets starting to turn into high-class fast-food markets?
Yes, it’s that time of year again! (And I haven’t written on the topic lately so I’m not bored with it yet.) [Update: but I am bored with looking at it now so most of it’s going under the fold until I think of something new to say.]
The latest diatribe against Mickey Mouse HE courses (pdf) is out, ‘The Non-Courses Report’, produced by a group called the Taxpayers Alliance. And for once, there seems to have been some effort at proper research; not all of the courses listed are full Bachelors level degrees, but they do all seem to be at minimum Foundation degrees or other minimum two year courses. (So at least we’re not talking about another story that finds a single module or one-term course with a wacky title from a minute HE college that doesn’t even award degrees and then shrieks UNIVERSITY DEGREES GOING DOWN THE TUBES!!!)
The report is a fascinating mixture of the sensible, peculiar and shoddy. The authors say they have asked two questions, which sound fairly reasonable: (more…)
Henrik has posted the latest edition of Carnivalesque at Recent Finds, and for reasons outwith his control, he was unable to include some of the most recent nominations made via the Blog Carnival submissions form. So I’m posting them here as a supplement (with a couple of links I hadn’t got round to sending Henrik).
Van de Venne’s Album posted at Giornale Nuovo
Parish registers: the new novel? posted at Renaissance Lit
The Lost Power Point Slides (Armada Edition) posted at the skwib
August 15: John Metcalf, aka “Blind Jack” (1717-1810) posted at Disability Studies, Temple U.
Martin wants to excavate the Harbour of the Sheaf Kings
From Cardinal Wolsey, some notes on the origins of the Ordnance Survey
Remember these babies?
Some of my fondest memories of my summer research trip to Kew three years ago revolve around the fresh fruit ‘n’ veg stall at Richmond Farmers’ Market, which was run by this barmy and slightly despotic European chap (never did work out where from. I’m useless at accents).
Also barmy and possibly despotic, but in the nicest possible minor-public-school English-treasure way, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall just evoked all sorts of memories of that summer and its fruits with this column devoted to tomatoes.
Mmmmmmm….
Oh dear. And after all the nice things I said about Firefox the other day.
So, it’s just crashed twice three times this morning, on top of having to be forcibly restarted twice after freezing up yesterday. (Silver lining: ‘restore sessions’. Up to a point.)
Hmm.
Update: Four times. Re-install?
Further update: Looks like it might be a problem with Zotero (I installed an update yesterday). Uh-oh.
Final update: In the interests of not putting people off The Joy of Firefox (and, truly, it does rock), I don’t think it was a Firefox problem after all. It was just that Firefox was the first application to start crashing. And then everything else was going down like dominoes… So, swivel and point at the damned computer. Some cleaning up and a reboot later, hoping it’s going to be OK. Because the idea of going through all the possible diagnostics to reinstalling the OS does not thrill me. One. Little. Bit.
For fans of the great 13th-century Welsh poet, a lovely new online edition and translation of the poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym.
Incidentally, looking up Dafydd’s biography led to the discovery that the National Library of Wales has vastly improved the usability of its Welsh Biography Online. (Believe me, it used to be truly awful.) And the ever-expanding Digital Mirror has also had an overhaul of its user interface fairly recently.
The university is implementing a new computer system that will apparently do everything bar tie our shoelaces for us. (Yes, you know this can’t turn out well, don’t you?)
And so I’m reading the instructions for setting up my browser (only IE6 or FF2 allowed?… not starting too good, is it?). And the very first thing they want me to do to Firefox is to make new pages open in a new window instead of a new tab.
And yes, it’s a little thing. Except it isn’t that bloody little. FF tabs are a reasonably big deal for me. There are many reasons I use Firefox, but the tabbed browsing is not the least significant. Tabs are my buddies, and I have a lot of ‘em. I don’t want to have a load of open windows cluttering up the computer. Surely I’m not alone?
Fortunately, I’m only likely to use this system once or twice a month. If it’s really that critical, I can tweak the settings as and when. (I might even bring myself to use IE… although I’ve just remembered that I upgraded to IE7.) But that’s not the bloody point. What am I supposed to think about a computer “system” that isn’t sophisticated enough to be able to deal with a key feature of the software I work with every day and that helps me get my job done?
Annoying enough so far. But do you know what was the final straw? I wandered over to the help pages for the system (just wondering if they might be a bit more useful than most of the university’s computing so-called help pages). And apparently
[systemName] is all about you
Not to mention that it’s
putting you in control…
There’s one thing worse than being forced (by employers, institutions, politicians and all the rest) to use bureaucratic, inflexible systems that at best cause us inconvenience and at worst make our lives downright bloody miserable. And it’s being told that the aforesaid systems are not bureaucratic and inflexible at all. No, no, they’re all about us! They don’t really take away our choices and control over our lives, whatever gave us that silly idea?! They’re really putting us in control - look, it says so here!
When I saw this book, the first thing I had to do was find a copy online. So, thanks to the Internet, within five minutes of seeing the pictures and going ‘ooooh…’, my credit card had been raided and my order placed. It was much less expensive than I expected…
A little toast to Bookfinder seems in order.
Update (Thursday): Have book. It’s utterly delightful.
The sparkly new all-singing all-dancing criminal bibliography.
It’s been quite a learning experience. As it turns out, there are quite a few free applications out there that will publish bibliographies online, as long as you can handle databases. (If you’ve ever installed Wordpress on a server, you already have an inkling; if phpmyAdmin is installed on your server, it makes it much easier than you might think.)
(This is a long and rather geeky post, so I’ll put the rest below the fold…)
Apparently Elton John wants to Just Say No to the entire Internet. The source is the Scum, so he probably never said anything of the sort, but can any of us even begin to imagine the idea?
(I’d be out of a job, for a start.)
Life without the blogs, news, music downloads, youtube videos, recipes, LOLcatz, and other assorted things that cheer up your day?
Without Google on hand to answer all those troubling little questions that you once had to trudge to the library for (and if you got that far you probably wouldn’t find the answers anyway because you wouldn’t know where to look)?
Without all your favourite places to spend money at the click of a mouse? Without IMDB? Without email?
Without all your online library catalogues, electronic journals, primary sources?
Without my website?!
Does refusing to Facebook make me some kind of Luddite?
(Apart from anything else, unless there’s a good security reason, I hate things that you have to sign up and log in to use. I have enough passwords to remember already.)