cup of sugar?

ornamental poultry

With all of the talk about H5N1 chicken viruses and so on, one 's mind can't help but turn to ornamental poultry.

I can't quite remember what its for, but this suitably extreme example should help other people realise the potential. For more examples, where else to turn, other than (ahem) chickscope. And how do you mail chickens?

Why, in an hen-velope, of course.

zoom

I've been using zoom clouds to generate a cloud of tags based upon my most frequent posts, for a few days now. However, the tag lists it creates seem to be somewhat unpredictable.

I'm sure there is logic in it somewhere, but I'm finding the results somewhat puzzling. I shall leave it in my page for another couple of weeks to see whether it tunes itself and gives a more rational set of tags than at present.


How sweet to be a cloud, floating in the blue.
Lying awake, late the other night
Heard above me a trembling,
I looked up, it was a little cloud,
From which a gold string was dangling;
You know, I gave the string a little pull,
Just to see what was on the other end.
Just then a voice came down to me, says,
"Hey, now, don't you want to be my friend,
And float with me to distant lands,
wondrous and fair;
Float with me to distant lands wondrous and fair?
You see I'm just a happy little cloud,
I laugh and float and sing my song,
But the other clouds don't like me none.
They say I am behaving very wrong.
You see a cloud's supposed to be sad,
To cry and weep and tear its hair and all,
And don't matter how hard I try,
I can't get the first little tear to fall."
And float with me to distant lands, wondrous and fair;
Float with me to distant lands, wondrous and fair;
I said, "Hey, I like you little cloud,
You are a nice little fellow, yes."
You making some, kind of a joke?, said the cloud,
Now can't you see I'm wearing such a pretty dress?
You see I am the prettiest little chick cloud
That you'd find anywhere up above.
I just dropped in on you awhile
To see if you could give me some kind of love.
And float with me to distant lands, wondrous and fair;
Float with me to distant lands wondrous and fair;
Just then the chief cloud come into view
And says, "Hey, girl, now what you think you're doing there?
I told you so many times before
You just don't seem at all to care.
You know you should be floating up above, now
Don't let me catch you down here again."
And as my cloud pulled out of view,
There come failing down a gentle shower of rain.
Happy rain come failing down,
Red, green, blue and golden.
And every drop, as it fell, it smiled
And, throwing back its head, began singing,
"Oh float with me to distant lands, wondrous and fair;
Float with me to distant lands, wondrous and fair. "
Incredible String Band

Hot Cross Buns

I'm sure this post title may confuse Americans, but we Brits are coming into the period where we eat Hot Cross Buns before Easter Weekend. I have seen the American varieties of these with icing/frosting/chocolate for crosses and various additional surfaces, but only a proper candied peel version which has been toasted and then drenched in butter will do!

The origins of hot cross buns are mixed with pagan traditions with Saxons offering them as sacrifices to their goddesses.

The cross represented the four quarters of the moon to certain ancient cultures, while others believed it was a sign that held supernatural power to prevent sickness.

To the Romans, the cross represented the horns of a sacred ox (bun/boun means 'ox' in ancient English). The Christian church adopted Hot Cross Buns as part of their missionary conversion of pagans.

It is popularly dated back to the 12th Century that HXBs were first linked with Christianity, using small spicy cakes stamped with a cross. It is said that families hung the buns from their kitchen ceilings to protect their households from evil for the year to come. Then during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign in the 16th Century, ‘backward - lookers’ were reportedly tried for Popery for signing the cross on their Good Friday buns. The accused often claimed that it was necessary to mark a cross on the dough, to ensure that the buns would rise.

Me, I'm just about to pop one in the toaster!

saxy

Looking forward to a visit from Ray the Sax at the weekend. I suspect a little Jazz may occur.

Thursday Thirteen (V18)

1. I was surprised last night that some people had already loaded their Thursday Thirteen blogs. Very keen.
2. Today I noticed that the Apple announcement about Windows working on a Mac was circulating.
3. You can get Apple's info about the software to make this work here and there's a handy little article about it here

4. I ran a link to the Windows story back on the 20th March.
5. It is strange seeing the long list of Windows style driver and installation errors published on the Apple web site. I'm used to running Macs that just work.
6. There's around 150 photos of the Mac running WIndows on flickr here
7. BBC Radio is doing a survey of how much music we all listen to in an average day. You can download the diary to complete here
8. Spent part of the day PowerPointing for a presentation tomorrow.
9. Had a strange IM debate about the continuum between tweaking, twiddling and frobnicating.
10. Just enjoying a slice of Emmental cheese.
11. Is still my favourite number;
12. I have turned over the cushion with the large hole in it, but I still know its there.
13. I threw away an entire 1.75mx1m filing cabinet's worth of paper during this week. Is that spring cleaning?

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!
Leanne, Chickadee, Judy, Raehan, Janne, Andrea, cq, amanda, venus, elle, mar, tnchick, kimmy
(leave a comment, I'll add you here!)

Get Leanne's Thursday Thirteen code here!
Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! Leave your link as a comment and I will link to you and you can continue the chain!



Tag: Thursday Thirteen, free link friday

almost wordless wednesday

Here's one I took earlier. Del Coronado, San Diego.
[open trackback enabled]

around the world twice

I've just gone through the 50,000 mile barrier in my car. Its actually on around 52,000 now and the car is 29 months old. Thats 1,793 miles per month.

With an average of 600 miles and 14 driving hours between refills, that makes my average speed 43mph at 13.4 kilometres(8.3m) per litre or 37.9 miles per gallon (thats 31.6m per smaller US gallon)

I calculate that I've filled it 87 times averaging £62 ($108) per refill which totals £5,373 and spent 1,213 hours behind the wheel or 51 days of 24 hours (say 20 full days per year, or 1.5 days per month). Buying the same amount of fuel in the USA would cost around half, in US dollars.

The distance I've driven in that time is around the equivalent of twice around the earth at the equator and the equivalent of driving 58.9 miles every day that I've had the car.

romance

First sighted yesterday. Click the icon to experience.

record label logo

March was supposed to be the month to finish the edit of 'The Triangle' - which was the NaNoWriMo novel from last November. I'm only about two thirds of the way through that, but I suppose its because we started the Christina Nott project at the same time.

We already have several tracks worth of songs and when we get to thirteen, I suppose I could post them as a Thursday Thirteen (a few weeks yet!). However, we've decided to set up a record label in any case and are doing this via last.fm. That way we can also showcase the songs - and ideally other folks' re-mixes - somewhere.

Like the novel, this is all really just a bit of fun. We will use the same name for the record label as the media company being used for the production at the Edinburgh Fringe in August. Christina's site has already described the Bongo Club, which is where that show will be featured. We have already got the website working but I won't publish a link yet, as we still have some cleanup to complete before its ready for prime-time and a suitable launch party.

ipod it back together and it works

Well its after mid-day here so I suppose I'd better admit to the last post being related to it being 1st April. This post is an update on the dead iPod. I decided that as it didn't work at all, there was nothing to lose by opening it up. Not as easy as it sounds, because it is built without any obvious screw holes or similar. Enter the guitar plectrum. Ideal to slide down the side of the case and then to follow with a not so slender screwdriver to ping the plastic clips holding the metal back to the white plastic front.

• Separate the pieces rather gently because there's bound to be fragile connections between the two halves.
• Press all the obvious looking connectors to ensure good electrical links.
• Do the special iPod reset (top button and middle button held down for four seconds).
• Yes a menu and no disk clicking sounds.
• Whilst still in pieces, plug into computer and fire up iTunes.
• Yippee. Recognised!
• Now I might as well reload all the tunes so that its up to date. Phew.

I've made the photo enlargeable for this so if anyone else is stuck with a dead iPod they can see some of the detail of the clips and the fragile ribbon connectors between the front and the back.
Tag: iPod, repair iPod, open iPod

powerful ideas

April marks the start of the grass mowing season, and I'm fed up with those powercords that have to drape over one's shoulder and back to a nearby socket. So these Wireless Extension Cords are a brilliant idea - just plug the base station into a standard wall outlet, and plug whatever you need into the satellite unit. The unit uses microwaves in the 7.2GHz range (well away from wireless networks and bluetooth frequencies).

Now, all you need to do is adjust the antennae on the two units so they are aimed at each other, but the amazing thing is they are 'wide angle' so theres no need to be particulalry accurate. Turn everything on and you have the power! The distance the WEC units can broadcast differs from situation to situation (due to interference of such things as walls, power lines, and nearby microwave ovens), but I'm told they can beam power over 300 feet! There is a small warning about sustained use and not putting sensitive electrical equipment, food, liquids, flammable substances, magnets, or living things in between the base and satellite units for long periods, buy hey - who wants to trip over power cords! My thanks to thinkgeek for this.

On a similar topic, around innovation, I recently acquired one of the screened sphorbs that thinkgeek have been advertising. Its fantastic and although at first I thought it might have been a foolish purchase, now I can't imagine how I'd go back to not using it. There's a great demo of it across on thinkgeek. I suspect you'll end up wanting one.

And finally, I introduced some customisation to this blog a couple of weeks ago with the selectable folders and so on, but not as sophisticated as The Register which has taken web customisation to an art form. Check it out!