Author: richard

The site has been slow lately, and now we know why…

I’m part of a web co-op: we all chip-in to pay for the up-keep of a couple of machines on the web. This site is running on one of the machines. Another of the many sites on the machine is audioscrobbler.com, which has been causing all sorts of problems. I didn’t know anything about it until I read a story in the Guardian today. Interesting stuff, and you’ll be happy to know it’s being re-worked to not kill our machines, and will probably be moved somewhere else soon.

The Brighton Festival (May 3 – May 25) programme dropped through our letter-box today. There’s nothing much that’s leaping out at me. Depressing. There’s “A Seaside Album” photo exhibition of pictures from 1840s to 1990s, which might be good. Lou Reed is down, which is probably something we should go and see. But apart from that…well, maybe if I read the text a little more I’ll find some good stuff.

There’s also the Brighton Festival Fringe and Brighton Fringe Festival, neither of which I’ve looked at in any detail yet.

In related news, this year we’re going to help out with the web site for the Virtual Festival. More on that another time, because I think I’ve gone over my allowance for the word “Festival” today.

Yesterday was my birthday (huzzah) and I have many exciting things to blog about, but for now here’s the summary.

I have a stack of Raymond Carver short stories to read,
I now have a nice looking chunk of moon, Jane found Ripping Yarns on DVD and also found me a very cool retro-looking mini DV recorder (need to find another photo, because it doesn’t look like that).

Update: This is what mine looks like

If that wasn’t “woohoo!” enough, we went out to see Brighton Bears win 107-92 against the Newcastle Eagles. I won’t post up any of the video we took during the game because I need to spend more time learning how to use the DV recorder…

This isn’t going to sound right, but one of the interval “fun things” is the Duck Chuck: people buy ducks and throw them onto the court, and if they land in just the right places prizes are won. Just imagine sitting down, not quite knowing what’s going on, and then 200 small plastic ducks flying through the air onto the court. It leaves a lasting impression, trust me.

We ate at
Picasso as part of our quest for find the very best pizza in Brighton. What we found was Pizza for £3 and a lot of students. It was fine default pizza, better than many other places with the obvious benefit of being amazingly cheap. We’ll be back there, but our quest for the very best in pizza continues…

I used to work on the corner of Spitalfields market. Jane told me about these photos: the BBC are asking for your snaps.

One of my fave pictures of all time: the earth at night (big; there’s a smaller version). The picture was created by joining up photos from satellites, according to the NASA write up.

The web logs for this site tell us that people have been asking search engines questions like “when is pancake day” or “pancake day 2003 UK” and ending up on a page of pancake pictures from last year. Not very helpful. So, for those of your searching for this information….This year, pancake day is Tuesday 4th March (2003).

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Pancake day is always the day before Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday is 40 days before Easter. And you can work out the date for Easter with some maths (including C source code. Woohoo).

I’ve been reading bits of the The Sydney Morning Herald (Jono‘s fault), and it made for interesting reading: Eriksson upbeat despite loss (BBC) vs.
Savour the perfect 10 (SMH). More interesting, though, is the SMH’s take on the UK press (‘Load of roo-bish’ causes a stink on Fleet Street) and the BBC’s take on the Australian press (Pom-bashing gathers pace).

It’s quite odd getting different perspectives from “local” sources. I might add the San Francisco Chronicle to my reading too.

I’ve been a fan of Terry Gilliam films
for a while,
although he’s perhaps more famous for the not
making films, or almost making films, or maybe for film
studious worrying about the films he makes with huge
piles of their money. While trying
to track down the DVD version of Brazil, I spotted
the following on the Terry Gilliam Fanzine:
“Lost in La Mancha gains BAFTA nomination”. Turns out
that Lost in La Mancha
is the documentary of the making of his film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote that failed to be
made (did that make any sense?). Lost in La Mancha was apparently released
in August 2002, and should be on DVD by the end of the month (view the trailer).

Warning! You may find britishpathe.com addictive.
Just browse their archive of film from the 1896 to the 1970s by hitting the “Lucky dip” button.
I’ve just been looking at images of Brighton’s West Pier from 1933. The preview of the clip gives you
some descriptive text, but to actually view the movie you need to fill out a form and then download
the (Windows) media file. The very low quality preview is free (oddly they email you an invoice)
and has a seriously annoying “(c) BRITISH PATHE PREVIEW ONLY” banner stuck 2/3 of the way down the screen for the whole movie.
Still, you can splash
out and buy the high-quality version if you really wanted to.

Promisied for spring this year: 12 million still images.