I had a "business" meeting in the city, so I parked where I always do, not quite in the middle of the road because it is a big old square with loads of dead space around the corners. Not at the kerb though either. But definitely not in anybody's way. None of us -- there were half a dozen cars in the...
Leander Kahney didn't contact me for her story in Wired about the magic of the music shuffle. If she had, I'd have pointed her to this prescient blog entry, the first, and probably the last, time I was moved to share such trivia. It is a fine story nevertheless, touching on many aspects of what makes listening to music such a pleasure. And of course it has the requisite quotes from academics who've latched onto the matter.
"Temporal order is an important element of how a work unfolds dynamically over time, an important factor underlying the aesthetic effect. Random shuffle pretty much flushes that down the toilet."
I had noticed, in developing the soon-to-be-released photoblog, that my stylesheets had got rather out of hand. There were, for example, several tags that had a value of 0px. It is so easy to do stylesheets in a suck-it-and-see kind of way by sticking a quick border around a division to visualize it...
While on the subject of spring and seeds, last weekend I went back to the gardens at the Villa D'Este in Tivoli. The connection is simple enough. The Wisteria buds are at that perfect pre-bursting stage when everything about them says "I promise". And back at home, among the germinating seeds are f...
I've been doing this almost every single year for the past, oh, 35 years and it never fails to amaze me. You bung the seeds in to damp compost, you keep them a bit warm and -- Bam! -- new life. Keeping a lid on my impatience can be hard, and in my current set-up is especially dangerous because ther...
