Status-Q

For those in the Cambridge area not heading for Strawberry Fair to smoke illegal substances, I’d strongly recommend the Cambridgeshire Art Fair at Chilworth Hall, the best art exhibition/sale I’ve been to in a long time.

The quality of work was, I thought, very high, and with nearly 50 exhibitors from all over the country, many of them galleries showing several artists, there’s bound to be something to suit everyone’s tastes, if not their budgets.

Highly recommended, but the last day is tomorrow, so you’ll need to be quick.

Hee hee…. this is fabulous…

At the ‘rapture’, when all good Christians will be whisked away to heaven, they may be kicking themselves that they didn’t leave behind some words of wisdom for their loved ones below, perhaps a last plea for them to accept the gospel. My knowledge of escatological theology is far too rusty for me to remember whether changing your mind at this stage is actually an option still on offer, but if it is, I’d have thought that the sudden disappearance of millions of people would be enough of a hint that it might be worth considering.

However, if you’re still worried, you can relax because there is, of course, a web service to cater even for this. At YouveBeenLeftBehind.com you can upload and store securely all your important messages and documents, which will automatically be sent by email to those who are left, a few days after the rapture occurs.

You can include your bank account details, powers of attorney etc so that your unfortunate friends and relatives can have fewer legal hassles after you’ve gone because, let’s face it, that’s the last thing anyone wants to worry about as they prepare for the everlasting fires of Hell.

Thanks to Bill Thompson for the link. Wonderful stuff.

The Telectroscope looks very cool, and some of the ideas further down in Tom Taylor’s post are just the kind of things we want to do with CODA before long.

My friend Phil Endecott has a webcam in the bird box on the side of his house, where some bluetits have made their nest.

You can see them here, where you’ll also find a great sequence of photos and movies of some of the more exciting moments in their lives so far.

Great stuff.

The fact that I have both an iPod Touch and a Nokia E61 in my pocket means that, over the last year or two, I’ve come to assume that I can find out almost anything wherever I am. At lunch today, out in the garden, the word ‘sardonic’ came up in conversation, and I wondered about its etymology. Could it have something to do with Sardinia? Was the population of the island once noted for its cynicism? Here’s the answer, by the way, which was trivial to find out while sipping a glass of Rioja in the sunshine.

This is made much easier since most of the places I go to look things up are now easily-accessible icons on my iTouch screen:

Another example – Rose has decided, after avoiding clothes shopping as much as possible for the last couple of decades, to do a little catching up. But she won’t buy anything without my encouragement and approval, especially since prices seem to have risen somewhat in that period.

The upshot is that I’ve spent a lot of time in the “husband’s chair” in women’s clothing stores recently, and have been grateful for having the web at my fingertips. In one store today, I liked the music that was playing, and by typing a few words of the lyrics into Google was able to discover the name of the song and artist. What’s more, since the Apple Store opposite had wifi, I was able to buy and download a copy of the song from iTunes before Rose came out of the fitting room. All without getting out of the chair. All without using a PC – in fact simply using the kit in the pockets of my shorts.

And I pondered just how fast the world had changed.

As I, and many of my friends, become more frequent posters to Twitter or Facebook, I suspect the frequency of blog posts decreases somewhat. Is this a good thing? Wheat and chaff, and all that?

Do longer and more thoughtful posts now make it onto blogs for the benefit of posterity while shorter and more trivial stuff that once polluted the RSS stream is now swept swiftly away in the flow of tweets? Or is this post evidence to the contrary?

Answers to ‘quentinsf’ on the social network of your choice… 🙂

We’re looking for software people – we’ve had a lot of good candidates already, so that one is going to close very shortly – but we’re also now looking for a Sales & Marketing Director who’ll have a very significant role in the business.

More info here.

Wow – this is a cool story!

Many thanks to Bill Thompson for the link.

Roger McGuinn, partly in an effort to save some old folk tunes from being lost, has released a number of recordings for free at FolkDen.com, under a Creative Commons licence.

Many of them are really quite good, if you like that kind of thing. I keep finding myself humming Blow the Man Down after listening to his recording, for example. Recommended.

Following on from my previous post about dull politicians, I’m glad to see that Boris Johnson got off to a good start.

He denounced as ridiculous the lights at Trafalgar Square. “They are red for one minute 45 seconds and go green for only 12 seconds!” He vowed to fix this as the audience shouted “Yeah! Yeah!”.

It’s splendid stuff – more here. I only hope Sir Roderick Glossop doesn’t turn up and spoil the fun.

Mac users will appreciate these poster designs.