Status-Q

Hap and I headed off for a fabulous day's kayaking in Puget Sound yesterday.

This is Blake Island, WA. Legend has it that Chief Seattle was born here.

This little chap fluttered down for the first time today from his nest above our kitchen window. He landed on the garden table.

He sat there squeaking for a little while, then stretched his legs.

And then he hopped up onto the chair:

before flying away down the garden to a rather inaccurate landing in a bush at the far end.

Given how much energy his parents have been devoting to feeding him over the last couple of weeks, I think he'll be off to a good start in life.

I wrote about the ability in the new Mac OS X to drive portrait-mode displays. Normally, on Powerbooks, this only applies to external displays. There is, however, a hidden way to rotate the internal display, which can be nice if you want to view a whole page:

Open System Preferences (it mustn't already be running) and hold down Alt while clicking the Displays icon. You'll then get the option to rotate the display.

Warning! This doesn't rotate the trackpad! It can therefore be a fun challenge to manipulate the cursor after doing this. If you have a mouse, you can turn either it or the laptop through 90 degrees and everything is easy! This works quite well:

Fountains Abbey - the cellarium
Our noisy neighbours
Storm damage
Shadows
A distant Rose. Not too crowded up here...
Very peaceful. Sheep are good lawnmowers.

Well, almost! We've been spending the last week in this rather sweet, early-18th-century cottage in the Lake District:

There is, of course, no such thing as broadband here, and almost no phone line. There is cellphone coverage outside in places, but the walls, which are nearly three feet thick, stop it penetrating into the house. I found, however, that I could get a phone signal if I sat on one of the window-sills, which are quite nice spots for telephoning but a little cramped for using a laptop.

Fortunately, of course, with Bluetooth, I don't have to be right beside the phone. So I'm typing this while sitting on the sofa in front of a blazing fire, and uploading it via a phone which is perched in the window just to the right of the door.

I'm working on a substantial document at present, which involves lots of cross-referencing between sections. It really helps to be able to refer to more than one section of the document at once. Here's the setup I like best:

This is Word 2004, showing three windows onto the same document. The top one, where I do most of the work, also has the document map switched on, for quicker navigation. I've used two separate windows on the lower display, rather than showing two pages side-by-side in one wide window, so that I can scroll them independently.

The other good thing about this arrangement is that it covers up everything else, which helps to reduce distraction!

Pixels are addictive. The more you have of them, the more you want. I'm just waiting for my pals at Newnham Research to produce something for the Mac...

A pronunciation guide for Cyrillic characters:

I flew home from Moscow this afternoon.

When I was last in Red Square in 1981, the guards were goose-stepping up and down in front of the Kremlin wall.

Yesterday, not only could I go inside the Kremlin, but a guard inside was feeding the birds.

Very different memories...

Well, I'm in Nizhni Novgorod for a workshop on Proactive Computing. We came through Moscow on the way here, and the airport looks very different from when I last visited it in pre-Perestroika 1981.

Some aspects of Nizhni airport still have the good old Soviet feel, though.