Status-Q

At my high school, we had a small, old-fashioned printing press. I was allowed to use it once – but under careful supervision, because it was deadly.

It had a big flywheel which was gradually spun up to speed by a treadle, and which regulated the rhythm of the ink rollers picking up the ink, rolling it over the type, and the type coming up and being pressed onto the paper. You had to put the successive sheets of paper in by hand, but you didn’t want to leave your hand there too long because the flywheel had a lot of momentum, and it wouldn’t have stopped simply because there was a hand between the type and the paper…

But I loved it, and that brief half-hour experience made quite an impression on me, fortunately only metaphorically!

So I loved this 6-minute documentary about a small press in Massachusetts, which celebrates all aspects of printing the old-fashioned way.

Sunshine in Seattle a couple of days ago. Stifling heat in Detroit last night. Am now in Toronto and it’s raining…

Paint the room with this.

I’m a bit late in posting this, but the pictures are worth seeing if you haven’t already.

It looks as if we haven’t quite nailed down all the potential issues with batteries yet!

This isn’t the first time Dell has had this problem, though, to be fair, they have such market coverage that if anything goes wrong with any machine, it’s likely to be a Dell, through simple statistics.

I may take any ‘battery recall’ notices a little more seriously in future.

Ingo Gunther makes globes. About a thousand of them so far, showing all sorts of different views of the world. The one above is called Mountains of Debt, but others show satellite coverage, population, pollution, gold deposits…

You can see many of them here and listen to him talking about them on IT Conversations.

I was in our local hospital today for a minor checkup – nothing serious – and in fact I’d never been there as a patient before so it took me a while to find the right department.

“Are you here to see Sister Ruth?”, asked the receptionist, and I said that I wasn’t quite sure, but it sounded plausible. I took a seat and waited for the matronly figure in a white coat to appear.

“Mr Stafford-Fraser? I’m Ruth.”, said a voice, and I looked up to see an exceedingly pretty and… ahem… curvaceous young blonde in a tight, brightly-coloured top, short skirt and high-heeled shoes.

“Now”, she said, leaning over me. “I’m just going to take your pulse and measure your blood pressure”.

And are you also running a control experiment?, I wondered…

Hugh Fraser of Blog Relations has been visiting my friends at Exbiblio. I think he captures the spirit nicely.