Liam's write-only LJ

I mowed my front lawn yesterday. It really really needed it. I also hacked down the thistles and cleared some of the weeds out of the flowerbeds.

I was shamed into doing this by the really neat job of mowing that a big burly bloke in a vest was doing on the house opposite. The garden consists of nothing but grass, but at least it's neat grass. There was also a new "LET" sign up, too - about the 4th time the place has changed since I moved in. I looked at it months before I saw this place, but as it's fully-detached & as an end plot has a much bigger garden, it was some £20K more than mine.

The slightly doddery but pleasant old chap who bought it last year is not around any more. I fear the worst.

But today I discover the reason for this burst of activity. Today, it's a film set. There's a film crew swarming around the garden, typically quite-cute girlies in jeans fussing around, as busy as a dead dog on an anthill, others lounging in garden chairs, "smokin' a fag".

(Saw a dead dog floating in the canal near Foxton at the weekend. How... nice.)

It's probably The Bill, something I have never seen. Veals Mead is used for location shoots for that quite often - certainly several times a year. It's odd that I have never seen the apparently-cinegenic or at least telegenic location onscreen, but then, I seldom watch the idiot box anyway.

There are big white vans festoned with England flags, parasols - well, big umbrellas - black fabric screens, windows taped over with silver foil. They do so much work to exclude natural light, then replace it with big hot electric lamps. Odd. Makes the Dogme film movement seem much more comphrehensible, in a way. Not that I have seen any Lars von Trier myself.

I suppose if one were into this kind of thing, it'd all be rather exciting. Personally, I find it just a distraction.

Ah well. On with the book...

I got an interesting email recently. It's from a researcher at Hong Kong City University, asking me about why I contribute to Wikipedia. I thought they were interesting questions & I found they led me to answer at some length.

If anyone reading this is also a Wikipedian, you might fancy getting in touch with this chap... Contact me & I'll pass on his details.

The Email

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I am writing to you to ask you about your objectives as a Wikipedia contributor.

My name is Mai Pattarawan. I am an academic at the City University of Hong Kong, researching Wikipedia. Specifically I am interested in the objectives and motivation of Wikipedians who take the time and make the effort to contribute.

I would like to ask you just three questions and hope you will be able to answer:

1. Why do you contribute to Wikipedia? Would you say it is a personal matter, where you enjoy the opportunity to reveal your knowledge on a subject, or a collaborative goal where you enjoy sharing knowledge with others?

2. In what ways do you find your contributing to Wikipedia beneficial? (E.g., satisfaction of building the world’s largest encyclopedia). Would you say these benefits (personal or for the entire community) are felt right away, or do you expect the benefits to arise as time goes by?

3. Do you expect that your contributing more to Wikipedia will lead to others to contribute more?

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( My answers are behind the cut... )

The key skills of snowboarding

Before you can move, the preliminaries:
1. standing up
2. balancing

These aren't as simple as they look, sadly. For example, there's
1. standing up – facing upslope
2. standing up – facing downslope

and
1. balancing on the flat
2. balancing on the toe edge
3. balancing on the heel edge
4. balancing on a slope
5. balancing at speed

There's no secret to balance. You just have to learn it, and the only way is to do it, repeatedly. You are going to fall over a lot. Wear padding, wrist braces and a helmet. Be prepared to hurt. You will. If you can be bothered, train up your leg muscles, especially calves and quadriceps, and do some sit-ups, because you're going to be picking yourself up off the ground a lot.

As for standing up, different ways work for different folks, but for most, especially the less-than-super-fit, the easiest is to hoik your legs in the air, flip the board and then yourself over onto your face, and then stand up facing uphill with your back to the drop. This way you can stand on tip-toe, keeping the uphill edge dug into the snow, and you won't slip. If you're clever or fit enough to flip from lying on your back on the floor onto your feet, then you can jump upright from lying on the ground, landing on your feet on the board. Some people can do this. I can't. Yet.
( Read more... )

Well, that was a full weekend. My cat is in hiding, my garage is once more my own and is half way through a massive reorganization, my house is slightly but significantly emptier of stuff I don't want - the last of Kjersti's stuff that I'm not actively using is gone. Oh, and I might just have sold my first book.

But what I thought I'd put here today was a little bit of a message from an email list I'm on, about why I love the writing of Terry Pratchett.

An acquaintance was saying that he rates Guards, Guards as one of the very best of TP's books, along with Carpe Jugulum, The Last Continent, Maskerade, The Truth, Witches Abroad  and Wyrd Sisters - and also Nanny Ogg's Cookbook - and much better than Small Gods. I had to reply...( Read more... )

I didn't bother with doing a birthday bash this year, but tonight is the next best thing, 'cos it's camies's birthday drinkie tonight at the Cittie of Yorke on Holborn. If you should wish to raise a glass to his anniversary and mine while you're at it, do please drop in!

And while I'm on that theme, hippo birdy to ewe to darth_tigger!

As for me, I have New Toys, and they're the kind that doesn't cost money, which is the best kind of all. By dint of trading lots of stuff to Computer Exchange, I have a 1GB card in my phone. A gigabyte. In a phone. If you count a flash card as memory, as RAM, that's more than any computer I own. Madness. And it was £40 in vouchers and is the size of a stamp. Makes me feel somehow very old. First PC I used and first hard disk I owned were, coincidentally, both 20MB. [Sigh]

I also have a shiny new (-ish - to me, anyway!) notebook computer, a little white Toshiba that tries really hard to look like an iBook. I only wish it were an iBook! It actually replaced an aluminium PowerBook, but the owner, a client of mine, has decided that she really likes the Powerbook as a home computer even if it didn't work for her as an office one, so she won't swap back. Shame! I thought I might be able to parley it into an AlBook for a while there.

NaNoWriMo continues. I've written about 10-15,000 more words, maybe as much as 20K, in the last couple of weeks, but I've got some on one Mac downstairs, some on the Mac upstairs, some on my phone and some on my Psion, so I have no idea what the total is. I fear I am falling way behind target, though.

I've also spent some time finishing up my Norwegian travel exploits. Next to add pictures and then I will upload it, but in the meantime, shout here if you'd like me to post the last few days of it here!

Does anyone want to try one?

I still have some old refurbished machines going spare.

Fastest looking for a home is a PowerMac 4400 - 160MHz PowerPC 603 CPU, 80MB RAM (if I remember rightly), 1.2GB hard disk, Ethernet, MacOS 9.1. Capable very basic Internet machine.

Then there's a LC475, 36MB RAM, 250MB HD, MacOS 8.1 (including install CDs, Norton Antivirus & Utilities, etc.), various apps. Can be supplied with Ethernet card and CD drive for a small consideration - these parts are still worth money!

Finally for now there's a PowerMac 6100/60. PowerPC 601 @ 60MHz, 40MB RAM. Comes with MacOS 8.6 (including install CDs) & various apps. HD yet to be decided but probably a 500MB. No CD but can take an internal SCSI unit.

All come with mouse & keyboard; I should be able to arrange screens for them all as well.

EDIT: sod it, I'll add my old PowerMac 7600/166 as well. About 200MB RAM, 1GB + 2GB SCSI hard disks included, 9GB 2ndary drive negotiable extra. PCI machine. Accepts CPU upgrades to G3 or even G4, in theory runs OS X - I used to run 10.2 on it until some kind of NVRAM corruption set in and made it too unstable.