At 6k:
I sort of knew this. I now know it better. I might buy this book. I now need a longer sentence, one that drives the point home a bit, but not too much, because after all I didn’t think of this, I just nicked it.
LATER (also from 6k): Plummenausfahrtwunderschein. In Germany, if you want to drive your point home really hard, you don’t construct a long sentence. You construct a long word.
Any person who have had anything to do with IT (aka everybody) knows, when IT work is being done (even something as humble as doing some rearranging of a little blog like this one), that the word “should” can cover a multitude of unforeseen disruptions. So, maybe the little round of maintenance issues that Michael was dealing with over the weekend and then again this morning (he refers to them in comment 4 here) have, in reality, not yet been entirely sorted. But Michael and I both believe we have good reason to hope that, now, they have been.
One thing that you may have suffered from is that if you clicked on a link from a posting here to another posting here you may, depending on when you did this, have been told “about: blank”, instead of getting to the linked posting. This was caused by the fact that this blog was being migrated (to somewhere cheaper) but migrated before its name had been migrated. It changed its name from “brianmicklethwaitsnewblog” to “3.8.5.22”, and helpfully changed all the links from here to somewhere else here accordingly. It had then to be persuaded that its name was still brianmicklethwaitsnewblog. Which it now has been. As in: should have been.
Other strange things happened this morning, but they too have stopped, and so, touch wood and hope to die, all should now be well. If all from where you sit seems not to be well, please comment to that effect. (That’s assuming the comments system is itself working. Follow the above link and you’ll learn of three lost comments from last night.)
What I’m basically saying is: Sorry if you’ve been mucked about, but with any luck it should have stopped now.
Recently seen on Facebook, with that little “world” thingy at the top, which (I think) means he doesn’t care who reads it, beyond his circle of Facebook regulars:
I have had a problem with the hosting of the domain that my Gmail account is linked to with the result that it couldn’t receive email for several days. During that time I had to spend a ridiculous amount of time online and on the telephone sorting out something that wasn’t my fault. Suffice it to say that I am very impressed with the customer service of DiscountDomain24 (German company out of Saarbrucken) and I am really not impressed with Google’s. For those not familiar with Britspeak “really not impressed” means “I think their customer service stinks like a month old corpse in a pile of steaming shit”. Still, all working now.
Living on my own, I don’t get the twenty first century explained to me on a daily basis, so still cannot tell whether I am breaking some sort of Facebook rule. Can a friend who maybe recognises the above perhaps comment here? I mean, I was able to link to this, but can anyone? If they can, should I be telling them?
Here’s the link. I can get there. But can you? And should you?
Some or all of this may in due course disappear, depending on what anyone tells me about Facebook and its rules.
I did not know this, from a massive thread about the London Underground, done by a lady called Antonia:
In 1612 a man named Robert Baker built a mansion house just to the north of Piccadilly Circus.
He became wealthy from selling Picadils, stiff collars worn by the fashionable gents in court.
He called his mansion Picadil Hall, and the name Piccadilly stuck.
She should surely have said “north of what is now” Piccadilly Circus. But pedantry aside, good to know. And no wonder we’re all confused about how the hell to spell Pic(c)adil(l)y. The name got started at a time when they never knew things like that in the first place.
This is from one of those Twitter “threads” that ought to be a blog posting, but isn’t, because it doesn’t make sense to stop using Twitter just because you feel an essay coming on. (I think very short blog postings work fine, whereas great piles of tweets are often a dismembered mess. This one’s okay, though, because each tweet is a distinct bit of information.)
When she said “mansion house” I thought it was going to be Mansion House she was explaining, even though that’s not, I now realise, where Mansion House (Tube) is.
So this blog has now done Piccadilly Circus, and before that, Horseferry Road. I’m not now going to start looking for these explanations of funny London names. But when I bump into another, I’ll try to remember to notice it here.
I bumped into this one because a bloke whose photos I like retweeted the thread in his feed.
According to this January report, this has just begun being built, in Chengdu, China:
This great agglomeration of Things was designed by Patrik Schumacher, for Zaha Hadid Architects. (Although maybe that just means that Schumacher was in charge of all the people who actually designed it. I genuinely don’t know about that, i.e. what “designed by” means in a context like this.)
It will be most interesting to see how the relationship between ZHA and China develops in the next few years. Will the above weirdness ever get finished in the above form? I rather doubt it, somehow.
Meanwhile I note with approval that ZHA have managed to make designboom refer to them as ZHA rather than zha, despite designboom’s capital letters phobia (“patrik schumacher”, etc.). There should be a campaign to start calling designboom dESIGN bOOM.
I know I know. There’s only one person in the whole world who likes clicking through huge collections of photos of London taxis with adverts on them. Me. But such galleries of persuasive transport are now easy for me to put up here, and have always been easy for you to ignore, so here’s another, consisting of fifty-four taxis-with-adverts photoed by me in the latter half of last year:
Photo 49, bottom row, number four, features Ms Calzedonia, a shapely lady with writing on her legs. But even my original 4000×3000 photo did not enable me to discern what this writing says and my googling also proved insufficient. Anyone?
Also puzzling, merely from my photo number 40, is “Duolingo”, but this was easy to learn about, and pretty easy to guess. It’s for learning a new language.
I just tried, for the first time, to make Zoom work. I wanted to hear what was said in a virtual meeting I had been invited to “attend”. But, I could hear nothing. I have no microphone, but I just wanted to hear what the others were saying. I could see various familiar faces yapping away, but could hear nothing. My speakers are working fine. (I now have music playing.)
Like all computer programmes, and there are no exceptions whatsoever to this rule – none, Zoom is trivially easy to make work if you know how to work it, and impossible if you do not.
Fucking computers. Trouble is, they know how to do a million things, so you have to be able tell them exactly which of those million things you want. If you fail to do this, which you often do because computers have zero common sense, you’re screwed.
There must a lot of this sort of crap going on just now.
LATER: There must be a lot of this sort of crap going on now because the time-honoured way to solve a problem like this is for a Zoom-savvy person to drop by and show me how to work it. Clunky, but the way to sort it. Except, that can’t now happen. The very problem Zoom was going to solve, not being able to have a proper meeting, is undeployable by me, because I can’t have a proper meeting to make Zoom work.
See what I said yesterday about how cities will never go away. Physical proximity is never going to stop being useful. Never.
The vegitative state in question being North Korea.
Other inevitable headlines will will be variations on the theme of “Undead”.
LATER: “Is he alive? Is he dead? For the moment, I’m calling him Schrodinger’s Dictator.” Ha.
I’m not going to lie, just took this photo in the garden about 10 mins ago and I am ludicrously pleased with it.
Fox in focus, everything else not. Just what you want.
This tweet perfectly captures the sheer pleasure that we unreal photoers get from our better photos. Dilnot is “ludicrously” pleased. He knows that his pleasure is out of all proportion to the achievement, but he feels the pleasure anyway. Snap.
I now feel ludicrously pleased with that “snap” at the end of the previous paragraph, with its artfully deployed double meaning. Snap as in snapping a photo, and snap as in feeling the same feeling as the other guy, when I photo a merely half decent photo of something interesting or pleasurable. I at first merely put “I know the feeling”. But the word “feels” was already in the previous sentence and I didn’t want the repetition. So I tried to think of another word. And found the perfect one!
Is it pronounced Shrewsbury or Shrewsbury?
I asked [the] Shrewsbury Cops but they told me it could be either … or either.
Tomatoes tomatoes potatoes potatoes. Seriously, I thought it was Shrows-bury. But the football commentators all call it as spelt. Which is surely very un-English. I still treasure the moment when an American asked me where Lie Sester Square was.
It’s been a busy day. Still getting that self-isolation thing organised.
