Spinneyhead

Leaping from tree to tree on the West Didsbury branch line

2010-02-08T16:28:00.002Z

I keep getting distracted from the main aim of the day (making a start on the first page of Point of Contact, since you ask). But at least it's by good content.

When I popped out for a quick food shop I ummed and ahhed about which direction to go. I'm glad I headed for Burton Road.

I'd seen the Save Our Trees signs, but hadn't realised how urgent they were.

I'm a big kid, and I'm so glad I got to see these grown up Tonka toys in action.

First through, but the last I got a picture of, is the one which does the actual cutting. They were on a break when I got this picture, but as they didn't call the Police when I asked if I could take pictures it would be ungrateful to complain.

I may have missed the machine which strips the smaller branches off the trunks and cuts the big sections into more manageable lengths. This John Deere beasty comes through after that work's been done, picks up the thinner branches and bundles them into convenient lengths.

Then this folows and picks up the big trunks.

I couldn't get down to platform level. This is it from up the embankment after cutting but before clearing.

This is a platform level shot of roughly the same spot which I took last year. And here's a post from a few years ago about a wander along some of the line they're clearing out. The cover of Global Weirding used a photo I took at one end of the old station platform. I have some other pictures, but they'll take a bit of digging out.

Entirely unrelated, but I saw this in the car park of the Four in Hand. I haven't got a clue what it is, but I know enough war geeks that I might be able to get an answer. The yellow panel on the side is a warning about high voltage radio equipment.

Word of the day- Burking

2010-02-08T13:16:00.001Z

Burking was a very specific form of murder for money- the killing of suitable specimens for medical research. No doubt it comes from one of its most famous practitioners, William Burke of Burke and Hare fame.

I found out about the name because of a historian's claim that two of the most highly regarded pioneers of obstetrics, William Hunter and William Smellie (what is it with the Williams, Hare was one as well), may have ordered freshly murdered pregnant women to help their research and run up a body count greater than Burke and Hare and Jack the Ripper combined.

On the subject of Burke and Hare, there's a graphic novel about them which has been getting some good reviews. I haven't read it yet, but it's going on to my (admittedly long) list of books I should get. Buy Burke and Hare from Amazon.

Political blogs- let's get local

2010-02-08T12:06:00.000Z

John Ottewell writes for the Manchester Evening News and also posts on their political blog. His is an informed and relatively neutral (the paper ran a campaign against the BNP during the European elections, which he has defended) voice on the politics of Greater Manchester.

But what of the many candidates for Manchester seats?

There are 28 constituencies in Greater Manchester, to become 27 in this year's election.

Let's start where I live-

Manchester Withington's MP is John Leech, the first Liberal or Liberal Democrat to win a Manchester seat since 1929. His blog is johnleechmp.wordpress.com.

The Conservative candidate is Chris Green. I can't find a blog from him.

Lucy Powell, the Labour candidate, has a website with a news feed. Which is almost a blog.

James Alden is the Green candidate. No blog though.

Bob Gutfreund-Walmsley is standing for UKIP.

Yasmin Zalzala is a former Lib-Dem now standing as an independent who has claimed that she was run out of the party by racists.

There may be other candidates, from parties even more minor than UKIP, but these are the ones I found listed.

Manchester Gorton, where I used to live.

The incumbent is Gerald Kaufman. No blog, or even website as far as I can tell.

Caroline Healy is the Conservative candidate.

Qassim Afzal is the Lib Dem candidate. He has an official site, but it's a bit sparse.

Justine Hall is standing for the Greens.

Oddly enough, the BNP don't seem to have a candidate in the constituency that includes Longsight. I guess even people who are that stupid aren't that stupid.

This is, unsurprisingly, taking a while to compile. Let's round out this post with the constituency of another high profile MP. I work in Hazel Blears' constituency, and end up reading the Salford Advertiser more often then my own local paper, so it's probable I know more about what's going on there than here. As part of the boundary changes, Salford becomes Salford and Eccles this year.

Hazel Blears is an odd looking little woman best known for causing trouble for Gordon Brown. Nothing that looks like a blog on her official site, but there's an RSS feed so maybe the news items will get pulled in by my reader as they update.

Matthew Sephton is the Conservative candidate.

Norman Owen is a Lib Dem councillor standing for MP.

Robert Wakefield is the UKIP candidate. The Salford UKIP blog's one and only post dates from 2007 AND IS ALL CAPS AND TOO PAINFUL TO READ. It's possible that Mr. Wakefield is the author of a novel about the crusades. He should talk to my UKIP candidate, who's a bookseler.

Tina Wingfield is the BNP candidate. No site or blog that I could find, but I did subscribe to the BNP blog, because the ulcer doesn't make me feel queasy enough.

Steve Morris is standing for the English Democrats. I don't think the Steve Morris I've found results for is the same person.

David Henry has been chosen to stand on the Hazel Must Go platform. His site's minimalist at the moment.

Joe O'Neill is standing as an Independent, though he's a Lib Dem councilor. He hasn't even bothered to write over the placeholders on his official Salford Council page, so I'm not expecting any web presence.

Last, and certainly least, is Richard Carvath. He's standing as an Independent, on the More Self Righteous and Homophobic Than Anyone Else platform judging by his blog. Everything's a conspiracy, it would seem, intended to turn our children into French speaking Muslim homosexual perverts or something.

I've subscribed to the feeds I've found, but I'm using Bloglines, which can be temperamental, so I don't know how many of them I'll be able to follow reliably. I'm not a wonky political blogger, I won't be loading Spinneyhead down with policy discussion. It's more likely to be anything outrageous that candidates say that'll make it here.

Further constituencies may be added, these are the three that mean the most to me. If you'd like me to look at yours please tell me. Likewise if you know of any candidates I've missed out.

A Withington architecture wander

2010-02-07T19:33:00.001Z

When I saw that the scaffolding had started to go up around the White Lion I decided I should get some pictures of it before it went the way of Cine City.

As I was out, I figured I'd take a few more pictures around Withington. Mostly I shot decorative bits and pieces-

I know it's not architecture, but I was impressed with this tree.

And finally, a few institutions.

These are amongst my first attempts to use my camera's raw format and edit them in Photoshop Elements. Hopefuly I shall improve as I take more. I'll also be wandering further afield.

Camera- Canon PowerShot G11

Software- Adobe Photoshop Elements 8

Who the fuck is Nick Griffin?

2010-02-07T15:54:00.000Z

A third of people asked by the website MyVoucherCodes said a picture of the BNP leader showed Peter Griffin. The makers of Family Guy haven't commented on their character's sideline as the leader of a bunch of racist arseholes.

In the same survey more people recognised a non-entity who's best known for marrying a reality TV star than did the Prime Minister. It's possible that Brown prefers it that way. And, if I'm honest, I'd have a hard time naming Nick Clegg if you showed me a picture of him.

via Pickled Politics

Trailer Time

2010-02-07T09:34:00.010Z

King Crab Attack. I'm not sure this is a real film. If it is it's a torrent-and-watch-after-a-couple-of-beers movie. (via io9)

Clash of the Titans. Release the Kraken!

Universal Soldier: Regeneration. Straight to dvd goodness from JCVD.

Ong Bak 3. Which reminds me, I haven't seen Ong Bak - The Beginning yet.

I've removed the Kick Ass trailer because it started automatically every time the page opened, which was annoying. I may search out a version that's better behaved.

Harlan: In the shadow of Jew Suss. Powerful stuff. Not an Orange Wednesday film, that's for sure.

The Scenesters.

Cop Out. Directed by Kevin Smith, of whom I'm a fan. The previous trailer made it look dire. This one had me swinging between, "Yeah, it could be fun." and "Oh dear, it's going to be dire."

Make the Pope pay

2010-02-03T14:49:00.000Z

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ask the Catholic Church to pay for the proposed visit of the Pope to the UK and relieve the taxpayer of the estimated £20 million cost. We accept the right of the Pope to visit his followers in Britain, but public money would be better spent on hard-pressed schools, hospitals and social services which are facing cuts.

Sign the petition.

via Pharyngula.

I've got worms!

2010-02-03T11:20:00.001Z

I've got worms!, originally uploaded by spinneyhead.

My sister always gets me good presents. For my birthday pie bought me a mini wormery, which arrived this morning. I was feeling bad about the amount of perfectly good compostable material I was throwing out. Now I can use it to make liquid super compost.

Bye bye Blogger?

2010-02-02T21:12:00.000Z

I just received this email (several times because I have several blogs using ftp)-

Dear FTP user:

You are receiving this e-mail because one or more of your blogs at Blogger.com are set up to publish via FTP. We recently announced a planned shut-down of FTP support on Blogger Buzz (the official Blogger blog), and wanted to make sure you saw the announcement. We will be following up with more information via e-mail in the weeks ahead, and regularly updating a blog dedicated to this service shut-down here: http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/.

The full text of the announcement at Blogger Buzz follows.

Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

Three years ago we launched Custom Domains to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year's post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you're interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.

For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:

o We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
o We will be providing a dedicated blog and help documentation
o Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.

We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way. Thanks for using Blogger.

Regards,

Rick Klau
Blogger Product Manager

So, as I already have hosting and there's a little bit more to spinneyhead than just blogs, it looks like I'm in need of a different blogging engine. Is Movable Type still around? What's WordPress like (I've used it to post on other sites, but what's it like to set up and run)?

I've been using Blogger since 2001 and remained faithful as other, better, tools came along. Admittedly part of that is because of the size of job it'll be to shift the archives of all my blogs to another platform.

Where's my sysadmin? I need to ask about setting up a database on the server.

The Idea Shop

2010-02-02T15:21:00.000Z

[ad agency] Ogilvy is giving something back by offering its expertise free of charge to the local community with a pop-up shop.

Idea Shop will be in Brixton for 3 days in February. We’re open to anyone and everyone, from small businesses and social enterprises, to charities and arts projects.

[...]

During opening hours we’ll be updating this blog with details of the organisations that visit us. We’ll post the problems put to the team and the solutions we come up with.

You’re welcome to post your ideas in the comments too.

via blandben

It's Rainbow month!

2010-02-01T19:10:00.000Z

February is Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender history month.

Lesbian Gay Bisexual Trans History Month takes place every year in February. It celebrates the lives and achievements of the LGBT community. We are committed to celebrate its diversity and that of the society as a whole. We encourage everyone to see diversity and cultural pluralism as the positive forces that they are and endeavour to reflect this in all we do.

How to pleasure a male elephant

2010-02-01T13:42:00.000Z

How to collect elephant semen without the risk of putting your eye out.

via Pharyngula

Some more political blogs

2010-02-01T11:14:00.000Z

Jamie Reed is the MP for Copeland, which is where my parents live. His blog is relatively new, so I'll give it a bit of time to grow. Wikipedia tells me he declared himself a Jedi in his maiden speech, so he can't be all bad. I may have fallen out of love with Labour, but I'd support him for the Copeland seat in the coming election. Tory polling puts them a close second and the BNP a distant third but with enough support to be disturbing. Copeland may be 99.3% white, according to this list (nearby Allerdale and Eden are even whiter) but that's no excuse for supporting the racist moron party.

The Tory candidate for Copeland is Chris Whiteside. He's a Conservative, so I took an immediate dislike to him. But we'll see how he fares over time.

John Redwood used to be referred to as the Vulcan. It wasn't just because of his elongated and Spock like face, but because he was supposedly a man of great intelligence. Sadly that vast intellect isn't in evidence when he posts nonsense like this about climate change. Rather than finding out about the subject he's latched onto the talking points which conform to his ideologogy and prejudices. His specialist area is economics, I believe. Let's hope he actually investigates and thinks about that before opining. Hope, but, on the evidence, don't expect.

Stewart Cowan is a Creationist and homophobe (and possibly a few other things, I've only been reading since yesterday). I'm sure we'll have lots to talk about. It may be borderline classing this one as a political blog, but I found it through a comment on Jamie Reed's blog and decided it should be included here.

The strays of Moscow

2010-01-31T21:55:00.000Z

There have beenpacks of stray dogs in Moscow at least since the 19th century and during that time the pressures of scavenging and surviving amongst humans has led to the evolution of a new breed, itself made up of smaller, more specialist packs. Most famous of the specialists are the metro dogs, which live near or in underground stations and have in some cases learnt how to use the trains to get around.

Trailer Time

2010-01-31T10:37:00.015Z

Sherlock Holmes. With dinosaurs and dragons. It makes perfect sense. Asylum make cheap rip offs of popular films. Wired did an article on them, which mentions this version of Holmes. (via io9)

The girl with the dragon tattoo.

Dirty.

A Dangerous Man. Seagal! I thought he only made straight-to-dvd stuff these days.

Reel Injun.

4.3.2.1. The trailer's incoherent, but it's telling me the film's got all the right elements.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-us&from=sp&fg=MsnEntertainment_MoviesTrailersGP2_a&vid=1b9d070f-aff2-47f6-8a86-9b2b44ec4fc6" target="_new" title="'The Losers' Exclusive Look">Video: 'The Losers' Exclusive Look</a>

The Losers.

Another clean page from a dirty comic

2010-01-30T01:25:00.002Z

Another clean page from a dirty comic, originally uploaded by spinneyhead.

To limber up before starting work on Point of Contact I've done a short erotic tale. It's called An American in Paris, and this is the splash page.

The tale is a flashback featuring Kerry, one of the characters from my previous naughty comic Shall We Take A Trip?, who's reminiscing about the time she met her penpal in Paris. Can you guess what happens?

Looking at it now, it appears Kerry (on the right of the page) is about to fall over backwards. I knew she was leaning a little as I drew it, but I had to look at it from a distance to see the problem. That will be remedied in Photoshop tomorrow.

Are small breasts illegal in Australia now?

2010-01-29T17:00:00.001Z

Australia's government seems to be going through some sort of moral panic at the moment. This press release from the Australian Sex Party details new and dumb restrictions on the content of adult material. Depictions of female ejaculation are to be banned, presumably because someone- like Queen Victoria and lesbians- doesn't believe it really happens. (TMI, but I'm confident I've seen it in real life. Not as spectacular as porn would have you believe, but definitely not urine and something more than mere lubrication.)

Another, even dumber, crackdown is on models with smaller breasts. The Sex Party asserts that material featuring models with A cups is being restricted because, somehow, it'll excite paedophiles.

I just read 25, 000 Years of Erotic Freedom by Alan Moore, which is basically a long essay on the history of smut with ample illustrations and gorgeous packaging. One of his conclusions is that the state of the eortic arts in the English speaking world (actualy he just calls out Britain and the US, but I think we can add Australia now) is so awful precisely because of the efforts our governments make to restrict discussion of sex.

There's too much low quality, demeaning and insulting (to both sexes) porn out there, and it's not because there's too much freedom. It's because many of the people who would create interesting, challenging, life affirming, sex positive and gorgeous work are scared off by the threats of censorship and worse. By saying that one aspect of women's sexual experience is too vile to be discussed and that a particular body type (a body type I prefer- I'm Not Safe For Australia) shouldn't be seen, Australia's government are doing great harm and little, if any, good.

Right. I'm off to draw a page of comic art which may be illegal in Australia.

via BoingBoing Ms Naughty and several other sources

Do I want an iPad?

2010-01-29T16:14:00.000Z

The greatest thing ever in the history of everything was announced on Wednesday. I was in the pub, so I'm only just starting to follow the hype.

Just a few of the pieces I've seen-

7 Ways the Apple iPad will affect Filmmakers and Creatives

Did You Hear? The Apple Tablet Is Gonna Save Comics, Too.

I haven't been following the hype, and even I've read speculation that The New Flatness will save, in no particular order: Book publishing, newspapers, magazines, music, textbooks, games and the music industry. Also: The Whales, the Children, the Tiger, The Cheerleader/World, Energy, Ferris, and The Last Dance for Me.

So yeah, once it's got all that sorted, it's gonna save the comics industry. No, really; for months the comics press has teemed with forward-looking headlines both bold ("Apple Tablet Will Restore Comic Books to Former Glory") and coy ("Could Apple's iSlate Tablet Be a Digital Game-Changer?")

The Morning After The Night Before – Comic Industry Wakes Up To The Apple iPad

Apple Event to Focus on Reinventing Content, Not Tablets

I may have to start saving for an iPad. It won't be as good as all the hype, but it will be phenomenally popular. And it looks like there'll be an iTunes extension for books. I'll skip over the ebook readers I've been pondering for a while for the product that's going to be in the most backpacks in a couple of years. I want to produce content for it, so I should get one to see what works best and maybe even to use whilst producing some of that content.

It seems I've finally- after years of resisting Macs (of my own, I did borrow time on Damian's to do some video editing), iPods and iPhones- fallen for the Apple shiny. I'm ready to be assimilated into the iBorg now.

The internet is made of cats

2010-01-28T21:54:00.000Z

via Charlie's Diary.

For the type geeks- Helveticookies

2010-01-27T12:22:00.000Z

Cookie cutters shaped like letters in Helvetica. Sweet.

via BoingBoing

40 things to do now I'm 40

2010-01-26T23:11:00.000Z

A few days before my birthday some of the tykes I know invited me to join a Facebook group called "40 things to do before I'm 40". I thought they might be making fun, or looking for a long weekend, but it turned out to be something started by a friend pondering what he should do before entering his own fifth decade.

I've been thinking about it, and it seems like it's time to draw up a list of things I ought to do . A few years ago I put together a 100 Things To Do Before I Die list. It's still lurking in the bowels ofn the site, but I haven't checked how I'm doing on it for a while. Reading it through, it's obvious that some of it was dumb in a way something dreamt up over several sessions in the pub was bound to be. But other bits will make a good basis for the new list.

Working my way through the list, here are a few keepers-

Cycle the Coast to Coast.

Follow the route of the M60 by bike. (There were plans afoot late last year which would have made this happen. I'll have to see what happened to them.)

Climb the highest peaks in each country of the United Kingdom.

Learn to juggle.

Build a model village.

Visit the beaches of D-Day, and the little town of Quenast my grandparents' house was named after.

Visit Pearl Harbour.

Own a Land Rover.

Have a bike for every day of the week. (With access to a garage full of bikes you could argue I've achieved this one. Expect none of them are in full working order at the moment and as soon as any one is it gets sold.)

Give a grand to charity.

Do over a hundred miles on the Bogle Roll. (I've not started training for this year's yet. Maybe next time.)

Fly in a hot air balloon.

Get a piece of art displayed in a gallery.

I may yet rescue some of the others from the original list, but these'll do as place holders. Any suggestions?

That would be why I couldn't pump the tyre up

2010-01-24T12:39:00.001Z

That would be why I couldn't pump the tyre up, originally uploaded by spinneyhead.

I had to unscrew this from the tyre. Apart from that, the bike I'm working on is in good condition.

Trailer Time

2010-01-24T12:01:00.013Z

Because we've all worked with aliens at some point. Or was that just me?

The Wild Hunt. LARP gone bad.

MacGruber. Probably not. Mostly it makes me want to watch an episode of MacGyver.

Hot Tub Time Machine.

Zombies of Mass Destruction. Looks suitably silly.

Attack of the dancing robots

2010-01-23T16:29:00.000Z

The Sony Rolly is an egg shaped mp3 player that dances. And has flashing lights. That you can program with your own moves and choreograph its dances. Then you can upload your moves to Sony to share with others. It's realy good at confusing cats.

It's incredibly silly and gimmicky and... and I want one. I have no reason to, but I really want one. I think the appeal's been built into the design, and I suspect there's some evil aspect to this. When the Rolly population reaches a critical mass the order will come down from SkyNet and suddenly your cute little mp3 player will sprout blades, crank up Ride of the Valkyries and start chasing you through post apocalyptic junkyards (or old quarries, depending upon the budget).

You can get your Sony Rolly from Amazon, though at the moment there's just the one available and it's listed at well over the recommended price because of its rarity.

I'm not the geek I used to be

2010-01-20T15:06:00.001Z

I've forgotten almost everything I dvds knew about the command line and couldn't work out what was wrong with Windows this morning. In the end I created a second version of xp which I boot instead of the shafted one. On the plus side I didn't delete all the stuff I've done since the last backup.

Time was I might have known what had gone wrong and not had to resort to the dodgy and slapdash solution I employed. I'm not handing in my geek card, there are still many ways in which I'm qualified, but I have forgotten some of the basic skills.