slipstream

John Shuttleworth - Two Margarines

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 12:22:15 +0000

A consolatory song for those of you out there who have faced the pain and mental anguish of opening a new tub of margarine, only to find that you have an open tub already. In John’s immortal words, “It’s a nightmare scenario”.

Posted via email from bsag’s posterous | Comment »

One of those 'clean graffiti' ads. Still not sure about them - they are effectively pretty permanent.

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:41:26 +0000

via tweetie

Posted via web from bsag’s posterous | Comment »

listening to "Black Joe Lewis

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:22:20 +0000

listening to "Black Joe Lewis :

Fantastic brass and enough funk to get the dead bopping around the room. If you ever need a song to get you going, this is it.

The problem with haircut specifications

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:18:08 +0000

Defective Yeti is on brilliant form with Haircut 2.0:

They wouldn’t even give me a haircut at first; I had to go through a “consultation”. The stylist who drew the short straw came out and asked me a number of questions only slightly less than that found on the LSAT. To each I provided the same reply: “just do whatever you think is best.” At one point she even asked me if I wanted “a clipper and scissors cut or just clippers” and I explained that this was like me asking my grandfather if he wanted his email delivered via POP or IMAP. Haha, just kidding. Actually I said, “just do whatever you think is best”.

Go and read the whole thing, it’s brilliant.

I go to the hairdressers slightly more often than that, but I have the same kind of communication problem. On the one hand, I have a vague idea what I’d like my hair to look like, but I don’t have any of the right terminology that would allow me to transmit this mental image to the hairdresser. On the few occasions that I have stumbled across a bit of hairdressing jargon (for example: ‘vertical bob’), I’ve managed - without having any understanding of what the jargon means - to use it like a secret password to get a haircut approximating the kind of thing I had in mind.

Posted via email from bsag’s posterous | Comment »

Secret reading

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:24:05 +0000

On the way home on the train, I saw a guy who looked like a builder, wearing dirty jeans, a high-visibility jacket, and drinking a can of Carlsberg. On the vacant seat next to him as a magazine called “Stylist” (no, I’ve never heard of it either) with the headline, “Are You Secretly Desperate To Be A Housewife?”. I found myself wondering if the magazine was secretly his.

Posted via email from bsag’s posterous | Comment »

Reference managers: advice needed

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:01:04 +0000

I’ve recently been having another look at reference managers, and my interest has been piqued by Sente. At the moment, I use Papers for searching for papers, auto-filling the bibliographic meta-data and reading them, then I export to BibTeX format and import to BibDesk. This works OK, but it doesn’t really cover citing references and formatting bibliographies unless I’m writing in LaTeX: sometimes I have to resort to Pages (exporting/importing Word format) to collaborate on documents with colleagues.

I’ve been playing with the Sente demo, and while I much prefer the UI of Papers (and to some extent, the method of importing references in Papers), the note-taking features in Sente 6 are brilliant, and the bibliography formatting works very nicely. Exporting notes to DEVONthink Pro, and adding to them there works beautifully, and then you get the power of the terrific AI searching abilities of DEVONthink too. I’m nervous about entrusting my precious PDF collection to the bowels of the Sente document bundle, so I would probably just link to the PDFs and manually sync the documents using Dropbox. I like the range of import/export formats in Sente, so I would plan on exporting the whole lot (or a subset relevant to a particular manuscript) to a BibTeX file periodically to enable LaTeX authoring, with Sente as the master collection.

So, my academic lazyweb question is this: have any of you had experience of using Sente for serious academic reference collections? Is it good enough to search for, read, make notes on papers and use for referencing on it’s own? I’m getting a bit tired of using multiple applications, excellent though Papers is, in many ways.

Posted via email from bsag’s posterous | Comment »

blech: roomthily: redesigning graphics from 1950s science...

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:57:46 +0000

blech:

roomthily:

redesigning graphics from 1950s science textbooks by R.A. Gallant (via Wired)

I wonder if I’m the only person to find the originals better than the remakes? They’re far less fussy and seem to be somewhat clearer. The remakes rely too much on being pretty.

I agree. It’s a good example of pointless 3D graphics making it much harder to see where the points fall on the y-axis. If you look at the original and the remake and try to work out the altitude at which auroras occur, it’s much easier on the original. Unless you need three axes, 3D graphs are pretty but useless.

Relaxing

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:50:15 +0000

A bit of perfect time: Mr. Bsag and I are sitting on the sofa reading, listening to Tallis and Byrd, with Bella nestled between us.

Posted via email from bsag’s posterous | Comment »

Everybody wants to be a cat

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:06:48 +0000

I’m watching The Aristocats on TV, which I haven’t seen for years. There aren’t as many good tunes as The Jungle Book, but this one is great.

Posted via email from bsag’s posterous | Comment »

The comfort seeker

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:30:19 +0000

A few of Bianca’s many favourite sleeping places. The first picture explains why we end up with cat hair all over our bedlinen, while the second shows that Mr. Bsag is a big softie. He gave up his cushion for Bianca to sleep on the top of his studio desk, while he used a few layers of bubble wrap on his hard chair.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from bsag’s posterous | Comment »

Peacock spider

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:51:46 +0000

That is a really beautiful spider. I’m not usually a big fan of spiders, but jumping spiders are brilliant, and this one (Maratus volans) is gorgeous with all the iridescence. There are more lovely pictures of both the colourful male and the drabber female here.

[via Neatorama]

Posted via email from bsag’s posterous | Comment »

Fireworks and pets

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:45:35 +0000

You know how pets are supposed to hate fireworks? Our cat Bella has just jumped excitedly up on the desk, and is watching the firework display in our neighbour’s garden with great interest. Our other cat, Bianca, is fast asleep on the floor of Mr. Bsag’s studio, oblivious to all the bangs and flashes. I’m very glad that we don’t have pets that you have to sedate during fireworks season, but this is a bit ridiculous.

Posted via email from bsag’s posterous | Comment »

Prototype slimline UK plug

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:42:51 +0000

This is a brilliant bit of design. I find US and European 2-pin plugs rather flimsy (they often feel as if they will pull out of the socket accidentally with little provocation), but they have the advantage of being small and having a relatively flat profile. UK plugs are solid and secure but relatively gigantic. Also, if you’ve ever stepped — bare-footed — on to a UK plug with its pins uppermost, you know how painful it can be.

I love the fact that the unfolded plug also has the advantage of a ring-shaped handle on the back, which would make removal much easier for everyone, including people with arthritis or other conditions which lower dexterity and hand strength.

Posted via email from bsag’s posterous | Comment »

Waving from Google to Posterous

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:53:54 +0000

Waving from Google to PosterousI’m trying out the posterous-robot to see if posting from Google Wave to Posterous actually works. Wave takes a bit of getting your head around, I’m finding. I can see that possibilities are enormous, but at the moment, I feel like I did when I first went on the Internet, many years ago…

via google-wave-robot

Posted via web from bsag’s posterous | Comment »

JustNotes

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:34:24 +0000

JustNotes:

This looks like a nice, lightweight and attractive app for accessing your Simplenote notes on the desktop. Though the Simplenote website is pretty good as it is.

Saw this dignified old gent waiting for his chauffeur in the Merc.

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 17:42:54 +0000

via tweetie

Posted via web from bsag’s posterous | Comment »

For Immediate Relief: Speaking Like a Human

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:20:31 +0100

merlin:

I’m also a big fan of that yearbook-caption style of opening a sentence with a gerund (“Flipping the Wang Chung cassette in his Fiero, Douglas plucks at the pastel tee clinging like a crazy girlfriend to the sherbet Don Johnson blazer blazing in the blazing Dade City sun.”).

“A gerund attacks some peaceful pronouns”: and that’s why you never start a sentence with a gerund, though I’m sure I have at one time or another.

But seriously, these press releases — and this Newsgator release is nothing out of the ordinary — are so hard to get any sense out of. After a few sentences, my brain replaces the words with “blah blah blah…”

System Records. Independant specialist music store.

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 20:14:33 +0100

System Records. Independant specialist music store.:

An interesting catalogue of unusual and hard to find CDs, DVDs and vinyl.

Meow mix

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:05:29 +0100

I just played this and my two cats came racing up to the computer, looking around with wide eyes to try to work out where all the other cats were. They even looked hard at one another as if trying to work out if the other cat had somehow taken up ventriloquism. That was all much more entertaining than the video itself.

Posted via email from bsag’s posterous | Comment »

Ravens at the Tower of London

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 16:38:17 +0100

kottke.org: The most famous unkindness

“The current raven roster at the Tower consists of Gwylum, Thor, Hugin, Munin, Branwen, Bran, Gundulf, Baldrick, Fleur, and Colin.”

Colin? So I suppose they ran out of Norse/Anglo Saxon names, eh? I bet Colin gets beaten up by the other ravens.

Posted via email from bsag’s posterous | Comment »