etnobofin

As anyone who follows this blog will notice, there hasn’t been much activity over the past week. Several topics were mooted. (Inter alia: racism in France, quality of life vs income, general annoyance at swish travel writers and foodies who rave about holidays in Languedoc, but have have never spent more than a fortnight here at a stretch, treating the place as some kind of thyme-scented culinary theme-park for their fabulous friends from Manhattan without regard for the region’s crippling rate of unemployment).

But none of these ideas ever got past the neural sub-editor in my blogocortex. In addition, a combination of heat, thesis-writing and job-hunting has been eating into time normally spent composing blog posts.

So, here’s a glass of wine from last night’s Estivales, and it comes with the hope that there’ll be some more action soon. A la votre.

There’s unlikely to be any posts here for the next week – I’m spending 7 days in the UK for some meetings and catching up with friends, mainly in London, Birmingham and Oxford.

I’ve decided to leave my laptop and home, as a bit of an experiment to see if I can run my life from my HTC Diamond (pictured – it’s kind of like the Google Phone, but runs smelly Windows Mobile instead of Android).

I’ll be tweeting, so you can follow me on twitter, if you expect anything profound or amusing might cross my mind during the week.

Take care and see you soon!

Here’s a little Web 2.0 story. Over the past few years blogging has become an increasingly integral part of the media, for better or for worse, and one of the side-effects of this is that content produced by “normal” people (like me, I suppose)  is more likely to be picked up and used by major media outlets.

ReadWriteWeb is a tech blog run out of New Zealand, rated by Technorati as one of the top 20 blogs in the world. They published a piece yesterday about Mark Zuckerberg’s pre-Harvard inspiration for Facebook. Prior to Harvard, Zuckerberg was a student at Phillip’s Exeter Academy, and the photo they chose to illustrate the piece was a photo I took last year during my short trip to New Hampshire:

Phillips Exeter Academy in the snow – March 29th, 2008

I found out about the photo’s use via Paul Spence at Genius Net, who tweeted the news overnight. (See, I told you it was a Web 2.0 story)

For extra coolness, ReadWriteWeb content is syndicated to the New York Times site, so although the New York Times version of the story doesn’t contain the photo, I still get a credit at the bottom of the article.  Does this make me a citizen journalist or something ?

There’s been a conspicuous lack of posts this last week.  Classes and a weekend trip to the mountains have not helped. Normal service will resume shortly. Meantime, here’s a photo from the weekend.

Les Allues, Savoie, France

Like most pretentious and moderately creative people I know, I’ve always wanted to write a novel.  There are a few ideas and some stubs of chapters (brouillons) lying about, but I still lack the discipline or the drive to actually complete the task.

In the meantime, this blog keeps growing, and I realised recently that in fact, this blog is my writing project.  I put far more energy and time into it than I should. I love that a few people read it and occasionally comment, but it’s really personal satisfaction of having written something that drives me onward.

Which is why my database crash of October 2007 was really, really annoying – I lost all my posts from March 2006 to October 2007, including some work I was quite proud of.

Yesterday I discovered that some of my lost posts (mostly October and December 2006 and January 2007) had miraculously been saved in the Internet Archive. So with a little HTML trickery and a couple of hours work last night, I reloaded them into the blog in their correct chronological order.

It was fun to re-read some of the writing from this period, which I thought I’d lost forever. A few highlights include:

• a tear shed for the manner of Saddam Hussein’s death
• some musings on the miraculous properties of tea
• the first YouTube video I ever made - Skiing in Slovenia
• a rather gorgeous dawn over the rooftops of Oxford

Rahsaan Roland Kirk… the blind man who conquered the world through sheer force of will, talent and not a little mild insanity.  His performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1972 was captured for TV, and yes, he IS playing flute and recorder at the same time…

I have the audio album version copy of this performance, first released in 1996, it’s well worth checking out.

Some regular visitors may notice I’ve played around with blog’s look and feel, and the sidebar. There are also a few changes under the hood, hopefully making the site easier to maintain.  If you like/hate it, or have any suggestions for improvement, let me know!

Oh and Sport Direct in the UK are evil. Don’t shop there.

It’s a busy week. Given limited time to write anything original myself, here’s a round-up of some highlights from some other blogs sliding down the RSS feeds.

Aren’t the Canadians lovely people? Jean-François at Jazz Frisson in Montréal has posted some classic Hollywood jazz moments: Lionel Hampton/Benny Goodman/Tommy Dorsey/Louis Armstrong etc in 1948 and the Bing Crosby vs Louis Armstrong MC Battle from High Societyin 1956.

Sarah Laurence isn’t Canadian. But she’s from Maine, which is pretty close.  Last weekend she went hiking in the White Mountains... the autumn colours in Maine are in a different class to the brown sludge currently filling gutters here in Edgbaston.

Andrew Dubber has written in support of a Kids’ Radio Station for New Zealand.  Remembering how important radio was to me when I was young, this is a good idea long overdue.

Klari in Paris saw the Kings Singers in concert on Monday night. Ch’uis jaaaaalouuuux moi. Here’s a clip of them singing Ellington’s Creole Love Call:

One of the best Christmas presents I got this year was a DVD of some old family films shot on 8mm and Super 8. Images I hadn’t seen since I was a child, all bathed in that curious watery light that only small-gauge filmstock can create.

The family’s stockpile of 8mm films go back to 1948, (well before my time!), but the earliest parts of my childhood were recorded on Super 8, until the cost and hassle of processing the films became too great.

New Zealand had no film processing labs in those days, so the films were posted to Kodak in New York to be developed. As VHS cameras and cassettes became affordable, the idea of recording home life on filmstock seemed rather quaint.

Watching the films now, it seems we spent a LOT of time on the beach, or playing outside – but of course the low-grade film worked best in natural sunlight, so the camera was used mainly in summer and then only during daytime.

Unfortunately there isn’t too much naff 1980s stuff to laugh at except for my first bike (red chopper-style with a banana seat and trainer wheels), our short shorts and the swingball set at my aunt’s house. (Maybe this is all really 70s stuff – NZ was still under import restrictions and we tended to be about 5 years behind the rest of the world.)

Long, dark evenings in an English January are perfect for editing silly videos to put on Youtube, so I messed around with a 2.30min highlights package. A few of the cats and grandparents are no longer with us, but way back then, it seems like we were all having fun.

The music is by The Cutters, a band from northern California. You can buy their stuff and get free mp3s on their site.

Right, I’m tired of trying to migrate my old content, so the blogging is going to continue in the midst of the chaotic rubble of the demolition-cum-building site, and I’ll see how it all pans out…

We’re still not sure which technical gremlin made etnobofin die after more than two years, but it might have looked like this:

Back soon with some block-rocking beats.

Slowly emerging from a perfect storm of 4 weeks travel for work, a work laptop that died, (meaning I’ve been earning my crust on my personal laptop while awaiting a replacement), a blog that fell over, not to mention the ever-expanding hours of darkness.

Now that serenity seems to be returning to these horizons, I hope to get the old posts up here in the next few days, providing that all the FTP mullarkey works proper. And maybe even a decent blog theme…

Peace

Christ Church Meadow and the cows, last weekend