birds

Influences

May 12, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

0600 Benedict’s Newsletter: No. 335 arrived yesterday and I scanned it on my phone. 15% of global internet traffic is Youtube and 11% is Netflix – more than a quarter of the traffic. Then I read his essay Covid and cascading collapses. You should too. Ever seen a soufflé collapse when the oven door opens? Technology collapses don’t happen the way you think or remember. And that makes them hard to predict. But what does seem useful is to know is Lenin’s astute observation that you can get a decade of inevitable in a week.

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Sourdough Bliss

May 11, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

It’s hard to imagine that the sourdough you are creating will be shared across a family network a decade in the future.

But that’s what happened and today I baked a loaf based on a sourdough starter that was 8 years old. This one started from the fermentation of Kilmullen Farm apple juice left over from a wedding and started in the Gate Lodge where the couple lived at the time.

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Isolationism

May 6, 2020 by Simon Robinson 2 Comments

The day started with birds; not a dawn chorus so much as a five-alarm dawn clatter. A herring gull has taken to dawn dancing on the flat roof of our bedroom, for the third annoying day in a row. Our neighbour has seen the bird looking in her windows but here, it sounds like it’s doing a pogo though more likely stripping off the roof felt. I might need to use a selfie stick to video the action just in case gull dancing is trending.

A grandson asked a question about the colour of a woodpecker’s beak. He’s five and the request came by a voice message during breakfast. There are a few Great Spotted or Pied Woodpeckers in the trees around his home and his Dad says they’ve stopped drumming recently so maybe that’s why beaks were on Master 5’s mind.

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Micromort and big numbers.

April 19, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

I’ve decided to put my trust in the reader and dispense with long introductions and explanations. If you care what a micromort actually is, you’ll follow the links. If you don’t understand big numbers, you’ll be in good company.

Today is the day we should have reached unorthodox Canterbury after walking out from Manchester on April Fools’ Day. Instead, like so many, I’m curfewed.

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File Death and Nesting

April 13, 2020 by Simon Robinson 2 Comments

I tried to read some files from a back-up drive yesterday. Dated 1992 and 1991, they were created with MS Word V1 and 2 using Windows 3 (true but a numerical series joke in memory of Lotus 123). The files are available to me because I kept moving them through time from device to device and continent to continent until I switched from Windows to a TimeMachine in an Airport on a windowsill.

I got some text from one of the files and realised that it only gave up its text because it was different – remember Word Perfect? We kept WP up for as long as we could but together with spreadsheet software Quattro Pro, it went the way of DOS. Meanwhile, Lia had bought a Brother hybrid word-processor for her teaching and first novel, a compromise because personal computers cost a month’s gross salary back then. It was hugely important to her. A massive affirmation of the importance of her work.

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