Category: Photos

The sticker in the middle originally said “why not hang a fascist from this lamppost?” It’s been there a while, and I’ve wondered about it a lot. Recently, someone scratched out “a fascist” very clearly and deliberately, later, someone added the sticker for the Manchester Ant-Fascist alliance. I don’t think the Gohar Shahi poster has anything to do with either of these things, though.

It’s all quite odd, especially since the original sticker predates the English Defense League march in Preston earlier this year.

This was taken at Data Journalism Camp in Manchester, an event I was involved in with Francois Nel and Tom Johnson. This is Francis Irving, from a company called ScraperWiki that creates tools for data scraping and does it for companies with money as well.

That’s Jon Snow of Channel 4 news behind him – they worked on a big project with Channel 4 recently, and Francis was discussing it.

In Manchester. And yes, I know, it’s 40 minutes away on the train. Except, in true English travel fashion, it’s not, it’s good hour and a half, and not in rush hour, or after 8pm or before 8am. I need to be here early, and needed to be here late, and well, teeny tiny functional hotel rooms go for £33 a night, and I’m not paying.

It doesn’t have a kettle, but it has everything else you could need, two beds, a shower, a toilet (in an enclosure so small you have to get undressed outside and back in to it), sink, TV set. Only one power outlet, though.

Oh well, you can’t have everything.

At this rate, it’s going to take two years to do 365 pictures, and you know what, I think I may be happy with that.

Some days, I forget completely, some days, I just don’t have time to think of anything at all. I may start uploading two a day, if I have time and space to take multiple pics, but until then, this will have to do.

I like little flowers. I like unassuming flowers, and these are both, hanging on a bush on campus. As usual, I have no idea what they are.

Or, more specifically, organic veg box soup. We get a box of assorted organic veg every week, and every now and again we look at the overflowing veg crisper and think “it’s time for soup”. This is minestrone, with, I think, four kinds of brassicas in it, and very good it was too.

I’ve been very busy, writing and marking, and have barely left the house. It’s not going to get much better any time soon, so expect lots of pics of food and knick knacks. Plus, the weather’s turned foul again.

This is a sight and sound that greets me every few hours, whenever I am home. I suspect it carries on in the night, but I sleep through it. Oliver is hungry. So so very hungry. He’s starving, he hasn’t been fed since before the rinderpest and that time, the black cat ate all his food. And all the other times. He’s never had any food. Ever.

And so on and so on and so on.

When we first got him, we figured he had been neglected or something, but FIVE years later, he’s still doing it.

And believe me, we feed him. The guy who delivers groceries for us must think we’re running a shelter – pretty much all we buy is a truckload of cat food and some coffee. And Oliver eats it, and stays skinny.

Cat has several hollow legs, he does.

I was in Manchester all day and forgot my camera, so this was taken on my mobile phone while waiting for the bus home. This is looking up Friargate, the main road north from the city centre. There are several pairs of shoes dangling from the overhead phone lines, I have no idea why, but this was really about the sky, which was an appealing mackerel pattern.

This is the inside of my main computer, a Sony laptop. It’s never a good thing when you can see the innards of pretty much anything, and that is as true of today as ever.

I caught some kind of blackmailware yesterday, one of those things that make you think you have a virus and then pay them to remove it. I’ve had it before, so this time I leapt into action and removed it, I thought. The problem is, though, that this particular make and model of computer has an overheating problem, and something along the way started to trigger that, so I opened it up to let some of the crap out from the fan and generally let it breathe and cool down.

It’s still not quite right, but it seems to be getting better, I think. Wish me luck – much as I love my netbook I would rather not do all my marking and writing for the next month on this dinky little keyboard and screen.

Bluebells are a mythical kind of flower to me. They seemed to feature heavily in the very old-fashioned children’s stories and poems we read (or had read to us), and I always imagined them much larger, and more sky blue than they actually are. I like them better this way, delicate and subtle

Here in England they’re a protected species, and bluebell woods are highly prized locations to visit. This isn’t one of them, it’s a neighbour’s front garden (that’s the lid of city of Preston recycling box you see there in the bottom left corner), but they’re still lovely.