If I don’t do this very carefully, it’s going to sound parochial, nationalistic, protectionist and generally negative. Which I honestly do not intend. For I think the second year, the BBC is broadcasting the Superbowl live on Sunday evening from 11 p.m. onwards. I’m sure a minority of Brits and a huge number of American expats will be very pleased at this, and those individuals who are not are likely to be on their way to bed at that time anyway.
I enjoy sport myself, although not obsessively so. I may even watch a little of the opening quarter of the game as I have in previous years.
The only objection I have to the BBC’s (and previously Channel 4’s) coverage of the event is when they try to put forward the idea that it’s a World Game and that we should all suddenly become American Football fans.
I’m not particularly blaming American Football. In previous years various sports have attempted to impose themselves on us, either from another country or, as in the case of Rugby League, by elevating what is essentially a regional game to a national level. One cannot help feeling that money is the motivating factor, rather than a desire to spread interest in the sport itself.
In 2003 I was lucky enough to spend a month as driver for a friend who did the famous Camino de Santiago across Northern Spain. Just beyond Pamplona we passed through a number of villages that each boasted large handball courts, sometimes in the centre or town square. In one I noticed a statue dedicated to one of their most revered handball players. Just as we began to expect a sight of one of these little sporting arenas, they stopped appearing. All the undoubted passion and tradition end enthusiasm given to that game was limited to a particular corner of Northern Spain.
So, while allowing the sports which can engender a genuine national or international interest to do so, let’s also celebrate diversity in sporting activity. Let us be pleased that as we move around our beautiful planet we can still see a huge range of athletic endeavour that can be admired while not necessarily being televised.

Tags: superbowl, bbc

Credit where it’s due. I’ve been spurred into writing this memoirette after reading Sam’s account of her mac experiences on her excellent FruitBytes blog.
I think I can honestly say that the Macintosh has helped to change my life in a moderately significant way over the last fifteen years or so. I was not there right at the beginning, not by any means. In fact, back in the late eighties I was something of a computer Luddite. I’d had a few negative experiences with them in the day job, teaching, particularly with the BBC micros which were prevalent at the time. So much was promised about the future of computing but for me the reality at that time was not good.
At home I was seduced by the ads for the Oric Atmos, which boasted a memory of 48k! Again, the inconveniences of having to connect it to TV and cassette player in order to get it to do little more than play tennis amounted to a hugely disappointing experience. Time passed and computers continued to play a minimal part in my life.
And then I discovered the Mac, firstly through using a friend’s machine and then by purchasing my own, a secondhand Classic (I think). It was an all-in-one unit with a tiny monochrome screen. At that time the £300 I paid was not an inconsiderable amount but right from the off I was hooked. It could do stuff! Most amazing was that often there were several ways of achieving desired results so that one could develop an individual ‘workflow’. While each computing experience at work was still a tale of frustration and disappointment, at home I was finding the Mac ‘teaching’ me each time I used it. I added an Apple printer and was producing great worksheets and reports in no time. The application of choice for me then was the robust and flexible ClarisWorks.
In 1994 I moved house, had a bit of spare money, and bought my first new Mac, a Performa, for around £1200. I loved it. Looking back it now seems quite limited with its floppy disk slot and lack of PC compatibility. Apple’s beautiful design specs had not yet arrived. Amazingly though, it did allow one to watch TV and by then I was beginning to dip my toe in the exciting world of the internet. I was also buying all the Mac publications I could lay my hands on: The Mac magazine, MacFormat and, of course, MacUser. My ‘toy shop’ of choice was (and still is) Hi Tec of Bradford (they too have an interesting Mac story - starting out in a parent’s bedroom and becoming a successful local company).
As we all know, things progress rapidly and soon the Performa was not doing what its successors could do. Apple had moved from the 6800 to the Power PC processor and so I needed to update.
I felt Apple’s pain in the mid to late 1990’s. Friends were either not aware of them at all or went on about how expensive they were. At that time they were probably right and in order to save money I was sucked into buying a UMAX Mac clone.
And then Steve returned! What followed was the well-documented second Mac revolution. I read that Jonathan Ive’s first iMac design came in 1998 so I must have bought my Graphite iMac around the turn of the Millennium. Since then I’ve probably followed the same buying pattern as many others as the Mac and iPod have grown in popularity.
In Autumn 2000 I was burned out and left teaching. In the years that followed I used my Mac to take courses in web design, desktop publishing and now I find I can actually earn money from it. Not a fortune by any means and I certainly would not claim to be a great designer but I don’t think I would have achieved any of this without the Mac.
I know we have to remind ourselves from time to time that Apple is just another corporation out to get our money and seduce us into buying their latest product. However, these ‘products’ have always been reliable, a joy to use and, throughout this decade, great to look at. So it is right and proper that they and the company that produced them should be celebrated on this their 25th anniversary.
Happy Birthday, Mac! Here’s to the next 25 years and beyond.

Tags: macs, birthday

It’s not everyone who buys a cat collar. The market is generally limited to those who possess a cat. This currently includes me, sort of. For several weeks, it (her) has spent most of its time either with me or my neighbour. We are convinced, however, that it has an owner as it’s healthy, well fed and often turns up with a faint aroma of tobacco. In order to try and discover who this might be I resolved to buy a collar with some kind of tag that would request the owner to get in touch. Then at least we might know what it should be called (at the moment its working title is ‘FC’ - ‘farting cat’ - due to the disagreeable smells it regularly produces).
After a brief search on the net I came across Kitty Collars. Their attractive, simple website describes a wide range of collars on offer. As my requirement was a little unusual, I decided to phone for help. After hearing my explanation, Marla was most helpful and suggested what type and colour would be best. She was clearly concerned about the cat and had a good deal of practical advice to offer. We agreed that it be printed with ‘Do I Have A Home?’ followed by my telephone number.
Ordering online was very easy and shortly after an email arrived, not only confirming the purchase but also having detailed advice as to how the collar should be fitted for each size of cat. Marla also wrote again to clarify one or two points and to tell me that the order would be processed immediately. The collar arrived the very next day and very smart it looks too. As yet there have been no phone calls but at least my conscience has been eased.
The great thing about the internet is that as well as having giants such as Google, Microsoft and Apple, there’s also a myriad of smaller businesses which have been given access to a global market through the power of the web. And the service can be every bit as personal as your long remembered corner shop. Thank you Kitty Colours, for a happy shopping experience!

Tags: Cats, Collars, Internet, shopping

Millions of words will be written, pictures taken and tears of joy shed. Whatever happens over the next four or eight years, tomorrow’s inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States of America will be marked forever as a truly historic day.
My small contribution is this image taken at the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama in 1995.
Designed by Maya Lin, the memorial consists of a circular ‘table’ which shows a timeline of events in the civil rights movement. This, together with the black granite wall behind, has a film of water constantly running across it.
The wall itself displays these words from Martin Luther King: ‘Until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness and righteousness like a mighty stream.’ Tomorrow they will have a particular poignancy.

Tags: barack obama, rosa parks, usa, civil rights

A great privilege for ickledot to be invited to the launch of Primary Colours’ latest publication ‘Did You Know? 2’ yesterday. This took place in the presence of Key Stage 2 pupils at Spring Grove School in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.
For those who are unfamiliar with Primary Colours, its aim is to promote the celebration of diversity in schools by producing teaching resources which are colourful and humorous, and by performing their very individual brand of theatre-in-education. Their productions range in suitability from Early Years Foundation through Key Stages 1 and 2 to Lower Key Stage 3. For those of you not familiar with the English education system, that’s from around four years to thirteen.
Yesterday’s launch was accompanied by a performance of ‘Rock ‘n’ Role Play’, one of PC’s newer shows. This tells the story of Rosa Parks and her famous refusal to move to the back of the bus, linking it to next Tuesday’s historic inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States of America. This involves dramatised descriptions of the inequalities of segregation, the Civil Rights Movement and South Africa’s system of apartheid.
Heavy stuff, hey? Not a bit of it! Primary Colours’ unique approach is chock-full of laughter, music and dancing throughout. As they learn, both children and adults are simply (and more importantly) having a great time.
There are also moments of magic that leave you wondering why you’re sitting in a school hall on a cold Friday afternoon, blinking away a tear. These are often almost unknowingly invoked by the pupils themselves during improvised role-play. Such a one yesterday was produced by a child playing the part of Rosa Parks herself. Her quiet, stoic refusal to move seats induced the atmosphere and significance of the original event perfectly.
We were similarly moved by a presentation of a copy of ‘Did You Know? 2’ to Lewis, aged 10. His remark, ‘Miss; Martin Luther King had a dream and today it came true,’ made to his teacher (and co-author), Shazia Azhar, on the day of Obama’s election, now appears as a quotation on its back cover.
ickledot is proud to have worked with Primary Colours on various projects for just over a year, culminating in this latest one, the ‘Did You Know? 2’ Teaching Pack. Released to coincide with the inauguration, it can now be ordered from Primary Colours’ own website.

Tags: primary colours, diversity, education, theatre in education, segregation, civil rights

Twittercounter informs me they’ve been ‘following’ me since July 16th of last year, which sounds about right, although I had 10 followers on that date so I probably started a week or two before. Since then my audience has grown steadily rather than dramatically and today I tweet to 67 followers. This, together with the frequency of my tweets, gives me a TwitterGrader score of 85.
So What? Exactly. Hardly a pimple on planet Twitter, let alone throughout the whole blogosphere. And yet there is something most interesting about this Twitter phenomenon, and overall I enjoy being an admittedly small part of it.
One of my favourite bloggers, Dave Winer (@davewiner), has written extensively about Twitter, both from a technical (much of this hovers a significant distance above my head) and social networking point of view. He has a wonderful grasp of its strengths and weaknesses and clearly he too finds its possibilities and limitations fascinating.
One point he hinted at when he kindly replied to a comment I left on his blog is that there is a universe of difference in the Twitter experience for those of us with an audience of up to, say, a hundred and the so-called Twitter elite with perhaps 10,000 followers. What he describes is the way in which, as one’s audience grows, so the ‘two-way’, conversational element of Twitter is dramatically diminished.
This was highlighted to me yesterday when I replied to a tweet of another of my favourites, Darren Rowse (@problogger). Although I didn’t expect a response, when I looked at his page and saw he had more than 28,000 followers, I realised that a reply to even the most scintillating tweet imaginable was highly unlikely.
One way the mainstream media has become aware of Twitter is in its discovery that many celebrities tweet. However, as Dave Winer has observed, if we think that just because we can follow and even tweet back to such notables as the currently disgraced Jonathan Ross (@wossy) or Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) we can expect a response, in the vast majority of cases, we are sadly deluding ourselves.
These examples show there is a point at which Twitter becomes a form of broadcasting, and the response element virtually disappears altogether. Those mainstream celebrities and high profile techies and bloggers have come to use Twitter in a way which is perhaps different to its intended use. For the former it’s a way of both informing fans as to what exciting projects they are involved in and who they’ve seen while at the same time appearing to be ‘of the people’. Techies and bloggers seem to use it to let us all know about the latest trends and products; their own and those of others. This is more useful on a practical level but the interactive or conversational element is minimal.
Not that any of this (to me) diminishes how good Twitter is. As I’ve written before, on a day-to-day basis it fits perfectly with my other commitments. I think it has also led me into ‘proper blogging’ on a more regular basis. And even with a mere 67 followers there is a need to separate those who I merely follow and those to whom I regularly reply. For that I use Tweetdeck. S’very good.

You know how one thing leads to another? Like many of us Brits, I have far more cookery books than I need and many of them have hardly been opened. A number of months ago I made a rule for myself that I would buy no more, especially ones by so called TV Chefs.
Last Sunday though (I remember it well), a friend recommended a recent work by Rick Stein: Mediterranean Escapes. She mentioned several of the recipes she had tried successfully so, temporarily suspending my rule, off I went to the Book Depository and bought a copy which arrived on Wednesday.
In retrospect, the first recipe I chose to try, Spaghettini with anchovies, parsley and crisp breadcrumbs, was not a good one as hardly any of its exact ingredients are available in this country. The anchovies, for example, can only be found in a particular area of Sicily. Anyway, I soldiered on and bought the nearest substitutes that Sainsburys of Keighley could supply.
The spaghetti I chose was De Cecco. I discover now they have quite a web presence and their product is very good. Not that I’m a great pasta expert.
After several years of storing spaghetti on shelves in its original packets, risking breakage and spillage, I have decided at last I could do with a spaghetti jar. There are many available online.
This led me to remembering a comment I once heard made by Habitat founder Terence Conran. He was saying that when their first London store opened in the 1960s, the glass spaghetti jar was one of their most popular products, as most people had never seen one before. He recalled how one woman returned the shattered remains of hers, complaining that when she’d put the jar on her stove for the spaghetti to cook, it had broken. How ridiculous, I remember thinking at the time. How could anyone be so stupid? Looking back, I feel a tad guilty for having such a reaction. When Habitat opened, this country was at the tail-end of a post-war period which had included rationing, austerity and hardship for all. Throughout the previous three decades or so, ways of storing or cooking spaghetti were not high on people’s list of priorities.
The meal was quite good by the way. Only quite good.

Tags: de cecco, spaghetti, Conran, habitat

At the risk of becoming repetitive, it was yet another truly great night at the Bronte Blues Club. The headline act was The Ramon Goose Band, a trio which, although based in Essex, includes Hungarian wizard bassist Akos Hasznos. The line-up, a relatively new version of the band, is completed by Paul Francis on drums. They were fantastic. The accoustic-electric mix gave a set which had great variety and also allowed for a quiet start, gradually building to a wonderfully rhythmic version of In My Father’s House to complete the first set. I would certainly love to see them again and would recommend you do the same.
Support act BBC5, due to enter the recording studio on Sunday, reached new heights. They really are becoming a tight outfit. As singer and recent sextaganarian Michael Ford (I take it back Michael - your singing is much better without the cold) mentioned, the band now spans five decades. They are living proof that the generation gap is a myth, in Laycock at least. Long-time members have been somewhat bemused of late at the audience’s early arrival. Could it be they want to make sure they catch the house band?

Tags: bronte blues, music, ramon goose

One of the (few) good things about getting older is being able to recognise changes in society first hand. Prior to reaching a certain age you have to rely on the possibly inaccurate accounts of elders but from the dizzying heights of forty-five or so the landscape of the previous quarter century stretches over your own life, and the memories belong to you. This can enable you to assume an air of authority as you insert the occasional ‘well, I remember back in the eighties’ or ‘ah, yes, the long hot summer of ‘76’. It can also turn you into a bore, particularly if you start spouting that ‘things were better in my day’.
Each new year now of course, when records from thirty years ago are released, they describe events that are clearly remembered, and you wonder why the news and review programmes seem to view them as ancient history.
So it’s only comparatively recently I’ve come to realise that marked changes in human thought and behaviour can occur in a reasonably short period of time; certainly within a couple of decades. Take drinking and driving as an example. In the early 1980s there were still a large number of people I knew who would drive after having a couple of pints. Some of my acquaintances would get behind the wheel after drinking considerably more. At that time we were all just beginning to think it was not such a good idea but were a long way from today’s situation where the vast majority of people opt not to drink at all if intending to drive.
It’s the same with smoking. A quarter of a century ago it was the non-smoker who was something of an outcast. I remember school staff rooms that were filled with clouds of smoke every break and lunch time and if anyone had suggested banning smoking from the premises they would have been thought mad.
And so we come to duvets. When I was a very young child I remember being told that foreigners slept under a single covering which many of them hung out of the bedroom window to air in the morning. This was described in such a way as to sound a bit weird. Certainly nothing like as sensible as our cotton sheets (flannelette in winter), blankets, quilts and possibly coats. Mind you, the bedroom itself was a different animal. Possibly no fitted carpet or central heating and double glazing was years away.
And then, perhaps as the instalment of central heating became widespread, the duvet was suddenly no longer foreign. It became ours. Certainly by the time I left home to go to University, the Continental Quilt, as it was more commonly named then, was used by many people I knew.
My somewhat limited research informs that the Victorians also had quilts but these were more for decorative purposes and were by no means the only covering one would have on a bed. Throughout the early and mid part of the twentieth century it was sheets, blankets and possibly quilts or eiderdowns before the duvet invasion of the 1970s.
But now perhaps our sleeping habits are changing once more. Two or three years ago it was I began to discover that many of my friends were making their beds with the inclusion of an extra sheet: one which went between themselves and the duvet. The general feeling seems to be that it saves on having to wash the duvet cover quite as often as it no longer comes into direct contact with the body (let’s not discuss nightwear right now. A new topic entirely).
I adopted this same sleeping tactic a while ago. I was therefore surprised to discover recently that Next has not caught on to the mini-trend yet as they do not sell flat sheets (there’s another development of the late twentieth century: the fitted sheet). The assistant admitted she herself used a covering sheet and helpfully advised me to go somewhere they sold both if I wanted them to match.
so I end with a couple of questions. How widespread is this sheet on top malarkey? If it is, has the nature of the top covering changed once more? Has the duvet reverted to being a quilt? Does anyone care? In the overall scheme of things - not me!
Next instalment: Whatever happened to the Car Coat?

Tags: Duvets, Change

It’s probably the same where you live, but here in the UK the TV ads are full of advice as to what one needs to buy to recover from the excesses of the holiday period. Whether it’s diets, detox or a new fitness regime, we are all being encouraged to make health and activity part of our New Year resolution list.
Which got me into thinking about us Mac lovers who spend endless hours in front of our machines, both at work and at home in our leisure time. Are we less fit and more prone to obesity than the wider population? More interestingly, are we really achieving a better sedentary-activity life balance than our PC counterparts, as the appearance of the characters in the famous Mac-PC ads (both UK and US versions) would have us think?
Not surprisingly, Google reveals little regarding this particular query. There’s a lot about safe ways to sit and avoiding eye sight problems when using the computer and there appears to be much fitness software on the market. Keying in ‘obesity’ and ‘computer’ brings up pages about children and the harm caused to them by poor diet along with too much time spent with the TV, computer and other indoor ‘toys’.
So we could be breaking new ground here. Would it be fair to say that Mac lovers, if we don’t watch ourselves, can be easily seduced by Apple’s marketing methods? We have to regularly remind ourselves that Apple is in essence just another big company that wants our money. Yes, it makes great, reliable products that look good but that’s where it ends. A Mac is not a lifestyle. And yet there is something about its advertising, on TV or web that might attract a certain kind of person? One who values a lifestyle which includes a certain level of activity and fitness? What do you think?

Tags: fitness, macs

Been thinking about buying this software ever since I heard a positive review on Adam Christianson’s The MacCast. MacSpeech is voice recognition software and, according to Adam, is much improved on earlier versions. It claims to learn one’s voice patterns, thus becoming more accurate over time. Always on the lookout for potentially easier, faster ways to write, and seeing the price has dropped to a more affordable £143, this morning I decided to carry out a little more research on Amazon, Twitter and by writing to Adam himself:

‘I was intrigued by your review of the updated MacSpeech software a number of episodes ago.  I'm still considering whether or not to buy.  I'm assuming you are still viewing it in a positive light as you have a banner ad for it on your site.  Is that so?

I only ask as the reviews on Amazon are fairly mixed (although the positive ones are very positive)

Also you did mention that the software improves with usage.  Is this still so?

Funny thing - I twittered a question about MacSpeech.  Within seconds MacSpeech was following me.  I wrote something about them probably having an automatic following set up. Almost immediately got a DM:

No robots here. I'm just awake late here (USA). I use Twitter to find out what users want to do with MacSpeech Dictate. -Jay-

Personal service, hey?’

Tags: amazon, macspeech, the MacCast, Twitter

This is surely becoming more of a dilemma for me. Been using Rapidweaver on this site for quite a while now and in the main have been more than happy with it. Get fed up with the look and it’s so easy to change, either by fiddling with the styles within a theme or swapping themes altogether. For my little projects I need various display capabilities and the native application together with the many available plug-ins can make the whole effect very attractive.
And yet, when trying to decide whether to use the blog page as supplied with the program, as I’ve done here, or to tie it in with Blogger or Wordpress, as I’ve done with my other site (bantamspast), the whole thing becomes much more complex.
Well … not really. It’s quite simple to set up using another plug-in in called RapidBlog. Set up the Blogger account. Fiddle around with RapidBlog for a few minutes and it’s done. But then you’ve got your Blogger blog, and it’s synced with your Rapidweaver blog and then throw in the fact that they use Haloscan for comments and you really want to use Disqus and you start to think to yourself why not use Wordpress? Then you cut out the middlemen. No syncing. Just a dashboard with an empty box for you to start writing. And the latest version, 2.7, is so beautiful and simple to use.
I’ve just begun following a blog from sunny Tyneside - Fruitbytes - and in addtion to liking the great comments on Mac and other techy products, I also admired the feel of the whole thing. It’s based on a Wordpress theme. And I started to think, I want one like that. Yes, I know. Wordpress is really for blogging, not whole websites. But you can have other types of pages on Wordpress as well.
And yet, I really like the Rapidweaver people. Not just the company itself. The whole community is so helpful and friendly. I visit the forums, read the blogs and follow the tweets. I just hate to let people down. And I’m quite tempted by the upcoming Stacks plug-in from Yourhead software.
As I said. It’s a dilemma.