redwelly.co.uk

I’ve been getting into the Twitter lark recently.  Like many, I kept it a good wingspan away for a long time.  It’s just Facebook statuses, after all!  The original reason that made me sign up has flown right out of my head, but for whatever reason I have been tweeting (a post on Twitter is a ‘tweet’) away merrily for a couple of weeks now.

Here I am.  If I come across a mind-bendingly easy way of putting a stream into the side of this blog, then I will consider it.

One thing which makes Twitter distinctive from Facebook statuses is that you don’t need to know someone to sign up to  their updates (unless they have made them private).  So lots of famous people are tweeting, and you can - in an ever-so-slightly stalkerish way - tap into the minutae of their lifes.  If they ruffle their feathers accordingly.  So far I have Followed Chesney Hawkes, John Sentamu, Lizo Mzimba, Bill Bailey and Dave Walker among others.  I did have Lance Armstrong, but he tweeted too much and I got bored of him.

I like it.  It feels quite democratic, and can encourage a more realistic perspective on how famous people are still people. They have daily lives involving gas meters and ice-creams and watching TV.

It also feels suitable for putting more trivial updates on than a Facebook status does.  Only people who have consciously signed up to your tweets will be fed them, so they can’t complain if you do too many.  Whereas, there are many other reasons to have people as contacts on Facebook than just to hear about their coffee breaks, so there you have to limit the triviality a little.

Tweet tweet.

Some quick answers:

• This was me, in see-through mode, on Saturday 4 April.
• I fell off my unicycle.
• It didn’t hurt any more than normally falling off unicycle does.
• It was my fancy, new KH Schlumpf 36″, but that wasn’t the cause (wasn’t going any faster than I would have done otherwise, around 30kph on the flat).
• I met the following nice people: Rhian and her mother busy lambing at their farm, who called the ambulance for me; two paramedics who took me from near Talybont back to Aberystwyth hostpital; various nurses and doctors in Bronglais who had plenty to joke about when I arrived with my unicycle.
• It will take several weeks in a shoulder brace before it is sorted.
• How I got hold of this image of the x-ray will remain a secret, as if I told you I would have to come around and break your clavicle.

The long awaited movie of my World Record unicycle ride. Thanks Jonny!

wordsarepictures.co.uk

Some great ‘typography-led graphic design’ by Craig Ward.

Warning: some day I am going to sit down and write some lenthy blog posts about fonts.  But for now, just sit back and enjoy.

A recent print I made in my black-and-white evening class.

It was taken in front of the Old College in Aberystwyth, using the Prom rail as a tripod, on which I held my mini-tripod as steady as I could.  With a manual exposure time of about 5 seconds I’m pleased that I got this so stable (this is the better of two attempts)!

I was looking for information about Kikobero village, near Mbale in eastern Uganda. There is not much on the internet about it.

But I found this site about education in Uganda more generally. With a picture that I took and put on Flickr years ago! The world of the internet is a funny and small place. They are not quite right to say that it is ‘public domain’ - it says All Rights Reserved on Flickr. No problem though.

I’ve been tinkering a little bit, and I don’t know what happened.

There was a frayed end of a rope sticking out of part of the internet machinery, and a buzzing noise. Somewhere down the line my previous blog template fell off the line.

This one you’re seeing now is the default Wordpress again, which I admit isn’t very exciting. And has some features which I didn’t bargain for when I put in lots of random tags… so the right-hand column is rather full of piffle. Sorry about that.

Some time I will sort it out, but at least it isn’t completely dead any more. Visitors to intensive care should fill out a long form in the correct colour pen (colour specifications available on request) and submit it in triplicate to the relevant authority (your authority can be found by submitting an Authority Request form through the above channels). Thank you.

Ok, two things. Unrelated.

Firstly, a little guide to a basic minimum knowledge of ethnic/religious demographics: 10 Facts Every Westerner Should Know About the Middle East. Unfortunately, there’s probably something new there for most of us. Number 6 was for me.

In other news, YouTube be praised: Norwegian kids modding a railway. I may have mentioned how cool train travel is before. But it just got cooler.

P.S. Sorry, I still haven’t got around to changing my blog template to one that works with YouTube embedding.

This is what I’ve been doing in work for the last couple of days.  Making hand-wavy diagrams in Adobe Illustrator.  Woo!

In Minneapolis, USA.