A Miscellany

Lots of bits and bobs to report today as I'm catching up so here goes. Firstly I took some video while at Fawber which is all now online¹ as individual clips or here as one rather disjoint video.

It starts looking south towards Settle before panning around past the lower barn, the track (which is completely covered with snow) and the bunk house before ending looking north towards the farmhouse.

If you listen with the sound turned right up all you can hear is distant birds and the sound of my boots crunching in the snow. Lovely!

On a completely unrelated note (I did say this was going to be a miscellany) I was reminded by a blog comment made while we were away at Fawber that one of my much earlier postings here continues to attract traffic. The issue still continues and my page continues to be the only one of the Web which explains what's going on. Curiously as a consequence a domain squatter now owns the obvious related domain name.

Which brings me on to April Fool's day, which it is. Which means a lot of my American online comics are screwed up. This year's "joke" is that XKCD is running a Questionable Content strip and so on. Now perhaps it's me but this is neither very funny nor an April Fool. For it to be the latter it would need two elements: it would initially fool you in some way (which this doesn't, it's patently them messing about), and it would have some hint in it so that the smart could spot the foolery (so traditionally the name of one of the people in the story might be a Swede with a name something like "Ewe Fuled"²). I don't know. Perhaps Americans just don't do April Fool's day the way we do. After all this a country where, allegedly, the citizens think the definition of "irony" is "looking like it's made out of metal".

Oh yes, and the virus: going fast now. Thanks for asking.

1. I had real problems getting these videos online. I ended up having to rebuild ffmpeg, the software I used to convert MPEGs off the camera it Flash video files, from source last night (you can tell I'm getting better) and re-write the shell script which invokes it before I could get decent files out and I also upgraded the Flowplayer software which plays them. It was worth the struggle, the videos are playing better now and the slider at the bottom actually works correctly.
2. "You were fooled", geddit?