Quiet Sundays

As a youth I was often told that Sunday was a day of rest. As an adult I have learned that this isn’t the whole truth. Some of it seemed pretty straight forward and then turned out to be anything other than simple. Take the injunction against buying things on Sundays for instance. As a child this meant that you don’t stop at the Supermarket, you could only use the petrol, later diesel, in the tank and if you didn’t have some desired comestible, you went without. Period. Credit goes to the parent here, we followed this rule religiously (yes I see the humour there) and as an adult the habit remains. But what does it really mean to keep the Sabbath Day holy in 2010?

Photography in London

At a friends daughter’s birthday party I was introduced to Andrei Razumov. For a while I thought he was just another parent but when the usual preliminaries were out of the way he produced one of those nondescript black bags which always contains a gem of a camera or some other technological marvel. I hadn’t realised before, but the practised ease with which a professional handles their camera and equipment is readily apparent. I didn’t need to be told that Andrei was good at his craft. As soon as he started looking for angles and backgrounds I realised that this man clearly had the photographers eye for colour and composition too.

The Bostonians

What an epic sense of relief? Not relief to have finished; relief to have begun. Henry James has, to my view, climbed to sit in the lonely company of the other authors who are, I consider, capable of ending a book appropriately. The Bostonian’s gentle paragraphs, characters, scenes, ideas and plot fell, with delightful tenderness, through my eyes like rain on the desert. I cannot say enough to recommend this book, nor to express my personal sense of gratitude that I have been led to return to the literature of this period. You don’t find too many identified as an interlocutress in the popular fiction of today!

Data Protection Day

Today is Data Protection Day. After the unremitting years of divisive persecution, estrangement, and torrid treatment of the poor, helpless, inanimate stuff, a special body has been created within the European apparatus to protect the recently determined rights of data. After some initial confusion, revolving around what some considered the eponymous personage at the focus of this event, a character from Star Trek: The Next Generation and the luridly absurd proposition that this celebration of warnings and hyperbole could in some way involve helping to control practically the access to personal information submitted to government bodies in good faith.

Low Cost Loans

Momentary Laziness

Have you ever read something like this, Wow!!!1 or OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1? Were you in any any concerned about the momentary lack of attention that led the author to release the shift key before the 1? If your answer to this question is no, then you may want to pop back tomorrow when this post is making its merry way to the archives…

Erewhon

Microsoft Access 2003

I may have mentioned that my job revolves, in part, around producing queries in Access. There are all sorts of terms that get applied to what I do. Monitoring, Reporting, Data Management, Database Administration, Information Systems, Management Information. Many of these terms mean different things depending on who you are speaking with. So I wouldn’t worry about them.

Time Off

I took the day off today. I’m changing jobs soon and so have four days of leave above those which I can carry over to my new role. Having to take the day off was rough. I sat at home, practically the whole day weeping because I wasn’t able to be at work.

Dairy Milk

I read today that Kraft Food Inc. has agreed the price for the purchase of Cadbury Schweppes. The amount of money due to be exchanged as part of this deal is mind boggling.