Duncan Moran

Somewhat belatedly happened upon The Way, Way Back so am now on a mission to find more characters called Duncan.

🤦‍♂️

Expanding on a theme by @ldstephens and @jtr the 2024 Mac’s menu bar contents/clutter.

The AutumnalCam from the end of August to the end of November in just over a minute:

To do today:

1: Do not buy anything. But being an old man I may have to spend a penny or two.

2: Search “Black Friday” in Mail and delete several hundred unread emails.

3: Enjoy

The ever fascinating Cultural Offering provided some advice on writing one of which was Check you quotations 😂😂😂

A sales poster for one of the new towers going up in Manchester promises a Content Creation area - because sometimes the kitchen table is not enough.

…on the bright side: at least there will not be anymore devastating hurricanes now that the Democrats can no longer control the weather.

The excavations of the desk has revealed a stash of old hard drives

from which I retrieved pictures of our home flooding in 2007.

Well said Matthew Graybosch:

...as far as I'm concerned, the personal and non-commercial web is the web; the various names it's been given — indie web, small web, personal web, etc. — are bad framing. It's the commercial and corporate web and social media — including the Fediverse — that we should be othering, instead of permitting ourselves to be othered.

Damn it! After the repairs I put the desktop on the wrong way which means the top drawers do not slide as they should. This has become sufficiently irritating that everything will have to come off and the top rotated.

😔

So farewell KnotWords. You have shared my morning coffee for 900 days but I feel we now need a break. At least I now know what an Alb is - so not a complete waste of time.

A view from Alderley Edge across the Cheshire Plain towards the hills of the Peak District.

You Too can make up your own joke!

A whole month’s worth of Autumnal Cam in under two minutes. Exclusively available in glorious Low-Res-O-Vision.

With delightful synchronicity Open Culture discusses the Wikipedia - first link - philosophy thing just after I mentioned it.

A trip to Chester (for the first time in thirty years) and a wander around the city walls and their potted history of England (even if Apple’s weather app insists it is in Wales). From Roman origins to medieval enhancements to a civil war siege and battle to Victorian ornateness to current repairs.

According to The Verge Apple’s AI feature set will expand to include localized English in the UK. 🤷‍♂️🙄

Now @xxxx has piqued my interest in Wikipedia again. I am always fascinated by the first link in successive articles will eventually/usually get you back to philosophy thing…. Here we start at a dmoRan baseball team…

A lovely day for a cricket match in Manchester today 😂🏏

With all the youthful excitement about AI the old man smiles and thinks ‘haven’t we heard all this before?’ This is from 1967

“Machines should do the work. People should think.”

According to the AI thingy… “A worn-out brown shoe with frayed laces is resting on a red surface.” Alas we are unable to argue with the AI thingy and have to correct its errors ourselves. Whilst the shoe is worn it is not worn-out as I wear them out daily.

Hmmm! 🤔 Not sure what I was doing last night but it looks like it was fun.

I was wondering if a new solar powered webcam could handle a Manchester winter but now I am wondering if it could survive a Manchester summer. 🏏🌧️☔️😟

A (long) day trip to Edinburgh yesterday…

…to visit some Fringe events including Voices of a Siren and Life.

For me the highlight of the informative documentary (BBC iPlayer till mid September 2024) about the 1969 Woodstock festival was the briefest of appearances of the Keef Hartley Band. Legend has it that, on being informed that there was no immediate financial award for being included in the filming and recording of their performance, their manager declined to give permission for the use of such material. As other performers had their careers boosted to international stardom by their inclusion in the subsequent film and album the Keef Hartley Band returned to relative obscurity and inevitable demise.

But it seems to me to also mark the demise of an era when one would listen to, and enjoy/appreciate, anything and everything. The first couple of Keef Hartley Band records were well known and enjoyed amongst our teenage cohort. They were a kind of quirky rock and/or jazz thing. It did not matter what it was. But as the 60s rolled into the 70s the marketing people sub-divided everything into a genre to make it easier to sell to a specific demographic - whilst hoping for an elusive “crossover” that sold to multiple audiences. 🤷‍♂️

For example in a 1969 concert the youthful Led Zeppelin were supported by the aging Woody Herman Big Band - which featured a young Bruce Fowler who would join Frank Zappa a few years later. Of course the later Mothers were never as good as the original pre 1969 Mothers.

The Keef Hartley Band’s Woodstock performance would eventually appear on the 2019 38 CD set Woodstock – Back to the Garden: The Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive.