Duke Street Alley

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

dukestreet.org has its first guest column today.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I went pretty much straight into the garden today when I got home, uprooted most of the old rocket and planted more, and also planted some dill and parsley - in containers this time, so I can keep a closer eye on them. I aso separated out several supermarket-bought basil plants, and put them in pots of their own - I’ve been carefully watering them for some time, rather than just eating them, as is my normal procedure with basil. I watered everything, and muttered impatiently at the strawberry plants, which have lots of green berries. Some of them are getting to decent sizes, but none are getting red, except for one on the Alpines, which got to the fully ripe stage earlier in the week. The strawberry was very good, and so was the gardening. I think I might be starting to get this gardening thing.

I’m letting some of the rocket run to seed, to see if I can actually get seeds back from it. This, I gather, is how plants work, but having stopped and thought about it for a while, I have had to admit that I have never seen it work with anything smaller than a chestnut tree. And, of course, I’m not yet old enough to have grown a new tree from a nut grown on one I planted before. Rocket, being as it goes from seed to flower in about six weeks, is a considerably easier proposition, at least in the time scale.

I started to reread Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance today, for the first time in about three years. Given that I read my old copy once and sometimes twice a year until it fell to pieces, it’s about time I picked it up again. It’s already having that effect of making me think. I understand that this is an effect that some people get from Gödel, Escher, Bach, but I’m not geek enough for that - Zen is about people, not numbers. This is connected in some way with the gardening, although I’m not sure I can explain it.

Zen follows on the heels of Ash: A Secret History and The System of the World, both of which will be reviewed on dukestreet.org when I get my head around them. A quick summary will go: both were excellent, if heavy on the wrists while waiting for buses.

Plans for the weekend, apart from the Starbound Economics Forum (is anyone actually coming?) involve more gardening, in preparation for the barbecue (more lawn trimming, patio weeding, and some general cleaning up) and an amount of housekeeping.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’ve put some more shape on dukestreet.org. I tried to resist the siren lure of black backgrounds, but I couldn’t. Hopefully, it should be readable for anyone, and I’ve increased the text size a bit as well, to make it easier. Let me know - here or there - what you think.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

It is a glorious day out there. I stepped outside when I was letting the cats out, and watched Junior Cat sprint across the garden and hop in the pond - no, I don’t know why, he seemed as surprised as me. However his sprint was slowed a bit by the jungle in his way, hitherto known as a lawn. I know it doubled in depth during the week, because last weekend, I could see Senior Cat when she was lying down in it. This morning, it was hard to see her when she was standing up. So out with the lawnmower… oh good gods, what the the hell’s happened here?

The alleyway beside the kitchen extension was completely blocked by honeysuckle. Now, this “alley” is a good eight feet wide, and holds a shed, with room to open the door. While the honeysuckle grows like wildfire at the best of times, that was ridiculous. So I forced my way through, and found that in last night’s wind, the trellis that it started out climbing on and and has since mostly eaten, had parted from the wall. At least I think it was the wind, it could have been sheet weight of honeysuckle. Two stout planks from the shed helped to force it back to the wall, and then I realised that the composter was still completely invisible. I poked through the honeysuckle until I heard a thump, and then did some digging. And then went and got the shears. I had to literally carve a short tunnel through the stuff to reach the composter, and open actual warfare to clear enough space to open the top. And since I last put stuff in it about three days ago, I can only guess that the slide forward off the wall covered the bin, and the planks didn’t push it back off that bit, or Jeff Noon has been having a word with it.

I’d already spent about half an hour just on this, but I at least I could then get out the lawnmower.  It’s a manual push-it-and-it-cuts type. Whirr, whirr, chunk. Clean mower blades. Whirr, whirr, chunk. Repeat. I eventually worked out that clearing one area and mowing toward that would work better, as opposed to the more intuitive clear an area and mow from it technique.

So now there’s a scent of fresh-cut grass, enlivened by the added scents of fresh-cut dock, nettle, and rosemary (not at all a bad combination, mind) from where I had to trim back some stuff around the edges. I’d forgotten the nettles were there; I had a notion earlier in the year of eating them, but they’re gone way too stringy now. There’s still a lot of trimming to do, but I’m going to have to wait until the evening for that, as it’s now baking hot out there.

In a repeat demonstration of feline insanity (or maybe he’s just too hot), Junior Cat proceeded to dance in the sprayed water from the hose as I attended to strawberries and rocket. He went to demonstrate his new damp self to Senior Cat and got boxed in the ears for his troubles.

The rocket has come up gloriously, and is now starting to go to seed, so it’s time to harvest and replant - actually, does anyone know if I can get the seeds from the old plants and plant them? The ground-planted herbs, on the other hand, were a complete failure - I saw three small dill plants, which later vanished, and nothing else came up. The strawberries, both alpines from Freecycle and a larger unnamed breed bought in from a florist, are all doing very well - we should have the first alpines by midweek, I think, and bigger ones by next weekend. If anyone knows of somewhere I can reach by bus that is still selling strawberry plants, I could do with about a dozen to fill up the top of the planter.

And now I’m at the machine, beside a very open sash window, with the cats going in and out through it, and sunshine blazing in around me, with much-needed coffee. I’m going to have to venture out of the house soon to get bread and milk, but otherwise it’s an afternoon for complete relaxation.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I and my two furriest housemates have the house to ourselves this weekend. They intend to spend it basking in the back garden, beating on each other, and sleeping. I intend to spend it reading, playing computer games, and sleeping. Potential visitors are warned that I will probably not be pleased to see anyone unless they bring both food and beer, and they’re in for a short stay anyway. If you need to get in touch, email is best, text messages will probably be read, and I will most likely be ignoring actual phone calls. Instant messenger conversations may be engaged in, but I make no promises.

I expect to emerge from this meditative retreat on Monday morning in a state well-capable of taking on the next few months.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Right, I’ve finally settled on a time and place for the Starbound Ecomics Forum. Following the excellent discussions on previous posts, I invite anyone who’s interested to turn up in the Westmoreland Inn on Westmoreland Street on Saturday 17th of June at 15:00, to discuss FTL trade and economics. I’ve yet to mention this to the Westmoreland, but I don’t think they’ll have any problem with it. That’s not the pub in the Westin Hotel, mind. RSVPs useful, but not essential. I’ll bring some notepaper, other people may bring laptops or the like for better note-taking.

Edit: Corrected “July” to “June” - see, I’m already living in the future!

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

… whoever worked out the code for embedding sound on webpages. If I ever meet them, I have every intention of slapping them.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I was talking to graylion this evening about site optimisation for search engines, and I’ve been thinking about it since. The first and major purpose of SEO (search engine optimisation) is attract traffic. The next step is to attract good traffic. I’m finding that the more niche-oriented your site is, and the narrower your niche, the better quality traffic you’re going to get. Better quality for me, since I’m not selling anything, is when someone lands on the site, and hits more than one page (and ideally, heads out via the google ads, but I can’t easily directly measure that).

In Ranelagh has a pretty narrow niche to start, and this means that most people who hit it are already seeking information about Ranelagh. So they look at two or three, maybe as many as ten pages. dukestreet.org, on the other hand, hadn’t much of a niche until recently, and while it was seeing more traffic than In Ranelagh, it wasn’t good traffic. But as I’ve put up more and more articles on Doctor Who and MMORPGs, it’s beginning to find niches to work in, and the quality of traffic is going up.

I’ll be very interested to see what happens to the traffic on A Political Education as the search engines begin to direct people there - is it going to pick up lots of wide, poor quality traffic, or is it going to find niches to work in as well? I honestly don’t know at this stage.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Somewhere over the weekend, the concept of an ambient novel arrived in my mental lexicon. However, I’m not sure who mentioned it. I’ve checked the usual suspects - Cybermind, some of the more brilliant thinkers on my LJ friends list (two of whom are brother and sister, come to think of it), and so on, and I ain’t finding it. Web searches bring up only references to Digital Leatherette. Own up, who brought this to my attention? It’s following me around, nipping at my mental heels.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I created a bebo.com account this afternoon, more for curiousity than interest - gothwalk.bebo.com, if anyone’s interested - it’s a livejournal/myspace clone, pretty much. I was amused to find that there was a community on it for alumni of my secondary school, and stunned by the number of people in it. And then I started looking for people I know, and while I found a few, I’m seeing a definite pattern by graduation years. From 1995, three people. From 1996, two. 1997, five. 1998, twelve. 1999, seventeen. And then it explodes; from 2000 on, there’re more than forty per year. I’m guessing that’s when the internet took off in rural Ireland, then…

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

One of these days, I am going to learn that I am not good at sitting down to work on my own stuff from early in the day. I’ve just put in three hours work on various websites, bits of writing, research, and so on, all of which is stuff I like doing, and it feels like hard work. Yet if I were to try the same thing in the evening - or even in late afternoon - it’d go far better.

However, some useful stuff done this morning, and I’m going to go read for a while, and try some more later on.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

There’s a pile of food things I wanted to post about, and I keep forgetting. So here’s a burst of them.

First, Fallon & Byrne is open in Exchequer Street. It’s pretty damn good - not quite the range of foods I was hoping for, but not as expensive as I feared, either. They have some excellent spice mixes - the gyros one is very, very good, and a competent and conversational French butcher. I’m not sure how seasonal their cheeses are, but they probably still have an Epoisses Bert AOC, which I advise you to go and get. You almost need to eat it with a spoon. We had it on lemon-and-almond biscuits with quince jelly, but I’d recommend it even on its own.

Second, there was a wine fair, sponsored by O’Briens, in the RDS last Saturday, and since they sent us free tickets, we wandered along for a look. I tried fifteen different wines, and by tried, I mean drank. My estimates of their worthiness were rising by the end, but I do recall a few of them as being great. Two actual honest-to-Gods champagnes, a Bauchet NV, which was nice and light, and a Bauchet Vintage 1998, which was the most solid, manly sort of champagne I’ve ever had. And they were the first I tried, so I was sober then. A Domain de Saint-Lannes Blanc tasted of nettles, and I will be acquiring some of it for the barbecue, to have with cheese. If you bribe me with more cheese, you can have some too. And then there’s a Rust en Vrede (don’t ask me to pronounce that; it’s Afrikaans or something, and I keep heading for French) Shiraz, which was absolutely excellent for my tastes, and the same vineyard’s Estate Wine, which Nina really liked, though it was too liquorice-y for me. And finally, a Chilean one, Chocálan Carmenère 2004, which I am going to consume with dark chocolate next time the mood hits me. I had better actually buy some to have in stock, I think.

A guy involved in the Fairways chain in the US has a most excellent food blog, which you should go read. It’ll make you hungry, though.

And finally, I have fresh pineapple chunks here, and you probably don’t. They’re very good.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

A new bookshop, one of the Hughes & Hughes chain, opened today in Dun Laoghaire, with a Costa Coffee branch upstairs. It seems like a thoroughly decent bookshop - decent range of books and magazines, plenty of non-fiction (the travel section in particular was really impressive) and chairs here and there, which I always consider important. It certainly knocks the local Easons into a cocked hat, and the only other bookshop in the town is the well-concealed Dubray Books, on the top floor of the shopping centre. Dubray don’t carry magazines, though, and the long narrow layout isn’t as attractive as H&H’s semi-open, semi-rooms approach - similar to the UK branches of Barnes & Noble I’ve been in.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’m not promising that I’ll continue House of Worms indefinitely. Most webcomics are indefinite, like old-style gaming campaigns, and I’d like to experiment with a definite storyline (most of it is already in mind). The screencap-posterise technique is easy enough that I might want to reuse it for other stories, though. I have a few more things I’d like to do, too - I’m not well up on current web comic where-it’s-at-ness, so these may be done already.

First and foremost, no sad girls in snow. Megatokyo, back when I read it, was a reasonably good comic, except that the consistently apologetic artist/writer, Piro, would occasionally have a dead brain day, and be able to produce nothing but a pretty manga chick in a late Victorian frock, looking up at the point of view with a sad expression. No background, hence snow. This is probably my impression, rather than what actually happened, but I am resolved: if I can’t post a comic, I won’t be posting a filler.

Second: No regular schedule. In these days of feeds, the comics will come to the people, the people don’t have to go look for the comics.

Third: No breaking the fourth wall. I had to have this idiom explained to me a few years ago, and I do consider it something to avoid if at all possible. The characters in HoW will not address you, advertise real-world stuff, or comment on the writer. Nor will they comment on the oddities of their reality (except when plausible, as with the Forsaken commenting on how odd it is being dead).

Fourth: No thought bubbles. They have their place, but I don’t like them - I dislike showing a character’s thoughts even in prose, unless it’s first person. Probably my background in gamesmastering coming through.

Fifth: No commentary. No “Later…” or “In Orgrimmar…” in a little box at the top left. Those things drive me spare; if you can’t show it in the art or the speech, don’t tell me, it’s clearly not important.

I think that’s it…

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

The dates for the Hollybank Midsummer Barbecue Extravaganza have been announced. If you haven’t let us know yet if you’re coming, go do so there.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Here’s the second page of my World of Warcraft comic, House of Worms:

Naturally, advertising this far and wide for me will result in more comics.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

For the last week or ten days, someone has been searching - nearly every day - for “andrew shiel fcj”, and landing on this page on dukestreet.org. They look at one or two pages, and then go away again. I can’t imagine that it’s a series of different people - it’s too concentrated in time for that. It’s possible, I suppose, that it’s someone who isn’t computer-literate enough to know how to use bookmarks, or to memorise the URL - but if they have access to a computer every day, that seems odd in and of itself. I cannot work out who they might be, nor why they might be repeatedly searching for me, yet not making any contact when they find the page.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I brought the copy of Oblivion we got back to HMV yesterday, since it doesn’t run on a machine that’s well above the minimum spec. I was prepared to quote the Consumer Rights Board, and the Sale of Goods Act 1990, and so on and so forth. I was rather surprised to have the people behind the counter go, “Yeah, that’s cool. Put your name and address here, and here’s your money back.” - with no hassle at all. And they were very nice about it. Impressed.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Is it bad when a track comes on Winamp’s shuffle, and I think “Jethro Tull… no, Thin Lizzy? Ah, Iron Maiden.”. But honestly, there are definite likenesses. Really.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

After the success of the jambalaya and flatbread at the weekend, I’ve been doing a good bit of reading up on cookery, recipes, techniques, and so on. I just found this: Ten Steps to Better Wok Cookery - and I cannot wait to try it. I don’t know how well the wok we have will do, though - it’s non-stick. Perhaps I should go hunting in some of the oriental shops.

From the same author, there’s also a guide to Cooking Chicken in a Wok - same technique, specifically for chicken.

Indeed, the whole site there is going on my blogroll: Tigers & Strawberries.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

A most excellent set of tips for Google Calendar. I hadn’t realised that you could add national holidays to the calendar, and I’m even more pleased by the fact that I can add, say, Indian holidays as easily as Irish.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been reading about permaculture - my gardening this year looks more successful, although I must learn to distinguish young chives from grass, which is more difficult than it sounds - and food for a good chunk of today. Google’s “define” fuction has been hit pretty pretty frequently - it’s my favourite use of google, and I’m just realising that not everyone knows about it. Type “define: seed ball” or “define: pomelo” or whatever into google, and it’ll return as many neat definitions as it can find. Incredibly useful for the quick wtf-is-that questions.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

It has been a very satisfying long weekend. Saturday involved some grocery shopping, and a visit to the (closing, sadly) Taney Books in Dundrum, where I acquired a couple of interesting bits and pieces, including a book of British boys’ public school stories from about 1919. Those things fascinate me - not least because they were the school stories I was familiar with as a kid (Irish schooling in the 90s was therefore a bit of a surprise), but also because of the very different set of preoccupations they portray.

The grocery shopping included the various components of a jambalaya (chicken, bacon, shrimps, peppers and onions), a dish I’ve never cooked before, but certainly will again - it came out very very well indeed, and for little enough effort. I’m going to be delving through the collection of cookery books for other such one-pot stove-top dishes, as they seem to be what I cook best.

We tried barbecuing on Sunday, although we got rained on. It worked out pretty well anyway, and we had a good evening inside, concluding in breaking out Carcassonne for a few games. I’m almost - but not quite - able to keep up to Mac. Actually using the rules for farmers is something I’ll have to adjust to; they make or break the game, and it can be hard to see exactly what they’re going to do, and how you can break up the other players’ while leaving your own a wide range.

And thus far today we have had breakfast outside, dropped some bottles to the bottlebank, and walked along the Dodder a bit. Plans for the rest of the day include little more than reading, spodding, and generally taking it easy.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I had stomach upsets and no sleep last night, so took the day off from work to get better - which has more or less worked. Nina brought home a copy of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and I’ve been attempting to install it on her machine. Or rather, it installed ok, but playing it is very hard because it’s running, with everything turned right down, at a magnificent 1 frame per second, or thereabouts. It was actually worse at first - I think, it’s hard to measure - and this is with various tweaks applied. The machine is well above the minimum spec and is very nearly the recommended spec, so I have difficulty believing that hardware is the problem. If anyone knows a neat solution to this, do let me know, as it’s not playable yet.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Speaking of George R R Martin, here’s a rather fine image of Jon Snow.

And here’s a fantastic Sky Castle by Kuang Hong. I’ve been following his work on Deviantart for some time now, and was really pleased to see him featured in ImagineFX recently.

ImagineFX is a pretty good magazine, actually, except for their habit of using a DVD instead of a CD for the cover disk - I haven’t a DVD drive in either my home or work machines.