Order of the Bath

7:07 on 7^th July, 2007! GMT, of course, the only true time. And a Saturday too, the 7th day (depending on how you look at it).

There has been/will be one of these every year from 2001 to 2012 but this is the first one at a civilised hour and the first I have remembered.

So what will we be doing on this lovely sunny day?

Well, first the eponymous bath, but then we need to pick the cherries off the tree. We know they are ready when we can no longer see them. That means that either the birds have had them all or they are so black they are invisible. This year we remembered to get the net on so we have saved most of them, but we have to allow our friendly blackbird family a few; they’ve learnt how to get in and out. They are Morellos and are good for eating or make wonderful jam—Wikipedia calls them sour cherries but I think that the European variety is slightly different to the North American Sour, they are blacker and sweeter and ripen earlier. It is the most successful “plant” we have managed to grow in our tiny garden and have to keep it well pruned else it will get out of hand. Even then it is a struggle to get the net on, I see why they invented cherry-pickers, just that we can’t get one in.

[Update: 17.9Kg picked—now to get the pips out!]

After or during that we need to make a trip to the city dump. I have finally cleared out all the dead, obsolete and unwanted computer equipment from the spare room. All pre-RoHS of course. Anyone want a 1MB memory module before it goes? Or a bulk pack of DD floppy disks? No use for a 524MB SCSI hard drive? I spent all of last weekend erasing these with DBAN.

I am told that experience in other parts of the country varies, but around here, the Post Office is the best thing going for letter, packet and parcel delivery and I support them in their bid for a fair wage and decent working conditions.

With a few specialist exceptions, no other organisation is geared up for delivery to domestic addresses, particularly not Business-to-Business courier companies. Just look at it—

Typical courier practice is to try to deliver when the house is empty, the office is closed by the time you get home so have to re-arrange delivery the next morning by which time it is already on the truck destined for non-delivery again. They will not attempt a third delivery on instruction from the recipient because you are not the customer and they return the parcel undelivered after 5 days if not collected from some depot in a seedy trading estate the other side of town which is only open during the working day. When it comes to letters, they skim off the lucrative bulk collections and dump them onto the Post Office for the “final mile” to your door.

Compare that with the Post Office with local distribution offices (for letters and packets); items kept for three weeks; through the letterbox delivery if it fits and a signature not required; the Postie is a regular visitor and you get to know them and they get to know you.

No comparison.

One of the projects I have been working on the past few years is the Cornwall Online Census Project which is part of a greater GB wide project which applies the Open Source Free-ware principle to public records. My role is to take the transcribed, checked and validated pieces and prepare them for publication. This includes normalising the coding for some aspects and also (the hardest part) make sense of what is there, what is missing and why.

Apart from observing that no one can spell “Niece” the most common error transcribers make is to get the Folio numbers wrong. The GB census is numbered twice. Firstly each “Enumeration District” booklet is numbered on the original printed forms excluding the title and preamble pages. Some time after they were completed, these booklets were bound together into “pieces” and a new numbering applied, stamped on the top right hand corner of each right hand page as the book was opened. These are the “Folio Numbers.” When we transcribe, we ask the volunteers to note the folio and page number for each entry to avoid ambiguity. What they get wrong is the folio number for those pages which don’t have them stamped—i.e. the left hand pages of the open book. To be fair, that is not how they see the pages. We are working from microfilm (or digitised copies) and what we get is (usually) consecutive single pages with no indication of left and right.

To understand it properly you have to understand what folio means. It is Latin for “leaf” so what is numbered is the leaf of paper both the front and the back—properly known as the recto and verso. So the folio number of an unstamped page is the same as the PREVIOUS stamped page.

I have met experienced researchers who adamantly believe that it is the other way around, that the number refers to both visible pages of the open book. I think it may have be used this way by accountants who refer to a ledger sheet which is continuous across the two open pages as a folio. I’m sorry, but they are wrong.

p.s. the abbreviation for folios is ff.

… when brother goes to law against brother.

In this case, it is the Episcopal Church of the USA suing eleven of its (former) parishes in Virginia to recover their property i.e. the churches in which they worship.

I have noticed that there is quite often a news item on the Radio on Monday morning that is either sensational or surprising. It is only a minute or so into the report that you discover that the BBC Panorama team are those providing the information. It is not that report itself is slanted in accuracy in any way, just that is being “bigged up.” It is really little more than a trailer for the TV show that evening. I think the radio people be more aware that they are being used and put the item into a clear trailer slot rather than the news bulletins.

While browsing around to solve a problem I came across this interesting post by a Google guru about what they think of paid links. Now I can see where they are coming from, they want to improve the customer experience so that you find stuff relevant to what you are searching for. So from that point of view, the links to casinos on the Linux site, to quote the example given, are certainly not helpful.

However we should remember that Google are in the advertising business (that is their main revenue source) so there is a bit of a conflict of interest here. When it comes down to it, what is the difference between a paid link and an advertisement; I have seen some pretty dubious Google Ad-Sense adverts on some news pages where they have picked up on words out of context: for example this news story about Charles Darwin included adverts for hotels in Darwin, Australia when I read it. I would prefer to see a well directed paid link than a robot generated advertisement.

In case you were wondering, I have promised to keep this blog ad-free but I see no problem with relevant advertising links on my other pages, though I will always identify then as such. It is the only way to make an extensive public information site financially viable.

I suppose that it must be H0C0O0NaCl.

That is discounting the fact that if it is sea salt, there will be a fair proportion of Magnesium Chloride in there as well as other compounds.

Thanks to Debbie for finding this.