Observations from a Hill

Here we are again in messing-around-in-the-workshop-land. Yesterday I decided to make a replacement for the most trivial of kitchen-things: the kitchen-roll holder; which in our kitchen had hitherto been an inverted toilet roll holder that I jury-rigged a couple of decades ago as a quick and dirty job and which has remained, irritatingly [mea culpa] since then. Anyway, I thought I'd just knock together a couple of bits of flatwood and some dowel to cobble together a freebie solution to this rather banal problem. Finding out that I had no drill-bit size to allow the only dowels in my possession to work in my imagined scenario, I decided on what might be considered to be the nuclear option instead, opting to shave the offendingly-large stick down to a more manageable dimension in order to fit the only hole size I could drill. Then I thought on, as you do, and decided to turn the spigots on the dowel on my old man's old Myford ML4 [blog posts passim] metal-turning lathe. I might a...

OK - pictured  is my repast tonight of leftover roast chicken tacos. This is not really one of my normally gratuitous food post throwaways as this particular recipe is a revelatory one to me. I really wish I could have come up with something so simple, cheap, quick and tasty myself, but I didn't. I caught this one on 'Saturday Kitchen Best Bites' yesterday, cooked by a guy called Miguel Barclay, whose online cooking channel is characterised by the basic philosophy of making 'tasty, easy, wholesome meals for a quid apiece'. All I can say is the boy can really cook. This little number took me less than half an hour to prep and cook and was as tasty as anything I've ever eaten. The key to his style is the concentration of as much flavour as possible in the shortest time with the fewest and cheapest of ingredients, using a few crafty, chef's techniques to achieve the aim. Just head to the BBC Food website and search for him for the recipe. Just remember to get a...

OK, following from last night's teaser, I said I'd riff on the success or failure of good ideas, and that one of the great ideas that didn't make the grade was the Apple Newton: the MessagePad, from the early-mid 1990s. I have to say I loved the device, despite its obvious shortcomings, and even foresaw using it as an integrated part of a suite of show-control programming gear for theatre presentations, turnkey visitor installations, museum displays, and so on. Unfortunately the device's tenure on this earth was short-lived and for one good reason: handwriting recognition, or rather its piss-poor performance in that department. It was a great idea pulled up short by the immature hardware available. Apple tried to run with this one before it could walk. Three years later, we were producing a piece of software that sought the opposite goal: to straighten out the shortcomings of contemporary hardware and make it do what no-one else had thought to do properly. We took a sim...

The nicety [there's that word again] that determines the success or failure of a truly great idea is timing. Timing either of technical or market readiness; get either wrong, and no matter how truly groundbreaking your concept is, it will drown at birth and you will live to ruefully see it resurface as someone else's cash cow product. I know from personal experience, as I've mentioned before in these pages. Get the timing wrong and you will fail, no matter how good your idea or product. This diversion was prompted by a small piece on Medium about the Apple Newton [which I loved at the time of its introduction], which failed on both counts; however I'm too knackered to carry the thought much further, so I'll come back to that train of thought when I've had a good night's sleep. I'll leave you with the above picture: the sunset from Fairview Heights this evening. It really was as spectacular as it looks in the image. It serves to highlight that 'succes...

I chanced upon an old acquaintance from the Golden Era of Bethesda's bohemian period in the 1980s, this afternoon. He didn't remember my name, which is quite fine by me: much water has passed under the bridge and much grey hair grown - and lost - in the interim, and ego and self-importance are concepts best avoided. He is a Quaker. I have Quakers in my family tree. I would like to learn more about them, and how that line turned to more mainstream religion and why. As I age, this lost knowledge has taken on a greater importance for me. I started the family genealogy journey focussing on the line that my dad had begun in the 1980s and 90s: his mother's, and her connections with North Wales, Staffordshire and Australia. Since my first, tentative overtures I have dug deep into both sides of my immediate family's history and turned up some pretty interesting stuff across the piece. One strand of interest to me was the sudden [to me] appearance of Quakerism on the Southall si...

Following on from last night's post, I was musing over exactly what nationalised land could look like in practice, assuming a blank canvas with no Taliban-esque dissolution-of-the-monasteries style of wanton destruction or restitutional compensation to either fork out or ignore altogether. These questions remain unasked for the simple fact that land is still, simply, owned. How does a government address this simple conundrum: who gets to build and live/do business where and by whose say-so? The tacit understanding with regards to land ownership - despite historical facts to the absolute contrary - is that certain individuals, families and institutions have historical rights to such ownership: in the UK that starts with the Church and the Monarchy, who over the centuries, through force both physical and spiritual, imposed a web of private land ownership by deed of gift for favours rendered; a concept familiar in more modern times as racketeering and protection, cf the Cosa Nostra, C...