The Digital Cobbler

If it seems that I have been quiet, it’s because I’ve been out picking flowers…… oh, wait, no, I mean I’ve been taking a lot of pictures. You can see them over on Flickr.

This is so incredibly cool. It’s been all over twitter but just in case anyone didn’t see it, look at this:
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/06/map-iphone-users-any-city-and-you-know-where-rich-live/5961/

Just a little interlude: home-made train in Cambodia!!

Just like this one:

We sure had a real French holiday the past couple of days.

First, we saw real cave art at La Grotte de Cougnac. What a feeling standing only a few feet from these red and black paintings that were actually painted more than 14,000 years ago. These paintings are now among the most extensive of the cave art that you can actually get close to. Most of the others are too small or too delicate to withstand crowds of people breathing on them.

Real genuine prehistoric cave paintings

Next morning, we zoomed off to Sarlat-la-Caneda because its weekly market is one of the largest in the Dordogne. Unfortunately, several thousand other people had the same idea to visit the market. We were crawling along in the car for many kilometres just to get into the town and then once we got parked out walked into the market streets, it was a total, claustrophobic crowd-scene. And, to make it worse, there wasn’t really anything there that we hadn’t seen at other, smaller, markets.

After the madhouse of Sarlat we figured we’d head to the next town and look for a quick lunch in a restaurant. Instead, we ended up with this amazing, high-quality lunch in a real chateau.

So far, one of the top two restaurant meals on the trip. Imagine the irony, a gourmet lunch in an old chateau on a day when we couldn’t linger because we had reservations for Lascaux.

Nowadays, when you go see the amazing cave paintings at Lascaux, you don’t really see the cave paintings at Lascaux. You see reproductions in a man-made cave situated about 100 metres below the entrance to Lascaux. That’s because, the real cave paintings started to degrade after about 15 years of a constant stream of visitors. All those humans breathing out their CO2 caused calcite deposits to form of the precious paintings and the real cave had to be closed.

Luckily, in the early 1980’s, after 20 years of work, Lascaux II was opened with two little caves that are exact replicas of the originals and contain exact reproductions of the majority of the paintings (complete with mineral-based dyes that are the same composition as the original “paint”). It was pretty cool.

Famous Cave Art in Lascaux II

So, we saw actual cave paintings, exact reproductions of the most famous cave paintings in the world, and had lunch in a renaissance chateau. A very French holiday.

I’ve decided that we can distill the definition of the problem with the IOC down to one person: Prince Hubertus.

I know that what’s wrong with the IOC can fill (and has already filled) several books but I say that if you want the short course, look no further than Prince Hubertus of Hohenlohe-Langenburg: a European aristocrat playing ski racer (and “pop singer”, no less).

Oh, I know Hubertus himself is not a member of the IOC. But just look at the list of IOC members. Look at the members representing European countries. Some of them don’t even have names, just titles. They probably don’t have any idea what that looks like to us over here in this part of the world.

So I was able finally to try out scoopler. Okay. Pretty handy.

In fact, it taps a thread that I’ve been thinking about for a while: the idea that the “standard” supply of  information content that means something to a given community has to include comments, criticisms, posts, and blogs by the very members of the community. And these posts and comments are now, increasingly, on these social networks that are hard for traditional information-agglomerating tools (website search (google), catalogues (library), listserv archives and digests, and so on.

Last time I tried to use it, scoopler were having some reliabilityi issues. But this time, while I think there’s still a few speed issues, it works pretty well and, in fact, it’s pretty handy to have. Especially for info on events and ideas that are moving fast. It’s worth checking out.

A good camera makes a difference, no doubt. This taken with my Oly E-1, not w/ that iphone. But this camera is also kind of big and conspicuous. I think this guy grumped at me when he figured out I was taking his picture. iPhone doesn’t (so far) seem to get that reaction. Or maybe it’s just messengering on a miserable day is pretty grumpy work.

My neighbour put these down on his sidewalk during the snow. They’re still there today.

I have no idea why.

Really.

Any conjectural suppositions are welcome.