Sunday, January 06, 2008
Geek test ahoy!
This PC is starting to misbehave. Nasty things like crashing on boot up. The story seems to be that I have acquired various moderately bad things from the Internet - something short of the full worm treatment - and that it would be a good plan to rebuild the PC. I think that at least some of this is down to the odds and ends that one gets from some of the tacky blogs one comes across using the next blog button. Which is a pity because one comes across some good stuff from time to time. Might be even more if I could read Spanish of which there seems to be a lot. Perhaps correlated with their use of the confessional. Not much French though. Maybe confessional theory not sound.
Back at the PC, I suspect that a rebuild followed by reload of the various bits and peices that I use is going to be a full day's work at senior speed. No doubt involving talking to that nice part of Microsoft which fusses about licenses. Will I get around to it any time soon?
A day or so ago, back to Millais, wanting to get in before it closed. On the way, irritated as usual by bossy computer lady from South West trains advising us of this and that. But I was amused by the suggestion that passengers would do better not to eat the security announcements. Not so amused by a copy of the Sun that I came across amidst the flood of freebies. It saw fit to publish a page 3 picture of some minor celebrity - I think she might have been involved in Brucy's dancing program - topless and taken from some feet South of her toes. The overall (redundant adjective, but the sentence sounds better with it in) effect was to make what is presumably an attractive woman rather unappetising. Sad to think that the Sun photographer sees fit to take such a picture and sad to think that he thinks that we want to see our minor celebrities taken down a peg or two in this tacky sort of way. Rather than seeing them in the way that is intended. Odd that I should be unamused by this when I am quite unperturbed by their publishing revealing full gut pictures of happy chappies on holiday in Ibiza or wherever.
The Millais well worth the second visit. Would even have been worth paying full price. Enough there that I think one would find something new over quite a few visits. But presumably I will never see no many Millaises in one place again. Rather crowded - with older people, very much of our own cut - and at my upper limit of crowd - a noticeable but very much minority proportion of which (whom?) had no gallery manners. That is to say one is looking at something from maybe six feet and they come and plant themselves right in your line of fire. Then have the cheek to look irritated when they turn to find you standing right behing them.
Rather struck by the picture I think is called Marianna. A lady in a striking dark blue dress standing before a window. On this occasion the blue dress looked rather like a cardboard cut out placed in a room which was otherwise very space like. And once one had noticed this, one rather locked on to the cardboard, to the detriment of the experience as a whole. I did wonder whether the picture had been the subject of some energetic cleaning which can sometimes have this result but the catalogue was silent on this point. Or was it a trick of the lighting on the day?
Continuing to make progress with the Christmas jigsaw - a picture of Napoleon crowning himself. Google alleges that the ceremony took place in Notre Dame although to my eye the setting of the painting looks much more like the Pantheon or somewhere a bit more modern like that. All goes to show that one should not believe everything one reads on the web.
Good to be reminded how the jigsaw process goes, having now got to the 67% point. Start with the edges which I find the most accessible. Got that done, having dealt with a few errors, in a day or so. Then move onto the most striking part of the picture, that is all the heads and fancy clothes. It is reasonably easy to pick out the peices involved from the heap. Then move onto the various architectural stripes. Select the peices by presence of stripe of appropriate colour and then fit them together by matching the shapes at the corners. (I have gone as far, when in trouble, by sorting all the blue bits of sky according to their shape. A procedure which works! Once sorted, fitting the peices together is quite quick). By this time one has used maybe half the peices and has got to know the picture fairly well. Well enough that one finds plenty of peices that one can place when scanning for something else. This last being surprisingly hard. One is looking for what might be thought to be a striking peice, crimson on the left and cream on the right, in a sea of dingy peices. One should find it in no time at all. And after various hypotheses concerning sloppy packaging, the vacuum cleaner, the new dog and so on, the thing finally turns up. And then one has a missing peice which you are convinced should be mainly a brilliant white and which should stand out a mile in that sea of dingy peices. And then, when you eventually find it it turns out not to be a very brilliant white at all. A muddle of green and red or something. All in all an entertaining business, the relevant bit of the brain working in very mysterious ways.
Perhaps I should have a word with the makers about Millais. I thought, going around, that a lot of his pictures would make very good jigsaws. The right mixture of textures and colours at a sensible level of difficulty. Not Hockney however. We noticed, on stairways, some large pictures of his of woods which I did not care for at all. Looked very thin and weedy compared with those of Mr M. Not much good for jigsaws or anything else.
But I think I will stick with what I call tiled jigsaws. That is to say, jigsaws which amount to a regular tiling of a rectangle. Each corner of each peice in the interior meets three others in a regular way. Each peice being, roughly speaking, a square. I have, on occasion, done jigsaws which do not stick to these rules and find them very hard. Perhaps they are quite hard to make as I have not come across them very often.
Back at the PC, I suspect that a rebuild followed by reload of the various bits and peices that I use is going to be a full day's work at senior speed. No doubt involving talking to that nice part of Microsoft which fusses about licenses. Will I get around to it any time soon?
A day or so ago, back to Millais, wanting to get in before it closed. On the way, irritated as usual by bossy computer lady from South West trains advising us of this and that. But I was amused by the suggestion that passengers would do better not to eat the security announcements. Not so amused by a copy of the Sun that I came across amidst the flood of freebies. It saw fit to publish a page 3 picture of some minor celebrity - I think she might have been involved in Brucy's dancing program - topless and taken from some feet South of her toes. The overall (redundant adjective, but the sentence sounds better with it in) effect was to make what is presumably an attractive woman rather unappetising. Sad to think that the Sun photographer sees fit to take such a picture and sad to think that he thinks that we want to see our minor celebrities taken down a peg or two in this tacky sort of way. Rather than seeing them in the way that is intended. Odd that I should be unamused by this when I am quite unperturbed by their publishing revealing full gut pictures of happy chappies on holiday in Ibiza or wherever.
The Millais well worth the second visit. Would even have been worth paying full price. Enough there that I think one would find something new over quite a few visits. But presumably I will never see no many Millaises in one place again. Rather crowded - with older people, very much of our own cut - and at my upper limit of crowd - a noticeable but very much minority proportion of which (whom?) had no gallery manners. That is to say one is looking at something from maybe six feet and they come and plant themselves right in your line of fire. Then have the cheek to look irritated when they turn to find you standing right behing them.
Rather struck by the picture I think is called Marianna. A lady in a striking dark blue dress standing before a window. On this occasion the blue dress looked rather like a cardboard cut out placed in a room which was otherwise very space like. And once one had noticed this, one rather locked on to the cardboard, to the detriment of the experience as a whole. I did wonder whether the picture had been the subject of some energetic cleaning which can sometimes have this result but the catalogue was silent on this point. Or was it a trick of the lighting on the day?
Continuing to make progress with the Christmas jigsaw - a picture of Napoleon crowning himself. Google alleges that the ceremony took place in Notre Dame although to my eye the setting of the painting looks much more like the Pantheon or somewhere a bit more modern like that. All goes to show that one should not believe everything one reads on the web.
Good to be reminded how the jigsaw process goes, having now got to the 67% point. Start with the edges which I find the most accessible. Got that done, having dealt with a few errors, in a day or so. Then move onto the most striking part of the picture, that is all the heads and fancy clothes. It is reasonably easy to pick out the peices involved from the heap. Then move onto the various architectural stripes. Select the peices by presence of stripe of appropriate colour and then fit them together by matching the shapes at the corners. (I have gone as far, when in trouble, by sorting all the blue bits of sky according to their shape. A procedure which works! Once sorted, fitting the peices together is quite quick). By this time one has used maybe half the peices and has got to know the picture fairly well. Well enough that one finds plenty of peices that one can place when scanning for something else. This last being surprisingly hard. One is looking for what might be thought to be a striking peice, crimson on the left and cream on the right, in a sea of dingy peices. One should find it in no time at all. And after various hypotheses concerning sloppy packaging, the vacuum cleaner, the new dog and so on, the thing finally turns up. And then one has a missing peice which you are convinced should be mainly a brilliant white and which should stand out a mile in that sea of dingy peices. And then, when you eventually find it it turns out not to be a very brilliant white at all. A muddle of green and red or something. All in all an entertaining business, the relevant bit of the brain working in very mysterious ways.
Perhaps I should have a word with the makers about Millais. I thought, going around, that a lot of his pictures would make very good jigsaws. The right mixture of textures and colours at a sensible level of difficulty. Not Hockney however. We noticed, on stairways, some large pictures of his of woods which I did not care for at all. Looked very thin and weedy compared with those of Mr M. Not much good for jigsaws or anything else.
But I think I will stick with what I call tiled jigsaws. That is to say, jigsaws which amount to a regular tiling of a rectangle. Each corner of each peice in the interior meets three others in a regular way. Each peice being, roughly speaking, a square. I have, on occasion, done jigsaws which do not stick to these rules and find them very hard. Perhaps they are quite hard to make as I have not come across them very often.
# posted by Jim @ 11:32 AM 
