Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Geek post 3 of 3
Making a fair amount of use of material from the TLS, thought it right to blog this item, discovered today in our 1951 edition of the 'Oxford Companion to English Literature'. It appears to be an article from the 'Times' of some time in January 1952 celebrating the 50th anniversary of the associated magazine. I don't recall seeing anything celebrating the 100th anniversary but then I do not read what has become a Murdoch rag very often. But maybe I should not be so picky, as, as far as I can make out the TLS is a Murdoch rag too - at least its online presence is very much mixed up with that of the Times, even if it does not appear in the Wikipedia list of newspapers owned by Murdoch.
Pleased to score a new word repeat 'as as'. The list of possibles slowly gets longer.
I also learn that the more common meaning of TLS is transport layer security, something which has superseded SSL, secure socket layer. Transport sound better than socket: at least I recognise it as one of the 7 layers of the 7 layer model, invented, I think, by a Frenchman. Would an Englishman plumped for 7 as well? Certainly one of the more important occurrences of the magic number 7. I wonder what the most ancient instance is? Don't think the Stonehenge people were on the case.
I had thought that as a mark of respect I would scan in the article, then with some clever geekery turn the two resultant images into one image. But I fail, only succeeding in cropping the two images, courtesy of some bit of HP software which comes with the printer, so that they no longer overlap. But, irritatingly, they now display at a different scale. Paint only seems to be able to cope with one image at a time and even then I have not worked out much about how it can edit that image. Adobe Photoshop starter kit, while present on the PC, has been discontinued by Adobe so I can't unlock it and use it. Needless to say I only find this out after I have gone through their registration rigmarole. Jessop's Picture Manager, also present on the PC, looks to do some of the right sort of things, but again, will only cope with one image at a time. I wonder if the print shop down the road would have done it for me? They probably have a scanner big enough to do the whole thing in one go, but that hardly rates as geekery.
Wondered about including the reverse, but thought this would be a bit OTT. So we miss out on the interesting juxtaposition of an advertisement for the latest Dennis Wheatley ('The man who killed the king') with one for the death of the Marquess of Linlithgow. The Dean of the Thistle (whatever that may be) helped with his memorial service.
Last but not least we have the problem of order. What you post first appears last, given the way the blogspot organises things for me. Would I have done better to have done it the other way around than I did done?
# posted by Jim @ 11:30 AM 
