Eat Your Greens

Saturn, originally uploaded by eat your greens.

Just got home from work, having set up the Observatory's LX10 telescope for some visitors in the courtyard tonight, right next to the Prime Meridian of the World. We spent a couple of hours watching Saturn, which looks amazing at the moment. I think we saw its largest moon, Titan, too. As Darren notes, over on the Royal Observatory blog, this month is a good month for planet-gazing. We have Mercury, Saturn, Mars and Jupiter all visible at some point during the night.

No photos from tonight, so I'm making do from an older photo taken with the 28-inch Great Equatorial telescope.

Posted by Jimbo on May 8, 2008 1:12 AM Permalink | Comments (0)

This is geeky navel gazing, but, courtesy of flickr stats, here's what people have typed into google in order to find my flickr photos, by order of popularity. Note that Daisy is more popular than tits!

1. staffy cross jack russell
2. tits too small
3. facebook tits
4. my tits site:flickr.com
5. stardust cover
6. jack russell cross staffy

Does this mean more people are searching for pictures of Patrick Lauke than pictures of ladies' breasts?

Posted by Jimbo on May 5, 2008 12:02 AM Permalink | Comments (1)

Photo credit: Dawn Sutter Madell

A couple of you (mr g. and k.r.) might remember my first venture into writing HTML – a few pages about the band Antietam, written in 1994 or 95 and hosted on geocities. Those pages moved to a home on demon internet in 1996 and lasted, more or less unchanged, until around 2005, when I bought eatyourgreens.org.uk. Well, the pages themselves still exist and you can nose around on them here. My favourites are the first appearance of the phrase ‘eat your greens!’ and a Guitar Player interview where Tara Key gets technical about amps and effects pedals. What's not to love about a librarian who plays guitar like Neil Young and waxes lyrical about Les Pauls?

Anyway, enough nostalgia. Antietam have a myspace page now and a new album, Opus Mixtum, which I just got hold of and have been playing pretty constantly for the last 3 days. 26 songs (11 of them instrumentals) sprawling over 2 CDs, it takes a while to sink in but first impressions are that this is a great record. It's an eclectic range of sounds, but no less powerful for it. There's Crazy Horse style rock, reminiscent of Rope A Dope or Burgoo, mixed with gentle acoustic guitar and piano that could have come from Tara's solo albums, Bourbon County and Ear and Echo. I think this is going to be one of my favourite records of 2008.

If you're in New York, Antietam are playing outside the Brooklyn Public Library on 31st May. More info on myspace.

Posted by Jimbo on May 1, 2008 10:12 PM Permalink | Comments (0)

2008 Book Sale Leaflet, originally uploaded by eat your greens.

34th annual Blackheath & Greenwich Amnesty book sale
Saturday 21st June 2008
9am 2008-06-21T09:00:00+1:00 until 5pm 2008-06-21T17:00:00+1:00
Church of the Ascension
Dartmouth Row
Blackheath SE10 8BF

20,000 new and used books at bargain prices. Last year we raised a record-breaking £9,500 for Amnesty International UK. Can we beat our personal best this year?

This sale is dependent entirely on the hard work of a small team of volunteers and generous donations of books. Work starts around about Monday 19th May and continues up until the day of the sale.

If you would like to help with preparing for the sale, or would like to donate books, please leave a comment using the form below.

You can also find us on Upcoming and Facebook. Flyers can be downloaded from flickr.

PS. No <abbr> tags were harmed during the making of this blog post.

Posted by Jimbo on April 29, 2008 10:12 PM Permalink | Comments (0)

The panel: Mike Davies, Kath Moonan, Bim Egan, Jonathan Hassell, Antonia Hyde, Dr. Panayiotis Zaphiris. Julie Howell moderating.

(laptop batteries are dying so this may not get the whole session.)

JH: PAS78 is going to become a full British Standard.

Better Connected report - accessibility is getting worse, not better?
Bim: No, it's getting better but we compare sites with their peers and the standards are much higher now. Example: everyone has headings now. Five years ago this wasn't true. Web probably 200% more accessible now compared with five years ago.
Talks about the problem of Too Much Accessibility - well-intentioned developers adding accessibility features which may hurt usability.

Why are Yahoo! here?
Mike: Y! understand that accessibility is part of their mainstream business. Built a very talented web team. That talent brings accessibility with it as a matter of course. Needs one person with power to see the need and push for it within an organisation. Same story at Legal & General.

Overcoming fear of contributing/fear of making mistakes?
Jonathan: Not sure. Give people the means to express themselves. Give them a voice, which may be text but may also be video. Give them a medium that they are comfortable expressing themselves in. Anonymity of the web is a problem - encourages trolling, which discourages people who have something to say. Barrier to contributing is the audience themselves. Youtube users can be awful. Web hides your disability, but sense of identity is important to people. BSL community a good example here.

And the laptop is onto reserve power. That's all for today folks…

Posted by Jimbo on April 25, 2008 4:49 PM Permalink | Comments (0)