Wed 2008-11-19 This morning I caught a glimpse of a white heron-like bird rising up from the river Blackwater between Farnborough North and Frimley. It was probably a little egret (Egretta garzetta), like the one I saw back in February.
Sat 2008-11-15 Yesterday afternoon, I saw an armed policeman outside the central library here in Reading. He was standing back from the road in a recess behind a pillar. I wouldn't say he was hiding, he was just being deliberately inconspicuous.
The last time I saw armed policemen in Reading was following the London bus bombings when, for several days there were two with submachine guns under their arms standing just ouside the main entrance to Reading Station. On that occasion they were clearly a show of force, intended to reassure the public. But the man yesterday was clearly not on show, and I found particularly worrying: some operation was going on, and it involved guns, and I did want to be around to see what it was. I hurried on home.
Tristram Brelstaff
A week or so later I saw a prison van coming out from behind the library escorted by two police cars with blue lights flashing blue lights and sirens wailing. They must have been coming from the back entrance to the Crown Court where a trial of some dangerous criminals must have been going on. That could also be the explanation for the earlier presence of the armed policeman in the area.
Thu 2008-11-13 Beside the railway between Blackwater and Farnborough North there is a field in which some ponies are kept. A few weeks ago, as I was on the train to work, I noticed what loooked to me like a large brown bird on the ground in that field. It looked like a large raptor of some sort, however, as it was rather gloomy morning and I only had a short glimpse of it, I didn't know whether to trust my eyes. Well, this morning, I saw what I presume was the same bird again, on the ground in the same field. And, as the sky was brighter this time, I got a clearer view of it. It was brown, flecked with black, most probably a buzzard.
Sun 2008-11-09 The process of programming language creation is a subject of too little reflection and retrospection. Newcomers to the field (including, in some measure, us) regularly propose new languages without quite understanding what they are getting into or how big the task is. Those of us who have already crawled down the language design rat-hole rarely have time to describe either the depth of the hole or the true majesty of the rats involved.
From the abstract of The Origins of the BitC Programming Language, by Jonathan Shapiro and Swaroop Sridhar (SRL Technical Report 2008-04). Via Alarming Development.
Fri 2008-11-07 From way back in 1981, Iceland by The Fall.
Someone has recently loaded this, and a large numbers of other Fall tracks, up onto Youtube, so I thought I'd give a link to it before they all got taken down.
Music journalist Colin Irwin wrote an account of the Fall's 1981 'tour' of Iceland which was published in the Melody Maker; a copy can be found here.
