Recently updated blogs

I had an epiphany some years back. In a brief conversation with a young woman, in the queue for lunch at a corporate ‘values’ day (I was a Director), opened my eyes up to the whole values thing in organisations. “I have my values,” she said, “and they’re not going to be changed by a HR department.... I’ll be leaving in a couple of years and no doubt their HR …

the California coast (Point Lobos State Park) Last week we took our first real trip since the pandemic, flying into Southern California, driving up the coast, and finishing in San Francisco. We wanted to see friends and family and get some vacationing in. We’ve been building up credit card points for the past four years so I was able to pay for our flights, hotels, and rental car with points …

In Great Britain, they have a national mapping agency known as The Ordnance Survey (OS) which provides highly-detailed geographic maps for individuals as well as for military purposes. In the early 1960s, the Ordnance Survey undertook to re-map Great Britain and it was a massive project. This 1961 British Pathe newsreel shows just how large a project it was and how many people were involved in the creation of these …

(via Andrew Parker)

“Calyx Krater” (2021) – Paul S. BriggsVia https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2024/11/paul-s-briggs-ceramics/

In his final years Clint Eastwood directs movies the way Ernest Hemingway wrote novels — straight, true and unadorned. There is nothing in Juror #2 that anyone might mistake for a director showing off. Maybe J.K.Simmons’ hat. Nor is there anything in the writing that gilds the lily. The ‘just the facts’ and ‘just what we need per scene’ could be mistaken for boring. And, given what a fan I …

Last weekend I finally got the chance to do a decent amount of fishing, a whole day has been hard to come by of late and armed with a loaf of bread and some maggots I made the most of my time. After weeks of heavy rain it was nice and settled, which did bring its own challenges but with some knowhow chub are willing beasts. The river was very …

Kerry Ellis will star in the long-awaited UK premiere of the Tony-nominated If/Then early next year. Created by the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning team behind the hit rock musical Next to Normal – Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey – the musical which was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Original Score in 2014 will make its UK debut as a staged concert at the Savoy Theatre on 10 …

“Your inner oddness is not a flaw. It’s a superpower!” – Futurist Jim Carroll With a little bit of downtime, I’ve been working in the home office on my next book. The title keeps flipping around: right now, I’ve settled on “Being Unique: Simple Strategies for Finding Your Creativity, Accelerating Innovation, and Getting to Your Future Faster!” Why right now? One thing I’m doing is that rather than losing myself …

There are many reasons to visit our major exhibition, Medieval Women: In Their Own Words. There are the hundreds of fascinating women whose stories you'll encounter, from Eleanor of Castile and Hildegard of Bingen, to Margaret Paston and Birgitta of Sweden. There's the collection of unique items you’ll find on...

Table of contents User journey Hurl source Create a new database Ensure freshness Database details Database queries Conclusion As I wrote in a previous post, I love using Hurl to test HTTP JSON APIs. Hurl is a command-line interface tool (CLI) that makes testing and automating HTTP APIs easy and enjoyable. In this article, I will showcase some Hurl features with a concrete example. We will test part of the …

Review: Herry Perry, Artist and Illustrator by Julian Francis.A guest post by London Historians Member David Fathers. This new publication, written by Julian Francis, reveals, probably for the first time, the work of artist Herry Perry. Her output of illustrations, posters, engravings and pub signs between the 1920s and 1950s was quite prolific. She was […]

The collapse of Genesis risked taking down Digital Currency Group with it. So Barry Silbert is trying a pivot to AI with his new AI-on-the-blockchain company, Yuma! SPOILER: it’s crypto token pumping. The writeup is over at Pivot to AI. Your subscriptions keep this site going. Sign up today!

Album of the Week, November 23, 2024 As we discussed last time, Herbie Hancock went through a transition back to acoustic jazz following the success of his “Rockit” band, and with a few exceptions stayed in this lane. His former Miles Davis (and VSOP) bandmate Wayne Shorter was in a different place. Following his departure from the Miles band after Bitches Brew, Wayne cofounded one of the bedrock-foundation fusion bands, …

Newness over at eggbaconchipsandbeans.