Recently updated blogs

Peanuts Worldwide and the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat (the newspaper of Charles Schulz' hometown) have launched "You Don’t Know Peanuts," the first official Peanuts podcast.Hosted by Melissa Menta, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications for Peanuts Worldwide (she's worked with the Peanuts crew for over 20 years), and David Templeton, an arts and entertainment journalist for the Press-Democrat, the new podcast is subtitled "The Untold Stories Behind the Greatest Comic …

Blitz is a powerful and somewhat disarming film about the longterm German bombing of London in 1940. One might be forgiven for expecting a kinder, gentler rendition of this horrific event because it’s told through the eyes of a 9-year-old boy. Guess again. Writer-director Steve McQueen spares us nothing in his recreation of the conditions before, during, and after each attack. If anything, they seem even more frightening than any …

I am often asked, at times, what is your all-time favorite surface fly to fish on the Sipsey Tailrace and Simth Lake during the Spring and Summer months? My response is the Caddis dry fly. For this post, I will only cover the surface aspects of this fly, not the subsurface stages the fly goes through to become airborne. Why is the fly so effective in fly fishing? It's a …

I'm about month late on this review, huh? I actually received this Michael Myers vinyl figure as a birthday present a little over two months ago but, since I stuck to the theme of 2024's Universal Monsters theme and this figure is from Halloween 2 which was released by...Universal Pictures? So was Halloween 3, Halloween 2018, Halloween Kills, and Halloween Ends. Wait.... is Michael Myers a Universal Monster? Ha ha. …

Birdwatchers will tell you that it is important to keep an eye on your garden, as some interesting rarities can turn up. I’d agree, have seen a yellow-browed warbler in ours a few years ago, and our neighbour saw a rose-coloured startling. The same applies to trains (sometimes.) Walking home over the railway bridge…. Allan informed me that it is a class 153, now used by the Network Rail inspection …

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 …

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 …