Caboose

Today has been a pleasantly lazy day, got up late, wandered into town, wandered around town and had lunch at the Arts Picture House bar.

I recently joined up as a Friend of the Picturehouse so I’ve get to see a couple of films for free. Pretty much on a whim I decided to watch AKA.

It’s not a very happy film, which suits me as I tend to prefer dark or miserable films. The plot summary on IMDB doesn’t do it justice, there’s more information on the film’s site and at Picture House Cinemas. Several of the reviews miss out the point that the writer/director, Duncan Roy, based the film on his own life.

The director’s technique of showing three frames side by side, often different versions of the same scene, was intrusive at first but soon I didn’t notice it, in much the same way as subtitles. It worked really well to show how the characters could have different perceptions of the same events.

One slight technical problem I noticed was that it looked like it was being projected from a video projector rather than film and there was an irritating background buzz.

Wandering along Mill Road today I noticed that one of the estate agents had its window boarded up. In the middle of the board was a small sign:

It was not a brick
Somebody jumped/was pushed through the window
He wasn’t seriously injured
Due to the size of the window it will be some time before it is repaired
We are still open for business

(or something like that, my memory isn’t great).

I spent last weekend in the Pyrenees with a couple of friends and of course my digital camera.

We flew to Barcelona, hired a car and drove north to the town of Vielha, right up in the mountains. The view definitely makes a nice change from the tedious flatness of eastern England.

We spent Saturday and Sunday walking in the valleys above Arties. It’s great walking all day knowing that at the end of the day you can have a nice hot shower, a cool beer and a great meal back at your hotel.
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Bored with the usual news sites? Try Jim Romenesko’s Obscure Store and Reading Room, it collects weird stories from other news sites (mostly US local newspapers).

I got back from my weekend in Spain at about 1am this morning and I’m in the middle of packing for a business trip to Sweden.

I get back late tomorrow night so some pictures from Spain should appear on Thursday.

One quick thing I noticed along the way: Barcelona airport has announcements in Spanish, English and Catalan, the English version even has place names mispronounced in a typical English way, for example Madge-or-kuh for Mallorca.

I’m off to Spain tomorrow and don’t get back until Monday night so there won’t be any posts over the weekend. In fact there probably won’t be any until Thursday as I’m off on a business trip to Stockholm Tuesday evening.

The digital camera will be going with me so expect photos from the mountains!

I finished reading Dead Air, the new Iain Banks book, last night. I’ve read all his books so far but I was strangely disappointed by this one.

It has all the usual features: dark humour, a Scottish main character and politics. Somehow it seems to be just more thinly-veiled than usual political rant. OK, I agree with many of the ideas but a bit more of a plot would be nice.

Maybe I just missed something, I’ll re-read it before I return it to the library.

I’m working pretty late at the moment, so I’ve not been getting much time to myself. This means that there won’t be much appearing here this week.

I’m off on holiday to Spain at the weekend though, I’ll probably be taking the digital camera so some pictures should turn up next week.

This weekend my sister Clare and her husband Iain came to visit. We went on a walk around Cambridge, visiting a few pubs along the way. The first was the Cambridge Blue, then the Fort St George, the Green Dragon and finally the Boat House.

In the evening we had a very nice meal at the Loch Fyne Restaurant on Trumpington Street.

I’ve finally got round to replacing my Handspring Visor PDA with something a bit newer and shinier: a Sony Clié T625.

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It has a beautiful colour screen and all the latest PalmOS bells and whistles.