Observations from a Hill

Just watched a lovely encomium to Keith Floyd on YouTube this evening, which made us reflect on the very influence this bloke had on us - food wise - during the 1980s and 90s, a legacy that obtains to this day. I can't begin to count how many thousands of great meals that we and our friends cooked and shared with each other over those decades, but suffice it to say that Floyd's enthusiasms and flamboyance had a very big influence on us all and our cooking. One of the things that stand out about the man was that he was prepared to wing it and improvise, and often to - publicly - fail: jazz, mes enfants! - something that has always been dear to my heart. Very often you've just got to go with the moment and rely on native instinct come hell or high water. I once told my photographer cousin that I could operate a Sony broadcast quality Betacam camera for a video shoot for Toyota, only to get him to stop en route to the shoot so that I could rehearse what I'd only just read...

I wrote the other day about The Great Bishop's Castle Power Outage - actually it lasted little more than an hour, but brought the town to pretty much a standstill - which made me think: how much survival resilience do we actually have, here in the second quarter of the twenty-first century? Answer, practically none. As soon as the power goes down, pretty much every aspect of our lives goes down with it. Which is actually kind of worrying. We were subjected to a freak power outage in the mid-nineties, when we lived in Brynbella, down on the A5, on the outskirts of Bethesda, at Christmas. An ice-storm - a very rare phenomenon in the UK - had taken down every wooden power pole across the tops from Aber. We were amongst a very small number of properties that were still fed with electricity from this very old circuit across the mountain. Suffice to say, we were without power from Christmas Eve, through Christmas Day and beyond: we gave up and drove to the Midlands to stay with parents o...

I had a thought [shit happens, I know] this morning about chasing down some of the history surrounding our software development back in the '90s/00s: viz the VBase/InfinitImages days of yore. I then thought, why not chuck some questions at Claude AI and see what comes back? So, mindful of the fact that a carefully formed prompt or question posed to a LLM will elicit more sense than a stupid question, I simply stated the following: ' In the 1990s there was a Photoshop plugin called FotoPage which has disappeared from sale - can you research this for me? '. What followed was very interesting, as the AI came up with exactly correct details about both the product and our development of it, and found an archived, compressed version of one of the range on the Tucows archive. It correctly returned the chronology of the software's development, up to and including its year of demise. It then went on to accurately analyse the two principal technical reasons why the product(s) eve...

The late, oh, so great, Alex Harvey sang, or rather er habt sprechgesang gemacht '...another tree dies of shame...' on the 1975 Sensational Alex Harvey Band album, "Tomorrow Belongs To Me" in the song "The Tale of The Giant Stoneater". Like so much of the SAHBs output, the lyrical content and intent of the album's songs is so genuinely right on in the original meaning of the phrase - please don't use the term 'woke' in this context - and carries forward to the present day prescient warnings from over half a century ago: the radical shift to the right and neo-liberalism was a mere twelve/eighteen months in the future from the album's release. The environmental and political issues that have dogged us persistently since then are still as thorny and unresolved now as then. I picked up on a linguistic parallel to this today in a book review in this week's New Statesman. In Sophia Smith Galer's new book, "How To Kill a Language...

  Our recent stay in Clun and many visits to The White Horse Inn [blog posts passim] prompted me to ease myself back into my family tree researches after a break of over a year - or is it two? Tempus does fugit without due warning at my age. A realisation struck me about the apparent mobility of family members across the Marches, the Midlands and Wales back in the nineteenth century which, given their poverty, I'd always wondered about; when the penny dropped: the railways. Also, when you look at the map, all the areas of concern to my familial archaeology are within relatively short distances of each other, and connected by what was then a comprehensive rail network. Pictured is my latest little acquisition: a facsimile of Bradshaw's Guide of the 1860s, which I bought to try and flesh out some of the travel background of the time. Using this with some of the other books of railway history I have to hand, I hope to get a better flavour for the movements of people at the time in...

I realised today that I, for the first time in my life, had failed to keep up with current technology: specifically, AI. The move from from chat-based interfaces to multi-modal agentic models over the last few [months, to be honest] has taken me rather by surprise. I've always taken some pride in the fact that I can always [at least cursorily] keep up with things techno-logic-al, and I find for the first time in my life that I've been blind-sided by the breakneck speed of developments in AI and its deployment in real-world situations. I aim to catch up; even at my advanced age there is simply no excuse for laxity in these matters: current knowledge should not be the exclusive domain of the young, don't you know. Anyhow, I decided to dip my toes a little further into the - as yet - little-known waters of agentic AI, and posed a question that models my undergraduate thesis' inquiry [although my dissertation was a good deal longer in the end]: “I need a discursive essay of...