no2self.net

Oops. The site (and my e-mail) was down for most of yesterday as I committed the cardinal sin of forgetting to renew my domain name. Luckily this isn’t a commercial venture with an address that people are queuing up to wrestle from my grip. It wasn’t claimed by another Annable.

In my defence, I never received an e-mail reminder from my site host UK Web Solutions. They’re forgiven though, as this has been the first the glitch in an otherwise impressive service. I get a lot of stuff for a small amount of money and their tech support is very fast. I’m happy to recommend them to anyone searching for a new home. The only downside is that I can’t telnet or ssh into the account like I can with freeshell.

• The Ecologist Magazine: Ecology News Online
• Images by Henrik Wann Jensen

cutting edge ray-tracing using effects such as subsurface scattering

delivered (almost) daily at (almost) midnight via del.icio.us.

Exurbia

(aka Edge City, subSuburbia, sprawl, outta control, psychick death zones): that newly expanded, resurfaced and subsubcontracted housing areas that aren’t really near anything, except the highway.

These are evidence of continued flight from the urban zones by the almost affluent. Requiring a car as they usually have no sidewalks, the exurban neighborhood is a psychological battlefield that pits “neighbour” against “neighbour” in non-communication assaults, assumptive competition and hyperreal conspicuous consumerism.

A word to the wise: do not go there except with the most profound sense of caprice and beatitude.

from monoculartimes.co.uk

• Mixmatcher

submit and share mix tape proposals

• BBC – Radio3 World and New Music – Late Junction

Highly recommended – diverse and captivating.

delivered (almost) daily at (almost) midnight via del.icio.us.

It’s been a busy week. There are a couple of entries waiting to be written, including one about the galleries I’ve been able to visit over the last few days. In the meantime, I’m posting an image instead of words.

Predictably, looking at the art work of others has made me think about my own work. Having revisited some of my old sketchbooks – driven by the guilty admission that it has been too long since I last picked up a pencil instead of a mouse – I’ve decided to post a few to remind myself whenever I look here, that I should look elsewhere too and record events with more than just words.

First up, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, as seen from seat 10, Row K on the 12th February 1998. I don’t remember what was being played that evening, but since this was back in the days of Simon Rattle, I imagine it was pretty good.

Curiously, following my recent entry about Tschumi, I note that below the sketch is a comment about pages 205 and 213 in Architecture and Disjunction – I had apparently some interest in the sections on cross programming and rejection.

• USB WiFi dongle antenna

Range extended to kilometres by using household implements

• Historical Fencing Manuals Online — Swords & Swordsmanship

parry and riposte

• Daring Fireball: Markdown

Text to HTML plugin for bloggers

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• Library of Alexandria – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

See previous post

• BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Library of Alexandria discovered

Cripes.

• dodgeball.com :: location-based social software for mobile devices

let’s hope this comes to the UK soon

• Joe Bussard’s Vintage78

Oh my gosh. 25,000 78rpm recordings available for custom made purchase on CD.

• . BASILISK .

‘an online journal of architecture, philosophy, literature, music and perception’ – that doesn’t work in Mozilla

• musicplasma : the music visual search engine

Spheres of musical influence – enter a musician/band and map their connections

• WFMU-FM 91.1/Jersey City, NJ; 90.1/Hudson Valley, NY

independent freeform radio station with complete internet archive

• The Vertical Farm Project

We’re currently have 48% of the world’s population living in urban environments, we’re probably gonna need this soon.

• loud paper : news

architecture magazine

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Oh dear. It’s not been too rosy for Mr Gehry lately. So far we’ve had snow falling on students head’s, clients employing other architects to fix bits they don’t like and a hockey trophy which … when Gehry pulled the covering off the trophy, it was like someone had tugged the burlap bag off the Elephant Man…. Finally, let us not forget the heat that bounces off the Disney Concert Hall’s stainless steel surface and cooks the residents across the street.

As a student I was inspired and intrigued by Gehry’s work. I fondly remember the time my friend and I discovered a slide and tape presentation of some of his early work. Having dashed to the empty lecture theatre to watch it we were captivated by the images as the carousel clicked by; Gehry’s slow, laconic voice on the tape carefully describing the details as if he was specifically addressing us. Intellectually enagaging and technically fascinating, it had a big effect.

Some years later I realised that the tape had been running slowly. In real life he sounded somewhat less deliberate and rigorous. It was a huge disappointment. I feel the same know.

(tip o’ the titanium hat to Veritas et Venustas and That Brutal Joint.)

It’s probably best if I leave my name off any planning applications at work for a while. The AJ published my response to the article they wrote the week before about Philip Singleton, the new head of Birmingham City Council’s urban design unit.

Dear AJ,

“University applications are up in both our universities and I have a hunch it is because of this building.” – Philip Singleton, AJ number 17/219

Dare I ask which of Birmingham’s three universities was left out of the discussion during the interview about Philip Singleton’s new role at the City Council? Since applications for the undergraduate course at Birmingham School of Architecture are currently down (perhaps because of this building?), it would appear that the University of Central England is the one that doesn’t make the cut.

Good luck to both Birmingham and Aston University*.

Yours sincerely,

Rob Annable

*who, by the way, don’t have any architecture courses

I’m missing my daily reading slot now that I’ve started driving to work instead of taking the tram. However, Radio 4 is providing an adequate substitute as I drive along the M6 hoping not to get stuck in a jam.

This week’s Start the Week program had some fascinating guests on it. Two of which have sent me scuttling off to my Amazon Wish List to add a couple of books.

The most interesting is perhaps Not On The Label by Felicity Lawrence. It’s a piece of investigative journalism about the behind the scenes processes that deliver food to our supermarkets. It has some sobering and stomach churning facts to share, such as the pre-packed salads that are packaged by cheap (exploited) migrant labour and then washed in Chlorine twenty times the strength of a swimming pool. It’s done merely to maintain the visual appearance and extend the shelf life.

Out of season the market moves to Almeria in Spain. Where a collossal farming program has transformed the landscape. I was there myself in October but in my naivety I never realised that the mile upon mile of covered greenhouses were producing goods destined for the UK. Those that make it to the UK have been put through rigorous visual tests before they’re allowed to be shown to the consumer. The actual taste and nutrition of the food is secondary.

In the supermarket beauty parade, an apple must look good in front of the camera or risk rejection. A Dutch firm provides packhouses with machines, which cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, to measure cosmetic perfection. The ‘Greefa Intelligent Quality Sorter’ takes up to 70 colour pictures of every apple on the conveyor belt to determine the ‘blush of non-equally coloured fruit’, and to grade it by size. It can detect deviations of as little as 1mm². So if the supermarket specification says that an apple of a particular variety must be, say, 15-17% blush red on green, it can ‘grade out’ or reject any that are 18% red on green or a miserable 14% red on green. The beauty parade often means the difference between profit and loss for the farmer. Anything ‘graded out’ ends up, if the farmer is lucky, as fruit for juice at giveaway prices of 3-5p per pound, but as often as not it will just go to waste.

This was taken from a section of the book published by the Guardian.

I hope you enjoy your next trip to the supermarket.