On heiding thistles
But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed,
The trembling earth resounds his tread.
Clap in his walie nieve a blade,
He'll mak it whissle;
An' legs an' arms, an' heads will sned,
Like taps o' thrissle.
The symbols we choose tell us something about how we see ourselves, and, perhaps, a little of how we really are. Only in Scotland would we seek to extirpate our national flower. Only in Scotland would we celebrate a poem which speaks of doing so. Only in Scotland would we be utterly confident that we will never succeed.
The state of social media
Vision
You post to the social media system of your choice. Your friends — the friends you choose and no-one else, unless you choose to make your post public — see it on the social media system of their choice. If they choose to respond, they respond to a common thread which all your friends (and possibly theirs, if you've allowed that) can see, limited by the specific capabilities of their chosen system. For example users of one system might see the discussion as a branching threaded discussion like Usenet, while others see a single unbranching thread. Common conventions for tagging, reposting and referencing other users are used across heterogenous social media systems.
Impossible? Technically, no.
Haymaking
It's been a big week here on the farm; so big, a journal entry is required. But so big too that, here in the lull that follows, my memory is already confused. I'm setting down events as I remember them; I could be wrong.
The core of it has been hay. We decided, early in the year, to put the majority of the farm down to hay as needing least work. We all knew that this would be a busy year...
We've needed to harvest the hay for a while; it's been ready. Finn had bought — out of his own pocket, as his own property — the basic equipment needed: a mower, a hay-bob, a baler. All of them were old, second hand, sold, in fact, as scrap. But Finn, our smith, is talented with metal mechanisms, and he fettled them up and made them work.
In praise of Digital Audio Broadcasting
Every once in a while, a revolutionary new technology comes along which is so much better than the technology it replaces that it immediately sweeps the old away and supplants it utterly. Digital Audio Broadcasting is a case in point — a technology which wholly eclipses the primitive and outdated Frequency Modulated VHF system.
Let's start with audio quality, which is, of course, what audio broadcasting is all about. Admittedly, when it has good reception, an antiquated FM radio has slightly better audio quality than DAB. But when it doesn't have good reception, the audio quality of FM degrades markedly. All radio systems suffer from time to time from poor reception and interference, of course, but DAB handles these in a far preferable manner: when DAB cannot provide an optimal listening experience, it cuts out entirely. After all, silence is golden, and who wants to listen, for example, to a weather forecast or a traffic report, or an important news story, with a degraded signal?
DAB values silence so highly, indeed, that it will use software glitches to sometimes introduce periods of silence into your listening even when reception is perfect — a truly wonderful innovation.
Introducing the Winter Palace
I started this section of my blog developing ideas about a really ambitious home I wanted to build. I eventually came to the conclusion that that first design was either too expensive or, if done cheaply, too environmentally unfriendly. So I developed a second, simpler design which still had a lot of interesting features. It was always obvious that it was going to be hard getting either design past planning permission. It was also always obvious that while I might be able to live in a vestigial shelter in the woods in summer, that wasn't going to be possible in winter. So there had to be a plan B; a plan B that could be quickly and inexpensively implemented to provide cosy and weatherproof shelter for the winter, and that that plan B would have to be implemented if I didn't have planning permission by midsummer.
It's midsummer. I don't have planning permission. It's time for plan B.
I've been developing ideas for plan B for as long as I've been working on the croft house designs. The original idea was to build a tiny Tardis like structure, based on what I've learned from yacht cabins — the smallest possible space in which I could live and stay warm. Later, I considered a log cabin — which would be less than ten feet square — built in the space underneath the Summer Palace. Both of these are still possibilities, but about six weeks ago, I made an interesting discovery.