Pig Sty Avenue

Per Dornyei (2005) (55-9). "...one of the most promising current directions in language aptitude studies", (55). "working memory for language may be one (if not the) central component of this language aptitude". (Miyaki and Friedman, 1998 [339]). Relying on Baddely and Hitch (1974 - no ref given) as reviewed in Baddely (2003), Dornyei reports a four part structure to working memory: 1 The phonological loop , the verbal component, responsible for storing verbal and acoustic information. It decays within 2 seconds, but loss is prevented by "subvocal rehearsal". 2 The visuospatial sketchpad , the visual counterpart to (1), used, eg, in everyday reading. Baddely suggests it also has a storage/processing component, which can translate verbal to visual information. 3 The central executive , "the most important and least understood aspect of working memory", it is the "supervisory attentional system". It's thou...

I can't write anymore. No, seriously. I've been working this morning with Dornyei (2005), getting my head into the theory of learner aptitude, and making notes on a proper paper notepad, (it's not my book so I can't scribble in the margins), and it's so bloody slow as to be painful. I type far more quickly now than I can write with pencil and paper. Besides, write down a reference by hand and you're going to have to type the bugger up later, anyway. AND you might mis-transcribe it at that point. Nope, laptops are aka notebooks for good reason. And I'm giving up on pencil and paper from hereon in. Ref: Dornyei, Z. The Psychology of the Language Learner . Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Mahwah, NJ. 2005

I'm not quite sure what it means, (The Mother Something Something0 but the man who does the website asked if he could use a picture of The Bairn , and I agreed. That's two websites in as many years who have asked to use photos, both of them of The Bairn. Time to give up the day job; not. One of the paradoxically funny and sad phenomenon on Flickr stems from this sort of situation. A not-bad amateur photographer gets their photos used on websites, maybe in a paper magazine, and possibly earns a few pennies from it. Kerching! Suddenly, they're raving paranoiacs, fighting off a hostile world out to steal their snapshots, put them on blogs , and God knows what. All rights reserved! Fuck off!! They get the occasional small cheque in return for all of the fun being bleached out of their hobby. Dopey twats. NOT that I'm saying big money capitalists should be able to rip off creative commons photos. No indeed: just try it with one of mine, Halliburton, or whoever. Bu...

During my last visit home I bought The Heart of Saturday Night . My favourite track is The Ghosts of Saturday Night (After Hours at Napoleone's Pizza House) . I googled it just now and found this wee goldmine . Ace. I'm due another holiday at home soon, so I've gone mad and ordered Nighthawks at the Diner , Small Change and Foreign Affairs , too. Inshallah, I'll come back armed with the new film scanner , plenty of Tom, and get on with the Tripoli Noir project . In other words, stop blethering and start snapping.

One of the best book about politics and economics I've ever read. Simultaneously harrowing (I had to put it aside for a couple of weeks, half way through), and inspiring. An eye opener .

That was vicious last night. A sand and thunderstorm all-in-one: never seen the like. Blowing a gale and boiling hot. Good to be indoors.

Dad and Grandad , originally uploaded by Pin Shy Avenue . I think that this is my oldest surviving photo. We moved from that house when I was ten, so it's before that, probably around 1968/9. I seem to remember that the camera had just two or three settings, probably adjusting the shutter speed. And you can see that it was fixed focus, with the focal point on the garden shed there. Strange, though, this is the kind of photo I really like now and am starting to take again: black and white, with strong contrasts, and ordinary people not posing. Grandad always looks a bit fierce in photos. Actually, he was a lovely man. He died a few years after this was taken. I often think of him.

Most working class people in Jarrow would like to live in Primrose. It's almost as pleasant as its name suggests. Biggish semis, built before the war, when it still seemed like a good idea to provide ordinary people with decent housing. My mam and dad lived there from the late 70s until they got their pensioners' bungalow a couple of years ago. We often talked about moving there, in terms of an aspiration. Until a month ago. It was interesting to read this article in the Guardian about the rise of the Right in Stoke on Trent. It's a story my townspeople will be familiar with: a Labour party that's been in power for generations and has evolved into an arrogant nepotistic clique. Natural Labour voters eventually need to rebel. If the Liberals don't stand, what are they to do? Memories of the 80s will mean that most Jarrow people are reluctant to vote for the party they still associate with Pinochet's Pal . But the BNP stood in Primrose. And a really fright...

When UK based people, who only go abroad on holidays, hear that you're working in Libya, they go into raptures about all the sunshine. Numpties. Living under Britain's shy sun, they think that all hot weather must be good. But just now, there's a wind blowing out of the south east, which means it's crossed thousands of miles of desert before it got here, and it's thoroughly pissed off about it. I've got a short Blighty holiday coming up, and I sincerely hope that it rains non-stop.

I thought I felt a tremor in Tripoli the other day. Maybe I was right .

Maybe the reason that some of us blog is that, unlike IRL, you can tidy your virtual self up in half an hour. And that's just what I've done with The Avenue and my Flickr account . Links I never use via the blog have been deleted, all links to blogs have been gathered into one place, and other links have been added to reflect the approaching move to Ayrshire. Voila! And I've started out a new category, "Fishing", which at the moment only links to the BBC's tide and weather information. This is because our new home will only be ten minutes walk from the shore. AND fishing tackle is really cheap in Tripoli. So I'll stock up on stuff to take home. I used to do a lot of fishing when I was a boy. Photography too, now I think of it. Funny how one returns to the habits of adolescence in one's forties. Well, some of them...

That's Mars, yesterday, that is. I got it from the University of Arizona's site for the Phoenix mission .

This is a note to myself to check out the films that did well this year.

Working Title: The relationship between attitudes to language learning and second language acquisition: a case study of three Libyan English language learners. Since our internet connexion was fixed earlier this week, like a dog returning to its vomit, I've been spending time on the frivolous side of Flickr , (that's DMU to those in the know). It has to stop. I've been leaving my Module 4 folder from the University of Leicester out in prominent places to spook me back into studying, and that's succeeded. Fortunately, my workmate Dan has an MA and did his dissertation in the related area of motivation, so he had some books (Dornyei) to lend me. So it's bye-bye Flickr, hello SLA for the next couple of months. The next couple of weeks, in particular, I can get a hell of a lot done as regards reading and checking sources.

I doubt you would have been able to predict, a year or so ago, just how crap Papa Gordon was going to be. Northern Rock, the snap-election indecision, fuel prices, repossessions, scrapping the 10% tax rate, and ignoring the government's own experts and reclassifying bob hope , in order to "send a message". Ffs. They sent a message that they were like a mad Daily Mail reading uncle who you only see at Christmas and who gets on about blacks as Dad's whisky bottle takes a pummeling and your trying to watch telly. This is something that has always puzzled me: why does the Establishment have such a downer on pot? Is it really the alcohol industry's lobbyists? This article suggests so , (thought I'd feel it was more cogent if the writer's keyboard hadn't lost its apostrophe). Anyone who's personally compared cannabis against prescribed anti-depression drugs might also be able to give you a clue to the Pharmaceutical industry's interest in keepi...

Well, I've ordered the Canon CanoScan 8800F . You'll notice that the Epson Perfection V350 comes off better for colour quality, but that's irrelevant if you're shooting mostly black and white, and anyways the Epson doesn't take 120; (which is significant: I had a dream about this - I can't remember the details now but I woke up thinking "of course it has to do 120!") I also found the rangefinderforum today, which is a mine of information, if you want to start dismantling and cleaning a FED 2 - which I probably will in due course. I picked up that roll of colour (Jessops Everyday 200 - I got ten rolls for a couple of quid on eBay) yesterday that I'd snapped with the second FED 2, and it looks fine: no light leaks, at least so far as I can tell from the negs. I've got a roll of Kodak 400 ISO in the camera, but I'll take my time with that until I've got the scanner and can catch up with the several rolls of negatives I've got li...

I'm about ready to give up on bloody Medina. I'm all for supporting the underdog, but I can't find a fellow supporter, or even a shop that'll sell their shirt. So maybe I should be more pragmatic and follow Ahly next season. Most of my students do, so someone could take me to a match. And the sports shops have their gear. Likewise, the SPL has been getting my attention. For all sorts of reasons which I won't go into now, we're moving our UK home from Tyneside to Ayrshire in the next few months. I had thought of following Kilmarnock, a local bus ride away. But their gates are around the 5000 mark, and they struggled this season. Whereas Celtic Park is less than an hour away, and regularly fills it's 60, 000 capacity. They usually qualify for the Champions League, so you get to see some serious European football, even though they don't usually get very far. I've gotten a heads up because the SPL is coming to a very close finish tonight . Coincidentally...

I love using my FED-2. And it's a good job I got a second one by mistake. The first one came from The Ukraine, and has a nasty light leak. I had thought it was flare , but it's definitely a light leak... ) The second one looks almost new. It came from a UK seller on eBay. The rangefinder wasn't working, so I tweaked it and now it's fine. I have developed a myth around it, that somebody bought it on a visit to the USSR, was flummoxed by the dysfunctional rangefinder, and put it away in a drawer where it lay for fifty years. Or something. Actually, I shot a roll of Jessops everyday colour 200 ISO, which I haven't collected from the developer yet - so I'm crossing my fingers that it too doesn't have a light leak... I'll pick up the developed film tomorrow. But of course the whole thing is pointless without a film scanner. I've got three 35mm rolls developed from the light-leaking FED 2 (and not every exposure is affected, I can tell), plus a...

A newish computer and peripherals shop in the former garage on Albert Rd, where Hebburn merges in to Jarrow. I bought a Bearpaw 2400TA Plus scanner there on my last holiday at home. It was cheap, less than £40. Will it run with Vista? Oh yes, no trouble, just go on Mustek's website. They'd also order a laptop, to be ready the next day, for only £340. Splendid. I told them it was really important that it was ready the next day: this was Thursday, and I was flying back to Libya on the Saturday, early. "It's as good as here," said the man. I rang them on the Friday to see if it was there. "I've been trying to get in touch with you. We can't do it." Ach, well, these things happen... I was in the Town, anyway, and got a Samsung Curry's were doing for £399. And now I'm back in Libya with an utterly useless scanner. No way, no how, will the fucker run with Vista. I've been googling all evening trying to find a solution. There is...

Kevin Keegan's remarks the other week continue to feed column inches. Typically, The Sun have just caught on . Actually, [spits on pavement] they do have a point there. What's the story at Arsenal? It looks possible that Ashley, no numpty as I keep saying, is onto this. And there are other reasons to be cheerful . All that success, built on a bubble of debt, eh? The bastards. I doubt United's creditors would risk their investment by pulling any plugs. But what if Abramovich decides he wants to take his ball and play elsewhere? The future's bright. It's Black and White.

Our IT bloke, in his free time it must be said, has rigged up cables to the router on the satellite dish, and some of us have access to the internet at home for the first time in a couple of weeks. It's said to be a temporary measure, it looks a bit crap, the cable comes in through the window so I'm prey to mosquitoes at night... But I'm not complaining. I've got a lot a film developed and unscanned because the Mustek Bearpaw 2400 Scanner I bought (cheaply) in Blighty won't run on Vista. There will be a way round this (the idea I linked to the other day doesn't work). But it's going to take an evening of googling. I can do that now.

My student's father died the other day. I went with the the head of the English department to pay my respects. There were chairs and tables set up in the courtyard of the local mosque for friends, relatives and neighbours to gather. The men, that is. There was a similar gathering for the women outside the father's house. There was that air of strained jollity you find at any wake. Young men came around with dates and leban, and then with barley bread and tea. There were some of our other students there and we sat around and talked in English about random subjects: mosquitos, Libyan driving, and halal slaughter techniques. The bereaved student told a story about Libya's Jews dispatching their chickens in a chest of drawers, leaving the head sticking out and slamming the drawer shut; someone else thought that this was actually a story against the Italians, not the Jews. There was another wake in another part of the courtyard, and my student told us that earlier in the day he ...

Here's Naomi Klein in The Nation .

I haven't seen him for ten years, but I often think of him, and I was thinking of him only the other day, as I was reading Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine . I remembered Harry's bitter condemnation of the newly elected Labour Government's 1997 surrender of overall control of the Bank of England . At the time, this passed me by. Now I understand a little better what he meant. It was a huge step in the process of government surrendering control of the economy to capitalism, pure and simple. It was a step not even Thatcher dared take. Yet a Labour government and a Chancellor considered leftish did it, and numpties like me had no idea what it meant. Harry Clarke has died . He was 85 . We met up in Carlise in the early 90s. Both coming from Jarrow, being very left wing, liking a pint, and not caring too much what the world thought of us, we had a lot in common and soon became friends and comrades. Harry was a leading light in the Anti Poll Tax movement in Carlise, and in t...

New Scanner - Driver. (Info for Vista). Mustek's own driver page. Not Vista, though. More later.

The Portishead, the Nick Cave and the phone were for others . The DVDs included also Godfather II and City of God . And they were all in the suitcase which I collected safe and sound from Tripoli airport yesterday. And I've managed to get the rangefinder coupling working on the other FED 2. :)

Two FED 2s, a Zorki 4, a Jupiter 8, an Industar 61, two Industar 26s. A new scanner, still in its box. 10 rolls of Fuji Neopan 1600. About 20 other rolls of film of all kinds. Three or four Salvia Divinorum cuttings. A Sony Ericsson K800i still in its box, unused, brand new. The Sopranos Series 3 and 4 boxed sets. DVDs: Trainspotting, Withnail and I, Breathless... CDs: Tom Waits, The Heart of Saturday Night, the new Portishead and the new Nick Cave. A new pair of swimming shorts. A belt. A pair of jeans, assorted underwear and socks. 100 valerian root capsules. Posters from recent productions at Newcastle Theatre Royal. A photocopy of a 1954 map of Jarrow town centre and a list of Victorian Jarrow pubs. All in my suitcase, which has gone missing. Bugger.

Who's Painting My Dream? , originally uploaded by Biroz . It's a Sally D thing.

FED 2 Second Roll (19) , originally uploaded by Pin Shy Avenue . That's two rolls now, and I think I'm getting the hang of it. I don't know what that funny mark is across the top, unless perhaps something to do with the scanning at Asda. Also, several of them have what I think is lens flare, so I need to get a lens hood (that won't interfere with the rangefinder). I've got another nine rolls of Jessops Diamond Everyday 200 ISO film that I bought for a couple of quid on eBay - I'm using that until I get the hang of this. Mostly, to get my eye in for the settings - I don't have a light meter yet. The development I'll probably leave until I get back to Tripoli, where it's only 1 LD (about 30-40p) per roll for colour. I'll do my own black and white of course. And I really need to get a film scanner this week. Right. That's me. I wasn't going to do anything online this holiday, but couldn't resist putting up these photo...

I had resolved to not be online whilst on holiday... But I had a new FED-2 waiting for me, and a load of cheap colour film I'd bought on eBay to enable me to get the hang of it. So naturally I loaded up a roll straightaway and spent a bit of time last night, and more time today, getting the hang of the rangefinder, and the wee diopter adjustment thingy on the left hand side, and generally having a huge time... Until the moment came to rewind the first roll. I tried everything to release it. Useless. So I had to break the resolve and go online. Where I found a pdf of the users' manual in English. Which is entertaining in several respects, but informative also because I was able to rewind and unload the first roll, and load a second. And that's me, I'm getting to love this camera. The rangefinder was hard to get the hang of at first, until I discovered the wee diopter adjustment. I've got the hang of it, but it'll take a bit of using to do it quickly. ...

I need to check this out when I get time. It's good to be getting some time with Herself and The Bairn, but England's a bit shit, isn't it?