Pig Sty Avenue

Man.

Here's a sort of fan-site , which has an index with transcripts. Haven't time to check it out now, but I'm blogging it as a Note to Self, to check out when this fucking term's over.

It really does grow like a weed . I got two cuttings about six weeks ago. One of them was green, the other more woody. The eBay seller said he had already had them in water a couple of weeks, so they should be ready to grow root within a week or so. Standing in a glass of water on the kitchen windowsill (facing north), they were indeed rooted enough to plant them in perishable cutting pots after a couple of weeks, and the roots were showing through the pots within another two weeks. I potted them on into a 50/50 mixture of multipurpose compost and perlite at the weekend. They are growing at a fast rate, considering they only get eight hours of not-very-good light a day.

I'm looking at writing a combined Inter Cultural Communication and Critical Discourse Analysis 5000 word paper for Mod 5: probably a CDA of the listening materials that go with the IELTS book I'm using at work, with particular reference to the emphasis the materials place on standard English with RP, and the cultural style passed on thereby. Or something. Anyway, here's the start of a reading list culled from some google-scholaring just now. Major et al (2005) looks like a good starting point. Dalton, C. and B. Seidlhofer. 1994a. Pronunciation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dalton, C. and B. Seidlhofer. 1994b. 'Is pronunciation teaching desirable? Is it feasible?' in T. Sebbage and S. Sebbage (eds.). Proceedings of the 4th International NELLE Conference. Hamburg: NELLE. Davis 2007 'Resistance to L2 pragmatics in the Australian L2 context'. Language Learning 57:4, December 2007, pp. 611–649 Gimson, A.C. 1978. 'Towards an international pronunciation o...

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian was ok, I suppose. Herself suggested it may have been serialized as the book which follows Woman's Hour on Radio Four at 10.45 - and that would be about right. The sort of book a man would read if he wanted to appear more interesting to a certain kind of woman. Which I don't. Next, I read a remarkable novel, The Crimson Petal and the White . That made the train fairly speed along - one minute I was in Stevenston, the next in Paisley. Now I'm reading Snow Blind .

looking at an ayrshire sky , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . I've realised that the Soviet lenses just don't do sharp, so I've just got to make the most of not-sharp, probably until I can afford an M and a several hundred quid lens to go with it. This is the Jupiter 8, and of course the Leica IIIf. Fuji Neopan 1600 developed in Perceptol 1+3 using the 20+5+5+5 minute methodology. Many of the shots on the roll are a tad overexposed. Mostly I was at 1/75 or 100 - at f2. So I could go to 1/200 indoors, or even 500 with some daylight through the window.

...pick the pockets of the world! Any brief, self-deluding enthusiasm I felt for Obama was dislodged with the appointment of this Geithner as Treasury Secretary. He'll be a fearless champion for the status quo, which means the maintenance of the power of big money interests in the US and beyond. Move on, nothing to see here...

Should have kept the mouth shut about the escape plans . They were based around exam item-writing, and that's still in the mix, but it won't be enough to pay the bills and put food on the table. The future looks like a dog's breakfast: few hours here, few hours there, some work at home. Which isn't so bad. As any character in The Sopranos would tell you, "a man needs to work". And, although, working at McEnglish is a shite strewn path, at least now I know where and where not to tread. A line from The Music of Time keeps occurring: Nick, Stringham, Templar, Duport, Brent and two girls have gone out for a late night drive in country. The car ends up in a ditch, they can't get it out, "While we were engaged in these labours, rain began to fall again, a steady, soaking downpour." They shelter under a tree and Stringham comments: "For my part, I am now in a perfect condition to be received into one of those oriental religions whose only te...

MP3s: Brilliant.

The Mail online, of all things, published this story . You can find the original paper here , but you'll only get the abstract without an Athens log in.

There was a time, which seems like a former incarnation now, when I was quite adept at this .

According to this , Nazis are few and far between in Scotland. Which is nice.

Google have done some kind of deal with LIFE magazine to put the latter's enormous photo archive online. Here's the story as reported in The Grauniad . And here's a link to what looks, at the moment, like a taster for the main project . Won't let you blog the pics, though.

Portrait of an articulated skeleton on a bentwood chair , originally uploaded by Powerhouse Museum Collection . I know just how he feels.

This roll was with the Jupiter 8, and the extra stop (the Industar goes down to f2.8. the Jupiter to f2) has led me to overexpose a lot of them. I would say that the Jupiter is a wee bit sharper than the Industar, and that extra stop will come in handy. It's very far from pin-sharp, though. I suppose that's going to take an M and a Summicron. It's ok to be going on with. I'll stick with this set up for a while: that's Fuji Neopan 1600, Perceptol 1+3 for 20 mins at 70F, (plus five minutes wash, five minutes fix and five minutes wash - which seems to be working well). I particularly like this photo, though, because it's so difficult to get something lit naturally with a window in the background like that. Not bad, eh?

Well, here goes for another week at Global Education Inc. There are two more weeks of teaching, and another of marking. Bizarrely, we don't get paid for that final week of marking, but, we're now told, we had an extra couple of quid on the hourly rate - which should just about cover it, we're told. There was a meeting with the MSU big cheeses last week. Another shoulder shrugging, nervous laughter affair. We established that there's something called "a zero hours contract" whereby you have a contract, but no guaranteed hours. Which sounds pretty ropey. Unfortunately, that's NOT what we're on, but what we might aspire to. We have no kind of contract at all, we're rented by the hour. It was during the course of this meeting that any shreds of glamour attaching to working for MSU were blown away by the realization that as I push 50, a few months away from getting an MA in TESOL, and with ten years really good experience, I'm still just a T...

For when we've time .

Indeed. League tables are great for solving problems, eh? And if you're some coke-addled wank-brain working at an ISP and your league position's slipping, well, why not boost your employer's rating by taking out a few f and c-word using bloggers? The fuckers. But really it's the use of "out there" by politicians that fascinates me. I must come back to it.

Actually, whilst I've got the bit between my teeth... The contents of my bottle of Ilford Rapid Fixer are: Ammonium thiosulfate Sodium acetate Sodium sulfite Sodium bisulfite Nary a word about proportions, of course, and there's nothing about it on the digitaltruth page, though this on Kodak F-24 fixer gives a clue. Probably better to get the whole lot, developer and fixer chemicals, in one go, save on postage. What larks, eh?

After the disappointment I go with Delta/Pereceptol, I'm looking at the recipes in the Digitaltruth Photo Formulas and Data page . Therein one learns that ID11 is exactly the same as D-76 . That's the recipe for me, anyhow. Next, then, we go to the Silverprint Store Raw Chemicals pages . And here's the shopping list with prices: Metol: 25g: £2.93 Sodium Sulphite (Anhydrous): 2.5kg: £12.41 Hydroquinone: 25g: £1.57 Unfortunately, Silverprint then fall down on the job with no granular Borax. Retrophotographic have it, though, and the rest as follows: Sodium Sulphite: 500g: £3.15 Hydroquinone: 100g: £3.99 Metol: 25g £3.49 Borax 100g £3.69 I'll also need some distilled water from the auto-store shop on Raise Street. Very roughly, overall, that's going to work out at £2 a litre. Not bad, eh? I've got enough fixer to last me ...

delta 3200 and perceptol 2 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . That's The Bairn getting on down whilst watching Strictly Come Dancing - her latest favourite telly programme. I was a bit disappointed to see that all recommendations for developing Delta 3200 in Perceptol suggested stock: I'm trying a once-only regime with this batch, so that's a waste. And the results are good for contrast, bad for grain. If I'd pushed some HP5 in ID11, I would have been quite pleased with this. But as it is... The next roll (in the camera now) is Fuji Neopan 1600. The new element in the mix is that I'm using the Jupiter 8 lens this time.

I'm pulling it back to 1600, and using a stock solution. It's 69F, and I'm giving it 14 mins, agitated 10secs per min. This is based on the Ilford PDF for the film , and the appropriate page on the Massive Dev Chart . I'll try the 5+5+5 rinse+fix+rinse routine again - it seemed to work well last week.

I was perspiring an embarrasing amount at the start of the week. By Wednesday I was aching as if I'd gone 15 rounds with a heavyweight. By Thursday I was horizontal. Bit better now, and I really need to be well enough for work on Monday, because, like many's the worker these days, I'm paid by the hour. At some point I heard on R4 this Daniel Everett talking about the language of the Piraha people. Here's a link to an unpublished paper . Hopefully, I'll have more time an energy for such stuff soon. Training for the exam-writing early next month. EDIT: thanks to anonymous commentator, for this link , which is the paper by Nevins et al (2007) to which Everett is responding. I'll get around to looking at this some time this year, inshallah, plus proper referencing and the backstory.

molly dining chair , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . That's one of the 1st roll of b&w with the Leica, cropped. I'm really pleased with the look of it. I know it should be the lens that effects the look, the camera's just a box with a shutter, after all. But these with the Leica IIIf and the Industar 61 lens just seem to have a "look" - a 50s feel, almost. It's getting there, anyhow.

leicaiiif 3rd roll 7 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue .

I've just dev'd a roll of Fuji Neopan 1600 in Perceptol . It's drying the noo . I'm knackered after slaving all day for Globalized Education Inc., and ready for bed now, but I just want to blog a note of the details first. The Perceptol was 1+3, and the Ilford Rapid Fixer 1+4. I gave it 20 mins dev time at 70F. And then 5 mins wash, for which I've got a new method, (rinse under the tap, then drain the tank, pour in 500ml of luke warm soapy water. Agitate. Pour out and then back under the tap 5 mins , and a luke warm rinse towards the end. Same with washing after fixing). The fixing was 5 mins too, so if this works well it's easy to remember as 20+5+5+5. The negs look promising. There was a calamity in the lobby press darkroom - I couldn't get the film onto the roll, and Herself was wanting to put the hall light on, which means light gets through the door, voices were raised and oh my God! I'll have to get a dark bag. And sacrifice ...

"i don't care if your a fictional character created by Mary Shelley, you are still coming with us" , originally uploaded by i didn't mean to go to Stoke . This photo (by i didn't mean to go to Stoke ) gets me thinking: I need to get out more - go places where I can take photos. As it is, I'm stuck in almost all weekend, every weekend. I don't mind so much with studying, but today's its work, marking. I fucking hate this job. Thank God there's only four more weeks of it. The burden of marking, with nearly 80 students, is seriously damaging to a personal life.

Army Club , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . Someone's just faved this. I'm sure I've blogged it before, but wtf, I'm feeling nostalgic this morning.

A google vanity blog and news alert for "pig sty avenue" - which has been set up for several months, has twice hooked me this weekend. In the alert that's emailed you see the ref to the search term amongst the text it's been published with. It was quite intriguing, written in lower case with punctuation errors, there's a reference to someone called "stevie" who borrows a tenner from pig sty avenue... Which naturally had me clicking on the link, and there you are on a page selling anti-virus software, with dialog boxes popping up threatening dire extremities if you don't download their software. It appears to be doing a scan of your hard drive. You can't close it, and need to ctr-alt-del and launch the task manager to close Firefox. Almost the same thing happened yesterday, but it must have been a different link I clicked on then, I can't remember, and I got out of it without needing to close Firefox. I copied link location on the google ...

He's Saving Up For a New Guitar... , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . Somebody just faved this, and I went to have a look back at it. It was nearly three years ago, which is a lifetime in Flickr and blogging. Did I really see the point in whoring a photo around THREE voting groups? Did I really ever want a DSLR that badly? I wonder how the busker's doing?

Starts here . Keep mum.

Life at SII gets weirder, but my escape plans are well advanced. Whilst I was waiting for the lift the other day, a "teacher" was telling off a student for missing an appointment. His tone was that of a 1960s comprehensive school deputy head. In the staff room, people complain about students who are late, don't pay attention, wtf. Most staff rooms, you talk about wages and last night's telly - actually talking about students or work is considered to be in bad taste, interfering with the staff room's refuge role. And yesterday we received an email with guidelines about marking, which said explicitly we should mark-up cheerful good attendees, and mark-down anyone with attitude. To suggest this is unprofessional, to say the least. To write the suggestion into an email distributed to several people is just downright stupid. I think I've worked out what's going on, though. It's some kind of creeping privatization. This bit has been hived off from M...