Michaels Bookshop

test post

2012-01-27T05:37:00.000-08:00

new test post

2011-12-31T14:46:00.001-08:00

In theory this is an improved method for posting text quickly form a mobile phone.

Ongoing with this test post is the question of placing images.

Ramsgate turn on

2011-12-03T09:57:00.000-08:00

Work meant that I didn’t manage to be there for the switching on ceremony, but I did manage to get some pictures with my phone camera about an hour beforehand.

Canterbury art shop, café and the inevitable bookshops

2011-12-01T13:09:00.000-08:00

I went shopping in Canterbury today, and continuing my battle with my new phone didn’t take my camera but used the phones one instead.

Here is the picture the right way up

As you see it really does Say Christopher Marlowe on it.

Carricio here you really do get a pot of tea with leaves and as the kitchen is just part of the room the café is in you can see the care with which everything is prepared.

I may Ramble on here

I sat in the window and endeavoured to draw the view, the inevitable white ven parked in the way.

This drawing in public is a bit of a physiological thing, I would prefer to draw the people, but am building confidence, the main problem being that it all goes wrong unless you are totally relaxed.

The artists materials shop in Canterbury is very good

The main thing I wanted was empty watercolour half pans, I also bought a sponge and a propelling pencil.

I will expand on this a bit, the most economical way to buy watercolour and its sibling gouache, either pronounced, goo ash, or gwash, depending on the artist, is in tubes.

You then squirt them into a thing like a children’s paintbox made for grownups, tiny paintboxes can be very expensive, a Georgian silver one can set you back over a grand. But one thing most have in common is they take either pans or half pans, which are little oblong pots that hold the paint.

Another thing these paintboxes have in common is that they either come empty or the come with the wrong paints in them.

The easiest solution is to fill them up with empty pans or half pans, squirt you favourite paints into them and when they dry and solidify you have a paint box that is of some use.

So I now have one full of gouache as well as the one I have full of watercolour.

the video, mercifully short, is an example is an example of; I fought the phone and the phone won.

Christopher Marlowe Statue

2011-12-01T08:08:00.001-08:00

I was quite surprised to discover what he looks like

Ramsgate Society Opens Charity Shop

2011-11-30T12:08:00.001-08:00

I am not sure how long this shop will be there for, but expect it needs our support

A watercolor experiment this time

2011-11-29T13:37:00.001-08:00

Experiment photographing pen and ink drawing

2011-11-29T11:46:00.001-08:00

evidently the blogger app has no facility for arranging pictures in any order

Another test post

2011-11-29T05:10:00.001-08:00

This is just to test the phone's cameras ability to copy pictures

Extra edit test

Greggs the baker now open in Ramsgate

2011-11-28T08:07:00.001-08:00

Man fights with android

2011-11-27T11:01:00.000-08:00

My remit here was to replace my internet phone cheaply, I have a pay as you go mobile with the T-mobile £20 for six months internet add on, and I needed a replacement phone for about £100.

My minimum requirements were:

A reasonable camera.

Being able to publish to my blog easily from it, including publishing images.

Being able to watch the BBC news live on it.

Being able to watch youtube clips on it.

Receiving my emails and getting a sound notification when they arrive.

Obviously the ordinary internet access and mobile phone facilities go without saying.

I am not sure if my replacement internet phone is winning or I am, it is a close run thing believe me.

I bought a secondhand Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 for £117 and I am now learning to use it.

Here are the pictures I took today using its camera http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop1011/id4.htm

In the past I have only used cameras with an optical viewfinder, these images have been reduced in size for internet publishing this one however is a crop from an average full sized one http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop1011/id5.htm

I was extremely unkind to this little camera, using it in low light in a moving vehicle, pointing it into the sun and so on and I am very happy with the way it performed.

I am used to a very old Windows phone with some archaic version of MS word for phones that operated a fairly normal spell check, so far I can’t find a way to make the Android system do this.

Spelling is handled by the keyboard and initially I found this impossible to use, being Mr Sausage Fingers, I have to use the larger, sideways version of the on screen keyboard, the idea being that it suggests words as you type and when right word pops up you touch it an hey presto it is there. The trouble was that in the sideways version nothing much happened until I had pressed it numerous times, the solution to this was to download the Gingerbread keyboard app.

Blogging, the blogger app is pretty good and I have been using it to produce some posts on this blog.

Most importantly it allows you insert images easily, the options being either to inset one that you have already taken or take one with the phones camera at the time.

The pre installed Facebook app was draining the battery, I overcame this by updating it.

The main bookselling app is the Amazon one, this allows the phones camera to read the barcodes on books and looks them up on Amazon.

Have added Androidsx spellchecker best yet and I probably buy the adds free version.

I will add to this post if I get time.

Margate sunset

2011-11-27T08:29:00.001-08:00

Test

2011-11-26T14:46:00.001-08:00

Paint box refilled

2011-11-26T14:42:00.001-08:00

Just another test post as I try various methods of posting from my mobile

Another mobile test

2011-11-26T07:39:00.001-08:00

Just check on images

Mobile test post

2011-11-26T06:42:00.001-08:00

Raspberry test post

The Youf of Today Leave Dope and Razor Blades on Kitchen Table

2011-09-02T06:12:00.000-07:00

As you can see from the pictures the situation was pretty dire when I went to get my lunch today.

Test Post

2011-01-14T02:29:00.000-08:00

This is a further test post trying to use joined up technology, type it on the notebook and post it with the phone.

more of the test

Test post

2011-01-10T10:12:00.001-08:00

From my phone. it beats me how people can be bothered to do this

Linda wants to know how to add a vid

2010-09-18T10:46:00.000-07:00

This is test post as I am showing someone how to use blogger

Church Fart

2010-05-31T07:02:00.001-07:00

An elderly couple are attending church services.About halfway through, she writes a note and hands it to her husband.
It says, " I just let out a silent fart, what do you think I should do?"
He scribbles back, "Put a new battery in your hearing aid."

Man with a Van

2010-05-22T03:59:00.000-07:00

Probably photo-shopping but it made me chuckle, with thanks to Allen who sent it, click on the image to enlarge.

Amazing new plans for Arlington House Margate

2010-02-19T01:48:00.001-08:00

More ravings from the bookshop

2010-01-08T09:24:00.001-08:00

Secondhand bookshops are by their very nature a little odd , tugging at the rubber sheet of reality is the nearest I can get to this, something along the lines of it’s the proprietors job not to notice the function too closely, so the right books appear at the right time for the right people.

As we sail, seemingly without any map, into a brave new world where there are far fewer secondhand bookshops, I am trying to come up with something that could redefine this type of shop so that it could still function beyond the paperless book and the internet.

A further thought here is what would be the effect on humanity lo live in rooms without books, the knowledge stored but in digital form, no paper no ink no sewing no binding?

The first thing I look at when I go into someone’s home is their books, without them, well I just don’t know, I shall digress.

Sitting behind the desk in the bookshop with a large cup of tea in a cup that says I love coffee on it, I find myself confronted by some of the many bizarre questions raised by life.

Somehow during a shortage brought on by Christmas, snow, truth is I don’t really know, we seem to have toilet paper with a pattern on it. Who would devise such a thing, I can’t really imagine, every time you use it you first think you are the victim of some strange internal disease. It is only when the hypochondria subsides into the back of your mind and you realise that you have been caught once again, that temporary relief from hypochondria flood sin.

I am the type of person who believes that acupuncture works by making it hurt more somewhere else and therefore directing your mind away from the problem, all that eastern mystical cure resolved into - if you stamp on your toe your ear will stop hurting, assuming you had earache in the first place.

The taking away of a malady that didn’t exist in the first place, well it is some strange area in the sensation of personal ill or wellbeing.

Staying on the mystical plane for a moment I was contemplating how the god of atheists would work, based on the principle that any gods existence is based on the sum of human belief. There must be a deity something like the square root of minus one in the god bothering world, presumably not bothered at all.

Another strange thing that came out of the festive season is my new jumper, this seems to be made of the wool equivalent of Velcro and everything sticks to it.

There is an upside to all of this too, the chef Toby rushed out of Age & Son to give my children petites madeleines in deference to Marcel Proust, this is to do with associations and the meaning of flavour perhaps.

I am just playing with bloggers new editor here

2009-12-07T06:20:00.000-08:00

Particularly to see if I can post images better with it

Click on the pictures and then click on them again to see what I mean big or what?

Books do furnish a room

2009-11-15T07:35:00.000-08:00

One of my odd posts to my little used and little read blog, excuse any errors I am writing it with a notebook and really need to get stronger reading glasses, so it is all a bit, through a glass darkly.

I was just reading Simon’s post on Thanet life where he is extolling the virtues of the electronic book, when it occurred to me that with digital storage of music and books a whole area of communicating ones self by ones surroundings is going.

During the 1900s there was a flowering of literature and music and I count myself very lucky to have lived through it, much of this hinged around two things the cheap paperback book, initially driven by Allen Lane with the sixpenny penguin book and the gramophone record.
The nature of both of these medias meant that the other people that enjoyed them, kept them where they lived and the fact that they were visible expressed much about the person.

I suppose this even extends to books of playable music, there is also the area where a persons non-fiction books expresses their interests.

I groan when I enter a room where the books have been selected by the book club that a person happened to join and the Readers Digest or whatever seem to keep coming in some sort of unstoppable way, to a point where the books were never opened.

I am afraid I groan in much the same way at lines of the sort of English lituture that is of the type set for GCE examination when I was at school, it’s not that I haven’t both enjoyed and been depressed by Thomas Hardy, rather in the same way that I wouldn’t have missed Beethoven’s symphonies.

No it is when this stops somewhere around D H Lawrence and Edward Elgar, when these are not accompanied by John Fowles or David Lodge or Mick Jagger or Jim Morrison, where has the person with the book collection been during their lives.

Anyway as a bookseller and therefore inevitably part of this conspiracy I am considering the these new machines that will inevitably make me redundant eventually.

My reading mind at the moment is in the world of 1984 and Brave New World as I am reading We (by Yevgeny Zamyatin the 1921 Russian novel that predates both of them and must have inspired them both) so I suppose it would be appropriate for me to be reading this from a machine as it is based in the future.

Sorry about that, I can only say that the square root of minus one is lurking unresolved in the back on my mind.

There are key bits of literature and music like say A Clockwork Orange or Sgnt Pepper, which at my age one can hardly have lived in ones own time without, so yes it is peoples collections of fiction and music that in furnishing there rooms, communicates much to me.

I suppose looking round this room there is the inevitable area expressing a sort of chaos of the mind and it as though in some places the books have been breeding and interlopers like Love Signs have appeared. This one could be construed as the message a sign of love.

Or strange areas where singles have appeared with video tapes, both now redundant media.

What is worse than anything I can contemplate is some sort of living room without books, like introducing a waiting room into a home.

Runaway bull's supermarket sweep

2009-04-25T03:58:00.000-07:00

Click on the link for another amusing video http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8017391.stm

German training video

2009-03-13T05:58:00.000-07:00

This is not suitable for young people or the squeamish so I haven’t published it on my main blog http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/ but as I had to get a forklift truck licence years ago I couldn’t miss sharing this with a few of my old chums from those days.

Picture poster

2008-11-08T07:10:00.000-08:00

I am having problems posting pictures hosted on my own site on my thanetonline blog so this is an experiment.

Purple seagulls the Fanit youf hypotheses

2008-10-19T04:20:00.000-07:00

There is a bit of an odd discussion here as to whether vanadium in it’s + 2 oxidation stage hydrolytic acid causing it to disassociate, the fume cupboard venting onto Chatham Houses roof was what caused the seagulls there to turn purple.

I am coming down on the side that potassium permanganate must have been involved, there is also an iodine school of thought here.

Anyone got any ideas?

Doctors advice

2008-10-09T06:53:00.000-07:00

There is a lot more medical advice going round the Thanet blogs at the moment so I thought it was my turn.

By following the simple advice I heard on a Medical TV show, I havefinally found inner peace.A Doctor proclaimed the way to achieve innerpeace is to finish all the things you have started.

So I looked around my house to see things I'd started and hadn'tfinished and, before leaving the house this morning, I finished off abottle of Merlot, a bottle of shhhardonay, a bodle of Baileys, a butleof vocka, a pockage of Prunglies , tha mainder of bot Prozic and Valumscriptins, the res of the Chesescke an a box a chocolets.

Yu haf no idr who fkin gud I fel.Peas sen dis orn to dem yu fee ar inned ov inr pece.

Smoke on the Water

2008-09-01T05:10:00.000-07:00

One of the things one has to do as a parent is to teach ones children things that one isn’t good at, with my two six year olds this weekend this has been the guitar.

If like me you you are pretty much tone deaf, the invent of electronic guitar tuners and tablature is a godsend that allows one to play music immediately, that sounds reasonably ok.

For those of you unfamiliar with guitar tab the lines represent the guitar strings, the thickest string being represented by the bottom line and the numbers represent the frets the little line over 6 5 means you slide your finger from the 6th to the 5th fret after you have plucked the string and the 0 means you don’t press down on the fret board at all but play the string open, that’s about it really.

So now they are both learning Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water, the one string version to start with, tablature above, as it’s on one string the guitar doesn’t have to be in tune for it so sound reasonably ok.

hell

2008-08-25T09:42:00.001-07:00

a little light music

test

2008-05-26T08:28:00.000-07:00

test html

The leaven of malice and wickedness.

2008-03-13T09:04:00.000-07:00

My son has just told me that as part of a science experiment he has to write up the ethics of using yeast because it’s alive. I wonder does this mean that a true vegetarian should give up bread and alcoholic drinks. I wonder does yeast have a consciousness is it thinking oh no not the oven when I wanted to drown in alcohol? Of course the real question here is what is the lowest level of consciousness where one should have a sense of moral responsibility for the use of a living thing?

I think therefore I’m confused

2008-03-12T09:15:00.000-07:00

I thought with so many blogs going members only that perhaps I ought to separate some of my more outlandish posting to somewhere where I can turn it off if things get out of hand without depriving people of a local history resource, so here it is.

Ones bloging persona is inclined to take on a life of its own something akin to the characters in the book Sophie’s World,

In that world the characters discovered that they themselves were not real in the sense that they perceived reality, so some of them decided that were not accountable and therefore there was no longer any need for morality. In the cyber world, perhaps in the same way, one makes ones own reality or perhaps more accurately one makes oneself real. It could be argued that there ones cyberself’s realness is a function of ones own accountability, the yawing trap is to consider ones cyber reality to be a function of ones conventional reality. Or how does the cyberself act when it discovers that its cyber reality like Sophie’s is written by someone else i.e. ourselves. He typed therefore I am.

In Sophie’s word what was written in other books is of course just paper and ink so we can all breathe a sigh of relief, the internet however is very much a large living being.