Keys Corner

Spotted on Andy Budd’s weblog:

I always thought the books displayed cover out at bookshops were done so because the staff liked the books or they were good sellers. It wasn’t until I dipped my toes in the publishing world that I found out you actually have to pay for your books to be presented this way.

Well, that’s news to me too. I like his idea which follows on from that – support your favourite authors by turning their books cover out when you see their books in bookshops!

I hope they duck when the bells ring…
We spent about a week actually in Spain, the rest of the time we were either travelling in France or at the Quilt Expos in Lyon. We found plenty of good places to eat along the way, revisiting one of our favourite restaurants, in Navarra, for a birthday meal for Ruth while we were in Spain. There are two birds we associate with Spain – the storks, of which many seem to nest on the Iglesia de San Miquel in Alfaro, and house-martins, which were also present here, although not in these particular pictures. There are so many storks based at the church that finding a place to nest can be a quite a problem!

Some residents have a grandstand view of the storks.

We got back Saturday evening, having driven directly from Lyon – normally we notice how much more traffic there is when we cross the border from France into Germany. But as Germany was playing in the World Cup in the late afternoon, there was only light traffic on the last leg of the journey.

The main reason for the trip was, of course, to visit the two quilting exhibitions in Lyon, (Ruth will be putting up some photos of both exhibitions over on sew2speak) – both were very different from each other and each was interesting in it’s own right. We spent about 6 hours in the larger of the two, and a full morning in the other on the following day – not bad given that on the first day we decided to walk to and from the Quilt Expo – 90 minutes in each direction. I don’t think our feet have forgiven us yet!

We are going to get away from the hysterics of the World Cup for a couple of weeks. Driving down to S. France and probably N. Spain; stopping in Lyon on the way back to visit the Patchwork & Quilt Expo – it’s the largest exhibition of its kind in the world (as always, I had to look up when to write “its” and when “it’s” – my memory seems incapable of noting that. Thank goodness for the internet!).

There is, in fact, a second patchwork exhibition on in Lyon at the same time, so we will probably visit both. We’re not planning on posting until we get back.

(Oh… and by the way, yes I do know that if you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer and you scroll down on this page, the first so-many pixels on the left side are truncated after the quotation in the following post: Bill G hasn’t got his act together yet and fixed his wierd non-standard-conform web browser. And I don’t have time to run around after him clearing up his mistakes. The easiest thing, if it bothers you, is simply to use Firefox or any other modern web browser.)

Now I can think seriously about upgrading to an Intel-based Mac

Patrick Luby has just announced that the alpha version of NeoOffice 2.0 for Intel Macs is available. (It is one of the few applications that can not run on an Intel platform using Apple’s Rosetta emulation software, due to restrictions regarding running embedded Java). NeoOffice alpha releases have usually been much more stable than you might expect for an alpha version, so this is excellent news!

The Palm Treo smart-phones don’t have the ability to disable the auto-power-off feature when they are in the cradle or just if you want to keep them powered up for more than three minutes (e.g. if you are running navigation software).

There’s a neat utility called NoAutoOff (scroll to the bottom of the discussion to get the latest version) to get round that, which will disable the auto-power-off within the application you are running by pressing “left shift”, “right shift”. When you leave the application, the default power-off settings are restored.

... peanuts? (With appologies to vowe

The micro-budget film Tarnation directed by Jonathan Caouette and shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004, cost $400,000. The cost of making the film was around $200, the rest was fees for music and video clip royalties. It is time legislators put more restraints on greedy music and video companies.

Currently the author is protected by copyright until 70 years after their death in Europe and the USA (95 years for anonymous works and for works made for hire, such as films). Until the 1964, the length of copyright protection was 28 years, which seems long enough, don’t you think?