Saturday was a bad day for this cold, I was all a shiverin’ in the late evening after sleeping most of the day. There followed a rotten night.
That bout has given me a chance to take big bites out of "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. The book meandered a during some of the middle passages, but then regained its pace near the end. There are many instances where I have read arguments and felt thoroughly supported in my own views. My own distaste for faith schools is a good example. RD went further and suggests we resist the practice of referring to children as a Catholic child, or Moslem boy or Jewish girl, we could though, say child of a Christian family (and so on). There is a little more to read, but then I can start lending the book out.

If there weren’t so many wanting to borrow it, I could consider the practise of "Bookcrossing". That is some organised way of planting a finished-with book so someone can pick it up to read.

Weather and worrying about it: hold back a little,
Here is a graph of recent trends

Nothing in there to start excessive panic. Curiously- 1940 peaks as a warm year, a year famous for it’s harsh winter her in the UK and western Europe.

It is taking time for me to look at things, there is a delay and everything is viscous. Yep, I have a cold- an all throaty detatched achey feeling one.

Goodnight.

27°C,

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Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

Shakespeare

I want a new digital camera. We are going to Cephalonia (Kefalonia) in May and I want it by then, so I dropped in on Jessops camera shop today.

Photography is plagued with the same problem that Hifi is:  Marketing by numbers. I want a lens that is equivalent to 28mm to about 180mm, so the shopkeeper shows me all these cameras with 10x zoom! But none of them go wider than 35mm equiv. so what’s the point. I don’t care that they sport a massive zoom range if they don’t cover the one I want. The zoom at the long range is wasted because you can’t take a picture more than about 150mm zoom without a tripod. All that fuss made over a wide zoom range is a waste. The other problem is "megapixels".4 megapixels is enough to print out onto A4 paper, there is therefore no need to get any higher resolution CCD than that. In practice, if the CCD is small but high res then there are going to be noise problems and colour distortion. Small cameras have small CCDs.

I want a good quality camera, all the numbers used in marketing the different models are no guide to the potential quality of the pictures it creates. Buying a camera has to be made from a bewildering range of choices, the marketing people are making it more confusing than ever.

These are on my list:

Fuji finepix 9500

Sony E500

2°C,+ice

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She said" so you have ‘man-flu’"

"Yeah" I replied, " but at least it’s not bird-flu".

Her reply: "so you had no trouble parking the car then".

 

That was gooood! What a quick witted reply! Cheered me up no end.

32°C ;impending thunder;very humid;steady SSE winds getting excited.

Still a bit de-hydrated after today’s cycle ride. I drank 3 litres of water while I was out and another 3 since getting home. My troublesome elbow has been no-problem today, but I must be careful. Nice elbow.

Returning to cycling is often problematic after a spate of illness, & I wasn’t sure in the first hour, but then I never am. Second hour onwards was all clear. The sunblock was very sticky – or at least it was if you are a fly, they just couldn’t get free.
http://www.bosworthwatertrust.co.uk/cms/index.asp?area=Home
this place provide sachets of sunblock to customers, which is such an excellent idea, it meant I could wash and not then get burnt.

Why can’t we have the ful set of emoticons from messenger here?