Indoor Archaeology
De Monfort University has its own pair of 14th century arches installed in one of its coffee rooms.
Hi, I'm Alun and I'm one of the archaeoastronomers associated with the University of Leicester. You can find my homepage at alunsalt.com
Japanese fighting kites. The winner is the last one flying.
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I've played around with the new theme settings for Posterous to make this site look more like my main site. It's a port of the Fusion theme by Digital Nature. I'm sure a better port could be done, but it covers the bits of the theme that I use on my main site, so that's good enough for me. Aside from ego, I've now got a Posterous theme that you haven't, it's handy because it helps with personal branding.
I've got various bits of what I do around the web. My photos are on Flickr and vs. the Electric Cyclops., bookmarks and references on Zotero and Delicious, videos on Blip TV and on each site I'm on I look different. So if you watch me on Vimeo it looks like Vimeo's site rather than mine. It's easy to lose track on all these sites what bits I've done and what everyone else has done. Even basic theming, like being able to tweak the colour scheme would help break this up. Themes aren't just about looking pretty, they add to your online identity. In Posterous's case, they've gone a lot further with theming possibilities than they needed to. They could have had some basic colour options with an uploadable banner. Making the design as customisable as they have shows they're taking their users very seriously. The shared visual identity between alunsalt.com and alun.posterous.com means that I can integrate what I do between the two with less confusion for visitors. In my case many of my target visitors are people who aren't that comfortable with Web 1.0 let alone 2.0. While the address bar might say they've gone to a different site, the colour scheme lets them know it's still me. Now I can leave audio and short video files on Posterous, where this system excels, and leave the longer blog posts on the main site where Disqus can manage the comments, where I can hook in tools from other sites like Google and where I can categorise them more neatly. One of the things I like about Posterous is that it's designed around integrating with everywhere else rather than grabbing all the content it can off you. I think the common factor in the design choices is that they've really committed to making the product flexible. Making the the theming tools flexible too is a great compliment to that.Comments [1]
Sheffield's looking a lot better since I last visited. Now to talk about Physical Sciences teaching.
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This is new to me. It's a wall of steel with water perpetually streaming over it. It's outside the Sheffield railway station and is either:
* A symbol of the steel industry for which the city became world famous, the water ensuring it gleams under the northern sun.
* A practical joke on visitors meant to drive them to the toilet.
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I'm told that the spire was warped by the Devil's tail when he was perched there. The alternative, that the builders built it on the cheap with dodgy wood, seems a bit far-fetched to me.
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There's a lot I don't like about East Midlands Trains, but sometimes the customer brings it on himself by, for example, falling asleep on the train to Leicester. There's a system for waking people up. They blow a whistle at Leicester which means: "Wake up! You're at Leicester!" and "We've locked the doors so the train can depart."
Luckily this train stopped at Kettering so I've not been carried all the way to London. I thought about hiding and buying a cheap ticket back to Leicester, but in the end I thought it would be a lot less hassle to find the guard.
They kindly endorsed the ticket, so there's no extra charge and all I've lost is time. East Midlands Trains staff must get a lot of abuse given the quality of the service. That must be frustrating when it's for reasons beyond your control. So all in all the staff must be pretty good to be so reasonable. It wasn't their fault I'd fallen asleep.
I'm now more inclined to believe East Midlands Trains are trying their hardest, rather than their cheapest, next time the service falters.
Which would be now. The train back to Leicester is late.
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