There are photos which I have taken and simply aren't mine. They don't show my voice somehow. I think that I was pretending to be somebody else at the time. Or maybe it was because I was hanging outside bergdorf goodman for 3/4 of an hour in sub-zero temperatures, which is something that I would never do.

Here's some more.

Barry thinking hard. Nephew little concerned that Barry is thinking so hard.

Interested Party: Andrew, how cold is it in New Jersey?
Andrew: Beardsicles. Literally.

This is from slideroll, a nice flash utility for creating and sequencing photographs. This is a trial-run based on photos of the recent snow.

Create a Free Flash Slideshow

Click below to see a full size image, courtesy of flickr. This is a work in progress, there is probably going to be a memorial of my own placed amongst the benches and stone signs.

Here's some more snow images but in a more painterly style. Reminds me a little of Peter Doig in some ways.

So, we've had about maybe 8-10" of snow so far and the forecast is saying snow for all of tonight until early in the morning. At the rate of 2-3" an hour this could mean about 3' by tomorrow. Here's how the carriage hours looks at the moment. Suitably picturesque, no?

I received this photograph from a friend on mine here in joisey asking whether or not it was fake.The simple is that it is hard to tell. The light direction, strength and shadow sharpness seem consistent between the sea and the land, which is often a tell-tale sign of a doctored image. I have a nagging doubt about the 'scale' of the water: it doesn't seem to fit, the water looks smaller than I would imagine. However, here is the crux of the matter in this regard - I have no experience comparable to this and so I'm confronted by a pyrrhic doubt regarding my own ability to comprehend this. However, and glibly brushing that aside in my favour, there is the sheer magnitude of this wave, and nothing in the reports that I recall, nor that at a cursory investigation through the silvered bowl of the internet could reveal, indicated that the wave was that big. It was from what I can gather an average sized tsunami, in the region of 10-20m high. (Its the impact from the speed of the wave that causes so much destruction: tsumanis travel at approx. 500mph.)

The height of the wave is what makes me suspect the photograph. Using the building in the middle ground as a guide, a 10-20m high wave would be in the order of 3-6 storeys, yet its roughly as high as the building. (The effect of perspective at that distance wouldn't be very great.) Although its hard to count the number of floors exactly due to the poor quality of the image this but is not a wave of that magnitude.

Perhaps, its from another wave from another time and not doctored at all but just altered through a misleading context, or perhaps the waves that hit the nearest land were that high, I don't know really, but given what little i do know it doesn't really gel with the facts. Any thoughts?

-----------------------------------------------------

On a side note the largest wave recorded was in Alaska and was 518m high. I have no idea how to understand that fact. (Here is a better article with photographs.) Doommongers have also been speculating that the (sometimes) fair city of New York could drown under 150 feet waves from the collapse of the one of the canary islands.

Welcome to the new and updated site. Both this blog and the parent andrewatkinson.net site have been rewritten from the ground up. Previously, the site was constructed in a truly inarticulate form of HTML, which was littered with worthless tags, incorrect tags and just plain old gibberish. It has now been written to be closer to W3C standards compliance, and is heavily dependant on CSS 2(ish).

I am, it must be said, one of the growing league of fans of CSS (cascading styles sheets) for applying design rules to pages, and sort-of separating logical structure and content from appearance. Of course, it doesn't actually work, but hobbles along all the same. I find that a reasurringly human aspect of it. So between the HTML, CSS and the colour-blind mutt that is JavaScript the majority of the site is now finished. (A few glitches persist, especially in the blog, but hopefully I will root them out.)

Most of the JavaScript is used to create an external script for the left and right columns which permits me to update just that JS file and effect site wide changes. So, when a new series of work presents itself, I can update the script and the whole site will include that new work. Or so goes the plan. Plus several other scripts allow me to include my del.icio.us feed and a flickr stream for added content. Again these should be kept current automatically.

The last two ideas were stolen from my good friend andrew eason and his website. It was he who first showed me that the CSS could govern the appearance of his blog after we had discussed it in the abstract. So, I guess that is the third idea I've stolen from him. Its ok, he's got big pockets and it caused him no pain.

One last note. Don't use IE5.x for mac with this site. IE5 for mac's css dialect is somewhat strange, and this site (nor others that I've created) don't agree with it. However, as MS aren't going to be creating another IE for mac, and as most users switch to safari or firefox this will be a diminishing problem. BTW I get about 30% of my traffic from firefox now, so I think that they probably are getting close to their 10% market share globally. An amazing feat considering the situation 1 year ago.