Nick Seeber's blog

Mag+ concept - reinventing the magazine...

'Ferly': a wonderfully strange word

I've been loving Word Idol, being run by Raynor Ganan. It's a series of blog posts written by different people, each one taking as its inspiration an "archaic or provincial word beginning with 'f' that entered the English language sometime after 1300 and left it sometime before 1850". 

The most recent addition to this excellent competition is a definition of the Middle English word 'ferly', meaning 'wonderfully strange':

Let’s talk bear. Pandas are wonderful (durr) but even my nephew knows about them and he is a nitwit. Ursus thibetanus gedrosianus exists only as fossilized crud in a dusty vault—it’s strange for sure, but about as interesting as as the skin on my butterscotch pudding. Garden variety brown bears? They are neither wonderful nor strange; they are ordinary. But what of the missing fourth quadrant: bears that are both strange AND wonderful? Bears like werebears and carebears and ursa major—how could they be described? Fabulous and marvelous don’t convey unfamiliarity. Uncanny, peculiar, and curious don’t quite convey wonder. If only there was a single word that could fill this void. [SPOLIER ALERT: it’s ferly]

The post is even accompanied by a diagram illustrating the 'ferly quadrant':

MS Labs' Pivot concept looks really interesting

MS Labs' Pivot concept looks really interesting.

The key to it being useful will be the quality of the meta-data associated with the objects in their 'collections'. Ideally though, there will be some intelligence behind it to intelligently categorise objects that don't have meta-data. For example, categorising photos by their dominant colour, or using processing to determine whether the subject is a person, or a landscape, etc.

The transitions are super-smooth but that might be because they're using very powerful hardware? If it's down to the interface and clever caching I'd be really impressed.

Hopefully there'll be an opportunity to play with it at some point...

Thailand photos on Flickr

UPDATE: I managed to figure out how to embed a Flickr slideshow within the blog post...

I've finally added our Thailand photos to Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickseeber/sets/ 

If you haven't seen them, you can also find all of the holiday blog posts here:

http://www.nickseeber.com/thailand-09/ 

Enjoy! It feels like a long time ago...

Patrick Stewart on his experience as a victim of domestic violence

Patrick Stewart has written an affecting and personal account in the Guardian of his experience of domestic violence. During his childhood, his father, a retired Regimental Sargeant Major and "an angry, unhappy and frustrated man who was not able to control his emotions or his hands" would often violently assault his mother. Patrick - faced with adults and police condoning the abuse - dealt with this trauma later through his acting career.

No one came to help. No adult stepped in and took charge. I needed someone else to take over and tell me everything was going to be all right and that it wasn't my fault. I wanted the anger to go away and, while it stayed, I felt responsible. The sense of guilt and loneliness provoked by domestic violence is tainting – and lasting. No one came, but everyone knew. Our small houses were close together. Every Monday morning I walked to school with my head down, praying that I would not encounter a neighbour or school friend who had heard the weekend's rows. I felt ashamed.

...

I managed to find my own refuge in acting. The stage was a far safer place for me than anything I had to live through at home – it offered escape. I could be someone else, in another place, in another time. However, whenever the role called for anger, fury, or the expression of murderous impulses, I was always afraid of what I might unleash if I surrendered myself to those feelings. It was not until 1981, when the director Ronald Eyre asked me to play the psychotic Leontes in The Winter's Tale, that the breakthrough came.

via www.guardian.co.uk

He's now a patron of Refuge, the national domestic violence charity and has done a lot of work to raise awareness in this area. The latest campaign is Four Ways To Speak Out.

Follow the link for the full text of the article, it's well worth reading.

Acrobatic craziness

This is flippin' ridiculous.

Going to see Cirque du Soleil live in Las Vegas is now on my list of things to do...

Nick & Liz in Thailand - Part 4: Cooking, Trekking, and then back to Bangkok

This is Part 4 of our Thailand holiday updates. You can find Part 1 here , Part 2 here, Part 3 here, and some photos here and here.

The last few days on Koh Chang (the island where we've been staying for most of our time in Thailand) were quite action-packed - a few highlights below! As ever there are lots of photos but they'll come later once I'm home and I've had a chance to process them.

On Monday we spent most of the day at a Thai cooking course which was great fun. It was held at the Blue Lagoon resort, and is one of two such courses one can do on the island. We were in the capable hands of Ronnie and Chen, two friendly and experienced chefs, who taught us about some of the different ingredients used in Thai cooking and then walked us through cooking some different dishes. We also ate them as we went along which was good fun! By the end we were rather full...

The course was small - Liz and I were one of three young couples taking part - so was very friendly and there was plenty of 'hands-on' cooking. For the first set of dishes we focused on deep-fried stuff - wontons, spring rolls, prawns wrapped in egg noodles, and something called 'deep-fried black pearl'. The latter uses an egg that's been pickled with herbs to make it go completely black, but it tastes completely normal. It just takes a bit of bravery to try it! We also made some sweet chilli dipping sauce - yum.

The second lot of dishes were all noodle-based. We made the ubiquitous Phad Thai, as well as several others, and all were delicious. One of them, 'drunken noodles' is apparently a hangover dish, and is spicy. Also yum. Then the last lot of dishes were curries - red, green, and a clear soup curry called tom yum. Despite being warned not to get curry in my eye whilst pounding the paste, I managed to do so and it stung for a while... However the curries were lovely! Finally we had banana in coconut cream for dessert. It wasn't very necessary but tasted as great as everything else.

The next day we went over to White Sands on the other side of the island to spend the day with my old boss and her family, mostly at the pool at their hotel. Then we popped out for lunch at a Thai place that our hosts at Amber Sands had recommended.

Wednesday was our last full day on the island and we were very excited, as we finally did what we'd been looking forward to the most - elephant trekking. Liz had told me that she was going to have a bigger, faster, and better looking elephant than me, but in the end we shared one, who we named Ellie. We had an hour or so of walking through the jungle with a mahout (the person who is in charge of each elephant, and spends a long time training and getting used to them). He was an enthusiastic photographer, and borrowed my camera to take more than a 100 photos of us on the elephant! So we'll have plenty to choose from. We also each got to ride on her neck (like the mahout) which was really fun.

Later we fed the elephants bananas, and then led a couple of them down to the river where we had a chance to swim with them. The elephants were very well trained and did some squirting of water right on cue. Photogenic :-)

Yesterday we took the bus back to Bangkok which was again pleasant and uneventful. We were sad to leave Koh Chang as it's been lovely to stay there, but it was also good to see Rob and Jane again.

Today we've been out shopping and then met Rob and his friend for lunch at a fantastic Japanese restaurant. It's obviously much more expensive than street food, but compared to London prices it was a steal - about £6 for a great set of dishes including some amazingly fresh and tasty sushi.

Tonight the plan is to go see some muay thai boxing, and then tomorrow of course we fly home. I expect I'll probably put out Part 5 once we're back, which will have a bit about the boxing and also some general thoughts about Thailand and Thai culture...

Liz with a (very cute) baby

Awwwww... :-)

Nick & Liz in Thailand - Part 3: By the beach on Koh Chang

This is Part 3 of our Thailand holiday updates. You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here, and some photos here and here.

Since being on Koh Chang ('Elephant Island' - so named because its shape resembles the head of an elephant) we haven't been up to much. So this update will be quite short...

We spent 4 nights in total at the Spa Koh Chang. It's a very secluded resort which (having seen some more of the island) is unlike the others I've seen. It's a spa in the true sense of the word, meaning that most of the people there are there to do the 'treatment'. This consists of fasting (meaning that only liquids are drunk) and twice-daily enemas. The standard treatment is seven days long and there are a variety of nationalities there - some Brits but also Scandinavians, Germans, Dutch, and French people. A few couples but mostly women, of all sorts of ages.

There's a hushed, chilled-out sort of quiet and it feels a bit wrong to raise one's voice. Also, despite the restaurant being amazing (extremely healthy, with a big selection of raw food dishes as well as veggie and vegan) it didn't have a bar, so between about 5ish (when it's starting to cool down and time to get out of the pool) and 8ish (when we had dinner) there wasn't really any socialising. I nipped down to a shop nearby and bought some beers, and Liz and I tended to watch a movie around then.

I didn't have any massages at the spa, but Liz had two and they sounded pretty good. I had one in Bangkok the evening when Liz was feeling rough, and it was very good. It cost 350 baht for an hour, which is about 7 GBP. Great value indeed. 

The other thing I did at the spa was to read Henri Charriere's Papillon, which is a true first-person account of his experiences in the French penal colonies in the 30's and 40's. I highly recommend the book, so won't talk too much about what happens, for fear of spoiling it. It's very exciting, and kept me on the edge of my sun-lounger all the way through. It's instantly shot into my top 5 books. I'm not sure what the other four are, but John Le Carre's The Perfect Spy is certainly up there too. I shall think. 

On Friday we had an excursion for a few hours to White Sands, the tourist town on the West side of Koh Chang. It's got a long strip of resorts all next to each other, and whilst I'm sure they're okay I didn't really fancy it. There were far too many people! And lots of places selling tourist tat.

On Saturday (yesterday) we got collected by the owners of the place we're staying now (Amber Sands), Julian and Cheryl. They're a lovely South African couple who bought what was then called the Funky Hut resort about a year ago and run it with their daughter and her family. It's also quite quiet, but there are some families staying and a bar, it's much more sociable and 'fun'. We have a small cottage facing the sea. We're still on the less built-up (East) side of the island, which is mainly because there aren't really any sandy beaches. The 'amber' sands here are a bit scrubby and with driftwood, and not as pleasant. But as I prefer swimming in the pool to the sea, I'm not that bothered. 

The best part is that my previous boss at BT is on holiday in Thailand at the moment, with her family. She's on maternity leave at the moment and as we're keeping in touch we discovered, by a huge coincidence, that we were going to be on Koh Chang at the same time! So we arranged to overlap our stay at Amber Sands by a few days. It's been really fun for Liz and I to meet her husband, two daughters (5 and 7) and baby boy. They are heading off to another resort in White Sands tomorrow, so we'll have spent two nights with them. Fab.

We've got a Thai cooking course and an elephant trek planned for this week, so no doubt there will be another update in a few days...

Some more photos from Thailand

Now at Amber Sands, where we're staying for 5 nights. Part 3 of our holiday news to come shortly...