Whilst digging a flower bed at the weekend, I discovered this object. My initial thoughts were that it was some sort of old ammunition. It was quite heavy for it's size. I took some photos and emailed them to my father, who was pretty confident that it was not a dangerous explosive device.
I was chatting to him on the phone trying to identify the item, I was washing the base of the metal tube and I saw something stamped in to the base, a little more washing and scouring and some letters appeared, I couldn't quite make out what it said. I brought it inside and held it under a strong light in the kitchen and the letters gave away this objects secrets. Max Factor (Made in Hollywood). Just aswell I didn't call out the bomb disposal. ;-)
Now off to ebay to see how much an old metal lip stick holder will sell for.

Posted by jaffs at 10:02 AM | Permalink

We went for a meal with my parents last night to the Pot Belly restaurant in Tullylish. The pot belly restaurant is in a converted part of the old bleach mill which also houses a pottery.
The fields which used to be the bleach green, where the linen was dried can still be seen nearby. The folk and transport museum now displays the watchman's tower from the bleach green at Tullylish.
Our family has been going there for many years, when we used to go for Sunday Lunch I would head off down the river after the main course for an hour or two, as the old mill was fed by the River Bann. Gilford Angling Club owns the fishing rights for about 8 miles downstream and a couple of miles upstream.
Tullylish is a lovely village despite being only a few houses big, opposite the entrance to the pot belly is Tullylish House, a rather grand home, with a cricket pitch in the grounds. Tullylish Cricket Club play there in the summer months and it is known as Banford Green.
It is possible to park at Tullylish parish church and walk downstream to Gilfrord and beyond to Knock Bridge and Portadown if you are feeling adventurous. This walk will take you past a host of old mills in varying degrees of dilapadation. If they were in England I'm sure they would all be converted in to homes by now. Tullylish, despite being so small shows 8 mills in the village on the Ordanance Survey map of 1836.

Posted by jaffs at 11:19 AM | Permalink

I took the opportunity of late night opening on a Wednesday to visit the Victoria & Albert Museum last night. Highlights for me were the lifesize replicas of Trajan's Column and Michelangelo's David. The whole sculpture section viewed from a height is incredible.
The iron section was an unexpected highlight, especially the locks and keys and the fire backs.
The Melville bed looked particularly appealing, I was knackered. You can watch the rebuilding of the bed , if you are interested.
Oh and any museum that sells beer gets my thumbs up.

Posted by jaffs at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

David Jones has built a number of ingenious “fake” perpetual motion machines for museums and trade shows. These are beautifully made of bicycle wheels, sewing machine parts, plumbing hardware and other embellishments. They are displayed in glass or clear plastic cases with no obvious means for energy input. Observed by visitors daily, they slowly turn, day after day, without diminution of speed, over periods of a year or more, seemingly in defiance of the laws of physics. Sometimes a nice prize is offered to anyone who can puzzle out the precise secret of their operation. Jones once said that an analysis of the entries showed that many engineers thought that he really had discovered the secret of perpetual motion, while many physicists proposed methods of deception that couldn’t possibly work.

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/art.htm

Posted by jaffs at 08:59 AM | Permalink

I spent a while in Bristol Temple Meads station on Monday a rather beautiful building. It was the hub of Brunel's Great Western Railway.
Reading the wikipedia entry on Brunel I read about the atmospheric railway . A mad idea when you look back in retrospect.
The first experiments were done in Dalkey Ireland, and it was the success of this trial that peaked Brunel's interest.
It's difficult to understand how this system would work beyond getting a train from one destination to the next. II think one of the major reasons the system failed beyond the rats eating the vacuum seal was the difficulties of making points work..
You can read more about the system at Tally-Ho the Vacuum.

Posted by jaffs at 08:21 AM | Permalink

I had to go to Cardiff yesterday which turned in to a pretty long winded journey from Belfast. Air Wales seem to have taken over the route from BMI, so the flight was in a dinky ATR-42. There were no flights coming home at a realistic time in the evening so I decided to catch the train from Cardiff. I got a local Taunton service through Newport and the Severn Tunnel to Bristol and then a bus out to the airport.
Bristol seems to be a pretty big hub for Easyjet and they had a series of major delays causing problems.
I didn't realise what a flight snob I was until I started people watching. There were drunk Scots left over from the Six Nations in Cardiff, mothers feeding their screaming kids burger kings, chain smoking paramilitary tatooed Belfastians, the complete Easyjet demographic.
Anyway I managed to get an emergency exit seat in the easyjet seat scramble, the plane was gradually filling up and the last two seats available were behind me. On comes a couple of blitzed Belfast people, middle aged alkies, stinking of drink.
They perched themselves down and he proceeded to give us a running commentary all the way home about the fight he had in Wetherspoons on Saturday night, interspersed with random abuse.
I was reasding a section of my book, the Empire by Niall Ferguson. The paragraph I read as I was listening to the abuse from behind was describing British migration as a last resort, it seemed quite appropriate.

At 8.00pm was obliged to batten down both fore and main hatches, and a little after I really think there was the oddest shene betwixt decks that ever I heard or seed. There was some sleeping, some spewing, some pishing, some shitting, some farting, some flyrting, some damning, some Blasting their leggs and thighs, some their livers, lungs, lights and eyes. And for to make the shene the odder, some curs'd Father,Mother,Sister and Brother.

Posted by jaffs at 04:09 PM | Permalink

I had a very busy week this week, spent a week in London attending the BBC Upfront course. I must admit I was slightly cynical about attending the course, and when i found out that The Office was filmed on the premises in Marlebone High Street, I couldn't help but think that maybe the course provided the inspiration.
It turned in to a great week, perhaps it's was the people on the course that made it interesting, but it was a very enjoyable experience.
We got a chance to make a piece of radio drama, it was an adaptation of Jack & the Beanstalk. The radio production process was one I had never thought about much and it was a fascinating insight. My job was sound effects, 1/4 inch video tape scrunched up was used to give the noise of walking on grass, apparently this technique is used in the Archers quite a lot. Simple things like entering and leaving a room were covered, this is a very visual process, so in order for it to work on radio the actor has to face the microphone and continue talking as they walk backwards towards the door.
We also got the chance to make a 5 minute TV programme in a live studio. I took what I thought was the easy option and voluntered for camera work. The whole process was nerve wracking, the director ran through the shots he wanted in the rehearsal and you had to remember the sequence so you had the right shot when he cut to your camera. This wasn't too stressful until he wanted live zoom and you could see that the light was red on your camera.
The instructors on the course all come from within their own jobs in the BBC, and they are rotated. This means that you get people with up to date skills, except perhaps in the web design class, where I was forced to make a website using a front page template, I felt filthy afterwards. ;-)
I met some really interesting people from across the BBC, some with jobs that sounded so appealing, particularly those from the Natural History department in Bristol.
I spend one week in 3 in London at the moment and every time I go over I get a burst of energy and feel like it would be so great to work there, I come back slightly unsettled and think I really should move. Then I get back to Belfast and the two weeks settles me and I realise that there are more important things than work, which means I'm never really content with where I am and what I'm doing at the moment.

Posted by jaffs at 12:21 PM | Permalink

The Sunday Times had a piece about RFID tags today, the usual applications were discussed; supermarkets tracking product lines, tailored advertising etc. What I didn't realise was that I was carrying one in my wallet, the new London Transport Oyster cards contain a Philips MIFARE chip. This was the chip recommended when we looked at these cards to give to students in my last job. The MIFARE system uses one of the Industrial Scientific Medical licence free frequencies at 13.56 MHz, so it is not illegal for other people to have or to use their own reader equipment.
I bought an oyster card last time I was in London, tonight I tried to add more credit online and it said my card was not registered. I need to complete a form at an underground station to register the card, London Transport then have a name and address assigned to my card and my movements around the London Transport system can be tracked, unless I foil wrap my wallet ;-)
http://www.rfidbuzz.com/news/2004/rfid_in_the_london_transport_oyster_cards.html

Posted by jaffs at 09:05 PM | Permalink

http://code.google.com/webstats/index.html

Posted by jaffs at 10:19 PM | Permalink