Recently in nofear.org Category

From Thursday this week (26th of April) until the end of the weekend Cambridge will be seeing a rather interesting set of exhibitions, demonstrations, and a very trendy conference. The photo on the left is the initial setting up of the domes that will host some of the displays and events.

‘Enter Unknown Territories’ or ‘Enter_Unknown Territories’ as it is funkily entitled is a 4 day festival that is bringing together art and new technology. It seems that much of the City will be involved with this. I myself will be attempting to attend a few of the shows or displays. Since Chenapan – our mad cheese-eating friend – will be visiting the town it’ll be interesting to see if we can coax him into coming along to this potentially bizarre series of events.

I noted that one of the major contributors to the organisation of the festival is the famous Bill Thompson. In recent years Bill appears to have become rather a centrepiece of Cambridge life. From his work at last year’s Cambridge Film Festival, to his work with the BBC, it is good to know that Cambridge is home to such diverse and colourful characters!

Returning to the subject in hand, I noticed that one of the major events is a picnic on Parker’s Piece on Sunday at 2pm. This could be a very community spirited event, or it could be totally overrun by scavvers. Only time will tell. If I obtain any interesting footage in the next few days it will, naturally, be shared here on nofear.org!

Click the various links above for more information.

As a long time collector of junk (who else has a box of cola can sized 5000uF capacitors?) I was delighted this weekend to get my hands on some old mechanical typewriters, the kind of which I haven't used for absolutely years.

I was interested to note after doing a little research that Olivetti still makes mechanical typewriters, and such items are still commonly used in countries and areas where electricity is not available to power word processors and computers. As with so many things in the 21st century, they are also used by people who just like that 'retro' appeal -- probably the same kind of person that has one of the old grey Post Office telephones.

As a sign of how quickly things move these days, they were of course ubiquitous until the late 1980's, whereup they started to get replaced by computers. Do you for instance remember all those ladies with typewriters sitting in the background on BBC TV's grandstand? I even have a copy of some (very) old bank statements from Barclays bank that were manually produced on a typewriter.

One very quickly gets used to the difference required to press the keys on a mechnical typewriter compared to a modern keyboard (he says, hammering the keys on his Dell). Of course, the lack of a carriage return key is initially an impediment to continuing to the next line (it's actually a lever to the left of the platen), and the missing 1 key is quickly replaced with the lower case L.

Typewriters, whilst obsolete, provide us with many terms that have followed through to computing, the tab key (from the mechnical tabulator on early typewriters), carriage return, line feed, carbon copy and of course the QWERTY keyboard layout.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go clean my hands, they got a little dirty changing the ink ribbon.

In the meanwhile I leave you with Leroy Anderson's 'The Typewriter', as far as I know the only piece of music for Orchestra and uh, well, a typewriter.

I know that large sections of the blogging community are taken with writing posts on their handheld devices and uploading them wirelessly, but it has seemed unnecessarily tedious to me, and I usually prefer to write my posts from the comfort of my study.

All has changed, as I type this post, I'm speeding towards Aberdeen on a  GNER train, and thanks to the perks of first class travel, get free use of their onboard wi-fi service. It is surprisingly fast, and I presume, although not indicated, they're using a high speed 3G data connection to connect to the internet.

Regular readers will know that trains are my preferred form of transport, and the east coast route is particularly scenic once north of the border. Couple this with the delights of eating in the dining car --yes, they do have them, and the food is, in my opinion, far better than most restaurant fare, and long removed from the BR reputation of yesteryear -- and long distance rail travel is far more relaxing than planes or cars.

As for the cost? Put it this way, my rail fare across almost the entire length of the country was cheaper than the cost of parking at the local airport for the weekend.

Rail travel does have its problems, but it is much maligned in the press, and I should imagine many of it's detractors don't even take advantage of this most agreeable form of transportation.

I'm proud to report that nofear.org has made it down to Essex! I found this piece of graffiti carved into the girders of a railway bridge near Epping. At least I think they are saluting the site?

I've run the webserver logfiles for the last year through the 'ol weblog cruncher, and am quite suprised at the some of the keyphrases used on the search engines:

The top five searches yield the following:

animalsex - 1103 searches - my curiously innocent gallery of animals at it, not what most people thought it was though.. dirty pervs!
fuckbus - 674 searches - No, I've no idea why either
roast pork - 577 searches
priceless - 514 queries
monkeyfuck - 183 queries

and scattered amongst the other 2670 there are:

Non Sequiteurs
reform tickles paraphrasing braking doug
album heinz tasting incomprehension modifier
globes cheater wee ranger fearless

Vanity
Lena Canada
Adrian Petty
Carrie Carolin
Chris Peddie-Burch
Melanie Cross
Rohit Fedane
Bob Acteson
Jamie Porter
Andy Bartolo
Brad Slavin
Ryan Eames
Irving Wolfe
Matthew Parker
Russell Stebbings

Desperate
how to masterbait (ok we had 57 referrals for this one!)
masterbait
how do you masterbait
handjob
beatmeat
pooping.jpg
needwoman
heavy petting

Obesity and Lifestyle Tips
Hairstyles for fat people
Fat lady photos
fat ugly women
blubber fat husband
fat chicks
fat lady

Various
images of madness
vicars and tarts
how to roast pork
piglove
cunt
mansteak
having sex with dogs
girlsareevil
brightly coloured machine tools
bad pigs