pault

tea at Claire’s

On Friday evening, went to Claire’s for tea. Happened to have a digital camera in my bag. So what follows is a little gallery of shots from the evening. Just me mucking about really.

We had a lovely evening sat out in the sun and warm at the end of one of the hottest days of the summer. Good strong coffee, a lovely warm bottle of rioja, rocket and water cress salad and loads of veg roasted in olive oil. All accompanied with chatting and laughing and star gazing. Summer in the city at its best. Claire’s got an interesting garden with some funky plants and other stuff in it. I hope this apparent from the photos—if it’s not it’s the photographer’s fault.

For another good looking garden in Burngreave [just down the road in fact], visit markmedic’s garden.

This little exercise also gave me the chance to have a look at MT’s file upload capabilities. [This particular blog entry will therefore get updated a few times while I get to grips with it—apologies in advance to those who subscribe to the rss feed for this site].

To make full use MT’s facilities, we were missing the Perl module Image::Magick—which gives the option of creating thumbnails on the fly—very handy. This gave me the opportunity to go through the installation of the module with aland.

So here’s the gallery [click on thumbnail to see bigger version [in a popup window]]:

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Abbeyfield Multicultural Festival

Well, I suppose I raised expectations in Sharrow Festival last week—Abbeyfield Multicultural Festival did not disappoint.

After the forecast said warm, humid and a strong risk of thundery showers, it was hot, sunny, not too humid and no rain at all.

Highlights of the day: Sheffield Samba Band leading the carnival procession with tonnes of brightly-dressed school kids and stiltwalkers, Stephanie’s roast pepper wrap and dumpling [second mention on the site already], Mr K’s pakoras, my mate Akiel [age 6] break dancing [very well] on the main stage, our yearly encounter with Carlos [and this year we remembered to swap phone numbers!], seeing hordes of people with I read the Burngreave Messenger—Do you? stickers on, selling loads of stuff from the stall, having a giggle with Rob, seeing Rich and Ian in BNDfC baseball caps, the Yemeni dancers, aland grinning at the setting up of four networked PCs in Abbeyfield Stables, ACAB wearing a cardboard copper hat, Special bigin’ up everyone and loads of other stuff.

The main greatness of Abbeyfield though, is that the whole of Burngreave in all its diverse wonderfulness comes out to play for the afternoon. The park is full [12,000 entries to park during day—which includes people going in and/or out more than once] of folks from everywhere—Yemenis, Somalis, Kashmiris, Kosovans, Pakistanis, Iraqis, Africans, Caribbeans, Chileans [and quite a few different flavours of white too]; of all ages from babies to great-great grandmas.It’s one of the most diverse environments I’ve ever come across in my whole life and swear I didn’t hear a cross word all day. Though there are trappings of commerciality [in which I take part—Abbeyfield is an important pay day for Crafty Things, I’ve got kids to feed you know] there is an air of liberation in the air. There’s a feeling of our space around. It’s a chance to catch up with people you haven’t seen for a year, to have that no worries vibe all around and to laugh a lot.

Many places claim to be a fun day out for all the family, few deliver on the promise. Abbeyfield Multicultural Festival does. See you next year—well you are coming aren’t you?

new burngreave.net blog

Inspired by my Drupal experiences and also by my recent playing around with rss/xml feeds I’ve decided to have a go at converting my existing rising7 website into a combination of static and weblog pages.

My motivations are multiple:

We’ve talked about expanding what burngreave.net can do and here’s another option for potential users to utilize.

I want to expand my own knowledge in this area, as I’m very excited by it.

I’m feeling inspired to be creative at the moment. I’m in the fortunate position of being involved in some great stuff and would like to record it.

Please feel free to comment either here or there.

I apologise in advance for the initial high percentage of test and rubbish postings, but these will be weeded out eventually.

Originally posted on burngreave.net.