Category Archives: Creativity and Recreation

Posts on creativity and recreation, creative writing, photography, film, TV and books.

Creativity and Recreation

Sherlock Holmes times two

The TV shows Elementary, and Sherlock are two TV shows depicting Sherlock Holmes.

Elementary

Elementary (2012), based USA and created by Robert Doherty premiered Sep 27, 2012. It takes place in New York, where Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) is struggling with a heroin addiction with the assistance of Dr. Joan Watson (Lucy Liu), an ex surgeon and a sober companion, whose task, assigned by Holmes’ father, it is to live-in with Holmes in order to keep him sober.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUJeWvpat-M

Sherlock

Sherlock (2010), based in UK, created by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, premiered Aug 30, 2010. It takes place in New York, and portrays Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) relation to his brother Mycroft (Mark Gatiss), as well as his friendship with Dr. John Watson (Martin Freeman), recovering from an injury he has sustained while in military service in Afghanistan (interesting how, more than a hundred years later, Great Britain is still messing around in Afghanistan…)

Continue reading Sherlock Holmes times two →

Computers, Creativity and Recreation

ISO 8601, or not…

They always have great alt texts as well: ISO 8601 was published on 06/05/88 and most recently amended on 12/01/04.
XKCD – nerd humor at its best!

I think Sweden adopted ISO 8601 sometime around when it came. Before that we would write dates as day/month-year (that would be discouraged format number 11 on the image to  the right).

Then came along Internet Information Server (IIS) invented by an American firm you might now, called Microsoft. In the US where Microsoft lives, dates are written using discouraged format number 1, or perhaps 2, unless it’s 3 or 4, I never manage to keep track.

Most of the time it’s possible to just ignore the highly illogical way of mixing up days and months and years in the US way of writing things. ISO 8601 goes from larger to smaller, the old Swedish way went from smaller to larger, the US way goes from uh… large to smallest, to largest…

However, a project I was involved in a couple of months ago used some form of standard date widget in IIS (Internet Information Server, Microsoft’s Web Server) that used discouraged format number 1 above.

Now for the fun part. In my humble and naïve mind this should be a question of just setting a language setting somewhere in the web server to get it right. Apparently it wasn’t (!?) Instead everyone was running with the totally confusing US-dates. The budget did not have room for making the change, and it seemed everyone humbly adopted… after all, there was a “date browser” that could be opened pressing a button (first time it took a minute to open, but then it was business as usual). I’m guessing they used that function to get their dates, or perhaps I’m just an old fossil that doesn’t adopt well.

So the punchline (unless the previous sentence wasn’t punchline enough for you…): yeah standard until some guy comes along and wants it otherwise, and this guy has all the power… then it’s a (quote-unquote) “standard” and not a standard any more.

 

Creativity and Recreation

Fear of the Dark piano tribute

In celebration of the Winter Solstice (the shortest day and longest night of the year – in the northern hemisphere), I’ve come across a youtube vid to get you through… and maybe even make mom and pop dig Maiden! 😀

Although, I’m not certain a Chopin or Mozart aficionado will find this overly impressive. Maybe it’s just as well to keep it hard rock and add some strings instead, like Metallica…

Or how about a … country/classical orchestra/”Celine Dionish”/”Mariah Careyian” version?

Creativity and Recreation

Winter has come!

Image

Snow covered trees in Sweden

This morning the whole world was covered in snow! Very nice looking. Very bad for commuter traffic! But closer to Stockholm it was mostly slosh and puddles.

I just felt I had to share this picture since some Swedish winters are just so gorgeously beautiful. They say this winter will be! The weather service actually warns of -25 deg C this weekend! I get to use my “alpine” winter jacket! Hurray! 😀

I tried to make a banner from that picture even though it’s been taken with a mobile (that didn’t even show the picture in the gallery until I hooked it up with my computer… crap!) I should get my Nikon and get busy tomorrow, perhaps I’ll get a decent picture because the mobile version is not really fit for bannerism… :D!

Creativity and Recreation

Four Still lifes

A couple of years ago, when I’ve just about purchased my Nikon D50 I snapped off a number of “still life” like pictures. These are the sometimes unusual things you just happen to have lying around in an otherwise rather uninteresting apartment.

Still life 1: Pile of laundry
Still life 1: Pile of laundry

This is obviously one of the first things I snapped a picture of. After looking at the picture closer I realized it was a rather nice picture, selection of subject excluded. Anyway, as far as I’ve been able to determine there’s no underwear on the picture, and no insanely dusty socks, so I hope it’s at least PG-13 😀

The thing with this picture I like is that the object in center, the pile of clothes are actually adding a kind of calm from the rather detailed background. It feels kind of backwards, and perhaps it is.

Still life 2: Knick-knacks
Still life 2: Knick-knacks

This is a bunch of knick-knacks lying around on my desk. Among other things you might notice a burnable CD box, a can of 5-56 universal oil and an ear cleaner rubber thingy. I’m especially proud of the bizarre factor that one adds. To my defense I might add that I used it to dust off my computer… you squeeze it and it blows air…

The ear thing sits atop an ancient letter scale, a bit crooked from being in my possession. I inherited it from grandpa who got it sometime in the fifties…

Still life 3: Bookshelf
Still life 3: Bookshelf

This is one of my favorite pictures. A classic book picture, true but still… it has a kind of uneven, haphazardly-piled impression to it that I really like.

What you probably don’t know is that this is my unread-books “pile” or part of it anyway. The thing you can’t see on this picture is that all the books are quite dusty…

Too much work makes Hoakzie a dull boy!

Still life 4: Fruits
Still life 4: Fruits

Okay, I confess: I’m a sucker for the classics. The only extenuating circumstance would be that there’s no banana or pine apple in there. And that the “cloth” in the “basket” is in fact a dish towel mom gave me when I moved away from home…