Language Test

Test 1 – Coming and going

Please select the correct word in each of the gaps in the following paragraph:

Last week I

Test 2 – The past tense

Please select the correct answer to the following question

Question: Why do you think about going to London next summer?

Answer:

Last week was the Green Man festival, where the was no green man, but there was a big tree ent who was happy to let us walk under him and write wishes on his legs. Doves were too loud and the singing was out of tune. I reluctantly quit early. The Flaming Lips played mostly new stuff, which was quite psychodelic compared to some of their recent output. The return to their earlier vibe was marked by the inclusion of She Don’t Use Jelly. It was fun and unexpected to see the band turn up in the morning to do their own sound check.

The week before we were up at Edinburgh for this little festival they have each year. Turns out, there was quite a lot on. We caught mostly small theatre shows, like Deborah Pearson’s little piece to a handful of audience in a tiny video shop where she had worked after immigrating from Canada. She had used her camcorder for it’s only outing to film her last days hanging out with her friends before leaving her homeland for good, and repeated verbatim every word that she said in the home movie of the end of her old life.

There was also a bloke walking to space. Well, the same number of steps, anyway. I love Live Art.

My bro came over to visit this weekend. He’s just come back from a gruelling five day residential piano course where he rubbed shoulders and had lessons from some of the best pianists in the world. We celebrated his survival by having an amazing curry in Lasan in Birmingham. Mmmm.

We also went to see The Illusionist, a beautiful hand drawn animation by the director of Bellevue Rendez-vous.

He’s a famous guy, I’m sure both search engines will give me some great results. Let’s take a look at Bing first.

My eye immediately falls to the top link, the news. Is this the best, most accurate, most interesting news about Brad right now? I don’t know, but his Mrs seems to mainly feature in the picture. How about the second line… lots of pictures, some almost pornographic. Not so sure. Then the third link, and we’re into the meat, the raw facts, Wikipedia. The videos are at the bottom of the screen, and there are four of them. I like the way they play little thumbnail videos when you hover over. Very media heavy, and that’s maybe what you want if you’re the kind of person who searches for Brad Pitt.

Score: 4/5

How does Google fare?

Well, first off, I like the side bar on the left; Google haven’t already decided that I’m looking for video or images, I have to specify what I’m looking for.  Interesting that the first news story is from four hours ago, but bing’s is from 11 days ago. Google’s selections are tabloid, but new, compared to the older, and more sober bing articles.  Following the news are the same three links in a different order, then finally the pictures. Was I after pictures? I don’t know, but when I get there, Google’s selection is much better – head shots of Brad looking great. But where are the videos? He’s a film star, but Google has no video links in sight. Strange, given that Microsoft choose four from Google’s YouTube property. Asthetically, I prefer Google’s sparser, less busy presentation; bing is more like a magazine.

Score: 4/5

The Other Way Works

There is a website which I put together for my wife’s theatre company, theotherwayworks.co.uk. One day in Febuary 2007 Google decided that it didn’t like it any more and it vanished without trace from the search. Apparently it doesn’t even help being linked to from two national daily newspapers. I’ve tried in vain to get it re-listed, but I’ve had to give up. Oh well. Still, perhaps I can still find some good links about this theatre company from the competing search engines. What have you got Google?

Well, all of the links are relevant, and hey look there at the sixth link! It comes from the company website. Maybe there is hope after all. That’s the first time I’ve noticed it there for years.

Score: 2/5

And bing?

Well, none of the links are relevant to the company.

Score: 0/5

So Google comes in ahead. They both did well on a popular search and bing failed miserably on a less popular search. I guess it makes sense for the bing engineers to focus on the popular sites, but I won’t be changing my first port of call.

Rafi ready for a game.

South Birmingham Food Co-op, Loaf, Stirchley Happenings, and Birmingham Town Centre Partnerships are proud to bring you Stirchley’s (and Birmingham’s) first ever community market.

Stirchley Community Market, which launches on Tuesday the 27th July with it’s first market outside Stirchley United Working Mens Club on the Pershore Road from 4-8pm, will feature stalls selling wholefoods, bread, hot curry, wood-fired pizza, artisan preserves, cupcakes, local fruit and vegetables, and local arts and crafts, as well a stall doing bicycle maintenance. The market will give the local community, as well as commuters on their way home from work, an opportunity to find out what Stirchley has to offer, meet some excellent food producers and craft makers from within Birmingham, and pick up some tasty groceries for their weekly shop.

http://stirchleycommunitymarket.wordpress.com/

http://twitter.com/stirchleymarket

stirchleycommunitymarket@yahoo.co.uk

Carnival in St Paul’s, Bristol yesterday.

Tonight I saw the the very bizarre Far Away at the Bristol Old Vic, the most incredible dystopian atmosphere I’ve ever witnessed on stage.

Last night I was at the pub next door to the theatre for a huge multi-language meetup. I’m in the Bristol Italian meetup, and the organiser had brought along the French group, so I got a chance to practice that with a Kenyan lady. It was a little difficult changing between the two.

To start with, I don’t need to tell anyone that it is a beautiful device. Apparently it is causing the Japanese electronics industry to do some soul-searching about how an American company beat them to the tablet crown (I can’t find the link), and I can see why. The industrial design is superb.

It is also surprisingly heavy. Having heard so much about how light it is and how it will replace books, I am beginning to wonder. It might be lighter than a thick hardback – but I can’t see it replacing the novel. I’ve tried reading some e-books on it and I find the screen to be a bit tiring. I particularly like reading Google Reader (one of the big reasons I bought it was to browse in bed), and while scrolling with a finger beats the mouse wheel hands down, I’ve not yet found a suitable app for reading feeds. That said, I’m quite fussy when it comes to reading feeds, I want the font to be just the right size, I want everything available offline, I want to be able to sort what I read any which-way. Hopefully I’ll not have to wait for long for something better than the micro-font-sized Google Reader, or the rather average News Rack app.

Needless to say, as soon as it was out of the box, I was downloading apps: Good Reader is a nice PDF reader; the Guardian Eyewitness app is a beautiful demonstration of how eye-poppingly beautiful photos look on the screen; the Marvel app is great – it has a storyboard feature which walks you through the frames, though the resolution could be better; and I really like the Korg Electribe grovebox app which lets you design some seriously crunchy beats.

There is also the not so good – many apps feel rushed out, and I’m sure they’ll improve, for instance the Right Move property search app is pretty but annoying and much less useful than the website. And this leads to one big problem I have with the ecosystem. At times I was reminded of the frustrating experience of loading up a BBC micro game and then spending ages trying to work out which keys to use. On the iPad, I’m not the first person to notice there’s little consistency between apps, and I found myself pecking around the screen with my finger trying to work out which bits of the screen were ‘active’, and what they did.

However, the built in apps are amazing. The maps app is lightening fast, the Youtube app is much better than the website, and the photos app is a vision of the future. I’m looking forward to seeing how things develop.