A few days ago I visited Chateau Samizdata.  While there, I picked the brain of its Chatelaine on the subject of my Google Nexus 4, because she now has one of these also.

She showed me various useful tricks. In particular she showed me – and helped me to download – an Android app called BUS LONDON, which identifies the bus stops nearest to wherever you are, and tells you what buses are about to arrive at each stop, when, and where they are headed.

BUS LONDON, in other words, provides you with information like this:

That is a photo I took last night at a bus stop near me.  I have always, in my pre BUS LONDON life, found such signs to be immensely useful because so very reassuring.  A bus to where I want to go will almost certainly be coming, quite soon, is the message I get, and it is most welcome when you consider the alternative.  But only some bus stops have these excellent signs.  Hence the value of an app like BUS LONDON.

Irritatingly, however, when I was at Chateau Samizdata, BUS LONDON refused to tell me about the bus stop that I was about to use.  This is because this bus stop is a bit further away from CS than it might have been, but is worth the short extra walk because of the greater choice of buses that it offers me.  This is a stop that buses converge on, so to speak.  But once I got near enough to it, BUS LONDON obliged with all the relevant information.

However, when I arrived at the bus stop, which also has an electric sign like the one in the photograph above, this is what I saw:

I stared and stared at this to see if anything further would happen, but nothing did.  This is something I have never seen before.  Usually these signs either work, almost always, or occasionally do not work and are blank.  Never before have I seen a sign behaving like an 80s personal computer, by publicising its problems like this and getting stuck.

Quite a coincidence, I think you will agree.  Within about an hour of acquiring BUS LONDON, I encounter a bus stop sign that fails to tell me what is due, but no matter, because I now have BUS LONDON to tell me!

I could not shake the feeling that my Google Nexus 4 had sucked all the information out of the sign, into itself, leaving the sign utterly confused.

If you think the reflections of all this info are not strictly necessary, and that the reflections might have been cropped out, well, true, but I do like reflections.

Here is the reflection of the first sign, the one near me, rotated and reversed to make it easily legible:

Off topic, but I like it.  If you think this reflection to be an irrelevance, then I suggest you redo this posting on your blog, with the first two images cropped, the final image omitted, and these last two paragraphs also omitted.  What?  You can’t be bothered?  Suit yourself.

As do I.  Suiting myself being what this blog is for.

The idea being to see if I had to log in again.  The idea was that I wouldn’t have to.  I didn’t have to.

LATER: Log on as in type in my password again.

Further Google Nexus 4 progress and rumination is reported and ruminated by me here.

This posting is a test, to see if I can post stuff to my blog entirely from my new phone/computer, and it looks as if I can.

No links, no complications.  Certainly no picture.  Just basic text.  It seems to be working.  Go.

Had a bit of trouble making the categories I had chosen stick.  And touching the screen instead of mousing really takes getting used to.  (Will those italics show up? LATER: YES) But, basically it works.

So here are three more digital photographers digitally photographed by me on March 5th, to add to the ones in this photo-collection:

I chose those for all my usual kinds of reasons, to do with focusing and composition and suchlike, which is not major my purpose now.

What I have done is reduced the size of the little photos above, that you click on to get the real photos, from 166 pixels wide to 165 pixels wide, and shoved a small space in between.  I’m hoping that 165 x 3 + 2 spaces won’t go beyond the 500 pixel limit, but only posting it will tell.

Which means that this posting is liable to be posted, and then reposted a few times, while I work out what works. I can’t tell from within my blogging software whether these new spaces and pictures sizes are a good fit, or if I’ll have (e.g.) to make the pictures a bit smaller.

It goes with saying (surely a more rational way of saying “it goes without saying”, if you immediately then say it) that I am a bit apologetic about this disruption.  But in truth, not very apologetic.

The reason I am doing this is that I have now got my Google Nexus 4 supersmart mobile phone, and have been looking at how this blog looks on it.

Point one: obviously all the regular stuff on the left that you don’t read should be on the right.  That may one day happen, and may not.

But the other thing is that when I do these little clutches of lots of little clickable photos, then on the GN4, just as on my computer, I get a small white space between each horizontal row of pictures and the next row down, but not between each picture, sideways.  If you get my drift.  And a much better arrangement would be to have spaces between each picture, if only to make the pictures easy to see as separate pictures, especially on something like the Google Nexus 4.

So now you know.

A BIT LATER:  Too wide.  The blurry digital photographer behind the focused leaves, who was supposed to be on the right, has moved himself to a new row below of his own creation.  So now I will make the small pictures 164 pixels wide rather than 165.  Isn’t this exciting?  Well, probably not.

A BIT LATER STILL: Done.

The photos below of NHS headlines were taken in one of my favourite newspaper and magazine shops, the one in Victoria Street on the left as you go towards Victoria Station, having turned left out of Strutton Ground.  Moments after leaving that shop, I started off back in the other direction along Victoria Street, towards Parliament Square, and took these the two snaps below.

There is not much point any more in taking pictures of just The Wheel.  We all know what that looks like.  But I still like to snap away at it, when I am able to combine it with other things, such as particularly sastisfying foreground clutter, or a statue:

I especially like the one on the left, partly because the scene will never be repeated.  I do like temporary clutter.  And I particularly like how it says “ALARMED”, bottom right.  I only saw that when I got home.

The statue on the right is the one featured in this posting here, from 2008, which I had of course totally forgotten about but have just been reminded about by google.

That’s right.  I went a-googling for “statue outside westminster abbey”, and clicked on entry number four, “images for statue outside westmister abbey”.  And guess what the Gold Medal Image was, the very first image, top left, number one on the list.  That’s right, only me.

Not long ago, Alex Singleton dropped by.  And one of the many intriguing things he told me was that Google really, really likes blogs like BrianMicklethwaitDotCom.  This is because blogs like BrianMicklethwaitDotCom have been going for quite a long time, are quite frequently updated with new stuff, and are real blogs rather than fakes.  Also, crucially, BrianMicklethwaitDotCom has now no truck with - and never ever has had any truck with - bullshit tricks for boosting traffic as peddled by bullshit tricksters on the www.  Google can tell this.  Google has its own box of clever tricks to spot anyone trying to do this, and guess who is cleverer, the bullshit tricksters or Google?  And Google has worked out that I never do any of that crap.  So, Google likes me, and when people look for a picture and I have such a picture, my picture gets to be at or very near the top of the list.

Alex also told me that some quite Big Cheese car maker and car seller had made the mistake of availing itself of the services of one of these traffic booster nitwits.  Jaguar, I think it was.  And Google proceeded to expunge Jaguar from its listings.  So, when you went looking for a luxury car, you got no Jaguars at all.  And if you went looking for jaguars, all you got was big black kitties.

At the time, I thought Alex himself might have been bullshitting, but it seems he may have been exactly right.

No, not Jaguar, so not exactly right, and I have only left that in for the kitty connection.  Sorry Jaguar.  If you want all that removed, just say the word and it will be done.  I have just dined with Antoine Clarke, and he told me it was: BMW.

Things seem to moving fast over as Samizdata, first there was an email telling us not to upload any pictures “whilst we are working on moving the blog”, and now this:

As of this Thursday, Samizdata will temporarily stop updating and on Friday, it will go off-line completely for… a while.

We wil be back at some point over the weekend with the New Improved Version.

And there has been another email clarifying when we may not post.

Meanwhile, here, there was another involuntary outage yesterday afternoon.  Something to do with upgrading a router, or some such thing, and all was soon well again.  No incoming emails told me of this.  I found it out for myself.  I deduce that this blog was not much missed.

I look forward greatly to seeing how the new Samizdata system works, and hope that it will continue to make sense for me to use the same software for a revamped version of this blog.

More pictures taken yesterday.  Will I ever tire of snapping my fellow snappers?  The weather was a bit cold, but not too cold, so there was lots of photography going on with gloves on, but sometimes just the one. 

Click an enjoy:

I am hoping that one of the benefits of switching to Wordpress, if I do, will be that both the posting and the viewing of such clutches of photos will become easier.  I will be able to fling them up more quickly, and you will be able to click through them more quickly.

And yes, I know that I could contrive this by using one or other of the dedicated photography “platforms”, but I personally particularly relish the thought of using only one platform for all of my bloggage.  I want to use Wordpress for Samizdata and for here, and I want to use Wordpress to display whatever photos I want to display.  I will only ponder alternatives if I find out that Wordpress doesn’t allow this sort of thing, far better than I am doing this now.  But judging by what Alec Muffet (the man who is contriving the Samizdata switch-over) told me in a recent conversation at Chateau Samizdata, Wordpess will offer much better photo-display options.  I definitely hope so.

As of late last night, and for I don’t know how much longer before that, this blog was out of action.  An error message involving database corruption greeted all those coming here.  The Guru was immediately emailed, and very quickly he had the problem licked.  Deepest thanks to him, and apologies if you tried to visit during the outage.  Thanks for trying again.

As it happens, I have in mind to relaunch this blog, in a matter of months rather than weeks, as a Wordpress blog rather than using what it uses now, which is Expression Engine.  The circumstance prompting this is that Samizdata, Real Soon Now, is getting a makeover, which will, I am told, involve Samizdata switching to using Wordpress.  This is very good news for Samizdata, and will surely unleash many improvements.

Now that Wordpress is clearly the market leader for blogging software, I thought I’d switch to Wordpress for here also.  That way, I will use only one software package, and hopefully I’ll be able to do a whole lot of things here that I can’t do now.

The only reason I picked Expression Engine in the first place is because, or such is my recollection, there was a plan for Samizdata to switch to Expression Engine.  That never happened, but meanwhile that was what I went with.  Very inconvenient.

Anyone who thinks Wordpress is a bad idea, please tell me why, now.