Tom Roper's Weblog

Cheltenham iCal calendar

With forty days to go to the Festival, I added the races at Cheltenham into my iCal calendar. If you use iCal, Google calendars, or anything else that will accept an *.ics feed, here it is:

http://ical.mac.com/tomroper/Cheltenham
or to subscribe: webcal://ical.mac.com/tomroper/Cheltenham.ics

Technorati Tags: ical, Cheltenham

Bach cantatas

The next two of John Eliot Gardiner's Bach cantata cycle landed on my doormat today, on volume 27, the cantatas for Whit Tuesday, BWV 184 Erwünschtes Freudenlicht and BWV 175 Er rufet seinen Schafen mit Namen and those for Trinity Sunday, BWV 165 O heil'ges Geist- und Wasserbad, BWV 194 Höchsterwünschtes Freudenfest and BWV 129 Gelobet sei der Herr, mein Gott, recorded in St Magnus' Kirkwall, and volume 3, cantatas for Fourth and Fifth Sundays after Trinity, the first set, BWV 24 Ein ungefärbt Gemüte, BWV 185 Barmherziges Herze der ewigen Liebe and BWV 177 Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, recorded in Tewkesbury Abbey and the second BWV 71 Gott ist mein König, BWV 131 Aus der Tiefen rufe ich, Herr, zu dir, BWV 93 Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten, and BWV 88 Siehe, ich will viel Fischer aussenden from Blasiuskirche, Mühlhausen.
I well remember when BBC Radio 3 broadcast Bach cantatas every Sunday in the early 1970s, in the correct liturgical order. A teenager at the time, I was amazed at the richness and variety of these works. I have long wanted a complete set and these, with the Monteverdi Choir, performed on a Bach pilgrimage in 2000, are just the thing. I don't understand the order in which they're released.

Technorati Tags: bach, cantatas

Cheltenham and Doncaster: Cotswold Chase and Cleeve Hurdle

Doncaster 1.55: Chomba Womba
Cheltenham 210: Patman du Charmil
Cheltenham 240: Neptune Collonges
Doncaster 300: An Accordion
Cheltenham 350: Inglis Drever

Burns night

The sight of a piper in full fig on Lewes station platform as I returned from the University of Sussex winter graduation ceremony reminded me that it is Burns night; that's Robert Burns not the evil capitalist in the Simpsons.
Burns was as revolutionary a poet as any, and to prove this point, rather than the address to the haggis, I shall intone A Man's A Man For A' That while drinking a glass of Bruichladdich.

Technorati Tags: Bruichladdich, burns

Food at Sussex

Two Sussex students have made a film about food on campus, Food for UoS.(Google video link; I believe it's also up in YouTube and Facebook)
'Food for US is a student made investigative documentary, addressing food at Sussex University and asking how it could be improved ... nutritionally, ethically and environmentally.'
Good for them. I don't agree with everything they say, but when I arrived at the university in 2003 I was surprised to find the food served for the most part indistinguishable from that offered at university when I was an undergraduate in the mid-70s.
The university has just carried out a catering review, but it was merely an exercise in cost-cutting.

The Eve of St Agnes

Apparently if maidens do not look behind them when going to bed tonight, they will dream of their future husband. I discovered that tomorrow is St Agnes' day, and that today is therefore the eve of that feast, while looking for excuses to serve cake at work tomorrow.

 

Victor Chandler Chase day at Ascot

With Haydock abandoned, I go with the favourite in the big chase at Ascot.
110: Hoh Viss
145: Twist Magic
220: Mahogany Blaze
2555: Refinement

Plain English vs. HR-speak

I asked for feedback from a recent job application. I was not short-listed and wanted to know why. They gave me three reasons. Numbers one and three were, in the main, not unreasonable. Number two read as follows:
'The panel felt that...you did not show evidence of....securing, managing and implementing significant and effective change processes to ensure the delivery of effective policies and plans to achieve demonstrable continuous improvement'.
Where to start? The meaningless vogue modifiers, such as 'significant' or 'effective', the latter used twice? What subtle differences are there between securing, managing and implementing change processes? In any case. what's the difference between change and change processes? What fantasy world do they live in, where improvement is always continuous?  The possibility of  demonstrable continuous improvement suggests that there could also be continuous improvement that is not demonstrable.  Why would you deliver a policy? What monster of a candidate did they find who could produce evidence of this stuff?

Base Patrimoine

One of the things I enjoy most about my current job is when I discover resources such as this, which I spotted from a post to the French Studies Libraries Group e-mail list by Teresa Vernon of the French Collections at the British Library. She describes the Catalogue Collectif de France, the CCF, (not the Combined Cadet Force of my schooldays) in particular the Base Patrimoine, 2.5 million entries for pre-1914 items, from 63 regional bibliothèques municipale and specialised library catalogues. 
From the CCF home page, in the left-hand column  click each of the following in turn: Localisation >    Rech. spécialisées >  Base Patrimoine
I wonder why we haven't managed to build anything like this in Britain

Information behaviour of the researcher of the future

The report I referred to yesterday, and which was the subject of a Guardian article, Intellectual literacy hour,  is now out, though not on the British Library website, as I was told, but on JISC's:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/reppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008.pdf

PS It has now (4.55 pm) found its way onto the British Library website too: http://www.bl.uk/news/2008/pressrelease20080116.html