I think the seasons might be in a bit of a mess!
The winter flowering cherry is flowering, so it must be winter...
The plum tree is budding, so it must be spring...
James is eating ice lollies in the garden at night, so it must be summer...
Admittedly James had just decided it was too cold to be eating ice lollies outside without a coat. But that's probably about right for a British summer anyway.
If you've got kids then you are bound to have read The Gruffalo written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler. If you haven't read it to your kids you really should. You should also watch the animation created by the BBC. It is absolutely brilliant.
I've been read The Gruffalo to James since, well for the past 4 years, so the words and the cadence are ingrained in my conciousness.
I've been cycling to work in the morning. A various points on the route cars and pedestrians have been cutting me up or stepping out in front of me and I've been thinking "I'm bright orange and covered in reflective material". The more I've ranted to myself, the more I've ended up talking to myself in the form of bits from The Gruffalo;
I finally decided I should write it down to get it out of my head. Its only a short bit from about two thirds of the way through the book and I'm sure it could be expanded, but it would need a better writer and rhymer than me to do that.
Anyway here's my brief cyclist/gruffalo rant...
But who is this creature with reflective hands
And ankles with florescent bands
He has flashing lights that point behind and ahead
And a protective wart on the top of his head
His arms are orange and his legs are black
He has a reflective stripe right down his yellow back
I was just walking back from the cafe at No. 1 Queens Street, looking up Dean Street and spotted a feature I'd never noticed before.
Up high on an end wall there is a rather large spray painted rams head. I don't recall having seen it before, so I'm not sure how long its been there, but that a long way up! Not sure I would fancy being the artist that painted that!
I've just seen AndyJ, MarkDrew and JustinCarter posting their desktops on their blogs on twitter. It made me realise I hadn't seen my desktop in a while and had no idea what my desktop image actually was.....
Its been a while since I've posted a little photo gallery of something from the quayside on Posterous in my lunch break.
Today I'm feeling a bit listless, so decided fresh air and a dirty Greggs pastie was in order. Once I was out it occurred to me that I've not actually sat on the Quayside to have my lunch, so that's is what I'm doing.
I couldn't be bothered to go far and I've found myself a nice bench under the High Level bridge next to National Cycle route marker 72. It is actually quite pleasant sitting out her despite the greyness of this mid-august day. The view around me is definitely making the greyness more bearable.
Looking up the structure of the bridge is intriguing to look; the pattern of the stone, the steel struts going across and the wooden beams running the length.
To my right is the view up river towards Newburn, running under the Redheugh & metro bridges.
To my left I have the swing bridge, the Tyne Bridge and through them both I can see the Millennium 'eye' Bridge.
The Brett Oil building, across the river to my right and the boat house in the middle of the river to my left have always been interesting structures to me and would love to know more about them and their history.
Behind me to my left is the old fish market. Its an incredible building with Neptune standing guard over its doors. Shamefully it is now, and has been for a long time, a nightclub, which appears to be getting its own renovations at the minute.
Well, dirty pastie and Belgium bun devoured. Back to indoors I fear. I hope you enjoy the photos, taken on my HTC Magic phone as usual, and that perhaps next time you're on the Quayside you'll take a closer look at architecture down here.
There's a set of stairs that run up the side of The Cooperage and Buttress pubs on the Quayside. I've always wondered where they go.
Today I was walking past to go up the steps opposite The Copthorne hotel to go up to the post office, so I finally walked up them.... and then walked back down them.
It turns out they go up to the main gates of the Turnbull Building and wasn't where I needed to be, hence walking back down them.
There are some great features and sights from the past and the present to be seen on those stairs. I hope that these few phone photos capture some of them and you go take a look too.
A while back I set up a survey for my followers on twitter to get an idea of their age ranges. More recently Aoife Ross @aoifebeefah asked the twitterverse if there were any figures of the age ranges of the folk using Twitter in the Northeast of England to prove that Twitter was not the exclusive realm of teens. I directed Aoife to my blog post of the results of my previous survey and suggested that she ran a survey of her own. Somehow I managed to end up offering to create the survey myself!
The survey had 7 simple questions:
The last two questions were only in there to help ensure that all the responses were unique and add some simple "usage" controls to the email addresses all the respondents have kindly entered.
The other questions were to help us get an idea of the kind of demographic that is using Twitter in the Northeast of England. The survey has had 122 responses from 272 unique clicks on the SnipURL link and an additional 50 clicks from the bit.ly URL. That is a very impressive 38% response rate and I thank you all for taking the time to complete this short survey and for passing it on to your family, friends and colleagues.
So lets now have a look at the results:
Question 1 : I am.... Male/Female
I expected the number of guys to be higher than the ladies using Twitter. I also know that there a large number of you ladies out there on Twitter every day. I'm very pleased to see that 42 of the 120 responses were female.
Question 2 : My age is.... (The one that shows that Twitter isn't a teen phenomenon)
An amazing 64.75% of the people responded are between the ages of 26 and 40 years of age! Only 12.3% of the replies were by people between 11 and 25. 17% of the responses that were between 26 and 35 years old where female and 31% were men. An additional 25% of the responses where by men and 11% where by women between the ages of 31 and 40, leaving a fairly small percentage in of replies from people in the other age ranges.
Question 3 : What do you do through the day?
There's no graph for this question I'm afraid. Leaving the question and answer open means that the answers I got were also very open. The responses that folks gave were anything from "ummm" to "Political/Community Activist and campaigner" with "Homemaker", "Research Scientist" and "Office Monkey" in between. I've generalised the responses you all gave, with the help of my wife, so the figures I'm about to give are far from scientific. One thing can be said, Twitter is predominantly used by the IT crowd. 50 of the 120 responses were from people with web and IT related roles. Don't let this put you off of using Twitter though. Other responses came from photographers, editors and writers, engineers, PR and marketing, accountants, students and people from the research, education and learning sectors, film and media, directors and entrepreneurs, construction and engineering, sales, fashion design, health and tourism, as well as the previously mentioned activists and homemakers. This is a very diverse set of careers and I'm sure that it will only get more diverse as time goes by.
Question 4 : What do you use Twitter for?
I found it quite interesting that pretty much everyone uses Twitter for networking and socialising. I did a bit of cross referencing of the responses to see if I could say something like "all the ladies are using Twitter for gossiping err I mean socialising", but actually the numbers show that the uses by gender are 1 in 3. In other words, the same percentage of male to female responders are using Twitter for socialising, networking, marketing and work. The distribution of usage by age group shows that the 26 to 30 and 31 to 35 age groups use Twitter for socialising and networking more than any other age group by about 10% and for work by about 5%.
I had expected that more people would be using Twitter for marketing. However only 37% of the responses said they use it for marketing.
62% of you are using it as part of your work, which, personally, I'm really pleased to see. Twitter has been and still is a great resource for like-minded individuals who can be of great help in your daily business, whatever that business might be.
Question 5 : Would you be interested in attending the Tyne Twestival?
76% of you said you would be interested in attending the Tyne Twestival, which I'm sure that Aoife will be very pleased to hear! If you haven't already, please do make sure you head over to the Tyne Twestival website, http://newcastle.twestival.com/, to purchase your tickets for the event on the 25th of March.
This year's Tyne Twestival is being held at The Tyne bar in the Ouseburn and is sponsored by Northern Film & Media, emailcloud, admiral pr & marketing, Better Brand Agency, Thomas Jackson Photography, the bigger picture, Sharpe Recruitment, Emma's Boutique, Fudge and Your Film digital film production. If you're reading this and you aren't from the Northeast of England, Twestival is a global event, so you should take a look on http://twestival.com/ to find your local Twestival event.
The Twestival is in support of charity "Concern". Concern Worldwide was founded in 1968 to meet the needs of people living in extreme poverty, for whom every day is a fight for survival. Concern is a non-governmental, international, humanitarian organization dedicated to the reduction of suffering and working towards the ultimate elimination of poverty. Their mission is to help people living in extreme poverty achieve major improvements in their lives - improvements they can sustain without ongoing support. The money raised by the Tyne Twestival will go towards helping Concern fund building and renovating schools for the poorest and most vunerable children.
In an attempt to make some space before the arrival of Moretti mark 2 we've decided to replace one of the two sofa's in our lounge with an armchair.
This means that we have a sofa that we need to get out of the house. Its a few years old now, but mostly in a pretty good state and is definitely very comfortable. I'm not going to lie to you I say "mostly in good shape" because one corner of the sofa got attacked by the cats a while back and is raggedy because of this, but otherwise its fine.If you need a sofa and you aren't too worried about the raggedy bit or if you're a dab hand at covering/refurbishing sofa's then this sofa may be for you. Now, I'm not giving the sofa away - with Number 2 imminent we need every penny we can scrounge ;) so I'm open to sensible offers.If you're interested, its about 6ft long and 3 foot deep with a fairly high back (I can get proper measurements if you want them), it is an oatmeal/stone colour and you'd have to come and pick it up yourself.If you want to come and have a look feel free to give me a shout. Tyre kickers will not be appreciated - I'll set the cats and the boy on you. :)I've just had to pop out to the shops for a couple of bits for our tea. The wind is a little chilly, but its a lovely night! The birds are going nuts singing in the trees!
Its great to be able to walk up to the shops without coming back with frostbite or mud up to your knee!
Long may it last!
I'm Stephen Moretti. Software Development Manager and ColdFusion web application developer for a company in the Northeast of England.
Married to the very lovely Gayle. Father to James and the gorgeous Izzie.
This posterous blog is my personal stream of conciousness. You can find my techie postings over at http://nil.checksite.co.uk/
