Plutonic Rainbows

The BBC are reporting that the author of this well-known book has died. A Kestrel for a Knave - about a young working-class boy named Billy who finds and trains a kestrel, was published in 1968 and filmed the following year.

This book had a big impact on me as a teenager. What I admired the most was how the gritty life of 1960s Britain was portrayed. I also remember the really bleak ending. The author resisted the urge to give the story some kind of emotional compensation. As in life, sometimes there are no silver-linings.

Found a few more first pressings today. These will be the last ones that I can get before I leave due to postal times.

• Emerson, Lake & Palmer - The Best Of (32XD-397)
• George Benson - Give Me The Night (38XP-2)
• Phillip Bailey - Chinese Wall (25DP-5219)
• Eighth Wonder - Fearless (25.8P-5021)
• ZZ Top - Eliminator (32XD-133)
• Wham - Make It Big (25.8P-5182)
• Chicago - Chicago 16 (38XP-36)
• Chicago - Chicago 17 (38XP-81)

I also bought the new Underworld album with the strange title of Barbara Barbara, We face a shining future. There are a few reviews floating around and it seems to have been pretty well received.

In addition, I ordered Discovery & The Killing Fields from Amazon Japan.

I've been thinking of moving all my general photos to Photos on OSX rather than worrying about Lightroom, Adobe's photo manager seems too cumbersome for my (rather modest) needs.

I recently found some more Japanese first pressings.

• Paul McCartney - Give My Regards To Broadstreet (CP32-5458)
• Toto - Dune Original Soundtrack (P33P 50011)
• Madonna - True Blue (32XD-449)
• Madonna - Like A Virgin (32XD-102)
• Madonna - Self Titled (32XD-318)
• Van Halen - 5150 (32XD-435)
• Tears For Fears - Shout (32PD-37)

I also bought the new Clark album The Last Panthers from Warp Records.

I'm looking for photographs of vintage supermodel Gail Elliott but there don't seem to be that many out there.

A distrubing piece from the BBC today.

This year alone, more than 360 migrants have died attempting to cross the sea between Turkey and Greece. Last year was the deadliest on record for people drowning in the Mediterranean. Some of the bodies get washed ashore in Turkey, and many are never identified.

In the last six months, more than 100 bodies have been laid to rest in a cemetery in Izmir.

Second one down. Only one more visit and I am done.

A very nice bottle of vintage Chanel Egoiste Platinum arrived today. A sealed 100 ml bottle. Very happy.

Had a twitter message from the supermodel Josie Borain. She was one of the most iconic faces of the 1980s. I've been trying to find her book and without much luck I decided to reach out to her.

Finished at the first of the three today. It didn't end so badly. Two children (Takata Hinata & Hamamaki Shiho) got upset when they heard the news. I was surprised at that. Maybe I made more of an impression than I thought.

Tomorrow, I finish at another school.

Spending the evening on resumé writing and letters. I am not really used to writing in Open Office so it's a little slow getting things formatted exactly how I would like it.

The Supernatural Tales Blog are running a poll on their favourite Robert Aickman story.

The nominations are:

• The Swords
• Bind Your Hair
• The Hospice
• Ringing the Changes
• The School-Friend
• Ravissante
• The Inner Room
• The Cicerones
• Never Visit Venice
• Pages From a Young Girl's Journal
• The Houses of the Russians
• The Same Dog
• The Wine Dark Sea
• Meeting Mr Millar
• The Unsettled Dust

You can add yours to the list by heading over to Supernatural Tales and letting them know.

I've been using Dropbox since it first came out and I always knew it ran on Amazon S3. Not anymore. Apparently, two and a half years ago, Dropbox began to build their own storage infrastructure.

Vice President of engineering, Aditya Agarwal:

Just getting the bits out of Amazon and into other data centers was an epic task. Digitally moving petabytes of data from one machine to another isn’t exactly on the same scale as downloading a few songs for your laptop. Even the fattest Internet pipes only have so much bandwidth. Transferring four petabytes of data, it turned out, took about a day.

You can read the full article on Wired.