What kind of Onions are these?

No, they spent most of their life looking completely different, lying in their beds soaking up sunshine and water and nice stuff from the dark soil. Oh, I hear you say:

I’d still know an onion if I saw it in a field.

That may be true, but is it ready to eat yet and more importantly, what type of onion is it?  Bah, what interest is that to me, I only go to the shops and buy onions in bags?  OK, fair enough but did you ever have a bad onion for your tea?  You’d know all right.  Days of misery and leaking out both ends and it’s maybe a couple of weeks until all is well again.

So it is with code.  Themes and plugins are code.  Code picked, processed and packed together in a nice shiny bag.  All you have to do is take it home and unpack it in your fridge.  However, just like a bag of onions, code can look nice, yet on the inside be rotten or full of weevils or not the kind of code your wanted when you went shopping.  Once in your fridge a bad onion will infect all your other veg and it will happily let you chop it up, cook it and eat it, in the full knowledge that you will be very sick.  For a bad onion this is the only laugh left.  Code is no different.

So do you really know your onions?  If not at least learn to tell the different types apart and learn what a good or bad onion looks like.  At the very least take a moment to ask your grandma.  She’ll spot a bad ‘un at twenty paces.

Don’t assume the supermarket ones are best.  They don’t even get checked.  You want to ask at an established green grocer’s where the dude puts out each onion himself and bags them up for you himself.  Better yet, go see an onion farmer and ask a few questions.  A decent chap won’t mind you asking -  he’ll appreciate you taking the time to know your onions.  He’ll get repeat business that way.

Oh and by the way, those onions in the picture.  Those are red onions.

Here are a selection of pictures that represent the sort of things you’ll find outside around Bergen.  Not the tourist drivel that they force the day trippers to see, but some things that are a bit special and still free to see and visit.

If you recognise any of these places, or you are going to visit Bergen and would like to check out one or more of these locations, then please drop me a line.

The most bogus dashboard link ever?

Women do pretty much everything these days. Many of them blog, some of them professionally. So I ask: Why do we need to hold them up as a special group of bloggers worthy of note, especially in some patronising, “ah look how well they’re doing” kinda way? Although actually it looks more like gratuitous self-promotion than anything else.

So here we have a sort of moral choice for the bloggirls, especially given the content of these sites, which are aimed at promotion or youth culture or women in business. Do I accept that the only reason I got myself in this article is my gender, and be happy about it, or do I strive for true equality and say no? Well I guess, actually these ladies have all learned the first rule of marketing bullshit, oft miss-quoted (and if I may say so, totally erroneous) – “any exposure must be good”. Or some such tripe.

Matt just re-links to someone else’s article, which quotes him (Is the irony of doing so little actual blogging himself in WordPress lost on him?) Who cares. The aforementioned article is little more than a list of women but, most importantly, because they are women, there must be pictures. Much more important for us to see them to judge their worth, than read their actual blog itself. Why are these peoples favourite women bloggers? This was not clear at all in most cases. There is no depth at all to anyone’s choices. Picture, link, name, half a sentence about the blog, a bit more if its a good cause. Finito. No actual explanation of why there are being picked. For example

Michelle Thorne is a thinker, about free culture and a whole lot more.

Sadly, and ironically as this is all about exposure, not the pornstar. This says nothing about the person, her site or why Mike liked this blog. I expect he liked it best because he got three lines himself and a link to his business. Nothing personal Mike, but holy crap “a whole lot more”. Did you have real work to go do?

Surly dashboard is about WordPress and “Other WordPress News” about promoting what’s good about it. That most people choose to write superficial drivel with the sole purpose of “being known” themselves is already blogged to death. You can read that crap just by randomly typing words into Google. You might even end up here. This is not something that should be seen as, in any way, good. Dashboard should not become another mouthpiece for patronising piffle. So cut it the feck out.

A Church Roof in Italy

This is a picture I took way back in the day when I still travelled places.  Have a gold “I’ve travelled a bit too” star if you know the name of the church this roof belongs to (and have skipped along it yourself).  Take an extra star if you also know the year.  Ha ha.  (take two extra because that’s quite a bit harder).