I finally got around to obtaining and listening to two albums by an obscure 70’s experimental rock group. The albums are supposedly among the greatest of all time. This group should not be confused with Pink Freud, a free jazz project who are in my opinion tak sobie.
Not that it matters.
Anyway, as you can see from the image at the top of this blog, we have a nice view of the cathedral up here on the 7th floor. However, there are a block of flats being built by the river, and I can see it going up brick by brick.
Already, we can’t see the charming high-rise student dorms “pencil” and “coloured pencil.” And quite soon, the cathedral will be completely obscured by this new block.
Alas!
I haven’t been very productive lately, and I’m a bit angry at myself for procrastinating. I think I’m looking forward to a change of environment, going back to Perth.
Some of the small things I have done over the last few weeks were to introduce SBP datalog support to GPSBabel, post a tiny tiny patch to librsvg (needed for something else), which is of course being ignored by the maintainers (usually a little prodding is needed), and do a little OpenStreetMapping.
On Sunday, on the way to the zoo, I went to the islands on the river and traced their borders with my GPS. This operation involved potential risks, such as slipping into the river, stepping on numerous dog poos hidden in the grass, and looking like a wierdo with GPS and pencil and paper. It needs to be done this way because the freely licensed satellite imagery is too low-res to get a decent outline. Anyway, I think the two islands that I traced look pretty nice, even if the osmarender map looks crap in general. After Thursday you can view the Mapnik render, which has a neater appearance.
You can see the tram lines as well. I think I have mapped about 50% of the tram stops in Wrocław. I have a little program which tracks the status.
Anyway, the zoo was nice enough. Though I think the mournful look of this giraffe sums up the general mood of the animals that day. The kangaroos did seem to accept their situation and not let it affect them too much. They were just sitting in the sun. The sloth was my favourite animal. He hung from the roof of the monkey enclosure building, but wasn’t in any cage.
The sloth is called “leniwiec” in Polish, and it comes from the word leniwy which means lazy, and which also describes my recent approach to learning the language. I have learnt shamefully little since coming back from tour. So I might go and open the Polish book now.
Or not…