Friday, February 19

I was woken by the sound of snowploughs touring the area, so the snow itself didn’t surprise me. It was mostly old snow and on the way out of the house I stopped a picked up a few of the bigger boulders that the snowplough had left. I threw them to one side where the car would miss them on the way out.

I began the day at Arcada by setting up assignments in Its Learning, and answering mails. Then I looked at the things I has put in my diary and decided to shift them in favour of doing one task to completion. Last Sunday I had wanted to see what we did the previous Valentine’s Day, and there was no easy way to do this. I remembered thinking previously that I really should make a One Year Ago button.

I set out to do this. Once it was done I realised I needed a way to get back, so I added another button and changed the labels to Last Year and Next Year. Then I decided that a Current button would be a good idea. Finally I realised that, as you went back and forth, you could easily lose track of what year you were in, so I added a Year marker.

The Year marker should be a link, I thought, if only for visual reasons. So I made a linking function. Doing all this made me go through all the functions I had previously made and I realised that they could be standardised, modularised and reduced in size. I decided that this was a project for another day.

I left Arcada happy that I had spent half a day or so writing php – doing some actual scripting – and not just lecturing about it. It wasn’t perhaps what I “should” have done, but it felt good and was definitely good for morale.

As I walked from Itäkeskus to Stoa I heard a voice, looked around, and there was Naa. We are both going to the opening of a photographic exhibition called Hidden Islam, by the Italian photographer Nicoló Degiorgis. We arrive to be confronted by the two metal cows. I cannot remember if I have seen them before or not. Later I will learn that I have.

The exhibition is based on the book of the same name, which has black and white photographs that fold out to show colour photos of the inside of the building in use as a temporary place of worship. It is published by Rorhof, a publisher that Degiorgis co-founded and which describes itself as

a studio producing books, exhibitions and workshops around photography. We are based in an old farm in the city of Bolzano Bozen in the north of Italy.

Our books are produced and printed in collaboration with Longo AG.

The exhibition is interesting, and we stay talking. Later I will look online atRORHOF’s website, and be both interested and intrigued by the other publications there.