Author: Dixon-Spain

We Catch Fire with our #CalendarCompetition, and Laird James Morris’s new album …

Mixing two moments of greatness today at Dunans:

jamesmorris

1. On tour today around Dunans with me was West Coast Alt. Rock singer songwriter, Laird James Morris, his mother, his father, and his very excellent bro. Not only did Mum buy the boys our fab new wool scarves and a tie each, I received a signed copy of James’s latest album Catch Fire (photo as above).

votes2. We have received over 120 entries for our Calendar competition or 1400 votes!!!! Great stuff, and the winner of the draw will receive a free copy of the finalised Calendar.

Vote here.

Competition to choose the images for our Dunans 2015 Calendar launches today!

We have a truly great photo library of images relating to Dunans Castle and Bridge, and we’d like to get as many folks as possible involved in choosing the best of our images for next year’s calendar. Everyone who makes their choices (and you can visit this page to do so) will be entered into our competition for a free copy when they come out in September.

Here are some of the images to whet your appetite, many of them taken by professional photographer Jean Donaldson (Powan Media)

To enter the competition, please click here.

 

Waiting for websites to be upgraded? Then paint the Office green and listen to @BenAaronovitch ‘s superb Broken Homes!

Spent Sunday painting the office while fielding emails from our new hosting company’s technical support as they transferred everything to our new server. While the technical stuff isn’t complete, the office is looking fab and I got to spend several hours in the company of Ben Aaronovitch’s Broken Homes – truly superb audio book in an ever-growing series about the supernatural beings of London.

Here’s the blurb:

61o4WYbZ6XL._SL300_A unique blend of police procedural; loving detail about the greatest character of all, London; and a dash of the supernatural. A mutilated body in Crawley. Another killer on the loose. The prime suspect is one Robert Weil: An associate of the twisted magician known as the Faceless Man? Or just a common or garden serial killer? Before PC Peter Grant can get his head round the case a town planner going under a tube train and a stolen grimoire are adding to his caseload. So far so London. But then Peter gets word of something very odd happening in Elephant and Castle….

One rock solid tip from the painting though: do not, I repeat do not, have the cheek to paint the boards around an active wasps nest. They do not like that. Possibly green wasn’t their colour.

CGDT recruiting 3 posts for our fabulous Greener ColGlen Project

Sara has done a great job reconfiguring the project requirements for  Greener GolGlen  and we’re able to recruit for three people which is a great result.

Exciting opportunities to work on this Climate Challenge Funded project.   Suit either self-employed or PAYE candidates for immediate start.

 To support the development and delivery of the activities and outcomes of the Project….

  • PROJECT SUPPORT OFFICER – Part-time, 16 hours p/w – £756 pcm (gross salary), until 31st March 2015.  Download Job Description here…Greener ColGlen Support Officer 

And to help set up the Community Growing and Composting at the Polytunnels….

  • SITE DEVELOPMENT WORKER – 35 hours p/w – £10hr, for 6 weeks.  Download Job description here… Site Development Worker
  • SITE ASSISTANT (ideal student summer holiday job) 30 hours p/w – £6.50hr, for 4 weeks.  Download Job Description here… Site Assistant

Alternatively, for job descriptions please email info@cgdt.org or phone 01700 841 358 during office hours.

Then please send your up-to-date CV and covering letter to Greener ColGlen JOBS @ CGDT, The Village Hall, Colintraive PA22 3AS.  Or by email to info@cgdt.org

The image above is the newly installed Polytunnel by the ColGlen shinty pitch.

#ScottishPlaywright: The Alloway Rap by Sadie Dixon-Spain is published

allowayrapcoverDelighted to announce that the first print run of Sadie’s play for voices, The Alloway Rap have arrived and are now available for sale here in a commemorative edition for Scotland’s  Year of Homecoming 2014.

This is the first in a series of Sadie’s plays that we will be publishing over the next couple of years. We’ve several on the blocks, all telling stories of communities and clans across Scotland, and all of them, like this one, will have pictures of performance, audiences and venues.

Special mention for Kilmodan Primary School who were an integral part of the play’s development.

 

#onlinestartup: Essential tools and skills for a successful online business startup

As I was working on my Q2 VAT return I was wondering what I would post about today – I was using excel, textedit, MySQL, phpmyadmin and cpanel to create the documents I needed to send off to our accountancy firm and thought, well, what are the essential components of a successful online business?

One of the things that immediately struck me was that aside from a wide skillset, which is the IP we work from, everything we use is either open source / free or priced at a marginal cost to the business. In other words, for anyone to set up an online business, all they need are the skills and the time, the rest is readily available if they have connectivity and a computer or even a tablet.

My second thought was that actually we do have some software which we have had to purchase, mostly the Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign … ) but there are open source alternatives freely available.

I’ve listed everything below. Some of it is generic, some is specific – like the hosting solutions we use – how we knit it all together to create a market-leading business like Dunans Castle Limited, is another matter 😉

Foundation for online presence:

  • Open Source software – Linux / Apache / MySQL* / PHP*
  • Domain registrars: Bluehost.com (Top Level Domains) and 123-reg (UK domains)
  • Hosting solution: Mediatemple (US) and UnitedHosting (UK)

Maintaining online presence:

  • WordPress* including:
  • Cpanel* (maintaining the server)
  • phpmyadmin*
    • for website health
    • for customer metrics
    • for essential metadata

Communications & Marketing:

Spreadsheet / Word Processor

  • Excel for detailed cashflow analysis
  • Google spreadsheets for shared information
  • Word for compatibility
  • TextEdit or Textmate for csv, text & sql manipulation

Shared Information

  • Dropbox – for shared proprietory documents eg. .ai, .psd, .pdf, .jpg
  • Google Drive – for shared non-proprietory docs eg. simple spreadsheets and collaborative how-tos
  • Google Calendar for scheduling

Proprietory Software

  • Illustrator
  • Photoshop
  • Microsoft Office

* skills or competencies which can take several years to acquire.

 

 

#EssentialReading: If you think expert consensus is evenly balanced on Global Warming, read this …

… because too many vested interests would have you believe scientific opinion is on a knife-edge:

97% of experts agree … from the Guardian

 

Vassal

The grass grows still.
Gulls remain a-wing

Their cries unfilled, despite.
One step follows another,

Paused perhaps,
Unwilled for a moment.

The sun rises, falls, still.
Stillness is still, still.

Happiness is unaffected,
Sadness unmannered,

Grief raw – none of these change.
The swing of plaid

at the back of the knee,
this too remains – implying

something does not.
That vassal doubt perhaps?

No ordinary stone: Cathy’s photo survey of the Lephinkil Stone shows up Cups & Rings

The CGDT Archaeology Group had a great weekend with the ACCORD Project surveying some of ColGlen’s archaeological remains. While we work up a full report for the CGDT website, here’s an idea of the type of output we were managing.

Below are screengrabs of the Lephinkil stone as surveyed by Cathy on Sunday in the midges.

The first is the view in colour, which shows how difficult it is to read these artefacts sometimes, and the second, in the lavender colour shows the cup features across the righthandside of the stone.

lephinkil-2

lephinkil-1During the surveys, which included three RTIs, Mhairi identified a ring around the 5th cup from the top, which I think Cathy caught on her photographic survey – see below:mhairis-ringedcup

Plaudits to Eamon who spotted to the stone on the solstice!

Oh, and the featured image is Cathy taking the survey with all the rest of us looking on!

 

Midsummer Archaeology: surveying Colintraive & Glendaruel’s ancient monuments inc. Dunans!

Seems oddly appropriate that today volunteers from the Forest Archaeology Group spent several hours learning to and surveying artefacts in the landscape on the longest day of the year. We began with the war memorial to the twins McKirdy on Colintraive beach, taking innumerable photos of the tall, cruciform monument to their sacrifice during the first world war, and then with the ACCORD team producing a 3D model of the artefact using the PhotoScan software from AgriSoft. This process was extraordinary and we’ll post some pictures tomorrow of the result.

Continue reading Midsummer Archaeology: surveying Colintraive & Glendaruel’s ancient monuments inc. Dunans!

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