Tag Archives: giant badger of mill street

Mill Street origins of Little Brock are explored

Genealogists in Mill Street have become interested in Little Brock’s antecedents and have dug up quite a lot of information.

Little Brock, the badger cub, emerged as an adventurous child of the Giant Albino Badger of Mill Street just three or so weeks ago. So far, we have discovered that Brock Little was a famous surfer and stuntman (https://www.liveabout.com/the-death-of-brock-little-4009907) who died in 2016 and did stunts for Die Hard 4.0 and Transformers.

Brooke Little is an actress (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6056936/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm). Big George Brock died on April 10th this year and played with Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_George_Brock). He was a boxer and fought Sonny Liston, beating him.

You can hear lots of his music on YouTube, for example:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xjcFc8o6EE&list=OLAK5uy_nRwUEn0u9xzp0IjGoi_qULT44UnSdpPmI

Dead Kodak digicams get grand post mortem

Apple Quicktake 100I spent 20 minutes taking a digital camera to pieces last night. It played havoc with my fingernails, but they grow fast and they needed cutting anyway.

I was at Susan Hutchinson’s excellent West Oxford Academy, held at WOCA, and Iain Tullis gave a most interesting talk on the technology of digicams. He bought 16 broken Kodak cameras at a quid a pop and provided screwdrivers and tools to help us all pull the stuff apart.

Kodak, of course, lost the plot on digital cameras and is now selling off its patents as it is in Chapter 11 – not that that helps much the folk in Harrow and in Rochester NY who have lost their jobs.

Techies will know that the choice for manufacturers is between CCDs (charge coupled devices) and CMOS – silicon tech. Iain said that the choice these days is down to fashion and of course to pricing.

After I’d broken my thumb nail, I got down to the circuit board of the Kodak cam I was breaking up. A Zoran chip and Hynix stuff and apparently it’s the Zoran chip that held all the software algorithms and that. All that Zoran stuff is no more, of course, the IP is all over the place.

Iain showed some fab pictures of the first Kodak digicams – in 1986 we had the Steven Sasson 1.4 megapix baby, storing its stuff on an audio cassette. Then he showed the model Kodak tried to sell first – the Dycam model one at a cool $1,800.  Kodak, of course, cobbled together the Apple QuickTake 100 – a 640 by 180 display and that.

So what went wrong with Kodak? Iain Tullis said: “This is MBA fodder.”  We knew it had a problem in the tech industry and the infamous recall didn’t help its credibility in the 1990s.  However, Iain Tullis said that Nikon, Canon and others managed to change.

So which digital camera is the best to buy, one of the audience asked.  The more you spend, apparently, the better the camera, it seems. The 16 corpsed Kodak digicams were collected at the end, for their uncertain fate on a container ship to China.  ♦

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The Giant Badger of Mill Street: Protector of the Faith!

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Oxford publican complains about price of beer

A MAN who runs a pub in North Oxford has moaned about the price of beer.

We only know that because Thursday’s copy of the Oxford Mail tipped up late last night.

Andrew Hall, of the Rose & Crown, a public house in North Parade, complained that the so-called “beer escalator” is ruining his business. He, and a handful of others with an axe to grind, are heading to the House of Commoners next week to “lobby” MPs.

Rose and Crown, OxfordThe very fragrant Nicola Blackwood (Conservative) is his local member of parliament. Oh and ours here in Mill Street, too.

In other news, yesterday’s Oxford Mail falsely reported the “electrical calamity” that afflicted Mill Street the other day, that we reported here on Volesoft Oxford.  It said the power went down at 7PM while our electrical oven reported it happened in the middle of the night, something verified by the locals and by the Giant Badger of Mill Street.

We are still waiting for today’s Oxford Mail. Perhaps it will tip up tomorrow. Or maybe not…  The Kite, in Mill Street, offers good nosh and the beers are good too and cheap as chips.