• News Corp to Offer Plaid Stamps! – “Giving Murdoch the benefit of the doubt, then, I’m guessing he simply doesn’t mean what he said. Perhaps he just wanted to sow a little confusion, get some publicity and maybe a concession or two from Google.”
• The night the Berlin Wall fell – “For me it was that rare occasion when a story was unqualified good news. After years watching the way communism was practised, I felt no need to mourn its collapse. Whatever came next had to be better.” Twenty years since the fall of the Berlin wall.
• OMG Ponies!!! (Aka Humanity: Epic Fail) – “The real world has failed us. It has concentrated on local simplicity, leading to global complexity. It’s easy to organise a meeting if everyone is in the same time zone – but once you get different continents involved, invariably people get confused. It’s easy to get writing to work uniformly left to right or uniformly right to left – but if you’ve got a mixture, it becomes really hard to keep track of. The diversity which makes humanity such an interesting species is the curse of computing.”

• Darwin teaching ‘divides opinion’ – Very depressing. This isn’t hard. Creationism and Intelligent Design is not science and therefore has no place in the Science classroom.
• Share the Memories: Happy 8th Birthday iPod – I didn’t get mine until January 2002 but it was worth the wait. After a series of tape and CD players that never quite lived up to the promise, the first gen iPod really did change the way I listened to music. Plus it still works, which is more than can be said for my fifth gen iPod…

I confess that I was very tempted to roll out one of my old favourite autumnal pictures but in the end I actually went out with my camera and took the above image. This was literally taken just outside my flat. The golden light and the yellowing leaves say “Autumn 2009” to me. Obviously for the true British Autumn we’d also need some rain.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “…Is In The Details.” I’m entry number 175.

The obvious part of this weeks PhotoFriday theme, “…Is In The Details,” is details. It calls for something close-up, imperfections and all. But there’s a missing part, typically “the devil,” so I thought it was appropriate that the above picture is a close-up of some tiles on a church in Spain. Hopefully that means that no dæmons are present.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Dawn.” I’m entry number 74.

• Palm Pre smartphone – “So you’re after a smartphone, you’ve got money to burn and an obvious decision to make: this or the iPhone. No other touchscreen smartphone is even in the running. The Pre has some obvious advantages. It’s a bit smaller than the iPhone and ‘Synergy’ works well, which could prove useful if you’re more familiar with Facebook than the concept of Gmail or an Exchange server. But weigh it against the iPhone and it’s hard to recommend.”
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide Turns 30 – Still one of my favourite books.
• Cat registered as hypnotherapist – To be fair, cats do seem to convince people to pet them and feed them without any apparent pay-back. Maybe they do hypnotise them?

Okay, I tell a lie. It’s not a larch. This is a shot I took on my recent trip to the Parque Natural Sierras De Tejeda. I didn’t think this fitted in with any of the individual blogs I did but I really like this image and wanted to show it off a little!

• Why Creativity Needs Shorter Copyright Terms – The subject line says it all. The “creative” industries have done a good job of convincing politicians that longer copyrights are better, but they’re only better for those middle-men…
• Giant ring detected around Saturn – “The scale of the new ring feature is astonishing. Nothing like it has been seen elsewhere in the Solar System.”
• I don’t go to restaurants to tell the truth – “Tips are embarrassing and stupid – they’re vestigial haggling in a society that has otherwise moved on. If you’re going to a restaurant to be served and eat a meal, why is the price of the delivery open to negotiation but not that of the food itself, the ambience, music, heating or use of the furniture? All of these things can disappoint or delight. It’s illogical to fix the price of one element but not the others.”

As anyone who knows me can attest, “Dawn” is not a time that you’re likely to see me awake, much less running around with a camera. That made this weeks PhotoFriday a bit of a challenge.

In the end I picked this shot from the top of Mount Sinai. It perhaps represents “sunrise” better than “dawn” but it was certainly taken at dawn!

I spent a week walking around the Sierra Tejeda Natural Park, staying in Canillas de Albaida which is about an hours drive from Malaga in the south of Spain.

Over the following few posts I’ll be talking about and showing pictures of the tiny, white-washed villages, the diverse and beautiful mountains and, as a contrast, the buildings and culture in Granada.

• Canillas de Albaida — the town that I stayed in
• Walking in Andalucía — what I went to Spain to do
• Granada — what I did on my “rest” day

Stay tuned for any future travels of mine by subscribing to the RSS feed or by email.

When I think of “Fast Food” — this weeks PhotoFriday theme — I think of burgers and pizzas and, generally, stuff that I don’t cook myself! The ultimate in fast food is a dish that takes none of my time! This steak sandwich was photographed and consumed at the Royal Exchange in San Francisco.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “The Face.” I’m entry number 300.