The Mumbling Fernando

“HAL” was the name of the ship’s computer in Sir Arthur C Clarke’s novel “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Many said that this was word play on “IBM” (with each letter being one removed along the alphabet). Today I was reading one of a series of articles as tributes to Sir Arthur which mentioned the name of the ship in his novel “2010: The year we make contact” as Leonov.

Lenovo is of course the company which bought out IBM’s comsumer PC business a few years ago, so is their name simply wordplay on Sir Arthur’s ship’s name?

Wikipedia says this about Lenovo’s name:

“Lenovo” is a portmanteau of “Le-” (from Legend) and “novo”, pseudo-Latin for “new”.

A quick google didn’t seem to reveal much information. Drop a comment if you know anything more!

While browsing flickr yesterday I noticed a couple of things on the Bristol Group, firstly that more elderly gentlemen may be stopped and searched by the police purely for the reason of having gray hair. Secondly that there is a petition open on the 10 Downing Street website asking for clarification of photographers’ rights in public spaces. We keep hearing more and more stories of photographers all over the country being stopped and sometimes illegally searched and even forcefully having photographs deleted from their cameras all in the name of national security. In most cases the police have little or no right to search you although complying with their wishes is arguably the safest thing to do despite the infringement on rights.

Useful links:

Photographers’ Rights Booklet (A4 PDF useful for keeping in your kit bag)
Petition to clarify laws surrounding photography in public places

During a visit to New Orleans in June 2006, I wandered around parts of the city to see first hand the kind of damage that was inflicted by Hurricane Katrina. To my shock, the trail of destruction far exceeded my expectations and indeed was arguably worse than what I had seen on the isle of Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the South East asian Tsunami of 2004.

The following link leads you to a short set of photographs detailing an afternoon of random meandering in the city

http://flickr.com/photos/timfernando/sets/72157604188361802/show/