October 4th, 2007, 25 Comments »
I occasionally see these water bottles positioned on the sidewalk, flush to the wall, in front of Maltese houses:
They have a particular purpose. I didn’t know what it was, and neither did any of our guests. I’m not sure how widespread the practice is, but it wasn’t what I expected.
Can you guess? Locals, keep your mouths shut.
UPDATE: Eoghan and others are correct–they’re apparently a defensive mechanism against wayward dogs. The Maltese folks who explained this to me weren’t sure how effective they were, but it’s interesting that it’s also a tactic used in Ireland and Japan.
25 Comments »
September 29th, 2007, 9 Comments »
While my parents were visiting last month, they spotted fishermen loading palm fronds into their small fishing boats before heading out. They later asked me what they used them for. I had no idea.
Today, coincidentally, I learned why they need the palm fronds. Can you guess?
UPDATE: Filmgoerjuan did not guess, but he found the correct answer nonetheless. The fish in the photo is called a lampuki. From Wikipedia:
Fishermen cut and gather the larger, lower fronds from palm trees which they then weave into large flat rafts. The rafts are pulled out to sea with small boats. During midday lampuki school underneath the rafts, seeking the shade. The fishermen use large mesh nets to catch the schooling lampuki. The fishing method has not changed significantly since Roman times.
Here’s a Geocities page with some photos of fishermen weaving the rafts together.
That said, I also really like Heather’s idea about pirate hats. “Arrrr! Where be the lampuki?”
9 Comments »
August 27th, 2007, 5 Comments »
If I’d been paying closer attention in Physics 12, I might know the answer to this question. We have a small pool in our backyard, and a small ocean about 10 minutes away. All summer, the Mediterranean has felt warmer than our little pool.
This seems counter-intuitive, because I’d imagine that, over the summer, the sun would heat up the relatively-small amount of water in our pool. The water and surrounding stone would store some of that heat over night, and so would get cumulatively warmer over the summer. That’s happened to some degree, but it’s no match for the ocean.
When I went swimming at Xlendi this morning, the ocean was bathtub warm. What gives?
5 Comments »
July 26th, 2007, 6 Comments »
How would you do it?
We’re planning on running one for a client, and we’re thinking of just hosting the thing in a Flickr group. Contestants will add photos to the group to enter the contest.
We were thinking that we’d enable the community to choose the finalists and then have our client pick the winner. I was thinking that we could select the five or ten finalists based on the number of times a photo had been ‘favourited’ (Flickr users can ‘favourite’ photos to give a photo a sort of thumbs-up, and to bookmark it on their Favourites page).
Do you see any flaws in that plan? Here’s one. Users will have to either take new photos, or upload old ones again, because existing Flickr photos may already have accrued some favourites. Do you think that’s a problem?
Flickr does track when people favourite a photo (here’s an example). However, that’s a lot of manual pain on our end in counting the number of favourites during the period of the contest. And it could be confusing for other users if a photo newly added to the group has, like, 15 favourites.
I thought I’d crowd-source this problem to see if anybody had another idea. I’ve also posted to the Flickr forum to see what they think over there.
6 Comments »
May 8th, 2007, 3 Comments »
Quick question for those of you generating the online revenue. This is mostly for a client site, but also out of personal interest. What’s your experience been with BlogAds? I imagine the rate of return beats Google AdSense. Have you been happy with the ads they run? Any complaints?
3 Comments »
