I have a tax payment to make, only I cannot make this blasted payment; which can only be made via a home banking system now; because my home banking system is not working properly. This is because just about everyone is trying to make tax payments today, because of today’s deadline.  In case you did not know, the legendary F24 is a tax form which you use to donate money to the government.  This form used to be made of paper, but now it is virtual, and all can only be accessed via computer for normal mortals such as myself.

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Wow! This is a heavy week. I had a long, and quite complex, translation that needed doing asap. I did manage to finish it, but it ate up a lot of time. So much time, that I have neglected my blog, and its readers.

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Full English Breakfast

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I have several friends from the south of Italy, but I was rather surprised to learn that one of them, Ciro, is an avid skier. I imagined that he must have made annual pilgrimages to northern Italy to learn to do his thing. He must be one heck of a dedicated skier, I thought, because he comes all the way from Naples. Wow, impressive, I thought.

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You probably heard the news this week about the loss of data concerning 25 million UK citizens.

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A MINTy Evening

2007 | Filed Under Art | Leave a Comment

MINT
MINT is an exhibition.

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Milanese Grey

2007 | Filed Under Life in Italy | 4 Comments

I think it may be true to say that winter has finally kicked in here in not-so-sunny Milan. As always here, the temperatures dropped almost overnight, well, it seems that way. In reality, the temperature had been falling gradually over the last few weeks or so, but it hit genuine winter levels towards the end of last week.

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Metz 58 AF1Nope, that’s is not a miss-spelling, ‘Canon’ refers to my Canon 400d, which now sports a heavyweight, in all senses, Metz 58 AF-1 flash unit, more about the ‘light’ adjective later on. I drooled over this lovely piece of kit some months past, and now I’ve managed to get my hot little hands on one. Yum, yum.

Some of my initial efforts with this piece of kit can be seen in the sausage posts, especially the photos of sausage making and the sausage tasting evening at my favourite local, the 442, here in Milan.

I have never had a good quality flash unit before, and so I cannot really compare the Metz 58 to anything. First impressions were positive, the build quality feels fine. It does not have a metal hot-shoe connector, but the plastic one feels good and sturdy, however, from what I’ve read, picking your camera up by the flash unit is not a great thing to do.

The controls, which I had read about, are indeed not all that intuitive and getting to the settings tends to involve quite a few button presses, but with more use and familiarity, I imagine that operating the thing will become quite fast. There are only four buttons, which, from a psychological viewpoint, means that this complex unit does not totally overwhelm. Apparently, the Canon high-end models are slightly on the fiddly side to use too. I guess at the end of the day, using these things comes down to whether you prefer Canon fiddly to Metz fiddly.

This nice Metz unit (I was about to write ‘nice little unit’ but it certainly is not little!), comes with a built in diffuser and a little white pull-out card for bouncing flash. In fact, you can also point the flash just about anywhere you like, because the head swivels round and moves up and down. This means that you can bounce the flash from wherever you think will make your photo look better, and gives you plenty of room for creativity.

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I found this amongst the junk blocked by the anti-spam system:

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I actually managed to hold an Iphone yesterday. One of my lawyer students managed to bring one over from the US, and with the help of Internet sourced hacks, she managed to get it to work in Italy.

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A very nice chap from Down Under wrote and complimented me on my blog. He also told me that his wife and himself owned a flat in deepest, darkest, and beautiful Umbria, and that they both made the twenty hour flight from Australia to Italy several times a year. Wow, I thought - people come all the way from Oz just to spend time here. That is impressive in my little book. But that is not all, this gentleman, whose name I shall not mention, also speaks pretty good Italian. And where do you think he developed his ability to speak Italian?

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The 442 Star

2007 | Filed Under 4-4-2 Pub | Leave a Comment

Without this man and his pub, my life would be too hum drum:

Ale - 442

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