Afonso Xavier Canosa Rodriguez


On philology, potatoes and construction.
Well, this is just my first approach to blog-writing. I want it to be the way to keep in touch with colleagues and friends.




Profile
info at canosarodriguez dotnet
 Subjects
 Archive
 PREVIOUS
 Highlights

Plowing, tillage, and finally planting (with some rain in between)

First week of May I finished plowing for this year. After some rainy days, I tilled the last piece of land on 9 May, and on 10 May the last (and most of the) potatoes for the year were planted.
Subject: potatoes - Published 27-05-2013 22:50
Permanent link to this article
More on travels
Cover of Anton Jankovoy
While still being busy with the edition of the glossary of place names of Mendes Pinto, I got in touch with Anton Jankovoy, an outstanding travel-photographer. It was many different subjects that led me to contact him to edit an article he wrote. First, the fact that I was into publishing at the time. Second, and most important, Anton is a traveler in Asia and his pictures are located in some of the most fascinating and inaccessible places on Earth. Finally, his work on astronomy brings a clear image of the sky, highlighting some aspects that were key to astronomical navigation. Rotation of the Earth appears vivid in the star tracks of Anton's pictures, so does the concept of the stars as a reference to find the celestial poles and hence define latitude, the only geographic coordinate used by Mendes Pinto on his travels (combination of latitude with distances in leagues and cardinal directions allowed location of places without longitude).

This is a short e-book on photography and the night sky. To me it was an excellent opportunity to learn more about topics that are extremely useful to better understand geographical description at the time of transoceanic astronomical navigation.

Google Books offers a good sample of Anton's e-book. Different formats can be found for sale at Lulu, Google Play and Amazon.

As for my e-book on place-names, most of the contents are available on Google Maps. If you have a particular interest in the field or you are a researcher on a related subject, you can contact me to send you a free PDF file with the whole list of place-names I have researched.
Anton Jankovoy's website
Subject: philology - Published 27-05-2013 22:35
Permanent link to this article
A former construction worker
It was about a month and a half ago last time I visited a construction site. This was a new house, the only one being built around at present. I was told that there was only one bricklayer in the site, so there I went to offer my services, nothing new to me, from bringing mortar and place the bricks on the scaffold to put some rows and rise some walls had I the time and were found skilled enough to do so. There were two bricklayers already, and the rest of the team about to come one of these days. Apparently there was no need to hurry up, work is still scarce!

Construction has become an extra skill that, sometimes, could be well worth mentioning in a CV. Something I do proudly, of course.

Not only. Last week I still could use my trowel to fix the hinged support for a fence. And earlier this month I spread some concrete as a slab for a garage entry. It was some years of hard work and some study, perhaps too many different tasks, changing too soon to become the perfect master, though enough to handle a couple of tools and mix some mortar.
Subject: construction - Published 27-05-2013 22:07
Permanent link to this article
© by Abertal







Warning: Unknown: Your script possibly relies on a session side-effect which existed until PHP 4.2.3. Please be advised that the session extension does not consider global variables as a source of data, unless register_globals is enabled. You can disable this functionality and this warning by setting session.bug_compat_42 or session.bug_compat_warn to off, respectively in Unknown on line 0