Cangas de Onis and San Vicente de la Barquera

We ran into two different celebrations in the one day.  The first one was in Cangas de Onis, where we’d stopped to photograph the medieval bridge and buy some bread.

Bridge over the Rio Sella

There was a procession featuring dancers and others in various traditional outfits, followed by an open-air concert.

Dancers

Procession

Traditional dress

The band looked and sounded very celtic

I have no idea what the festival was about.  Then, in the evening at San Vicente de la Barquera there was another celebration.  The streets were closed whilst a statue was carried through the town and onto one of the fishing boats, which then sailed out to sea and came back again after half an hour.  I think they were blessing the new fishing season.

San Vicente

Good response to new JournalTOCs design

The new JournalTOCs design has been warmly welcomed by various commentators.

Peter Scott blogged about the new design: New-look JournalTOCs website, it was reported in the Information World Review, and also in the Bournemouth University Research Support blog, and Hervé Basset in Science Intelligence and InfoPros wrote that “…the best journals Table of contents service in the world” has a new look and some new features.  Jean Thomas blogged about the new design, as did Math Library News, and Biology Library News, it was mentioned on the SLAINTE website, in CILIP’s Weekly Information World, and featured by InformmationToday Europe.

A number of people have tweeted about the new design, including @sallyheroes, @enriquediestro, @aarontay, @CarolineCooke, @LivUniPress, @kotlnc, @Assidens, @StevenHeywood, @andywalsh999, @Anne6fy, @pstainthorp, @glambuslib, @linda_kerr, @HelenPullen, @Bulelwa and @aabibliographer.

JournalTOCs is a free current awareness service that helps you keep up-to-date with new scholarly publications from multiple publishers (commercial, professional, and Open Access).  It’s aimed at researchers, students, academics, librarians and anyone else who wants to scan the latest scholarly articles and link to the full text (where institutional or personal subscriptions, or Open Access, allow).

In my next life I want to live backwards.

“In my next life I want to live backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people’s home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then, Voila! You finish off as an orgasm! I rest my case.”

— Woody Allen

Camping Playa de Troenzo

The Camping Playa de Troenzo is a few miles from Llanes, in Asturias.  Excellent location, but the pitches are small and I imagine it could get crowded in the high season.  There were only a few people on site when we stayed for three nights.

Our pitch

Looking west

Our pitch

This was the view from our pitch:

Playa de Troenzo

Neu! Reekie! 5

I made the mistake of agreeing to see Fat Mac last night at a literary event – Neu! Reekie! 5.  I thought – ‘Literary event – he won’t be able to drink too much at that’ – but I was wrong.  When he arrived at the venue, at the Scottish Book Trust property off the High Street, it was obvious he’d already been drinking for most of the afternoon, and he immediately ordered two bottles of beer from the bar.  Blind Dave and Poisonous also turned up.  Blind Dave wasn’t drinking, but Poisonous was on his worst behaviour.  I was forced to have a couple of beers so as to fit in better.  There actually seemed to be a lot of drinking going on at the event.

They’re digging up the High Street yet again!  It’s only a few years since a small fortune was spent, laying down the cobbles.

High Street

I had not known what to expect of the evening.  It turned out to be a pleasant mixture of short films, readings and then a band.

Inside the venue at Trunk's Close

Adelle Stripe

Of the authors, the talented and entertaining Adelle Stripe stood out.  The band was called Emelle.  They were excellent, their harmonies helped by the fact that the lead singer and the percussionist are brothers.

Emelle

The official gig photographer took these photos.

Fat Mac’s ticket won the first prize in the raffle, but he was too busy up at the bar to notice, and so they pulled out a new number.  After the gig, Fat Mac insisted on everyone going to the Waverley Bar, where he drank until he couldn’t stand up anymore.  I made my excuses, and left.

Waverley Bar

Outside the bar

Kath (or possibly Cath)

A man with a strange hat

An old-timer with his granddaughter

Campsite at Potes

We stayed for three nights at La Isla Picos de Europa campsite near Potes.  Lovely situation, and adjacent to the Picos de Europa.  The weather was variable – it had been very good the previous week.

La Isla Picos de Europa

When the clouds clear, you get wonderful views off the Picos, so I believe.

Behind the clouds are the mountains

Campsite at Arija

This was our campsite at Arija, on the shores of Embalse del Ebro.  It looked like a nice location on the map, and the surrounding countryside was attractive – very like Scotland, in fact – but it’s not the sort of place you really want to be staying out of season.  There were only a couple of other caravans occupied, most things were closed, we couldn’t get the hot water to work, and we moved off after one day when the weather didn’t clear.

Campsite at Arija

Along the road from Arija

A church at Julióbriga, near Reinosa

New design for JournalTOCs current awareness service website

Often, I don’t like it when websites are redesigned.  You can get so used to doing things in a particular way that a redesign can throw you off – a typical examples of this happened when I upgraded to the latest version of Firefox.  However, the new JournalTOCs design is cool!

The essentials have been kept the same, so you can still easily search for journals, or search for articles by keyword, or browse journal titles by subject or publisher, or Follow a journal, but everything now appears in a much more professional looking interface.

New JournalTOCs website

JournalTOCs is a free current awareness service that helps you keep up-to-date with new scholarly publications from multiple publishers (commercial, professional, and Open Access).  It’s aimed at researchers, students, academics, librarians and anyone else who wants to scan the latest scholarly articles and link to the full text (where institutional or personal subscriptions, or Open Access, allow).

I’ve written before about JournalTOCs in this blog, in particular: 10 ways to keep up-to-date with the latest scholarly articles using the free JournalTOCs service.  I help with marketing JournalTOCs and I occasionally add new journal titles to it, e.g. 24 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service.  I’d also like to see more Open Access titles added to it.

With the new website, it’s now possible for anyone to Suggest a journal with a Table of Contents feed to be added to the service.

There are all sorts of really nice things on the new website.

Journals I Follow

You can see which journals are Subscription (S) or Open Access (OA), and how many people are Following a particular title.  And you can add a little personalisation:

Personalised features

You can see journals by subject:

Sample subject list

See the latest Tweets about JournalTOCs.

Some of the things you can do with JournalTOCs:

• The latest research research at your fingertips.
• Tables of Contents for 16,300 journals (including 2140 Open Access journals) from 825 publishers.
• Follow journals of interest, and be alerted to the contents of new issues.
• Receive Email Alerts when new issues are published in the journals you Follow.
• Search by keyword(s) within the half a million recently published articles indexed by JournalTOCs.
• Browse journal publications by subject or publisher.
• Export TOC RSS feeds.
• Link from anywhere (a blog, a website, Facebook, an email message, etc) to the latest Table of Contents of a journal.
• Create customised RSS feeds to follow the latest scholarly articles on a topic.
• Suggest new journal titles to add to JournalTOCs.
• Use JournalTOCs API (Application Programming Interface) to create your own web applications that integrate content from freely available journal TOCs.
• Add journal Tables of Contents to your OPAC.
• Customise the service to give your users fast and easy access to the full-text of the most current papers published in the electronic journals to which your Library subscribes.
• View the most Followed journals.
• News from JournalTOCs.
  And more…

Food in Spain

The food we ate in Spain was generally very good.  Here are some of our restaurant meals.

Fabada a La Asturiana

Whatever this was, it was delicious

Huevos revueltos

Bogavante

Calamares

Last night’s paella

Very tasty

Late on, Jimbo from Melbourne listened to some Brian