DerrenWilson.net

Here at the University, the students have been back for about a week now, but I’ve only just noticed the signs of life across the way. Behind my back as I sit in front of this Apple is one of the Halls of Residence. From here, if I swivel around, I have a fine view of that most exciting of culinary locations, the student kitchen.

Yesterday I saw a bottle of vodka, lime cordial and two bottles of cheap lemonade on the student’s kitchen windowsill. Today, all gone, replaced by scantily-clad ladies cut out of FHM and stuck to the windows. They won’t last long either, probably.

Other windowsills around the hall are also beginning to sport veritable drinks cabinets: none of the students have been tempted to turn up the volume on their stereos to let us know what’s popular with the kids these days. Yet. I bet it’ll be The Darkness, just like the rest of us.

NB for those outside the UK: most students here choose to move away from home to go to University, meaning that their freshman year is the first time they’ve encountered concepts like ‘cooking’, ‘cleaning’ and other mayhem.

Fresh from a trip to the biggest smoke of them all (cough), here’s a London icon from 1962. I hope it’s 1962, otherwise those four numbers on the front of the map (bottom right) are misleading.

Front

See the whole thing 276K jpg, 1500px wide

No ads anywhere to be found on this tube map. Notice the old style phone number, ABBEY 1234, and the exhortation to write for further information. Who’d write to anyone for information these days? E-mail’s too slow half the time, and that travels at the speed of light…

Middle

See the whole thing 232K jpg, 1500px wide

Can you imagine trying to set a map like this before Illustrator? If you look closely around Bank there seems to be an extra bit of Northern Line as well, which was later folded into the not-yet-built Victoria line. How did people get to the Tate in the sixties?

My first work-related site is now up at www.mediaservices.mmu.ac.uk. It’s part of a wider reorganisation of the main Manchester Metropolitan University website, and the design was dictated by that (e.g. the use of Arial, the big header), though I have re-mixed some of the elements.

Underneath the hood, the site is two-sheet CSS with tables for layout, as a large percentage of the University audience still uses NN4.7 (for now: it might be a year before it’s completely gone). I’ve not validated all the pages yet, but it’s on my to-do list.

All the content is held in a MySQL database, with each page as a single record. Each page calls a set of PHP functions that build the top section, the left nav, the content, the right nav and the footer. That means I can change the content via the MySQL database, and make global layout changes via the PHP functions. I wrote some simple pages to help me insert & edit the content in the MySQL database without using phpMyAdmin, which worked pretty well, except for entities like &amp#8217; getting lost when they are echoed in a text-box.

From the homepage, there are three ways of going further into the site: a normal left nav, a directory, and a geographical list of locations (MMU has seven campuses, 30,000 students, etc etc). The geographical list data is held in another database that also holds cross-referenced staff contact information for particular services (e.g. photography). The search function is pretty basic: there’s a lot I need to learn about search that I’ve only realised from trying to set this one up.

It’s still pretty much brochureware at the moment: next comes trying to add some actually-useful services to the site…

I’m now going to wander off to London until Sunday night, if you’re at 100% design on Friday, I’ll be the one in the ‘Hayfield Sheepdog Trials’ t-shirt.

If you have a blog, you should have a pretty high embarrassment threshold. After all, you are putting out for general consumption (even edited) some quite personal stuff. Web pages have a habit of hanging around, in their be-tabled and font-tagged glory, long after things like photographs or print designs are lost in drawers/‘filing systems’.

So, here’s something I resuscitated earlier. In 2001 Laura and myself were invited on a holiday to Mablethorpe, a wheezing holiday resort in Lincolnshire, near the much better known (thanks to the ‘Jumping Man’ poster) Skegness. It was September, cold, windy, and a lot of fun. This is the website that documents our holiday in Mablethorpe.

It’s Praystation grey, tables, fixed type size, and has a lovely Flash bingo card. How pre-CSS. I think I had some sort of divine revelation when I made the Flash part, as I just sat down at the computer and figured out how to use action scripting to keep track of things. It’s all forgotten now. I have had reports that the java/flash popups with the photographs don’t work with some browsers, but it’s fine in Chimera.

Since the gods of the internet have smiled upon me, let me repay the gods’ favour by introducing you to one of my favourite songs.

On CD2 of the You Am I best-of just landed on our welcome mat is She Digs Her, a song about er… something. Just try and stay annoyed-about-whatever-it-is-you’re-annoyed-about (need a word for that in English) when the band crash into that chorus.

At work, they watch and wait for the new Media Services site to launch…

This weekend you might find me at the Hayfield Country Show and Sheepdog Trials or at the New Mills French Market. I know how to enjoy myself.

The Mark E. Smith Special (who’s Mark E Smith?), as recommended by the BBC6 mid-morning show. And if I’d not been the victim of a slowly-travelling e-mail, I might have heard them discussing the SP at 10:30 this morning. D’oh²!

I have a file next to the Mac with magazines I’ve bought and kept as ‘inspiration’ – I wonder how much they all cost me?

• Wired × 4 at £3.99
• Adbusters × 2 at £4.00
• Grafik (was Design International, was readable) × 2 at £5.00
• Word × 1 at £3.50
• Illustrated Ape × 1 at £3.50
• .net (I know it’s rubbish) × 1 at £4.99
• Esquire × 1 at £3.40
• Uncut × 1 at £3.95
• the Face × 1 at £3.00
• Formula 1 Magazine (gone right downhill) × 1 at £3.70

Grand Total £60.00

Blimmin’ heck. That’s a lot of money for something that lasts two train trips (if that). Might explain why there’s also a very big pile of library books (my aching back) on my desk as well…

If you don’t want to head into the kitchen after reading one of Nigel Slater’s cookbooks, you probably enjoy the kind of pasta that needs a can opener.

Not content with cookbooks, Nigel’s now written an autobiography, Toast (excerpt). There’s also an interview with him on the Observer’s Food Monthly site. The autobiography is centered around Slater’s childhood and the food that was connected with it.

This got me thinking about my own childhood relationship with food: the Friday night fish and chips, for example. I remember carrying the hot paper wrappers home with Dad, spreading them out and eating the chips with my fingers, watching the spots of oil spread over the library books I was reading at the same time as watching the Two Ronnies. I ate thousands of three-minute noodles. If we went out, Dad would always try something new, a tradition I’ve been continuing, even when we’re at St John (the Ox heart is very good indeed).

I was about eight when the first McDonald’s (just near my Primary School) started to rise next to Main North Road. The Big Macs seemed so big then… When I played football, being nominated Player of the Match would get you a voucher for a free cheeseburger, so the whole family would have a chance to be indoctrinated by ol’ Ronald McD.

My Grandparents didn’t understand the fuss at all. But then, they could cook. Well, on my Dad’s side, anyway. The last meal I had before my braces went on was with Grandma Schwarz, who served up a completely scorched crispy Lasagna. Grandma Wilson still (as far as I know) makes Yorkshire puddings with dripping, generous, piping-hot pancakes and, for Christmas, a big, boozy pudding started in September.

Mmmmm. Is it time for lunch yet?

You know your blog’s reaching, um, maturity when an old entry deals with the first rumblings about a reality television series that finished last night.

This time it wasn’t average people performing for the camera, but shaky old buildings in a show called Restoration. The BBC chose thirty rickety old bits of architecture, put three at a time to the public vote, and on Sunday night the people chose the winner. What was it? Well, strangely enough, it wasn’t a Gothic folly, or a forgotten Adam masterpiece (though there was one of them in there), but Victoria Baths, a Victorian building(!), built for (unwashed) common folk(!). And it’s right here in Manchester.

Our opinion of the show suffered a downturn when the local entry, Cromford Mill didn’t make it past the first round. Hopefully the first modern factory in the world, dating from the 1770s, and the very epicentre of the Industrial Revolution will get money for its much-needed conservation of the original factory space from someone on this uncaring island. But we aren’t bitter. Too bitter, anyway.