DerrenWilson.net

But you can’t choose what colour your landlord has painted the front room before you move in.

For nearly a year, we lived with an emerald green front room before our eyes revolted and we asked the Estate Agents if they’d ask the Landlord if we could repaint it. Thankfully the Landlord said yes, on the not-totally-ridiculous condition that we signed a lease for another six months.

Almost as soon as we’d moved in we started collecting colour chips and little tester tins of ‘magnolia but less boring’, so after christmas and the confirmation letter from the landlord, roller hit wall for the first time.

Yes, I was graduating from little tins of Humbrol paint, a plastic model kit and a reasonably steady hand to four (textured) walls. So far it’s taken three Saturdays of dismantling, mixing, rolling, masking, cutting-in and drying. The emulsion takes two coats to cover the hated green:

No big drippy accidents so far, but now that most of the walls are done, there’s some shelves that need re-painting in gloss. Even the ‘one coat’ gloss white doesn’t cover the blasted green. The evil white stuff sticks to everything, hands, shoes, floor, brush, and won’t come off, even with the special, probably extremely toxic, brush cleaner.

Hopefully the last vestiges of the green will disappear this weekend, at least downstairs – there’s a turquoise bathroom door and a brick-red bedroom door left after that. Now if we could just do something about everyone looking in our front window as they walked past…

• Snow. Until it turns to ice.
• Last night’s Grand Designs, following the building of a massive German prefabricated house in four days. Each panel built in Germany, transported across the continent to Surrey, and then each piece slotting into place perfectly. Not just a triumph of organisation, but well-thought-out design. Then this two-storey house was filled with design classics collected over 50 years by the very tasteful owners. Fancy watching the TV in his and hers Eames Loungers (one black, one tan), anyone?
• Chickens roasted with tarragon. Roll some of the tarragon into a ball and stuff it into the cavity of the chicken, smush the rest up with some butter and push it under the skin.
• Books like The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones. If you’re interested in, or are going to visit Italy, you should read this book. Full of the revealing little details of Italian life that pass by tourists, however hard they keep their eyes open.
• Être et Avoir: the best film I’ve seen for ages. Baldly, it’s a documentary that follows a year in the life of a tiny rural school in France. But as you watch it, you think about your own school life, and the way we learn and interact with others. Only sore point is that in the post-watching-the-movie googling, I found out that the apparently saintly teacher, Mr Lopez, is suing the documentary maker for more money.

As I’m a celebrity, get me out of here oozes out of our television screens again, I thought I’d go see if I could find anything about what the host country – the otherwise-engaged Australian nation – thinks of this earth-shattering televisual feast.

And I struck gold, in the form of an article from the Melbourne Age. Not only did this story about IACGMOOH have a quote from High Tory Boris Johnson (‘I think we are approaching the cusp of a great exasperation’) but there’s a link to a celebrity survey run by the University of Leicester, which is open to everyone.

If you ‘… would gladly die in order to save the life of my favourite celebrity’, or even if you just feel a thrill when you see Darren Day across the road, spend a few minutes filling in the form, and people might be able to invent an antidote, or something.

It is time to learn the flash. Again. Every so often I can’t suppress the urge to learn how to use the program that lets you do stuff like this. At the moment I’m in the fiddling about with the edges of stuff stage, where you tinker with bits and pieces off googled tutorials, but don’t get really serious. There’s a few things I really want to learn, like the PHP/Flash stuff, and how to make elastic boxes for portfolio sites (he means like this).

It’s not worth banging on about this unless I can embarrass myself by posting an example of how far I’ve got (you’ll need a flash player):

Bffffffff!

I have celebrated Australia Day in the following manner:

• Listened to You Am I’s live album in a loud and unsociable manner
• Worn 5 layers of clothing outside, while waiting all day for the promised apocalyptic snowstorms
• Taped a few documentaries off UK TV for my Dad
• Made a new bit of the site, to remind myself that spring is going to get here eventually: I live on your visits in the garden (the design is more a proof of concept than a finished product)
• That’ll do. No point wearing yourself out.

Nine ante meridian this morning I gave a guest lecture on web graphics to some second year students. Yes, nine years after I’d last had to pay attention to someone drone on for an hour in a university lecture theatre, it was me doing the droning. The academics wanted someone from the ‘real world’ – I was close enough.

I had made some lovely powerpoint (euugh) slides and had a big projector screen to play with. The room was tiered, and the seats were a bright red colour. In between looking at the monitor, the screen, waving my hands about and trying to remember what I was going to say next, I couldn’t count how many people were falling asleep.

At the end I thought that, even if some of it was probably a bit obtuse, I’d not said anything completely stoopid. It’s difficult taking a step back from what you spend all day doing to try and explain it to someone who’s never clicked and dragged a point with the pen tool or hit ctrl+alt+shift+s in Photoshop (you mean there are people like that left?).

I’ve got another lecture at the beginning of February about the Real French site and the databases sitting behind it.

Iloyv’s syndication feeds (XML, rdf) now contain the full text of each entry. Difficult? No, all I had to do after a bit of googling was change <$MTEntryExcerpt$> to <$MTEntryBody$> for the two templates.

If you are going to read this site via the medium of syndication, I beseech you to change your newsreader’s font to Univers, if you are able, for that iloyv touch (it works for me).

There are two sorts of people in the world (that part of the world that uses the western musical scale): those who respond in an almost primeval manner when they see the roman numerals I-IV-V and those that don’t. Tonic, sub-dominant, dominant, I-IV-V, E-A-B, the ‘wild thing’ chords, the first bar chord progression that your aching fingertips will drag over a guitar’s fretboard, skin white with effort…

But, if you know what you are doing (I don’t) those three chords can be twisted, turned, re-emphasised into almost anything. Into a fine, smoky, elegant song like Melanie Oxley and Chris Abrams’ Benchtop (.mp3, 128kps, 3.3MB), perhaps. You decide.

It’s almost exactly eight years since the 747 that bought me to the UK touched down at Heathrow. I still remember the neon jellyfish of the towns of northern Europe stretched out under the wing of the jet before we landed.

My first act on arriving in the UK was to run over someone’s (liveried) foot with my baggage trolley. It’s got better since then, honestly. I remember the cold, the fog, the sound of the old Northern line trains. London seemed irredeemably shabby, rubbish everywhere.

But the bookshops, the British Museum, the sense of being closer to the centre of where everything was happening, started acting on me. The Melody Maker wasn’t six months out of date in the newsagent. Tenuous reasons, I know, but good enough for me.

There were other, er, complicating factors that made me grin and bear the first stumbling months in London. But you don’t need to know her name.

There are two different sorts of wasting time with computers:

1. When you are trying to accomplish something without really knowing what you’re doing, or there’s something not working as you thought, and you end up learning a lot about a program or operating system as you click through, trying to solve your problem. Mostly these are good, and are looked back on as part of the apprenticeship you’re going through to learn how to use these new-fangled machines properly.
2. The pointless, frustrating, eyestraining hour you spend watching blank screens, spinning progress indicators, and other distractions as you try and get something – anything – done, impeded by a dial-up connection to the internet that seems to be using an Apple ][ at the other end.

Guess which sort of time wasting I’ve been indulging in. Back to our regular service tomorrow.