In the last few days, I’ve noticed something about the way I work in front of the computer. I start with an idea, like automagically generating heading and subheading bookmarks from a marked up document, and what I think will be the best way to approach it. I might even make a few scribbles on a bit of paper to satisfy myself I’m not just a hacker. Then, as I start to piece things together on the computer, the flow, the moment, takes over, where I more or less know what I’m coding, but it seems to be not entirely within my control. Acting on impulse, maybe.
It seems to be a question of trusting your own abilities and experience to turn what your mind can see as the finished product into a tangible (as tangible as web sites get) mixture of code, graphics and whatever else is required.
Some days you make great strides without even noticing; some days you immediately spot connections and pathways that have been hidden from you before. I like those days.
Other days nothing works. Even things that worked before won’t work now. This used to make me attempt to damage things (there might still be a big hole in the wall in the study at 27 Augusta Street, Adelaide, SA where I kicked the wall while trying to get WordStar™ to stop making everything bold and italic). But now I see days like that as necessary learning steps, a chance to improve troubleshooting skills and think more strategically, getting more done with less effort on my part.
And some days I just like playing with cool stuff like audioscrobbler.
Somewhere in my box-of-stuff-that-follows-me-around is a print out of my two and a half thousand word write up of the two weeks I spent by myself, walking constantly around Rome in January 1997. It was written in Word during a long-ish temp job at the BBC (I did do some work as well, promise), but I didn’t save the .doc anywhere useful. One day I might well get around to scanning it in and putting it on this site (the Amsterdam write-up is coming, promise).
While you’re waiting, two things I stumbled on today that still stick with me from that holiday. First, the big marble map of ancient Rome, once hung on a temple wall, now in one of the museums (Is it the Capitolium?). This map is being pieced back together by various scholars, but is one of those tantalising things that just enough survives to give us an idea of how good it would be if the whole thing was intact. I can imagine Romans going to look at it and getting confused (the archetypal American tourist/tube map scenario). ‘Are you sure that’s the Ara Pacis?’ ‘Yes, there’s the Forum Boarium, it’s just off to the left!’ ‘ But I thought that was the Temple of Vesta…’ etc. etc.
The other site is one that Things deep-linked to today, the Catacomb society. When the Romans decided to stop cremating their dead and to bury them instead, they built miles of tunnels around Rome, now known as the catacombs. I remember walking down the Via Appia Antica, and deciding to go look at a catacomb instead of the brilliantly preserved Circus Maxentius. Again, I can’t remember exactly which catacomb it was (Saint Sebastian, I think), but it was dark, damp and crumbly. There were some later christian burials with wall paintings at the end. It was atmospheric, but not exactly like a Piranesi etching.
After work yesterday, I went to the opening of the Doreen Roberts: Artist, Author, Teacher exhibition at the MMU Library. The exhibition covers the whole of Robert’s career as a children’s book illustrator. To get an idea of her work, have a look at the poster for the exhibition, designed by a certain Mr D Wilson. As a designer that’s come into the profession via computers, it’s interesting to see the ‘old’ ways of doing things: book titles lettered by hand straight onto the jacket illustration, cellophane overlays of line art on top of pastels and other things that can’t be corrected with control-Z.
After the opening, I thought I’d have plenty of time to get the train: they don’t come very often after the rush hour’s finished. I arrived at Manchester Piccadilly to see the 18:42 to New Mills Central half way along platform one and gathering speed. Luckily I had London Orbital with me, and read that until the 19:38 to New Mills Newtown wheezed into platform 13.
Careful reading of the bus timetable at the station in New Mills revealed I would have had to wait another thirty minutes for the bus, so I started walking. In the failing light, the fields and hills that stretched out from the A6015 were an amazing deep green that seemed to be full of new life and spring.
As I walked past the houses either side, the quiet only broken by the odd car freely interpreting the speed limit of 40 miles an hour, I could see people bathing in the light of their televisions, oblivious to the landscape around them.
The still-redesigned Sandwich Project is now the proud sporter of a quiz section, hewn from the living MySQL and PHP (note to self: and my first cookie-leaving script).
This week’s quiz question concerns the shapes we like to cut our sandwiches into: at the moment the diagonal single cut is winning.
I seem to remember being a fan of the double square cut as a child: one bite of soft bread and filling, then the character-building trial of the chewy brown crust.
There’s also a lot to be said for the diagonal double cut, as you can sit the pieces onto a tray with the filling showing. Needless to say, these are the two lowest scoring cutting patterns at the moment.
… are your slug-fighting friends.
Last year our hostas were eaten alive by slugs – big green leaves turned to slimy doilies overnight – but they were only the most obvious victims. These must be superslugs: they even went for the mint we had growing, which they aren’t supposed to like. It doesn’t help that the dry stone walls surrounding our garden give the little slimebags (literally) somewhere to hibernate over the winter.
Now that it’s spring, they’ve woken up, intent on defoliating our garden all over again. But this time we’re ready for them.
Our anti-slug offensive began on Wednesday night, when I was taking out the bin. There were some massive slugs making for our herb planters (like uncooked sausages, they were): I carefully ran them over with the wheely bin while putting it out for the morning collection.
Then last night, embolded, we set out with the above-mentioned apparatus and a bucket of soapy water. And there they were. Behind the pots. On the pots. In the walls. On the soil. Oozing and sliming their way towards our precious plants.
They tried to curl up. They tried to run away. But none of them escaped. Each one we found plopped satifyingly into the foaming prison we had prepared.
We lost count of how many we caught pretty early on, but if the average garden has about 200 slugs in it, we have put a pretty big dent in our garden’s allocation.
Drunk on our success, we tried making the slugs drunk as well, setting out old ikea dishes full of beer around slug hotspots. They apparently crawl in and become immediately inebriated and unable to climb out (I know the feeling).
Looking this morning we hadn’t caught any yet, but I’m confident we will. I know if I was a slug I’d prefer to drown in beer than be killed by detergent (and I’d stay out of our garden).
Sorry about this, but you’re stuck with me until 2006, now that I’ve paid another twenty pounds rent for this domain. It’s also the second birthday for the blog-ged incarnation of this URL, more or less.
I’ve been inspired by this news story to write some poetry…
You’re the gold voice that we built this city on
Thank you for coming home.
I’m sorry that the chairs are all worn.
I left them here I could have sworn.
These are my salad days slowly being eaten away.
Say you don’t know me, or recognize my face
Say you don’t care who goes to that kind of place
Knee deep in the hoopla, sinking in your fight
Too many runaways eating up the night.
We have the chance to turn the pages over
We can write what we wanna write
We gotta make ends meet before we get much older.
Who counts the money underneath the bar
Who rides the wrecking ball into our guitars
Don’t tell us you need us, ’cos we’re just simple fools
Looking for America, coming through your schools
In this time, we know we often stand together
We give power to the powerful
Even we can make it better
Just another play for today.
Oh but I’m proud of you but I’m proud of you.
Nothing left to make me feel small.
Luck has left me standing so tall, all.
Stirring stuff, isn’t it?
Oh, for goodness’ sake: these big record companies have no idea. I’m not that fussed about waiting until the lawyers are happy for the UK iTunes shop, and I keep an eye on the spread of evil copy-protected CDs, but this time it’s personal.
I want to spend 37 pence (89 cents) downloading the single (with bonus track) off Tim Roger’s new record from this Australian website but I can’t, just because I don’t live/access the internet from Australia (I can understand the copyright issues) and I won’t (actually can’t, as we run NT at work and I’ve a Mac at home) install Windows Media Player 9 so I can burn the songs to CD to (novel idea this) listen to them.
While I’m indulging in a little pointless ranting: the site puts content in a total of nine frames, making bookmarking nearly impossible, puts a smug little ‘(Non IE)’ notice in the homepage’s title text when you view it with Mozilla, and the page source has in-line style tags and other becruftment. And who are the cloth-eared fools downloading ‘Suddenly’ by Angry Anderson?
I feel better now.
Hello, I’m back.
I had an inspiring time in Amsterdam. We walked until our feet smoked, however. I’ve tried to recover by eating all the chocolate eggs we had to abandon when we left on Easter Monday, but I’m still a bit groggy.
There will be a full report in time, but until then, if you happen to be getting on a plane to Amsterdam in the next few days, I recommend the Frozen Fountain furniture shop at Prinsengracht 629, the Artimo art book shop at Elandsgracht 8, and the restaurants, cake shops and record shops on the Utrechtsestraat. Tell them the English people who didn’t even try speaking Dutch sent you (that should narrow it down a bit…)
I’d just negotiated the wiggly uphill bit of the A624 in the car, heading towards Glossop, when someone going the other way flashed their lights at me. Ah, I thought, there’s a casualty prevention unit* just around the corner. I’ll slow down.
Over the crest of the hill, coming down into Glossop, I understand what the flashing lights are for. Not the pigs, but sheep. A massive flock of sheep (no lambs though), milling about on the road. It looked like they were being herded from one field to another – there was even a sheepdog on hand to encourage the stragglers.
None of the drivers stopped on the road was sure where these animals were going. I was sure they would turn off the road before they got to me, about third in a queue of the Glossop-bound. But no, they jogged straight past me, close enough for me to admire their thick fleeces. Then they were gone.
* Casualty prevention unit: mobile speed camera. Not my euphemism – it’s what the sticker says on the front of the van.
NB: And I’m going to go too, just for a week. I’ll be in Amsterdam all week (I’m taking a camera) and in London on the weekend (Happy Birthday, Uncle Nathan).