DerrenWilson.net

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My Country is not a brand

Welcome to the ‘new puritan’ I live on your visits, coincidentally uploaded on my very own birthday. Prompted by a deep disaffection with Movable Type, both my own, and that of my webspace provider (mt-comments.cgi was the culprit), I switched, relatively painlessly, to WordPress today (the ground will stop shaking soon, promise). I hope you like the sIFR Univers headers, and the page title in Meridien, a serif face also designed by Adrian Frutiger. All the other bits and pieces you’d expect from a blog are at the bottom of the page.

Not everything is working properly at the moment (font sizing, etc), but most things seem ok for now.

This was about two weeks ago, mind you. You’d think I was busy all day.

When we moved to New Mills, apart from gaining a lovely park-under-the-town to go wander in every morning, we also gained access to broadband. There was broadband in Hayfield, but because the village was three miles from the nearest exchange, it involved adding a wi-fi card to your computer and other interesting but unjustifiable expense.

So we signed up soon after moving in, got the box with the USB modem, cables and evil installer CD (it wasn’t evil in the end, but I never trust installer CDs from big ISPs). I strung a cable from the bedroom telephone point to the back bedroom, plugged everything in, and waited until our line was upgraded.

A few days later, the solid green lights on the modem said ‘the broadband is ready for you’. The first site we tried it with was eBay: it was a bit of a let-down, but I think it was all the javascripting that eBay seems to do. But other sites fairly fell over themselves in the rush to display on our poor little iMac.

A whole new world of software upgrades opened themselves up to us. I could finally get around to updating our version of Firefox and iTunes. We could use the iTunes music store. I felt like our computer was happy again.

(International comparison details: it’s UKP17.99 a month (USD33, AUD42, 48 million Turkish Lira), and that’s for 2GB of data, although apparently the bandwidth measuring isn’t working yet.)

And now, this morning, my Dad e-mails me that he’s got broadband in Australia as well. It might be time to invest in a couple of webcams for international haircut comparisons. Maybe he might update his website a bit more often now too. Pot, meet Kettle…

Quand je me reveille tot le matin
Soulevant ma tete, je baille toujours
Quand je suis au milieu d’un reve
Restant dans le lit, flottant sur un nuage

S’il vous plait, ne me reveillez pas, non, ne me secouez pas
Laissez moi ou je suis, je dors seulement

Tout le monde semble penser que je suis paresseux
Ca m’est egal, je pense qu’ils sont fous,
Courant de partout a une telle vitesse
Avant qu’ils ne constatent qu’il n’y a aucun besoin (il n’y a aucun besoin)

S’il vous plait, ne gachez pas ma journee, Je suis a des kilometres plus loin,
Et apres tout je ne fais que dormir

Surveillant d’un ’il le monde qui s’agite par ma fenetre
Prenant mon temps,

Etant couche la et regardant fixement le plafond,
Attendant un sentiment d’endormissement.

S’il vous plait, ne gachez pas ma journee, Je suis a des kilometres plus loin,
Et apres tout je ne fais que dormir

Surveillant d’un ’il le monde qui s’agite par ma fenetre
Prenant mon temps,

Lorsque je me reveille tot le matin,
Soulevant ma tete, je baille toujours
Lorsque je suis en plein milieu d’un reve,
Restant dans le lit, flottant sur un nuage
S’il vous plait, ne me reveillez pas, non, ne me secouez pas
Laissez moi ou je suis, je dors seulement.

The world going by my window…

… with woodchip on the wall.

Until this Saturday, when after a little trip to Bakewell farmer’s market (incredibly busy – has some broadsheet tipped people off?), we fired (steamed?) up the wallpaper stripper.

Here is my foolproof system for stripping woodchip wallpaper, honed over several hours of stripping (I can see I’m going to get some odd google referrers now).

1. Fill the wallpaper stripper with water, set it on a flat surface (two offcuts of laminate flooring are perfectly acceptable). Connect up the tube and applicator and plug it in.
2. Spread out your dustsheet. You will not believe how much rubbish will be falling off these walls.
3. Sharpen your scraper. You can use a professionally produced sharpening tool, or do like I did and rub your scraper against the ceramic tiles in the front room in a masterful fashion.
4. Score around the edges of the wall where the paper meets the skirting and doorframes.
5. Attack the wallpaper like this: there are two layers with woodchip, the outer (probably painted) layer, and the inner one stuck to the wall. In between is the woodchip itself. What you need to do is rip off the outer layer with your sharp scraper without gouging into the wall plaster. Once you get a bit of the top layer up, it will start coming off the wall in satisfying chunks.
6. By now the wallpaper stripper will be hubbling and bubbling. The steam will popple up the tube and start flowing from the applicator.
7. Now your job is to be systematic. Start at the top of the wall and work down, so the drips start to loosen the paper underneath you. Count to ten, and scrape. You should be able to loosen the section below where you are scraping by holding the scraper in one hand and the steamer applicator in the other.
8. Wonder what bizarre mass hallucination in the 1970s made people think that woodchip textured wallpaper was a good idea. It looks like an ant colony has been trapped behind the paint.
9. After a few short hours, stagger upright and admire your bare walls. Lovely. Anyone for a spot of painting?