6.30am: The Police call around and get me to open the front door. They knock on my neighbour’s door and ring the doorbell a couple of dozen times. Looking out the back window, the entire block is surrounded by plain clothes policemen. My neighbour doesn’t answer. This probably means that their son has beaten his girlfriend to a bloody pulp again.
So work’s still going a bit nuts and I have no time at all. It should all be over soon (couple of weeks max), then I’ll be throwing myself back into the world more than ever. In the meantime, a few little catchups from the few things I’ve managed to get done outside the BBC.
I went to see Harry Potter on Monday with my younger brother and bloody Cory who did his ‘taking photos of the “don’t take photos” sign’ thing to general hilarity from the rest of the auditorium. Again. And – of course – the Englishman dies quietly of shame inside (but it wouldn’t have been the same without him). Personal verdict – still flawed, but better than anything else in the rest of the series so far. Four stars. Well done to all involved etc.
And on Wednesday night, I finally got to see the Pixies in concert at Brixton Academy. It was a dream come true in many ways – and one of the most tight, sharp and systematically well assembled concerts I’ve ever been to. But it was also a slightly sad experience I think – tinged somehow with the fact that I’ve worn all the songs to the bone with repeated listening. Looking on the stage it looked a bit like Frank Black and Kim Deal felt pretty much the same way…
This weekend I’m planning to detox a bit tomorrow and generally get my head in order – maybe teach myself some more Illustrator to stop myself going nuts with thinking about the web. And of course I’ll be at NotCon on Sunday, as indeed should you be.
From a relatively old article (at least in terms of webloggia’s attention-span) comes some pointers on improving design through simplicity:
This is a good set of assumptions for trying out new ideas and building new products and pretty close to the way we’ve been working in R&Mi when we do our rapid prototyping sprints. I should really write that stuff up sometime…
Yesterday evening, after a few too many cocktails with lovely people from work and an emergency Italian meal, we walked back towards Charing Cross to catch the tube only to see a van full of police officers looking weird and mischievous while playing the theme tune to Mission Impossible incredibly loudly and driving up and down the Strand. They all looked about seventeen, and like they were wearing their dads’ uniforms. These are not the uniformed whores from Morrissey’s The World is Full of Crashing Bores and that’s quite nice. I wasn’t scared of them or anything. But I wasn’t exactly filled with confidence either…
The TV miniseries Earthquake 10.5 is just airing in the UK. It is – bluntly – an unmitigated pile of shit. Interestingly if you search for it online, pretty much the first thing you get is a long page by earthquake experts explaining precisely why it’s total bunk:
Fiction: There can be a magnitude 10.5 earthquake
Fact: The magnitude of an earthquake is related to the length of the fault on which it occurs–the longer the fault, the larger the earthquake. In order to have a magnitude 10.5 earthquake you would have to have a fault that circles the Earth – no such fault exists.Fiction: Thinking an earthquake is an aftershock because they couldn’t find an epicenter – all earthquakes have epicenters
Fact: Aftershocks ARE earthquakes!! The only difference is that they occur after a larger earthquake instead of by themselves.Fiction: Nuclear explosions can “seal” faults
Fact: Nuclear explosions CANNOT seal faults. Earthquakes are part of a global tectonic process that generally occurs well beyond the influence or control of humans.
Additional Earthquake 10.5 fictions that are enough to drive you nuts:
Now I know it’s churlish to expect entertainment to be completely accurate, but this is just a few things from a list of dozens! I’d like to think that people doing stuff like this had some grasp of what they were talking about, but evidently not…
Apparently some people using IE6 are having trouble logging into Typekey via plasticbag.org and as a result can’t post comments. Most other browsers seem to be working OK – certainly all Mac browsers that I’ve tried – but obviously this is a problem that I need to resolve. If anyone has any idea why this is happening (presumably I’ve messed up some aspect of the template), then I’d be delighted if they could e-mail me on my normal e-mail address: tom {at} plasticbag {dot} org. Otherwise I’ll look into it more thoroughly tomorrow evening, once I’ve slept and worked the requisite number of hours.
So my installation of Movable Type has never been the simplest of things. I’ve had to use cgiwrap to avoid some of the more arcane problems with pair’s process throttling and I’ve got MT installed in a completely different directory and domain to my site. For someone with as little overt server knowledge as myself, this means that every time something’s supposed to be a simple installation or adaptation process, everything goes completely wrong. This is all by way of me saying that I’ve still got lots of problems around the place with integrating the Typekey registration system, including but not limited to it randomly not working, having lots of really nasty preview screens that remain totally untemplated and generally feeling more than a little rough around the edges. I’ll endeavour to get it all sorted out this evening so that the Monday morning crowd don’t start snarking out at me… Plus: Lots of actually interesting posts on real subjects to come soon!
First impressions of the new MT are generally really positive. I’m still having the same problems with incredibly slow performance that I had before, which I’m now assuming are to be laid at the door of my $140 a month host – pair.com. While I can now manage to do a full-site rebuild without my server throttling the process, if I pre-moderate or delete more than two or three comments in one go the whole thing shudders to a grotesque halt. For this reason (and because I’ve had some twat try and pump another forty incest-related bits of spam through the site), I’m putting the ultra-draconian comment management features into effect from this point on. I’m afraid if you want to make yourself heard on this site from now on you’ll have to register with Typekey. I’m terribly sorry, guys, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let my site prop up the porn empire of some grotesque little money-grubbing freak who thinks that pissing around with the personal sites of well-meaning people in order to make 0.01 cents a pop is a legitimate thing to do. Wankers.
If you’ve tried to comment on the site in the last few hours then you’ll probably already have noticed that I’ve upgraded to MT 3.0 and that I’ve turned on most of the draconian comment features. In the last couple of days I have had the better part of sixty comment spams from various hardcore pornography, bestiality and rape sites and quite frankly I’ve had enough.
Anyway as a result of the upgrade there are a few templates across the site that have broken and look a bit crappy. I’ll try and get that stuff sorted over the weekend, once I’ve ploughed through my new book on Illustrator. I’m so far behind in my various obligations outside work that I can’t really imagine I’m going to get everything done I want to over the next couple of days, but I’m going to give it my best shot. In the meantime, I can recommend Troy – it’s long and it’s not particularly accurate, but it’s mostly pretty compelling and has a few ridiculous Classics jokes which appealed to me in it. Back in a bit.
Wow. What a couple of weeks. I’ve been working so hard that at times I swear that my keyboard fingers have been getting cramps. Certainly my brain has. A succession of twelve-hour days, plus travel (including weekends) has left me a little the worse for wear and not really in the fittest state to talk to the general public. And – of course I have this epic post gestating in the background that I can’t get rid of and can’t finish that I really just need to release into the world as is. Mental constipation due to an overly refined diet of work, I think…
Anyway – I’ve carved myself out a long-weekend of slacking off and not thinking about work at all, both Friday and Monday to wander around the place and think about personal stuff and catch up with what’s going on online and clean my flat and try and get a few design treatments done for some things I’m working on. So far I’ve already seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, watched the final episode of Friends and the penultimate Enterprise and Angels, gone for lunch with Cory and ripped a few new albums. And later today (when I’ve got bored of standing up in the Human-Computer Interaction department of Foyles scabbing off their wifi) I’m going to wander off and catch Troy. Tomorrow is cleaning and basic creativity, I think. And then I might spend Sunday on the blog and Monday doing personal project stuff before the slog begins anew… Relaxation is fun.