Alasdair – Page 176 – Alasdair Watson

Prototype

Posted on March 8, 2006 by Alasdair

I’ve spent the last couple of days doing a bit of work involving ~~tarmac~~ AJAX, and while I’m sure everyone else in my line of work discovered them yonks ago, I’d just like to take a moment to sing the praises of both script.aculo.us and especially the Prototype javascript library that it uses. These are clearly the work of clever bastards, because even I, with my attrophied Javascript can knock together some fairly nice stuff with them. If you’re engaged in web development these days, then really you ought to be using this stuff. They’ve saved me so much work it’s untrue. (Which isn’t to say it was all painless, but it wasn’t the special torture it might’ve been.)

This entry was originally published at my workblog.

Opium Dreams

Posted on March 6, 2006 by Alasdair

As anyone who’s been near me in the last few week or two can attest, I am currently suffering from a cough that would make the most consumptive poet give up and go home, clearly overmatched in the smashed lung stakes. This, honestly, doesn’t bother me. It has happened to me almost every time I have had a cold since I was small child. It sounds (and is) unpleasant, but it’s getting better. But for the last week or so, in order to make sure I get more than a few hours fractured sleep at night, I am taking a thing called Gee’s Linctus, who contains, among other things, a weak tincture of Opium. It’s pretty much guaranteed to knock me out in about ten minutes flat.

I will refrain from sharing the details with you, but let’s just say that I’ve been having some pretty fucked up dreams. I am almost at the point where I want the cough to fuck off less for it’s own symptoms, and more because I’d like some dreamless sleep some time soon.

Better Living Through Chemistry

Posted on March 5, 2006 by Alasdair

I spent Saturday at Whisky Live. Which means I got to try a lot of excellent booze. And I got to thinking.

I used to write quite a lot about comics. And then I realised that really, I didn’t give that much of toss any more. I still read ’em, I still enjoyed ’em, but they weren’t not the objects of passion they once were. So, I stoppped writing about them. I might start again, if I get really excited about them again.

But whisky, on the other hand, still is something I love. So, let’s talk about whisky, then. In previous years, my whisky live write up has more or less consisted of a list of what I tried, and what I thought of it. This year, though, I thought I’d do something more than that. I thought I’d attempt a few essays about the drink itself. I’ll get to what I like in due course. But I thought I’d use the first of them to make sure we’re all on the same page, and talk about the basics of making the stuff. Later on, I’ll talk in more depth about the taste, and about what I like. For now, let’s just make sure we all understand how it gets into the glass, and just what it is we’re drinking.

Whisky Making For Beginners

Food and Drink. Well, no, just drink.

Posted on March 4, 2006 by Alasdair

I have been at Whisky Live all day, drinking expensive booze. I shall bore you all with the details tomorrow. Now, I must decide whether to go out and drink more, and possibly shatter my lungs beyond repair, or to stay home, and sleep.

Really decent takeaway

Posted on March 2, 2006 by Alasdair

I’ve been pointed in the direction of Deliverance as a place that does really good takeaway (although priced accordingly higher than your average takeout), but typically, they don’t serve my postcode, just the one next door. Bastards. Still, maybe they’ll expand their delivery area, or it’ll be os use to someone else.

Recent Songs

Posted on February 28, 2006 by Alasdair

Tagged by mightygodking, 7 songs I am digging right now, in no particular order:

1) Leonard Cohen – Hallelujah (oringial version). Talking about it on tyrell‘s LJ today reminded me just how much I love the original. I like the secularised version that you generally hear as well, but there’s something magic in the lines “There’s a blaze of light / In every word / It doesn’t matter which you heard / The holy or the broken Hallelujah”. “There’s a blaze of light in every word”. Fuck, I love that.

2) Flogging Molly – May The Living Be Dead (In Our Wake). “And the ghosts of our souls thanking Christ we’re alive.” Screamed out to that foot-stomping beat, it’s a fantastic affirmation of love and joy. Again, from tyrell‘s discussion of love songs earlier in the day.

3) The Go! Team – Ladyflash. Brilliant pop, electric and spiky made entirely from jangly sounds and bubblegum.

4) Carter USM – Let’s Get Tattoos. It’s bloody good, daft, fun. It’s straightfoward teenage take-on-the-world shouty music.

5) Firewater – Dark Days Indeed. “We walk but once among the living/so no regrets and no forgiving”. Rules to live by. It’s also a bloody good “cheer you up” tune, all footstomping percussion and carnival sounds.

6) Johnny Boy – You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve. I can never decide if I wish they’d put an album out, or just leave me with this one, perfect, pop song.

7) Menlo Park – Big Black Smoke. I just love this. It’s hard to articulate, it’s just sleazy and loud and fucking aces.

Everyone else is doing it (but I can’t)

Posted on February 27, 2006 by Alasdair

5 fictional characters with the same profession as me:

I don’t even know *one*.

My job falls between so many bloody stools it’s ridiculous. I’m not an “IT guy” like you’d find in most offices. I’m not a programmer, as is normally understood – all the applications I develop are web based, and rope together a grab bag of technologies. I am not a designer. I am not a user experience consultant or a systems analyst, or a database architect. It sometimes annoys me, because I know there a lot of people out there that don’t take my profession seriously, from the “proper” programmers that look at me funny when I explain that frankly, I have only the vaguest idea what a pointer is (no, please don’t explain) or the DBA’s that assume that because I’d prefer to work in Postgres or MySQL, rather than Oracle, I musn’t be doing anything serious, to the normal people who file me under “web nerd” and do not accord the same level of respect that they would someone with most of a decade’s experience as a lawyer or doctor or or teacher or accountant (and yes, obviously, other IT professionals get that end of the stick, too) it is, from time to time, a little frustrating.

Like I said the other week – the single best definition of what I do is this: I build tools to help people communicate (some of the things they use them for, I like better than others, but ultimately, that’s what I do). I’ve been doing this, in one form or another for the better part of ten years. What I find incredible, to tell you the truth, is that I still have to explain to people what it is that I do. The internet has been mainstream since about the year 1999. And yet, people still don’t understand that the the clever stuff that all these websites do, isn’t the fault of designers (who are very important in other ways), and doesn’t just magically happen because the internet pixies make it work.

(And why, by the way, is it still acceptable for people to be proudly clueless about the basic workings of the internet, as if it were still the provide of the poorly socialised – as if not knowing somehow makes them not a nerd, and confers on them the status of well-adjusted human automatically? I mean, if someone thought that cars just magically went forward, we’d laugh at them. We expect people to at least know words like “sparkplug” and “piston” and have some reasonable comprehension of how they work to produce forward motion, even if opening the bonnet themselves to change anything would be beyond them, don’t we? How many of you actaully know what happens when you type an address into your browser and hit return?)

No, it’s not the sexiest job in the world. But it’s a profession. It requires training and specialised learning. Why the hell aren’t there any fictional characters in my line of work?

I have just read this back. I am clearly on the strong cough medecine tonight, aren’t I? I should probably go to bed, and enjoy my healing coma. Mmmm, medication…

Ugh.

Posted on February 25, 2006 by Alasdair

It turns out that the answer to the question “What would my neighbours do if they had a hammer?” is exactly what you’d expect. It’s not even 9am on a Saturday morning, and my (slight) hangover and I are awake, thanks to the ceaseless heavy pounding.

Bastards. If this is repeated tomorrow, I shall have Words. The words will mostly be things like “Die, fuckpig!”.

I Have The Strange Feeling I’m Being Watched

Posted on February 22, 2006 by Alasdair

Hello to all the people who’ve friended this journal on that back of all that nonsense about chocolate. I can assure you that I’m not usually that interesting. I’m assuming you’re all grown up enough not to take it personally if I don’t friend you back, complete strangers that you are. You’re not missing much, anyway – I mostly friends lock anything I don’t want anyone I’m trying to impress to see, so if you’re after more entertaining nonsense on y’know, actual topics, you’ll get a (slightly) better content-to-drivel ratio by not seeing the friends-locked stuff. Not much better, mind, because I’m quite willing to talk rubbish in public at the drop of a hat, but slightly.