Valentines day does have some impact on me.

This is the impact it has. Go on, send your loved one(s) a Trojan Records Valentine ecard. Validate my employment. Or something.

Just went to the gym for the first time in most of a fortnight.  Sad but true: I’ve missed it.  I am, therefore, what, when younger and stupider, I always swore was The Enemy.  Oh well.  Happens to us all, etc, etc.

stu_n and burge had their birthday do at The Big Chill Bar on Sunday.  It was ace, for both the company and the setting.  I forgot to put a flash card in my camera.  On the one hand, I am very stupid.  On the other, this just means I’ll have to go back there.  Oh, the hardship.

Via tinyjo I find The Way We See It.  Accordingly, I shall be at Savoy Buildings WC2 at 3pm on Saturday, to take photos, should anyone else fancy it.  If the next location (due to be posted Friday) is reasonably nearby (or within easy tube journey) I shall probably do that, too.

Weekend roundup: Photography, clubbing, nap, drinking, coma, badly-needed day off work doing nothing.  All excellent, thank you all.

Week coming: Taiko, clubbing, haircut, photography, possibly more clubbing, persistent vegetative state. 

Following that, it is Valentines day.  For the record: this year, I have decided to adopt to the official position of having no opinion at all about it.  It is neither good nor bad, and does not affect my life, or anyone else’s, in any way unless they wish it to, and as such I have no need for an opinion on it at all.

Mental list:  Things I want:

A Digital SLR.  Unless someone out there is fabulously wealthy, and feels like gifting me with one, then this is just going to have to wait.

An iShuffle.  Next month, assuming the Apple Store ever gets them back in.  I’d like to use the treadmill at the gym again, and I don’t like doing it with an iPod – I worry about the constant jolting of the hard drive, and the iShuffle seems perfect for my needs.

A new tattoo.  I know what I want – a caduceus on the back of my left calf.  I feel like I should wait a while, though – it’s all of six months since I got my last one, after all.    Anyone want to make bets on how long I’ll hold out?

One for the PHP developers on my friends list, because I’m completely stumped.

Set-up is PHP on IIS, connecting to a SQL server 7 database.

The problem is an interesting one – different data is being generated depending on the browser that accesses the page. I have an “artist” object, on of the properties of which is “name”. If I load the page in Firefox, the “name” property has the value I’d expect. If I load the page in IE, the “name” property is blank, despite the fact that all the other data for the object has been loaded. The data all comes from the same stored procedure call. This isn’t a browser rendering error – the source code for the page is different depending on which browser looks at it, and echoing the raw data before any HTML comes back gets different resuklts depending on the browser.

Anyone ever run across this? IIS/PHP behving differently depening on which browser access it?

Anyone feel like wandering around somewhere interesting in London with me while I take photos, either on Saturday or Monday (or both)?  I’m running short of photos to post, and need to get a bit ahead of myself again.  I can offer coffee/drinks/reasonably cheap food somewhere (depending on time of day/location/what we feel like doing) as well as sparkling conversation[1] in exchange for the company…

(If you can think of anywhere to go, that’s good, too.  Otherwise, I’m just going to head for somewhere in zone 1 at random.)

[1] Well, conversation, anyway.

Another note to self, abut you’ll all probably enjoy it. Alan Moore interviewed, and being typically clever and interesting.

I’m still whoring for viewers for electricana.  Aside from a week’s inabilty to upload photos, I’ve managed to keep to my five-a-week goal, and remain optimistic about doing so.

So, what I thought I’d do at the end of each month is pick the top four photos, make some brief comment on them, and try and see if anyone’s willing to circulate it a little wider, on their own LJs and blogs.  So, here you go.  The code to reproduce this is under the cut tag, if anyone would like to pass it on, as it were.  If people are seriously pissed off by the prospect of something like this turning up on their friends page once a month, I’ll filter/cut it, but I’d rather leave this as a public post.  So…

Electricana: January ’05

Under Electric Light
It’s a simple enough shot, this one, but I like the combination of the lines of the brickwork, and the way they draw the eye down to the light, and the colours.  And y’know, it’s a neon light.  I love neon lights.

Awakening
Sometimes, you really don’t need to work to get a good photo.  I work up early one morning, and the bands of colour in the sunrise did all the hard work for me.

Light of Knowledge
The reaction to this one caught me by surprise.  I honestly felt that this was a “well, it’ll do” sort of shot – the composition is slightly off, and the light effect isn’t quite what I was looking for.  But it seems people like it.  Another one where the scenery did all the work.

An Otherwise Dull Day
Another neon sign, and another simple composition, but this time it’s the limited range of colours here that I like, the way that the neon sign stands out.  It feels like quite a New York photo to me, which is odd as it was taken right beside Sloane Square tube.

Photos taken from Electric Arcana.  Photos and text © 2005 Alasdair Watson.  Permission granted to reproduce this post in whole, including this notice.

Cut and paste code

Another one for the sake of memory, this time, a photography site: Peter Funch.

I really ought to sort myself out with one of them del.icio.us things properly, like…

Mostly for my own reference, but they’re fun reading for anyone. (Item 2 via cairmen, Item 1 via Item 2.)

The Law West Of Ealing Broadway – Magistrates Blog.

The Policeman’s Blog – What it says on the tin.

In a rare display of tact, I’ve ummed and ahhed about this one. Dan Curtis Johnson came up with the marvellous notion of Livejournal Rabbit Hole Day, and I immediately decided to take part. Very much my sort of thing.

So I wrote something. And I was about to post it, when I checked my friends page, to find anw reminding people that (rather more importantly) it’s Holocaust Memorial Day today. I’d forgotten. Yes, I’m a terrible person.

This wouldn’t stop me taking part in Rabbit Hole Day, because there’s room for the two things in my life. However, I looked twice at what I’ve written, and concluded that the little bit of biological apocalyptica I’d decided on seems a bit, well, tactless to put it mildly. I thought about not posting it.

And then I thought: no. One does not honour the dead by doing anything but living one’s life. And, yes, this is a small, stupid, and inconsequential thing, but so’s more or less everything that makes life fun. Understand: I’m not claiming that posting it is a mark of respect, or anything stupid. My head is not that lodged up my own arse. It’s just that I personally do not believe in doing (or not doing) anything in the name of the dead.

But, as I say, the tone, imagery and words I chose for this may not be for everyone, given the day. Hence the cut. Proceed with caution.

Down the rabid hole

Anyone out there know much about wireless networking? Anyone willing to come round and be plied with booze in order to sort out the problems I’m having? Please?

(In short: I cannot get my main computer on our in house wireless network, and I don’t know why – the other two wi-fi devices in the house can get on OK, and indeed, the main machine can see the network, but just refuses to connect to it and get an IP address. More details on request.)

As a result of this, my net activity is a bit curtailed. Email responses may be very slow, electricana is annoyingly fucked, because all the good photos are on the other machine, and all told, it’s a bit arse, really.

In other news, PWEI rocked extremely fucking hard. Didn’t get “Inside You”, but got everything else I could have wanted. They put serious effort in, and as far as starts to the gigging year go, I couldn’t have asked for better.

Now, sleep.