Can anyone recommend me a place to get 120 film developed, or even just a guide as to how much I should pay? My local shop are charging me around the 20 quid mark for a roll of 16, plus a set of 6×4 prints and a digital copy.

And while I’m paying it as a one off, if this is the regular price, then I don’t expect I’ll be doing it terribly often, since that’s about the same price as I paid for the bloody camera.

(Anyone saying “learn to print your own” will be laughed at. While I wouldn’t mind, I think my housemates might object to my turning our toilet into a darkroom.)

Tell me about examples of good design that you’ve seen recently.

I don’t just mean functional, or informative – in fact, I don’t give much of damn about what the thing does or is. I want you to show me examples of something that you thing is really cool, visually cutting edge, and still clear and comprehensible.

Adverts, websites, t-shits, whatever. I just want a wash of fresh design stuff that I haven’t seen.

(I really really must sort out that subscription to Creative Review.)

Were I to attempt a videoblog, this is where I feel the bar currently is.

It’s because someone has unfortunately afflicted the electric internet pixies in our phone line with a case of the black death. We’ve dumped their little digital carcasses in a plague pit, and we’ve got a fresh batch on order but apparently there’s a quarantine period, and BT won’t let us have a fresh lot in until Monday.

(I’ll stop torturing the metaphor now.)

I won’t be on-line outside of office hours. If you want to get hold of me, use the mobile. Or your hands.

Just trying to organise my thoughts about what I want to do with my on-line presence this year.

1. Well, there’s this LJ. The same old rubbish.
2. Flickr/electricana and Electricana.org. Photography. I need to put a portfolio site together on the domain proper – I’ve tried a few variations of the thing there, and liked none of them, but I’ll get one sorted.
3. alasdair.biz. Remains as it is – linklog and occaisional spot to think about websites.
4. ala.sda.ir. As is. Aggregator.
5. Vox. Scratchpad for this photos/text idea I’ve had kicking about for 18 months now.
6. Myspace. I think I’ll just sack it off. It’s a means to keep in touch, but it’s not a good blogging platform.
7. Dead Air. A place for things I’m actually thinking about, which these days mostly means Art. I need to write up something on graffiti, and something on Duchamp’s Fountain, before they leave my head.
8. Black Ink. Finally got a blogging platform back on it after a year of it being dead. Still wondering what to do with it. Used to keep short fictions there, but since I produce them at the rate of about one every three months, there’s no point. What little of that sort of stuff I do should go to Vox for now. Thinking about trying to something halfway to topical with it. Or possibly just writing the most outrageous madbastardism on it – stream of conciousness fragments, cut ups and general randomalia. Alternately, I may move what’s on Dead Air to Black Ink, and then use Dead Air for madbastardism, just because the title fits better.

Secondary thought: I’m moving away from LJ as a place to write anything over a couple hundred words, because I don’t feel it’s the right kind of context for anything other than personal life and conversations with friends. I find I censor myself, thinking “no bastard on my friends list is going to give a toss” or even just worrying about seeming pretentious. But, saying that, I also know that it’s trivial these days to post anything I produce in WordPress to LJ. Should I set up another journal for the purpose of dumping the contents of alasdair.biz, Dead Air and whatever I wind up doing with Black Ink to? Should I just dump it here anyway?

I’ve been trying to write some little memorial for him, something to explain what his writing meant to me, the huge, huge effect it’s had on me, and I keep coming up short, deleting paragraphs of content because there’s no way I can make you understand what it felt like when I first encountered his work.

I’ll leave it at this: more than any other writer I’ve ever read, I would not be the man I am today if I hadn’t read his books.

I’ll leave you with this quote, in the hope that you can see some of the value in him that I do:

“Please pardon my levity, I don’t see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd.” – Robert Anton Wilson, 5 days before his death.

But this both here and on my workblog, because well, it’s social media, and professionally relevant, but it’s also something I’d like more of my friends to use.

I’ve been playing with Twitter for a while now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I really like it, for two reasons.

It is the single simplest way I have to put a quick note somewhere I know I’ll find it later on. The post via SMS function (which I know most blogs have, but I don’t want that sort of content on a blog) allow me to note things I want to see/do/buy/read or whatever, wherever I am.

But more than that – I like the way that when my friends on there update, I get an unobtrusive little notification in my IM client. (Which reminds me: GTalk users can find me at the predictable [firstname].[surname]@gmail.com). It’s a nice, effortless way of hearing from them, especially those I don’t see very often. It promotes a surprising sense of connectedness. I don’t just hear about what they’re worrying about, or what they think is worth writing a couple of hundred words over. I get little details that I would otherwise go unremarked, except perhaps over a pint. And because it’s not something I have to seek out, I don’t find myself bored hearing about what they’re having for lunch, or whatever.

So go on, sign up. You might find you like it.