You can tell, because I laughed in weary recognition of this…

This’ll turn up later in my linkpost, but I think it deserves it’s own post as well:

Chris Lightfoot died unexpectedly last month (his blog has just been updated with the news, presumably by family).

Odds are, you’ve never heard of him.

His work powers WriteToThem, HearFromYourMP and PledgeBank, among other sites. There’re reasonable grounds to claim that he’s the single individual who has done most to change the way we in the UK interact with our representatives, to alter the way we experience our democracy, in the last 20 years. If there was any justice, his passing would have been marked in the national media.

But it wasn’t. Regardless, I think we in the UK are all poorer for the loss.

I’m attempting to book tickets for Patrick Stewart as Prospero in The Tempest at The Novello. I ring the box office.

They have tickets available for one night and one night only. Result!

But the one night they have is tomorrow, when I have tickets for Faust.

Arse.

Various techy things I want to get done in the next few weeks, just so I’ve got a record.

• Sort out home network, add secure wireless.
• Get all 4 of my machines on speaking terms.
• Clean down Sindri. Get it back up and running with both a Rails and a PHP environment on there.
• Make a final decision about which machine is going to be the main file server for all of them.
• Set up a 3 subversion repositories – PHP websites, Rails websites, Other documents.
• Arrange automatic backups of repositories, and of media library.
• Get Locomotive installed on Ganglari.
• Get all my WordPress sites upgraded up-to-date.

Just a quick heads up:

Jason’s playing in London on the 4th and 7th of March.

He’s at http://www.favelachic.com/ at 9pm on Sunday the 4th. (Nearest tube Old Street.)

He’s at http://www.greennote.co.uk/ in Camden on Wednesday the 7th.

I say this every time, and I’ll do it again: everyone I’ve ever dragged along to see him has had a bloody good time. Almost everyone winds up getting hold of at least one of his CDs.

There are 4 free MP3s by him available here: http://www.elevenrecords.com/free.html

If you’re free either night, then you really should come along.

Reading an article this morning, The Design Disease, reminded me of something I’ve long held to be true – that while you or I might create Art now and again, it’s not the same thing as the urge to be an Artist. (Or in this case Designer.)

Everyone I know who has become a successful (by which I mean: makes their living doing it, and receives at least modest acclaim from their peers in the field) creative type has one thing in common – brain damage. They’re obsessed with their field. I swear to god, I could go round my friends with creative aspirations, and point fingers saying “will make it”, “Will do a few bits and bobs, might make a modest living”, “no chance”, purely on the basis of the level of their obsession. I’d be right about 95% of the time.

It’s a long documented thing, the thin line between Artist’s gift and madness. But the thing I find most interesting is the idea that it can be taught. You can make yourself an obsessive, with a brain that is optimised to do certain things, and you will do better than your contemporaries. All you need to do is be willing to sacrifice a bit of your normal human function in exchange. For some people, this is no contest at all. Others, they hold a bit of themselves back, in fear.

In a move that is obviously all the fault of hirez, I appear to have accidentally bought myself one of them there lomo things – specifically, a Holga. And some slide film, for purposes of cross-processing.

Still, it was all cheap on eBay.

So, adventures in non-digital photography to follow.

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.

It is Saturday. I am in the office. This would be bad enough, but it is pissing down with rain. This is a problem, because I am hungry, but I have no food. The nearest supermarket is a ten minute walk, in which time I will be soaked to the skin.

1) A Trip To London In Maps. Highly recommended. You can see what it did to my head here.

2) Dead Air and Digitalia now fire a notification of to my Twitter stream whenever they are updated. This sort of thing is irrelevant bollocks to most of you, but I feel a certain professional obligation to play with web services like this, just to see how I wind up using them, so that I can point clients/employers at them when relevant.

3) In a similar vein, I have updated my aggregator site, so that it pulls in my myspace blog, althought naturally mpsacks don’t do anything so considerate as provide a full content feed, despite the fact that the content is mine…. I’ve also added some what we are apparently now pleased to call a “lifestream” to the site. It seems like a logical fit with the general purpose of having that site, and again, it may have possible professional uses.

4) I’ve made a start on the first serious post for my myspacks account, and will get on with more on Wednesday. In case any of you are wondering what I’m suddenly doing with all this myspacks nonsense, I’m over there for purely self-promotional purposes. I’ve got some plans for next year that will mean I want to try to build an audience for some work, and I think myspace may be useful in doing it. The blog there is going to be a load of waffle about Art, at least to start with.

5) I’ve gone through the few shots I’ve taken recently, and generally sodded about with photos.

This holiday business is all quite tiring, really.

I’m out all day tomorrow, so if you could all try not to do anything interesting that I’ll need to know about until Wednesday, that’d be ace.