Unreliable information since 1972
If anyone out there is a designer/generally handy with photoshop, and wants to do me a favour (and earn themselves a pint), then if you wanted to pick one of these logos (the ones with white backgrounds, for preference) and adapt it so that it looks more or less the same, but with the name of the company replaced with my name, I’d be hugely grateful.
(I’m looking for something in the 350 wide by 90 pixels high area, if possible.)
I think it’s very important to pay close attention to the things that make you smile, each and every day. The little things. You life will be infinitely better if you do.
For example: I no longer work in East Acton. This is one of those things that’s continually brought home to me, and always makes me smile. Today, it was brought home to me because I have just eaten a sausage roll for lunch.
Were I in East Acton, this would have been a Greggs special, made from lips and eyes and genital parts. Grey, and rubbery and flavourless, encased in pastry made from salt and lard.
But I am in Battersea and the local sandwich shop sells sausage rolls that are sourced from a particular farm, and made with real meat taken from lovely, lovely Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs. I half-suspect that if I had pressed him, the owner might have been able to tell me the name of the specific pig whose fleshy parts I have just had for lunch. It was spicy and meaty, and the pastry was perfect. Hurrah.
So, now I have a new thing to be happy about.
What has life brought you today to make you smile?
marysiak is playing Prospero in the Tempest at The Hen and Chickens in Islington from the 28th of March to the 1st of April. My current plan is to go on Friday the 31st.
Anyone else want to come along then, and see some Shakespeare with me?
I had a bloody marvellous weekend. You should all be very jealous. Friday night, I went to see the might Golgol Bordello, gypsy punks. (Side note: I am listening to more and more Eastern European/klezma tinged stuff in a variety of genres. I am not sure what this means, although More 4 was at pains last night to inform me that Russia is dying, which may be significant in some way.) The gig was ace, although I boggle that they were originally supposed to be in the Mean Fiddler. They got bumped up to the Astoria proper, and it was a full on sardine-tin job. Still, they had even more energy live that Flogging Molly, something I had not hitherto thought possible. Complete Eastern European mad bastardism. See ’em when they come round again.
Then there was a slight drinking accident with the rest of Friday night. ewa is home, and obviously it’s all her fault, because I would never do a thing like that on my own.
Still, the hangover was beaten back with the aid of a large fry-up, and then it was off to see the Yamato Drummers. I’ve seen a few different Taiko outfits now, and I think that these people are the best I’ve seen. Kodo have the more traditional show, and possibly even a more physically impressive one, and Yamato are all about laughter and marvellous energy. It was a matinee show, and there were a fair number of kids in the audience, loving it, something I have a hard time imagining them doing at a Kodo show. My only gripe is that I wasn’t allowed to take photos, and that only because some of it looked so good, I’ve have had to be asleep not to get decent shots out of it. They’re on for another week, and there may be a few tickets left. Go if you possibly can.
On, briefly to coffee, and thence to johnmazzeo‘s birthday drinks, to wish the aged one all the best, and say hi to a few people all-too-briefly, since I hadn’t seen half of them in months.
And then to sushidog‘s extremely civilised port and cheese evening. I am now officially a middle-class grown-up, but somehow it’s less ghastly than my sneering eighteen-year-old self thought it would be. Thanks to one and all for making the idea of being a respectable adult almost as palatable as the port.
Sunday was rather more relaxed, and certainly rather better rested, spent as usual in the delightful company of lovely people. And so back to werk.
Apropos of not very much: I have my new dead-air.org domain running (in a slightly-concealed manner, at least until I can get a few last details sorted out) but I need a) suggestions for new sources for mad science news, or just feeds full of unusual and horrible things to wire it into, and b) a WordPress template with an urban or radio-styled theme. Anyone able to help with either?
I picked up a copy of Mustard in GOSH, yesterday, because it was a quid fifty, and contained a sizeable interview with Alan Moore. In between talking about comics, and his new novel, and etc, there is, as usual, a bit about magic, in which Alan says “I approach magic the same way I approach writing – no one taught me how to do it, I just thought let’s take a look at this from the outside, see if I can figure it out, and come up with my own approach from there. Y’know, magic is an art, so I’ve decided to approach it the same way I would any art.”
He goes on to say a lot of other things, some of which I agree with, and some of which I don’t, but that quote is such a nice summation of my attitude to the whole thing, I though it was worth noting. I’m always suspicious of magic traditions that require teachers and initiations, and similar bollocks, partly because they have the stink of religion on them, and if magic is anything concrete and proveable, it’s a device for thinking for one’s self, by one’s own lights (I think it’s more, but that’s the most basic use for it, I feel) where as every. single. religion. is about suggesting to their followers that “this is the way you ought to think/feel”. Some of them are nicer about it, some (many) don’t evangelise, some appeal to different subsets, some don’t suggest that it matters much if you do or don’t, but still, every relgion I’ve run across is a means for defining your patterns of thought by the light of belonging to a group of like-minded others. If you like it, ace, glad it works for you, but I have no need for it myself.
I also avoid them partly because, as Moore says: magic is an art (or the Art, if you want to get terribly pretentious about it), and frankly, teachers and tradtions and that sort of thing seems as useful to me as writers workshops, or painting classes. Again, if you like them, good, glad you’re happy. They’re not for me. I’m a hopeless autodidact – if I can’t learn it on my own, by practice and reading a few books, then I don’t want to know. Creativity, to me, is a totally individual thing. Being taught someone else’s techniques *might* be helpful, but I think it has as much, if not more chance of just getting in the way.
I have this sense that today might be a slightly odd day.
(Cheese update: not *as* fucked up as the opium shit, but still, a bit of quality traumatic subconcious behaviour last night.)
Written a couple of bastard clever AJAX based tools. This is incomprehensible to most of you, I’m sure, but basically, they’re quite tricky, and prior to this week, I had done almost sod-all AJAX related stuff, so what it basically means is that I am a god-like genius, and you should all be Very Bastard Impressed, OK?
In my spare time, I have put together http://ala.sda.ir, which is basically a one-stop shop for all the various places I produce writing, photos, and general stuff. I’ve got a few bits and pieces left to do on it – I want to more clearly mark the origins of the different posts, and while it goes and fetches all the content itself, at the moment it only does so when I tell it to, rather than, say, automatically checking every few hours. I’ve got a couple of hoops to jump through to make it do that, but that’s fine.
I’ve also found time to finally sort myself out with some decent time planning stuff. If you should be moved by insatiable curiosity about what I’m doing on a given day, you can get out http://ala.sda.ir/cal which will list those of my movements as I’m willing to share with the world. (Before anyone asks: on those Wednesdays where they or I aren’t busy, I visit my folks.) If anyone knows of a PC app that will allow me to convert from iCal (which it uses) to vCal (which my PDA uses) format, then I will buy you a pint if I wind up using it. I also need to write a tool to pick up the week’s diary every Monday, and dump it out, probably both to LJ and to ala.sda.ir.
I’ve registered http://www.dead-air.org, which I intend to wire into half a dozen blogs and news sources, as a sort of personal info-feed.
I’ve also been to the gym once (would have been twice, but I had the plague), read three books, picked up two levels in World of Warcraft, and tonight, I’m off to see what promises to be a storming gig, followed by a packed weekend.
Can you tell that I’m feeling more like myself than I have in six months?
Does anyone reading this use any online calendar/event planning sites? (I’m on upcoming.org, for example.) What do you use? Why?
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.
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.
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.