Alasdair Watson

The curtains in Fin’s bedroom are made out of tissue paper. Or something slightly thinner. I, on the other hand, have become accustomed to sleeping with something close to blackout curtains – enormous heavy velvety things that admit almost no light whatsoever. This makes staying at Fin’s something of a trial for me, as I invariably wake with the sun, and then spend the next hour or two trying to sleep, and never managing more than a fitful doze.

At this time of year, at least it’s usually about seven in the morning before the light is strong enough to wake me, but on Saturday night, I was woken at 4am by the moonlight – the moon was almost full, low in the sky, and staggeringly bright. It was gorgeous, looking out over her back garden, everything washed in silver, the light glinting off a mild frost that was just settling. In that moment, I went from early December mode straight into full-on festive cheer. I attempted to wake Fin up to look at it, but in a reversal of the usual way of these things, she swore at me, and went back to sleep.

Sadly, thought it’s a full moon tonight, and quite possibly frosty, it’s also due to be overcast, in London at least.

And I can prove it. Go here and see for yourselves.

Hitherto unconsidered difficulty of having wifi: I don’t have my own SMTP server for the sending of mail. I rely on those of my ISP/office, both of which only work if you’re hooked up on their network, which is only good if you know what they are. But when leeching bandwidth off unsecured networks, I can’t use them, and hell, even just having to switch settings whenever I go between home and office is more hassle than I really want. So I’ve spent a little cash, and got myself an account with AUTH SMTP, so I can send mail whever I am in a more convenient manner.

In order to do this, I’ve had to buy yet another domain name, which brings my total to something like 10 now, which is faintly absurd. I’ll probably ditch a couple of the unused ones come the new year, although now I think of it, it’s only one of them that qualifies for that, and I like the name too much to part with it. I’m sure I’ll get around to the site I was going to build on it one day. Honest.

Post NaNoWriMo stress disorder has set in. I have these strange acres of unfilled time. I’ve written Friday’s column already, desperately trying to fill up the hours, and I don’t know what to do now. I’m tempted to start the next draft of Stormbreak, but I really want to give myself a week or two’s distance from it. Time to start in on something else, I guess. I think I’d rather leave Hard Rain (the sequel) alone for now – the first one is due some extensive re-writes and I don’t want to tie myself to keeping, well, any part of it.

Time to go back to that notion I had for Big Dead Bones, perhaps…

I will forestall the sexual jokes, first of all, by referring you to these parts of the (dictionary.com) definition of fetish:

1: An object that is believed to have magical or spiritual powers, especially such an object associated with animistic or shamanistic religious practices.
4: An abnormally obsessive preoccupation or attachment; a fixation.

I will concede that I like my little bits of shiny geek wizardy, certainly more than my bank manger thinks is healthy, but I don’t wanna hump them, or anything. Having cleared that up, I can move on to talking about my shiny new toy, a Palm Tunsten C, which I acquired most for the joys of wireless networking it bestows upon me. I was resigned to having to wait until next year to be able to abuse that facility in the office, where we are not yet wireless (although we plan to be), but it turns out that actually there’s someone nearby with an unsecured wireless network that I can gank bandwidth off, should I develop a burning need to. The house, has, obviously, been wireless a while now. I discovered this morning that the range of the network just about covers the bus stop outside out front door, which is great because it means I can get my emails as I’m waiting for the bus in the mornings..

Slightly annoyingly, the keyboard I bought to use with it doesn’t seem to work. The thumb keyboard is fine, but the one I was planning to actually, y’know, type on just produces gibberish. Specifically, gibberish I’m not telling it to type. But I’ve got a ticket in with Palm’s support people, who have been helpful to other of my acquiantance in the past, so I live in hope. If all else fails, I’ll send it back to Amazon, and think about getting a different one.

I have discovered something odd, though, in the browser that comes installed. It’s CSS implementation is, erm, quirky, but I can forgive that, given that it’s trying to cut web pages designed for screens that are three times as large down to a useable size, but there’s a very odd quirk if I look at 9A that doesn’t seem to occur anywhere else, to whit: everything renders properly, exactly in line with what the stylesheet is demanding, except the navbar on the left, which just doesn’t render at all. No sign of it. Very strange. (It does, however render my friends page just perfectly – the content column is exactly the width of the screen, provided no-one has stuck any whacking great pictures on it…

Expect more of my adventures with the new toy over the next few days. Because I hate you all, and want to bore you to death.

I am changing my personal e-mail address to one that isn’t in the databases of every third spammer alive in the planet. If you’re reading this on my website, you need to put your email address in the box provided of the right hand side of the page, and you’ll get an email with my new address in it. If you’re seeing in on LJ, then use the link above to go to my home pages and do the same. Sorry to put you to the trouble, but like so many people, in the last twelve months, spam has gone from a minor irritation to quite a large waste of my time, so I’m taking steps to remove it from me life.

One of the reasons I moved over to using Nucleus as my blogging tool is that I don’t like what I’ve been doing with my weblog very much. In the three-and-a-bit years it’s been running, it’s never quite come together into something coherent, and there have been a variety of excuses for that. At first, I was seeing if I would even use it. And then I was getting used to making regular updates. And then I was focusing on other projects. And then I was having a neurotic period. And then, and then, and then.

Of late, I’ve fallen into treating it like a livejournal. Not really a shock, given that almost all the content I’ve written here in the year and a bit since I got my livejournal has been cunningly sent over there as well. But perhaps because I make so much use of my friends page, my own writings have, to a greater extent that I like reflected the narcissim of LJ. LJ, while I love it for many reasons, is not the best environment in which to produce content that is not about one’s daily life. It’s do-able, as others have certainly proved, but as social software, it’s geared toward keeping one’s friends up to date, and, as I say, I’ve rather gotten stuck in the rut of doing. This is, of course, only the latest excuse in the litany, but the time has come to find a new one.

But y’know, I’ve kind of run out, and while I’m sure another one will come along in a minute, I figure that I could at least take a swing at the sort of thing I want to do with this while I feel like I can. If NaNoWriMo has taught me anything it’s that, a little over a year after I got out of the habit of regular writing, I’m more than ready to get back to it. I’ve been doing more and more as the year has worn on, but as much as I love short things like Take A Walk, I really want to get back to doing longer things.

With specific regard to Black Ink, that means longer, reasoned posts about specific topics. It means thinking about things. Doing reseach, if neccessary. Actually saying something worth the time it takes to type it, rather than just the airing the mundanity of my life. (To forestall the comments, though, yes, I will probably still update my LJ with that, because I do like LJ for itself, after all.)

What has this to do with switching to Nucleus? Nothing, exactly, but I was reading Mo Morgan’s rather clever ideas about threading weblog content and thinking that that sort of thing would suit the sort of thing I’m thinking of very nicely – a nice way to chart the progession of an idea, and the point of switching to Nucleus was to give me the freedom to do exactly this sort of thing with my blog – because the data and the scripts are all on my server, I can do as I please with them, thus allowing my to shape the functions of my blog to the form, rather than having it’s form limited by the fuctionality provided by a third party.

So it’s time to start looking at what I can do, while I spend a while writing something a bit cleverer.

I spent most of my weekend watching movies. I saw Love Actually on Saturday afternoon, and watched the extended edition of The Two Towers Sunday afternoon, and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle on Sunday night. Very pleasant.

Love Actually is possibly the biggest pile of sappy nonsense I have ever watched. This is not exactly a criticism, but still, it bears saying. This film has no plot. It’s a series of immensely loosely linked relationships/romances and nothing more. It’s a distillation of RomCom. But then, that’s what it’s trying for, and even the dullest of the romances has laugh-out-loud funny moment, and at the other end of the spectrum, there are couple of nicely realised stories of things going wrong, illustrations that love isn’t an easy, effortless thing. For what it is, this is excellent, but do not go expecting anything more than I’ve suggested here, and especially don’t go looking for a plot.

The Two Towers is, like its predecessor, hugely improved by the extra footage, although again, I can see why just about every bit of it was cut – the noteable exception being the Faramir/Boromir flashback that provides the key to Faramir – without it, he seems flat and dull, with it, he becomes, well, no, not interesting, but y’know, human. But once again, there are only two or three really new scenes – most of the rest of the extra footage is a line or two here and there, short extensions to exisiting material. Still, well worth seeing – you may want to wait for the inevitable twenty disk deluxe edition of all three films, though, as you’re not going to get anything here that you need to see in order to enjoy part three. I bought this as a birthday gift for Marysia, or I probably would have waited myself.

Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle is bigger and flashier and funnier than the first one. Which is what we want from this franchise, oh yes. Over-the-top action for those who were disappointed with the po-faced Matrix. Anyone failing to enjoy this is probably someone who doesn’t know how to relax.

I’ve changed the Black-Ink photolog to run using Simsi, rather than Textamerica. The chief reason for this is that I was in violation of the Textamerica T&Cs – the RSS feed that I was using to pull the pics in from contains text adds that I was stripping out so that they didn’t spoil my lovely page, and apparently, I’m not supposed to do that.

Not that they’d noticed or complained, or threatened to kill my account, but I like to play fair, and besides, if at any time they’d changed their text adds, I’d have had to altered my ad-stripping code, and that’s just hassle. And I like to have everything on one server, y’know?

That said my Textamerica photolog will continue to be kept up to date, chiefly for Fin‘s benefit, as she’s got it listed on her Textamerica page (god knows why – mine’s rubbish compared to hers), and besides, the way I have things set up, I can do that automatically, so I might as well.