Alasdair Watson

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.

One of the reasons I moved to using Nucleus is that I wanted to be able to customise my blogging tool. And indeed, I have just done so, so that whenever I make a post, it’ll look through it for a list of friends that I have defined, and automatically wrap their names in links to their LJs.

It’s by no means my whole friends list, but it’s a list of people I’m reasonably likely to refer to more than once a year. Like Fin, Andrew and Marysia, for example. I think it’s even work if I put an apostrophe after their names, so if I decide to talk about Fin‘s sexy new hairdo, that’ll work too…

There’s a grey wash over the world today. That Autumn weather that can’t be arsed to rain, a dampness blown by the wind that comes to London every year. Matches the scabby building site view I’ve had out the window for the last month or two, and suits the way I feel, too.

It was Fin’s birthday at the weekend. (Ciara’s and Andrea’s, too). I drank an intemperate amount, and as a result had a hangover for most of the day yesterday, and feel washed out through lack of sleep over the weekend – six hours drunken collapse on Saturday night is not a substitute for real sleep, and it’s always a day or two later that lack of sleep really hits me.

All this means that I’m annoyingly behind on Stormbreak – I really need to be writing 6 or seven pages a day for the rest of the week to get back on course.

And, of course, today is Andrew’s birthday. I have no idea what’s happening for that.

But that’s birthday-and-going-out season over. It’s a bit under a month to the next birthday (Marysia’s, which pretty much marks the start of the Christmas season for me.

So, that’s my life. I have run out of party, and now must get back to work. Dang.

Lunch at the gastropub over the road from work, on the company. It’s one of the great perks of working here, Battersea Park and the power station being the other ones, of course. Apparently, the power station came in fourth in a recent list of national eyesores in some magazine or other, presumably voted for by the blind, or possibly just the terminally stupid. But either way, I can add another animal to the list: Springbok. Very nice it was too, on an apple and port mash with bok choi and lentils with red wine jus.

The Tiger Lillies last night were fantastic, as expected. Bumped into the landlord of The Sun (one of my favourite pubs) while I was there – turns out he’s a fan too. Braved the bun-fight for CDs and then had a shopping accident. I’d been intending to pick up the new CD, but somehow bought two of their older ones as well. Whoops.

As if that weren’t enough money to spend, I discovered that Kodo are playing in February next year. Have talked Fin into going, and duly paid a small fortune for two tickets. I urge anyone reading this to give serious consideration to forking out for it themselves – it’s pricy, but no more that you’d pay for a good ballet or opera, and personally, it offers me far more than either of those do. I have no idea how to describe them – their music is beautiful, but it’s the sheet physicality of the performance that makes them well worth the money. So I’ll resort to stealing the words of others, who’re clearly having as much trouble defining them as I am:

“Balancing a deadly aggression with utter tranquility, their sound stretches from the lightest of rainfall to cataclysmic thunderclaps, from pleasant laughter to discordant fear and from silence to – just once here – a wall of sound, as high, frightening and impregnable as a mountain. Musicians, theatre directors and all interested in the sheer power of sound to feed emotions should take note.” – The Grauniad.

“Dynamic, electrifying vision ….Nothing will prepare you for the 1,000 lb. drum assault, the precise timing or the wall of sound. An essential experience.” – Time Out.

Seriously, go and see them.

mild ROTK spoilers

I am not a designer. I can just about lay a comprehensible web page out. But It’s getting round to time for Black Ink’s yearly overhaul, and I can’t seem to come up with anything. Of course, some might say “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, but I have no interest in hearing that. I’ve had an off-the-shelf design for a year now, and I know CSS a bit better by this point, having rebuilt Ninth Art into a table-less layout. But try as I might, I can’t come up with a layout that interests me.

In desperation, I’ve tried just playing with the colours of my current one, and I can’t make that work, either. Anyone know anywhere I can look for inspiration?