Yeah, more. You’ll probably get a bunch of them in the next while, as I continue to play with the new toy. Was in Putney, pissing about with the camera at lunch, trying to take a look at the area I work in. I’ve adapted the script I use for the photos to allow me display a text blurb as well. You can take a look at what I saw and thought here.

Can’t get PHP to auto generate .jpg thumbnails. It’ll do .gif files, but not .jpg, it seems. Still, to compensate I’ve thrown together a quick script that should auto-index photo directories. If you visit the link I gave you earlier, you’ll see I’ve moved the photos into a subdirectory, and as I add new mini-albums, the simple act of dropping the directory into place should add them to the listing. So that’s something. And it gives me a use for the webspace I’ve got at Electricana.org, as well.

Bought a new camera at the weekend. Canon Ixus V. So I’ve been taking photos, naturally enough. If you’re interested, you’ll find them here. I’m about halfway through writing the scripts I want to use for photo display, but I’m proud enough of them at the moment – I can drop the script, a config file and a template page into any directory of photos, and have them produce a basic display page. At the moment, I have to put thumbnail files in with them, but I’m going to play around with autogenerating the thumbnails with PHP in the next few days.

Or, Slough, at any rate. Had dinner (and spent the night) at Antony and Marcia’s new place, out in the barren wilderness between London and Reading. A good time had by all.

I’m jealous. It’s a lovely house, for what sounds like a very reasonable rent. Slough itself seems quite pleasant and suburban, rather than the concrete hellhole it used to be – there are still traces of it, but it really does seem to be gentirfying at a frightening rate. I honestly could see myself winding up living there, or somewhere very like in the next year or two.

All I’ve got to do is come up with some way to afford a mortgage. This may be a bit more problematic. I don’t want to look for a new job, because I like where I am, but I don’t think I’ll be able to get a decent mortgage on my current money. Still, I can postpone the decision until well after San Francisco.

In other news: I am informed by several of you that the text message thing I had mentally filed under “complete and utter scam” may not have been quite as bad as I thought – apparently, it’s a service run by Genie, and someone will have fed it my phone number in order for me to have got that message.

Of course, I have deleted the message, which rather preculdes me phoning it back (although I’m unclear on whether or not you get to find out who it was sending the message anyway). But I am rather intrigued to know who would be feeding my number into it. I mean, I think I know all the women who have my phone number, and in the first instance, most of them aren’t single, and secondly, of the two or three who are single, I feel pretty confident in saying that they don’t fancy me.

Yes, it could of course be a man, or someone who isn’t single. I am discounting these options, for no other reason than because if I must have mystery people sending me weird text messages, I’d like to believe they are someone that there’s at least a chance I might want to sleep with. Of course, it could just have been a wrong number. If so, I choose to believe that it was an attractive wrong number.

I was digging about on my hard drive last night, looking for some old reference material I saved, and I came across a fragment of something I don’t remember writing, notes toward something bigger, just needing a spine to hang it off before I make something out of it. A story set in a bar called “Revelations” and populated by a weird cast of deviants, secret people and divine lunatics. I know it’s defintely something I wrote myself – it’s got my familiar thought-shortcuts all over it, and I have unconciously recycled one of the lead characters into something else.

But I have no memory of writing it.

I wish Tom had link anchors on his blog at the moment, because I really want to link to the most recent post on his site. I know I’m a big geek, but god, it made me laugh…

Been a while since I stuck any photos on here. Don’t know why – I’ve just been looking throught the file of eyemodule photos I have, and realising that I still quite like some of them. I took this one ages ago, sitting in Borders cafe on Charing Cross Road. In case you’re not aware, the shop across the road used to be the biggest bookshop in the world. I remember going there as a kid, and thinking it was a really magical place, all nooks and crannies, turn a corner and find yourself in a totally unrelated section – go from Asterix to Egyptology in two strides.

London’s not the same as it was when I was a kid. Sometimes, I’m kind of sad about that.

I have just recieved a text message saying “I’ve always liked U. It’s time 2 come clean.” from someone calling themselves TXT FLIRT. There is a callback number, that clearly states that this is a premium rate call, that will cost me most of a fiver to phone back.

How fucking thick do they think I am? And more importantly, how did they get my mobile number?

I failed to do any work after getting home last night, because two of my favourite celebrities were on TV. John Peel was on Room 101, and, by the standards of the show, failed miserably, taking most of the items he was trying to have cast into the room home with him. Following more or less straight on from that, Billy Connolly‘s new show, on of his “World Tour” series, this time visiting Ireland, England and Wales.

Peel’s a marvellous chap, combininng a real love of new music with a sort of reassuring steadiness, and a dry sense of the ludicrousness of, well, everything. There’s something immensely comforting about his presence in British media – as longs as he’s around, there’ll be someone with some sense on air…

Connolly, as well as just being screamingly funny, has a similar sort of sense, and a psychogeographer’s instinct, a knack for finding the interesting places, the slices of history and art and touches of the weird that make a place interesting, along with an eye for the things that bind a community together, make a place what it is. Well worth your attention.

Sometime in the next few days, I shall be sending out the info for Thought Bombs. A few people have mailed me on the strength of the name alone, wanting to be involved, which I regard as a good sign. But either way, as of tonight, the back is broken on the required tech-work, so all I’ve got to do is write up the sort of call for contributors that you’d all have to be mad to refuse, and finalise the utterly minimalist design I’ve been working on.