Friday, 13th January, 2006

Pwned

erin hacking

I'm not in a trannie-mood at the moment. I'm in a techie-mood. Despite the fact that the Mother Of All Hoop Skirts™ is waiting for me up the road at the Post Office to go and pick it up, I can't quite seem to engage the trannie-part of my brain this morning.

I'm also a bit grumpy — but I'll explain why in a second.

The past few days have seem me return to the Code World™ I was in just before Christmas. Taking a "little break" from what I was working on, whilst it was bloody needed, had the effect of knocking me out of a productive cycle — and I'm now frantically trying to get things to work in time to meet deadlines.

Seeing as my mind is far away from dresses, I thought I might just take a bit of a detour in my usual journaling of pretty things, and write about (a) a film I made a while ago, and (b) the technique I used to make part of it — seeing as I often get asked how I make my films.

So, off I trundle through the dark corners of Erin's hard disk, in search of the notes I made about five years ago that explained what I do.

Here comes the grumpy part...

I fire up my very, very old website — the one I put together for my MA — and there, all over the front page, is stuff I didn't put there. In fact, the stuff I did put there has gone, and the whole page has been replaced by something else

Yikes

A small Google-search for the name of the person claiming credit took me to an archive of web defacements, and sure enough, on the 15th of December, Erin got pwned.

(Well, actually, not pwned technically. He managed to replace one page through what I can only presume was a vunerability in Apache.)

Two days ago, I was writing about the importance to me that my webserver is here in my studio — how I feel connected to it (and therefore to this weblog) because she's sat at my feet. And now I'm feeling a little 'violated' — like someone's broken into my house and scrawled on the walls while I was out.

'scuse me while I go apply every single Security Update that Apple has to offer OK?

...but it's a very nice dress

photo dress

(via flickr.com/people/si08han)

Forget what I said earlier about "I can't quite seem to engage the trannie-part of my brain this morning". This is the most hugest, humungous dress I have ever owned. I am so in a TrannieSpace™ right now

Oh yeah But I can't get through doors in it.

head_clog

moving-image work

(Just continuing my little "All the films I've made in the past" series)

OK, first things first. If that doesn't work, can someone let me know? I think it should (I'm trying to get around the "QT7 crashes XP" thing by embedding an MPEG-4 if you're not on a Mac), but you can never be sure about these things...

(Actually,while we're at it, did the 7.0.4 update to Quicktime fix that bug does anyone know? )

head_clog isn't one of my best pieces of work — it was supposed to be an introductory piece to a larger body of work, and to be honest, is a little clichéd for my liking.

My other problem with it is that the stripes are horizontal.

Horizontal stripes, for me, just don't quite 'do it'. They always end up looking like landscapes (for stills) or 'looking out of a train window' (for moving image).

The section in the middle of that — the black lines against the colour — looks suspiciously like overhead power cables on a railway line, for example. They're not, as it happens — they're made from the same images that I used at the start of Geometry 101, along with a scanned piece of film that I found lying on a floor once.

But having said all that, there are two bits I really like in this piece. The first is the accidental synchronicity in the part I just mentioned. I've often found that if you throw enough stuff into a piece, sometimes it just seems to gel with the audio. The more I watch that section, the more I'm able to convince myself that the timing of the little blips and the movement of the stripes is completely intentional.

The other part I really like is the start sequence. As with a lot of what I do, the bits that look simple are usually the most complicated to do. This little bit of animated timecode looks like it was a piece of piss, but it actually took me ages.

And I had to make a font from scratch to do it...

How to Use Quark Xpress to Make Animated Numbers

howto quark animation

OK, this is a very old tutorial I wrote sometime in 2001. I realise all the screen-grabs are of MacOS 9, and the versions of software I mention are waaaaay out of date, but it should still all work with current versions.

...

I know what you're thinking. You wondering "why on earth would I want to use Quark Xpress to make animated numbers when there's a filter in AfterEffects that does it without any bother?" And it's a fair question. One that I'll have to go back a few years to answer...

When I first started making moving images, I was using a little Apple Duo 280c — and the only software I had on it was whatever I had from my print days, along with a copy of Adobe Premier that I got free with PhotoShop.

I wanted to create a stream of text — one word after an other — in the centre of the screen, so I set up a PhotoShop file at 384x288 and began a long and laborious job, typing in a word, saving the file, typing another doing a Save As... and so on. Then I strung all the files I made together in Premier and — ta dah!

It worked, but it was slow.

I found various ways of speeding up the process — like hacking shortcuts in PhotoShop (this was PhotoShop 2.5 — there was no shortcut for Save As... back then, let alone any Actions) — but what I really wanted to do was type a load of words and have the Mac sort them out into frames.

So I started using Quark XPress. I set up a page to be 384pt x 288pt, and used a continuous text box to set a word slap in the middle of each page. Then I would scroll through the pages, one by one, taking screengrabs of each, finally using an Action in PhotoShop (I was on version 5 by then) to crop the pictures down and save them.

At about the same time, I'd discovered AfterEffects and it's Basic Numbers filter, in particular the Timecode option and used it extensively in Are You a Being. And when I came to do the introduction to head_clog, I figured it would be pretty easy to do the same.

Not so. Even though I had designed myself a lovely font that looked like a Digital Clock Face I found that the kerning in AfterEffects leaves a lot to be desired, and my lovely monospaced font was kerning itself all over the place. I decided I would have to go back to my Quark technique, but also that I would have to find an easier way of converting the pages to QuickTime movie frames.

And so I came up with this technique. Sometimes, AfterEffects's text filters aren't enough and you need more typographical control over your text. And sometimes you just can't be bothered with AfterEffects.

Step 1 : What you need

Obviously, you're going to need Quark Xpress. That goes without saying really. But as well as that, you're going to need Adobe PhotoShop version 6, some way of creating PDFs, and something that's going to let you put a whole stream of image files together in a QuickTime movie or an AVI. Oh, and enough coffee to make at least three cups.

Now then. For the purposes of this tutorial, I'm going to assume that You have Quark Xpress v4.1, Adobe PhotoShop v6, Adobe Acrobat PDFWriter, and Adobe AfterEffects v4 — because that's what I've got.

Before we start, it's a good idea to make a new folder to keep all the files we're about to make in. This can be anywhere on your hard disk, but for simplicity we may as well make it on the Desktop, and call it something like "Quark Frames".

Step 2 : Setting up the Quark Xpress document

The first task is to make a new Quark Xpress Document that's exactly the size of your screen. In this tutorial, I'll be working at Widescreen (16:9) PAL.

Launch Quark Xpress and select "File > New > Document"

Set the width of the document at 1024 point and the height at 576 point (Quark Xpress understands that the "pt" after the measurement means that you want it to be points. And since there are — nearly — 72 points in an inch and we are working at 72 pixels per inch, this will give us a document the same size as a widescreen television picture)

Incidently, this would be a good time to save the document in the folder we created in step 1.

Step 3 : Setting up the Master Pages

Your screen should now look something like this:

(Yah, boo. Look at her with her 22" monitor)

For this technique to be any use at all, and to simpify matters for us, we need to set up a Master Page, so select "Pages > Display > A-Master A". This will (funnily enough) display the master page "A".

Now draw a text box that fills the whole page. Select the box with the Conents tool and select Item > Modify...

(Contents tool)

There are two settings we need to make to this text box. Firstly, we want it to have a black background.

The background colour is set using the drop-down menu in the top right of the dialogue box. Your dialogue box should appear exactly the same as this — if it's not, change the measurements. Next, we want the text to appear in the middle of the screen, so click on the "Text" tab at the top left of the dialogue box.

In the middle right of the dialogue box, set the Vertical Alignment to "Centred" Then click "OK".

Next, we need set up the automatic page numbering, so — whilst still having the text box selected with the Contents Tool, press the following key combination:

This will give us the page number on every page that we create. Using the Measurements Pallete (View > Show Measurements), set the font to Helvetica, the size to 72 point, and the alignment to centred:

Now, in the the Colours pallate (View > Show Colours) set the colour of the type to white:

Your Master Page should now look like this:

Now we need to create our pages...

Step 4 : Making the frames

So, now the hard bit's done, and it's pretty much downhill from here.

Switch back to normal layout mode (Page > Display > Document) — you should now see a black page with a number "1" in the middle of in 72 point Helvetica.

From the "Page" menu, select "Page > Insert..." and enter "50" in the Insert field:

If you make sure that the "Master Page" option is set to "A-Master A" then it will use the page we just set up to generate 50 more pages, each with a sequential number in the centre of it in 72 white Helvetica.

Cunning eh?

All very well, but how do we turn this into a QuickTime movie?

Step 5 : Creating a PDF

...Glad you asked.

I struggled for about two years, trying to work out how to get my Quark Xpress files into a form that I could use in After Effects — and then I found PDFs.

As I said, I'm going to assume that you have Adobe Acrobat PDFWriter. There are numerous other ways of converting Quark Xpress files to PDF, but I find this way a lot easier.

First of all, we need to select the Adobe Acrobat PDFWriter in the chooser, so open the Chooser from the Apple Menu:

In the left hand panel, click on the Acrobat PDFWriter icon and then close the Chooser.

Then go back to Quark Xpress and from the "File" menu select File > Print... This will bring up the following dialogue box:

Make sure that the bleed is set to zero, and registration marks and separations are off, and click on the "Page Setup..." button. This is where we define the size of our PDF:

Initially, it will be set to something like A4, but if we click on the "Custom" button, and change the measurements to "points", then we can set the size of the PDF to match our document — so set the width to 1024, the height to 576 and (very important) the margin to zero. Then click "OK" to return to where we were.

Now click the "Printer..." Button, and in the dialogue box that appears, uncheck all the checkboxes (that is unless you want to either view the PDF after it's been made, or you want to add some authorship information to it).

For some reason, although this seems like an unnecessary step, it's through this dialogue box that we tell the computer where to make the PDF. Once you click "OK", you are then asked to specify a location for the PDF — to keep things nice and easy, put it in the same folder as the document.

Then put the kettle on. This example won't take too long, but if you've set up a very complicated Quark Xpress document with hundreds of pages, you could be in for a pretty long wait.

Step 6 : Letting PhotoShop do its stuff

Now that we have a PDF, we need to turn the pages into individual frames that Adobe AfterEffects can understand.

From version 5 onwards of Adobe PhotoShop, in the "Automate..." submenu of the "File" menu there's been a little command called "Multi-Page PDF to PSD...". I'm not entirely sure why someone thought people might need this function, but it's absolutely ideal for what we are about to do.

Firstly then, launch Adobe PhotoShop, and select File > Automate... > Multi-Page PDF to PSD...

There are three things we need to do now. First, use the "Choose..." button at the top to tell PhotoShop which PDF file you want to convert. If everything is going well so far, it should be in the "Quark Frames" folder we created:

Notice that PhotoShop has filled in the "Base Name:" box with the name of the PDF (minus the "pdf" extension). You can change this if you like, but I'm not going to.

Then, from the "Mode:" pop-up box in the middle, select "RGB". Even though in the case of this example our final files will be in Grayscale mode, it's wise to get into the habit of setting this option as RGB, because our resultant movie will be in RGB format.

Finally, use the bottom "Choose..." button to select the destination folder for our frames. Again, use the "Quark Frames" folder.

Fingers crossed, the dialogue box should look like this:

Now, click "OK" and go and make your second cup of coffee. Once again, this may take a while...

Step 7 : Putting the frames together in AfterEffects

Once PhotoShop has finished, you should have a folder containing the original Quark XPress document, the PDF, and 51 PhotoShop files numbered from 0001 to 0051 (notice how Photoshop has inserted leading zeros in the numbering — this means that the files load in the right order).

Now launch Adobe AfterEffects and create a new composition:

Set the values to match the dialogue above. The "Frame Size" is the same as the size of the PDF (1024 x 576), the "Pixel Aspect Ratio" is "Square Pixels", the "Frame Rate" is 25 frames per second, and the "Duration" is 2 seconds and 1 frame. (You may want to set the "Frame Size" and the "Pixel Aspect Ratio" differently depending on how you plan to use the final movie — for example if you working with DV widescreen set the "Frame Size" as "PAL D1/DV, 720x576" and the "Pixel Aspect Ratio" as "D1/DV PAL Widescreen")

(The "Duration" incidently comes from the fact that we have made 51 frames. 50 frames makes 2 seconds, with 1 left over.)

Now select File > Import > Footage File... which will bring up to following dialogue box:

Select the first PSD file in the "Quark Frames" folder, make sure that the "PhotoShop Sequence" checkbox is ticked and then click "OK". The "PhotoShop Sequence" checkbox tell AfterEffects that we want to import all the files that we just created as one piece of footage. You should now have a piece of footage ready for use in the Project window:

(Notice how AfterEffects has stripped off the numbering from the files — including the "2" at the start. If I had needed that "2" then I could have put a space after the "Document2" in the "Base Name" box when we were converting the PDF to PSD files in step 6).

Drag the footage from the Project window to the Timeline window. This will insert the footage in the centre of the Composition, starting at the current time (which should be 0:00:00:00).

Next, click the High Quality checkbox and select Composition > Make Movie...

AfterEffects will now ask us where we want to make the movie (again, put it in the "Quark Frames" folder), and bring up the Render Queue...

Step 8 : Making the Movie

The Render Queue is where we set the properties for our final movie. For simplicity's sake, set the "Render Settings" at "Best Settings", and the "Output Module" at "Lossless". (Again, you may want to change these settings to suit your needs.)

Finally, click the "Render" button and go and make your third and final cup of coffee.

That's it. You can now view your handiwork using Apple's QuickTime Player.

jumper and jeans

Oh God, same here You don't think I'm actually wearing that now do you? Seriously, I can't get through doors in it. And I wouldn't be able to get any work done today at all if I started swishing around in that

I'm saving it either for (a) a dressing-session with Pauline, or (b) the unlikely event of someone organising a glamorous ball or something. (I could have done with this dress a few weeks ago for the Lancaster Pride opening night I think)

Surely you've had a taste of it?

Oh, naturally Spent a good half an hour waltzing round my bedroom (bumping into things)

I would assume that other XP users WILL need the 7.04 QuickTime update.

Ack well, it'll do them good I think it cures some of the compatibility issues that were in 7.0.3

I was going to say, it should be fine for OSX 10.3.9

That dress looks ginormous!

Oh it is Here's another picture of it...

It's the one I got off Ebay the other day, but what makes it so huge is the 4-tierd hoop skirt underneath it that I got from another seller.

And since I'm a lovely person who likes to do lovely things (like sharing), here's a link to their Ebay store. It's in the States, so it took about a week to get here, but it was worth the wait. Pretty cheap as well — cost me about $50 including shipping to the UK

Aye, but it's going to be fun to iron in (Not that I do much ironing really — that's the advantage of not having to wear a suit to work I guess)

Frustration

tech quicktime

I'd thought I'd been a clever little wotsit by putting different things in the <object> and <embed> tags for that film earlier today. But gradually reports started filtering in that all was not well. So I've put a JPEG in instead.

What's worrying me, is that this whole site that I'm developing for work relies on Quicktime movies and MPEG-4s — and it it's all going Pete Tong on my weblog, then it's probably going up the Gary Glitter on there.

Arse

Thanks Dave

Recipie For Disaster

siobhan drunk random

Ingredients:

• 1 transvestite
• 2 bottles of wine
• 1 weblog
• 3 Macintosh computers
• 2 cats
• Other weblogs and mailing lists (to taste)

Directions:

1. Marinate the transvestite in her own juices by leaving alone in the house all day with only the cats and Macs to talk to.

2. Simmer in a medium oven, seasoning with the other weblogs and mailing lists until bubbling slightly.

3. Baste with wine and serve up on her own weblog — garnished with a large red dress.

...

I've been sat here all day, staring at this screen. My eyes hurt, my tummy is rumbling, and my head is slightly throbbing.

But as well as that, I've got this tiny feeling of 'narkedness' in the back of my head. I dunno what's wrong with me at the moment — tiny stupid little things seem to have the effect of triggering a previously unknown 'angry' personality trait.

Last night, for example, something appeared in one of my inboxes that wound me up no end. It was just a quip that someone made, but I found myself pacing round the house ranting about it.

I very nearly sent a reply, but in keeping with my (semi) new year's resolution of "not posting things late at night when I'm drunk", I waited until this morning — and was glad that I did.

And then this evening, I read something somewhere else in which the author (a) didn't actually read what I said, or (b) bother to spell my name right.

...

Sorry, I'm just really wound up at the moment. I need to get out of this house...

who used to animate by drawing directly onto the film

That would be Norman McLaren would it? The 'drawing audio on film' thing that he did was called "Synchromy" — a wonderful film in which what you see exactly what's on the soundtrack part of the film.

To be honest, the way that McLaren made his stripey films is almost identical to the way I make mine — and, if I could confess, I started doing them right after I saw a documentary on him. The only difference, I guess, is that he used celluliod, whereas I use digital files.

I have another tutorial that I wrote, about the same time as the one above — a step-by-step guide to making stripey films.

But I'd be a fool if I shared that one

Voices in Your Head

self voices

OK, no-one cares about my fabby little tutorial above . No matter. Whatever. I have to say though, that I found something rather interesting about it, reading it again after five years.

The thing is, I've often thought that my writing online has matured over time. If you compare my cringeworthy beginings — anything up to 2003 I think — it's all written from the point of view of a 6-year-old.

(Or at least, that's the vision I have in my head when I read it)

But reading back through that stuff that I was writing (as a boy) in 2001, I was struck by how similar it is to the way I write on here today. It doesn't feel out of place in the general "stream of consciousness" (Thanks K! ), in fact I've only changed two words in it.

A prize for the first person to work out which two words BTW

Mike was talking about 'blog voices' a while back, and while on the main, I agree with him, I'd take it a step further.

Perhaps.

I think maybe weblogs have personalities, and as try as you might, you can't stop your own personality creeping into them. So, to sum up a badly made set of points, I think that my writing has evolved over time — but it's evolved into the way that I actually am.

Does that make any sense at all?

what else do I need

You need to click on it Lana

When I click on it I just get a stream of gibberish

Ah. I get that too on a different machine. I'll have to check the config files on my new server to see if it's dealing with MPEG-4 files properly.

Sorry Selina Although you could pop round and I'll give you it on a DVD

Tried phoning today but you were deep in techie mode

That or I still haven't actually plugged my phone into the wall since November. I must reconnect it sometime...

Dodging The Draft

tranny dresses

Ha! I'm so funny! See what I did there? I made a pun on "draft" being a bit like "draught" and, er, well, I should probably have explained what was in my head before I congratulated myself on such a punning feat...

That dress yeah? Bloody wonderful it is. Sorry to bang on about it so much, but I've wanted something Fit For A Princess™ for ages now, and that hoop-skirt is — quite frankly — the most poofy, bouncy thing I've ever owned.

As well as giving me the volume that that red dress needs, though, it's also marvelous for breathing new life into my saggy wedding dresses.

(I have, if I'm honest with you all, been flouncing around the house in as many big dresses as I can today — knocking over things left right and centre, and leaving a wake of slightly damaged things behind me. The hardest part is going up and down the stairs. I need some kind of Grand Staircase to make a bit of an entrance I think)

But there's one thing about it which is quite, well, disconcerting

The hoop-skirt is, as I've (continuously) said, gigantic. I think you could fit an entire rugby team in there (she said, quietly drifting off into a different mental space altogether).

But it's bloody draughty. There's a really vivid sense of nakedness when you wear it — which may seem daft, but with nothing touching your thighs, it kinda feels like you're not wearing anything at all.

What I need is some bloomers

How To Be Happy

photo

(via flickr.com/people/si08han)

Naming Conventions

mac

I'm always intrigued by why people call things the things that they do. I, for example, call all the machines on my network after Irish kings and queens (more of the latter than the former, fittingly)

Lancaster University seems to have all of it's mail servers named after pets from Harry Potter, and I just spotted frodo.seekbot.net in my logs which suggests to me that the usual clichéd portrayal of geeks isn't too far from the mark.

I had thought that sometime soon I would retell the story of how I managed to pick the name "Siobhan Curran" — because the first time I told it I made a right hash of it.

No flair. No panache.

But I'll save that for some other time (maybe). In the meantime, I'd just like to make it clear that I think the word "MacBook" is the stupidest, ponciest, crappiest, wankiest, lame name I've heard in a long time.

But admit it, you want one!

In all honesty, no. But I have to confess to being totally pissed off that I got a new PowerBook a month before they were annouced

Why I'm Called What I Am

tranny name siobhan

It was interesting, today, reading through someone writing about me and completely getting my name wrong. It felt a little patronising to be honest — like they hadn't taken any time whatsoever to get to know anything about me. At one point, I seem to recall they actually put my (mispelt) name in quotation marks.

That's probably why I was feeling grumpy earlier. Quotation marks?! ME?! FFS

But it did make me think back to where I got this name in the frst place...

Trannies are in a rather unique position when it comes to names. We get, obviously, to choose our own.

It does, I have to confess, often bemuse me about why we end up with the names that we do — I mean, if you had the choice of choosing a name, would you plump for the ones that half the trannies on the planet choose?

I am, obviously, called "Graham" in Real Life. We all know this. For years I hated this name — desperately wishing I was called something more innocuous, like "David" or something. I did. once, flirt with the idea of renaming myself something more Gaelic — more exotic — when I moved over to England. But I didn't

I think a lot of the time, trannies tend to pick their names based on the female-version of their male names. How many other Stef/Stevens are there out there for example?

But whatever. On with the story (as it were)

...

When I first moved over to England, I didn't have a trannie-name at all. I was pretty closeted at the time, and to those that did know about my little oddness, I was just "Graham in a dress". I went through one year of Uni like that — gradually coming out to people that were close to me, but never really embracing that whole "I am another person" thing that a lot of us do.

But one night, I was put on the spot.

See, this is the thing. I've had the name "Siobhan" for well over fifteen years now — that's nearly half the time I've been alive. And you;d think that a monumental decision like "what you would like to be called" would have some kind of "decision-making process" behind it wouldn't you?

Well, frankly, in my case, no.

I was Out to most of the people I lived with when I was in halls at Lancaster. (I lived in Pendle College, if that means anything to you at all. The Old one BTW. It's now Grizedale, and probably up for demolition). I used to walk up and down the Spine in a hideous ballgown, late at nights, for No Reason Whatsoever™

The thing about Halls of Residence, BTW, is that inevitably there's always going to be one guy who no-onw likes. And my corridor was no exception. On my corridor there were several people — the Freshers, the third-year-Greeks, the Second-year-teaching students (ie. me and another guy — both of whom were considered "the cool older ones" by the Freshers), and the "Guy we all hated". He was — to put it bluntly — a letch with no socials skills whatsoever.

He would recount his stories of 'conquests' in the bar, to a bored assembly, gradually notching up Hate Points™ from everyone in earshot.

I think he thought we all respected him. Little did he realise that we were all laughing behind his back.

For what it's worth, BTW, his name was "Martin".

So yeah, the general consensus was that Martin would probably go for anything in a skirt. Anything.

I dunno quite how the subject got broached — perhaps someone wanted to test just how far this "anything" would go — but whatever. We thought we'd see just what the guy's limits were.

"Graham, why don't you dress up like a girl and see if Martin hits on you?"

"Okay"

The caveat from the first time I told this story still applies BTW. I would have serious qualms about doing something like this again. I'm not — as I think I've pointed out, time and time again — someone who takes what I do with dresses lightly. To get dressed-up and try to fool some guy into thinking I'm a woman — even for a laugh — is something I'd have real problems doing.

But still. I was young

That night, I went up to a friend's room on the top floor of the Halls. It was a cunning plan you see — I'd get myself made-up and pretend to be her friend visiting from back home in Northern Ireland. I wore the best clothes I had (I think some of them must have been donated because I had a shite wardrobe in those days), and I slapped on my (very) old wig.

It was halfway across the courtyard to the bar that someone turned round to me and said:

"Hold on. What's your name?"

I hadn't ever really thought about it. The whole night was just a joke and any sense of planning had ended at the "I'm a friend over from Ireland".

So I had to think up an Irish-sounding name on the spot

...

When I was younger, I used to play Double Bass in an orchestra. We toured all over Europe, getting drunk on Strawberry Wine and causing more damage to hotels than a bunch of nerdy teenage isntrumentalists should.

I liked playing the Double Bass. The pieces were a lot easier than when I had to play them as a violinist, or a viola player — plus I got a bit more kudos playing something cool.

The leader of the second-violins though, was a girl called Siobhan Curran.

She was, if I recall correctly, stunningly beautiful. I used to gaze over at her across the cellists and wonder what it would be like to be her boyfriend.

(I also used to gaze over at the leader of the cellists and wonder the same thing about her. And the leader of the first-violinists — but that's another story...)

...

Stood there though, in the middle of the courtyard of Pendle College, having been put on the spot and having to think of the most Irish-sounding name I could in the fifteen seconds that we had before we got to the bar, two words popped into my head:

"Siobhan Curran"

And that was that. That's why I'm called what I am.

...

The rest of the night was pretty uneventful — Martin cottoned on pretty quickly, or at least he cottoned on pretty quickly after someone said to him "That girl you just asked out on a date is one of the guys who lives on your corridor". And later on, some little shit thought it would be funny to rip my wig off and run around the bar with it.

But that doesn't really matter does it? The point is that I now had a name.

And Siobhan herself?

She got married. So she isn't called Siobhan Curran anymore.

Which is a bit of a relief for me really. I sometimes fall asleep wondering what she'd think if she knew about all this.

I kinda hope she'd be flattered.

something with the words "Kahney" and "Leander" on the front.

Whoosh! Right over my head that one Dan hon.

And "Leander"?

Me and Erin

photo erin graham

(via flickr.com/people/si08han)

There's a little story I always tell about this photograph...

Every time I give a lecture about using Final Cut Pro, I tell this cautionary tale...

A long time ago, I made a website to act as a document in support of my MA. It wasn't a very dynamic website — but this was 2001, and I hadn't embarked on my Coding Adventure yet.

For this website, I had in mind that I'd have a photograph of me, on the front page, naked with Erin.

OK, so she wasn't called "Erin" at the time — back then she was just called "BIg G4" — but that's beside the point.

I loved this Mac — I made some seriously good films on her (if I do say so myself), and I wanted to take a picture that represnted how I felt about her — how I felt that my work was just waiting to be discovered within the magnetic medium of her hard disk.

God, that was pompous. Even for me

So, I had this image in mind — but I didn't have a digital camera, let alone one with a remote control. So I had to make do.

I set up a video camera in my studio, and filmed myself sitting down with Erin. THen I took a frame from the film — which is what you see above.

The thing is though, I tell this story to students whenever I'm giving them my "Introductory session into Final Cut Pro" and I'm capturing stuff off a tape. It's a cunning ploy to guard myself against having the wrong tape in the camera when I hit "capture".

But I'm not really worried that I'm about to show them the fabled tape of "me walking around nekkid" — what I'm worried about is that I've accidentally put the source tape for the "This is me getting amde up to look like a woman" film that I made a while ago.

There is a tape somewhere in this studio of me waltzing around my bedroom in stockings putting lipstick on.

And one day I'm going to grab it by mistake as I walk out the house to go to Leeds to give a lecture.

And it's on that day that I'll probably wish that I labelled my tapes better.

Thirteen Things

random

...is good enough for one day yes? Especially on Friday the 13th.

I'l shut up now. I'm in a 'humbling' place right now. Plus, I just told someone how I feel about... ack. Never mind. Like I said. I should just shut up sometimes.