Monday, 6th March, 2006

Expectant

random shopping webdev

It's half-past eight in the morning. I'm lying on my sofa with my laptop, coffee, fags, and a rather fetching blue nightie, wondering if I should maybe get dressed properly.

There are a few things coming in the post at the moment, and I don't want to give the postie the shock of his life by signing for a package looking like what I do right now.

Those few things, incidentally, include:

• some DVDs from Amazon

• a replacement for my Elgato EyeTV (because it's busted already)

• the most enormous dress in history

(It's so big, it had to be sent in two packages )

I'm also expecting a Spark to pop round to see if he can fit me a power socket in my outside loo, so that at last I can get a washing machine, and not have to do my socks in my sink every sodding week.

...

This afternoon, I've got to go see a client. I did a small website for a local gallery a while back — nothing fancy, just a bog-standard HTML thing — and they've been bugging me to show them how to update it for quite some time now.

I'm worried about this, because I haven't been able to do my usual thing of "Let's make you a blog, then you can use that as a CMS" routine.

Essentially, I'm going to have to show them how to edit the code.

Yikes.

It could all go horribly wrong...

...

Just one little morning-based contemplative thing — while it's in my head. I'm concerned that I'm getting a little stuck in a routine — a pointless and unproductive routine. Weekends kinda go like this:

• wake up with hangover

• drink coffee and swish around in nightie for several hours

• go to shops to buy wine and fags

• write pointless shit on the internet

• lie on sofa reading pointless shit on the internet until 6 o'clock

• drink wine

• dress up (and all that entails)

• pass out

• repeat.

I need some variety. Perhaps.

And how!

Portraiture

photography portrait

There's been a consistent rumour floating around that the next Video iPod will have a screen that fills the whole, um, front. Regardless of what I happen to think about these "OMGWHATISAPPLEABOUTTORELEASE?!" exercises (I think they're pointless and serve only to over-hype things, personally), and regardless of the fact that ever single "secret development photo" that gets posted online usually turns out to be a fake (see this), The Register pointed to some rather convincing pictures this morning...

"Next-gen video iPod spotted on web"

But, like I said, I'm not one for mindless speculation. What did strike me as interesting though, was the possible implications of such a thing...

Telly is, and always has been, landscape. 4x3 or 16x9 — it's always wider than it is tall. There are, no doubt, logical reasons for that. In the early days of cinema it was the best way to represent the 'theatrical' element of the first films.

Also, our vision tends to be horizontal — we look left and right, moreso than up and down.

(I'm sure that there are lots more reasons, but my head is fuzzy this morning)

The thing is though, I've been noticing that when it comes to mobile phones — photos and videos that is — it's more natural to hold the things the other way araound. Their shape — the fact that they fit neatly into a cupped palm — intuitively forces us to film and shoot things in a portrait orientation.

Even my K750i — with its shutter button on the side — feels a bit odd when I'm holding it at 90 degrees. And despite getting a larger view, it feels 'unnatural' to hold it horizontally when flipping through pictures.

I've also been noticing it a lot with the phone-videos that my students stick on our website. Most of them need to be rotated to be seen properly (and although I've written a 'rotate this' script for photographs, I haven't tried it with QuickTime yet).

The only two examples of 3x4 (or 9x16) TV that spring to mind are Brian Eno's experiments in the eighties (?) and the 'video-phone' sequence in 2001 : A Space Odessey.

I was just wondering, if — with a full-screen iPod — vertical films are something we're going to see a lot more of.

(/me goes to try and find links to Brian Eno's stuff...)

...

Brian Eno's 14 Video Paintings

Also...

Watching the film, he even turned the television on its side, as an experiment. Thus Eno invented "painting" with a video camera.

(from)

That'll do

Karma

shareware

Not so very long ago, when I was a poor, skint, shareware hoarder, I used to download things willy-nilly and then try and find hacked serial numberz for them.

Bad Girl™

Recently though, I've been coming to the conclusion that the warm cosy inside feling of having actually given the equivalent of a few quid to some software developer far outweighs the loss of cash.

I'm about to register SpamSieve (because it is that good) this morning, and last night I sent Michael Fortin (who ported Markdown to PHP) something off his Amazon wishlist.

Because, well, basically I've been using it for a good couple of years, and I wanted to say "thanks"

...

Just one little curiosity relating (indirectly) to SpamSieve: I got a false negative this morning. That's not bad really — it makes two in the past month (and two false positives — I still check through the spam mailbox just in case).

It was one of those usual phishing emails — from 'Barclays' this time (its usually the Halifax or Lloyds) — and I would have completely ignored it, were it not for who it was addressed to.

The email address was my princess[at]siobhansplace.co.uk (which I never use these days), but the To: header was my real, full, boy-name.

I'm wondering how the hell that happened

Can You Just..?

house electricity

One of the phrases that used to fill me with dread when I worked as a repro technician, was that one: "Can you just..?" — it always preceded a request for something that sounded easy, but in fact meant that I would have to spend the rest of the day wrestling with highly complicated techy things.

"Can you just make the type a bit bigger?" — on an already flattened Photoshop file...

"Can you just take uncle Bill out of the shot?" — and replace him with what?!

You know the sort of thing, I'm sure.

Today though, I turned the tables.

I often wonder if it's a surprising thing that I have an outside loo I guess to most people in the UK this is No Big Thing™ — especially here in the North, where most of us seem to live in old Victorian terraces. It's only very recently (relatively) that my house had an inside loo — maybe about 12-15 years.

My next-door neighbour keeps telling me the story about how the old lady that lived here before the guy I bought it off came panicking to his door one night, because the toilet had broken.

It wouldn't flush, apparently. Or it kept flushing — one of the two.

J and F who used to live next door (on the other side) turned their outside loo into a storage place for bikes and stuff — but I just use mine for keeping crap in it. Old tools, half-empty paint pots, off-cuts of wood — all the usual stuff you expect to find in a hoarder's shed really.

But I had a really good idea a while back — one that would (a) put the loo to use, and (b) solve the "I forgot to leave somewhere for the washing machine when I got a new kitchen" problem I've had for over a year.

There's already a water supply to the toilet (natch), all I need is power

"Can you just run me a cable out to the toilet and fit a socket?" I asked the electrician who turned up a few moments ago.

*sharp intake of breath through teeth* — uh oh.

"Armoured cable ... blah blah blah ... drill through wall ... blah blah blah ... RFD socket ... blah blah blah ... junction box ... blah blah blah ... clip cable over door ... blah blah blah ... four hours ... blah blah blah ... about three hundred quid"

THREE HUNDRED QUID?!

Yikes I was expecting about fifty quid and a cup of tea.

My motorbike budget has just dropped a little

Poo

photo

(via flickr.com/people/si08han)

I was home one minute later. I passed the van as I was driving up my street. In fact, I waited at the end of a narrow bit to let him pass. At the back of my head, I was wondering if I should jokingly ask him if he had a package for me ... I wish I had now

Yeah, see, this is the thing is it not? I have a 'tendancy', if you will, to bodge a lot of the things that I do. Not all of them, she quickly points out — but enough to warrant Public Concern™ when the words "DIY" and "mains electricity" (not to mention "outside" and "water") occur in the same sentence.

Of course, I could do it. But I have a feeling that if I did, and something went wrong, I would totally invalidate my insurance.

Thanks for the info though Jenna — if it was something paultry like 12 volts or something, I'd be out with my wire-strippers and a roll of insulating tape (Jo, one does not use Gaffer for electrical stuff — that's just not the done thing. One uses it to attach sockets to walls and the like).

I've kinda made up my mind to go ahead with it BTW. Selling this house at a later date — with nowhere for something as basic as a washing machine — would be kinda hard, I reckon.

So all-day nightie-lounging is allowed, I think.

But just think what I could achieve if I was some sort of energetic, organised, busy-as-a-bee person whose first thought after getting home on a Thursday night was "I think I'll finish off that piece of code before tea", rather than "I think I'll finish off that box of red before bed"

Don't know how this will affect people like B&Q.

They'd tell you to "just do it"

Wait, that's Nike...