Friday, 31st March, 2006

This Is Why I Want A Motorbike

photo

Two days parking. Fucking rip-off

A Further Analogy

teaching computers

Just re-reading what Susan said yesterday this morning, I thought I could extend it a bit...

you teach them to read anything, so they can handle both books that have not yet been written

Yesterday, one of the students came into my Mission Control with a bit of a problem with his laptop. He was using a programme called Live to sequence some stuff, and it had bizarrely stopped responsing.

Everything in the main programme window was working — but none of the menu-bars was

Seriously, it was bloody weird — the poor guy had this complex series of MIDI things going on, and he couldn't bloody save it. I tried everything I could think of, but nothing I did made the menus spring back into life.

The thing was, it was a totally different kind of programme that I'm used to — and had a way of working that I find is common in audio applications, everything reinvented and accessible through one main window rather than having pallets and normal controls.

I theorised that whatever it was linking the programmes internal thing to the rest of OSX had crashed, so I dived into the CrashReporter logs ... but nothing

In the end, I had to give up — but I guess with enough time and a bit of research I could probably get my head around this weird interface.

Analogy-wise though, it reminded me of when I first sat down to read Trainspotting. Couldn't understand a bloody word of it. It took a long time, and determination, and persistence. It was like English, but it took me quite a while to adjust my reading skills to be able to flow through it comfortably.

...

Sorry it's early on Friday morning and my head's a little fuzzy. Had a bottle of Shiraz last night — Shiraz not being my most favourite type of wine (but it was free!), and stronger than what I'm used to.

Hence the tenuous and torturedly-inserted analogy where there should be pictures of pretty things

I was about to point towards the link underneath the Flickr bit of the form, but I see the url isn't working. So http://www.flickr.com/help/account/#90 (and I'll fix the link)

It's the last bit of the url to your profile/photos — my photos are at http://www.flickr.com/photos/si08han/, so my alias is 'si08han'

Let's Take The Piss Out Of Local Newpapers!

funny newspaper local

Every week, on Thursdays I think, the weighty tome that is The Citizen comes through my door.

I say "comes through", actually I mean "is left half-sticking out of my letterbox so that every passing thief knows that I'm not home", but that's a personal gripe between me and whoever it is that delivers the paper, so let's not go there.

I have a long-standing rantage against the local paper — each time I skim through it (especially the letters page), I'm gobsmacked about how petty most of the issues concerning people around here worry about. I'm also dumfounded by the need they seem to feel to find even the most tenuous link between some national news, and Lancaster — and I believe that somewhere, my esteemed fellow Lancastrian blogging-colleague Looby has mentioned the Citizen's 'exclusive' about how a local woman's birthday party was ruined because her son couldn't travel up from London on the 7th of July last year...

But still, regardless of all that, I was just having a tentative scan through this week's offering, and I came across an "advertisement feature" near the centre pages, extolling the virtues of shopping in Church Street (home of fine charity shops, and pre-burgled jewellers¹)

There are a few things I'd like to just point out about this advertisement feature, the first being the very first sentence...

The Historic city of Lancaster — originally the Roman settlement of Lun-Castrum, or the fort on the River Lune — is one of the most beautiful and historic places in Britain.

Um, hello! We live here FFS. We know this already. I mean, really, just who are you pitching this too? Did you expect me to read through this and think "Ah, Lancaster eh? I must visit this wonderful place someday".

And did we run out of adjectives half way through? "The Historic city [...] is one of the most [...] historic places in Britain"

Really? No kidding. Wow (I actually counted five "historic"s in twelve sentences, including the headline and a photo caption)

But it goes on...

And lurking right in the heart of the City Centre is the stunning Church Street — a real hustle and bustle...

Wait. Let me stop you there. "Stunning" you say? "A real hustle and bustle"?

Funny how the pictures on the page depict a dreary, overcast day, and a street with no-one in it.

For centuries, travellers approaching Lancaster have been greeted with the magnificent sight of the medieval castle as it presides over the city's compact, historic heart.

Really? We have a castle? Shitty fucking death, I'm glad you pointed that out to me, otherwise I would have been wondering what that great big stone house at the top of my hill was for, like, eternity.

I mean, I could go on. Whoever wrote this obviously had four columns to fill, and started drinking just after they got to the bottom of the first one. The effervescent language, the hyperboles, the exaggerated enthusiasm used to described "that street up the back of Wollies with the Nags Head — oh wait, it's not the Nags Head any more", it beggars belief.

But no, that's not my favourite part of the whole thing. Not at all...

My favourite part is the directions to me — the reader — of how to follow this piece of prose through a very tricky page manoeuvre:

more on facing page

Thank God! — I wouldn't have known where to look otherwise. And then, just in case I lost track of the thread for a second — just in case I picked up this story half-way through and wanted to go back to the start — there, at the top of the "facing page", it says...

from page 18

No shit Sherlock.

Honestly, as each day goes past, I feel like my intelligence gets insulted more and more.

...

(¹ Exciting piece of "Siobhan Curran — Action Transvestite" for you: quite a few years ago, I was wandering up Church Street — to get my Giro or sign on or something — when I passed a guy sitting in a car with his engine running. "Odd", I thought, and continued up the street. I turned round though, and saw another guy come running out of the jewellers pointing a gun. I managed to give the Police a description of them, that landed them in the Castle The event has featured a couple of times on those CCTV-Crime things on telly — you can quite clearly see the owner of the jewellers cowering in the background, as the customers shout at the robber and give him shit )

Guardian podcasts

link

Cool — and the Media one has David Tennant and Billie Piper

30 Years of Apple Adverts [wired.com]

link

This one *has* to be my favourite

Be thankful you get the Citizen

Why?!

The only benefit I get from it, is as a firelighter. Honestly hon, if you want mine, you can have it

Yes, I viddied it once, but I found it hard to get my gulliver around, my droog. I needed a firegold or dva to pony it.

I Am Up To Something

photo

What? Up to something, or not fond of marzipan?

No marzipan in this one, just sponge and icing and jam

BTW, Jane, I wish I could make cakes as good as this one

I'd like to see a series of photos...

Ah, too late. Cake is made and iced and, erm, candle-ised. I got too involved in it to take pictures — apart from a couple of it before icing.

I'll show tomorrow.

(PS. There was lots of mess)

Diversion

photo

Ack well, sure, if I'm having seafood ... and it was free.

Just a thought: You never hear desperate conversations like this do you?..

"OMG I've spilt my white wine on your sofa!"

"Quick! Pour some red on it to stop it staining!"

Compare And Contrast

photo

It's almost been two years since I last had my hair cut (short). I was just drying it there (with the intention of taking a completely different type of photograph), and I thought "Wouldn't it be interesting to try and do a split-screen comparison of myself from then and from now".

So I did.

Kath, do not fear the inbetween stage — the inbetween stage is your time for play and fun-ness. Sure, it's unkempt — but it's the inbetweeness that people like us thrive in

Actually, Can I Talk About My Hair For A Bit?

hair

A couple of years ago, on the gazillionth floor of a hotel in Atlanta, me and a few other bewigged trannies were bitching about a girl we knew:

"Yeah, she thinks she's so special, just 'cos she has her own hair"

Granted, the girl in question would walk up to people randomly in the street and delcare that "it's my own hair", so AFAIC, she deserved every bit of bitching we laid at her.

But still. Sometimes I wonder if my own smugness at not having to wear a wig is slightly hypocritical.

This is not an insightful post, by the way — it's just a couple of thoughts. I'm far too drunk to be making coherent sense, and I've more important things on my mind right now — things like "crap, I've stuck my left tit on slightly too far out"

But anyway. Thoughts:

(1) It's always been the hair for me — the thing that acts as a suspension of disbelief. As I've written countless times before, it was only the moment that I tossed my head back and saw myself with long hair that I suddenly realised that I could look like a girl if I wanted to.

(2) My hair is very very thin. Stupidly thin. No matter that I use Pantene's "Full and Thick" shampoo every sodding day, its still as fine as a, um, dammit, very fine thing.

But — and this is my one saving grace — there's lots of it.

(3) The healing brush in Photoshop has more uses than first appears. The photographs I was trying to take this evening, were of me in a Raw Moment™ — hair lank and wet, head bowed over hairdryer, fake tits in place, but decidedly blokish.

Unfortunately, I look fat in all of them ... so they'll never see the light of day.

But it amazed me the two strokes of the healing brush could get rid of the harsh line between my body and the stuck-on-silicon-yumminess that is my tits.

A photoshoot for the future perhaps. And so much cheaper than surgery.

Over Three Hundred Proofs of God?s Existence

link religion

50: ARGUMENT FROM UPPERCASE ASSERTION

Ack, borked white-balance from an energy-saving lightbulb ... what more do you want eh?

PS. Personally, I'm loving the 'insert question mark for unexpected character' thing going on with my last del.icio.us post. A whole new world of uncertainty.

Ah, yes. You're absolutely right. My apologies Looby had it in his email signature — that's what confused me