Saturday, 15th April, 2006

Head Flux

random lancaster

Sometimes, you spend much of your adolescent life trying to convince yourself you're definately, positively not one thing, only to find out later in life that you kinda are, a bit. Then, later still, you find out that you're not quite so that something as you thought you were. What's even worse though, is to find out that you can be one day, then not the next.

I've always insisted in the past, that I'm not someone who thinks of themselves as "two people" — split between male and female. What I am coming to believe though, is that my head is firmly split between being a "me" person, and an other people" person.

Or perhaps a "self conscious" person, and a "uninhibited" person.

Or even a "sober" person, and a "sozzled" person.

Who knows eh? WTF is that all about?

...

Do you ever see something online, and think to yourself "Oooh, I'd love to have one of those", then spend the next few days in girly squeals anticipating the arrival of the postman, only to still be sat there a fortnight later — with no response from emails to the company — waiting in vain? Then decide "fuck it" and order the same thing from somewhere else (which arrives in two working days, to your utter delight). And then a month later, get woken up by the postman at nine o'clock on an Easter Saturday morning, wrenching you out of a disturbing dream about your childhood, and spend a few confusing seconds trying firstly to pull a jumper over your head, then secondly trying to hold a pen and a clipboard while you try to sign and simultaneously keep your hair out of your face.

Only to find that whats in the package doesn't quite look like what you ordered online, but you're such a coward that you've no intention of sending it back?

...

Yesterday, I went for a long walk. April spent a large amount of time over last weekend nagging insisting to me that I needed to "make more work" — and not rely on a my usual Photoshop sleight of hand to make stripes out of everything I photograph.

So I bought myself a camera bag, flung all my lenses and wotnot in it, and decided to take some out-of-character shots of the area around me.

I wasn't going to go up to the hill on the other side of town, but I found myself there anyway. If you start at the botom of Moor Lane (I used to live there, BTW) and keep heading up, you're basically following the old route that prisoners from the Castle took as they made their last trip up to the gallows.

At the big junction near the Grammar School (the one with the stop signs and the inevitable hill-starts), take a left and go a few hundred yards until you reach a field with some large terraced steps in it. In the middle on one of the terraces, is a stone memorial marking where the gallows used to be — and therefore where many people lost their lives.

Its marked as a memorial to those who died "because of their faith" — and I guess the two most noticable groups of people that spring to mind are the Quakers, and the Pendle Witches.

(In later years, public hangings took place round the back of the Castle — in "Hanging Corner". If you're ever in Lancaster, take the Castle tour — in the last room that you go to, they show you where the prisoners were led out, and the rather macabre chair that was constructed for one old woman who couldn't walk. There's also an engraving of one of my ancestors. Possibly. Maybe. We have the same surname (not "Curran"))

The view from that hill is amazing — you can see all the way across Morecambe Bay to the Lake District. Sitting there though, on a glorious day with the sun doing its best to warm me up, even though I could see for miles, I couldn't help but feel a sense of melancholy that what I was looking at was often the last thing that a lot of people saw.

...

Next to that hill, is Williamson Park — an old quarry turned into a public municipal ornamental gardens by Mr Williamson (Lord Ashton). It's dominated by the Ashtom Memorial (the big domey thing you can see from the M6 as you drive past Lancaster).

Once, when working as a photographer for the local council, I took a photo of it that I'm really proud of — a wide-angled spectacular of the front of it, in which the steps seem to wrap around the whole image.

I tried to take another one, but there were too many people around, so I just rattled off some close-ups of the top of the building.

Speaking of people, I'm always amazed by how the slightest suggestion of sunshine in Britain causes young men to take their tops off. There were a group of kids running around half naked, throwing water-bombs at each other.

It was bloody freezing yesterday

Walking around the paths and the lakes, I felt totally unispired. Whatever I pointed my camera at never seemed to turn out interesting enough. I imagine that that park has been photographed more times that anything else (except perhaps the gatehouse at the castle), and I was struggling to find a particularly me approach to capturing what was going on around me.

I did like this one though. Taking a shot of the sky as reflected in the water seemed to give it a strange light — almost as if it was night.

And this one turned out OK as well — even if it is a rather clichéd kind of photograph:

...

In the evening, me and some friends gathered together and troughed our faces on a coke-drenched roasted ham. We drank wine, joked about a few things, and generally had a lovely night.

I should do more things like that.

Hell, I should do more things in general.

...

I was rather excited the other day, to learn about Google Calendar. I've been wanting some way of having an XML-based calendar thingy that I could integrate with iCal, because originally, when I was thinking about the redesign of this weblog, and contemplating the 'previous' and 'future' columns, I was going to list things I'm planning on doing in the right-hand column.

I've since decided against it — it doesn't really make sense.

Being in a frame of mind of "doing more things" though, yesterday morning I booked my tickets to Lost Vagueness, which April promises me will be like the burlesque affair we went to last Saturday, but 100 times better.

"Wear your Big Red Dress™" she insisted.

Maybe

...

You'll have to excuse this 'disjointed' style of writing that I seem to be prone to at the moment. I guess it's partly to do with my aforementioned "head flux" — little contradicting bits of ideas are popping into my head right now, rather than any form of solid thought.

Normally, I guess, the traditional blogger would just wait until they had something solid to write about, but my keyboard-splurging approach seems to be the only way I can cope with it right now.

I could, of course, just shut up and write nothing — but that would mean that I'd have to sit here cringing about the awful pun I made last night.

So you'll just have to put up with me rambling for a bit.

...

Crap. I said "rambling" in a weblog post.

Shoot me now.

*chortle*

Torchwood on BBC THREE

torchwood link doctorwho

John Barrowman says: "I can't wait to explore Captain Jack even more." — You and me both, honey [bbc.co.uk]

Photo Splurge

photos

A small handful of pictures I took last night based around a dinner party — but not featuring food¹.

I {heart} Pink

Small boys were climbing on the wall of the local football 'stadium', throwing things at each other, generally playing around. On the ground — in between the gravel, the grass and the tyre-tracks, lay a small, pink, heart-shaped pillow.

And I thought, "I gotta take me a picture of that".

Attention To Detail

I'm amazed, sometimes, just how much effort my friends go to when having people around for dinner. C & J had laid the table out beautifully

OMG! KITTENS!

This is Bedford. He is a rascal.

¹ Again, not liking the 'dual conversation' thing with using Flickr to post these. There has to be some way I can circumvent that.

Salling Clicker Network Sharing

Sometimes, you find out about software features by accident...

So I'm lying on the sofa, yeah? And I'm about to fire up iTunes on my laptop and control it with my mobile, when I noticed a menu in Salling Clicker that I'd not seen before:

"Clicker Network"

"Hmm", thinks I. "I wonder if that does what I think it does..."

A quick browse through the manual, an installation and activation on my G5 (sans Bluetooth), a cross-my-fingers-and-pray-to-the-developer-gods later ... and w00t! I can use my phone to control any Mac in the house!

For all my "I read computer manuals" musings, I obviously don't read them enough

...

Crap. I said "musings" in a weblog post.

Shoot me now.

Leftfield Thinking From Siobhan's Sister, Sarah

funny

Thinking outside the (cardboard) box.

*brrring brrring*

"WTF? Hello?"

"Hey sis²"

"Oh, hey Sarah. Sorry, I was just dicking around with something on my mobile"

"blahblahblah Can I come down and stay for Gran's birthday?"

"blahblahblah yes, that means I have to tidy up though. The house is full of cardboard boxes"

"blahblahblah I'm in Carlisle, what's it like down there?"

"blahblahblah cold. Bloody cold. I'm low on peat and wood as well."

"So you need something to burn? If only you had a pile of, say, cardboard boxes lying around"

"doh!"

² No, my sister doesn't call me "sis". She calls me "bro". But remember, we're doing that whole "suspension of disbelief" thing here.

Does This Work?

dev photo

Heh, cool

Thanks Beki. I'm trying to find other ways of posting stuff you see. That came in from an email to Erin — rather than through Flickr. I'm just trying now to work out a way of doing similar things using Bluetooth and ftp — so that I don't run up a stoopidly big file-transfer bill on my mobile phone account.

I was planning on getting my laptop to do all the resizing and uploading to my media server, then sending Erin information so she could add it to databases and things (I can't get a MySQL connection out of Leeds) — but it's just occurred to me that I could just ftp the file to her, and let her handle it all.

I'd better hurry up though. There's only 3 and a half hours left...

I Thought That Was A Bit Shit Really

doctorwho

The Matrix meets Shaun Of The Dead meets The Doctor Dances from the last series ("Everybody LIVES!") meets Thunder Cats, held together by the one delight of seeing Billie Piper call herself "a chav".

And the descent into "intensive care"? Wasn't that the same set from the first episode of the last series?

I've not been a fan of the episodes that Russel T Davis writes. Bring back Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss

Meh

Where's the bridge?

Its in Williamson Park. You know that little 'lake' thing with the fountain? It's the bridge over it as you're walking out towards the car park.

What kind of theme are you running on your Sony-Ericsson K750i?

Um, I think it's just the bog-standard one that was on it when it came out of the box. I dunno if different phone networks have different themes, but it's just how Orange sent it to me.

The only two things I've done, is change the main background to be one of my swirly pieces and change the screensaver