Saturday, 3rd February, 2007

On The Mortality Of Plants

house plant sad

One of the things I love about my house, is the plants in it. People often insist that my love of white walls is a bit cold and heartless — "Graham," they say, "you should really add a splash of colour here and there.".

But I like simplicity, and I like the monochrome (or rather, duotone) of white with occasional explosions of green all around the place.

I've got foliage in each room: upstairs in my bedroom it's the dual-act of two (and I'm very proud of these) enormous cheese plants — both of which were saved from spindly messes caused by a lack of light and over-watering into plants that are taller than me now; in the bathroom, an aloe vera is gradually taking over the windowledge; in the kitchen, there's another aloe vera (also taking over) and a small money-tree (how apt). Even here, in my studio there's A Generic Plant From B&Q™ (which actually, looks like he could do with a drink).

And in the living room, are the twin spectaculars of my two peace lillies, a palm which unfortunately is a poor shade of his former self, and my enormous umbrella plant.

Two things about my umbrella plant:

1. He's not really an umbrella plant — I just call him that. I've always called plants like that "umbrella plants", but I looked it up on day and they're something else. I have no idea what he is, but I bet someone else does because they're really common.

2. He was given to me by some friends when they moved into their new house a good few years (four?) ago. I think the original owner thought he wouldn't survive a move, but we got him round to mine no probs, and he's been happily adding colour and structure to my downstairs ever since...

Beautiful, isn't he? I've always loved the way he 'breaks up' that expanse of white — curling himself around the stub left when I knocked out the dividing wall, naturalising the formal 'humanity' of ridged white lines and grids.

Except, well. Um.

For the past few months, I've been noticing problems. It started off with a greater-than-normal leaf-fall, and then whole branches started to wilter. Little sections started randomly turning dark and shrinking, taking their leaves with them. I scoured my house-plant book trying to find what to do¹, but there was nothing in it at all so, fearing disease, I cut out the bad bits and hoped he'd recover.

But when I got home from Leeds this week, even the one paltry branch that I'd whittled him down to was showing signs of decay, and this morning ... well ...

'S funny, really, being upset about the loss of a plant Especially one that was kinda 'imported' rather than nurtured from a little bog-standard pot. In a way, my 'umbrella' plant made that space, and it isn't going to be the same without him.

¹ Before anyone jumps in with words like "overwater" and "underwater", I must just point out that I am really rather good with house plants. I've learnt about things like that — and stuff like heat, light and humidity — the hard way, and always managed to coax life into what appears to be dried-up shreds of foliage. But disease isn't something on my house-plant CV.

Well, that long plus however long he lived at the last house Good point — thanks Nick

The only healthy bit left of him is a small section of a branch near the bottom, so I'm going to cut him back to that, repot him, and see if I can bring him back to his former glory.

BTW did you ever get your motorbike licence??

Nah — Things Got In The Way™ I've still got a year left on my CBT though, so I've not given that idea up for good

I know that you class [...] Macs female

Ah — but CuChulainn and Creidhne are male, which demonstrates either (a) a belief that Shiney Metal Things™ == boy, or (b) a complex set of relationships between myself and their anthropomorphisied characters based on usage and personal connections.

I think about these things too much PCs are easy though — they have no soul and therefore are genderless personality voids

I'll give it a go — when I can find a pot big enough

Twissle — Second Life -> Twitter

code secondlife twitter

I haven't really ever mentioned Twitter here, despite having a lot of fun with it recently. I'm not exactly sure why I've not mentioned it — I guess it's just that it's nice to have a little 'space' I can blurt the odd thing out into, and pick up the odd conversation or two.

Tell you what though — I'm rather glad I managed to get involved with a Social Wotsit early enough to not have to rely on my 'l337' username¹

But anyway — it struck me that it might be rather fun to be able to send Tweets as Kisa from within Second Life, without having to jump into a browser ... so I made a thing that does just that

I'll write up the code and post it somewhere useful, in the meantime, if you want a copy of it, drop me an IM inworld.

¹ "Siobhan" and "Kisa" — quite chuffed with that.

*la la la. Fingers in ears. I can't hear you*

"Web 2 far"

Oh very good I'll let others enthuse/evangelise about it — I just rather like it as a place to drop random chatter.

When Spam Goes Wrong

spam funny

I am, to be honest, a terribly sloppy coder. But even I wouldn't end up with something that did this...

%TO_CC_DEFAULT_HANDLER
Subject: %SUBJECT
Sender: "%FROM_NAME" <%FROM_EMAIL>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html
Date: %CURRENT_DATE_TIME

%MESSAGE_BODY

*Gah*

Waste of fucking bandwidth...