Sunday, 25th March, 2007

The Greatest Thing About British Summer Time

...is that the clocks going forwawrd mean that we have one less hour to wait for the new series of Doctor Who

I kinda like that we mess around with the clocks each year. I mean, apart from the obvious benefits of having lighter evenings and the joy and happiness that that brings (cue the potential for relaxed glasses of wine in the open air late at night), it's just rather cool that we can all, collectively decide "Hey, let's decide ourselves what the time is", and propel ourselves an hour into the future.

We are, in our own little way, Time Lords I guess

Heheh That countdown clock though, it might have just been me, but it didn't seem to sync with the seconds

They postponed British Summer Time because of the football?

Ongoing Projects

For some reason, I seem to have the wind in my sails today. I think, perhaps, that the overall enormity of tasks sometimes puts me in a procrastinating mood, and when I actually get started on things, they take a lot less time that I thought, and spur me on to do other things.

For example, I've had a whopping pile of CDs next to my desk that needed me to go through and copy/organise their contents for a little publishing project. I'd told the guy who gave me them "Listen, rather than emailing me everything five times and worrying whether or not I get them, why not just whack it all on a CD and give me it when I next see you?" — not realising that he'd interpret that as me meaning to put each individual thing on its own CD

But hey, when I started, it took me half the time I thought it would, and — because of a nifty bit of command-line scripting on my part (oh yes), I'm now sat here with a series of folders all nicely organised, with suitably resize, rename, and thumbnailed images sitting in them.

*yay me*

But as well as that, something in me made me grab the bull by the horns and crack on with the house a bit yesterday. Maybe it was the sunshine, or the general loveliness of Spring, but I found myself sat on the stairs — paintbrush in hand — giving the uprisers a well-needed coat of white.

And, combined with a cleaning frenzy that came out of the blue, I'm now feeling a lot better about this place Sure, there's lots to do still, but just having made a start fills me with enthusiam, rather than despair.

But hey, with this new found confidence and doingness, I thought I'd just quickly outline a couple of things that have been in my head for a while — things that I'm actually considering doing today...

SL-Flickr Browser

You have, I presume, seen my little thing that acts like a 'browser' in Second Life, letting you look through someone's sets...

It is, if I might just say so myself, a Rather Cool Thing™ — but it's not working right now. I couldn't for the life of me work out why the other day, when I was about to present it to a group of Educators who'd come to visit, and I didn't have time to fix it. So I just told them about it, and have been fobbing-off several IMs asking me for a copy ever since.

Initially, I guess, it was just a little 'proof of concept' — in my usual idiom of Trying Something Out To See If It's Possible, Then Losing Interest And Leaving It Half Finished™.

But, there's been a few interesting developments recently in regards to Flickr and Second Life — in particular the new Filters that I linked to the other day (and the rather interesting discussion on their impacts in the SL Flickr Group), and it occurred to me that if I actually made my browser-thing into a more useful object, it might help increase the ties between these two User-Content communities.

So one of my little plans for today is to revisit that script, and see if (a) I can get it working again, and (b) see if I can use ImageMagick on my external server — rather than the GD Library on Erin — to make a much more stable version, unfettered by Erin's continuing network downtime-issues.

A Timeline

A while back, when he was trying to persuade me to join Twitter, Jon pointed me to something that Jeremy Keith made: http://adactio.com/extras/stream/

I was trying to work out how best to integrate this New Thing™ into my blog (because I'm like that), and whilst I'm pretty proud with my "It's in the source code" approach, I kinda think I could do more with it.

See, every morning when I get up, I check feeds. I jump around from RSS readers, to blogs, to Flickr, to Twitter, to Mail.app — trying to find out what's been going on while I was asleep.

(Is that sad? )

I guess it's part of my Too Many Online Identities™ thing, but it's hard to keep a track of the conversation when I'm three different people online, and I'd really like a way of bringing it all together into one stream. I made a stab at doing that with my Twitter accounts, pulling updates from three feeds into one text file that I can tail in the Terminal...

...but I was thinking, wouldn't it be great to have one big web page that pulled in everything that I try to keep an eye on, driven by a series of cron jobs and a Big Fat XML File™, all presented with lovely formatting.

We'll see where that one goes...

Finger Ballet

Sorry, continuing in the Of No Interest To Anyone™ vein that this page is rapidly taking, I got a new keyboard yesterday.

Well, I say "new", truth is, it's been sitting on a shelf downstairs for the past couple of months.

And I say "got", but in reality I kinda 'purloined' it from work, after an administrative error landed two on my desk when we'd only needed one

(I kind think though — in my defense — that having forked out a shedload of cash over the past year or so on things for work, and not claimed half of them back, that I kinda deserved something in return)

There wasn't anything wrong with my other one — it was just a bit dirty that's all, and the responsiveness of the keys seemed to have slipped towards me having to thwack the enter key. But, I dunno, maybe Apple did something to their keyboards between the last one and this one — it's just that this one seems unbelievably smoother.

It's amazing how much difference a good keyboard makes to your typing. I'm finding that (spelling mistakes aside), I'm now typing like a bitch, spewing words out all over the palce — in IMs, code, and posts.

I've just got to make sure I don't spill wine and fag-ash all over this one within twenty seconds...

Ah, Torchwood ... thanks for reminding me. *sigh*

Short Term Memory Loss

Hmm. Does this ever happen to anyone...?

You go downsstairs to make a cup of coffee (or tea, if you're weird), and while the kettle's boiling, you think to yourself "Hmm, I'll just nip back upstairs and do that".

But when you get upstairs, you find yourself standing in the doorway to your bedroom with no idea what "that" was.

Downstairs

photo

Since I managed for once to actually get my house tidy, I thought (being me) that I'd document it. This is a rather rough auto-made panorama, which is a bit borked in the middle — but hey.

I might do one of my hand-stitched ones later

Unexpected Search Results

I am, as you know, often tickled by the different things that people come here searching for. It often amuses me to think that someone after information on "helvetica scenario" would land themselves up on a transvestite's blog¹. But (I guess) it's even more amusing when it happens to me.

In my ongoing quest to become Queen of the Flickr/SL Integration Thingies™ whilst sticking to an 'open source' ethos, I thought I'd try and download Bitstream's Vera to my external (Linux-based) server, what with it being public domain and everything.

Of course, I'm a complete Mac zealot experienced person, with no idea how to install fonts on a Linux box so that ImageMagick can use them, so I Googled...

download and install vera

Wasn't expecting that to come up as the first result

¹ Although, of course, someone might like to point out that it's been a long time since I wrote anything lucid on transvestism...

Fly Me To The Moon

photo