Skip to content

More ch-ch-changes….

Well, it’s all change round here. Son has now moved into Trevor’s place and is busy making it into a home. And a new couple will be moving into Graham’s house next week.
They are Sue & Bob – we apparently know them from our time in Preston, but we met so many people at the moots we organised there that we remember few of them clearly.
Anyway, S&B came up on Friday and stayed over until Sunday, cleaning the place and getting a few things in. I’m afraid I inadvertantly snubbed them, on Sunday – it was on my walk back from the village with my Sunday paper, I was sitting down for a while on the bench outside the golf club resting, reading and enjoying the sunshine. This couple walked past, greeted me, said “lovely day” etc. and I just more or less grunted a reply and went back to reading, thinking that they were just tourists. Later, at home, they drove by on their way out and waved at me – then I realised who they were. Too late to apologise, so I shall have to make it up to them when they move in.

Got some pics of Andy & John showing off their muscles and being all manly with their big choppers – will post them soon on my Flckr blog.
(BTW, they were chopping wood. What did you think I meant??)

in:

General

Another grump….

I wasted most of the day trying to get an RSS news feed onto a web page – any web page. I’ve tried two different pieces of software, diddled like crazy with the coding, but still can’t get anything to go right.
I’m fed up. It’s been a beaudtifully sunny day here, and I’ve spent most of it inside in front of this blimming machine.
Bah.

in:

General

Another Good Link…

I already have far too many blogs on my Fave list – I haven’t got the time to read them all on a regular basis. However, I really do have to add Pop Occulture to the list. He writes intelligently and knowledgably about pop culture and occultism, with loads of articles whose very titles scream MUST READ!!! at me. Like Sophia, Cybersex & Magickal Masturbation.

Ah me, putting off work again….

in:

General

Grump…

Spent the last two and a half hours setting up a server on my comp. I need one to properly teach myself PHP, and to also test out various CMSs and doing it all remotely is too slow. I’ve got Apache, PHP5 and MySQL installed and configured, but the blimmin’ PHPadmin keeps telling me that MySQL isn’t running.
Bah. I’ll give up on it for now.
Tomorrow, I have to update the AA Diary page – that should take at least the morning. Then I should really get started on the July edition of Transit. And I’ve made a small start on the 2008 Elfin Diary. Don’t want a repeat of this year’s fiasco, when I left everything far too late.
And I’ve promised to write a book review!

So, I’m keeping busy.

ETA: Decided to have one last go at fixing the MySQL stuff, by editing the config file. But that didn’t work. Fed up with faffing with it, so I detleted and reinstalled the whole damm thing.
Bah again.

in:

Techie Stuff

No title

Reading a couple of other blogs….
One is of a graphic artist/designer. Let’s call him Eejit. Never met him. but last year, he and I had an electronic spat when I dared to criticise his ghastly frames-ridden website in my blog. He was enormously childish about it. Not only was he personally abusive and sneering in his emails, he posted all our exchanges on a forum, so that all his literate, polite little friends could send me their opinions as well. 🙁
Like I said, childish. The graphic work on his website is very good, I thought (and I told him so) – he’s clearly been blessed with a shedload of talent and design skills. But, boy, does he need a personality makeover!
Anyway, I carried on keeping an eye on him, every now and then dropping in to read the blog on his website (which was completely redesigned and hugely improved not long after our little spat – what a coincidence…). A couple of weeks ago, he posted that he wouldn’t be doing any work or posting for a while as something awful had happened in his life. He didn’t go into details, but he made it sound tragic, on the order of the sudden death of a loved one, or the Big C. I felt very sympathetic for him – even a little sh*t can feel pain.
Being the nosy sod that I am, I wanted to know just what had happened. So I went to the forum where he usually hangs out. And there discovered…

Wait for it…..

His girlfriend had left him.

OK, I know that can be horrible. But, hey, it really isn’t the complete and utter end of the world that he made it sound like. Looking at what he’s got – a good job that he likes, talent, he’s a rising star in his field and achieving his ambitions, he’s in perfect health! – I can’t see that he’s got a lot to complain about. Yes, he’s got a mortgage that he won’t be able to cover by himself. But he can move to somewhere cheaper, or get in somebody to house-share.
But that’s Eejit all over – whingy and self-pitying; not much surprise that his gf went!

It’s a good job that I have somebody like Steve on my blog-reading list. He’s an art sudent and I came across his blog by accident while looking for something else. He’s the complete opposite of Eejit, personality-wise – cheeful, breezy, sunny. He writes about silly trivial teen stuff – TV, music, personalities – as well as his art stuff, but is so honestly unself-conscious that I really warm to him. This week he was acepted for Uni, and I nearly did a happy dance for him!
He’s only eighteen, and doesn’t seem to have anything traumatic happen to him yet. But you feel that if his gf walked out on him (and she ‘d have to be out of her mind to leave such a nice fella), he would pick himself up off the floor, crack a joke and ask what time CSI was on. That’s the big difference between Steve and Eejit – positivity in all things.

in:

General

Musings

I don’t do much artwork any more. And I’ve been asking myself why. Mainly, I just don’t feel compelled the way I used to be, to get out my sketchbook or my painting boards and express something graphically.
When they ask why I’m not painting any more, I make the excuse to people that I can’t afford it. But I used to scrounge sheets of hardboard from skips, use the cheapest wood primer, buy acrylics from the sale bins at art shops. So money doesn’t expecially come into it. The truth is, I can’t face the competition from the landscape all around here! When we moved here, I tried to paint landscapes. But I couldn’t. I just looked at everything – the light, the colours, the clarity, the space – and realised that nothing I could slap onto a board could go anywhere near to doing it justice. Every time I tried, I ended up blobbing and scraping paint around for hours without getting anywhere.
Even when I tried to do abstracts and impressionistic stuff instead, I felt it just wasn’t good enough. Always, I would end up just sitting there, staring at what I was trying to capture and wondering why I was bothering.
So, my paints are now mouldering away in my artbox – maybe I’ll get them out again one day. But I have to really feel the impulse first. Seems like I’m not much of an artist after all – a real artist can’t stop making art.
I do some drawing still, but nowhere as much as I used to. Here, the situation is a little different from painting. I’ve always drawn, or doodled. I’ve always had to keep my hands busy, almost a compulsion. And my drawings usually end up tiny and detailed. I can draw figures OK – sitting though all those life-drawing classes really paid off! – but I prefer to go in close, concentrate on a few sqare inches of undulating torso, or some leg musculature. Or I’ll try dragging a broad soft pencil across a sheet of rough-textured paper, then use some sharper pencils to bring out the details to make all sorts of interesting shapes. I really really get into this sort of detailed, tiny work (maybe it’s my Aspergers…) and the results IMHO are pretty good – albeit rather small for hanging on gallery walls.
With my photography, I’m also getting into details and textures – natural ones of moss, stone, tree trunks. The results so far have been pretty ham-fisted, as I’m still not sure how to use the zoom and focus on my camera. But I’ll keep trying. I think I’m getting better at it.

in:

Art, General

Getting Political…

This morning, there was more bad news for the Home Office: Hundreds of inmates have escaped from open prisons. Shouldn’t the Home Office now consider a change of name? How about “The Lights Are On But Nobody’s Home Office”?

And the ever-excellent Charlie Stross weighs in with a third blog post on the insuperable problems with National ID cards. Charlie is an SF writer and IT expert (his day job used to be writing for the IT press) and this and his other posts on the ID card fiasco lays it all bare. His current work-in-progress is a novel set in the Britain of 2016, and concentrates on the ID card mess. So he has done some research on the subject. Read his posts on the subject and despair:

It is, in fact, the biggest fiasco since the Poll Tax.
… All because of the quid pro quo the French government demanded in return for closing the Sangatte refugee camp (i.e. that the UK adopt an ID card), and Tony Blair’s Americanophilia (which caused him to demand that the British ID card follow the example of the US REAL ID Act and use biometric authentication), and the gravy-train instincts of the usual government IT project contractors.

in:

Blatant Plugs, General

Quick update

Been quite a busy week again. Advanced my plans for making money online, and got a couple of new websites up.
Got some new photos, but can’t upload them to my photoblog – probably because I’ve hit their storage limit. So I’ll look at Flickr now for a photogallery.

Son is supposed to move into Trevor’s old flat on the 2nd. Which is good news. He’ll need some furniture, though.

Oh well, have to go…..

LATER: Just added my Flickr gallery.

in:

General

The Bluebells of Scotland

Bluebells in my local woods
Went into the woods this morning and got some pics of the bluebells. They’re late in blooming this year, as everything is. But now they’re out, it’s a beautiful sight!

in:

General