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current weblog Friday 31 January
One of the nation's favourite sports gets under way as the post mortem commences into why it is we cannot cope with amounts of snow greater than an inch or two before the infrastructure of the nation breaks down. Al Queida would probably be pleased with the notion of 25 container lorries jacknifing all over the M11, blocking the motorway so that people were trapped in their cars for 16 hours only a few miles from the capital.
I suspect that some people were not doing their jobs very well, if at all. The lunatics who insist on powering their juggernauts at maximum speed down the motorway play their part too, of course.
The Message included a welcome rant at the BBC output I dislike the most ie the adverts (or "trails" as they are known in house). Get rid of them all I say. Bring back the potter's wheel.
Wednesday 29 January
Even the sidetracks have sidetracks...
It was like this, you see. I thought I try using one of the automated blogging systems but I'd prefer to have freedom to upload large numbers of images etc so I hired some shared webspace on an Apache server which has cgi, PHP and My SQL facilities. However as soon as I tried to install something a bit more sophisticated than static webpages I came adrift. I realised I needed to know about chmod, about permissions, about PERL, CGI scripts, .htaccess and goodness knows what else. And I need to keep checking that the hosting company has its end set up compatibly too.
OK - so I'm trying to learn the essentials but maybe it would be simpler to set up a Linux machine, run Apache on it if only to test out anything I try. Simpler! What am I thinking about?
Anyway, for anyone else forced to confront these dilemmas here are a few basic links I've turned up which have tutorials for PHP, PERL/CGI, and UNIX.
Tuesday 28 January
I'm going to archive all the stuff up until the end of November. I guess I have a responsibility not to let the loading time for this page get too out of hand. I do think it's easier in some ways to read more from a long page than a succession of linked pages but broadband obviously helps me have the page up quickly at home. It's hard to know what people find acceptable as it's a standard that is changing all the time. There's no "one size fits all solution" for sure - maybe a mirror site for broadband users with a bit more in the way of graphics and sound?.
Monday 27 January
The urge to organise. To wash up. To get fitter. To tidy up.To succeed in hoovering the hallway. To pay the Barclaycard bill. To feel on top of things. To concrete the front steps. To update the blog. To give free food.
Listening to: Weather Report - River people
Listening to: Taste - Born on the wrong side of time
Listening to: Philip Glass - Island
Sharp bright sun rays. A hint of spring. A lightening of the spirit.
Sunday 26 January
A photo taken at twilight.
I didn't manage to get that program installed yesterday and I'm not at all skilled in ways of PHP. Maybe one for the back burner until I know what I'm doing better.
Saturday 25 January
I'm trying to set up an interesting looking web publishing program called pmachine on my alternative webspace. Installation is not quite as hassle free as I would have liked because it's necessary to get some technical details from the hosting company. MySQL is a foreign country to me.
Talking of foreign countries - a big welcome to Isobel for making it on to online territory. A journey to a thousand sites starts with one email...
Wednesday 22 January
I'm feeling run down this week. Tired and listless. I want to put some time into planning the future of this site. I'll post again when I feel a bit more lively. I made a bad decision to start a new webfolder on my local machine and I think that this has caused some of my links to break. Please be patient and mail me if you notice anything that needs fixing.
Monday 20 January
A space/environment clean up. Cleaning pads and brushes and an exercise in locating and organising the myriad bits of mail, clothes pegs and other paraphernalia that's been accumulating in favourable ecological niches. Getting off on the feeling of virtue that follows mirror cleaning.
Once I formed a strategy to mildly disrupt predictable daily habits which was to make sure I'd done something different by the end of the day. It might be quite a small thing such as taking a different route to the shops or a potentially much larger thing like going to an entirely different place.
Today I've swapped a carpet from one room to another which has had the strange effect of making both rooms look larger. That's different enough for now...
On my PC desktop is a picture of the Billycat in the snow. I've just discovered that there's an exact fit if I park my mouse pointer in his right ear. Is that sad?
Sunday 19 January
Sometimes there's a lot to say. Sometimes there's hardly a thing... However, here's a nice little game to pass a few minutes with.
The Fall of Milosevic was a tremendous series. The resolution in the faces of the people who flooded Belgrade on his last day of power was a thing to behold. I'm impressed by the amount of authentic video footage of critical meetings and incidents from former Yugoslavia. I'm not at all sure that our democratic processes get the same amount of detailed coverage.
Saturday 18 January
I intend to make greater use of my webspace allocation from free ISPs. Today I uploaded some more mp3s to space on Freeserve. Pat has bought a coconut for us to present to the squirrel.
Friday 17 January
A reminder of the snow before it becomes a distant memory
"So why then, why at that significant moment in time, did a dolls head apparently explode/implode/jump off a shelf leaving its body behind?"
all that jazz asks the questions.I secured a 20GB hard drive today secondhand from a Cixen. I have a Maxtor which is slowly developing bad sectors so now is the chance to swap drives so I can try to get it repaired. When I say "now" I mean when I can psych myself into a mood for wrestling with hardware.
Listening to: Captain Beefheart - Orange Claw Hammer
I've been resisting the urge to write about blogging for a while now - the reason being that so many bloggers have been intensely involved with this subject for a lot longer than I have, that it seemed right to read and learn and not to dwell on the subject here.
But...the time has come for me to develop my ideas on the direction of blogs so here goes....
Thursday 16 January
Tenpin bowling and food at Finsbury Park. The annual outing of all the folks in the medical centre last night. I managed to get a blister on my thumb from my exertions with the bowling balls but I felt that my technique improved considerably over the course of the evening - I even finished up with a couple of strikes. Food excellent, company convivial.
I met someone who was a witness to a UFO in the lake district whilst on a retreat at a meditation centre. Apparently a saucerlike object with a big ray of light below it hovered over a lake, before rushing off somewhere else at great speed. Also witnessed by five others a week later.
Tuesday 14 January
My new domain at Betameme is now active and is fertile ground for experimentation until it settles down. I've been getting acquainted with CityDesk - another publishing tool which seems very slick and fully featured. Anyone could publish their works to the web using the free version very easily indeed.
Monday 13 January
I feel that I have swathes of text pouring into my head at the moment due to monitoring countless blogs, and trying to get my head around an interpersonal dispute that's broken out in a few areas on CIX where I have some involvement and some interest. The issue of copying from CIX to the Web is under scrutiny - it has always previously been assumed to be off limits but that now seems to be under review.
Invisible keyboards eh? Whatever will they think of next? Rocket power dachsunds?
Sunday 12 January
I can't seem to get my updated site listed at weblogs.com today. I'm getting an error message:
Can't open named stream because TCP/IP error code 11001 - Host not found. (DNS error).
Hmm - I wonder what that's about?
Listening To: Tottenham v Everton (Radio 5) (4-3 Wow!)
It's cold. Cold enough for the squirrel to take his nuts and eat them at a little "table" he has made for himself on the nearby wall, instead of taking them off and burying them around the garden.
Yesterday I bought a new domain name and acquired hosting with Ideal hosting for the next year. I expect to use that space for a more experimental blog which will benefit from the ability to use CGI scripts, PHP and the like. More news to follow as I start to get things set up.
Saturday 11 January
3pm. Last night I trawled through the list of UK blogs on the Eatonweb portal. This was a fascinating journey which kept me screenwatching long after my eyes were threatening to fall out of their sockets. There seems to be a lot of creativity out there and, surprisingly, almost as much in the unrated blogs as in those which attract some sort of regular readership.
I'm going to break my own unwritten rule by commenting on the weblog creation process in the next few days. I formed this rule because I thought there was something incestuous about finding so many blogs dedicated to explaining all aspects of the blogging process.
One observation to be getting on with...So many times I've come across a well laid out blog which contains interesting material only to find that I'm forced to sit with my face two feet in front of the screen to read the text. What is it about blogging software that seems to have made half the world decide to use small, non-resizable fonts? Answers on a postcard please. On second thoughts email or the comment fields might be a better option. Frankly I'm puzzled. I thought that the idea of HTML was that the reader could alter the presentation to suit their own eyesight and taste.
Out of the random hops I've been making I'll cite smokewriting as an example for the point I've been making (but it equally could have been any one of thousands of other blogs).
"the existence of a link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein may possibly exist at some time in the future, therefore it actually exists. As all other desperate efforts to make the 'link' theory respectable have so far crumbled hopelessly, this sort of, er, 'creative' approach must surely constitute some sort of last gasp, before the attempts to magically confer legitimacy on the impending slaughter are just given up on and the fun begins in earnest"
Couldn't agree more old son, but I wish I didn't have to squint to read it.
"Poor Christmas Tree, it’s dressed up and made a fuss of and all the family tell it it’s so pretty. Then before it even loses its green, this happens." Nice photos of London in the snow too.
Thursday 9 January
Heaviest snowfall in London for 10 years
A superior spot in cyberspace - Wood's Lot Interesting selections of links to current literature, photography etc. A very high standard of writing on this site.
Wednesday 8 January
St Jude's Church in the snow which fell earlier today in unusual amounts for inner London.
Tuesday 7 January
Freezing!
"Context" is an interesting term. Something is placed "into" a context when the background conditions form part of the description of the thing. It could just be a specific geographical location (such as the top of a mountain) or a cultural location (the West bank).
The context modifies the foreground focus just as the foreground focus affects (strongly or weakly) the context.
Many political statements are rendered meaningless through a diminution of context - an attempt to close the world down to one particular facet of a situation.
Sunday 5 January
Let us reinstate the sky - the sky with a few fluffy clouds.
After the unremitting wetness of the past two weeks winter has turned cold and clear again. When the sun is out in the middle of winter Islington looks in some ways even brighter than it does during the summer because the bare branches of the trees allows the rays through.
And don't the English like to talk about the weather anyway?
Chris was in London yesterday and gave me a present of Colin Wilson's "Alien Dawn" - an investigation into the contact experience. I will be looking forward to reading that for reasons which will be known to more than a few.
Thursday 2 January
An interesting and realistic look at the psychology of weblogs.
"What has to happen, however, is an understanding that blogging is not the same phenomenon it once was, or has some special quality to it that makes it, and the people who engage in it, somehow unique or special."
Dr Grohol has had plenty of time to think about the relationship of blogging to other internet activities. I'm experiencing a subtle changing of my own ideas about online communities but I want to let them work themselves out slowly rather than rushing to produce the killer insight on this topic.
Wet, wet, wet as floods threaten large parts of the country. The Billycat feels it's better to stay inside curled up at these times.
Wednesday 1 January 2003
A Happy and Fulfilling New Year to anyone who reads this.
How about a clean white beginning for the new year....(backgroundwise)
Today I have mostly playing about with the Wavefinder. I can now pick up thirty or 40 digital radio stations including the all important Radio 7. I'm using the excellent DabBar software which seems much more reliable than the Psion offering. Exciting. I am surprised to find that there is a station with broadcasts nothing but books being read out - Oneword.
I've been waiting months to get it set and I managed to jam the laptop supported by a "Monitor arm" into a mound of other equipment and close enough to the wall to accommodate the device with its aerial.
Last night Pat and I ate a curry, drank some champagne and had a pretty quiet but cosy night in.
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