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Sunday 1 December
December brings some sunshine and another cat falls into place.
Scanning of some maps and meta-models goings on now in between household tasks.
Thursday 28 November
I've reorganised the cats section of this website making it easier to navigate - enjoy!
Wednesday 27 November
Rummaging through sound archives - Haunting past images of sculptured noise and the decisions - which bit to translate to bytes to one day (bandwidth permitting) launch a precarious career in cyberspace, perhaps to be heard once on the side of a mountain in Peru - or which modest compositions and unruly jams to leave in analogue cassette oblivion.
And like all delving into the past it brings forth images of the once-seen and loved...
Listened to "The Battle of the Beanfield" on Radio 4 today. A reminder of that atmosphere and oppression which stalks people who try and make a life around their own codes in this society - particularly those who go against official policy. The mid eighties was probably the nadir of such oppositional attempts when the police became an iron fist in an iron glove during the Thatcher reign. When the violence used aginst the miners could be clearly seen it was hardly surprising that a few hundred hippies in a beanfield were seen as easy prey.
Tuesday 26 November
A small technological breakthrough as I manage to get viavoice going on the laptop by copying over an older version of mfc42.dll into the Viavoice \bin folder. I have a feeling that using voice input may be good for the development of good voice projection. If the machine doesn't understand me I shall just shout louder of course.
Anyway here's something fundamental arranged via voice input and minus all the fish that ended up in the words.
To chew upon...endlessly.
Sunday 24 Novemember
Weather yuk wet steady for the last fortnight. Mood - oscillatory, dispirited. The black paper between the mirror...
Listening to: John Coltrane - Bessie's dream
In fact I've been sorting through cassettes and getting my ears massaged by jazz and fusion whilst keeping an occasional percentage of attention on Celebrity Big Brother.
commentWednesday 20 November
Another marathon scanning session. It's so strange to digitise the face of someone I haven't seen for years and look at a full screen close up..and wonder whatever happened to them....
Faded little snaps are somehow transformed into real images. I could spend hours on getting these things to look better if I could find the time but parallel scanners are slow. One day I'll have a machine with USB and be able to get a faster, better scan so some of it may have to wait until then.
Tuesday 19 November
"The voice girdled in ladders alike" - ho hum I seem to have installed a Beefheart Windows Theme from Shining Silence. How sad is that?
Monday 18 November
Music at Night - An unexpecedly good afternnon play about a solitary musician. Available on real player at the BBC for a week - as will be "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue" which returns tonight for its umpteenth series."Sometimes you can only climb a hill by walking backwards" anon 1979. I still ponder that one.
Scanning the past - digitising personal history.
commentSunday 17 November
I keep mistyping the word 'November' for some reason....curious. Experimental writing from the pencil archives.
Saturday 16 November
Undertaken a major change around in the site so that this now becomes my main page. Pagemill seems to have made it fairly easy but if anyone spots mistakes please let me know. The new comment symbol which appears after postings leads to a discussion board. Feel free to use it - anonymously if you like. I'd really like some sense of communication to come out of this web site.
Thursday 14 November
The Ridley book is proving engrossing. It's the first time that I can remember taking "division of labour" as a starting point for looking at the social behaviour of humans.
A rainbow over Dalston.
I've finally got my Tabby 2 graphic tablet working with Windows 98. I'd given up for a long time but I came across some information lately that made the situation with drivers a lot clearer - my thanks to the author.
I've been transcribing some of my dreams from some tatty old notebooks - it's strange to be putting effort into something which, almost by definition, won't be of interest to anyone else. It's also strange to see your brain behave in unusual, almost unimaginable, ways. Take, for instance, this gem from 1988 -
The surgeon said, "You make a small incision in the neck and pull it out.
Well the first time it happens it's quite startling - I had my first 3 years. What comes out quite literally is a stick of rock. You can make it into a pencil if you like. That's a smart move. Three years later it's just a bit tiring."I protested that it sounded like a major thing. "I assure you that most people handle it themselves" he said. A tiring noise developed in Max's left nostril.
"Look" he said "it's perfectly harmless but we have the odd person who needs oxygen - the centrefold gates are available to all who need them - why don't you watch an operation?"
I saw the tiring noise disappear from his face...
Can no-one make Quentin Cooper stop quipping?
Sunday 10 November
There should be a guest book in place when you read this. Any comments will be appreciated. I'll even collect brown stamps.
The Remembrance day services afforded an excellent opportunity for listening to In Our Time (via BBC listen again). A good discussion on the nature of human nature. Steven Pinker ended on the "optimistic" note that it is possible to observe that humanity has succeeded in making some moral progress almost by accident and that all we can do is find out how some "tricks" succeeded.
The (true, original, old) squirrel has now been christened Gnutty.
Saturday 9 November
On the subject of squirrels...
We've had a male squirrel turning up on the window ledge and begging for nuts for a couple of years now. The other day I noticed another squirrel hanging around and watching him collect his bounty. This other squirrel has now copied the begging behaviour of the first squirrel and fooled me into feeding it before the usual one (it needs a name) sent it packing. Now there is a small scale skirmish every day on the plastic roof...
Listening to: Tim Buckley - Wayfaring Stranger
On Thursday and Friday I experienced the delights of wrestling with some large items of IKEA flatpack furniture. I found that the trouble with the diagrams supplied is that it encourages a micro view on to the esoteric components used rather than taking a more functional view of the eventual object. Alright so I managed to build some drawers without bottoms and had to backtrack a bit...
Had an email from someone from schooldays thanks to the social magnet that Friends Reunited has become. It's good to see some of my contemporaries getting to grips with the new media and its possibilities. Maybe in the future we'll always know the people we get to know if you get my drift.
Sunday 3 November
Introduction to weblogs article which hints at some of the possibilities that they inspire - Free pint
"We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth that fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years I never seem to get fully used to it." - Richard Dawkins
I now know how he feels. The jolt that this idea gives to the rest of the social sciences will take many years to be appreciated. The last time I received a shock like that was when I read Julian Jaynes's seminal but flawed work on the development of consciousness.
Lamborghini could be a compelling name if you are a serious fan of exotic watches - Coryn has been working on the design of the site so this is by nature of a shameless plug for his efforts.
Saturday 2 November - 3pm
I have an inner life - it is preoccupied by matters of role, purpose and meaning. It connects to everyday life through roles whose parameters are continually open to re-interpretation through changing situations and changing perceptions of those situations.
"When you find out the circumstances then you can go out." - Van Vliet
I am full of doubt and uncertainty.
Kundera in an old interview on Late Review last night said something about the events in the first half of someone's life inevitably forming the basis of their later preoccupations. Like working out what happened I suppose.
I'm looking for a handy word or phrase to describe... what?
A field of interaction centred on the individual...
Our self interacts with the presentation of other selves which take up various roles, representatives of institutions, employers, employees, teachers, lovers, wives and husbands, friends. Some of these roles are more structured and explicit than others. Mostly the roles are played by ear, without a conscious script and we slip effortlessly into them without questioning the origin of their operational parameters.
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Listening to : The Birthday Party - Harold PinterErving Goffman is someone whose work I need to look at again. The metaphor of the stage in human interaction is powerful and perhaps strangely, somewhat disconnected from the rest of sociology. Symbolic Interactionism? On a day when the UK news is dominated by by the machinations of royalty to preserve its image, and the dumping of prominent TV personalities because of their reported off-screen activities, it seems more relevant than usual.
Thursday 31 October
Pat and pumpkin
Wednesday 30 October
One of a series of irregular emails arrives from Our Correspondent in Belgium mentioning a possible reference to Dilbert. Maybe this stuff works on the unconscious. Who can say?
What would we do without Professor Laurie Taylor somewhere on Radio 4? One of the few people to think as they speak.
Paint gripe. Dulux "Once"? Give us a break. This should have been called Dulux "Two or Three times at least" but I guess that wouldn't have been so catchy.
Listening to - Beethoven's Fifth.
The yoga of rubbing down and painting a cupboard door.
More haste, less speed. That's deep.
At its most reductionist life is a long succession of moving things from one place to another.
Monday 28 October
I have now got round to uploading some more material into the painting gallery - it seems that all went smoothly and I hope the effort is worthwhile. I get a crick in my neck from too much image resizing - expect ambient music....one day.
I perform the yoga of handwashing my dirty jeans just to keep in trim.
Listening to: Captain Beefheart - The original Bat Chain puller (1976).
And isn't the radar station so the best web site of its type going. And is this now English?
In a sudden move towards social acceptability I purchased a new pair of jeans and a fleecy top today. Surprisingly the jeans seem to fit.
Compost leaves, repair kitchen roof after the yesterday's gales, shop and hoover. Is Beefheart energising or what?
Great astronomy photos from Hubble - check out the galaxies and gawp a little.
Sunday 27 October
There are so many things I'd like to do - so many areas to explore in music graphics and the internet that it seems more than enough to keep someone busy for several lifetimes. Meanwhile there is always the painful business of having to earn some sort of living ready to rear its gruesome head if not actually biting hard.Wading through past photographs and processing them for this site means a continual walk through time where the boundaries between the past and present blur. Seeing people who I have known in other times and places inevitably brings home some flavour of the frozen moment - some feeling of sunshine, of edginess, of intimacy.
Gales are sweeping the country - my parents in Norfolk have had no electricity for a few hours.
Saturday 26 October
The smell of freshly made bread.
I've just ordered "Origins of Virtue" by Matt Ridley as a result of some discussion on CIX in the evolutionary psychology conference. The first book I've bought for about a year (excluding computer related manuals).
Today I've been updating and expanding the music links on this site especially the artists and bands category
Friday 25th October, 2002
Gales and heavy showersCalled into work today because a hole had apparently appeared overnight outside the surgery on the pavement. It turned out that this was due to a manhole cover which, having decided it had adequately performed its humble life's work, had crumbled out of existence leaving a neat ring.
Come to think of it, not a bad way to go.
I've been processing scanned photographs into "a life" at a rate of knots. Irfanview takes a lot of the hard work out of creating thumbnails and reducing image sizes.
Listening to: David McWilliams - Days of Pearly Spencer
Saturday 19th October 2002
Could have gone to a party tonight in Brixton at some old friends of Pat (Happy Birthday Aubrey!). In the end Pat's gone by herself whilst I make up for my depressive and anti-social tendencies by revamping some parts of this site that need it and making this page the main entry point since it's the page that changes the most. I'm feeling dissatisfied at the lack of direction and creativity in my life at the moment so maybe this effort helps.
Sunday 13th October 2002
The cycle returned to the point where I started yesterday. In other words it was my birthday. However I managed to remain cheerful and even consumed some champagne given to me by the kind folks at the Mayville last year. I'm also using a nice smooth optical mouse given to by Pat for which she shall remain forever blessed since my old mouse was driving me to distraction.
The rain has also arrived for the first time in weeks. What a strange thing wetness is.Sunday 6 October 2002
I had an interesting conversation about the deceptiveness of memory with Chris in the early hours fuelled by whisky, curry and other delicacies. People contradict events as we "remember" them - somehow the process has become distorted so that our memories of "fact" become a kind of true life fiction, not that far removed from events as remembered by another but differing in significant details.
Chris has moved to Leicester recently. It's a place I ought to check out as a possible landing point when the London sojourn reaches its end.3 October 2002
A new virus called Bugbear appeared in my inbox twice this morning. Luckily I had updated the virus checker the previous night (thanks for the tip Andy) but it was disconcerting to start getting copies so quickly. On a hunch I did a full scan of my C:\ drive and found no less than 19 examples of an HTML Mime exploit virus in the Temporary Internet Files directory. Grrr! Anyway I've scrapped the preview pane in Outlook Express, deleted all my temporary files and strengthened the security options in my virus checker so we'll see how it goes.
Listening to: David Bowie - Space Oddity2 October 2002
Interesting observations on digital photography.
1 October 2002
A strange feeling - drifting through the last 2 weeks, visits to the dentist, desultory tidying and cleaning, getting much too involved in a thread on the rites and wrongs of foxhunting (of all things).As computers have got faster, more usable, more sophisticated and altogether more useful than the ancient micros which used to infest our homes I notice that, contrary to expectations, some people have actually got worse at handling the process of email communication. If they haven't got a virus then the machine will have gone wrong or they'll have lost the last mail you sent them (or that they think they might have sent you). The result is a dissappointing melange of questions with unseen replies, statements without any clear referents, or just gobbledegook.
Weblog Archive - November 2001 to October 2002
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