After that nightmare of upgrading this site to MT 3.2 where they'd fixed all the little bugs that I'd previously assumed were how things worked and have provided the most complex default templates ever css-wise and a comments structure that needs some serious meditation to get your head around (and still isn't working on the Linklog and Podcast sections), well, I'm kinda at a loss for something to write about that isn't fucking tedious and boring. Actually, I probably will write about this experience soon but only once I've figured out a way to make it interesting. I think I've got the angle but it needs work.
Anyway, today was a return to Moseley for the first time since the tornado last month. It was kinda weird in that there's still a lot of scarring - trees roughly butchered back, roofs still half-tiled and workmen absolutely everywhere - but otherwise quite normal.
I was there for some post-tornado work myself. Jez and Nat were replacing their fence which had be crushed by a big tree and since I painted it last year it made a perverse kinda of sense for me to paint it again. Plus I'm absurdly available for odd-jobs at the moment.
It being a stunningly lovely day it was really good to be out in the sun getting mucky again. I miss these kind of jobs. I occasionally think about moving the huge pile of bricks at the end of the drive a few feet to the left just for the hell of it and then moving them back to the right the next day. I wonder if this constitutes a problem.
In the pub on Saturday, along with demanding the right to punch old ladies who let their dogs shit on the pavement (with the wonderful mental image of his dog Badger "sweating bullets" because he's been trained not to shit while on a lead), Jez had talked about "contributing to the hobby deficit" or something which seems to be related to the mass of niche things that have proliferated in this country of late. Stuff like Carp Fishing magazines in high street shops and model railway museums. When he mentioned today he was still thinking about it, it occured to me that if this is a proliferation it's might be because people, probably men mainly, don't tend to have a speciality any more regarding their jobs, or at least not one they care about. If you're some office drone entering data and processing invoices you may well have a desire to actually be good at something interesting, like driving a train or building furniture. So you have a hobby and get really really good at it.
Oddly enough I had a similar conversation with an old flatmate years ago about how, he theorised, hobbies were part of an ancient initiation right for boys who hadn't made their first kill yet. Once your hunt an ox or kill an enemy then you're accepted as an adult in the tribe. Before that you're missing a purpose so you get really really good at something relatively inconsequential, like football statistics or comic book artists. Since we have a lot of blokes doing boring jobs they don't care about which don't give them the same sense of purpose as hunting an ox... Hey, I've just discovered the origins for the rise of the adultescent!
Someone, I think it was the professional fence-putter-upper, say the phrase "mad as an ox" today. Do oxen get mad? I always thought of them as pretty docile creatures that pull things like wagons. Checking in the dictionary the term refers to a castrated bull, which explains why I can't remember ever seeing an on specifically. I'd just assumed they were docile bulls. Still, "mad as an ox" has a nice ring to it.
And then after painting it was over to ex-housemate Sam's new flat, also in Moseley, to set up their bemusing WiFi router, which I did. Go me! Now she and Charlie can comment on each others LiveJournals and IM each other from separate rooms. That flat will henceforth be referred to as the "House of Squeeee" for that is the kind of LJers they are...
In other news I haven't been reading any weblogs since Friday. No reason, but the catching up is getting a bit daunting (350 unread posts, not including linklogs). Hope everyone's okay.
I think I've got my blog back...
Those of you with long memories might recall my mentioning that a good friend of mine was working on a film and that I was looking after the website side of things. Well, today we launched the site.
I present for your clicking pleasure The Street Cleaner - a movie by David Early.
The main purpose of the site is to hold the trailer but there's some other stuff on there. Designing the site was a bit of a wrangle as Dave had some pretty clear ideas of how it should look but since as a digital matte artist (here's his IMDB page) Photoshop is his principle tool they were pretty static. Being a stubborn arse (and also wanting to produce something that Google could index) I wanted to produce something more fluid using HTML/CSS. Finding that middle ground, and making sure it worked across all browsers, was kinda fun, especially as I'd not done such a graphically intense site before.
Anyway, there it is. The actual 18 minute short is in the final stages of post-production. I'm not sure if we're going to be hosting a low-res version of it on the site but I'll let you know if we do.
And it would be remiss of me not to mention that I'm available for hire for this sort of thing.
This next week or so I'm going to be a painter and decorator, or rather a painerandecraer, as I believe is the correct job title. While doing this job - slapping a few buckets of Magnolia over the walls of a semi-detached house, rather more carefully popping some gloss on the skirting and touching up the front door - I will be resident on-site.
What's ever-so-vaguely of note is that the house is in Kingstanding, the arsehole suburb of Birmingham I recently escaped from. Punchline: it's my old house. Sam, the ex-housemate, is moving out (to Moseley! Yay!) and the landlady is selling, so it needs a quick tart up, nothing fancy. And if it's nothing fancy you want for a little under the going rate, I just happen to be your man.
So, a return to Kingstanding. I must say I'm so looking forward to it.
I'm getting close to completing a new website, designed from the bottom up, the back-end forward, from guts to sheen (it'll be launched when the actual content is sorted, but that's not my department) and something has been bugging me. It's not a major thing, but it's bugging me none the less.
When you look at the site it just consists of seven pages and a stripped-down blog with a very simple design. I've managed somehow to mask all the complexity behind it so the reader is completely oblivious to its inherent genius. The hours of teasing CSS attributes into place (simple is not easy), the fact that every single piece of text can be edited by the client without having to touch the raw HTML, none of that is obvious.
Which, of course, is how it should be. But it's still really annoying because when I come to show off this site no-one, at the very least no-one who's in a position to pay me money, will be able to tell.
Histed bi miown pitard, I guess.
