notes: July 2005

James who?

D & A were over from Canada for a few days; they stayed in Bath with D's dad, so we had a chance to catch up on old times.

D asked me: "What's new in music? What new stuff should we be buying while we're over here?"

I mumbled a useless reply. Years ago, when we were students, it made sense to ask me this question. In those days I bought NME every week, along with a ridiculous (given my income) amount of music. I was music-addicted and had to be on the cutting edge of all the new stuff. I knew what was hot, and what was not.

These days, I struggle to keep up with the times. Sitting on the loo this morning, reading through last week's Observer (because it takes me a week to read a Sunday paper nowadays), I noticed a raving profile of James Blunt. The former soldier is currently number one in the singles and albums charts, and I had no idea. I'd never even heard his name.

I sighed and made a mental note to look up some of his stuff, when I got a chance.

So this is middle age.

UPDATE: I checked out James Blunt and found his music was utter rubbish. So that's that settled then.

Labels: life, music, writing

Friday, July 29, 2005
0 comments

Notes on "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown

Blimey, is this what there was so much fuss about? I picked up a tatty copy of this novel in a charity shop for a pound. We were on holiday and I hadn't brought many books; now that Barney is old enough to play by himself, I found I had more time to read than I'd expected.

But after the first couple of pages - during which our hero woke in a strange hotel room, thought "Where am I?", then examined his own good looks in the mirror - I was convinced I must have made a mistake.

After all, this is the story that has prompted a whole new industry of conspiracy theories, not to mention a Hollywood film. Could something this cheesy, this cliche-ridden, be as good as so many people had said it was?

No; and yes. The novel as a work of literature is plain bloody awful, much of it the kind of stuff I'd expect a teenager to write (and indeed, the kind of stuff I was writing when I was a teenager). But the pace of the action, the depth of historical research, and the way Brown incorporates so many classic mysteries into a single plot, kept me reading.

So I hated this book; but I couldn't put it down. And that must be why its been so popular, and is being made into a movie.

Labels: books

Wednesday, July 27, 2005
0 comments

In the playcentre

Tim and I sat in the play centre, sharing a pot of coffee and discussing academia.

Tim is an academic and had wondered aloud if I knew any suitable candidates for a new research project he is in charge of. There's funding for it, and Tim is keen to get started. He just needs the right person to do the work.

We talk about undergraduates. Tim rolls his eyes upward.

"You do get some who are good," he conceds. "Some who are genuinely interested and want to study; but that's usually the older ones who have been away from education for a while and have come back.

"But too many of them are just so thick." He looks fed up and disgusted. "They just don't seem to understand what the point of doing a degree is."

I nod.

"I was one of them," I tell him. "I pissed away the first two years of my degree and only started working in the final year. What a waste."

"That's what a majority of people do," agrees Tim. He goes on:

"Thing is, all that's needed is the willingness to do a moderate amount of work every day.

"If you'd done three or four hours a day, five days a week, for all three years of your degree -- well, you'd be laughing. That's how to do well.

"And if you think about it, anyone who found themselves in paid employment where they only had to do three or four hours a day, five days a week, would be roaring with laughter wouldn't they? It would be a dream job for most people."

I nod again. Tim's right. I pour more tea and watch our sons playing on inflatable bouncy things, musing on my time as a student and wondering how things might have been different if I'd made more of an effort to work.

Labels: writing

Wednesday, July 27, 2005
0 comments

How I work

If I were to break my work down to essentials, it becomes two tasks:

come up with ideas for articles that will sell
write them

This means I spend a lot of time looking for things to write about (via incoming email, browsing web sites, and monitoring feeds), and roughly the same amount of time writing.

I write ideas and rough drafts in my todo.txt file, a large single plain text file that includes all my work in progress, things to do, shopping lists, addresses, notes and ideas. As I write this, the file is just over 3700 lines, or 12000 words, long.

I edit the file in BBEdit, using split view so I can edit two different sections of the file at once. To me this is a natural and very efficient way of working; I know the structure of my file well, and can easily find the section I want to edit next by searching for keywords and section headings (marked with an asterisk, eg *todo or *weather or *books).

BBEdit is set up to display white text on a blue background; I've found this much easier on my eyes when spending many hours a day writing.

Usually, an article will start life as a snippet of text, or a couple of URLs somewhere in this file.

That snippet might get expanded to something much longer - several hundred words - before it gets cut out and moved to a file of its own. This happens when I need to know the exact word count of what I'm writing, and it's easier to do this when the piece is in a file of its own. And anyway, the article needs to be filed away in a logical place on my hard disk.

Because I write a lot of stuff for publication on the web, I often have to file copy in HTML. To make this easy, I write everything in Markdown markup language, and have got into the habit of doing this all the time. BBEdit makes using Markdown very easy and it's a function I use several times a day.

Copy is always filed by email; soon after filing, I send an invoice (usually by email, but some clients like to have a paper copy in the post).

I'm a part-timer, working on Mondays and Wednesdays when my son is in nursery, and looking after him on the other days of the week. Since some of my work needs to be spread over the week (especially Rising Slowly posts), I often write things in advance, setting them up in handler apps like MarsEdit so I can post them with a couple of clicks when the need arises.

Being a part-timer is wonderful because my life never feels dominated by work. If anything, work has a minor role to play alongside my other regular duties. The downside is that sometimes, I have more than two days worth of work to do within the week. That's when I have to work evenings and weekends, as long as it takes to meet the deadlines. Thankfully these situations are rare.

And that's how I work. It's a very simple process, the result of a very simple set of demands.

I'm very interested to know how other people work. I want to explore the mundanities of work processes; what tasks are people required to complete, and what tools (sofware and otherwise) do they use? How do they use these tools? What changes do they make to their work environment to make the work easier to do?

Labels: mac, work, writing

Wednesday, July 27, 2005
0 comments

In Redcliffe caves

In Redcliffe caves
Originally uploaded by gilest.

Under a car park in Bristol lies a huge network of caves - mines, really, because they're all man made.

The stone is red sandstone, soft enough to carve with metal tools but firm enough to hold itself up. It has been worked for centuries, and the resulting holes used as prisons, storage depots, sewage treatment works, and much more.

On Saturday the caves were open for the day, as part of the Harbourside Festival. We went to explore. The caves were well-lit and interesting features were signposted well. These included a tree root that has wormed down through eight metres of rock, a Victorian carving, dark tunnels leading off to lost parts of the network, and several bits of graffiti.

Brunel carved a rail tunnel through the hill just a few feet away, partially destroying and bisecting some parts of the cave network. The entrance to this tunnel (now disused) is clearly seen round the corner from the entrance to the caves, just past The Ostrich pub.

Labels: photos

Monday, July 25, 2005
0 comments

Monday morning

I'm trying hard to get down to work, and facing the problem I face almost every working day: where to start?

I have a feature for MacDevcenter to finish. I need to write some fresh posts for Rising Slowly. My brain is churning with ideas for (non-technical) articles and I can't think of a way to start the process of finding someone to pay me to write them.

I need to finish the newsletter I've been creating in Pages. There's a backlog of photos to process, letters to write, bills to pay and email to answer. I'd quite like to have a block of time for idea-expanding, to see if I can come up with a way of broadening my professional horizons.

It's 1130 and so far today I have achieved very little.

Labels: work

Monday, July 25, 2005
0 comments

What is Preview?

Yes, what is it exactly?

Many people only know Preview as Apple's humble PDF viewer. Rather than mess about waiting for Adobe Reader to launch itself, plugins and all, Preview opens faster and does the job just as well. But there's so much more to this application. It turns out that Preview, especially the most recent version shipping with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, has plenty of extra features that can elevate it to one of your favorite utilities.

There's also an odd missing piece of Preview which looks like it was a mistake by someone at Apple. Perhaps the help files should have been edited to remove this particular reference?

Labels: tech

Wednesday, July 20, 2005
0 comments

Summer hols

We spent a week on the Dorset coast near Highcliffe, the same place we've been for the last two years. There's a wonderful beach just a few minutes away, and on our first afternoon we ventured down. Barney cavorted in the sand as though his life depended on it, and enjoyed being partially buried to become a mermaid. Later in the week, we built castles and trains out of sand. It was nice to get away, although bad weather and sore throats for me and Kate spoiled the holiday mood somewhat. Maybe we'll be able to get away again later in the year.

Tuesday, July 19, 2005
0 comments

Another summer festival

Today was the Woolley Street Festival. Barney made biscuits, a mask, and got his face painted like a clown. Then he danced to The Volt for a bit (alongside Jess' mum) and finally fell asleep in my arms, completely exhausted.

Saturday, July 16, 2005
0 comments

Archives