I still definitely want a nifty photoblog thingy that’ll inspire me to put up pics more often than words, and in a more controlled environment than facebook or flickr… But it’s not gonna happen soon :-( If I wasn’t a web developer I’d just get a tumblr, but I do have (web) standards. Guffaw chortle.

Well actually, not so much. I'm spending hours and hours just getting my head around the very basics. I needed to upgrade my hosting, work out subdomains, the export took a while all by itself, then there was finding out what a "theme" is made of, how posts work, the different taxonomies. In some places it's bafflingly freeform, allowing several ways to achieve the same thing, in others it's strangely restrictive; things that are done with a click in Expressionengine being ostensibly impossible. Now I'm at the unenviable stage of having to individually categorise, tag and set the format for each of my seven hundred and fifty posts, and after that's done I have to set up some custom menu thingies before I can finally get my hands on the dreaded "loop"... Except there'll be at least three of them, because I like making things difficult for myself.

So yeah it's going pretty slowly, and it's playing second fifth fiddle to seeing my lovely boyfriend, socialising, deleting four fifths of the resulting photos and putting the rest on facebook, and playing a ton of different computer games (which needs a blogpost of its own). Also there's a merger and a complete refurb happening at work, and I turn the big THREE OH in a week and a half, so there's a lot on. But I'm keeping at it, in dribs and drabs. Dribs and drabs.

Parallax!

Linking in with the 2010 craze for one-page websites; these are sites where the backgrounds, foregrounds and/or midgrounds animate relative to the position of the scroll bar to make it look like they are moving faster or slower than expected. It started with the Nike site, and now everyone's doing it. Easier shown than told though! Click and scroll up and down to witness the nifty.

• Mark Lawrence Design is the personal site of a designer, it's pretty arty and freeform with things swooshing in from every direction as you scroll down. Nifty!
• On the other hand Quality Cabinets is a "just" a commercial, almost brochure-ware site, but it still uses a restrained parallax on their homepage effect to very nice effect.
• I can't decide if Dentsu Network over-uses the parallax, but it's certainly very striking when you use the left hand navigation to get around the page.
• A charity appeal on a sector jobs site Authentic Jobs uses a well-drilling analogy to get through the page, striking water at the end.
• The Nizo sign-up page is slick and minimal...
• While swiss design firm Ala decided to go in the opposite direction, showing off everything you could ever possibly want to do with scrolling-based animations. It's a leeetle busy.

Responsive design!

In a nutshell these are sites that change depending on the width of the device, which is becoming critical in a time of increasing web device plurality. Technically they're a combination of three techniques: auto-sizing columns (using % widths instead of px), auto-sizing images (by setting their widths to 100%), and using Media Queries to serve up a different styles at very wide or very narrow widths. To see the changes you'll have to vary your browser width.

• The website for the dConstruct 2011 web conference by the inestimable ClearLeft is predictably one of the quintessential responsive design sites. The columns shrink, the images resize and flow and at narrow widths it switches layout to a more "mobile friendly" design.
• Stephen Caver has another true responsive site, using three layouts instead of two. This one's interesting because of the CSS3 used to get some pseudo-parallax texture effects when you widen and shrink the portal size.
• Andersson-Wise has BIG PICTURES YAY. Slightly basic layout but this demos the technique of stretching an image to fill the space, where usually the images have a maxwidth.
• Forefathers doesn't actually use resizing columns or images - focusing instead on Media Queries - so this an example of adaptive design similar to what I already use on my site. It's much less fluid so it needs four distinct layouts at different widths to get it looking as good, and it's a bit less future proof as it's difficult to predict what portal sizes new web-enabled devices will have. Still, at the moment it still looks great. Plus there's a monkey.
• Andrew Revitt's page is another example of adaptive design with four layouts. It also uses a double background to make a better use of what space is left over at the sides.
• The Happy Bit is a lovely little adaptive design site, but it uses five CSS layouts at different widths... On anything but a tiny site it's a bit much.

At first I got very excited about the parallax-type sites, but looking under the hood the markup behind all those different scrolling elements is actually pretty ugly and unsemantic. I'd never be able to compress my site to one page anyway. So instead I'm going to focus on responsive design, which certainly has more longevity, though I still hope to throw some subtle parallax elements in there.

Dauntingly. what both these techniques have in common is they're a big step away from websites being frozen HTML interpretations of static Photoshop documents; they move, they change, they flow. It makes my next stage - amateur wireframing - kinda tricky.

I mean, it's needed! It's not really fit for purpose anymore. I originally built it primarily as a collection of my various web presences and secondarily as a archive of all the old posts on a blog I'd stopped writing on. Yeah, the one you're reading now. If you look at the home page, it's mainly a place to send you elsewhere: big links to my twitter (which is irreverent, irrelevant or both), last.fm (which since I mostly listen to music on my frustraingly incompatible blackberry is now completely inaccurate) and my photos.

See, I have the opposite problem with my photos. While I never used to update them, now I do often, and I'm really getting into photography as a hobby. Similar story with the blog, it's not the redheaded stepchild it used to be. I didn't even have a cv and portfolio section at first, and though they're both now up-to-date content-wise, they could really do with some sprucing up. And as for the "info" pages, in spite of my adding some shiny canvas-based graphics I still think they're kinda dry. Ideally they'd be boiled down to a less tedious series of h'amoozing infographics, but that's for another time.

So I need to get a some more HTML5 action going, tighten up the basics and rework everything as a triptych of blog, fotos and work. Time to dust off the designer hat.

One game at a time Dan. One at a time.

A gadfly-like attention span makes it difficult to play the same game more than once: my attempt to work through Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 again to make "canon" savegames (for exporting into sequels) had to be completely shelved, it just drags too much when you know what's going to happen. The Witcher dragged too, this time because being poorly translated, so I never finished it. Which is really annoying because they fixed the dialogue and everything else in a subsequent uber-patch and the critically acclaimed sequel Assassins of Kings came out earlier this year. It sounds amazing but I just can't bring myself to play it with the prequel on a shelf unfinished. I've also given up on finishing the DLC for Fallout 3, but as soon as the last of the DLC and major mods are finished for Fallout New Vegas I want to get back into that as it's better written, more in keeping with the Fallout spirit and on top of the open world exploration there's also a lot of sniping, which I love. I'll find some sniping time.

I've not even really thought about the excellent Starcraft 2 or Portal 2, though I'm sure I'll get to them eventually. Probably next year when they'll be competing for attention with the likes of Mass Effect 3, Diablo 3 (both a guaranteed delight) and Star Wars: The Old Republic. The latter is an MMO which is a little risky, them being so addictiveness and whatnot, but I figure I'll just play it like it's a single player game. At the other end of the scale Civilization V has been really nice to casually dip into; it holds your attention while you play it but doesn't demand it while you're doing something else. Maybe that's an RTS thing? Empire: Total War did that to an extent but it was way too easy to dominate once you began to pull ahead and the premise of global conquest in a pseudo-historical game strikes me as really silly, so though it chafes not to get my money's worth I've had to ditch it entirely. I'd love to replace it with Shogun 2: Total War though as it's supposed to be tighter and less buggy and the idea of merely conquering all of Japan is much easier to swallow, but y'know... Time.

To think there used to be a years-long dearth of good RPGs for the PC! It's an embarrassment of riches now, and relatively unrestricted by budget or computer specs as I am the only thing I'm missing now to play them all is time.

Glad to see that PC Gaming seems to be having a revival, just a shame I'm too BIZ-AY. ...Time.

Still, we pretty much managed. My highlights for the holiday went a bit like this:

• Show-wise: easily the stunning Le Gateau Chocolat and the adorable Mae Martin
• Drinking highlight was accidentally meeting the owners of an actual good gay bar in Edinburgh (IKR!?) called The Street, followed by more shots and dancing and the hall of mirrors that is CC Bloom's.
• Family-wise was chilling out, dog-walking and the unexpectedly delicious vegetarian cooking. Also they loved Dom which is nice.
• Tourist-wise we didn't get a lot done, so the highlight was probably napping in the short-lived sun in Princes Street Gardens.

I'm not sure how to categorise the extremely surreal dinner with a Harry C-W and a bunch of comedians including Scott Capurro and Margaret Cho, so I'll just file it under "lolwhat".

Dear dead Bizzy Wizzy. You were seriously unhinged, hated and tried to attack strangers and had a really stupid name, but I'm going to miss you scaring the dog four times your size and getting hair on all my things. You'd totally mellowed out in your old age, which was nice, though it's sad that you passed just as you were finally about to get your own garden.

Hope you had a nice life of sitting on plastic bags and purring. Rest in peace, old cat.

I got to thinking about the EXIF meta data embedded in my photos last week, and wondering if there's anything interesting I could extract from it: with a bit of work and number juggling I put together a graph of how many photos I've taken and how many I've kept with my various digital cameras, since the start of 2004. It's pretty nifty, and far too much effort for a single blog post so I've also used it the new photography info page I've written. (That's a demo of deeplinking which is also new. Woop!)

Pics taken per month

Realising I've taken fourty thousand pictures in the last two and a half years is a bit scary. It also doesn't count the hundreds I took at uni with my uber-retro film camera, but that's a story for another time.

In other news, I'm off work for the next 17 days, including 10 days in Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival, which is AMAZING. Longest non-Christmas holiday since uni. Yes.

As you might have heard, I bought a shiny camera last week. It's a lovely CSC, like an SLR but smaller and a bit more techy. Here's the pictures I took with it this weekend, with Flickr's awesome slideshow viewer that I don't use often enough.

It's my first "real" camera, and with a few tips from photographer friends I'm quickly learning how to work it, but I'm still only scratching the surface. It's exciting. Maybe I should get a book or go on a course, but I'm totes poor now.

You know what else is exciting?

I BOUGHT IT WITH A CREDIT CARD. AND THEN I INSURED IT. What with the pension I started earlier in the year I feel so very grown up now.

Feels like I've been taking pics forever (though I actually took a two-year break around 2005). Here's some old collages of uni friends I must have put together in about 2002.

Ciaran

Darren

Mikey

Seldo

Will

Matt

giles

Jamie

Carly

James

Alex

Someday I should take a scanner to my hardcopy collection of oldschool photos. Not that they're very good, but might be lol.

Back in 2004 everyone used Hotmail (*cough* and Yahoo!); it was the most widespread and accessible browser-based email, nicely tying into messenger and all the rest of it. You could only hold 1 megabyte in your inbox though, and if it got full you had to start clearing stuff out. On top of that it also seemed to attract spam like flies to shit. It sucked, but we really didn't know any better. When gmail came out that year with a flawless spam filter and a 1 gigabyte(!!!) inbox limit, everyone who cared about these sorts of things said "LOL BAI!" and promptly jumped ship. Microsoft Hotmail scrabbled around to increase their storage, and even amusingly blocked gmail invites but the damage was done.

I feel like we're in the same place now with Facebook. It's obviously got huge traction, with half the country having an account, but I don't think anywhere near that proportion actually likes it. Lets be honest they seem to delight in dicking around its users; changing layouts and features for some users and not for others, not telling anyone about it in either case, not always for the better, and always needing yet another set of notification boxes to unclick. All the message threads that once started are impossible to add or remove people from. The number of times I've attempted to upload a bunch of pictures only to have it say "upload failed" after an hour, or spent an hour using its purportedly nifty tagging systems only to hit submit and find only about a dozen of the hundreds of tags actually stuck... It's glitchy, to put it kindly.

So now Google Plus is suddenly on the scene, the interweb giant finally answering Facebook's gradual encroachment on Google's "we are the web" turf. I was sceptical after their lame Buzz and Wave efforts, but it really looks like they're going all-out on this one. It's already pretty comparable to Facebook, who actually made the news yesterday when it announced video chat, something that's already available on Plus. And Skype, and Messenger, and whatever else.

Plus minuses:

• No walls. It's debatable whether walls are needed but it does mean no birthday spam which kinda sucks.
• No direct messages. I guess they'll integrate it with gmail at some point, which makes a lot of sense, but at the moment it looks like something is missing.
• Ditto events. This could be a killer feature if they sort it and integrate it with Google calender. Here's hoping.
• Paucity of invites. It's still in beta (whatever that means thse days) so not everyone who wants to get in, can get in.

Plus pluses:

• Circles. Some people don't like the overt social stratification but only you can see how you're categorised your contacts, so I don't think that matters. For my part I like that it's not hidden under several sub menus a la Facebook, and the interface is much, MUCH better.
• Speed. Everything's faster. You only really notice when skimming through photos but it makes Facebook's theatre viewer thing look like it's grabbing everything by dialup in comparison.
• No adverts. They'll probably change this eventually but frankly I think they're much more interested in uptake than revenue for the moment; Google have deep pockets. Besides this is all about how it is now, not how it will be, plus Google ads are always less obtrusive and more relevant than Facebook ads. Fact.
• Integration with googledocs / gmail / gcalender. In the top bar for these sites you can now see how many "red squares of joy" you have pending on Plus, and not only this but when you click on it you get a dropdown that shows you the relevant content and allows you to add comments as if you were on the page. You can also use the chat function on gmail too, so basically you can stay completely uptodate without leaving your email page.
• I'm told the web app is outstanding from everyone that's used it.
• Picasa: Google Plus images is essentially picasaweb, which is already integrated with a desktop version. Things tagged on the web are tagged on my computer, and I'm pretty sure I could upload all my 19k photos onto Google Plus (at no charge), something I wouldn't dare even think about with facebook. In fact yesterday I deleted 50 photo albums on facebook. It took 45 minutes, and I left ones that were either too epic or too recent, but I want to do a little bit to wean myself (and my friends) off it.
• You can delete. Completely. Sounds silly but you can't on Facebook. I think that speaks volumes about their relative ethoses. Is that a word? We'll go with it for now.

Either Facebook stays rubbish and all but the blissfully ignorant bail to Plus, or they up their game in response to their first real competitor. I know which one I'm betting on, but either way we win. I'm excited.

I’ve updated my set of favourite pics and made it so those are the ones that appear on the front page of this site, which is pretty nifty. The portfolio section is complete too, with improved navigation that I’ve extended to the other pages, and the CV page is ACTUALLY up to date for the first time in years! I’ll probably trim and prune at it like an errant bonsai for weeks yet - the compulsive editor that I am - but it’s nice to have something done that’s been “pending” for so long. Added to the recent work on how the site looks at varying widths, and the whole thing’s kinda finished! It’s a slight embarrassment really, I’m going to have to think up more things to augment. Perhaps a bit of jQuery.ajax shenanigans next?

But for a brief moment the site is done. It’s been a long road and shit. Here’s some of the Best Bits! I.E. some mercifully low quality screenshots of what my site used to look like in its previous iterations. Also my first use of images in the blog for an age, I should do that more. It’s not like I’m short on jpegs.

Mynciboi: done in dreamweaver. Sorry. To be fair it was 2002 and I had no idea what I was doing.

Mynciboi 2.0: don’t remember how I coded it but it was a Blogger back end.

Mynciboi 3: Ugly.

Mochaholic I moved to Movable Type coz I was a GROWNUP.

DanGovan 0.5: never actually coded up! Shame. I liked it but most people said it was awful.
They were wrong, right?

DanGovan 1.0: Simple, classy, ever so slightly plagiarised.

Cya next month for more stuff you don’t care about! AND OMG STOP JUDGING ME.

A unexpected side effect of a more powerful computer is a renewed interest in photography: having switched to some better software to do all my post-processing and with the new hardware juggling thousands of edits to hundreds pics without raising a sweat, I find that while I still spend the same time, I can do much more with it. I'm trying to raise the bar though; being more picky with which pics I keep. Given I look back at albums from a couple of months ago, deleting some and seeing things I should have done differently with others, I guess it might be working? That would be nice. I'm learning. It's quite exciting.

Facebook's image viewer is ropey and small so I've been uploading pics to flickr first, which means I can see how many people look at them; it's nice getting a few thousand hits from people curious to see the damage over the weekend. It must it give them time to get used to them too as there's been less whining about photo tagging recently, but maybe will pass. In the continued spirit of self aggrandisement I've also set up a set of my favourite recent pics to try and see some progress and showcase pics that I like individually and outside of the usual narrative documentary context.

In other news, I've also been working on this here website: The portfolio page now has actual content like you might expect of an bona fide web professional, and the layout changes at four different page widths. Change the browser width, go on, you know you want to. Oh, wait, you're using Internet Explorer? No shiny nift for you; get out.

That was as far as the plan went, unfortunately it turned out that the old CD drive wasn't compatible with the motherboard so I had to rush off to comet to get a new one, and to add insult to injury I've just received delivery of replacement case fans; having been given a sweet sweet taste of a silent gaming machine I really want to make sure it stays that way. After all that the only thing that hasn't been upgraded is the power supply and the box they all go in! Having most of the components for a computer just lying around feels like a bit of a waste, but I don't want to spend £130ish to resurrect a computer that I'd never use. Given I recently started paying into a pension, bought tickets to Malaga, four Threadless tees and Dragon Age 2 on top of all this hardware, I really need to stop spending.

Some pics on flickr: Boxes of shiny technology!, Oscar + dust, Old GPU vs new GPU, OMG that's a big heatsink, Build success!

This being my first post-XP machine I've been nerding up on Lifehacker, researching Windows 7 tips and tricks, and I stumbled across something called Rainmeter. You can apazzles use it to srsly mod your desktop, and as I used to spend days customising my UI in World of Warcraft in lieu of actually playing it, the prospect of giving my PC the same treatment is veeery interesting... I haven't had a chance to tinker with it yet though; been spending too much time using those two extra terabytes to do a massive computer spring clean, including getting all my pictures together, deleting duplicates and sorting by year. There are about 16,000 in total, about 4000 from 2010 alone. ZOMG SO MANY PICTURES.

Which reminds me, I need to get to work on those. Or I could play more Dragon Age 2... Hmm decisions decisions.

Back in 2004 I had been a big fan of Blizzard and Warcraft 3, particularly multiplayer mods for it like the now-famous DOTA, so I was on tenterhooks watching the drip-feed of information on the upcoming "World of Warcraft" MMO. I got into the US open beta and was blown away, but it was only a week or two long, so I got into the EU open beta a couple of months later too. I was amazed. All the characters and beasties I'd seen in the previous games were brought to life, and I was running around with them! The lore solid was solid and the immersion was like nothing I'd seen: I was totally hooked.

When release finally hit in early 2005 I played a Night Elf feral druid. It was a horribly gimped character class due to terrible imbalances, but I didn't really care, after all it let me turn into a kitty and scamper about at 130% running speed which was awesome, plus I somehow got into an awesome guild who didn't stress at me if I wasn't healing every (read: any) raid. After reaching level the then level cap, 60, I got into PvP instead of dunegoneering, hiding in bushes and ambushing warlocks in the massive rolling battles between Southshore and Tarren Mill was so much more fun than spelunking in the Molten Core for a random chance at lewtz. When PvP moved into a Warsong Gulch - a then-new competitive capture-the-flag type battleground with actual objectives and scores - I moved with it. With a combination of charm and 1337 skill I got into the top Alliance team at the time, which was great. We became known for steam rolling the Horde players so badly that many tended to AKF'd out of the match rather than lose to us... (Which given how long alliance players had to queue for a match was really annoying to be honest.) Still, the epic clashes against the Horde guild Mortalis were the stuff of legend. At the peak of my playing I was the 3rd best druid on the server and the 5th best player on the Alliance side. Random people would run up and ask me where I got the orange armour I was wearing as I was the only person on the server with it. Good times. However the constant queueing and BG camping that was needed became too much and I burnt out, cancelling my subscription for the first time after 10 months.

I was back in early 2006 though; Blizzard had released Ahn'qiraj; a new dungeon full of giant bugs which had some hitherto unknown feral gear in it! I swapped out the tedium, camaraderie, banter and coordinated tactics of hardcore PvP for a more laid back but very structured PvE. It made a nice change for a while but being tied to a strict raiding schedule was tiresome and the cruelty of RNG loot drops was a needless stress. Plus my previous PvP achievements had been not only surpassed but nerfed in my absence, they were now achievable by scores of people instead of a handful: lamers were running around with MY armour! So I quit again.

The next time I rejoined was for a full expansion called The Burning Crusade in December '06, with 10 new levels and a whole new continent! There was so much to do with more battle grounds, arenas, reputations to grind and loads of new dungeons. Also, feral druid was finally a viable choice for fulfilling either the tanking or DPS role in dungeons, which was amazing. I wasn't that interested in hardcore PvP or PvE this time, so though I played a lot I played like a "casual", grinding reps or money for cheeps. Eventually I switched most of my play to meta-gaming: "theorycrafting" in spreadsheets to find the optimum feral gear configurations and rotation for the other more active druids in the guild who were much more used to a Restoration spec. I also spent time customising my UI playing on the in-game auction house, but eventually even that got dull and I quit yet again.

October 2008 I was back for the next expansion: Wrath of the Lich King, getting to the new level cap again, exploring some of the new dungeons again, grinding the right reputations and profession skills again. Again I quit in the spring, and rejoined in the autumn. For something to do I started collecting in-game pets and mounts and racking up achievements points, a new system Blizzard had introduced for tracking how many virtual hoops you get your character to jump through. Random dungeons took away the bellyache of having to organise a team to do the five-man content, so that was yet another area of the game opened to me. For most of 2010 I watched the community news on what was going to be in the next expansion, new races, new levels, new skills dungons, areas, mechanics, they were even going to overhaul all the old questing areas that had lain untouched since 2005. I started a few alts in preparation, and levelled up their profession so I could make a lot more money on the AH. I also stockpiled commodities that I thought would gain value on release of the new expansion in anticipation.

The Cataclysm expansion finally hit, and it's amazing. The overhaul of the levels 1-60 questing areas are brilliant; I played a few alts (including the new werewolf race) and had a blast. I also sold all the short-term speculation stock and made 70k gold; 5 times what I'd ever had before. Everything was looking rosy on paper, but when it came down to playing my main characters I just couldn't be bothered. I think much of the unique attraction of World of Warcraft for me was the implied longevity, I've had Lews for 6 years and his litany of exploits could continue yet, but I no longer know how long for. With Blizzard working on a new as-yet unnamed MMO, and my other favourite games company Bioware releasing a Star Wars MMO in the autumn (which I HAVE to try), not to mention new kid on the block Rift apparently kickin ass, WoW just doesn't have the invulnerability it used to. Though it's better now than it's ever been, its days are self-evidently numbered, it's time we parted ways.

Between going out and processing pictures of my goings out, I barely have any time anyways. A month ago I cancelled my World of Warcraft subscription and deleted it from by hard drive. Last week I sent a farewell email to a few guildies. Bai Lews. I'd link to picture of him on the online armoury but he's been "inactive too long" so I can't. The fuckers.

Unfortunately my dear machine is almost five years old now, and getting a little long in the tooth... It still runs everything fine, but no longer at max settings, and it's begun to complain with the over-the-top multitasking I always put it through. It's time for an upgrade, especially with the new and reasonably priced Sandy Bridge Intel processors outperforming even their high end predecessors. It's also long past time I upgraded to Windows 7 with its DirectX 11 graphics goodness. It's a shame the uber fast and shiny solid state drives are in such a state of flux; they're improving so quickly that anything I get now will have me kicking myself in only a few months... So having passed on that (and also resisting the temptation to get a third monitor), I've settled on this lot, using my old case, power supply unit and optical drive.

• Intel Core i5 2500K
• Be Quiet! Dark Rock Advanced CPU Cooler
• Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD4-B3
• 1GB MSI GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr II/OC
• 8GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600
• 2Tb Samsung SpinPoint EcoGreen F4EG
• Microsoft Windows 7 Home

Unlike last time I shelled out for a computer, I'll be building and possibly overclocking it myself! Excitement!

BBMs a nice alternative to texts but they're exclusive to blackberry users. Facebook chat is utterly godawful but annoyingly ubiquitous, Skype is decent enough but the videochat isn't a USP any more, while Gtalk seems like the mid point of all the others. Flickr is great when I remember to upload pics, and last.fm used to be amazing but recently stopped scrobbing tracks played on my ipod, which sucks. Steam would be really useful if I knew more PC gamers but at the moment it's not. Sadface. Twitter belongs in an awesome league of its own, I <3 it.

Anyways I thought it might be good to throw out more comm lines to people I see out and about pretty often but never speak to in the week, so here's some deets!

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Steam
• Flickr
• Last.fm
• BBM PIN: 21EAf3C1
• gtalk/email: daniel.govan [at] gmail.com
• msn: mynicboi [at] hotmail.com
• skype: daniel.govan

• Work out more FAIL. 4srs. When I have the time I don’t have the energy and vice versa. Need to MTFU and work on that, even if it is only a couple of times a week.
• Work harder Uncertain. I’ve been working harder, and have gotten the opportunity to do some really nifty jquery stuff, but it’s not been enough. The thingbox blocking idea didn’t last this time.
• Moderation with alcohol. EPIC SUCCESS! I’ve been out 15 nights so far this year and remember it all! Partly due to the realisation that excessive alcohol makes an uncomfortable situation worse, not better. IKR? Obvious conclusion is obvious. Honestly though it’s been pretty easy to keep a reign on myself for some reason. I’ve also started taking taking epic numbers of social documentary type pictures again.
• More spontaneity. Part success. I even cancelled plans on Saturday and went to something else instead to make the weekend more balanced! Proved to be a good decision. That said, I still don’t really like going out in the week, and my weekends are mostly booked for the next couple of months due to some outrageous plague of birthdays. Perhaps doing two parties in the same night counts?
• Be social. And remember it. Definite success. Tried to up my remote socialising too with a continuing effort to get more BBM or msn/gtalk deets, I miss the days when everyone just had msn and that was that. It’s a shame I don’t have more time and energy; there’s a lot of awesome people I rarely see because it’s “inefficient”, but there’s probably a whole blog post in that and the strange butterfly-type monster I’ve become.
• Learn how to use a frickkin phone. Part success. Dom likes the phone.
• DANCE Win. Obvs. Most of the weekends so far this year have been epic.

Now of course there's facebook to do most of that, plus I'm older and wiser and more able to autopilot the same bullshit anecdote as many times as is necessary if it means coming across well to some acquaintance who may prove important down the line. That said, some tales are just too tedious; the ones that though not actually that interesting I'd still have to explain at length with far more uses of "I" than I'd like to employ in polite company. My last two posts are good examples: My new year's resolutions and the reasons for them? Generic beyond belief. Shaggy phone story? Dull as fuck. If I was the kind of person to recall and relate dreams, they'd be on here somewhere. It's all pretty awful really. Why does anyone read this shit?

A few more things mind-numbing things I'd like to get around to posting about, most of them already half written, but I certainly wouldn't dare talk about where anyone can hear:

• My Threadless collection and why they're awesome.
• Love, and why anything you could have to say about it is bullshit.
• My pithy "philosophies" and where they come from.
• Photo tagging, and why you need to man the fuck up.

Or I might just spaff another stream of consciousness across the page, like this one. WHO KNOWS? Oh and if anyone has a crackberry hit me up for BBM shiny goodness.

1. Work out more. I already know all the exercises and have even gotten whey protein supplements, so I’m hoping to build on that.
2. Work harder at my job and on other web-based stuffs. Banning thingbox during the day seemed to help a lot so I’ll go back to that.
3. Moderation with alcohol: Less of the “oh fuck it” attitude at house parties and other places where the barrier to getting another drink is perilously low. If I’m hosting or have other responsibilities I find it easy to maintain tipsiness, there’s no real reason why that shouldn’t go for every night out, right?
4. That said: more spontaneity, less stress. Less looking, more leaping. (Just not into a vat of sherry.) Sounds prosaic but it’s a new one for me.
5. Be social. And remember it.
6. Linked to the above; learn how to use a frickkin phone. This is actually the one I’m most sceptical about succeeding at, it’s close to a phobia at the moment. Having to call someone up makes me really nervous and tense and I hate to do it. Sigh.
7. Edit: blates stolen from Chloë Sevigny: DANCE.

So then my mum kindly offered to get one for me, what with my Birthday fast approaching and all. She grabbed one from the same people and network that did her phone and quickly sent it down, but in her haste only used first class. Days later it hadn’t arrived. We had to wait two weeks before my mum could claim on the insurance and get another one sent.

It arrived as planned, just in time for my birthday party! It was awesome and all was going well until people called me to get directions or just be let in the front door; I could hear them but they couldn’t hear me. The phone was busted.

After the party-based dust had settled I went to a vodafone store to inquire about swapping it for a working one. They were quite helpful, but on consultation it turned out the phone was from phones4u, so I was barking up the wrong tree. My mum had a long conversation with the manager of her local store who was very clear that all I’d have to do was pop into a local branch and I could swap the phone no probs. Yay! So I pop in, and they tell me to come back with the charger and box. I duly return the next day (during the student demo that later went on to brake some conservative windows) but after a lot of pouring over a computer and phone calls to Edinburgh it turns out she was wrong; as this phone was sent by the insurance company it’s their responsibility to swap it.

So more phone calls. My mum arranges for them to send me an addressed envelope from me to send them the defective phone. They send it to my mum instead. My mum sends it to me. I send the phone away. They don’t have replacements in stock. They eventually get them in stock after much insistence from my mum, and she makes treble sure they send it to me. They send it to her anyway. She wraps it up ready for sending down and puts it in the post room, but the snow means the post van can’t get to the office. Eventually they do and it wings its way south. Delayed of course, due to the ice on the roads etc.

I still don’t have a phone.

On Saturday I freaked out and kinda jumped the tracks a bit. It was just a party, I just drank (WAY) too much, and my friends have just chalked it up as a messy one and no more need be said. But I feel like it was a several-year low: I normally trust myself drunk and to have that undermined was a blow. In the day-long hangover and 3-day lack of appetite there was a lot of time to ponder many different variations of "wtf?, that's not me". Eventually I came round to the obvious question: "Well who do I want to be then?" Yesterday while waiting for the tube the answer came to me: TOTALLY FECKIN HAWESOME.

Yeah you heard! That's what I want. It's (probably?) not as stupid as it sounds, I've been working on being totally awesome on and off for years now, plus I only have to be totally awesome in my own eyes so the bar's not really that high. I've got a feeling it'd get higher if I got too close but that's fine too. So yeah, time for a bit of self improvement:

• Communications Yeah I go out a lot, I see a lot of people when I do and it's great to have a wide circle of friends, but the fact is when I'm not out I'm actually pretty uncommunicative. Messenger is still my favourite method which a) is non transferable to IRL, b) less and less people actually use it and c) it ties me to a computer more than I'd like. Solution? SMART PHONE. A Blackberry Bold to be precise! It makes texting SO much easier, having twitter and facebook on the move unshackles me from my desktop, and what with the contractyness and free calls I might even talk to someone once in a while! Yeh it's all pretty obvious but I'm well late to the party.
• Working out Embarking on my usual self-improvement plan I weighed myself to see how much I'd have to lose, only to find I'm lighter now than my target weight's been for the past five years. Perhaps having so many stairs in the new house has its upsides?! So instead I've decided to try using protein supplements after workouts to see what I can do on that front, as I've seen that work well on others. Being close to a body I can be confident of it is pretty exciting, that thought might even help me stick to a routine.
• Geek out Making webby-type stuff makes me happy. Dossing about (though fine when my batteries are low); not so much. After a few redundancies work's very much picking up, so that should take care of that. Though it'd be ace to get back into pottering about with my website there are only so many evenings in the week!
• Do cool stuff I've been keeping pretty busy with this one, so no danger. That said it does kinda conflict with the previous two; I'm running at capacity! I'd like to add a bit of travel but it looks like I've got a trip to DC coming up so that's all good.
• Health Like, I haven't been to a dentist in SO LONG. I should probs do something about that. And register with a gp at my new place, boring but should be done.
• Emotional constipation UGH! IKR? It takes me hours or days to put feelings or desires into words. Which is fine if I don't particularly want anything, i.e. most of the time, but when things begin to "matter" to me I clam up and turn into a helplessly frustrated mute. Good times! It's probably not rare but it's so time to get over that, amirite?

The next weekend was just silly though; I had time off work so it was a long one. THURSDAY was with hilarious ikea construction with dolly and jono, massive pasta dinner, tekken, drinks & dressup at dolly’s with a few other peeps for Alex’s leaving do, getting lost, dancing G-A-Y Late. Hot mess. FRIDAY was quieter; round Rob’s for sausages and chat, clapham fireworks authentically viewed from the pavement under trafficlights, then a couple of drinks in the two brewers before I escaped the awful and went home. Apparantly they ended up at Speedwagon which might have been fun, but you just can’t be doing with a hungover host, so I went to bed. SATURDAY was my birthday party thing which, i dunno, 60+ people came to? Humbling. It made great use of the space downstairs and the cosy “smoking yard” too. SUNDAY was mopping and clearing and then lounging in bed, followed by a beef roast at Josh’s then the vicky park fireworks, then some random pub, then josh’s again for the end of xfactor. Poor wasserface never stood a chance. Epic Birthday win.

I spent all Monday just trying to recuperate but it wasn’t enough - I’d had a cold the whole time after all - and this week the cough’s gotten worse rather than better. Gallingly I’m now on my second day off work sick; instead of being productive and social I’m stuck indoors being pathetic and losing all the manpoints I gained with the flatpack construction. Also my ‘tache looks absurd, and apparently makes me look French. UGH.

I’m the one in the middle with the red t-shirt in case you’re having trouble recognising me. I went from full beard to goatee to smooth-faced this weekend; my cheeks are decidedly drafty and I can blow up my own nose for the first time since 2008. The reactions I got for my red-devil or ghost-faced Halloween costumes were nothing compared to the abject horror that the sight of my bare chin elicited, but hey it’s all for a good cause. And I can grow it back, right? RIGHT? I might collect the beard clippings just in case…

So yeah, SPONSOR ME.

We finally sorted out the heating at home after weeks of massive jumpers and double duvets, and now I've got a cold. But not because of the singleglazedness and tiny heater of my bedroom; because of the overzealous air-conditioning at work! KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!

Feeling totally crappy my (not-so) grand plans for tea and scones (or yeah probably beer) with people, putting together a (highly derivative) presentation and fixing my site (the RSS seems to be fucked) all just have to wait; I'm far too busy with the vitally important endeavour of sitting about, plus the sleeping and the moping. So much so that I've had a day and a half off work to let me do more of it. It's funny that while ill and single I find myself idly wishing for some nice boy to make me soup and tuck me in, given that out of a little over five years total relationship time I've never asked for or wanted it even once. The realities of dealing with the other half while a grumpysnotmungous are just much less glam than the fantasy.

Beardageddon

In other mildly more interesting news I'm doing Movember this year, along with quite a few people at work. Basically it involves growing a moustache for charity, for which I'll have to shave off my beard of one and a half years! It might look awful for a while but hey, it'll be lol, and I've never had a moustache before. I also plan to trim down to a short-lived goatee tomorrow for Halloween, so it's topiariotous action all over my face! Well, y'know, it passes the time...

So yeah, go donate! If y'all give now I won't have to keep spamming that link all month.

• IKEA delivery time. I have to wait 2 weeks til I can properly put my room in order.
• Royal Fail: after a month or so of trying to get a shiny contract phone via various means I’m currently being thwarted by a backlog at Royal Mail. It’s been en route almost a week, however it was only sent first class so is untrackable: it might just be “lost”!
• Internet: To be fair it currently works (slightly) more often than not, but that unreliability is really frustrating. Unsettling even. I needs me my connection! An upgrade to Sky was meant to happen a couple of weeks ago. Slow.
• Lack of focus at work. Lots to do, lots of trouble concentrating.
• Missing Luke. The second opinion, the partner in crime, the hungover grumbling etc.
• Adjusting to singledom. A much more holistic issue than it first appears; I’m in a weird limbo atm.
• It’s cold out.

Good things

• I have a long weekend now. And another next week, and a very long one the week after that.
• I have a pile of good books I’m quickly working through.
• I’ve bought myself so much online stuff that I’ll be getting fun presents for weeks.
• Teething problems aside the new flat is awesome, as is living in walking distance of several friends.
• I’m getting back into working out (arms still hurt right now).
• I’m out more evenings than not, and will hopefully be hosting a party in a couple of weeks.
• We got a job at work that’s long-term and will use exactly the kind of web-crunching infoviz stuff I’ve been getting excited about lately.
• I can go abroad without feeling guilty: gonna do D.C. and maybe Toronto next year.
• It’s sunny out.

On the downside me and my bf of almost two years broke up a couple of weeks ago, which totally sucks. In spite of our best efforts we never really got the hang of talking things out, a few things were more papering-over and then blowing up, which only got more hurtful as we grew closer. So I guess it’s fair to say that it ran its course, pouty though that makes me. Which means at the moment I’m mostly acclimatising to singledom and trying to work out how to furnish my massive room. I’m thinking a big Ikea delivery of Expedit shelving, even though ordering online takes forever to arrive. I also have a few nifty posters still to be delivered. And threadless tees, but that’s pretty much a constant with me.

I also decided I need to join respectable society and get a contract phone, preferably a shiny one. I went with a blackberry as I’d like something I can type fast on and the battery life of the iphone and the HTCs seem to be ridiculously bad, however my attempts to purchase one were denied: credit fail! Probably down to my having just moved and thus not being on the electoral register and never having had a credit card. So as much as it irks me I’m filling out a creditcard application form. Le sigh. In the meantime my mum bought me a phone in her name - coz yeah I’m 13 apparently - which SHOULD be winging its way over to me as I type. My first technologically uptodate phone. Excited.

Highlights included:

• Camp fires every night thanks to manly Gareth
• Rolf Harris, though he's 80 years old he was showing a whippersnapper MC how beatboxing's really done.
• Miike Snow's album shows only hints of the phat electro noize they pump out live. Loved it.
• Shakira was just filth. Sexy sexy filth.
• La Roux + Heaven 17 doing Temptation (not the rest of their set, it was shit.)
• NYC Downlow was filth of a very different kind, East London party times inna tent. Mind you the rest of the party village was just insanely awesome. Ohai Gomorrah! Thank god you're only around a few days a year or civilisation would like totally fall.
• Napping in a hippy tent. Wasn't even planned, it was just humid and comfy and we all drifted off.
• Scissor Sisters + Kylie (so SO gay). The rest of their set was good too, crowd pleasing hits interspersed with new stuff carried off on Jake Shears' drug-fuelled energy.
• Pet Shop Boys were surprisingly amazing. Great set. Fantastic dancers. Tune after Tune.
• The Kinks (well, 2 out of 5 of them). Gobsmackingly amazing. Several "Glasto moments" all rolled into one set, including Sunny afternoon, Waterloo Sunset, Days and Ray Davies being furious at having to cut his set short.
• Excellent food. N00bs assume that everything out of a van is shit, and certainly if you grab the first thing you find you won't be disappointed, but there's serious noms around if you keep a look out.
• Crossword solving. The easy one though obvs, we were hungover after all. Guardian sponsorship was apparent everywhere.
• Stevie Wonder was unsurprisingly amazing. Michael Eavis, however, can't hold a tune in a bucket.
• Pea soup mist and popup-tent-folding at 5 in the morning on the way back to civilisation.

It was a little weird being out and about without my camera but it was also oddly freeing not having the responsibilities of both looking after it and of documenting everything. Being with a bunch of friends all suffering from sleep deprivation meant a lot of hysterical nonsense was talked, which was similarly relaxing. It was just an easy breezy time, and in the days since I've had to stop myself dancing in the street to my iPod and skipping when I should be walking. Good times.

Though it sucked that it took 7 hours to get home there wasn't really any time for post-party comedown, what with the charidy gig on Wednesday where I knew everyone playing, London Pride on Saturday where we watched the parade, drank in soho then dressed up in 60s gear for Duckie's Gross Indecency and partied till dawn, then on Sunday was Tommy et al's massive BBQ.

On top of all the expensive party times I've just shelled out 400 quid to go to a web design class (and the dConstruct conference) in September! After thinking about it for a bit I decided I just couldn't pass up the opportunity of a day being taught by one of my favourite web designers, plus it can go straight on my CV, so there.

I'm now tired and poor. Hurrah!

Something that's really helped me stay enthused is walking up and down the Thames listening to podcasts about the web like the Big Web Show, which has been surprisingly exhilarating. It sounds dubious but seriously: sun + awesome scenery + three mile walk + mini web seminar in my head = amazing. It leaves me energised and relaxed but at the same time filled with the post-conference ambitious tension that keeps me thinking about the web. With that sort of daily injection of buzz it'll easy to keep the webdev side of things ticking over with nips and tucks moving forward, in spite of this site moving out of focus a bit now.

That's needed though; the next couple of weeks are going to be very busy with the Glastonbury Festival and London Pride on consecutive weekends, so I think this is a good place to draw a line under it. Also my PC is grinding to a halt, and in the dirge of smartphone and ipad info I'm hopelessly out of touch with PC tech; research needed towards getting a shiny new one. The other big thing is I need to look into finding a place to live come September: I like the idea of moving east, from Wapping to Bethnal Green to Bow, but beyond that I've no idea. For the first time in forever I'll need to move in with all-new people too! Scary!

Today I spent at the Future of Web Design conference (London 2010). I went in '06 and '07 too, though in those days it was a smaller event, and MUCH cheaper. It's scary numbers now, but thankfully the company I work with are sending me, providing I can cobble together some learnings to spread among the tech and creative departments in a presentation or two. There's a lot to take on board, plus a couple of key talks I missed due to a clash that I'll have to stream when they put it online, and there's another whole day of it tomorrow! MY POOR HEAD. I'M NOT EVEN A DESIGNER. But then again the main subjects were HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery, which is exactly what a Front-End codemonkey like me should be learning, perhaps I am a designer. It's confusing.

In any case "dossing around with flash games" + "new experiences" + "inspiring talks from luminaries" = "thoughts". Though I'll have to reflect more carefully on the speakers and the subjects when I digest them for the MRM London audience, there were a few small easily-forgettable things I wanted to jot down before they're buried under the wisdom of tomorrow's speakers, mostly under the theme of "Keeping Score", by which I mean a sort of IRL-metagaming: staying goal oriented in order to keep productive, fresh, enthused, interested and interesting. I'm fighting the temptation to over-analyse but as that's just the adult equivalent of colouring in your revision plan I'm going to try and avoid well-meaning procrastination, skip the theory and just take stock.

Fresh: Change is a good thing to keep score on, and new sources of info. One that's gone stale is blogs, I just don't read them any more! My google-reader goes unnoticed and the things I do read tend to be list articles. I need to unsubscribe from 90% of them and start again. Similar story - though not as severe - with ipod tracks; they need a good pruning. Quality not quantity! Tangentially, I should look at grabbing podcasts or audiobooks for Thameside walks at lunch.

Fitness: I've relapsed into old eating habits in the past couple of weeks which is perhaps regrettable, and I've stopped walking at lunch which might be fixed with more interesting reading material, but as workouts are going fairly well I'm not too cut up about it.

Funtimes: I've no ambition to cut games books and sci-fi out of my life, but there are other non-productive things with are much more self-evidently a total waste of time, usually when I'm bored. I need to learn to recognise and avoid these troughs as they happen.

Social: As I've stopped using a couple of social-networking sites I feel a little isolated sometimes, which could be fixed by going out more than the once or twice a week I do now, but again it's not a disaster. Keeping busier would help too.

Website: It's going well. Light at the end of the tunnel, etc. A few of the talks today provided some good insights into nift of the UX or jQuery variety that I will definitely follow up.

• Tone: Jocular? The cv section is a little informal which might be ok, but it still needs way more work. Giving my penchant for editing to the nth degree I probably won't be totally satisfied with it for weeks so I need to shortcut to the next stage.
• Typography: Vertical spacing/gridwork is a mystery to me, I need to find out about that. Finding non-standard fonts to showcase would be excellent if I can find a monospace pretty enough.
• jQuery: Fade out the "working" gifs, then get rid. Condense the "tips" section, and bring in the html from another page to reduce clutter and also demo another bit of pseudo ajaxyness (does that count as ajax? Find out). Have the "previous" tip fade out faster than the "next" fades in to give the impression of more whitespace.
• UX: fade in the dangovan logo onload as a cue to the user that things change. Introduce some more "discovery", perhaps more graphically rewarding on mouseovers? If that can be done without losing the simplicity.
• Portfolio section: title at the top, on mouseover the year slides down from top, the blurb slides up from bottom and the left/right button slides in from sides. Some possible sections: pride stuff, HTML email, localisation, design work, ITM3, big names, etc. Include link to live?
• Design: #999 background on the last.fm pics? Make top-border thinner? Work on a me-pic, similar to obama/hope but in red/grey/white and dashed.
• Nice-to-haves: Mobile version? Yoink simple tools I use anyway?

It's also been extremely gratifying that I've been able to use so much of what I've learned tinkering with this lot in a professional capacity. "Twitter feed you say? Oh I did that last week. Twice." "json? Oh yeah I know all about that." When (if) this is all "done" I should create a playground section to keep mucking about in!

Still todo:

• Work out nift-factor for portfolio section: eg mouseover behaviour, flicking between images.
• Compile portfolio screenshots according to appropriate themes and put them in as blog entries
• Find a decent/amusing photo of myself (perhaps impossible) and posterise it for the about page.
• Re-write CV
• Combine hover and focus for the mainNav slide
• Create a fastHover function as part of hiHover
• Then an awful lot of design/typographical fine tuning

In other news: 3 day weeks don't give enough time for my body clock to normalise. Who knew? Going out at the weekend, all-night vigils for elections, Mass Effect 2 tempting me to stay up in the week... NEED SLEEP. Also I dropped my camera on its front a week ago, breaking the telescopic lens and ending two years of devoted service. Knowing from experience that it costs a lot to replace that part I decided to just get a new one. I want a bit insane though, and got a top-of-the-range sony tx5 as a replacement. But it's so shiiiiiny! And also, ostensibly drop proof, which might help.

Other things I'd like to add:

• Navigational "here" state that also turns off the link, with a js/css combo.
• Dynamically swap out the intro text on the front page for nifty hints on mousing over other parts of the page.
• Pull out date of last blog post somehow?
• Get that and other hover-behaviour to fade in and out.
• Draw in more tweets and get the area to scroll down on hover
• Homepage details: border along the top etc.
• Poster-ised photo of myself on the info page.
• Both "work" and "cv" will probably featuring a nested-list nav on left and entries on left structure.
• Hide "commenting not allowed" copy from single-post blog pages.
• Snaz up the 404 somehow. Giant punctuation?
• Style the (horrible) blogsearch section. For some reason ExpressionEngine makes it a separate, table-ridden subsite. Ugh.
• Contact details? Though I don't want a spammable link and email forms always feel crude...
• Suddenly become a genius at typography and refine all the fonts throughout.

Photo-snapping, foot-stomping, "music-loving":http://www.last.fm/user/mynciboi, gig-going, computer-game-playing, web-mongering, black-wearing, over-analysing, quiet-speaking, loud-laughing, terminally-curious, rabidly-relativistic, hyphen-abusing muppet.

My name's Dan, I'm a meandering web-geek born and raised in Edinburgh, now living in London, playing things by ear and generally checking out this and that.

I'm at a computer more often than not, whether at work putting websites together or tinkering with photos, playing games, trawling for infos, conducting illicit downloads and/or chatting on messenger. I'm online a lot.

I much enjoy chatting shit over drinks or dinner before heading out to an indie/electro/pop-type club for dubious dancing. Houseparties and PiE&MASH are aces too. I tend to be the designated documenter/photographer for such ventures which can be fun but leaves me with a lot of photoshopping to do.

Sweeping generalisations/assumptions/tribalism wind me up no end. That and X-Factor. Soz.

Music, last.fm, film, cinema, subtitles, internet, computer games, RTS, RPG, WoW, photography, flickr, indie clubs, cake, coffee, indie, electro, popstarz, ghetto, trash palace, design, history, mythology, sci-fi, fantasy, Song of ice and fire, Nightwatch, computer games, canasta, books, black books, eddy izzard, Bill Hicks, pop-psychology, philosophy, zen, websites, futurism, lolcats, anything shiny, naps, naruto, true blood, dexter, heroes, photoshop, mimbling about, CAEK.

Next up, blog front page and similar single-post page including concertina-d archive links. Then CV page, then a Work page with a lot of screenshots in some sort of gallery arrangement I haven’t thought through yet.

Gaming: I tore through the single player campaign of Supreme Commander 2 in a few days: not bad, though not that interesting. Better than Command and Conquer 4 though, I deleted that in frustration, I wish I hadn’t bothered. The “single player” campaign can actually be done with two players, which is nifty I suppose but it means it’s really frackking difficult to do with one. Balancing fail. The multiplayer bits seemed like a crappy version of Dawn of War 2 so basically: game fail. Similarly I finally got around to reaching the tier 3 ship I wanted in Star Trek Online, a nifty little one with four nacelles, and was disproportionately disappointed when the warping animation only lit up the top two. The bottom two nacelles stayed dark. It’s nicely indicative of the laziness of the game, and already disillusioned I deleted and unsubscribed. Browsing Steam I saw called Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, a Hungarian-made near-future sci-fi space ship game a couple of years old. So far it’s surprisingly good, and after the fail of Star Trek little details like directional thrusters firing to manoeuvre your cumbersome ship in a physically plausible way are much appreciated.

This hasn’t stopped me watching lots of Enterprise though.

Books: Again with the tearing: I read the sixth book by Trudi Canavan, the last in her first trilogy. Easy read but you can tell she’s a noob, the ending was rushed and clichéd. Her second series is much better, and I’d be tempted to give her future work a look. Having read so much recently it’s given me a nice run up to finally get my teeth into a massive hardback tome that Laurie got me a year and a half ago: Anathem by Neal Stephenson. I found it frustratingly impenetrable until now but am suddenly enjoying the jarring metaphors and drip-feeding plot.

Fitness: Well I’m walking 4 or 5 miles and doing about 45 minutes of weights exercise 4 or 5 days a week, which is good I guess… Not doing too well resisting pizza and/or pasta for dinners though, and I’m finding it difficult to push myself beyond “exhaustion” to an hour exercise… So I’ve levelled out at 71kg, but I’d love to get down to 70. Sigh, so close! Gngngngngn!

In other news, I spent a few days in Spain visiting Abuella, Alberto and Ignacio. Was good to catch up, especially with Alberto, but kinda depressing too, sad to see them so down on themselves.

Work has been busy, I’ve read five Trudi Canavan books in as many weeks and have been storming through Assassins Creed 2, so I’ve paused on my tinkering with this site for now, hope to get some done in the Easter Break though.

• Cued up flights to Gibraltar but got distracted before I managed to press "buy".
• Wrote 680 words about an emo vampire.
• Brushed up on my CSS3 and went "oooh" at some JQuery nifty woo.
• Compiled my notes on the upcoming website overhaul in a Wave. Design next.
• Read about hundred pages of Priestess of the white, lent to me by Keith.
• Worked up a sweat jumping around my room like an idiot for all of 20 minutes. Weak.
• Watched 2 episodes of Star Trek: Voyager.
• Played some Mass Effect. Meant to roll a biotic this time but snipers are just too awesome.
• Pretended to be a megalomaniacal super being on Thingbox.
• Ate two bowls of cereal, one bowl of soup and a tuna sandwich.
• Downloaded 5 new films that I might never watch as they're probably all rubbish.

• Boned up on Shy Child in preparation for seeing them tonight.
• Read about Howard's weekend, told through the medium of dinosaurs.
• Asked around for some work to do. Failed.
• Signed a couple of anti-pope petitions.
• Looked for more nifty blog designs.
• Played with the "My Maps" bit of googlemaps. Ambivalent.
• Measured how much I've sworn on twitter.
• Walked 3 miles along the Thames (in the rain).
• Spent a coffee pontificating about shrinks, films and vampires with Mikey.
• Tried again with the work thing, succeeded. Woop(?)
• Undid some code that I misguidedly thought was really clever in 2006.
• Got terrified that they had put the deadline for paying for Glastonbury tickets back a month and not told me.
• Realised the difference between 2009 and 2010. Paid for ticket.

Anyways that sort of stuff is relatively simple, what's trickier is what I want it to look like. A palette of red, white black and grey is a given, because, well, it's my site and I like those colours. But beyond that, it has to be SNAZZY! (But doable.) I've been looking through blogs and web pages that are ostensibly nifty looking for something along the right lines. Here's a few that I thought were Plus Nift. I was just bookmarking them til I thought it'd be useful to note down why

• denisechandler Love the header, the wacky bees and the menu reaching over to the side of the page. Simplt but really impactful. Is that a word? Oh sod it.
• sursly.com Ok, this looks like nothing, til you click a link and you're all like WOAH WHAT JUST HAPPENED. Hiding the scroll an putting a bunch of stark graphics between the "pages" is fully nift.
• mikeambs.com Very simple. I like minimalist stuff and this is that. Similarly blog.squarespace.com, I've seen the little marks on the edges like that in a few places now and it's a nice touch. I'm sure there's a better word for it but hey.
• jeffsarmiento.com Wee details are also good though, and this has loads of that. I particularly like how the secondary column feels undeniably secondary.
• colly.com Probably represents the my idea in webdesign. I'm not aiming anywhere near that high, to be honest, but it's good to keep a benchmark of awesome in the back of your mind.
• northtemple Love the NORTH widget thingy. Awesomesauce.
• urbanlandscapelab Minimal colours, nice use of negative space, love the header/footer and the bright green blip when you click a link. Nice.
• matthamm Textured background vs flat foreground + slight bevel = subtle text that pops sufficiently anyways.

With any luck I'll add some more sites/ideas/etc here. Woop!

For the moment though, I've hit a gear wall. Until the next patch hits in a few weeks the only thing I can reasonably upgrade is my weapon, which Bliz seems to enjoy making as rare as rocking-horse shit. Apart from logging on every week for a Raid to try my chance with the drops, I've been playing Dragon Age: Origins instead, easily the best RPG since Neverwinter Nights 1, or Gothic 2, maybe even the best since Baldur's Gate 2 back in 2000! Good times. Some how I also need to find time to process the 300 pictures I took while out last weekend, plus the 200 from my holiday in Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago, plus read the latest Wheel of Time book, which by all accounts has not suffered at all from the death of its original author. Woop!

In other news, I'm now 28. Probably undeniably an adult. Woe.

Summer in London has been kinda rubbish weather wise. Yes there's the heat and ok storms can be fun the first couple of times, but generally it's just hot and muggy, with occasionally breaks for cold-and-wet or hot-and-sunny, depending. For example Glastonbury was perfect (or so I hear, sadface) but Brighton Pride this Saturday was a complete washout. I'm a little sad we didn't persevere a little longer with it as by all accounts there was great fun to be had in spite of the weather, but we were late to the party, slightly hungover, completely sober and almost posse-less, so after getting soaked we went home, showered and cooked, like old people.

Was really nice to have Luke over for a long weekend too, good times, fun wanderings, much snuggles, though it's ridiculous how much we bicker, given my previous opinion on couples who do that.. I think after the deceptive calm of the relationship with Si I seem to have gone to the other extreme: interesting but tiring. Plus he ate all my food. Damn him. Oh! And someone submitted a picture I took on Saturday to Look At The Fucking Hipster starring my *cough* beautiful *cough* boyfriend. He seems to be taking his new-found fame well.

I finally registered and went to the doctors recently about my upper/mid back pains, which I used to attribute to my arthritis and just grin and bear but I'm no longer convinced; it seems more muscular. I'm hoping to get seen by a physiotherapist soon to see what, if anything, I can do about it. I really want to try and get in decent shape and I can't when flexing any part of my back gives instant cramp-like pains :-( The short term involves a crap-load of tests though. I've already had blood tests (many vials filled, erk) and a couple of x-rays taken, next I'm going to get some sort of endoscopy thing to find out how much nomming ibuprofen like it's candy over the years has screwed up my insides. Probably lots. SADFACE. I've been banned from taking my beloved ibuprofen tablets for now so I'm relying on deep heat and ibuprofen gel which is kinda awkward. Still though, it was nice to be able to walk in and out of hospital unaided.

Work is pretty good right now, the all-company meetings sound slightly corny and are easily dismissed but I really get a feeling of where we are and where we are going as a company, and it all sounds good, even if I do take it with a pinch of salt. There's clear evidence of progress, from the report on the company Vision and Values that I helped put together and present to the London office FINALLY having a web presence at www.mrmworldwide.co.uk. I did the markup and styles for that as well which is a nice touch. At the last all-company meeting I learned that one of the websites I've been working a lot on recently (on of those projects that just won't go away) is to be on store PCs on the shop floor of every PC world in the country. Which is nice. On the other hand it's odd to have so many new faces in the tech department, what with the redundancies and redundancy-fears earlier in the year, as well as a couple of people leaving, part of that is down to us going from a .net house to .net and Java. Interesting times. I still walk to work every day which is awesome. Hopefully we'll stay at this address for another year to keep that lovely perk.

Oh yeah, here's the list of games.

• The Last Remnant Didn't grab me in the first hour. Fail.
• Demigod Good, but it's just DotA
• Fallout 3 Not that awesome really. In any sandbox game like this I always get sidetracked making my fortune. I never care enough about the main plot.
• City Life Delux Confusing.
• Crusader Kings Damn confusing. And old-looking.
• Europa Universalis 3 AWESOME. With the Magna Mundi mod this game keeps me coming back.
• Europa Universalis: Rome Didn't catch on.
• Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 Silly but fun.
• Overlord Silly fun. Frustrating sequentiality given the lack of a map.
• Empire: Total War Kinda easy when I first played it. Shelved it waiting for patches.
• LotR: Battle for Middle Earth 2 Decent.
• LotR: Conquest Shite.
• Universe at War Good. The differences between the races kept it fresh in spite of the old-school UI
• Warhammer Dawn of War 2 Good, but I didn't get the big deal behind the multi-player which is clearly its main strength. With only 1 race single player quickly became dull.
• Civilisation IV I have trouble remembering which civilisation is which. The same flaw I find with every one is that the AI produces hundreds of units and I don't, because shuffling around hundreds of units is DULL.
• Chris Sawyer's Locomotion LOL
• Elven Legacy I can see some people liking this but hex wargames are a little oldschool for me.
• Sim City 4 Classic. I think Cities XL might steal it's crown though, god knows Sim Cities Societies damn well isn't.
• The Sims 3 After Sims 2 with all the add-ons Sims 3 very feature-poor. I'll have another look in a few years when the money-grabbing bastards have pumped out the obvious expansion packs that they already did in 1 and 2.
• Prototype AWESOME. Smashy smashy game with a decent plot. Didn't like the protagonist at all but I'm sure empathy would get in the way of all the smashy.
• Far Cry 2 Promising start, though my computer might die.
• CoD 4: Modern Warfare Really really good for the handful of hours it took.
• Overlord 2 Much better than Overlord. Made me realise I love having a palace/castle/den to upgrade and have ever since Civ 2 and BG 2
• Stronghold Legends Baffling.
• Sacred 2 - Fallen Angel Awful. Diablo and Dungeon Siege have a shit child.
• Plants Vs Zombies Good arcadey fun. Desktop flash game basically.
• The Witcher - Enhanced Difficult to get into it a second time, I wish there was a way to skip the tutorial bit. Yes my attention span is that small.
• Left for Dead Shot some zombies. No big whup. I assume you have to play it online to care.

In other news, I’ve been taking a royal fuckton of photos of gays and their drunken antics, such that I’ve damned myself to dozens of hours mucking around on photoshop and wrestling with the evil that is Facebook Uploader, and my friends refer to me as their paparazzi, and then complain when they find out who sweaty they get after dancing three hours straight in a basement that’s never heard of aircon. Part of me wants to take a break from that, another wants to shell out for a DSLR and do it properly.

I’ve been failing badly when it comes to live music this year, I think the only stuff I’ve seen has been accidental, and looking through people’s Glastonbury photos I’m quite jeluz. I hope working Bestival works out but having not heard anything about it for months I’m not at all hopeful. I was going to try and go to Field Day, but it clashes with Brighton Pride. And Lovebox clashes with something else. Sigh.

Started using twitter properly now. A little while back I finally knew enough people that are on it *and* (shock) USE IT to make it not a waste of time. Slightly mourning the death of flickr to facebook and the death of last.fm to spotify. Oh well. Keep on movin’.

I’ll put up a list later of all the games I’ve played recently, but these are the ones I want to play. They’re not out yet.
Sims 3
Diablo 3
Starcraft 2
Dragon Age
Prototype
Champions Online
Knights of the Old Republic Online

Empty diary. Sadface. My life is measured in google calendar and facebook fotos.

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Title 1

Definition 1.

Title 2

Definition 2.

Title 3

Definition 3.

January

2008 sucked to begin with, mostly a continuation of the emotional hangover from the breakup in November. I'd been doing cool stuff and gotten back into Warcraft to keep busy but the grief was still a constant companion and New Year's was a mediocre washout, by comparison to most other NYE, a failure. On the plus side, January was where I began to turn things around. It had been a particularly lardy Christmas and I decided I needed to lose wieght, so I started exercising and watching what I ate. In the name of getting out of the house I started a regular Orange Wednesday film night with a few friends. I re-opened comms with Ciaran and his posse that I'd been friends with at uni. I got talking to and met a couple of guys off OKCupid (not as sad as it sounds) and was out every Saturday with Giles and Will in a refusal to bow down to the depressingness of January. Also: West 5. Lol.

February

Was mostly more of the same, though a bit less partying and was kinda seeing Rich. Highlights: Eddie Izzard at a tiny venue, the new Popstarz venue. Lowlight: getting ill twice.

March

Involved five days in Paris visiting Mikey and a weekend revisiting Warwick for the "End of the Union" event. I also re-quit Warcraft and hit my weight target (70kg), which I've stayed around since then. Clubs and parties continued on Saturday nights, exploration of cinemas continued on Wednesday nights.

April

Saw Portishead and We Are Scientists, went to the The Future Of Webdesign conference, Laurie visited from SanFran, James turned 30. Also: snow!

May

Ken lost the election, I saw the Wombats and went to Edinburgh for a few days, Mikey returned from Paris.

June

Mmmm sun. Glastonbury. Stonking. Avenue Q. Start getting active on thingbox more. Drastically misrepresent myself to a posse of new friends by pulling two nights running. Also fun and frolics at Thorpe Park.

July

London Pride, Lewis, Week in Malaga, Mark, Javascript training. Meeting lots of fun new people.

August

Brighton Pride, Singing in the Rain, Anglesey, Manchester Pride, my first Pie and Mash. More of the same.

September

Shitty month, due to having to stay in Kev's (lovely) spare room in Watford and living out of a backpack. Randomly went to Bestival. Apart from a few lunches and dinners there were no midweek funtimes. On paper things were fine but it was very depressing, with too much time to myself to think. Perhaps as compensation I began going out on both Fridays and Saturdays as the norm, rather than one or the other, crashing on spare beds, futons and couches of more centrally-based friends.

October

Having finally moved into the place at Elephant and Castle things began to look up, though it was frustrating how long it took to get and assemble all the Ikea Furniture. Film Wednesdays had died a death but the heavy weekends continued. Had my first (and as yet still only) bona fide club pull. Amusing but meh. Annoyingly in spite of the facts of the matter I seemed to be getting a "reputation", though it was true I had tripled my sexual experience in less than a year, that really wasn't saying very much.

November

The two-nights-out weekends (including my birthday) culminated in a my taking advantage of time off work to go out four nights in a row. A record for me, and a bit of a milestone. I was clearly much better at this malarkey than I used to be. Excellent fun, good times, but tiring, and it changed my point of view on a couple of things. Firstly, I was kinda tired of night buses. Secondly, I decided I wanted a bit more "grins and snuggles" in my life. Given I had been pretty busy and social recently I had a few possibilities for dating, but that proved irrelevant as my first choice agreed to what was a lovely night of drinks and dancing. The rest of the month, and the first couple of weeks of December, was mostly spent being ill and/or playing Warcraft. The expansion had been released so I rejoined after a break of 9 months. Between that and Luke's pennilessness, I didn't do a whole lot, especially in comparison to the previous few months. As I discovered later everyone had had colds or flu of some description over this period though so I didn't actually miss anything.

December

Mid-month it was off to Edinburgh for the season's familial festivities. To be honest I had been really dreading it, but it turned out to be really good. Almost issue-free and pretty cheery; it was great to catch up with everyone. I had also been stressed about NYE, after the previous year's flop, and I had resigned myself to tagging along with some friends to a houseparty. Which proved awesome. Lots of people I knew and kinda-knew, was drinking and talking shit til 7 in the morning. My New Year's nights have always been good and I was very glad to find that 2007 -> 2008 was a glitch.

I recently moved to elephant and castle, but I haven’t really settled in yet. Most of my stuff is still in boxes and disarray, and we still lack real internet. It’s 15 minutes walk to work though, which in London is just astonishing. Feels pretty good generally, hopefully I’ll be able to get everything sorted and get back into the swing of things. BBQ season is over, it’s time for the house parties.

I am immortal.

Never had any evidence to the contrary. Never been in a traffic accident or been seriously ill, never had any broken bones or needed to be in surgery. I'm not saying this actually means I'm immortal, this just means I find it impossibly hard to get my head around the fact that I'm not. As fear of my own mortality is not an aspect of my life I want to expand on I don't really dwell on it much.

Morality is bullshit.

It portrays itself as a series of absolutes, but with a little knowledge of anthropology you can see that it's clearly entirely subjective. It's just a collection of customs and shouldn't be idolised as much as it is. I prefer causality. Do what you damn well please, just be prepared to accept the consequences.

There are no absolutes.

Everything is relative. Perhaps an odd thing to say in a post about supposed absolutes, but hey there are always exceptions.

I don't do anything I don't want to do. (And neither do you.)

There is always a choice. The exception is probably waiting; I'm really not a fan of waiting.

Apathy is the death of the soul

Boredom being the most common embodiment of this. As an ever-living immortal (hah) I do of course fear only boredom. Being entertaining is fun, But I don't really get any validation from it.

I don't care what other people think.

I dress for me, I do interesting stuff for me, I live for me. The point of life is to have fun and leave it with interesting memories, and I owe it to myself to do that.

...but I hate being hated.

I can live without love but I can't deal with being hated. I try to live life fairly humble and reasonable, so can't stand it when some misunderstanding unjustly earns me someone's wrath. Unless they're a twat anyway, in which case who cares?

99% of people I don't give a shit about.

Every crowd I pass through I'm always searching for people I know. I'm ridiculously good at it, I can tell people by their walk, or the back of their head or their mannerisms. Failing that I'll look for attractive or interesting people. Everyone else I just don't see. To quote a friend: "You're all blobs to me".

Lying is to be avoided

At almost any costs. If you're really lucky and are not found out then it constructs walls between people. Fake people, people who are not truly perceived by anyone, almost do not exist.

I'm ugly and uninteresting.

I don't find myself attractive, so if someone else tells me they do I find it hard to take them seriously. Likewise I never assume attraction as the cause of other people's actions. If new people choose to spend time with me or talking to me I'll always put it down to their own boredom.

But I'm funny.

Being somewhat witty and charming comes fairly easy to me. To what extent I succeed depends on various factors, regrettably few of which are ever under my conscious control. Perhaps that will change.

I can be addictive.

This is how I explain away that the more people get to know me the more they like me. After all it's fairly easy to get under someone's skin.

Admiration = attraction

For me the best way to pick up good habits by a LONG way, is to have a crush on someone who has that habit and copy them. It doesn't even have to be a big crush. This one works both ways though, and I'm not sure which is cause and which effect.

Men are more interesting than women.

I've had two sisters, but one died in cot death and the other was much older and I never knew her growing up. I went to an all boys high school, I went on to study engineering, I mostly go out on the gay scene, all of which points towards a very male orientated life.

I'm a work in progress.

I change my mind about things very regularly. It keeps things interesting.

Ideally I’d like to set up my website to display flickrd pictures on the front page, tucking the blog away somewhere else. At the moment not many people actually look at my favourite photos, never mind the larger versions, which is a shame.

Here’s another pic that was used, this time for a travel site. Or something.

Then it became a personal record of how I am and what I’m up to. Which is much more valuable in the long run. Facebook for all it’s transparency doesn’t have much of a history beyond the photos. I should be relating my changing opinions on life the universe and everything in this interesting period of transition. After all I’ve learned a scary amount in the past six months, where nothing much happened in the six before that. In retrospect it seems that my life was very dull, for all that it was content, living vicariously through my ex as I was. I find the fact I was so happy doing so rather disturbing now. Although it requires much more effort to achieve the same level of contentedness overall, I think I’m actually happier in myself, which is a real surprise to me. And having to put more into living isn’t necessarily a bad thing, after all you reap what you sow and all that. Though I’m not certain it’s entirely good either. Maybe it’s just a thing.

I think I’ll shove this all into some archive at the back of the site, and use the front page to showcase flickr photos or something nice. That’s one thing that annoys me about flickr, the default display size for the photos is never enough to really see what’s going on…

So I’ve been slack with things on here, big shock there. I’ve been meaning to add linklog functionality to this site for ages, and then I was contemplating moving the blog part off to a sub-page and replacing it with an updated random quote generator of old… But none of that is very high priority at the moment to be honest. It’s been a busy couple of weeks, and I need to clear the decks a little I before getting back into the proverbial swing of things this week. Hmm.

As it turns out, I really can. I’m kinda surprised how easy it was. Basically I’ve lost 10% of my weight in 2 and a bit months. Going from 78kg back to 70ish, which is around where I feel comfortable being. Which is nice. Being narcissistic in the mirror and generally tight clothing have both made a welcome return. (Not that tight though. I’m skinny not a student.) So here’s how:

• No sugar in tea or coffee. I drink a lot of these beverages and used to put in several spoons of sugar into every one. No longer. Sweetener if needed, but getting used to going without altogether as often as not is pretty good too. Obviously skimmed or semi skimmed milk where possible.
• Fruit for breakfast I used to either kip breakfast altogether or east a pastry thing and a full-fat sugar coffee. Apparently that’s not so good! Who knew? So now I bring in a few pieces of fruit, plus maybe porridge or a sandwich if I feel like it.
• If you can’t be arsed cooking, don’t. I get a relatively big lunch on south bank every day, either something salady or a wrap. I’ve stopped with those cheesy grilled sandwiches. So most of the food I eat is now much earlier in the day and cooked by people who do it better than I do, and with all that goodness dinner is very light and/or optional. Massive pizzas and troughs of pasta at 9 at night are now rare exceptions rather than the rule.
• Don’t eat it just because it’s there. If you don’t actually want a sweet, don’t take a sweet. That goes for everything, eat only what you actually want to eat. If I want a packet of chocolate biscuits I’ll still go get one obviously, why shouldn’t I? It’s just that I’m far more aware that if I eat all of them I WILL feel sick, plus the sugar crash etc. in fact I can barely manage half the packet now, where before I’d absent-mindedly chomp through the lot of them. Oral fixation much?
• Exercise I’ve been bouncing around my room a lot in an aerobic stylee. Not sure what the next step will be really. A gym maybe? Ugh.

There’s nothing draconian or even virtuous in what I’ve been doing, and no diet par se; I’ve just been exercising more choice. Just choice. It’s funny; I read Existentialism And Humanism by Sartre at Christmas and I think I took a lot of it to heart ;-).

But nobody can point at a painting and say “that’s forgiveness” or “that’s regret”. Or love or pain or or joy or sorrow. Everyone has to figure all of that out for themselves. And who’s to say that one person’s idea of sorrow is the same as another’s? On the contrary, I’d be very surprised if they were. The same goes for the rest of these fluffy ambiguous and entirely subjective terms. You can’t know it until you feel it, and even when you do, it won’t be in the same way or with the same intensity as the next person. You’ve got to make it up as you go along.

I find good nights out are something you have to leave yourself open to, rather than something to seek out and count on or plan for. When it all comes together it can be a hell of a lot of fun, but then when one is banking £50ish, a good night's sleep and the possibility of losing the next day to a hangover, anything less than an excellent night out is a pretty shitty ROI. On top of that to have even a hope of a good night I've also got to have a few of what is a small handful of friends willing to make a similar commitment. Too small a handful, really, I'm way too vulnerable to key people dropping out of circulation for whatever reason. (Being hundreds or thousands of miles away seems a popular one at the moment.) I'm not really sure how to fix that, but I'm sure awareness of the predicament is an important step. Being able to teleport like in Jumper would be sweeet.

Nights out are all making memories with friends, and with acquaintances you make on the way. Take away that and you're just drinking for it's own sake and dancing to whatever (possible) rubbish the DJ throws at you. Personally I find going to new places really helps a lot, due to some combination of novelty factor and the event being easier to remember when it's the only time you've been there. I really can't be doing with going out the same places as last week or even the week before. By the same token going to the cinema every Orange Wednesday as I have been recently is much more interesting because it's a different cinema every time. I guess that means both exercises are pretty unsustainable, at least at the rate I've been going. But then I've been completely neglecting gigs and coffee houses so hey, maybe it's their turn next.

Also I finally understand the loathing people have for first day of the week: Mondays totally suck when you didn't sleep on Saturday night.

• NYE: Popstarz Quick visit to Darren's sumptuous soiree before high-tailing it to Popz. Was really fun to see NYE in a club atmosphere and the "Snow storm" and "backstage" were very cool, but between my not knowing many people out, and hitting the free alchy a leeetle too hard and crashing out at 2ish, it doesn't rate as one of the best NYEs ever ;-) Got to bed about 6, woke up about 4, ugh.
• 5th January: West 5 + randomness Put silly blonde bits in my hair. Stylist talked me into it. With that and the long black coat it's all very retro-me. Later went to Will's for impromptu cheese and wine followed by West 5 which was actually a lot nicer than expected. Rather than being cheesy and naff the Piano-side Karaoke was actually fun to watch. Am I getting old? Anyways it began to all go horribly wrong when after West 5 finished when we decided to continue the party at Will's with a random posse and too much alcohol. Hrm. I was on the roof at some point but I only know that because I took a picture of it.
• 9th January: I am Legend You're not Legend, you're a very naughty boy. This film seemed to deliberately miss the point of the book, replacing it with some weak-ass god-bothering. Meh. A let down.
• 11th: Ricardo's Birthday thing I had decided not to go out that night but in a spate of random a party came to me. Woot! They rolled in from the pub and commenced drunken cooking and Portuguese liquors, before rolling out to the club a few hours later. Sweet.
• 12th: dUCKiE Billed as a 30+ club night at the Vauxhall tavern. Noted by a friend of a friend as "the place where indie boys go to die". Good crowd, great cabaret, music extremely random and massively hit and miss. The place was rammed to the rafters and smelled of toilet, only worse. Great night in the face of adversity, topped off with a 3am visit to MacDonald's. Classy.
• 16th: St. Trinians Billed as a crap film, pleasingly it was actually very good. Many laugh-out-loud moments, and more than a couple of "Oh, Mr. Darcy!" moments too. Heartily recommended.
• 19th: Trash Palace > Ghetto Luke's Birthday thing. A few old Warwicky faces, a few I never knew at the time, excellent "Jager Bomb" things and a bit of a boogy. Good night, if cut a little short. Spent longer negotiating night buses than anything else :-)
• 21st: Pub Quiz Regular version of last month's music pub quiz, again with the sitting and the watching other people get points. Celeb spots: Julian Barratt from The Mighty Boosh and some dude from Hot Chip. Le shrug.
• 23rd: Gayer Nacht Few peeps round for wine and films, namely Broken Hearts Club (which was actually fairly terrible, in spite of featuring Superman and Whatsisname from Scrubs) and Another Gay Movie (which is brilliant if you can bear to watch it). Must do this again! *poke* Maybe with less psuedo-porn though.
• 26th: Unskinny Bop Due to a change of management at the venue the future of Unskinny Bop is in dire peril! They negotiated 2 more nights to prove themselves to the people in charge, of which this was the first. Considering we kinda didn't move from the same spot all night (it's a small place) it was excellent. Just plain old dancing throughout, old-school. Lots of pics here. It was all back to Darren's post-club for more drinking and a good few hours of talking shit.
• 30th: Charlie Wilson's War Heard there was rather a lot of singing in Sweeney Todd so saw this instead. Hmm. It was alright, but kind of ended on a bum note. *poot*
• 31st: BUG Adam Buxton does it again at the NFT. Sweet bunch of videos and way more directors than last time, including the ones who did the Hoosiers latest stuff. Nice.

• 5th Dec: Caroline's Soireé Very strange event in that it was all very posh, the average age was a couple of decades north of what I was used to and the amount of wine put away was astonishing. Very interesting. The older I get the more of my convictions are challenged revealed as subjective rubbish, but talking to these olds I assume there'll be some sort of turning point somewhere down the line I'll start becoming very opinionated about some utter tosh.
• 6th Dec: Darren's Birthday thingy Eagle Bar Diner - Milkshake cocktails: still very good. Crocodile/chicken burger: Not really very good at all.
• 8th Dec: Dansistor Uber-random disco/dance night in some sort of mini-warehouse type establishment. Seems disco is great because you don't have to know it to dance to it. Who knew? Also where I realised that what you like to dance to doesn't have to be what you like to listen to. I hear it's closed down now though. This was the night I walked home from Piccadilly Circus at five in the morning, headphones on, pacing along. Actually fun.
• 12th Dec: Work Christmas thing This was a bit dire to be honest, the cocktails looked very nice but were mostly water with flavouring and the "food" was an assortment of inadequate canapés. The vodka luge ice statue was kinda fun though. The masses of free drinks proved to be a little too much, and after leaving the venue for another Soho place that I don't remember much of, I decided to walk home in completely the wrong direction. I eventually hailed a taxi in Battersea. The best part about it was all the picturesque scenes I captured with my rubbish cameraphone as I wandered off, all the lovely landmarks that should have screamed "wrong way" and, "head back". Muppetous.
• 15th Dec: Mary's Mulled Wine Evening There was wine. It was mulled. There was also Glögg. It was soooo good. I could so do with that right now, to soothe my throat you see. Purely medicinal purposes. Lovely evening swapping gifts and catching up. Cut a bit short as we also had to go to:
• 15th Dec: JCW's Christmas do "Too much is not enough", cue random flashbacks to a similar party with the same theme in Leamington about 5 years ago. Brilliant to see JCW again, strange to see his peeps in their fabulousness. It's astounding these people that have so much money they can spend their entire lives just being beautiful and doing interesting things. I've also never seen so much champagne in one place, and I'm including retail establishments.
• 17th Dec: Christmas Pub quiz Old School pub quiz had a Christmas edition that mostly involved more prizes than usual and some free food. Apparently it was notorious in it's time but then it moved venue and now it's mainly a place for the team from the NME to feel superior by winning every week. Definitely a laugh though. Saw a couple of the Magic Numbers too, which was funny.
• 21st Dec: Giles' Christmas Party G lives in a lovely place in what feels like the middle of nowhere but assuredly isn't. Kinda "architectural" and odd. There was "a wonderful life" projected onto a wall and an old engine sitting around. The party was ace, starting with more gift-swapping, excellent nibbles and good company, then moving on to a bus to Ghetto which was excellent. Don't think I'd ever been on a Friday
• 30th Dec: BDD at Turnmills I've never been to a "proper" club (Wait, does Heaven count?) for fear that the music would be shit or the clientele twats (check and check for Heaven), so having the peeps from Button Down Disco take over Turnmills for a "Fuck New Year" party was a treat. The scale and variety of the decor was dazzling, the music was good, the crowd was decent. It's just a pity the drinks were so dear.

There were meant to be illustrations but I can't work out how to blog flickr pics. Which is annoying as I did it for the last post. Bah. Anyways January later. In other news, the RSS feed works now.

I’ll start with a quick one; Photography.

Problem: I found I had stopped taking photos entirely, due to combination of apathy and crapness of camera. I thought this sucked. Solution? Get new camera. Take lots of pics. Huzzah!

Progress: Camera got: Panasonic Lumix. Wide angle for a digicam and small enough to fit in my pocket all the time, even when out at night. It also has the fabled anti-shake thing and can take a string of photos in a row. Me likey. It’s taken a while to get used to having a camera on my person again though, so photos have been a little sporadic, but a few are on flickr now, including what might be my best/favorite picture ever, shown below. (Larger resolutions here.)

Still to do: RTFM! As good as automatic mode is on this camera I still need to read the manual to work out how to do things… well… manually.

So true.

Unfortunately the massive amount of work that needs doing here means the actual writing of blogs is still on hiatus: I've got a small pile of would-be blog entries that I haven't yet written, and most of them probably never will. In the mean time I might write about progress here, or about how the inevitable new year's resolutions are going, or a random rant about the weather. It doesn't really matter because nothing's ready for "launch". As soon as that fateful day comes I'll up the witty and turn the insightful to 11 (For about a week.) but I'm in no particular hurry to get there.

If you're looking to keep up with what I'm doing my flickr stream has seen a bit of a revival so it's probably more reliable, if only in the vague sense that grainy camera-phone snaps can relay. Oh and Facebook I suppose. And last.fm, if you really badly want to know what I'm listening to (which has been mostly Placebo, Silversun Pickups and Kate Nash this weekend). So yeah, a few updates from the past month in rough chronological order; one last gasp on mochaholic before I put the old dear to sleep:

• Day Watch is a great film and a worthy sequel. Shame there's no third. I'm reading the books now, they rule also.
• Saw Stars at the Scala. Not only was it great to see a band I've been "squee"ing about for so long, but we got to write a review here! Sweet.
• Questionable punch should be mandatory at all house parties, and it should be always presided over by someone who has already partaken extensively thereof and totally forgotten what was in it.
• The Witcher is a solid RPG, but given it's so dialogue oriented the crap translation from the Polish really lets it down. I'm sure I'll finish it one day.
• Afternoons in coffee houses are just as fun as they were 5 years ago. With more money to spend on masses of cake; possibly more so!
• Primrose hill is a handy place to watch the fireworks across London from afar, but bring a hot drink. Or port.
• Ratatouille is much better than a Disney film about a cooking rat has any right to be.
• I'm 26 now. I keep thinking it's 27, but no; 26.
• Scouts are way better than Engineers. Snipers tortured puppies as children. They're evil I tell you! So yeah Team Fortress 2 is brilliant.
• Beowulf is awesome, but only when in 3D.
• Stardust is a very silly film that wouldn't be worth watching if it wasn't for stunning performances from Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer.
• Pigeon Detectives were much better that I expected, partly because I wasn't hanging on their every word and could enjoy some serious moshing. Fantastic fun.
• In real life Will Self looks scarily like the food Critic from Ratatouille.

Hopefully drawing a line under this will help spur on the fiddlings with WP and EE, and a new blog will rise from the ashes. 'Til then add me on Facebook and Flickr!! ;-) -dan out

• 7th: DConstruct. Bloody good. Astoundingly good. Almost every presentation was extremely enjoyable and almost every presentation had useful and relevant take-homes. Very glad I was able to go to that. It's the kind of thing that reinvigorates your professional outlook. Crap freebees though!
• 8th: Mary's housewarming. Their house is great, and the party was too. Got chatting to some genuinely lovely friends of theirs as well as catching up with people. Felt a bit bad running off to get the last tube though; I'm getting old.
• 9th: AiH at Koko. Not the Scala.
• 13th: Met up with a bunch of old school blogger-types, most of whom no longer blog and a couple of whom gave talks at the conference I saw in the previous week. Very entertaining people, but a strange experience nonetheless. Much gadget swapping and meta-photo-taking.
• 14th: Dinner at the Canteen at the Southbank Center followed by a presentation of interesting new music videos there given by Adam Buxton, followed by a very empty Popstarz for Will's birthday.
• 15th: CHRISTIAN wedding. Where the word "wedding" is always prefaced by "Christian" and "secular parodies" are derided. Hmm, k. Both wedding and reception in the church, lots of tea, no alcohol, all over by five. Very pleasant but deeply alien at the same time.
• 25th: Reopening of Trash Palace, free drinks and such, woot! They've redecorated the place a bit, and put Simon on the wall. Hmm, k.
• 29th: Trip to Edinburgh with Si to see the parents. Went to Edinburgh Castle (which is more a citadel), The Royal Museum of Scotland (who have taken a leaf from the London Science Museum's book, hurrah) and ate at Biblos again, which is still one of my favourite bistros anywhere.

In the gaps I've been watching every episode of Dexter I can get my hands on. Really excellent; an unexpected combination of compelling aspects… That'd make sense if you saw it. Anyways it comes a close second to Heroes in my opinion. Go see! Also been playing a lot of

• Europa Universalis III, an historical strategy game (with the Magna Mundi mod, of course!), so I know all about European history from 1450 to about 1800 now. Go Italian unification 200 years early!
• Warhammer 40k: Dawn of war. Sweet futuristic RTS based on the Table-top Games Workshop game. You can get it and both expansions for £20 or less now, which adds a lot to the scope of the game. Go Tau!
• Neverwinter Nights 2: Hopefully I'll have the patience and commitment to get past the first chapter now, particularly as I've shelled out for the expansion now. Go questionable purchases!

So before I ramble further: serial content does not a blog make. Not that it matters, Facebook etc will soon subsume most of the blogosphere ;-) Also the above sites are brilliant; check them out. Apropos of nothing: check it out, I'm a music critic!

It was also really interesting to hear them discuss data portability and its impact on the future the web. They seem pretty certain that Facebook's days are numbered as log as it remains a walled garden, for example. I found this short post entitled "There is no social network" that explains it really well.

So anyways, except for going over these notes and expanding on them, that's day one over. Tomorrow is another trip down to the coast for d.construct proper, with an all-star cast including zomg Cameron Moll and a few people I've met through Simon, strangely. If yesterday is anything to go by it should be totally sweet. Can't wait!

With my latest blog design I've been trying to make it as CSSy as possible, and having such a clear-cut design-based css resource is great. It's not done yet, but it's already looking very sweet. And people in the know are loving it, so it's got momentum from the get-go.

Andy Parsons
We were only there because we had heard that Bill Bailey was to do a set at that tent, but I think we must have seen almost all of Andy's set, which was lucky coz it was bloody brilliant. Definitely my kind of humour, was aching from laughing so much. *****

Bill Bailey
Woot woot Bill Bailey! The material was old, audience participation was throwing him, and there was a constant ruckas from the edge of the tent as wardens kept having to remove people sneaking in as the tent was at capacity. It was still BILL BAILEY though!! #I got ham, but I'm not a hamster!# Sweet. ****

Shirley Bassey
Hahahahahaha! It's Shirley Bassey! Doing air guitar!! Bwahahahahaah! So she was brilliant and the crowd loved it. From opening with her cover of Pink's Get The Party Started to Gold Finger to Big Spender (TWICE). Hitting all the notes and winding around like a snake. Not bad for a septuagenarian! *****

Manic Street Preachers
Can't dis' the Manics, right? There was no way I was not going to go see them. But after a few songs it got uncomfortable. There seemed to be precious little chemistry between the band and the crowd; indifference reigned. And then of course you've got the fact that all their good songs are over a decade old! It was great to see Australia live, and it seems they played La Tristesse Durera after we left which I'm disappointed I didn't see; BUT OMG MOVE ON! So we did. I had planned to see the whole thing, but it was getting depressing and the go team were on at the other stage… **

The Go! Team
…Who were great! My pick of the festival. Their music is so upbeat and positive anyway, and it was really nice to see that they were even more so live, getting the crowd dancing and in the mud. As I've said I like it when musicians swap instruments, and there was plenty of that, it seemed like some of them were doing a circuit of the drum kits, guitars, and keyboard. But they took it to the next level; swapping mid-tune. When one of them suddenly dropped his guitar, pegged it across the stage, picked up a drum stick and did a flying jump to hit a symbol, before seating himself and taking up the second drum kit… Well that was pretty sweet. If you don't know what I'm on about or if you're just curious, here's the last song of their set; Ladyflash, on youtube. *****

The View
Admittedly we didn't really know who they were before we started watching them, but after a couple of songs we concluded that they were crap and we moved on. *

Radio Luxembourg
While everyone else was at the final headliners we went wandering through the dark and deserted mud fields and stumbled across a random band playing at a random stage being watched by about a dozen people, and were totally glad we did. These welsh kids were just great; kind of a cross between the Fratellies and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, which lots of random bouncing in welsh.*****

Gruff Rhys
(He's the lead singer from Super Furry Animals, if anyone's wondering.) The first set we went to on Thursday was a random welsh dude with a repeater, and so it was nice that we ended the festival on a similar note. He did go on a bit with a couple of songs but this might have been exacerbated by his set being cut short by the 12:30 curfew. Damn locals! Despite it being sooooo wet by that point I really enjoyed it, I guess the free 3-d specs handed out at the beginning must have helped. ****

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Not actually that good, shockingly! They were really trying, bless 'em; throwing bubble-makers into the crowd and generally trying their hardest to engage. They'd probably be much better in a smaller venue where that kind of infectious energy would be more appropriate and likely to take root in the audience. As it was their tunes were all over the place. Pity.**

Calvin Harris
I wanted to see this chancer with my own eyes. We arrived just as they were starting with that 80s song, which was excellent. We stayed for the one after out of politeness, but as we only really came to do gurning club-singer impressions of that one song: mission accomplished in record time, and we moved on through the mud lakes.***

Pirates of the Caribbean 2
Our explorations took us to the cinema tent! Where we watched some buckling of swash and had a rare sit-down. For 15 minutes or so anyway. Yay!

Guillemots
Sound was bad and we'd seen them before anyways, in a much smaller venue with much less rain. And they insisted on playing that "She's evil" song which everyone hated. ***

Babyshambles
After catching the start of their set we listened to the rest of it from our tent, where we went for a quick nap. I was just thinking that the libertine were so much better, when they finished on a libertines song. Hah! ***

Maximo Park
Passed by Maximo Park just as they were playing Our Velocity, so yet another uber-efficient set watching as that was pretty much the only song I wanted to see. Yay! ****

Patrick Wolf
Genius. Boy has a lot of energy, climbing on the scaffolds and jumping around the place. (Yeah the music was great too.) Apart from one act we saw on the Sunday this was far and away my favorite set of the festival. Totally blew us away. *****

Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly.
Suffered a lot from being just after Patrick, probably would have been pretty good otherwise, but in (unfair) comparison it was a little dull. ***

Iggy and the Stooges
We saw Iggy Pop hump a speaker stack! Didn't really stop to listen though.

Rodrigo y Gabriella.Took aaaages to come on due to "technical difficulties", and then were pretty underwhelming. Nice music and impressive musicianship, but hardly stadium stuff IMO. Maybe it would have been better if they weren't so late, or if it hadn't been so muddy/wet at the time, or if they had engaged the crowd at all. At the end of the day there's only so many things you can do with a couple of flamenco guitars, though respect to them for doing all of those and then some more. We totally should have gone to see The Killers, prosaic though that decision would have been. Anyways we soon cut our losses and took advantage of a friend's backstage passes to go check out flushable toilets and large amounts of beer. *

Lana
She was mental. We ignored her and got down to some serious cider drinking. *

Friday:
Modest Mouse
I like these guys a lot, but they're pretty laid back and the sameyness of their songs doesn't really bear close scrutiny, so I don't think playing to a stadium-like venue where the punters were getting pelted by some obscenely hard rain was really fair to them. Give us a drink, an armchair and some low lighting (indoors) and we'll see. We left to find shelter maybe half-way through the set. ***

!!!
(Pronounced "chk chk chk" BTW) They were going apeshit in a jazzy Primal Scream kind of way; I only barely recognised their songs. Fair enough if you're a big fan, but I've only been listening to them for a few weeks so we moved on pretty quickly. Also the drug-fuelled self-satisfaction of the people in the dance tent was just weird. **

Bloc Party
We'd been wanting to see these people for months so it was great that we finally got the chance . They didn't disappoint either, Kele was a great front-man with a good way with the crowd and a stunning voice, and most importantly he really looked like he was enjoying himself. The rest of the band were tight, though they hardly moved in comparison to Keke. All in all brilliant. *****

Rufus Wainwright
Rufus is the man! I think he carried this set off by sheer force or personality, he was beset by sound problems throughout, and the temptation to make jokes about cold remedies ruining his career proved too strong. (He has a really nasal voice.) I didn't hate his version of hallelujah, even though I'm all about the Jeff Buckley version. He ended on a stroke of genius though; dressing as Judy Garland and doing "Get Happy", while his band did the actions of her dancers from the film in a comedy manner. Predictably it's on YouTube so check it out. *****

Arcade Fire
I've never really clicked with Arcade Fire, they sound too similar to a bunch of other bands like the Decemberists or Broken Social Scene and I keep mistaking their songs for other people's. But they were stonking live, 11 of them (?) and their assorted equipment filling the big stage nicely. I like any band where people play various instruments throughout instead of just standing there strumming the same tired guitar; bring on the accordions! ****

Bjork
It was Bjork! ZOMG! AKA a really small pixie in a huge dress a long way away hugging people at length for no real reason… Was really surprised she did a lot of old favourites and it was a real treat to see them live, but I didn't know any of the new material. Voice was great, band was weird, electro-base GUI thing was sweet, her banter was odd though. As she is I guess. Very enjoyable, but it wasn't all that. ****

"With Last.fm, users tell the website what music they are listening to. The site recommends other music they might like and links to buy the songs. For music it doesn't have licenses to play, it offers 30-second samples.

"Music sales aren't a big part of the financial picture so far, and they might not be even when CBS takes control. The minimal advertising on the site, however, will be beefed up. CBS envisions channels for music backed by corporate sponsors that will pay for the privilege every month.

"CBS also plans to put versions of its existing radio programming on the website."

"We currently live in a world of live texture mapping and rag doll physics. And yet as web developers, we don't even have the ability to create rounded corner boxes programmatically. The W3C are so concerned with shaping the future, I'm worried that they may have forgotten the present."