I recently had a photo-shoot at the Hotel Pelirocco with the Tight Lip team. The photographs were taken by Sam Collins and will be used to illustrate a magazine project I participated in (details to follow). The image chosen to go with my bio was this one:
But my favourite was the one below. There's something magical about the shadows in black-and-white photographs. Thanks, Sam!
The trailer for Synecdoche, New York is one of the most exciting trailers I've seen in a while. According to wikipedia a synecdoche is a figure of speech related to metonymy, where part of something stands for the whole. I don't know how good the film will b but the trailer gives me goosebumps.
On Thursday night I went to a Making Presentations workshop at the Werks, run by the copywriter and poet Ellen de Vries. I wanted to go because my recent Barcamp presentation didn't work as well as I'd hoped. I figured it would be good to learn what I might be missing.
Nine people attended the workshop, split into two groups. We were asked to introduce ourselves with just our name and job titles to see what conclusions people drew from them. This was a little weird for me, since I'm still on sabbatical and had to invent a title. Everyone else sounded very fancy.
The course covered a lot of material in two and a half hours, including defining objectives, understanding the audience, not presenting after lunch and the use of adult education theories. The workshop format worked well, allowing people to share their own experiences and tips. Hopefully it won't be too long before I have a chance to present again – I'm looking forward to putting what I learned into action.
Sadly I'm going busy when Ellen's doing her next course on DIY Copywriting, but would be going if I was free.
I've been generally very happy with my vodafone USB modem, particularly after the unpleasant problems with Tiscali. The Vodafone modem even works on Ubuntu, despite not being officially supported. However, I have had problems with Javascript on a couple of sites. They would work fine through non-Vodafone connections but break when used through Vodafone.
Thanks to David Pashley, I've now learned the problem. Vodafone transform some of the content they deliver over the web. One effect is degraded image quality (discussion of the problem and its solution in Germany is here and here). The other problem is their use of minify, which is breaking some sites. This was breaking the JQuery library included in a site of David's I use.
We resorted to loading the libraries over HTTPS, which is not a good general solution but works in this case. Meanwhile I thought I'd make this entry in case it provides a pointer for anyone facing similar problems.
(Aplogies for the technical post. If you've read this far and are disappointed, here a link to a kitten video —> kittens )
I've recently found some excellent short stories on the web. The list was somehow lost in draft status but it's all fixed now. I've also added approximate wordcounts for each piece – none are long, and all are worth reading:
"In the winter [the base] held radio darts contests with other bases. After a couple of years of competition someone went to Bird Island and discovered that the small scientific station there, its occupants always keen participants, had never had a dartboard there."
from Terra Incognita by Sara Wheeler
(Terra Incognito was one of the books I used last year in my dissertation. It's one of my favourite books on Antarctia, along with Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the world.)
From the window of Mailboxes etc. on Western Road:
Yesterday was an exciting day. It started with a trip to the dentist, where another broken tooth was fixed, and ended at Portsmouth's HELL-oween Ball, where I performed with Kitty Peels. We did a new version of last year's Zombie Bride act which featured more gore and some astounding make-up from Kitty.
The night was fantastic with about 3 hours of acts. All the other performers I met were lovely, particularly Dolly Divine and vaudevillian Joe Black, who I hope to catch up with when they come to Brighton for the Bands and Vampesque night. Among the many performances were a couple of awesome routines from Miss Ruby Red. With so much fake blood, the backstage bathroom looked like a scene from Reservoir Dogs before I tidied it up.
Kitty has also been a zombie for Dark Daze recently. Dark Daze and his team spent several days preparing a set for a single shot. I can't wait to see what it looks like – Kitty apparently wields a chainsaw. Another recent Dark Daze shot of Kitty is here and there's also a Dark Daze flickr RSS feed which shows recent photos with background notes.
Following a suggestion in the Oliver James book Affluenza, I drastically reduced the amount of news I consume. I still seem to learn what are the issues of the day, without being overwhelmed by them. So I liked this quote from Nasim Taleb, via the Long Tail Blog:
"Put wax in your ears. People are more afraid of flying than driving
because the press does not report car accidents. I never watch the
news. Only listen to news you get in a social setting, the things
people talk about. Our brains cannot deal with the overload of
information. Having a lot of data is not good for anyone trying to make
a decision." (originally quoted in the New Scientist Article Risk – not what you think)
One of the things I love most about reading RSS feeds is that I wake to a set of news stories about things I am directly interested in – what friends have been doing, literature, Brighton and so on. It's not perfect, but seems far more relevant than reading a newspaper. The echo-chamber effect even seems lessened since common interests are no guarantee of common politics.
