(This page is just drivel. If you're looking for interesting stuff...)
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| Jenny |
Well, looks like I skipped 2005.
We now have a fabulous daughter, Lola: read all about her on http://lolabump.velleity.org/. That site excuses me a little for my absence from this one. Not, as the below shows that I have ever been especially assidious at the upkeep of this one. Not frequently updated, it's true; but it does have longevity.
Have also started up a country band (well, continued with the one I put together to play at my wedding). See http://www.fangled.co.uk/
Erm... Still at the BMJ. No longer doing any teaching. Must start exercising. Jenny, who illuminates this page, died this spring.
Yup, still here, though the gaps are growing longer. As the previous entry might have led you to suspect, I am now married :) . We had a fantastic time doing it in Italy, as can be seen ad nauseum at http://wedding.oops.org.uk/pics/. Organising it all was ferociously stressful; as was coming down the other side of it. It didn't help that work, and thus money was on a severe dwindle.
That's picked up now, though, as I've taken a full-time job on working for the British Medical Journal. In particular on their knowledge products, Clinical Evidence and Best Treatments. It's all deeply complex (certainly to me, ATM), XMLy stuff massaging raw data into super tools in a variety of formats. It's a great job; I hope they keep me.
Also been teaching a PHP/MySQL/apache course atCity and Islington College. You can see the coursenotes (probably) at http://learn.velleity.org/dcw2/.
And now it's late and I'm abed. I wonder will I re-appear in the next 12 months...
Later the same day...
Well, another year, another dollar. Approximately... It has been a very odd year, with the hectometer (to continue with that metaphor which you won't have come accross yet unless you are diligently reading this from the bottom up) barely registering anything.
Let's see, last September I gave up smoking, cold turkey, and instantly put on a stone and a half and a bad mood.
OK, the 'bad mood' wasn't just the ciggy withdrawal. I was already slipping into something I was terming my "mid-life crisis", which is probably quite accurate: there were desisions to be made, regarding career and, in a cascade, my creative ambitions, and an increasing urge to procreate (in the specific context provided by my partner-of-ten-years-now, Isa). This I attributed at first to a rebound from the extremely busy period which had just ended with Isa's degree coming together and a mountain of work for www.petetownshend.co.uk and its offshoots. And, no doubt, this was the trigger but the continuing lack of work, coupled with the lack of nicotine and the greyness of winter, helped entrench the mood.
Which is not to say I was a miserable bastard all the time, though. During this period we developed quite a social life, thanks to a sudden upsurge in the local friend population. Isa started to work down at the Halaen Centre -- a local health food store where a lot of great people work. And then a friend of Isa moved into a house a few streets away and introduced us to the household, who in turn introduced us to other local bods... My, and our, new bestest mate, John came out of that deal. I may force him into being my best man. Oh, damn. I may have given something away!
Johnny Cash died today, aged 71. Hence the black border.
A bit of a gap, sorry. Just as I was starting to get a bit more regular... The hectometer has been hitting the endstop over the last while, and there haven't been many moments in which I've been idle enough to bother with this. Isa's degree show is coming up (starts June 22), and I've been helping her with that. That help has included designing and creating the catalogue for the show, which is a bit of a dip into the past for me -- it's quite a few years since I've done any typographic/pre-press work
Apart from the joys of sourcing appropriate images and text from 23 stressed-out students (a joy which Isa bore the brunt of), the project meant getting my old Mac clone up and running again. More specifically, it meant getting it onto my network (doing all the transfers by 'sneakernet' just wasn't a consideration). So I bought a cheap NIC, and spent an entire weekend getting the *@$%$$! thing to work under MacOS; a process which involved two installs of Debian Linux as a dual-boot on the same box. Hey ho. At least I had just installed my new bit of hardware-holding furniture, which made it all a bit easier.
Anyway, the catalogue design turned out OK. We should have the finished product in a couple of days, having given the printer the go-ahead today.
Meanwhile, 5eye have built www.petetownshend.co.uk, which went live yesterday. A satisfying job, not least because it's so popular: the The Who minisite gained over a thousand registered users in the first day!
I flag. More soon, if you're unlucky.
Been scanning loads of old pics and bunging them up at pics.oops.org.uk. Which made me remember how horrible my image-mangling application is...
Just updated this to conform to XHTML 1.0, and thought I'd dribble on here a bit, too. New version of HTMLTidy is super, and converts to XHTML nicely; I can't get the new docbook xsl to work with the chunker, though which is annoying, especially as it's so hard to debug. Too dense. (Both myself and the jungle of codes.)
Went to Italy for a week just after Easter, where it rained a lot, but was nevertheless wonderful. And we're getting a return visit from Isa's Mum in July, which is just stunning. She's coming to Isa's graduation ceremony, which is in Parliament Square somewhere, so should be quite impressive :).
Obtusely, the weather here was very sunny. We came back to our back garden bursting with flowers: loads of bluebells, and great swathes of those pretty little blue ones, whose names I can't remember, or perhaps don't know. The first thing we did when we got back was to run out into it; I'll try and remember to put the pics on pics.piddle.net.
If I were still living in Porthleven, I'd go out for a walk around the harbour now. Maybe out along the far wall that juts into the sea; staring into the noisy darkness, tasting salt.
Now is about 3am. Been sitting here in front of my screens since, erm, quite a while ago, mostly working through a complex CVS merge. Well, I'm finding it complex; complex enough to want to work through it in one session and not have to try and pick up the threads again in mid-stream. Because they get all soggy, and the dye runs.
Wondrously, however, I've been quite sociable. My brother, Tom, was around this morning and then again this evening, playing with his new Vaio and my bandwidth. We didn't talk a lot, but fell into a comfortable, engaged silence -- something which isn't afforded the time to happen at all often these days.
And then Isa was around a lot of the day, and in the evening she did Eliza and Richard's hair, which was entertaining as usual.
Ah, my steam is running out. I'll bid you relief from further drivel and a good night :-)
Whoa! May I just say what an impressively long entry that last was. If I keep that up, I'll have a whole mass of drivel...
Well, aren't these first-quarter months horrid? Grey, wet, grey, cold, grey, cloudy, windy. Did I mention the monochromatic thing? Trying to pull things together, and doing a bit of spring-cleaning: this site is now in CVS, and there's a tomcat running hereabouts...
I thought of lots of interesting and witty things to add here while I sorted through the site. I've forgotten them all now, of course. I could tell you interesting domestic stuff? We've got a new telly and . . . a dishwasher. I know, it's a knell, a bell of doom, the seal of middleclass-dom. Makes a difference, though: we cook more, are pissed off less, and quite possibly are saving water, given the unbearable nature of the plumbing and fittings here.</whinge>
But moving on . . . Is what our neighbours have done, all the way to Bristol. We were just getting to know them a bit, which is a fairly unusual state of affairs in London. There's a new couple installed above us already; mail suggests possibly from Yorkshire. We introduced ourselves, but they didn't offer, and I didn't ask. Entropy.
I've been fiddling with Cubase a bit, to the extent of actually starting to know what I was doing a bit. I don't have a link to hand, though. Enough. Time to bed. I'll leave with a quote. Because I like it.
Methought I heard a voice cry 'Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep', the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast
Hi, it's 2am and I'm brushing my teeth. I feel like being voluble, but have nothing to say. Except, perhaps, "Beer good".
I'm bored with this boring format...
Here's a very simple MIDI
generator which will let you feed it appropriate strings
and get back a MIDI file. Golly.
You can see our (yes, we are Borg) pics at pics.piddle.net. Prepare to be not excited.
I host this site. On a box in our sitting room.
