thing13

October is the tenth month of the year. So why is it called October? And December. Twelfth, but calling itself tenth. Barking. I feel some Wikipediaing coming on.

There seems to be an awful lot happening right now. Time for another list.

I have mostly been:

• Trying to buy a house, and failing miserably due to the fact that some people find it amusing to change their mind and not sell their house after all, even though we paid money for things. Not a survey yet, though, thankfully. But still.
• Doing presentations at work, trying to convince people that they should allow us to totally overhaul the part of the BBC’s site that I work on. It’s a long story, and one which I might find time to explain some time. (But let’s face it: probably not.) It’s all good though, the presentations seem to be doing the trick for now.
• Saving the lives of people who have massive fits in Tesco by swiftly putting them into the recovery position. Well, one person.
• Cycling around in my new red jacket in the freezing cold.
• Installing Mac OS X Leopard, and having fun with the new speech synthesis addition: ‘Alex’. It’s one of those hugely impressive things that comes around once in a while. One or two other bits of Leopard are a bit less impressive, but hey.
• And so on…

This year so far, I have mostly been:

• not really going with my resolution to keep this site up-to-date with illuminating posts on life in general
• travelling on the tube between Holborn and White City, reading The Metro and thinking that everyone else in the world must be completely mad for reading it every morning, no doubt surrounded by people who see me as one of the completely mad people (although some of them are, I am sure, actually completely mad)
• making a box out of ash, and taking far too long about it
• drinking more than normal, and assuming that it’s perfectly fine because there are definitely people in the world who drink much more than that
• really actually seriously considering buying a house, which, needless to say, is quite a scary thought
• realising that my family, who for most of my life have seemed quite sane, are actually totally fucking insane
• doing yoga, which I didn’t ever consider one of the things I should do, and quite liking it to be honest
• not reading very many novels, which seems a shame because I’m sure there are lots out there that I was planning to read, although I did read jPod the other day, and it’s quite funny, because some of the people I work with are like that
• going to lots of weddings, which, I gather, is something that starts to happen about this time
• not playing guitar at all, and feeling a bit guilty and stupid about it
• seeing my dad more often, going for a pint after work at a very nice pub and being rather pleased about it
• not being the most efficient human being on the planet
• ranting, which I have to teach myself to do less of
• reading Daring Fireball in a slightly all-the-time kind of way
• cycling around London and noticing bits linking with other bits in ways I never noticed, like Kings Cross and Angel.

In case you find it at all useful:

Make iTunes Music Store arrows search within your library, rather than going out to iTMS:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool true

Allow Dashboard Widgets to be dragged away from the Dashboard and onto the ‘normal’ layer you work on:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode -bool true

A different progress indicator in Safari 3:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugUsePieProgressIndicator -bool true

Safari debug menu:

defaults write com.apple.safari IncludeDebugMenu -bool true

Safari Web Inspector - not as good as Firebug, but pretty good:

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true

a.Edinburgh:visited {
    border: crossed;
    conference-background: url(http://thehighlandfling.com/2007/);
    position: absolute;
    top: 50%;
    /* stuff: sorted; */
}

I returned to haunt my former haunt in Edinburgh for a couple of days, this time for a web conference.

The conference itself was great. I had the chance to chat with clever people like the ones from Clearleft and Yahoo!, and I really did get a lot from it. Being a new conference, it was all quite small, so there were plenty of opportunities to shoot the breeze. Discussing the idea of Web Principles with people outside the BBC was especially cool, and a useful reality check.

On the other hand, being back in the ‘Burgh was, as ever, a bit odd. It’s good odd, overall, but still bloody odd. My good friend Dr Vines, who left for Canada a couple of years before I moved to London, described his eventual return as being “like coming back to the scene of a crime”, and at the time I couldn’t quite see what he meant. This time I see.

I think Edinburgh has an bizarrely intense personality. Everywhere has a certain something, of course: London, Manchester, Glasgow… all have a distinct feeling about them, and anywhere you spend any significant time is bound to get under your skin somehow. London has obvious massive capitalness, but Edinburgh is so much smaller that it has a kind of condensed capitalness. And maybe the smell of malt and breweries that pervades the place somehow connects directly to some inner emotional-olfactory-psychotic-nostalgic part of the brain…

London has enough pubs and parks and corners-you-never-knew to last you the rest of your life without repeating yourself. Every nook and cranny of Edinburgh seemed exactly as I left it. Just as if I never left.

As for Tim’s crime scene metaphor, I think it’s something to do with the feeling of leaving something unresolved. Just as if you never left. Here’s the thing: if you go away from a place while you’re in a bit of a state for some reason, you’ll rediscover it all when you go back, even if you’ve done a great job of sorting things out in the meantime. Especially if the place in question is small and smells strangely of breweries.

I’ve had an increasingly strong urge to actually make something real, recently. So have started a woodwork course.

It was actually meant to happen a full year ago; the course was a present from Jen for my 30th. But procrastinator that I am, it’s taken until now (and until I have Ben, my old Edinburgh flatmate, to do it with) for me to get round to it.

I have made lots of things before, and been taught a lot of useful things by my uncle (who can make amazing things). But now that I have access to all the tools and all the expertise and all the time in the world… I can’t quite decide what to make.

It’s quite a seriously difficult decision, because it’s real. That’s the whole thing. If something goes wrong, or I change my mind, I can’t just press ⌘-Z.

But it’s very exciting. I think I’ll make a box.

I believe the phrase is “OMG”. Apple has announced the iPhone, surely the most eagerly - no, desperately eagerly - awaited bit of technology in the recent history of bits of technology.

Over the years, the “will-they-won’t-they?” debates became so extreme that it was impossible to trust anyone’s predictions; it was all just endless wishful thinking. But when even the best Mac blogger started guessing that it was going to happen, it all got rather exciting. Would they really try to reinvent the phone? Isn’t that a bit too amazing a prospect, even for Apple?

Nope. It’s real. And it’s exactly what I’d secretly been holding out for: pretty much a Newton-iPod hybrid, running OS X. But with a phone. And a camera. And a proper web browser. And everything else. Bloody amazing. It will be mine.

Autumn 2007. That’s a long time to be continuously hitting refresh…

This weekend, I have mostly been:

• discovering how to make pancakes just like I had in Canada and making myself very happy eating them
• putting a large number of scraps of paper that have things like “Inland Revenue” on them into the recycling bag. That’ll teach’em
• cycling around in the rain in London, when it would have been nicer inside with a cup of tea
• being inside with a cup of tea, where it was much nicer (especially with the food we had got while out in the rain)
• going to a gig where the sound was bad, and thinking about how I’m not in a band any more and how that is [insert word for it here], generally
• going to a yoga class for the first time, and feeling really quite strange in a very good way afterwards
• not being entirely sure how much of a good idea it is to go back to work again on Monday

So there I was, all ready to begin in top-notch super-motivated resolution-making mode. One minor plan among several exciting drunken ideas I had was to blog more. I’m not sure why I had this idea, and this is probably precisely why it’s taken until now to do the first entry of the year…

But anyway.

I once wrote a diary. It was of my 21st year - from my 20th to 21st birthdays - and I have to admit that, even if it does run out of steam by August, it makes mildly amusing reading in places. Cringeworthy in others, but that’s diaries for you.

Thing is, it’s now more than a decade later, and that’s a bit bloody astonishing.

Looking back at the diary, I really do seem a decade younger. All a bit “he said, she said” and “life is shit, ho hum”. A strong whiff of whinging depressive cynic… so, good to know I’m at least consistent. I can confidently state that I’m a bit less of a whinging depressive cynic now though. A bit less.

Anyway, at one point I thought it might be quite clever to try doing a diary that ran in parallel with the 1996 version. “This is what I was doing when I was 20, and this is what I was doing when I was 30…” You get the gist.

But I’ve missed the boat for that now. Nevermind. Probably a blessing in disguise for all concerned to be honest.

So, shall we do a diary for 2007? Report back on the new me, the one who Gets Things Done?

One step at a time, eh?