thing13

A few people I know at the BBC went to the same Sigur Rós gig that I did. And I just happened upon a blog post by one of them, where they had included photos by another of them. And the photos are nearly exactly the same photos that I just uploaded to Flickr: three of them, in the same order.

Just shows how much those same moments (the water curtain thing and the confetti in particular) have stuck in people’s minds…

If you’re using Textmate and want to post directly to your blog, and are using the Blogging Bundle, and can’t get it to work… try adding ‘.php’ to the XMLRPC URL in the setup file. Worked for me.

Today I caused a flurry of productive activity at work by sticking a big bit of paper on the wall.

At the top, I wrote ‘Frequently Unanswered Questions’. On big yellow post-it notes, I started writing all the annoying gorilla-in-the-corner-of-the-room questions I could think of. The questions that consistently get asked on the way out of meetings, or over cups of tea and exasperated looks. The things that have become assumed unanswerable questions.

People started adding more questions. We collected a lot of them. And people started trying to answer them.

I moved the ones that looked like they might have been answered to another big bit of paper, to one side. The questions with unsatisfactory or contradictory answers were left in limbo, in the middle.

We now have lots of things to think about, and a way to see with our own eyes the progress we’re making to clear this mess up.

And a new acronym to use, cos there aren’t enough of those.

We bought a house.

It’s gonna take a lot of work, but… we bought a house.

I’m experimenting with the Blueprint CSS Framework. Things will look a bit griddy, boring and broken, while I nail a few bits down. I may also play with 960, which looks like it might be similarly simple and clever.

Just don’t view source.

The summer of 2008. Time flies like the wind, fruit flies like bananas, etc.

So, by way of a frantic catch-up: since we were last here, I have…

• been to India, to escape parental carnage over the New Year. Spent three weeks in Kerala, discovering memorable individuals, more amazing food than we could have imagined (and we could have imagined a lot), and plenty of new and clever ways to get killed. All in all, months ago, now, but unforgettable.
• continued to try to buy a house, though things are closer to actually happening this time. The closer we get, the more gutwrenchingly awful it will be if things fall through… but let’s not think about it that way, shall we?
• observed that the old saying about the only constant being ‘change’ is proving itself to be a genius description for life at the Beeb, with things in another exciting new structure (hey, why stop now?), and me in a new (or rather, renamed) job. It’s all going to be OK, though, actually. Which is nice.
• been to France, for a bit of camping and eating and being in the sunshine. Got a new tent, which makes me very happy.
• failed to blog as regularly as all that… but trying to justify it. Succeeding, mostly.
• read increasing amounts about things like RDF and FOAF and OWL and all that sort of thing. It’s all very clever, this web stuff. (More about these things and more, quite likely, at the soon-to-arrive BBC Developers Blog. You heard it here first. Although, to be honest, I’d be quite surprised if it launched before the heat death of the universe.)
• not done any woodwork, which is making Jenny angry ‘cos I’m not making her the breadbin which she desires.
• made bread a bit more frequently than my recent average, which is quite low. Y’just can’t beat freshly toasted toast from freshly baked bread, with Marmite on it, all with a cup of tea. You just can’t.
• read lots of rants from my old friend Stu, who is nearly always right about these and other things.
• tried not to get any Big Ideas… they’re not gonna happen. Failed, however, and they might just…