thing13

Weekly report 2/52

January 14th, 2010

This week, time seems to have accelerated back to its usual high speed. The xmas break was pleasingly long and gradual, and I managed to forget everything to do with nearly everything, which is good. Now, we’re back to the familar mix of trying to wake up, commuting through London (through the snow, this time), working, commuting again, eating, and finally sleeping. Hopefully it’s just the contrast, and it’ll all settle down.

But it’s not been a great week. I have discovered again what I do for a living, and it seems to involve existing in a fractal version of ‘Groundhog Day’.

Thankfully, it’s not all work-work-work (remember this?). I made lots of things Sunday, including bread, chocolate brownies, soup, and a blackboard. Bread I do more-or-less every week, but it gets better every time. Brownies were actually a first… I misjudged the timing slightly and they ended up more liquidy in the middle than I wanted, so sadly we had to scoff the whole lot in a very short space of time. Soup was… for lunch. Blackboard was for Kai, who makes things too, and who made me a pair of bike-helmet ear-warmers last year.

I have decided to set up a way to sell these blackboards somehow… I think they may appeal to a certain sort of person. We shall see.

Other things from this week, in no particular order:

Grandma (the Peggy Vesta Northover) was 90. We are all descending on her place in Suffolk for a party at the weekend.
I went for a meal with my dad and brother, which was good. We usually meet for a pint at The Angel in The Fields in Marylebone High St, which is a good pub. Good.
Went for a meal with Hannah and Vincent (that’s ‘Vansarn’ with a French accent, mind you), and ate waaaay too much cheese. It was a Raclette party, though, so that was the general idea.
It was still snowy, and dangerously icy, but it seems to be melting now.

And, as they say, so on.

Weekly Report 1/52

January 8th, 2010

Right then.

The first few seconds of 2010 were spent on my hands and knees in someone else’s flat in Dalston, feeling simultaneously a) annoyed that I was on my hands and knees in someone else’s flat in Dalston and b) pleased with myself for having fixed the connection between someone’s iPod and their hi-fi just in time for the stroke of midnight. The next few hours were drunken, but the resulting hangover wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.

We had a party on New Year’s Day. After a long walk in the sunshine, we spent the day clearing up the house and making food. I baked a ton of bread, and made celery salt for Bloody Marys… which was probably not quite as worth it as I thought it would be. The bread and Bloody Marys went down well, along with excellent vegetarian chilli and about 15 tons of baked potatoes made by Jenny. Lots of people turned up, and I was having so much fun I forgot to take any photographs (apart from the resolutions one, above). We drunkenly cleaned the house up before going to bed. Rock and roll.

We spent the next day, the final Saturday before returning to work, not cleaning the house but sitting by the fire. Before getting warm, however, we got very cold swimming in London Fields Lido with Ben and Caroline. At home, we settled down and I read the whole of ‘The Road’ by Cormac McCarthy, and Jenny did 95% of her new 1000-piece jigsaw. We started at about 3.30pm, and - without any real breaks - stopped at about 10pm. Not bad going.

Sunday was spent panicking about the fact that we were going to have to go back to work. I went with Ben Martynoga to Hackney City Farm for a few hours to shovel shit into bags¹ (for our respective gardens).

Work started the next day. I won’t give a day-by-day account…

The week was basically spent remembering what I do for a living. I tend to genuinely forget if I go away for a while. It’s a good sign, I think. I tell myself.

The project I work on (which is still a bit of a secret) progresses. We launched the first beta version to the live servers on Monday, but it’s restricted for now so you can’t see it unless you’re us. It’s quite good, but not there yet. Meanwhile, I wrote an article for the Web Developer Blog, which I’d been meaning to write for ages.

It snowed a lot this week. It’s very very cold in our house. This is the coldest it’s been in this country for the whole of my life. The trains and roads are frozen and not working, in a slightly pathetic way. I hope it clears up in time for us to get to Suffolk next week Grandma’s 90th birthday… or that, at the very least, the real breakdown of the transport system waits until we’re firmly out of London and have had a chance to get ourselves a decent supply of tea, toast and Marmite.

It was fun, but it reminded me a bit too much of work. ↩

2009

January 3rd, 2010

If I’m going to do a quick review of 2009, it had better be quick, because it’s extremely 2010 now.

So, in no particular order:

I became an uncle, when young Scott Northover came into the world
Jen and I grew lots of vegetables in the garden - it’s not quite a baby, but it’ll do for the moment.
We did a ton of work on our house, and now the kitchen and the room next to the kitchen are really good
I raced in the Brompton World Championships in Oxford, for the first time, and missed my target time by one second exactly
I did tons of work at work, and the project is (as ever) getting closer to being a) good and b) out there. Time will tell.
I decided to start trying to take a photo every day and upload it to Flickr. The idea was to take self-portraits reflected in things. I managed to keep going for nearly two months, but I ran out of steam. I think my favourites were numbers 8, 13 and 46.
We went to Italy for a couple of days, and it was great (even though it fucking snowed, which wasn’t really part of the plan)
I made a lot of bread, inspired by Richard Bertinet’s book ‘Dough’, which is very good

Pedersen

September 4th, 2009

According to Flickr (and it should know), this is my most ‘interesting’ photo. It’s of a Pedersen bicycle, and this one belongs to my uncle.

Grass snake

August 11th, 2009

I found this very beautiful Grass snake at the weekend. It looked like it’d been nabbed by a bird and then dropped, because it had a couple of big gashes on its back. I took these photos and then left it on a low roof at the side of my uncle’s house. It was gone by the morning.

Waiting

August 2nd, 2009

I have been waiting for a time that never seems to come, when I’ll sort out this site and make an effort to say things on it. It’s not like I don’t constantly think of things I want to say… I just wait for that time.

I think that sums up a lot about the way I do things. I hate planning, and I hate finishing things… I think I like the bits in between. Which is a fat lot of good, really.

I read an interesting article about procrastination a while back, and it basically recommended just trying to do more things, as a way of tricking your procrastination-ridden brain into doing some things as a way to avoid doing other things. The more you have to do, the more likely it is that you’ll use one of the things you actually have to do to avoid doing one of the other new things you have to do. I think that was it.

So: onwards and upwards.

Déjà Flickr

November 30th, 2008

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 (which is now a 404, thanks Ben), 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…

Blogging from Textmate

September 25th, 2008

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.

# List of Blogs
#
# Enter a blog name followed by the endpoint URL
#
# Blog Name   URL
  thing13     http://thing@thing13.net/xmlrpc.php

/Users/[you]/Library/Preferences/com.macromates.textmate.blogging.txt

Worked for me.

FUQ it

August 1st, 2008

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.

Finally

July 11th, 2008

We bought a house.

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

June

June 18th, 2008

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…

October

October 29th, 2007

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…

Thusfar

July 11th, 2007

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.