February 2004

Leap day celebrations

by Suw on February 29, 2004

So, how did you spend yours? How are you spending yours? An extra day in the year, and a Sunday too. A beautiful day, weatherwise, here. Sunny. Blue skies. A little cloud but not til the afternoon.

An extra day.

A gift.

A treat.

A day to be spent doing things you wouldn't perhaps otherwise have done. A day to spoil yourself. A day to be self-indulgent.

How did I spend mine? I worked. I designed preliminary screens for a website. Sad? Tedious? Hard work? No. No, it was marvellous. To be working again, to be designing again, to be stretching my little neurons til they twang. Fantastic. For someone long without work, such things are indeed a gift.

In fact, the last few days, things have started to look groovily interesting. I'm going to be writing a feature for a new online design mag, and I've been picking up some bits and pieces of design work which will keep me busy for a while. It's great. I feel like things are starting to move again.

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Career plan now confirmed

by Suw on February 29, 2004

GapingVoid. Go. Now. Or else.

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Sneeuw!

by Suw on February 28, 2004

Ok, so I know you’ve all seen snow before. Well, I presume you’ve all seen snow before. Certainly there are enough pictures of snow on tv and the internet that even if you haven't seen snow in the flesh before, you can't possibly be unaware of the nature of snow. So these pictures aren’t going to be hugely educational.

But I like them anyway.


Daffs bowing under the weight


Our garden


Across the road from here


Twee!


Twee two!

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From a conversation on #joiito, it seems that yes, Orkut* really does mean ‘orgasms’ in Finnish, but better still, ‘join Orkut’ actually means ‘Joi’s orgasms’.

I’d been wondering what the screaming was every time I opened my emails…

*Orkut-the-site is named after Orkut-the-guy, who developed it.

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More limerick goodness

by Suw on February 28, 2004

Another post courtesy of #joiito.

Suw, IRC-ing from bed
Could not get it quite through her head
That to type with one hand
Gives us to understand
She is fiddling elsewhere instead
-om

A Dorsetshire maiden named Suw
Was unsure which language to do
Advised by Maciej
She got carried away
I językiem zrobiła coś mu
-km/om

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To the end

by Suw on February 28, 2004

Listening to all my Blur albums tonight. Hearing things in the songs now that I don't remember noticing before, remembering things I thought I'd forgotten, feeling feelings I haven't felt for years.

Makes me want to get my bass guitar out again, to feel the surge of bass run through me like electricity, making all my hairs stand up on end. Why did I stop playing? What happened? Listening to Parklife, I can't recognise who I am now, it's so different from who I was then.

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BlogTalk 2.0 – registration complete

by Suw on February 28, 2004

It's official – I'm going to BlogTalk 2.0 in Vienna in July. Registered just now, and am already planning the trip.

Some of the other bloggers I know may going: Gary Turner's thinking about it, Horst Prillinger's submitting a paper, as is Maciej Cegłowski. Couple of other #joiitoers may also be there, so already it's looking like it will be fun.

Who knows, I might even learn something.

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Wifi! Broadband! W00t!

by Suw on February 27, 2004

It works! It works! It works!!!

I am so going to be ircing from my bed tonight. Yeah baby!

Ok, so it took us all day to realise that we had a dns address wrong, but still, it only took us about six hours to get it all up and running which I consider to be a minor miracle, considering. So now you can phone me on my landline at any time and I will almost certainly not be engaged!

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Just sitting here, in the lounge, making the most of our new wifi network*, with XFM playing for the first time since I left Reading. Bliss!

For years I was used to having XFM, an indie radio station with exceptionally good taste, on in the background all day whilst I worked. I was surprised how much I missed when it became no longer possible to access Sky from my office (it’s a London based station broadcasting also on satellite). Being able to sit here now and listen to it whilst working on the laptop is wonderful.

At the moment I’m proofing my old Melody Maker features ready to go up on what will be my new CV website and I’ve just come across my first ever View from the Crew – Blur at the Brixton Academy in Jan 98.

I was shitting bricks before covering this gig. I’d never done crew interviews before and the fact that I was quite possibly the biggest Blur fan on the planet didn’t help my nerves. Blur were one of the reasons why I was a music journalist. Alex James was the reason why I started playing bass guitar.

Unfortunately, when I get nervous I sometimes also get very clumsy. At one point I remember thrusting open one of the swing doors at the back of the stage area and very nearly smashing Graham Coxon in the face with it. Poor mite looked at me in a rather shocked manner as I, in a moment of excruciating embarrassment, shouldered my way past him.

Sorry, Graham. It wasn’t rudeness on my part – more like blind terror.

However, the fact that I was working a Blur gig for the Maker did give me a feeling of legitimacy that I’d never had before. I felt like I was who I should always have been, like suddenly I was worth the air I was breathing.

In the end, despite my nerves tripping me up a little and the fact that many of the crew were hungover and grumpy (and, in one case, astoundingly rude), I got a really good feature out of it. My favourite lines still stand:

With such attention to coolness, James has managed to subordinate his bass playing almost entirely. Whilst there are plenty of bassists out there with better technique, there are few that can produce sounds that swing so effortlessly between extremes of subtlety and full in-yer-face-ness. You'd have to be a real spaniel to ignore how much his bass adds to songs like ‘Beetlebum’ or ‘Girls and Boys’.

*wifi rocks! I love this! Being able to sit in the lounge, where the seats are more comfy, the room brighter, the view… er… actually the view’s just the garden so not hugely impressive but being able to see it at all just rocks! We should allegedly be getting broadband tomorrow, at which point hopefully the network will really come into its own.

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A special and unique snowflake

by Suw on February 26, 2004

Wow! Snow twice in one year! And both on a Thursday evening! Nature surely is conspiring.

Honestly, though, it's beautiful. The snow is falling gently but steadily, and we have about four inches settled on the ground now. It's so unusual to get snow here, it just doesn't happen very often so it's a big event when it does.

Just look at it – it's so beautiful, so pristine, so pure. It's amazing how tiny little crystals of frozen water can look so breathtaking. Staring up into the falling flakes, it's hypnotic.

If only the world were that beautiful all the time.

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Wifi-ing up the house. Or not.

February 25, 2004

Finally we've got round to this whole idea of a domestic wifi network, prompted by the myth that broadband is available at this postcode. Personally, I'll believe that broadband is available at this postcode when it's actually installed and running, but til then I remain sceptical. The little wifi widgets came this morning, theoretically allowing […]

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Extreme Pingu

February 25, 2004

Played Reinhold and Yeti? Try PinguXtreme. Those land mines, they really help the scores. Update: Working again!

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This way, magnificent Valhalla lies

February 24, 2004

If you can just slip behind a molecule… There it is. Just as Douglas Adams described it. St Pancras. The huge locomotive shed, fronted by The Midland Grand Hotel, empty now for years, sadly deserted and abandoned. The first time I ever went to St Pancras I thought it was spelt St Pancreas and couldn't […]

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BlogTalk 2.0

February 24, 2004

I was talking to GT last night about going to the BlogTalk 2.0 conference in Vienna in July. It's affordable in terms of registration, and it would be deeply cool to go and network with interesting blogger people. Somewhere in the back of my head, a small voice is screaming that I might not actually […]

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This way, magnificent Valhalla lies

February 24, 2004

If you can just slip behind a molecule… There it is. Just as Douglas Adams described it. St Pancras. The huge locomotive shed, fronted by The Midland Grand Hotel, empty now for years, sadly deserted and abandoned. The first time I ever went to St Pancras I thought it was spelt St Pancreas and couldn’t […]

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