The Occasional Masthead

So far today I have made two onion tarts for a medieval picnic tomorrow, begun work on the administrative pages for the list of members for the QLHF, and moved the desk that has not been moved for over a decade in order to retrieve the pen that had fallen behind it. While there, of course, I found ancient letters and considerable dust. Unfortunately neither the Grail nor the Snark were there.

For the remainder of the day I will be working on some fancy shoes for Jess-from-BiF then will most likely spend the evening continuing to hack away at the website.

Anything to keep busy.

I watched Blade Runner again last night. I'm not completely sure why it's one of my all-time favourite films. Perhaps because it's sometimes surreal and hallucinatory image of a future is so relentlessly realised and detailed. Couple that with a narrative with multiple and recursive threads, and you have most of the things I need to keep me intellectually happy.

As an aside, Fiery the Angels Fell turns out to be a reference (deliberately altered) to a very obscure Blake poem. It is a testament to the nature of the internet that there are now a plethora of places where this poem is explored, linked to the film, and the correct quote listed. I like the version used though:

Fiery the angels fell;
deep thunder rolled around their shores,
burning with the fires of Orc.

reasonably meaningless, but it sounds great.

As a second aside, I realised for the first time last night why, for the past several decades, I rub throw-away bamboo chopsticks together to remove splinters: Deckard taught me to do it.

(n) A person who never actually gets around to doing anything because he spends all his time writing out lists headed 'Things to Do (Urgent)'.

This, at the moment, is a completely accurate description of me. I'm just back from a trip away for a week, and have spent the morning:

• installing a new stair-tread, complete with pinching the side of my hand with a hammer, resulting in blood and pain completely disproportionate to the scar which will result;
• catching up on several hundred email messages, about 30% of which were offers to sell me either viagra or fake rolex watches;
• trying to wake up;
• trying to ignore the ToDo lists.

I've been running with a list of things that should happen in the next few days, a list of things that really need to be done, and a list of lists of stuff that might get done. And the list in my head of things I don't write down, for one reason or another. Of course, these lists just get longer.

I think there are two reasons for this. First of all, it probably would help if I reduced the number of lives I'm simultaneously living. If someone suggests I should get a life, in any context, my reply is "no thanks, I already have at least two-and-a-half". I've started on this, by dispersing some responsibilities, and vigourously trying to close off various long-running projects and situations so that someone else can take responsibility, so things may improve. So, the first reason is that tasks come onto the list faster than they get taken off.

The other reason, thus, is that the available time to pursue things I want to do instead of things I am constrained to do seems to decrease hourly...

Of course the whole point of the "meme" concept is the idea that it is an idea that self-replicates. So I have no shame in responding to a meme that I saw elsewhere (smiles and waves) by listing what is on my bedside table:

• a lamp;
• a vial of fairy dust;
• a sealed and un-opened spell of Three Wishes, kept against the time that I need them;
• a box decorated with a medieval representation of the Four Horsemen, containing cards;
• about three dozen books that I may or may not read;
• a ring holder;

Thinking of books, I just finished The Half-blood Prince. I found it fairly good, although I found the pacing of it a little odd, almost as though it was a much larger book that has been split in two. This could well be because it does not (no spoilers here) follow quite the same structure that she's set in the previous books, or because the sophistication and depth of writing and concept in this one is pitched at a much older readership.

Next, The Runes of Earth, wherein I spend time sighing heavily over Thomas Covenant's bloody-minded intransigence.

Completely failed to come up with a new title to avoid repeating this one. Hmm, what did I do today, apart from shiver in the freakishly cold weather - at least now it's 17 Celsius, rather than 9 Celsius. One drawback to living in a cool and comfortable Queensland house is that it is totally unsuited for the one week of cold weather we get every decade.

Today I:

• went to see The Island with Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johanssen, which falls into the category of being better than you might expect, although I came out of it thinking I'd seen Blade Runner, THX-1138, and Logan's Run, and knowing that I'd seen a film of Spares, even though it wasn't credited;
• went mad with a tape measure, a belt sander, a table saw and a router and cut a new stair tread, complete with snazzy rebates to make it easy to slide into place;
• slapped several coats of undercoat on said tread (he said, rhyming, off the top of his head);
• adjusted the QLHF Financial report to take into account the cheque that I didn't think had been included in the current financial year...

oh, yes, that's the other thing. Even though I'm still only halfway through The Half-blood Prince, I peeked in a bookshop and to my surprise found a hard-cover edition of the new Stephen Donaldson marked down from $45 to $8 - sweet! I'm certain I'm not going to get past about page 60, though, without cursing Thomas Covenant and telling him just to get on with it instead of whining.

I'm currently listening to Jazz, and actually enjoying the experience of using Ecto. Methinks I'll fork out some of my hard earned $ for it.

(Fencing Term.) The play, or manoeuvre, where one swordsman leaps on to the table and pulls the battleaxe of the wall.

For lack of any better intent, I intend to pluck Douglas Adam's The Meaning of Liff off the shelf, randomly open it, and grab a definition that appeals to me a the time upon which to riff. Hence, pabbay.

The image appeals to me on several levels. Of course, the image (in black and white, with Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks) is inherently funny. You can just picture the surprise on the swordsman's face when the conflict suddenly escalates up a notch. Of course, the funny thing is that in terms of real swordplay, this is a natural and correct and justifiable manoeuvre - although I'd advocate against jumping on the table, as it leads one open to having ones ankles hacked through - since the whole point of armed combat is to seriously do unto the other before the other gets any opportunity to do unto you.

And there in a nutshell is another layer that appeals to me. In this day and civilised age, people (particularly men) like to strut and push and shove little conflicts, safe in a belief and understanding that there are limits to how the conflict will proceed. I, however, reserve the right to put the sword down, grab an axe, and seriously escalate...

Spent quite a bit of time under the house, enjoying air that has not been recycled endlessly through an air-conditioning plant. Mind you, I spoilt that fresh-air bit by putting more coats of varnish on the cupboard. So today I:

• finished the cupboard door
• hung the cupboard door
• added a bolt and a knob
• slapped on a dash of slapdash varnish
• listened to Dresden Dolls (Missed Me keeps running through my head), Eagles and Emelie Autumn
• chewed up great slabs of time working on admin pages for the QLHF site

On that, I remain reasonably impressed with PHP. It certainly works, and is a lot easier to knock up quick-and-simple things with than JSP or similar. I will have to put it on my resumé...

Now that I’ve passed through the Tiger hoop, gotten my backup solution and local network solution done, I can start tackling some of the thousand other projects sitting in the queue. Of course, an alternative would be to sleep, but that’s too easy.

Next cab off the rank might be a blog editor. I’m looking at either ecto or MarsEdit. The only hassle with doing frequent updates to MovableType, so far, is that the web-based interface is a bit clunky. This entry is being done with ecto. This has some nice features, like being easily able to add things like what I’m currently listening to:

Another Day from the album “Talkie Walkie” by Air

and add arbitrary cat photos:

But I’m hoping — because this is something that I like — that it winds up presenting proper typography…

The last time I did a major Mac OS X upgrade - which was further back than I thought - I littered this blog with titles all about Panther. I won’t do it this time, all I will do is say “Tiger” a few times, and make other stripey references. Tiger, Tiger, Tiger. There, I’ve got that out of my system.

Ok, the good news is that everything just worked. I opted to let the installer do a simple Update, then explicitly added XCode 2. After about an hour, everything came back up, and I downloaded the 10.4.2 upgrades. Only two things seemed to cease functioning as a result of the upgrade, although others may come to light in time.

First up, local iCal publishing and serving broken. Second, MovableType disappeared. Both were extraordinarily simple to get going again: I simply grabbed the old http.conf from the backup I did just before the upgrade (pats self on back for being a good boy) and re-instated the various hacks I’d done their over the years.

On that, I found long ago that one way to keep track of this sort of thing is to add comments something like “RAH HACK yyyymmdd”. So if you ever see something like that in my code, you know I did it so I could find changes again.

Of course, the proof is in the publishing, and I’ll see what happens when I save this entry and try pushing.

There’s quite a lot I’m going to have fun exploring in this release. Dashboard could quite rock my planet - it’s particularly nifty to hit F12 and see the weather forecast, the next few shows on TV, and a quick summary of what’s in iCal. Combined with Spotlight, this is going a long way to simplifying the whole Getting Stuff Done paradigm. On that, I will probably drop Quicksilver again, and may eliminate StickyBrain.

One thing that Spotlight should do is more-or-less remove the need to obsessively organise information. I should be able to just simply throw things in the bit-bucket and let Spotlight worry about retrieving them. Well, we’ll see.

Updated…

Well, the save worked. I am now attempting to see whether I can access and operate MovableType across my internal network…

…mixed success. Seemed to save this entry, but then complain about not being able to access localhost (not suprising, really). Tinkered mt.cfg and let’s see what happens next….

… well it worked ok off my mac, let’s try that remotely…

This was going to be a list of eight people who have exerted a considerable influence in shaping me. However I realised that, apart from my father, listing any of those people would be just a little too revealing, and most of the names would have to be obscured. If you think you need that list, contact me. If you think you’re on that list, contact me. Here then is the other list, well not the other list, the secret midnight 9th list of eight lists of eights, but another list.

Eight artists of one sort or another whose work has been influential or instrumental in shaping the way in which I perceive the universe and myself

1. Douglas Adams, who metaphorically slapped me in the face and woke me up.
2. David Bowie, who has a knack of writing songs that are bizarrely appropriate for my internal soundtrack.
3. Richard Bach (don’t laugh — through him I found out about the real philosophers he cribbed from).
4. Gene Kelly — because he made me realise that even though I’d never dance as well as him, there were things I could do that he couldn’t.
5. Jim Henson, who demonstrated that Silly does not mean Stupid.
6. Tom Wolfe, from whom I learnt that language is a tool not a ruler.
7. Miyamoto Musashi, who explored the ultimate ramifications of the philosophy and madness of swordplay so that I didn’t have to.
8. Vincent van Gogh, who taught me how to see rather than just to look.

Being a list of items that I would like to be given as a gift. Yes, I know some of these are mythical. I can still desire them though, and their very unobtainability enhances their desirability.

1. Excalibur.
2. The Sangreal. It would look nice on the bookshelf.
3. A plaster cast of the footprint of the Snark.
4. The coat and hat worn by Tom Baker in Dr Who - I already have an appropriate scarf.
5. Two dozen bottles of a particularly nice red.
6. A sweet and gentle kiss.
7. A large quantity of well seasoned oak planks, 1 inch by 18
8. Two tickets to London

…while I still can, but will probably never get to do.

1. Spend a considerable amount of time in the UK
2. Spend a considerable amount of time in Europe.
3. Drink cocktails in Manhattan.
4. Sit on the rocks overlooking the Pacific Ocean, at night, by the full moon, and drink sake.
5. Have dinner with eight of my favourite authors
6. Be an extra in the combat scenes for a big Hollywood block-buster.
7. Learn to play the guitar properly.
8. Stop working and build fine furniture.

Time
(Mason, Waters, Wright, Gilmour) 7:06

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time.
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I’d something more to say.