NaBloPoMo

Spotlight

In NaBloPoMo, Photos and Videos on 17 November 2009 with Comments Off

LED lights from Pound­stretcher, con­ver­ted from bat­tery to plug powered by Al. Now I just need to get my hands on some very small bal­loons and Bal­loon Light Pro­ject 2.0 can begin.

Transition

In NaBloPoMo, Photos and Videos on 15 November 2009 with 1 comment

It turns out that I’m ter­rible at this blog­ging every day thing, although I have been keep­ing to my photo a day res­ol­u­tion. I apo­lo­gise for the lack of post­ing, but I have been too busy — oh, you know - leav­ing the house to write every day. Oh yeah. After almost six weeks of feel­ing a little like death warmed up and then rap­idly cooled down to shivery before being boiled up once more, I’m able to get up and out most days. This week the plan is to build up to leav­ing the house and work­ing in any given day. Don’t get too jeal­ous all at once, now.

I am real­ising, though, that in some strange way I prob­ably needed the last six weeks of com­plete body break­down. I stopped. For the first time in years, everything ground to a com­plete halt — even brain activ­ity seemed to stop for a while. Every so often a Big Thought would push its way through the fog, but with time to con­tem­plate I actu­ally man­aged to get some­where with my think­ing. There’s a few things I’m a lot closer to being able to let go of now, just because I had no choice but to work through them before hav­ing another nap (to get over the exer­tion of think­ing!), so recov­er­ing from it all almost feels like a renewal in some way; an emer­ging. I’ve real­ised how blocked my head had become, and while I’m no clearer just yet on where I want to go, it feels like some­thing I’m able to think about now instead of the messy tangle of before.

Part of my frus­tra­tion is in real­ising that I’m strug­gling to express myself in any way — some­where between thought ini­ti­ation and expres­sion, some­thing gets blocked, and noth­ing — writ­ten or spoken — comes out feel­ing authen­tic. I’ve always felt divided in some way — I’m not wholly aca­demic or nat­ur­ally artistic, not entirely cyn­ical but not fully optim­istic, even not badly ill but still not very well — and it almost feels like that’s where the con­flict lies, like I’m strug­gling to work out how to straddle all of the ele­ments yet remain a cohes­ive per­son. I don’t think I’m man­aging it at all at the moment, but I’m start­ing to fig­ure out that work­ing that out a little is prob­ably the key to work­ing out everything else, like what I want to do with myself and where I want to go.

(And this is the part where I would nor­mally insert a pithy joke about how lousy I am. But I am not going to let myself do that — although you have no idea how hard that feels, being Queen of all Humour is the Best Defence — I’m just going to let this lie for a bit. Let it go out there into the uni­verse and maybe help my brain to start work­ing on it all. We’ll see.)

In the shade

In Hamster, NaBloPoMo, Photos and Videos on 12 November 2009 with 1 comment

Mighty Morphin’ Power Links

In Design, NaBloPoMo, Photos and Videos, Websites on 11 November 2009 with Comments Off

Because I have a couple of half-written lengthy draft entries that I don’t have the energy to fin­ish before I col­lapse into bed for the night, I’ll share some (admit­tedly work-based) links with you instead.

Typekit
Typekit can be sum­mar­ised as font replace­ment through javas­cript, which in turn can be sum­mar­ised as “magic hap­pens”. I’ve not played around with this as much as I’d hoped, but if you read this on the site (as opposed to the RSS feed), you’ll notice I’m using it for entry titles (and all other h3 ele­ments, too). Dis­turb­ingly easy to imple­ment, this is some­thing I’d genu­inely pay for if the choice of fonts improves.

Brizzly
Man­aging more than one Twit­ter account? Brizzly is the best solu­tion I’ve found, mak­ing it suit­ably dif­fi­cult to announce your per­sonal secrets to your work account. Now includes Face­book integ­ra­tion and has seem­ingly man­aged to get over a bizarre bug where it finds search res­ults over and over and over again, announ­cing them as new every time. This wouldn’t be so annoy­ing had I not pos­ted the tweets that triggered the search find­ing in the first place… (Still invite only, I think. Leave a com­ment or send a mes­sage to @whoopdedoo on Twit­ter if you want one).

Mobile web­site devel­op­ment
Without giv­ing any­thing what­so­ever away about what I’m cur­rently look­ing into for work purposes:

• Smash­ing Magazine on Mobile Web Design Trends. Des­pite my own pre­ju­dices,  Smash­ing Magazine do actu­ally pro­duce con­sist­ently use­ful art­icles, all of which must include the word “trends”.
• Cameron Moll: Mobile Web Design Book.
• Jakob Niel­son: Mobile Web Usability

How to Under­stand Your Users with Per­so­nas
PONIES!

Lost in space

In NaBloPoMo, Photos and Videos on 10 November 2009 with Comments Off

I can’t find my reset but­ton. Maybe I have a key com­bin­a­tion instead? Some par­tic­u­lar but­ton order that will get me into dia­gnostic mode?

Your bat­ter­ies are flat. Please recharge and return to normal.

Do you know where my char­ger is?

I know a bit about fatigue, but it’s not mak­ing this time any easier. I’m try­ing not to beat myself up, try­ing to reas­sure myself that it took me five weeks of virus to get this run down and tired, so it’s bound to take more than a couple of days and a quick nap before I’m back to where I was. But the level of frus­tra­tion is high — I have so much work to catch up on. Doc­tors don’t write you a note if you’re ill and self employed. Instead they say, “well that’s good then,” like your cli­ents and let­ting agency won’t mind if you just take to your bed for a few weeks, sub­mit no work and pay no rent. Self-employment: it’s easy!

For now, I’ll make do with cel­eb­ra­tions of little steps (like get­ting through two-and-a-half to do list items!) before climb­ing into bed and hop­ing for tomorrow.

Rachel’s birthday

In NaBloPoMo, Photos and Videos on 9 November 2009 with Comments Off

It was on this day, a whole 30 years ago, that my big sis­ter was born. When I was little I always had a sneak­ing sus­pi­cion that Rachel being born at 4.11pm was just part of the world’s biggest suck-up trick (my Dad’s birth­day being the 4th, and my Mum’s the 11th. Oh, what a handy coin­cid­ence for someone look­ing to seal their fate as Favour­ite Daugh­ter!), but then I also also, vari­ously, believed that Rachel was adop­ted, I was adop­ted, and Um Bongo had poison in it. One Christ­mas, my only present request was for a burst bal­loon, so you can make your own mind up about the way my mind worked as a child.

I’d claim Rachel got all the good genes, but she is both older and shorter than me, so HAH! When we die, we should prob­ably be bur­ied next to each other and have sep­ar­ate grave­stones with, “which gravestone’s tallest?” engraved on them, although that would be mostly point­less because Rachel’s will be stand­ing on tippy­toes and our skel­et­ons would do noth­ing but fight. She got all of the attract­ive, healthy and soci­able genes, but was also lumbered with a hard time when we were grow­ing up because I got the men­tal arith­metic gene. And look where that one got me, eh, every teacher I’ve ever had? If I went back in time my advice to little me would be to go for attract­ive, healthy and soci­able too: it turns out that nobody ever really needs their seven times table (you can even get a degree without doing any maths past the age of 13) and soon they will invent this thing called Word which will cor­rect all of your spelling anyway.

Happy birth­day, Rachel.