Sometimes my dreams are like cathedrals. I don’t mean they’re tall and old, I mean that they have so many details, you couldn’t possibly comprehend them in one lifetime - angels and devils at play on every surface. And somehow, in my lucidity, I can take all of this in not only in one lifetime, but in a few moments of sleep. So why is it that as soon as I wake up they crumble and fall, and all I’m left with are millenia-old foundations torn by ivy, lashed by wind and vandalised by passers-by. Take, for example, the other night - I was reading a magazine profile of… I can’t remember who. I can remember the exact sleeping moment that the lucidity hit me, when I realised how funny it was that some part of my brain had conjured up this entire article, which I was reading word-for-word, my mind had created the environment in which I was reading it, where every fleck of paint on the wall was visible and slight changes in air pressure, temperature, humidity, breeze… I noticed them all, which of course I never do in real-life. And then last night… meeting up with…. someone, I think based upon Jan… climbing out of the house and through the woods and ferns to his tent, the dead turkey-bird-eagle-things under the trees, every feather picked out, the cloying bird-shit limewash mess dumped over them, the blades of grass bent beneath them. The points I wanted to add to the conversation about Kettering and Bristol, but couldn’t get a word in edgeways. All of these things are shadows now, but at the time they were made so much more real, realer than real, by the accompanying details. And then the guinea pigs and the bleach…. nyeeurgh… no, that one’s still far too clear in my mind.
Monthly Archive for February, 2002
I really enjoyed reading this valentine tale of woe - especially the supermarket bit. The Adam and Eve bit got a bit convoluted for me, but started making sense again towards the end.
Here’s one button that you may want on your website.
Been fiddling with our new Unix server homes. Thought I’d try to convert some ASP over, starting with this blog. Well, the server has a thing called Apache ASP on it, so I thought I’d give that a try - spent far too long (though not as long as I might have done) fiddling, banging my head against the screen, converting upper-case and mixed-case to lower-case, before I realised that Apache ASP only supports PerlScript, not VBScript. So then I found a thing called ASP2PHP, and at long last dipped my toe into PHP. Unfortunately, the conversion process isn’t very good - took me a couple of hours fixing errors that it put into the scripts, though to be fair I would have probably spent at least as long working out what mapped onto what.
ASP2PHP seems particularly weak on file-system stuff: it barfed on a call to FileExists and screwed up the rest of the script after that. It also converted a lot of functions to variables, retained VBScript Object.Function naming conventions when PHP does things differently, and converted function calls to $function[parameter] when they should have been function(parameter). Ah well. Learning lessons all the time…
Yaaay! Another Dan cartoon courtesy of Gaz!
Finally found somewhere that can supply me with a new bowl for my Magimix (apparently I have the “original model” from Robot Coupe, as there is no model number on the thing. Looks like it’s about 40 years old but works like a dream - when the bowl is in one piece). Looks like that website could be handy for a few more things I have lying around the house half-useless too.
Got another book review, The Murdoch Mission, published on Brand Republic today. Will post the full text here as soon as I get around to it, for those without a subscription to that esteemed media publication.
Ed just introduced me to Fischerspooner - wonderful sounds. Fast forward to the 80s. And unlike most music, it sounds perfect coming out of the tinny speakers on my Vaio.
Another weekend in the countryside, rambling around Grindleford with Terry. Another opportunity to put some damn fine photos online.
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