Life Less Literary

I took part in my first ever focus group tonight. I’m a Friend of Sheffield Galleries and Museums, and they chose about ten of us at random to come in and talk about the galleries and the friends’ scheme.

I’ve always been fashionably cynical about focus groups, but tonight was actually a really great experience in many ways. Firstly, it was nice that everyone else there was more-or-less in agreement with me on a wide range of topics, many of which I’d assumed represented just my own peculiar views (for example that the Mappin Gallery, now closed, was so much better than the horrendously over-hyped Millennium Galleries; that the cheap-and-cheerful café at the Graves Gallery is likewise better than the trying-to-be-modern-but-not-putting-in-enough-effort restaurant at the Millennium Galleries; that the members’ events are over-priced and elitist; and much much more). Secondly, it was just really nice chatting about this stuff in an open environment. And finally, and most importantly, it felt like tonight we really made a difference: we brought to light many things which hadn’t been considered; our consensus opinion made it clear that we needed to be listened to; and the proposed new membership scheme, which seems to have been the raison d’etre for this focus group, is a terrible idea which will only serve to increase the elitism and keep more members from attending special events. It certainly felt like our views were taken on board, and as a result any future changes to the membership scheme are likely to be radically different from the ones they had been planning. (Famous last words…)

Gizmo is rather scary to behold when he gets into full on running mode. He does that greyhound thing, baring his teeth, eyes wide open, like the black dog off the cover of Parklife by Blur. Thing is, he has a habit of charging towards me whenever he does it. Usually I face him down and he veers off at the last second, but the other day I was carrying a bag of his shit to the nearest bin when he came up behind me at about 60kmh, ploughed straight into the back of my legs. It was like being hit by a small car. I went flying forwards a couple of metres, landed on my face, my glasses went a few metres further, and ever since I’ve been suffering some kind of whiplash in my neck. I’m gonna be keeping two eyes on him from now on whenever he’s off the lead.

Last night’s rehearsal ended fairly early, and Gill had given me instructions not to arrive home while she was putting the kids to bed, so I wandered down to the Showroom to see whether there was anything interesting on.

Turned out there was nothing I’d been dying to see, but there was Stage Beauty which I’d heard both good and indifferent reviews of. I went in. Glad I did.

For the first half-hour or so I found it moderately enjoyable, though spoiled a bit by the driving Afro-Celt Sound System-esque music which came on at full force as Maria ran through the streets of 1660 London.

But as the film progressed there were moments of brilliance, with some great acting and some hilarious jokes (many of them very, very subtle. Others anything but). And Rupert Everett’s Charles II emerging rosy-cheeked from his bedroom after a blowjob from Nell Gwyn was absolutely perfefct. The Hollywood-style happy ending detracted slightly, but overall it was a really good film (no doubt made better by the large glass of wine I drank while waiting for it to start), 4/5.

From this week’s Popbitch. The disclaimer on this is, ahem, to die for:

        >> Suicide is painless <<
        Beware the Mitsubishi Martyrs

    Suicide bombers throughout the Middle East
    are often given Ecstasy by their handlers,
    to help inspire them with the fervour
    required to blow themselves up. 

    After the Saudi bombings this summer, the US
    ordered a crackdown, and the Saudi authorities
    traced the bombers’ Ecstasy to a batch shipped
    into the country by a member of the Saudi
    royal family, based in London. 

    The prince has been recalled to Saudi Arabia,
    and has not been heard from since.

(NB: Popbitch does not condone terrorism, but if
you are going to crash an airliner into a skyscraper,
we reckon the experience would be massively enhanced
by being off your tits on MDMA.)

Aaargh! Why is life like this?

I just got around to installing a new hard disk. Finally. My 120Gb MP3 drive was almost full, and was starting to report the odd error (losing indexes), so I bought a new 200Gb one, ooh, ages ago, but haven’t been arsed to open up the computer and stick the new one inside until yesterday.

And today, guess what? Another one of my (many) hard disks decided to go offline. Windows disk manager just shows it as “missing” and “failed”. I’m not exactly sure what that means, but it doesn’t sound good. Fortunately, it’s the disk I use mainly as a temp drive, there was nothing of any lasting value on it except for my rips^B^B^B^Bbackups of DVDs, but all the same I had been looking forward to having some extra space to play around with. Damn damn damn.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

A few months back, I read Cloud Atlas and was duly blown away. I said at the time that it would win the Booker. I’d even had an urge to put money on it, though I had no idea of how to go about doing so.

Then a couple of weeks ago they released the longlist for this year’s prize. Guess what, Cloud Atlas was on there. And The Guardian ran an article on including Booker odds. Cloud Atlas was sounding good, 3/1 favourite at William Hill “the shortest odds ever quoted on a Booker novel at the longlist stage” and yet 8/1 at Ladbrokes. I fancied sticking 25 quid on it at Ladbrokes. I could see myself making a couple of hundred quid.

I didn’t know quite what to make of the fact that I was not alone, William Hill’s spokesman said:

“We have been inundated with people wanting to back this book ever since it was published.

Does this mean that Cloud Atlas is a shoe-in, or that its fans are all people like me, who never usually bet but suddenly felt they were onto something this time. Is this a good sign or a bad sign.

Whatever, I left it too late, as I knew I would. Ladbrokes now have their odds on the book down to 3/1, the same as William Hill’s, it seems to be clear favourite. I stuck the £25 on at Ladbroke’s anyway, because I’d promised myself for so long that I’d do it, but I do feel rather like I’ve just missed out on a hundred quid.

Of course it’ll never win anyway, favourites never do (do they?) and this whole discussion will be adademic, but right now I feel like a right plonker for not acting right on time.

Hmmmm

Some fun with my server tonight. I just upgraded it to Plesk 7, which went reasonably smoothly (so far…). I had to check a hell of a lot of package versions, locate and download RPMs for several which is a new trick for me. It got a bit nailbiting halfway through, when my mailboxes were all asking for new passwords and I couldn’t get into MySQL, but somehow with the addition of the last few RPMs that all seemed to fall into place. Only problem now is, even though the new Plesk 7 license has supposedly been installed on the machine (it must’ve been because Plesk 6 was complaining that I no longer had a license for that version), now everything’s up and running the control panel tells me I only have a license for one site. Oh well, EV1 are onto it. And tomorrow, I hope to find out about the jobs of a new step on the Plesk ladder (and also, I hope, make use some of those PHP calls which my previous version of PHP couldn’t hack).

Ah, it’s always nice to get back to putting together a website, making somebody’s ideas appear on the screen. Today I sat down with Will and we talked through the Next Best Thing website. I had a play around with some of the pictures, made a new logo, and came up with this. Disclaimer: website not anything like finished yet. Or tested in anything other than IE6 for Windows XP. Or even looking vaguely like what it’ll end up as. But anyway, it was fun, making something appear.

Also a problem: the image rollovers are terribly slow when I run it from the server, almost as if the browser is fetching the images each time. I’m sure I’ve not seen this before (the rollover code is bog-standard stuff from Dreamweaver MX 2004), dunno what’s going on.

I found an audiobook of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep the other week, listened to it in the car on the way to Weymouth and back. I’ve never actually read the story, although I seem to remember Sanjida urging me to do so once when we lived together in Bristol. But Bladerunner was one of the first films I videoed off TV, and so I must have watched it dozens of times (the original, non-director’s cut, although I did go and see the later version in the cinema. Possibly twice. In fact, I’ve a feeling I saw it with Sanjida, which could be how the conversation came about).

So listening to the audiobook was simultaneously an exciting new experience and a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Synapses dead these past 15 years started to fire again, I really started to miss that damn film, would love to see it again, (and, hey, look: it’s just been voted the best sci-fi film of all time). But at the same time I realised (yeah, Sanjida was right. Again) how much more complex the story is than the film it inspired. Glad I got there eventually, even if I haven’t read it off paper quite yet.