Life Less Literary |
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A small selection of the many things that have happened to Dan Sumption, his family, friends and colleagues
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Saturday, December 29, 2001
Christmas, holiday, no time for computer. Music: Ronald Shannon Jackson, God and The Cardiacs. See you all soon! 1 comment Add comment | this item Saturday, December 15, 2001
Heh heh. I'm now an Amazon associate! If this earns me enough gift certificates to buy all the Edward R. Tufte books by next Christmas then I'll be a very happy man :-)
Add comment | this item Friday, December 14, 2001
(also courtesy of NTK) Some great (kazoo) music, no, really! Check out Zooloop and Zoodub; and The Little Spanish Fleabox is a nice version of the music on (theme 1 of) Entropy8Zuper's site for Fractal. Add comment | this item Thursday, December 13, 2001
Had a... slightly tipsy... slightly queasy... night at Century with Mark & Gordon. Mitch turned up later as well. And then... strange, interrupted sleep. Woke up early but tried to sleep on, and got involved in the most realistic and compelling dreams. And... I woke up from the dream. But it turned out I had woken into another dream. Then I woke from that. And then from that. In the end, I had woken up so many times that I was completely disorientated. How was I to know that the two women outside on a ladder cleaning my window weren't real. And when they came into my bedroom and sat down for their tea-break, and wouldn't leave despite my protestations that I had to get up ("where we gonna 'ave our tea-break then, eh?")... I couldn't have know that it was another bedroom that existed only in my head. I was amazed when I finally did wake up to realise that none of the previous wakenings had been genuine, and only now, finally, after 2-hours of repeated awakenings, was I finally in the "real" world. Add comment | this item Wednesday, December 12, 2001
 When I walked into the living room at 6am, that moon was the first thing I saw again.
Add comment | this item Tuesday, December 11, 2001
Some fascinating peeks at history in the making, as well probably more bytes of crap than there are atoms in the universe, at Google's new 20 year usenet archive. 20 years doesn't feel like a long time, but some of this stuff... first mention of the IBM-PC anyone... just seems, well, from another world. But then when we hit 1994 it all seems like yesterday (albeit a yesterday that I lived several houses and a couple of PCs ago with a much slower internet connection running under DOS and occasionally, when I could figure out the TCP/IP stacks, Windows 3.1). Gawd, the Green Card spam. That was a story which went round and around for ages. Seems such small fry now. Next thing, of course, is to look out all my old posts - much tech-heavier than I seem to remember at the time, although one or two from the Demon newsgroups have resurfaced including my favourite ever flame and my very enjoyable argument with Demon's Malcolm Muir, who I later found to be lying on all counts (Demon was sold to Scottish Telecom a few weeks later, and I subsequently met someone who had worked at Demon at the time and confirmed the "server crash" collapsing floor story). Add comment | this item (apologies to Guy for lifting this from my email to him) S'funny, while I was lying awake this morning, I had a 7-year old Caustic song, which I'd previously almost forgotten, going around my head, and despite the occasional clumsiness of Arthur's snarly-mumbled lyrics it perfectly sums up my feelings about England on a day like today "feels warm against the cold".... "our smiles as short as winter's long". Here it is (sorry about crap quality, it's the only version I have digitzed, and I can't be bothered hooking up the tape player to make it into an MP3) Add comment | this item wow - just noticed the perfect crescent moon in the dawn sky, just through the window next to me Add comment | this item Tried to post here twice yesterday and, because of my habit of flitting from one program to the next and then clicking a link in an email and having it open in the IE window that holds blogger, lost my post both times. Can't really be bothered to reconstruct it but... Really got back into the swing of working yesterday. Spent much (far too much) of the day on some Zed work for Holler - just a couple of popup windows made from PSDs, but proved to be a nightmare because an anchor link which targets an already open HTML page in another frame apparently doesn't work on Macs.... gaaargh.... now I have to look for an alternative, probably using some horrendous amounts of JavaScript to scroll or refresh the second window. In between times I managed to research MMS animated logos for mobile phones.Ought to have been easy... just make an animated GIF and presto!... but no, of course not. Took me some time to work out that I had to make each frame of the GIF cover the entire canvas, otherwise the bits not included in the update would get wiped clean for that frame. And then I also crammed in some research on writing bots for IRC and Analog webstat analysis (which doesn't do what I want it to - track users by cookies. Anyone know of a free/cheap and highly customisable [preferably Perl] system which will do this?) Then there was a box in the post from Amazon to make my day - all my Christmas goodies, including several pressies for Gill. Plus 2 copies of Hagakure for Mark and I to either use as a business philosophy or scream words from when performing with our new band, TIFT POVIS. And a copy of Mastering Exchange 2000 Server, so I can finally try to migrate my emails off Leonardo's box and onto the one next to me. And the awesome Gorillaz CD (had lots of fun round Jan's the other night driving the Gorillaz' Geep). Wow, just checked out the rest of the Gorillaz site - fun stuff. And finally, I didn't get the Zero 7 CD that I ordered, although it was listed on the delivery slip. Instead, some monkey packed me the S Club 7 CD. I can understand the mix up, y'know, both have a 7 in their names. It's just that I'd much rather they'd stuck a DVD of Kurosawa's 7 Samurai instead. Mind you, dunno that Gill would let me watch it again. Add comment | this item Wednesday, December 05, 2001
Another overdue life - another weekend visiting Sheffield museums and parks. Add comment | this item Tuesday, December 04, 2001
Strangest weather this morning - I walked out of the house to take Rowan to school, and there was a mini-storm cloud covering our portion of Walkley, yet down the hill the sun shone brightly over the centre of Sheffield. The effect was a dappled grey dark-light, the like of which I haven't seen since the eclipse. Took Rowan into school and when I came out the cloud had passed, and the whole area was glorious with light. Now as I sit high up in the house, surrounded by tall windows, things alternate between not enough light to see by and so much that my screen is dazzled. As I look out I can see the clouds rolling over towards the East. Add comment | this item Sunday, December 02, 2001
Just stumbled across the 2000AD website and relived my youth. Incredible linked database of artists/writers/letters and stories/covers (with pics) etc. - could spend years in there. Add comment | this item La la la (yeah, that's the word... I mean phrase... I mean, meaningless string of verbal noise... for the night) OK, so I'm babysitting. Gill has gone out for tapas or somesuch. And I'm getting lonely. And I need a cigarette... thought she might pick me some up. So I decided to ring her. Tum tum tum. Gotta search out my mobile (that's where I've got her mobile # programmed in). But I found her's first. And you know what... every time I used it to try and ring her... SHE WAS ENGAGED! Who's she talking to? Add comment | this item But when I get drunk... I still wanna light up the night sky with an orange flame. Well, no, make it a lilac one. Yeah, with a bit of yellow. And pink. Nah, not any old pink, cyclamen, and.... blah blah blah... GAAAAAAAAAHHHH Hee hee hee Watching the top 100 number 1 singles on Channel 4. Amazing... the power of music, all that. Mind you, Imagine @ #1??? So many better tracks in there. Even the Oasis (Don't Look Back in Anger) bringing tears to my eyes, but John Lennon... nah, lost it by then. Ah well. So many songs. So many emotions. Wanna list them all, and the circumstances, and the everything, and.... so much. I WANT TO MAKE MUSIC. I WANT TO SING SONGS. La la la la la la la la. Oh, and Sinead, singing Nothing Compares 2 U, Wow! <sniff> Hee hee hee... don't think TIFT POVIS will quite raise the same emotions. Some emotions though. Gotta work out how to get that heartrend into my voice as I sing this Euurggh.... and Invisible Band by Travis is on my list of Amazon recommendations. Amazon, you so do not understand what lives in my head. Oh, and some wanker has nicked a picture of Gill from my website and posted it as a minger lookalikey. That makes me kinda angry. But then... I kinda suspect Tim, in which case it's probably my fault for submitting his picture to Am I Hot or Not, and more to the point telling him that I had done so. And speaking of hot or not, saw this today and it made me feel very ill. Probably more ill than anything I've seen on the Internet since Dan took down his gallery of the grotesque (which was in 1995, possibly earlier) with its picture of the LSD deformity miscarriage. And... oh, much more... no no no, really I just want to sing some of those songs I just heard. Very loud. So, hope you don't mind if I leave you and I just go off and.... LA LA LAAA LA LAA LA LA Add comment | this item Saturday, December 01, 2001
So anyway, continuing the London tales... that night we went to a magazine launch - centrefold, basically just a load of (well, 3 or 4) A3 sheets double-sided with high quality fashion/glamour shots of skinny models. Party was fun - didn't make it to Leo Burnett's in the end, as we'd thought we would. Instead got far too drunk etc. Ended up at JCs, caught a cab back there, terrified that JC was going to redecorate the back seat at any moment. JC kept coming on a bit strong too - think that as he now has a lesbian girlfriend, he's trying to discover his inner gay man. Ah well, was kinda sweet. Amazingly woke up (jumped out of bed almost) at 8.10am (after crashing at about 3), and even managed (just) to get to St Pancras in time for the 9.25 train. Tried (briefly) to sleep on the way home, but brain was working too fast. Instead I copied all the phone numbers from my mobile to my PDA (one tiresome, mindless task I've been putting off for ages, perfect for a tiresome mindless morning) and then wrote up the previous day's meeting with Liv4now. Add comment | this item hee hee... noticed blue felt-tip stripes up Rowan's arms & legs tonight. Apparently she wanted to be a tiger. Add comment | this item Had another fun 2 days in London this week. Wednesday we met up with JC in some olde-worlde pub near Paddington. Talked music, magazines, websites... Mark now wants to start a band where the two of use scream words from suitable samurai texts over a background noise of Ed's Ilhan Mimaroglu-style music. The name of the band is TIFT POVIS (possibly an acronym for The Institue For The Promotion Of Violence In Society... but who knows?) Thursday was Liv4now day. First thing I went over to Holler to pick up some work I have to do for them on the Eleksen website. All pretty straightforward, until I tried to get a cab down to Brick Lane. Cab firm said they would be 15 minutes. Then when we rang them back 25 minutes later, they said they would be another 10 minutes. Eventually another 30 minutes later, I was told the cab was downstairs. I was in the middle of a phone call at the time, but I did my best to grab my belongings and head down 3 stories to the street. By the time I got there the cab had gone again. Wanker. Piece of advice - never try to catch a cab in Dalston. Stick with the buses. Add comment | this item |