All posts by Armand

Writing

Just wiped the whiteboard

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It’s a good buffer space, brainstorming site etc, but want to keep it as a short term store. Think that’s going to be one of the ways I motivate myself. To try to fill it up every so often, capture the information digitally, then wipe it clean and start again, hopefully a little further down the line. I’m still very much planning this novel, I’m coming to realise, and need to keep fleshing out ideas at least until I can give a straightforward answer to the question: “what’s your novel about, then?”

“My novel is about…
…a man coming to believe in himself”
…gangsters in London with big plans”
…pan dimensional aliens plotting sinister things and the forces of good that stop them”
…demons! explosions! football! death-defying stunts!”
…lemons”

Back to the whiteboard….

Internet, Technology

Birthday admin (a tech story)

I love having big birthday bashes, no matter how irrelevant the occasion – in this case my 26th, which, other than being the 5th anniversary of my 21st, is completely pointless.

The tech story (how do I always find one?) – is that I’ve been using Google spreadsheets to manage the dinner reservation (it involves tedious working out of set-menus in advance) — it’s very useful. 5 years ago the concept of an online-only service would have driven me nuts, but am actually finding myself moving away from the ‘thick client’ MS model – and there are two key motivations for it.

    1) I need to access the content from multiple locations, usually at least home and work. Being online makes this easier.
    2) I really, really can never be bothered to wait for my Office apps to load. Even on quite fast machines. It’s why I so often end up taking notes in ‘Notepad’.

So here’s my guidance for MS in their next release of Office.

    1) Provide a pared down, simpler, SAAS, web-based version of all the apps online.
    2) FIX Windows Live Mail so it is as quick and easy to use as Gmail
    3) Work out some clever integrated online storage scheme so that people can store large amounts of data securely online

If you do all that, reduce the license fee and provide the basic versions for free or a low subscription cost, you might make Google nervous. With broadband everywhere, and rumours of Mesh cities popping up here, there and everywhere… More people will be happy about moving online for basic software needs.

Travel

Cubacuba

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Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Holiday booked. Negotiations not that complex this time, just four of us going and all fairly laid back. The complications largely involved finding somewhere Central America-ish that didn’t require flying for 20 hours, transferring onto a mule train and then scaling the side of a mountain to get to. We’ve only got a week off – otherwise would definitely get on the mule train.

Was that a song by the O’Jays?

Anyway, its very exciting. Looking forward to Mojitos, Castro… everything. I don’t really know what to expect – imagine some of the more ‘developing nation’** aspects will remind me of some of the crappier bits of Malaysia, so there’ll be some familiarity. But culturally I suspect it’ll be very, very unlike anything I’ve ever encountered before and I’m v. excited as a consequence.

What should I do when I’m out there other than:

    1) Say ‘hi’ to the Castros
    2) Drink lots of rum
    3) Smoke some cigars

Suggestions in the comments if you know anything about it, please, and will be greatly appreciated. I may even bring back gifts for people who tell me of interesting things to do out there.

** is that the PC thing to say? I don’t know anymore.

Music, Technology

Hi Fi indie house

I’ve done two things lately: first, got a bit carried away on eBay and used some knowledge (and hi-fi prejudices) acquired from time spent with my father when I was younger to get a new (2nd hand) sound system. B&W 601 series 2 speakers matched with a Cambridge Audio A300 amp has got me some sweeeeeeet, awesome value bi-wired sound. Works well for the music recording too, but note for all wannabe rockstars: the A300 doesn’t have a headphones output (!!) so to monitor recording you’ll need to split the signal coming out of your soundcard and run the sound through headphones there. Or find some similar solution.

The thing that’s probably more interesting is the music I’ve been playing through it lately. I had a pretty hard-rockin’ 90s. Not death metal or anything – but lots of G&R, Nirvana, the Foo Fighters, Weezer, Metallica, Ugly Kid Joe etc… Hard rockin’. Recently I’ve been acquiring a taste for more indie music… partly influence of some of the people I’ve been hanging out with (like Chris and Tom) but also was pointed to Athlete by Mazmo and have pretty much been listening to their album on repeat for a week now, as you’ll see if you check out my Last.fm page. I’m enjoying the music (Athelete are chilled, catchy, singalongtoable). I am slightly worried that by the 2010’s I’ll be onto folk music, and by 2020 I’ll be listening to Mongolian throat singing. My hard-rockin’ ness is degrading…

;-)

Also really getting into Gorrilaz. I need more exposure to music generally, I think. At school, we used to visit each other with a stack of CDs and go ‘listen to this’… and so got a lot recommendations on a lot of new music. A similar thing happened at Uni with MP3s… but more recently this has subsided somewhat. Ah well – am signed up to an Indie night next weekend so hopefully get some new recommendations then (might need to use Shazam a little…).

In the meantime, if you think of anything I should listen to let me know in the comments. Some further useful indications of my musical tastes from Last.fm – but be warned – a couple of occasions when I left iTunes playing on random has somewhat messed with my history there**.

** also my excuse for listening to any really awful music. I’m sure I don’t own the Hanson album. I can’t do. Can I?

Writing

Armand’s writing wall

The work on the novel is ongoing, and still painfully slow. This is my latest writing-aid – a rollout whiteboard! Cheaper and more easily mounted than its steel-framed colleagues, it’s allowed me to do character mapping, multi-colour scene setting and other generally fun things.

Actually helps as a mode to motivation – I don’t know whether its the egocentric exhibitionist in me or perhaps some missed vocation as a teacher but I do actually love writing on the whiteboard. If only I could write the whole novel that way…!

Books, Personal

Creovationâ„¢

Just finished reading the v. entertaining ‘Who moved my Blackberry‘ — a book which hits so closely on everything that is bad about big corporate and marketing environments it is just eerie — and thought, as a laugh, that I’d check if www.creovation.com was registered. Creovationâ„¢ is a concept that the lead protagonist, one Martin Lukes, comes up with – marrying innovation with creativity (obviously!) — which is singled out as being a particuarly ridiculous marketing non-concept.

And amusingly, a London-based marketing firm has that name, although its proposition seems a little more solid than most of the rubbish that Martin Lukes comes up with in the novel.

Thanks to Douthers for pointing me in the direction of the book and lending me his copy.

Miscellany

Welcome, fellow iTunes haters!

My traffic spiked like a demon on a drug trip when I posted about iTunes the other day (yes, that is what happens to demons when they go on drug trips). So welcome! If you need to know more about my adventures, leave a question in the c-c-c-c-omments.

I will post more substantially this weekend: it has been a busy (and fairly stressful!) week but things seem to be coming together and I have that Friday feeling, so things are looking up.

I am sad I missed International Talk like a Pirate day this year, though. Aaaaaaarrrrr.

Personal

Parentals

My parents are visiting for the next few weeks; not sure what that’ll do for the blog post frequency but I thought I’d warn you all anyway. It’s my birthday in a couple of weeks and it’ll be the first time in 9 years I’ll have been able to celebrate with my folks, and the first time in 14 years since I’ve celebrated with them on the day.

That’s quite significant, really. Looking forward to it…

Software

iTunes 7 sucks

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Sleek, glossy and ‘simple’ as it is, getting iTunes 7 to work on my machine required:

    installing iTunes 7 (error message)
    uninstalling Quicktime
    reinstalling iTunes 7 with quicktime (works, but doesn’t detect iPod)
    uninstalling iTunes 7 AND quicktime
    reinstalling iTunes 7 and quicktime
    restarting machine 3 times

…and breath. No wonder people are complaining. Man, that Steve Jobs really busts my chops.

You wanna fight Steve? You wanna fight? Bringit.

And to all you people saying that this wouldn’t happen if I had a Mac… shutup. I was kinda tempted by Linux after seeing this, though: