grahambinns.com

Sigh. Apologies for the half baked, never to be finished post that somehow appeared on the site anyway (I blame a blog client that exploded, which is a shame since I wrote the damn client).

Nothing to see here. Move along now.

Edit:

The post was a comment on this story from the BBC. The point I was trying to make wasn't actually valid given the context (that'll teach me for not reading the whole story before I write a post). Nevertheless it seems only fair that I write a full comment on the story so that you know what I actually think, but I'll do that tomorrow.

I've just noticed that the photography category on this blog has 105 entries and the writing category has 130 (including this post). For a blog that's supposed to be primarily about writing that's not so good. I'll have to do more writing to make sure that photography doesn't take over.

That means that I can't use photography as a means of procrastination. Hmm... 

So.

I'm writing this on a Nokia N95 with an iGo Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard. It's useful, but it's not exactly the most svelte of devices in the world and, to tell the brutal truth, it makes its user look several different kinds of idiot, sitting here with it perched on his knee.

There again, though, it does allow you the freedom to use your N95 as a communications device just about anywhere: in a (parked) car, in a cafe... anywhere that you may feel the need to construct something more than a short text message or email without the benefit of having a full-sized laptop around you. Plus, of course, it gives you the GPRS access, which is always handy.

In the end, though, the twat factor does weigh heavily on you when you're using it, and you find yourself trying to hide it under the table, at which point you become some saddo staring at his phone's screen and, apparently, fiddling with himself surreptitiously.

There's also the minor issue of my working out the best way of getting things off the phone and into a blog entry. Typing this in the Gmail client is okay, but the number of characters you can use is decidedly limited, which pretty much sucks any joy out of doing it at all.

Of course, how often I'll be typing n-thousand word emails on a phone is probably a pretty small number.

The blog keeps losing its categories. No, I don't know why. They're in the database, they just stop showing up in the feeds and the blog pages themselves. This is decidedly sucky.

And fuck knows why it throws HTTP 500s around after I add a post. That's just bizarre and irritating.

I need to give things a good kicking, so the site might disappear and reappear seemingly at random over the next couple of days. Which, well, you can cope with, frankly. 

And yes, it is that time in the morning.

You might have noticed, as your RSS readers break down or your LiveJournal friends page becomes swamped with my posts, that I've imported a bunch of photos from Flickr into my blog.

This is a project that I'm going to try and carry on throughout the year. I know that a lot of people do "366 portraits" projects and the like, and I fancied trying something similar. Not with self portraits though; I think that you've got to think yourself at least semi-attractive to do that.

So my idea - which a number of other people are doing; I'm not claiming sovereignty on this one - was to take a new photo every day and post it to Flickr. I'd like to make them all arty and fantastic but of course I realise that the likelihood of that happening is on the slim side.

And since I realise that not many people subscribe to my Flickr stream (though feel free, you know), I thought it might be best to integrate it with the blog. Only for the Three Hundred and Sixty-odd Days of 2008 photos for now, though. Just to save you some friends page space when I become a photographic genius.

Some links for you then:

• My Flickr stream
• The Three Hundred and Sixty-odd Days of 2008 set

Enjoy.