I should be asleep. I should, by rights, be exhausted, because it's been a long week of too-ing and fro-ing and I seem to have not stopped for any decent length of time, unless it's when I've been asleep, which hasn't been much.

Anyway, back from London, done a couple of days work (but disjointedly because of all the travel and the having to take the car to be MOT'd and the lots of travel that that involved because, well, free MOTs are good but having them at garages a long way from home isn't) and now I'm off for another day to attend the wedding of a friend. Camera will be coming with me at friend's request, so I'm viewing it as part wedding, part chance to see if weddings would be something I could enjoy shooting.

I've uploaded some of my work from the Bert Stephani workshop to Flickr. I can't say that I'm entirely happy with it; I think I let my nerves get the better of me at times and that's something I need to work hard at getting over. Nevertheless there's some decent stuff in there. The pool of everyone's work  has lots of stuff that's much better than mine (and I'll bet we're all saying that).

Anyway, a slideshow:

And now a bed for me to fall into. 

Happy Goth Christmas, everyone.

I'm exhausted. It's been a long two weeks and, though I was supposed to be going to the the Canonical Halloween party at Canonical Towers tonight I decided that, due to lack of sleep and general grumpiness on my part, I would be better off concentrating on finishing the Halloween story that I've been promising everyone all week.

Incidentally, if I promised you this story, thank you for taking the promise: you've helped to keep me honest.

The story, The Girl, Death is available here and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. Please go and read it and feel free to send feedback to blog AT this domain. Alternatively, you can leave a comment on this entry (the stories section of the site is pretty rudimentary, thrown up in a hurry today; I'll fix it later and migrate any comments I receive).

Finally, I'd like to thank my fiancée, Sarah, for being my beta reader, guinea pig and editor. If it weren't for her this story wouldn't have been published, no matter how many promises I made to others.

Very quick post because I'm supposed to be going out to photograph most of London (this may be an exaggeration; we'll see) before too long. Of course, it would have helped if I'd actually done some organising of said photo walk; that may cause problems.

It's been a good, if very tiring week. We - that is, the Launchpad team - have managed to squeeze a lot of learning into five days, and I think it's fair to say that we've proved our quality as developers and as a development team as a whole. I hope that I'll be able to take at least two things home from this two week epic:

1. You couldn't wish for a better team to develop software with.
2. I really do actually fit into it; they're not going to suddenly suss me out and send me back to doing PHP pages.

In other news, I went to Piracy vs Obscurity - an evening with Neil Gaiman last night with a few colleagues. The talk was held in a (very pretty) church crypt and was everything that I was hoping for. It actually encouraged me to perform the butt-in-chair motion that Mur Lafferty has been talking about for years; maybe I will manage something for Halloween this year after all.

A final note on the Gaiman subject should go to my friend Michelle, who was pretty made up to have come out of the evening with a signed copy of The Graveyard Book and a hug from Neil himself. Not a bad evening, all told.

Right. Off to capture London's soul. I'm sure you'll see the results later, if I can rely on this fairly flaky hotel wi-fi to withstand the upload.

It won't have escaped your notice that I started to write a comment piece on this news story but my blog client (which I really do need to write something about in the not-too-distant future since it's something that I've written and could possibly turn out to be quite useful to a fairly small subset of the Open Source community) fell over. Before it retired to that great stack trace in the sky, however, it managed to vomit up the beginnings of my post onto the internets (a fact about which I have filed a bug) and as a result managed to make me look like both a bit of an idiot and a bit of a bigot. I'm used to the idiot part. I don't like looking like a bigot.

Anyway, since it had made it onto my blog (and I never bothered to check that it hadn't, it also ended up propagating across the interwubs to LiveJournal, where a good friend of mine commented:

Interesting case. If they were only leafleting, though, I can't see the harm, and even if they were preaching in the street, I think asking them to leave was a bit severe. People can quite easily walk past and seal up their ears (as we do every day to resist free newspapers being thrust into our hands) - and Jehova's Witnesses have been door-knocking for years without being asked to leave certain streets. The "Be a winner, not a sinner" man who yells his (Christian) faith down a megaphone in the middle of Oxford Circus every single day is seen as a local landmark, if a slightly irritating one once he starts going on about how buying stuff on a Sunday is a highway to hell.

I don't believe in thrusting religion down people's necks, but we accept the marketing of coffee, newspapers and shampoo samples readily enough on the basis that people can take it or leave it, so why ban people expounding on their religion in the same way, as long as they're not being aggressive or harrassing people?

On a similar theme, I got handed a flyer today about a man who's riding a horse from Texas to Jerusalem (the tricky bit with the ocean wasn't explained) in the name of Jesus, to spread the Gospel. Fair dos, I thought, before turning my thoughts to how he was going to get the horse across continents.

All of which, plus the fact that it was late and I was tired and lacking in the brain power necessary to sling a sentence together, let alone make a point about religion, left me thinking that I should probably re-write the post, or at least some of the post, and actually make clear my thoughts on the matter, which, exploding blog clients aside, I'd hitherto failed to do.

Read more...

My colleague and friend Matt Revell has a nice summary of some of the reasons for rising domestic fuel prices in the UK at the moment. A phrase that particularly caught my eye was this one:

Wind power, also, is not reliable nor particularly efficient and requires generation from other sources (coal, gas, nuclear, for example) to back it up when it’s either too windy or not quite windy enough. So, this is the Goldilocks of power generation and just like Goldilocks in the story, it can’t go for that long without needing a lie down; it’s the energy source with ME. So, no, your electricity won’t be free and nor should it be.

I confess that I don't pay a huge amount of attention to the telly these days. It's a means for me to watch DVDs and little else; most of the news content I read on a daily basis is read via the intertubes. But the point that Matt is making in his post, the one about the problem with TV audiences, or rather with TV programs who cater to the lowest common denominator and require no effort from their audience (that's how I see it, it may not be how Matt sees it) is a valid one.

One of the problems with living in an age of high information availability, when all you need to do to be able to know something more about an issue is look it up on Google, is that people accept the information that comes to them almost without question, in the same way that a stereotypical Daily Wail reader will accept the paper's opinion that the country is going to the dogs almost every single day of the week.

Is this just a human problem? Are we just naturally rather too trusting of, well, just about anyone who seems to be better informed than us? One of the most common phrases I've heard - and which has irked me no end - over the years is "It's (in the paper|on the web|on the TV) so it must be true!"

Anyway, I'm not going to go on further in a post that started out with a purpose but has subsequently become somewhat disjointed and is turning into a rant. Go and read Matt's post for a saner and less crabby commentary on matters.

Instead, dear reader, I'll leave you with a summary of my thinking on such matters by that other web luminary, XKCD: