It's 03:15 as I write this. Decent, civilised people are in bed. Indecent but still civilised people are in bed with someone else, doing things of a biological nature. Whatever. I am not them. I am in my living room, blogging this stream-of-alleged-conciousness to you, people who are actually reading it in the future.

Funny thing about writing, that. It's time-travelling telepathy. It leaps all bounds of geography – I can write this in Lancaster and you can, theoretically at least, read it in Kathmandu – language – assuming it's translated correctly you can understand what I'm thinking perfectly well – and of course, time period, which is why we can still know what Oscar Wilde was thinking a hundred-and-odd years ago (I wrote 'a hundred years ago' originally and then had the commons sense to check whether or not dear old Oscar, who turned 155 this week, was dead a hundred years ago. Sure enough, he died in 1900, poor chap).

So you could be reading this ten years from now, scouring through the new, improved, instant-download-to-your-hippocampus version of the Internet Archive. You might even be looking at a 3D representation of me – though not, of course, of me right now because I'm a bit shy on the 3D recording equipment front here.

Or maybe you're reading it tomorrow, when I'm asleep, recovering from not having been so last night (I can see that language is going to be a problem here). Or perhaps it's Sunday, and you're reading this over a cup of coffee and a muffin, whilst I'm learning things and shooting frames at the Wilkinson Digital Splash. Thing is, wherever we are, we're all right here, right now, and this particular instance of me, right here, right now, should be asleep.

This instance will now shut down. 

Stream-of-consciousness tumblogging again this morning as I'm about to head off for day two of Bert's workshop. Today we're going to be shooting in and around Richmond's parks, archways and alleyways, trying to put into practice what we learned yesterday (but possibly without Paris or the horse's head). Later on we might be headed to Canary Wharf, assuming that the bureaucratic gods have been placated.

I'm feeling astoundingly creative at the moment. I wrote a poem and two story outlines on the train back from Waterloo to Richmond last night (so much more comfortable than the tube). I wonder what it is about London that makes my brain work this way.

Anyway, caffeine has been consumed. I'm off to shoot some frames. Might upload some frames tonight (I've been shooting RAW, but I figured that RAW+basic would allow me to show off before doing any editing, which, let's face it, isn't exactly what a netbook screen was designed for).

Okay, so that wasn't as tumblr-ish as I expected. Must do better next time. 

I'll expand on these later (if I remember) but I'm now heading off to the first day of Bert Stephani's London workshop, and am insanely excited. 

And then I came to actually blog about it and I realised that if you’re a Planet Ubuntu or Planet Ubuntu UK reader you’ll have read most of what I’ve got to say on the subject of UDS and AllHands already (Empathy and Banshee by default (maybe), Android on Ubuntu, Scott James Remnant is insane and wants your machine to have booted before you even switch it on, etc.), and if you aren’t a reader of either of those planets then you probably don’t really care about any of that anyway, so I decided to not actually bother saying it. You can always go and find it if you want to, because you’re smart and savvy people.

So suffice it to say that Barcelona was an interestingly manic place, though not somewhere that I think I’d want to spend oodleplexes of time once I’d done all the touristy bits. You can see some of the photos I took on the one day that I did any serious tourism – with the camera and one lense and nothing else, because nothing says "hey, I’ve got some expensive gear here" than lugging around a Stealth Reporter 650 bag as you wander, your spine crooked from the weight, down La Rambla – on my Flickr stream.

The week before UDS, that of Canonical AllHands and, before that, SomeHands (which I didn’t attend) was spent out in the back of the Spanish beyond at the La Mola conference centre, which is slap dab in the middle of an area that is half forest, half golf course, and which has buildings with turfed-over roofs, a swimming pool that was empty apart from some scummy water and a couple of pissed-off-looking frogs, and a three-hundred-year-old chapel-cum-hall-cum-terracey-thing in which the assembled cognoscenti sweltered for plenary sessions every morning and afternoon. I later appropriated the terrace for a very brief and rather rushed portrait shoot with my good and at-a-slight-angle-to-the-universe friend Michelle, the results of which will appear once I’ve got round to finishing the editing (having a tropical plague plays merry hob with your sense of contrast, I’ve discovered).

And that about covers What I Did on My Holidays. Except it doesn’t really tell you anything at all because I can’t fit into one blog post – or even into several – just how much I enjoyed AllHands. UDS is something that I’ve grown used to, I suppose – the people are always astounding and scarily smart (or in some cases just scary) – but AllHands is something really special, because when you’re at one you realise that every single person that you work alongside is awesome at what they do and at the top of their game to boot, and that’s something that I think’s bloody hard to find in any other company on the planet (though I confess I’m biased).

And now it’s twenty-to-two in the morning and I’m not sleeping again (which makes this the fourth time this week that I’ve seen two AM when I didn’t want to and which might end up making it the third time this week that I’ve watched the sun rise), so I’m going to go and find a warm drink and hope that tiredness will drop on me in a sort of fluffy lump. On the other hand, I could suddenly get a second wind and start writing the story that’s knocking about in my skull, which as usual is the result of two or more things smacking into each other when some neuron or other in the thing that I tentatively call a brain misfired.

Sleep tight, folks. May the morning bring you happy things.

Anyway…

I had entirely intended to write this as a 2008 end-of-year ooh-look-what-I-did post. Then 2008 stopped happening and 2009 started happening and I thought I could write it as a ooh-look-what-I’m-going-to-do post. Then I decided that it was too much fun having a holiday from work and blogging and, well, pretty much everything else, and I stopped trying to write it and enjoyed not doing much for a week or so.

Of course, that doesn’t get anything done in the end, so I figured I’d better finish this off before it got even more out of date and I came back to it wondering what on earth I’d been on about in the first place.

As one year rolls inexorably into another I’ve been thinking, for the most part, at least, about identity, specifically mine: where I am with certain aspects of my identity (which I’m using as a high-falutin’ way of saying "what I’m doing with my life") and where I want them to go.

Identity as a writer

When it comes to writing I think I’ve had a pretty good year, though I’ve written very little compared to previous years. I’m less frustrated with my writing than I was, perhaps because I’ve focussed less upon it than in the past. For the first time ever I’ve published a story, The Girl, Death (albiet on my own website, true) for all and sundry to read. Now that that particularly silly mental obstacle is out of the way I can think more about actually writing things than about whether or not people will like them.

I don’t expect to have a huge amount of time to write in the coming year, mainly because there are so many other things that I want to do (on which subjects more shortly) but I do expect that, when I write, I’ll be more relaxed about telling the story I want to tell; I certainly won’t be worrying every second about how I can never finish the story because everyone will hate it (nobody, so far, has hated the last one).

Identity as a photographer

Roughly this time last year I started my Three hundred and sixty-odd days of 2008 photography project. Like all similarly-named projects the idea was to take (and post) one photo for each day of 2008 (or near enough anyway, given that I started a couple of days late). Whilst I haven’t managed to get round to uploading all of the photos to my Flickr stream (partly because I’m lazy, partly because I fell behind in the processing of them) I did manage to capture the majority of, or at least bits of the where-I-was-at-the-time-ness of 2008, on camera. It was an exhausting exercise, and since this year I’d like to do things that are more and varied (quite aside from arranging my wedding) I don’t think I’ll be attempting anything on nearly as grand a scale in 2009. There will be something photography-project wise this year; I just don’t know what it is yet (though I have some ideas).

Separately from the idea of some kind of overarching project, I want to push myself further as a photographer. I blogged a while back about wanting to photograph more people. Whilst my request for subjects didn’t yield many responses (probably because it didn’t get read by many people for starters) it did yield some, and I intend to take the people who offered their services as models up on their offers some time in the next year.

I’ve been viewing and loving the work of people like Bert Stephani, LIME, Katie Lee and Dave Hobby for much of the last year, and I think it’s about time that I did something with all the inspiration and ideas that they’ve given me. Even if the work that I produce from that inspiration is derivative in the beginning it will, hopefully at least, eventually lead to a style of my own as time goes by (in much the same way as emulating your writing heroes eventually leads to you finding your own voice). As usual, I’ll post the results of my experiments in trying-to-be-good-at-what-I-do to Flickr or somewhere similar. As much as possible I’ll make them available under a Creative Commons license, though depending on who’s in the images the licenses may vary.

People have asked me whether I want to start moving into the realm of the semi-pro photographer, and I suppose that in some ways I do (for example, I bought myself an insanely expensive Nikon 70-200mm lens as an end-of-year present; I’d like to at least pay for some of its value through using it). Truthfully, though, I’m more interested in becoming a better artist than I am in becoming rich through my photography. Money is nice, but it’s a means to an end; having money for the sake of having money is a silly game to play, especially in this day and age. I may consider selling some of my work as prints in the future, but I don’t think I’m at that level yet (and besides, I think I’d need a bigger audience for that to really work).

As far as the quality of my photography goes, I know I’m getting better. I’m more comfortable behind the camera and I’m happier with the results than I was in January 2008. I want to continue to grow and learn, though – otherwise what’s the point?

Identity as a software developer

Let’s face it, being a Launchpad developer is the best job I’ve ever had. I’ve been with Canonical for eighteen months now and I’m loving every minute of it. Launchpad is going from strength to strength and (as I’ve said to just about anyone who’s ever asked me) you couldn’t ask to work with better bunch of developers.

Launchpad will be open sourced in July, and I’m both happy about it (because after all I love freedom) and a little scared (because a part of me keeps thinking that once we go open source I’ll no longer be necessary, though I suspect that’s nonsense).

I honestly and genuinely want Launchpad to be the best that it can be and I can only see Open Sourcing it being a great help in continuing that. The Launchpad user community has some phenomenal brains in it; I can only see that having some of them looking at the code will make our work that much easier (even if they don’t contribute patches; having someone going "WTF?" at odd code can be a great help, which is why I love code reviews so much).

I’m really looking forward to what we have in store for Launchpad in 2009. I think the users will love it, too.

Identity as a FOSS contributor

This has been growing on my mind for most of the past year. Although I’m working for a company that backs one of the most popular Linux distributions I don’t contribute an enormous amount to open source projects, besides filing the occasional bug.

If there’s one thing that working with people like Daniel, Jorge and Jono (besides that it’s a good idea to practice before you play a gig – or indeed to know the songs you’re going to play) is that all OSS projects need help, not just with bug hunting but with documentation, too.

I’m hoping that I’ll be able to step up my contributions to the various FOSS projects that I use this year. I don’t know that I’ll always have enough domain nouse to be able to contribute a patch to fix a bug but at least I can help with triaging and isolating the bugs.

Identity as a human being

I’m getting married in 347 days(!). I can’t imagine at the moment just how crazy things are going to get as we go through the year, but I’d like to think that my fiancée and I can deal with it.

When it comes to this time next year and I’m writing the next iteration of this post I want to look back and be able to say that I every hour of 2009 full of minutes.

Of course, only time will tell.

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.

I went to the Neil Gaiman / ORG event last night with a number of Canonical colleagues. It was a very interesting talk, especially considered Neil’s jet-laggedness, and the Q-and-A session afterwards was excellent. Two things that Neil said resonated particularly with me. Quoting Douglas Adams, he said:

"Books are sharks. There were sharks before dinosaurs and there are sharks now. There is nothing in the world better at being a shark than a shark is – and there is nothing in the world better at being a book than a book is. They’re portable, they’re light, they’re mostly solar-powered… Books aren’t going to go away."

And responding to a questioner, who asked whether giving things away was a good way for journeyman writers to get their material out to the world (the question I had planned to ask, incidentally, but I got question-gazumped, not that I begrudge the gazumper), he said (I paraphrase):

Yes. Absolutely… When I started writing there were a very few ways to get things to the people who matter, and none of them really wanted to read what you had. Now there are many, many ways to get your work to the people who matter, and they all want to take on new authors (well, enough new authors). Of course, there are a lot more people making their writing publicly available these days, so now you have to be very, very good indeed.

And I found myself wondering why I’ve not put more – indeed, any, come to think of it – of my work online.

There’s an immediacy about photography that writing just can’t have, almost by definition. Writing is to photography what sculpture is to… err… photography (I can’t think of another visual art that offers photography’s instantaneousness – answers on a postcard please). I can shoot something, edit it briefly (a quick retouch in the Gimp or an adjustment of levels in Picasa) and have it up on the web within minutes of having shot it. If I write something it can take days, even for the shortest of stories, for me even to get to the point where I want someone else to take a look at it (I think I’ve written before about my not-being-able-to-show-people-stories problem so I’ll not go on about it here). Getting it up there on the web is an entirely different animal.

But for some reason, call it a kick in the pants from a best selling author and philosophising with friends down the pub or whatever else you may want to call it, I find myself finally wanting to put work up online.

Halloween’s coming. I’ve been promising myself a Halloween story for years (I did write one before, but it never felt quite right; maybe it’s worth digging out the manuscript for that, too).

Anyway, the point was that I was supposed to be writing that now. Instead I’m listening to Douglas Adams, Mark Carwadine and an unhappy, bedraggled, three-toed sloth. Still, as displacement activities go, could be worse I suppose.

Three hundred and sixty-odd days of 2008, day 247

Written by my fianceé on Morecambe beach.

I’ve been working on this version of things for a while. Besides a re-skin – which taught me a lot about how I should be designing my templates and CSS, so it should be a bit easier next time – I’ve also tidied up the codebase a bit and added some new features. Most of them are under the hood, but here are some of them for those of you that care:

• Each piece of content on the site has its own license. For example, all my photos are CC-BY-NC-SA, as is all the content here so far. But when I start adding stories here (and it will happen within the next few months, I hope) I’ll be able to license them as I see fit.
• I can now make posts using markdown syntax. This might not seem like a big deal but over the years I’ve come to loathe sites that simply turn linebreaks into <br />s (yes, WordPress, I’m looking at you. You still do it, even with valid HTML posts). On this site I used to use TinyMCE as a WYSWIG HTML editor, which worked fine but was pretty horrendous to load on a slow connection. Now I just use markdown and let Django’s markup app do all the work. Fantastic.
• You can now post comments using markdown syntax. No more trying to post a link and having Django eat it!
• I can now post to the blog by email. I thought about using gpg signatures to validate my emails but realised that it was too complicated (we do it in the Launchpad email interface and one look at that code a while back persuaded me to not do it unless I had to). Instead I’ve gone for generating single-use authentication tokens, which suits me fine and should hopefully – along with an obscure incoming address – stop spammers from doing nasty things.
• The site now supports pingbacks, though at the moment it can only receive them until I iron out some issues with the pingback sending code.

There are a lot more things that I’ve fixed, added, tweaked and polished, but none that are particularly interesting.

So here, finally, are the vital statistics of the new site:

• Server: Bytemark virtual server running Ubuntu 8.04.
• Django 0.97-pre (to be upgraded to 1.0 stable when it comes out in September).
• PostgreSQL 8.3 (the migration to which fixed so many problems it’s unreal).
• Apache with mod_python for serving the Django stuff.
• Lighttpd for serving the static files.

I have my reasons, to an extent, for not being able to get much done at the moment. For a start, I'm not able to go very far at present, which limits the things of which I can take photos. On top of that I'm not, unlike JR Blackwell or Rebbeka Gudleifsdottir or a dozen other photographers on Flickr, particularly photogenic and I'm not terribly fond of self portraits. I do have some ideas for shots in which I could serve as the subject but having the time to execute them is another matter entirely. Oh, and there's always the matter of what to say when someone sees you taking a self portrait and asks "what are you doing?"

And let's not even talk about writing. Well, okay, let's. But only insofar as to say I'm not doing any at the moment and haven't been for a while. And of course, when you're off the wagon for too long it makes it harder to get back on. Much, much harder. So even now, when I have the time to write, I find myself doing something else entirely whilst thinking "I should be writing."

All of which means I am made of FAIL.

Still, a night's sleep and who knows? I might get up in the morning, full of the joys of… er… Summer, and sit down and write 1000 words before breakfast and then, after breakfast, go out and take some photos.

In an infinite universe anything is possible.