grahambinns.com

If you read my identi.ca or Twitter feeds (and well you should) you might have noticed this little piece of ridiculous self-pity last night:

Well, that's one project that is now effectively dead and buried. Expect blog entry about it soonish but pretty disappointed right now.

Quite aside from being made up entirely of whinge with a side-order of neediness, which I confess I found utterly galling when re-reading it this morning on the way to writing this blog entry, that dent / tweet / blurt / thing-for-which-there-is-no-good-noun was basically me realising that something that I'd wanted to do wouldn't come off.

Of course, being me, I posted about it before I'd had chance to think about it. Now that I've thought about it I wish I hadn't moaned, because it's not all that big of a deal, and it's certainly not some kind of personal disaster. I don't half talk nonsense sometimes.

The idea, you see, had been to do a series of photoshoots of people affected by the November floods in Cumbria late last year and to produce a book of all (or at least the best of) the portraits, sales of which would contribute towards the charity fund for helping the victims. I nicked the idea from Joe McNally's seminal work Faces of Ground Zero, which is a book of portraits of the heroes of 9/11.

I had all kinds of grandiose ideas, speculating how the portaits could be exhibited in various locations around Cumbria, with the entry fees for the exhibition also going towards the charity fund.

I had this idea back at the time when the floods were still happening, and I promptly emailed the Cumbria Community Foundation to ask them if they were interested and whether they could help me arrange to shoot the subjects I wanted to shoot. The email back said that it was a great idea, but that I should contact the county council, which I duly did by email.

The thing you have to remember about local government is that it moves at a glacial pace. If you want something done you need to nag, because otherwise it simply won't happen. So I nagged a bit, phoned the council, spoke to someone, got a promise of a response the next day. When it arrived it told me that they council officer writing it also though I was onto a good idea, but that I should in fact contact the Red Cross, who were coordinating all the campaigns. Because I was getting used to this by now, I emailed the Red Cross without asking any further questions (like "why are you telling me to contact the Red Cross when your website says to contact the Cumbria Community Foundation and they told me to contact you?").

The Red Cross person who replied very promptly to my email was also on board with the idea, but said that I should contact the Cumbria Community Foundation. I double checked that this passing organisation to organisation was indeed legitimate (I was assured that it was), and then emailed the CCF again. Nothing happened for about a week and then I pretty much forgot all about it because I was getting married at the end of December and not in much of a mood to think about anything else.

I remembered all this last week and thought that, whilst maybe not quite as urgent as before, my idea still had merit, so I emailed the CCF yet again. As yet, I'm still awaiting a response, but yesterday the Cumbria Community Foundation declared the flood fund closed. No more donations needed.

So that, dear reader, is why I was being a whingebag last night. Good idea dead before it got started because I didn't chase it hard enough. I knew full well that if I didn't work to get what I wanted I wouldn't get anything at all, because I'm familiar with how charities and local councils work, but I got lazy and didn't stay as on top of things as I should have.

From this I've learned two things:

1. Working with charities is hard: if you've got an idea you must keep pushing it; don't expect anyone to do it for you.
2. As 1 but without the first sentence.

Here endeth the lesson.

Today is the 29th anniversary of my birth. I can provide Paypal account details if you want to send me money.

Anyway, I appear to have caused some confusion by stating on twitter that I have now started my 30th year, and that my 29th year has ended, so I feel I should explain. Here comes the working:

1. Birthdays are zero-indexed. On the day of my birth I was 0 years old (please, don't tell me that I was 9 months old. I can't be bothered to argue with you).
2. My first birthday came at the end of my first year of life, from Feb 9^th 1981 to Feb 9^th 1982. My second came in 1983, after my second year of life, and so on.
3. Therefore, the year from Feb 9^th 2009 to Feb 9^th 2010 was the twenty-ninth year of my life.
4. Therefore I am now 29 years old.
5. Therefore, my 30th year of life runs from now until 9^th Feb 2011.

I hope that's clarified it for everyone. Yes, this makes sense.

Well, it looks like I jumped the gun with my last post. Turns out that the shiny media features that Wordpress 2.9 has, and which I got so glum about not having in Frabjous have actually been in Frabjous for about a year. And I wrote them. Yes, I fail.

True, they're a bit more rudimentary, because Frabjous's admin interface isn't nearly as polished as Wordpress's (because it pretty much just uses the Django auto-generated admin interface; something that I keep meaning to get around to fixing). However, for all that, they work, and work pretty well. They'll do exactly the job I need of them and, with a little bit of tweaking, more besides, which is fantastic for me because I'm no longer having to worry about migrating from Frabjous to Wordpress with no obvious migration path in sight.

Phew.

And now, back to our regular scheduled programming.

Looks that way, anyway. It just happens to need to do what I need and I don't have the time to hack those features into Frabjous, since they're major work.

Yes, I hate myself. Yes, running PHP on my server is like allowing a busload of hackers into the Bytemark datacentre (with apologies to Chris Jones).

Oh well, using Frabjous was nice while it lasted.

So, first off, brain is better than it was early Friday morning, though I still have a head full of snot, so everything smells of the kind of old, forgotten dustiness you find in attics.

More brain-dumpery, I'm afraid, since I can't be bothered to make this into anything coherent.

Alan Bell replied to my last post with the following comment:

So the software developer box doesn't quite fit, the photographer box doesn't quite fit, the writer box doesn't quite fit. I suggest a Graham Binns shaped box, blog about whatever the heck you want to.

A good suggestion, and one which deserves a reply.

The fact is that I'm not trying to get into a box so much as I'm trying to control which aspect of me people come across when they search for me on the web. There are a few reasons for this, but it boils down to trying to make my website work for me as a sort of photography business card, i.e.: Look here, this is me, this is what I do, this is my creative process as a photographer.

Now, granted, I've come only lately to the photography game, but the fact of the matter is that in my head there's been a shift in how I perceive myself. Now I'm a (admittedly inexperienced) photographer who can write and who can hack, rather than a hacker or writer who can take a decent photograph. I need that to be reflected in my blog, or at least my website, because I intend to make money out of this photography gig (though I'm not betting on making a living out of it; I've no intention of giving up the day job and I've every intention of being a full-time developer for a long time yet).

This might seem a bit weird to a lot of the people reading this blog, because so many blogs out there on the web are about what the author is thinking rather than about who or what the author is.

Think of it this way. If you, in the course of your daily life, were given business card of, say, a landscape gardener, and told "check out my website if you want to see what I'm capable of," you might be a little confused to go to www.myfirstlandscape.com and see, on the front page, an essay about - to pick a topic at random (honest) - the pros and cons of Ubuntu changing its default search for Firefox from Google to Yahoo. It would have no relevance to you in the context in which you're viewing the site (as the potential customer of a landscape gardener). It would detract from the basic purpose of the site, which should be to sell the author's abilities in landscaping.

And that's why I'm thinking of moving all my other stuff - the writing, open source and other general blather - onto a different blog, maybe on a different domain or maybe on a subdomain of grahambinns.com, whichever suits best. I've spent some time this weekend hacking multiple site support into the Frabjous blog engine (very simple thanks to Django) so I'm at least in a position to use my existing infrastructure should I decide to go down that route.