boreders

Everyone has a talent. I don’t mean a skill or a qualification, I mean an innate talent. In many instances, people use that talent to help them in their work; in others, the talents is meaningless in any useful context. I think I may fall somewhere in between with mine.

I can ‘Xerox’ something with my bare hands. If I write something in a certain way, I can almost certainly replicate it – again and again. I’m not gonna forge anything with this, because the accuracy comes close, but not that close. If I create a typeface and write something, I can repeat ad nauseum. Over time the quality of the copy might degenerate a little, especially if I don’t keep the original close at hand. Also, I happily emulate the fonts in greetings cards, often with such accuracy that people have to ask me how I did it, or whether it was there to begin with.

Yes, I have to concentrate a lot – if I don’t the copy tends to be adequate rather than good. I guess that applies to anyone. If you have a talent for painting but your heart isn’t in it, you probably won’t be creating a masterpiece.

I just sat for almost two hours creating labels for my wife’s homemade jewellery and charms. In the process, I did several fonts and logo designs – all pretty rudimentary considering the timeframes involved – and I had to repeat them three, six or a dozen times. I grumbled. If I didn’t grumble, it wouldn’t be worth the effort. However, somewhere, deep down, I enjoy the whole process ‘cause I’m quite good at it.

If anyone can suggest a career path with high salary potential to which I might apply this skill, by all means leave me a comment with the details!

Sometimes work can feel like you’re a kid in the ball pit looking out through the safety netting to the grown-ups. As you watch, you see they’re not interested in you and are having an earnest discussion about something. If you left the play area and asked, they’d probably tell you it was a chat about grown-up stuff and you should go back and play with your friends.

I’m sure it isn’t intentional, but whenever a big change occurs that is exactly how it feels. The more significant the change, the longer the earnest chat and the more time you get to spend in the netting… Despite the fact you’re ready for your Kids Meal now and all this bouncing around is making you feel a bit sick to be honest.

It’ll pass, I know; but in the meantime you’re left in a state if limbo. You don’t want to disturb the adults again and tell them you’re hungry now because they might take it the wrong way. However, you REALLY will be sick if you have to stay in the ball pit a moment longer.

I suffer from a persistent cough. Some suggest I take up smoking just to make all the coughing worthwhile. I take such comments in good humour. In fact, I have only smoked a single packet of ciggies in my life, and that was some seventeen years ago. About nine years ago I had a lung infection, which seems to have weakened my resistance. Last year I got pneumonia, which wasn’t pleasant at all!

I have been feeling a tad rough for the last couple of days with sinus pain and an upset stomach. My appetite has faded somewhat and I’m plagued by a tickle in my throat. I daresay it’s a cold to be, or some ailment without the energy to put up a proper conflict.

Last night I got a jab for flu and one for swine flu. Now, I really feel stuffed up and my shoulders feel like the worst kind of sunburn. Prickly discomfort combined with sore muscles. I realise I should have better protection now against infection, but that’s no compensation with the headache I’ve got!!

I have been getting up 5am every morning this week. I know I should be getting up at that time anyway to get in some writing, but it rarely happens. In this instance, it has been a matter of necessity rather than choice. Someone has ruined my already horrible commute.

I travel about 75 miles every time I go to work. That represents a round trip. In theory that should be 50 minutes in each direction, fair weather and sensible traffic permitting. In reality it can be as much as twice that in bad weather and heavy traffic. Last week someone thought it’d be a good idea to complete work on the Runcorn Bridge and reduce it to a single lane in each direction.

Heading out from Liverpool, four lanes of traffic get on the bridge, so last week that meant a phenomenal amount of congestion. It took me about 45 minutes to travel a few hundred yards at one point. I tried alternate routes, but each seemed to be clogged with congestion all of it’s own. I didn’t do anything less than a 90 minute return journey and in one instance it took more than 2 hours. At the end of a long day, that can be soul destroying… It isn’t as if you have a lot of beautiful scenery to lighten the experience.

This week I hope all will return to normal. Work on the Bridge has been confined to overnight activities, so now there’s just the standard traffic to contend with. I’m done grumbling for the moment…

In an ideal world, I think technology should be as flexible as possible, meeting myriad needs of the average user in a single compact package. For example, since I got a new computer a while back I have been searching for something that will allow me to blog without having to visit my blogs. I tried MarEdit and WordPress on the iPhone, and now I’m trying Flock, which is not only letting me post to my blogs, but keep an eye on Facebook, Twitter and the World Wide Web. I like that.

I have been plagued with a similar frustration for features around Twitter clients on the iPhone. Ultimately, if the app lets you tweet that should be enough, right? Nah. I’ve tried Twitfire, Tweetie, Echofan, NatsuLion, Tweetdeck, Twitterific, and Tweetie 2 – which is my current primary client. They all have something to offer, but Tweetie 2 has delivered landscape typing, which I’ve been hankering after for an age.

Now, it might not seem to fit into the bracket of technology, but I have been struggling to find a ‘pad’ for work. If I just wanted something with lined paper, I’d be fine, but that isn’t enough. I could pick up a pad from stationery if I wanted something so simplistic. I have seen Oxford notebooks that have hard covers, spiral binding, nooks for keeping loose papers in, and lined pages marked with points to allow you to draw vertical lines for improvised graphpaper, but… I’m at a loss to define exactly what it is that I’m after. I know I need something more, but I’m not entirely sure what that is. Perhaps, I’d like paper that was lined on the front and graphed on the back, with enough weight in the paper to mean I can use a marker on either side without suffering seepage. I undoubtedly would like tabbed page dividers to keep my notes in order, but I’d also quite like some kind of integrated indexing tab dispenser with those narrow colourful tabs that Post-It do. And maybe the card cover of the pad could double up as an impromptu wipeboard… Too far?

So, I find myself plagued by a need for features – might explain the number of hardly used apps on my iPhone. I hunger for functionality… and yet, I wonder whether having found my Holy Grail I won’t be left wanting for just a little bit more.

I seem to have spent a good part of the weekend snagged up in the seedy world of the Internet. No, I have not been knee deep in porn or wading through pixelated orcs in a raid. I have been participating in the honourable pursuit of “working out what the heck makes something tick”.

I now seem to have spent the last month trying to move my old web presence from a hosted package to a virtual server. One of the things this has involved is a learning curve rather like K2. When you have to slog so much, you appreciate a helping hand – so, I tried loading a piece of pre-installed software to run an image gallery. Alas, the accuracy of the automated install seemed to be rather poor. I ended up with something that, at best, didn’t fail completely, but that obviously wasn’t working properly either.

So, I set about working out what needed to happen to get it working. This was akin to someone giving me a paragraph of text in a foreign language and asking me to translate, accurately, merely using reference books. At first, I spent a while going through support forums and searching for likely causes of the error, then I tried resetting permissions and re-install elements of the setup. Finally, I decided to run through the whole configuration and installation procedure from scratch. Each error that arose was cross-referenced and fixed, a painful and gradual process of trial and error.

Finally, at 9.40pm yesterday evening, I completed the re-install and the gallery worked “perfectly” (within acceptable tolerances). My weekend had vanished, but the work had been done.

I ponder, was this weekend lost in translation, or did I gain something from the experience. Perhaps, my knowledge increased just a little along the way, though probably not by much.

YouAre Theme Demo shows off a neat looking theme for the blog keyed in to self-promotion. Looks remarkably easy to customise right from the Dashboard – judging by the screenshots on the site.

I shall have to give it a spin myself sometime and see how well it handles…

On a tangent, how come when you plan to do something or go somewhere, the weather spontaneously turns to precipitous shit. I have precious few days off in the year as it is, so I would really appreciate the world giving me a break and serving up some benign meteorological conditions, damn it.

I just saw the GoCompare.com advert with the opera signer. Apparently, the character, called Gio Compario, the creation of veteran husband-and-wife advertising team Chris Wilkins and Sian Vickers, is intended to reclaim market-share from Comparethemarket.com.

I wander whether 20 years can dull the senses enough to make someone in marketing believe they have come up with an idea? Personally, I cannot fail to make comparisons with The Laughing Man from the classic, and fabulous, ‘Absolutely‘. A stereo-typically rotund opera singer, loud and in-your-face in the most embarrassing way possible. Hmm…

I have spent the last 8 or so years slowly filling up the web space I rent. At the moment I use a fairly basic business package, but I have hit a ceiling within the limits of the offer. Despite making no sense, my host restrict file numbers as well as file size. I’m sure it makes sense to them. Anyway, despite the fact I have only 4Gb stored on the server, I have hit the quarter million file limit. So, I have to change my package – or do a large and painful clear-out and consolidation.

Wordpress plays a part in the problem. It’s too easy for me to start a new blog. I upload a fresh install and start a new blog. However, each time I consume precious file space. I seriously need to work out the best tool to create a single install multi-blog setup. If I could work out how best to do that without impact on the functionality, it would save me a lot of bother.

Anyway, in the meantime I’m going to try out running my own virtual server. I can create the environment that works best for me without needing to worry about files. Lucky for me, the basic virtual server option is the same price as the existing hosted package I use.

This could be an interesting and rewarding experience. Or, it could be a complete and utter bloody nightmare.

There is nothing I like more than spending my time lingering in a service station car park waiting for something that might happen. We’re dropping the kids off for a trip and the organisers are taking their time to arrive. We’ve been here for twenty minutes. Admittedly, the weather is good. It would be more of a pain in the arse if it was raining. However, I don’t really like wasting time standing around doing nothing. It would be nice if I could be more productive while I’m standing around doing nothing. Oh, yes – I could be soooo productive.