echohelloworld

So, it hasn’t been a very birthday-y birthday. I tidied the flat, I went to ASDA, I drove 120 miles to my parents’ house and I went out for a couple of drinks with Jake and Charlotte. I don’t really do birthdays anyway so I’m not particularly bothered by the lack of fanfare.

The photo is my birthday cake, except I’m not a huge fan of cake. I am, however, a huge fan of pizza so it’s a pizza. We also didn’t have any candles so I got 23 matches. We didn’t light the matches because we wanted to actually eat the pizza. There was 2 pizzas. I ate one of them. I can now say that I ate a whole birthday cake.

I am 23 today.

(I promise to take better photos when my life isn’t so unpredictable. For me, it’s enough that I’m actually using my camera. That was the point of this exercise)

Nothing particularly special about this, but I love the reflections in the glass so in it goes!

Today, I witnessed how temperamental postfix can be, yet again. On our test server, postfix wasn’t starting and hadn’t been for around 35 days. There was also a cron queueing up mail every minute as well as the regular apps. This lead to over 430,000 emails being backed up and it was my job to remove them all! What fun!

I’ve also found out that I’m going to be making an iPhone app. I’m so excited!

Today has been mental. I’m trying to get a test server working, and it turns out I’m not the only person trying to configure it to their needs - I spent yesterday messing about with it, only to get in this morning to find all my changes undone. Lucky me. I’m also working on an infinitely expanding project. Literally every time I finish something and think I’m moving onto something else, another thing crops up. I think I’m feeling stressed about my birthday and moving. Got Friday off, so hopefully I can relax a bit.

God, today. Headaches, javascript, MySQL, eBay, vets and heat have all gotten in the way of productivity and creativity today. Tomorrow is another day, and it’d better be a damn sight better than today!

I’m not sure about the copyright issues with this photograph. It’s only intended as a spatial representation of a quote that really hit me in this book, so hopefully it’s ok.

Morning shrinks space, but leaves no messages

At this point in the book (that I now appear to be obsessed with), Johnny is ruining himself with obsession over a girl. This girl has given him her pager number, told him to call but then never returned his message. I can’t decide whether “morning” is supposed to symbolise the passage of time until he sees this girl again, decreasing the chance that she’s ever going to call, a reference to his worsening agoraphobia or something totally different, but I’ve taken the former; most probably because that’s an angle I can relate to and I expect anyone can given the appropriate level of abstraction.

The book is full of quotes like this, and so much more incredible observation and invention. It’s really quite unnerving and impulsive at the same time. I’ve literally had to drag myself away from it this evening. The pace can be a bit annoying, and the admission that the footnotes are fictitious renders them relatively pointless, but still readable in case something important lies therein.

I think this is the sort of book that Jordan would read, and Charlotte should not read - the fear of spiders is enough without adding darkness to that list too!

ps. There’s some utterly inspiring imagery in here for budding photographers, too. I don’t really feel I’ve done that proud today, though.

You know what it’s like. You’re moving house, your girlfriend makes up a box and calls you into the room. You go into the room and she’s in the box, giggling like she invented the concept. Naturally, you grab your camera, and the flash going off makes her even more aware of how funny the situation is. You decide that the only way to take her down a peg and make your afternoon bearable is to capsize her.

No? Just me?

Went down to the courts to play some ball today and there was a huge cruise liner there, but obviously I didn’t have my camera on me. By the time I got back to take a photo, it’d gone. This made me sad.

I realised today that it’s like 6 days til my birthday. When I was 10, I’d never have imagined being this blasé about my birthday! I’ve already had my presents, though; 160GB iPod, shorts, a tshirt and House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. I’ve been wanting to read that book for absolutely ages!

Continuing my unintended closeups in the kitchen series, some matches.

Can’t stop, people round, video games.

I personally don’t believe that technology and techniques that benefit both the user and the developer should be shunned just because the lion-share of users are still relying on older technology. PNG gives far better quality images, usually at a greatly reduced file size. It seems like a no-brainer. Except for the fact that IE6 doesn’t support transparency in PNGs.

There is an IE6 PNG fix on TwinHelix that I can only get to do half the job, which is really irritating. The technique makes the image render with transparency, but makes it expand to a somtimes arbitrary size with the dreaded red cross in the corner. Another problem with this is that it doesn’t allow you do position the image. I’m currently using a relatively verbose alternative, which essentially involves you emulating an img tag, but allows you to position your element. Hopefully some will find this helpful as I was racking my brains for something like this on my last project.

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