The Better Side

No, nothing to do with ITV1's current tagline.  That's "The Brigher Side", anyway, not "Better".  And I'm more of a BBC watcher.

More to do with the fact that Saturday had some really bad bits, and some really good bits.  (Hannah's blog post in the small hours of the morning about good and bad experiences was rather timely, as it turns out.)  I won't depress you with the bad bits of my weekend - I'd prefer to ramble about the good bits instead.

The big news: I've finished making those blasted DVDs at last!  After waging an epic war against my DVD burning software, ranging across three different computers, I finally nailed it down on a little old laptop and compelled it to do my will.  So now I've got a nice neat row of finished RH DVDs sitting in a cardboard box by my desk and waiting to be put in the post.

I also decided that I was finished with my latest painting.  It involved six different layers of colour (each allowed to dry before the next was applied), and although I actually put the last one down on Friday, I thought at the time there would be more to do.  But on Saturday morning, I went back and looked at it again, and I said to myself "nope, that's enough.  I'm going to call it a day."  And then, for lack of a better title, that's exactly what I did.

#004: A Day

Yes, I  do realise that I have committed a truly atrocious pun right there.  My sincerest apologies to those of you with delicate linguistic sensibilities.

I also made more use of my new webcam.  It's rapidly turning out to be better value for money than anything else I've ever bought (not difficult, considering how little I had to pay for it).  Skype is much fun.

And I've done the illustrations for Fort Paradox Episodes 33 and 34, which feature a new experimental art style which I've never used for any other cartoon before.  It involves biros, I'm quite pleased with how it's come out.

And now for something completely different (and altogether nerdier): on Saturday, I used Linux for the first time.  My Grandad was asking if there was a free operating system he could use to recondition an ancient PC of his, so I made him a Ubuntu installer disc.  But before handing it over, I thought I'd try it out myself in demo mode on our family laptop.  It more or less worked, except that the laptop's optical disc drive is basically shot so it took ages to read the disc and load the software.  It took me all of two minutes to find my way around the OS though, and I already like it almost as much as Windows, and much better than Mac OSX.

Since I've already got a perfectly good Windows installation on each of the machines I use regularly at the moment, I'll probably stick with dear old Microsoft for the time being.  But I got a very good first impression of Ubuntu, so you never know - I might end up going the whole open-source hog someday!



My stats, for the next-to-last post of the 11 For 11 race...

• 11 For 11 status: 10 down, only 1 more to go... who will be the winner?
• Latest book read: *still* that commentary on Ephesians...
• Latest film/TV watched: haven't seen anything in a few days, and I've actually forgotten what the last one was...
• Latest music listened to: How to Train Your Dragon OST by John Powell (2010) currently on speakers
• Latest food/sweets/whatever eaten: crossaint and cowjuice for breakfast, unless you count the bit of jelly sweet I'm currently chewing on
• Programs and web pages currently running: Outlook 2007, Word 2007, Windows Explorer, Skype, Firefox (tabs: Blogspot Create Post; YouTube; Blogspot Dashboard)
• Webcomics posted today: Cylinder and Miserable #1130; Alien President #9

- The Colclough

From Yesterday

Yesterday (Wednesday 12 January 2011), I did something I hadn't done for about six-and-a-half years: I went for a repeat viewing of a film at the cinema.  There had previously been exactly four films I saw on the big screen twice each: the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Shrek 2.  As of yesterday, this exclusive list has expanded to include Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

As so often happens with films based on books, I spent a lot of the first screening worrying about how much it had changed from the source novel.  That, and being distracted by popcorn management issues.  This time round, it was more a case of sitting back and enjoying the ride.  I suspect the projector might have been ever-so-slightly better focussed this time as well - or my glasses were cleaner.  The rest of the family all seem to be in agreement that Dawn Treader is better than its immediate predecessor Prince Caspian, but I'm not so sure - not that I think VotDT has gone downhill, more that I didn't dislike Caspian as much as a lot of other people seemed to do.  Both have their flaws, but both did pretty well on the whole, IMHO.

Also while in town, I acquired a webcam.  I went into WHSmiths with £40's worth of gift cards to use, and after pootling around the whole place two or three times I decided that the webcam for £39.99 seemed like the best option.  The book section was mostly full of GCSE revision guides (I've got a first-class BSc, so those were a bit beneath my level), travel handbooks (I have no travelling ambitions), and vampire novels (I avoid vampire novels on principle, and I fail to see why so many other people are rabidly obsessed with the blighted things).  So webcam it was - and according to the price marked on the shelf, it would conveniently use up both gift cards.

Then I got to the till, and the computer only wanted to charge me £8.74.  So I've still got over thirty quid's worth of Smiths vouchers to use, and no idea what to use them on - you can only have so many pens in your collection before it starts getting a bit silly - but then again, a new webcam for less than nine quid isn't to be sneezed at.

Which leads me to Skype.  Yes, guilty... after all my ramblings about how much I dislike social networks and will refuse to join any, blah blah blah, you might think I've gone and betrayed the cause by having got a Skype account.  But I don't think it counts, really.  After all, it's not about posting banal, vapid nothings to be read by the public en masse (I'm looking at you, Facebook), it's about one-to-one realtime conversations - with added video-ness so you can see who you're talking to.

And finally, talking of seeing stuff, here's a photo of my latest acrylic painting, completed yesterday afternoon:

#003: Hamster Hamster

The idea is very simple: a blissfully happy hamster sitting on his own little planet made of solid cheese and supporting an ecosystem of broccoli.  It's got a bit of a The Little Prince vibe going on - I read the book once, years and years ago, and even though I've long since forgotten most of it, this bizarre image has stuck in the back of my mind ever since.

I've now started work on another, abstract painting.  Photo to follow in due course.

As for today... I've got a 'do' list as long as your arm, and writing this post is just one of many, many things to get done.  So I'll wrap up now and get on with some of the others.

• 11 For 11 status: 8 down, 3 to go
• Latest book read: still Stuart Olyott's commentary on Ephesians
• Latest film/TV watched: Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
• Latest music listened to: Cylinder and Miserable: Official Webcomic Soundtrack (WIP), written by Timothy Johnston with some interference from yours truly
• Latest food/sweets/whatever eaten: bagel and cowjuice for breakfast
• Programs and web pages currently running: Outlook 2007, Windows Explorer, Skype, Firefox (tabs: Blogspot Dashboard; Blogspot Create Post; MatNav x2)
• Webcomics posted today: Cylinder and Miserable #1127; Alien President #8

- The Colclough