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I think that I first learned of the idea of ‘parking on a downhill slope’ via 43folders. Merlin passed on the advice from Jeffrey Windsor (which he, in turn, got from a book on finishing your dissertation) that you should try to end the day’s work by setting out very clearly where you need to start the next day. I’ve tried to follow that advice, but I don’t do it as often as I should. However, today I made a concerted effort.

I’ve got to write a reference for a student; it’s not a particularly difficult job, but it’s one of those things you procrastinate over and find difficult to start. By the time I’d got all my other stuff done today, it was getting late and I was exhausted. I wanted to make a start on the reference, because I knew if I didn’t that I’d be in exactly the same Procrast-A-Rama state that I’m in today. But I couldn’t write the reference because I was too tired to do a good job on it, and I didn’t have time.

The answer, I decided, was to park downhill, and nibble away at the task a bit. I created a folder on my computer to hold the reference (and the inevitable future ones for that student), looked up and noted down the student’s marks for the previous years, addressed the envelope for the finished reference, and finally made a few notes in a file as phrases occurred to me. Each thing in itself was pretty trivial, but now I’ve got everything gathered together that I’ll need to finish the task, and I’ve made an important psychological start, at least. Of course, the real proof of whether this technique works or not will come tomorrow when I’ll take the hand-brake off and see whether I roll downhill as I want to, or defy the laws of physics and roll back uphill.

Every now and then, I need to send something by that antiquated method of communication known as the Fax. It happens less and less, but sometimes it seems that there’s no way around it. If it’s a work matter, I just use the machine at work, but if it’s personal my scruples (or stupidity) prevent me from sneaking personal faxes through the work machine.

The last time it happened, I managed to rummage out my old modem cable, hook my PowerBook up to the phone line, and use that to send a fax. It worked, but it was a bit of an inconvenient hassle. And if I ever get one of the new MacBooks, it won’t have an internal modem¹. Of course, I could get off my backside and walk to a shop that has a public fax machine, but they are expensive, and you’re never sure if your transmission will get through, especially if you’re sending something internationally.

There are no end of online services that allow you to receive and send faxes, the most popular of which is Yac. However, they tend to be aimed at the fairly high volume business user, and with most you need to pay a monthly fee to receive faxes. I really don’t need the incoming fax facility (because I can always direct people to my work fax number), and I only need to send occasionally. What I needed was some kind of Pay-As-You-Go equivalent for sending faxes.

Eventually, I found InterFAX. They have a send-only bundle, where you can make a one-off payment of £10 for a stack of credits to send fax pages. The per page rate is pretty reasonable, given the convenience of the system (between 7 and 10p per page for faxes to Europe or the US), and it’s easy to send them by email. You can either include your content in the message body, attach the documents you want faxed, or do both, using the message body as a cover page. There are also a number of geeky command switches that you can add to the subject to tweak the settings, which rather appealed to me. You get an automatic reply to your email address if the transmission is successful, which is reassuring. Finally, you can add a number of sending email addresses, which means that you can add a GMail address for emergencies, so that you can potentially send a fax from any computer.

¹ This is fairly typical of my sometimes skewed thinking where technical issues are involved: let’s try to find a highly technical solution to a problem that hasn’t actually arisen yet.↑

In the latest of a series of on-going plumbing problems, our shower has broken, so we’re having to take baths instead. Bathing rather than showering is annoying because it takes so much longer and wastes a lot of water, but it is really quite excellent when you’re very tired from your first day back at work after six weeks of sick leave, and even better when I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue is on the radio at the same time.

We have a shower (i.e. splash-proof) radio, but it’s difficult to hear when the water’s running. So it’s a real pleasure to lie back in lovely warm water, while it’s chucking it down with rain outside and blowing a gale outside, and relish the surreal experience of the words of Uptown Top Ranking to the tune of ‘When You Wish Upon A Star’.

I sometimes amuse myself in idle moments by trying to compile a list of my ‘Desert Island Animals’ — those animals I would most like to watch (not eat!) if stranded on a desert island devoid of other life. It’s always very hard to choose, but collectively, Birds of Paradise often rank highly (choosing among the Birds of Paradise, however, is nearly impossible). So I was delighted to see some excellent footage of several species on the ‘Jungles’ episode of Planet Earth.

It isn’t just that they are brightly coloured: many birds are. Birds of Paradise¹ have so many pop-up crests, chest shields, cloaks and deely-bopper-like head appendages that they can change the outline of their body completely. They are the Transformers of the bird world. As if that wasn’t enough, they often accompany this visual transformation with an eccentric dance and an unearthly sound.

The Superb Bird of Paradise (Lophorina superba) is a great example of this principle. At rest, it looks like a pretty black bird with a striking metallic turquoise chest, but when it displays, which you can see in this clip, it erects a set of feathers to turn its whole front elevation into a vertical elliptical shield, with a huge turquoise segment. Just in case that doesn’t get the female’s full attention, he throws in a clicking sound like someone trying unsuccessfully to light a gas stove, and bounces up and down in a sexy fashion. If you haven’t seen it before, you’ll be staring and yelling “Whaaat!”. Even if you have seen it before, you’ll be wondering (in the original sense of the word) how the heck you turn something bird-shaped into something that looks like the Superb Bird of Paradise when displaying. Birds of Paradise: Birds in Disguise.

¹ That is, males do. The females are brownish and ordinary-looking. However, they are the architects of the males’ amazing displays through their choice of mates, so they are impressive in another way. ↑

…in a dream, of course.

I was standing watching some kind of fireworks display outside. Morrissey came along and, smiling, said “Hello Woman”. I smiled back and replied “Hello Man”. In the dream it was clear that we were friends and this was our little ritual, a private joke. He stood behind me, wrapped his arms around me, and we watched the fireworks. He was wearing a big old woollen ex-military overcoat, and as I leaned back against it, it was slightly scratchy and musty smelling, but comforting. And that was more or less that. We watched the fireworks for a few minutes, then he said good-bye and left.

I have some vague memory that I read somewhere that Morrissey is one of the most dreamed-about people, along with more obvious icons like Elvis and Marilyn Monroe. I tried a quick Google to see if I could locate the survey, but didn’t have any luck.

I’ve been itching to try out The Rasterbator (careful how you say and type that one), which accepts an ordinary, low resolution image, and lets you print it out at almost any size by stitching together a number of A4 sheets. In my new office/spare room, we have an enticing blank wall that was crying out for a nice, serene, but striking image.

It’s a pretty easy process. You upload an image (you can see my original here), then choose what size of paper you want to use, whether you want landscape or portrait orientation of each of the sheets, and how many sheets you want to form the final image (which determines the size). You can also choose whether to keep the original tones of the image, make it black and white, or choose a monochrome tint. It then crunches the image and gives you a multi-page PDF to download, where each page is printed on a separate sheet to form the final image.

I printed mine out on an inkjet on ordinary paper, then fixed the sheets to foamboard with spray mount. Then it was just a case of blu-tacking them to the wall. I ended up cropping the original image a bit, partly because I realised I’d only got enough foamboard for 12 sheets, not 16, but also because I think the composition is a bit more striking.

The original, if you’re interested, was taken at a Jain temple at Shravanabelagola, India, and depicts Bhagavan Gomateshwara Bahubali, who is reputed to have stood meditating so long that vines grew up around his legs and arms. The statue is about 71 m tall (you can get a feel for the scale in this photograph), but the detail of the carving is exquisite, so I chose to focus on his hand and the leaves. I find it quite a tranquil image, like the original.

Rasterbation is a fun way to produce giant images, and if you use plain paper to print on, it can be very cheap. I’m thinking of printing a seascape on acetate next, and mounting it on a kind of home-made lightbox to hang above our bed.

I’ve been watching the first couple of episodes of Into the West, and enjoying it in a guarded way. I find the bits with the settlers deeply dull, but I’m very interested in the parts of the story concerning the Lakota. I don’t know how historically accurate any of it is, but Steven Spielberg seems to have managed a fairly balanced view of both sides so far. I’m pleased that they chose to have the Native American tribes speaking their own languages (though I’m in no position to say how authentic either the language or pronunciation is), but I do wish that they wouldn’t make the translations for the sub-titles so stilted. They sound like my bad Latin translations, and I keep wincing in case ‘White Man speak with forked tongue’ pops up. I can imagine that Lakota language used in ceremonies or rituals might be quite formal, but surely family members didn’t speak to one another in such a telegraphic way?

Anyway, it has reminded me of how obsessed I was with Native American tribes when I was little. I think it was in primary school that I first learned about the Plains tribes, and I thought they were wonderful. I was such a tomboy that I couldn’t imagine a better life than galloping over the wide prairie in buckskin and feathers and living in a tipi, never thinking in my innocence that my life might not have been quite like that as a female Lakota or Cheyenne. For that matter, I didn’t think much about the hardship involved at all, but I suppose I can be excused because I was only six or seven at the time. I want you to take my tender age into consideration when I tell you the rest of the story.

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For minor changes to CSS files, I tend to use TextMate, but for major re-working of a stylesheet, I use CSSEdit. It was always a good bit of software, but with the recent update to version 2.0, it has become really superb. One of the best new features is the ability to extract the stylesheet from even a dynamically-generated site (like this one), and save a local copy. You can then make changes to your heart’s content and preview the changes on your live site, without fiddling about making static local HTML files, and without messing up the actual site for visitors. When you’re happy with the result, you can just copy your local file to the server.

There’s also a nice versioning feature, whereby you can save ‘Milestones’ and revert to them if you mess things up royally (which I do frequently), allowing you to experiment without worrying about putting things back the way they were.

CSSEdit has a gorgeous interface, and you can work either in source view, or with a series of palettes from which you can choose settings, pick colours and so on, or — if you want it all — you can have both visible at the same time. It’s the best of both worlds, really. In most cases, I find it quicker to work in source view, but there are some things that I never remember (like the correct format for font-variant), so for those (and picking colours), it’s easier to use the palettes. Any changes you make in the source are immediately reflected in the palettes and vice versa, and also in the web preview, so it’s a really quick way to design. There’s also X-Ray view in the preview, which allows you to click on any of the page components and view their class or id, and also where they come in the cascade. It also shows the margins and padding, which saves masses of time when you’re trying to debug the positioning of page elements.

Unfortunately, CSSEdit was released just after I’d done the recent re-design of Wings Open Wide, but I’ve used it a lot since to fine tune the design, and I’ll be using it a lot in the future.

Wound healing is a pretty amazing thing. I’m a biologist, so I know how it works¹, but I still find it fascinating. Four weeks ago, I had a relatively large (but very neat) cut through my body wall, something that ought to be fairly catastrophic — there’s a reason we have all those layers of skin, after all. But now I just have a red scar, and the skin has knitted itself together nicely. That part of the procedure was more or less the handiwork of my body’s own processes, without much modern medical intervention. All that is needed is some way of temporarily keeping the edges of the wound together (modern surgical clips, stitches, thorns, soldier ant mandibles, or whatever), and your body does the rest.

I was thinking about this yesterday while watching a couple of plumbers trying to fix my leaking radiator pipe. Why can’t we design domestic pipework to heal itself of leaks, like a scab forming over a wound? We could provide the equivalent of a temporary plaster over the hole to slow the flow, then the pipe could gradually seal itself. In this case, the plumbers who originally installed the pipes couldn’t even get basic plumbing right, let alone advanced self-healing. The guys yesterday had to open up the wall a bit to find a sound bit of pipe to form the new joint with, and discovered that a) the plastic piping that’s supposed to protect the copper pipes from corrosion caused by the plaster stopped half way down the wall, and b) they hadn’t actually bothered to solder the upper joint — it was just slotted together, which goes some way to explaining why it was leaking.

¹ …she writes, desperately trying to recall the details of that lecture many years ago in which the process was explained. It would be more accurate to say that I know roughly how it works. ↑

A week or so ago, I had a email via flickr from Schmap Guides to tell me that my shortlisted photograph (of the inside of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford) had been selected for the Oxford Guide. Yay! The Schmap Guides are apparently free, downloadable guides with maps, photographs, reviews and so on for places in the UK and beyond. I say ‘apparently’ because at the moment the viewer is Windows only, so I can’t take a look. Anyway, if you have a Windows PC you can download the Oxford guide here if you’re interested. If you do, can you send me a screenshot of the page with my photograph on?

Following the transfer to ExpressionEngine to run this site, the hardest thing to get right has been the feeds. That’s partly because they are inherently somewhat tricky, and also because caching in feed readers and browsers makes it very hard to debug.

Anyway, I think that I’ve got it sorted now. I’ve set up two ways to access the Wings Open Wide feeds, so that people subscribed to the old feeds should start to see content again (thanks to David of fuddland for the reminder that I’d broken it).

I’ve also set up a separate feed for the media section with my reviews in it which is here. For those of you who are feed junkies or just gluttons for punishment where my witterings are concerned, there’s a bumper combo feed which I constructed using the excellent FeedDigest. This combines the feeds for my writing, my photographs, the links in the ma.gnolia list in the sidebar and the media reviews.

I no longer have a comments feed (though I could make one if anyone is interested), but when you comment with EE you can check a box to get it to email you when there’s a follow-up. I think that’s what most people used the comment feed for.

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I’ve recently transferred this site over to using ExpressionEngine (EE) from WordPress. WordPress is an excellent tool, but if you want to do a bit more then EE is really superb. The templating system takes a little while to get your head around (not that it’s particularly difficult, it just does things a little bit differently), but once you have, there’s more or less no end to what you can do. In the process of rebuilding this site, I’ve frequently thought, “I wonder if I can do this…” and found that I can. EE has enormous flexibility, with ‘weblogs’ which are just containers for data, and can be displayed in any way you choose. One of the things I initially worried about was whether I could replicate the domain structure of my old site so that old permalinks could be redirected, or would just work. I found (after a few questions on the support forum), that EE could be installed in a subdirectory of my web root, but if I copied a couple of files into the webroot, that subdirectory would not need to appear in the URL. Then I could just name template groups appropriately to form what would appear to be subdirectories of the main domain (/blog, /wingsopenwide etc.)—nifty. An .htaccess rule (again, a solution provided by the support forum) transforms the old permalinks to individual articles (which had the article date in them) into the new /blog/archives/entry-title format.

I thought I’d document the process I went through in a little more detail—partly so that I don’t forget what I did, but also in case anyone else is trying to solve similar problems:

• Importing the old entries and comments using WPExport
• Translating the templates
• Setting up the structure of the site
• Using the gallery to replace the old Wings Open Wide photoblog
• Entry Linker plugin
• Using phpThumb to dynamically generate thumbnails
• Creating the Media blog
• Setting up a dynamic link list via NewsGator

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If any of you visited earlier, you will have noticed either an “under re-construction” page, or a big ‘ole mess. I’ve been tinkering again (not that this will be much of a surprise to anyone). I used to run this weblog using WordPress, which I still think is a very fine bit of software. However, a couple of things made me think that it might be worth a bit of work to port this blog over to ExpressionEngine.

The first was that I built my Tracks site using ExpressionEngine (hereafter, EE), and was very impressed with how powerful but easy to use it was. Then Leslie Camacho of pMachine very generously donated a couple of Personal Licences for EE to me for the Tracks site and my own. This allows you to use the Photo Gallery module, which isn’t available in the free Core version. As some of you may know, my photoblog has been very broken for a while, so it seemed like a great opportunity to rebuild that using the Gallery module.

The second thing was that it would be quite a bit easier organisation-wise to administer all of my sites through one administrative interface. I’m doing things in stages, so Tracks is still running from a separate installation, but I’m quietly confident that I’ll be able to merge the two. That brings other advantages, like being able to share information between the sites. For example, I currently have to remember to update the link to the latest version of Tracks in the sidebar manually, but when I merge the installations I’ll be able pull the information in automatically.

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I’m beginning to think that wild bird food is one of the best value entertainment purchases around. In our old house, we had a bird feeder, but got a pitiful number and variety of birds visiting it, for reasons that still aren’t particularly clear. In our new house, the situation is completely different, and we find it hard to keep up with the ravenous demands of the avian residents of our garden. Yesterday I was just gazing out of the window (something I’ve had the luxury of doing while on sick leave), delighting in the acrobatic show that the blue tits, great tits, coal tits, long tailed tits, house sparrows, blackbirds, robins and dunnocks were putting on. All of the trees and shrubs around our garden were alive with birds, and occasionally a blue tit would fly up to the guttering just above the window I was looking out of, flip upside down in midair, and cling on with its feet while pecking at insects, giving me a sidelong glance at the same time.

It’s fantastic entertainment, and about a million times better than daytime TV.