A new thread starts. Having bought a house I'm learning something else new - DIY! Sally bought me a book as a gift called "You Can Do It!" (It's a B&Q book and B&Q's advertising slogan used to be "You can do it when you B&Q it!"). This thread will be the ups and down, ins and outs, successes, failures, and lessons learned, of learning to do DIY.
Which starts here with the question "Why does no one teach us this stuff?". I remember painting and stuff as a kid but DIY should be handed down to us somehow. I've lived in rented houses since I was 18 and so all my DIY and decorating has been done for me. I haven't got a clue about filling, sanding, wallpapering, plumbing, electrics, lighting, interior design, building, plastering etc. There's so much to know! And so much can go wrong.
I hope my readers can learn something from my mistakes.
And, for those of you who know, I've already learned my u-bend lesson!!! Won't be doing that again.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Finding purpose
So, it's been a long year. It's been a hard year. I've been ill a lot. I've not achieved very much of what I thought I would. I enjoy physical activity and I've not managed to do much.
On the up side we have bought a house and very much settled in Swindon, into our jobs, and into our church.
I've now had a period of feeling well for a while. Things finally seem to be fixed. So I'm taking stock, looking around and thinking "Phew, OK, so that's over...what now?"
To help with that process I'm re-reading a book that's quite well known in Christian circles called "The Purpose Driven Life". It's written by famous American church leader who does lots of "purpose driven" stuff. It's a very American book - though I can't really explain why. But if you can see through the American Evangelical-isms it's a good book.
It's just what I need right now. It's taking a very beaten and battered soul inside of me, and taking it back to the basics of my faith. Why am I here? What on Earth am I doing? How do I find God in all of this? And what does he want me to be doing with my life.
Hopefully I'll be reporting back sometime...watch this space.
On the up side we have bought a house and very much settled in Swindon, into our jobs, and into our church.
I've now had a period of feeling well for a while. Things finally seem to be fixed. So I'm taking stock, looking around and thinking "Phew, OK, so that's over...what now?"
To help with that process I'm re-reading a book that's quite well known in Christian circles called "The Purpose Driven Life". It's written by famous American church leader who does lots of "purpose driven" stuff. It's a very American book - though I can't really explain why. But if you can see through the American Evangelical-isms it's a good book.
It's just what I need right now. It's taking a very beaten and battered soul inside of me, and taking it back to the basics of my faith. Why am I here? What on Earth am I doing? How do I find God in all of this? And what does he want me to be doing with my life.
Hopefully I'll be reporting back sometime...watch this space.
New camera
During our trip to the Lakes last year, to climb Helvellyn via Striding Edge with my sister and her man (oddly, I didn't write anything about this, but we did!), we managed to drown both our digital camera and a mobile phone. They were wrapped up safely in rucksacks but it was so wet that they filled with water anyway and they never came back to life.
So, after phoning the insurance people and a bit of research, we've bought a new digital camera. We've bought a Canon Ixus 70 because:
It has one feature that I particularly like though - it does time-lapse filming! You can only set it to take a picture every 1 second or two seconds, and it kills the battery pretty quickly, but I've had some fun playing around with it and it gives interesting results. It has prompted a bit of a fascination with life-at-high-speed.
I first started playing around with this after a day's working from home. Here's a bit of me at the laptop - it's quite boring but I had no other subject to try it out on:
For a laugh I tried moving really slowly to see what would happen when speeded back up again. This has a strange stop-motion animation effect and makes me laugh every time:
I wonder what sort of life-observation could be had with this. Look out for speeded-up naturewatch movies next spring!
So, after phoning the insurance people and a bit of research, we've bought a new digital camera. We've bought a Canon Ixus 70 because:
- We've had a Canon before, they're well built (but not waterproof) and we know how to use them
- It's pocket-sized but has a 3x optical zoom and all the features we need.
- We'd hoped for a fully-manual mode but there are hard to find on compact cameras. You can manually adjust the ISO setting, but there's no aperture or time priority. But then no other camera we looked at had those either.
- The flash on our old Canon SureShot A80 was horrible, but this one, in testing, seems to have been improved.
- We chose the Ixus 70 over the Ixus 75 mostly because it has a smaller screen and therefore better battery life.
It has one feature that I particularly like though - it does time-lapse filming! You can only set it to take a picture every 1 second or two seconds, and it kills the battery pretty quickly, but I've had some fun playing around with it and it gives interesting results. It has prompted a bit of a fascination with life-at-high-speed.
I first started playing around with this after a day's working from home. Here's a bit of me at the laptop - it's quite boring but I had no other subject to try it out on:
For a laugh I tried moving really slowly to see what would happen when speeded back up again. This has a strange stop-motion animation effect and makes me laugh every time:
I wonder what sort of life-observation could be had with this. Look out for speeded-up naturewatch movies next spring!
A couple of gigs
We've had the good fortune of seeing a couple of gigs lately. We always enjoy live music, but finding bands/artists we like at venues we like on dates that we're free, and at prices we like is always difficult.
However - despite our picky-ness we made it to the following recently (nicely matching with some recent CD purschases!)
KT Tunstall at Colston Hall, Bristol
Now...one of the games we played when we lived in Shepherd's Bush was guessing who was playing at the Empire (a popular music venue just round the corner from where we lived) from the people who were queueing up/milling around. e.g. Jack Johnson gigs have lots of normally-dressed, but pretty stoned, surfer and indie types; The Beautiful South had lots of middle-aged, middle-of-the-road-looking people queueing outside.
For some reason, I was very self-concious at this KT gig. Though the crowd was a real mix, I felt slightly too young, slightly too normal, slightly too 90's indie. Yet, I think if I was playing the "who's on at the Colston Hall" game, I'd have picked me out as a MOR soft-rocker type along with everyone else. And I didn't like that. Part of me is embarrassed that I went.
BUT...I don't really care. The gig was GREAT! KT is a great entertainer, with lots of crowd-pleasing banter. She's confident and charming, but a bit kooky. She's incredibly cool, and very talented, but comes across as homely and clumsy. Her mum and dad were in the audience and she even forgot the words to one song called "Hopeless", which, ironically, is about being just that!
The band were awesome and KT certainly doesn't stand alone, with a bassist, guitarist, keyboards/random sounds guy, a brilliant percussionist (I'm not calling him a drummer because he played far more than just drums), and two backing singers, playing, between them all, a HUGE number of different instruments.
The songs were great, and we had fun, and enjoyed a class act.
Martyn Joseph at Marlborough Town Hall
I was almost certainly too young and too cool to attend this aging, accoustic folk-rockers latest tour, but we love him to bits and we've caught the last 2 tours (and previous gigs too), so I've already lost any credibility I might have had. :-)
We've seen MJ with accompaniment before - a single keyboard player at a gig at Bush Hall in London. But this time he had a little band of sorts. There was a very cool-looking and talented female bassist playing double bass and both fretted and fretless electric bass - not all at the same time of course. And a very un-cool-looking but equally talented wind-instrument guy, playing tenor sax, clarinet and...yes really...the recorder!
I won't say much about MJ. He was on good form and the new songs, which have grown on me more since my album review, sound great live. Though I prefer "Kindness" unaccompanied...it has a certain kind of emotion and tension when it's just the accoustic guitar...it's longing for more sound around it..."how I miss you/my angel and my reason how I miss you". (Though I'm just listening to it again and there's a hint of piano and electric guitar on the album version...so I'm wrong there. I do prefer the album version though).
What did amaze me at this gig was the teamwork, humility and restraint of the musicians. The wind-instrument guy hardly played at all. He only chipped in when it was needed. He didn't, pardon the pun, blow his own trumpet.
There's a great metaphor in here for how we should live our lives. Quietly working in the background, not demanding attention, playing along to the tune of our creator, but remembering always that it's His work. He's the lead, we follow, we play, and if we demand too much attention that will detract from His glory!
Music is a great gift and I left both gigs thankful for the talented people who write and play these songs to bring us pleasure.
However - despite our picky-ness we made it to the following recently (nicely matching with some recent CD purschases!)
KT Tunstall at Colston Hall, Bristol
Now...one of the games we played when we lived in Shepherd's Bush was guessing who was playing at the Empire (a popular music venue just round the corner from where we lived) from the people who were queueing up/milling around. e.g. Jack Johnson gigs have lots of normally-dressed, but pretty stoned, surfer and indie types; The Beautiful South had lots of middle-aged, middle-of-the-road-looking people queueing outside.
For some reason, I was very self-concious at this KT gig. Though the crowd was a real mix, I felt slightly too young, slightly too normal, slightly too 90's indie. Yet, I think if I was playing the "who's on at the Colston Hall" game, I'd have picked me out as a MOR soft-rocker type along with everyone else. And I didn't like that. Part of me is embarrassed that I went.
BUT...I don't really care. The gig was GREAT! KT is a great entertainer, with lots of crowd-pleasing banter. She's confident and charming, but a bit kooky. She's incredibly cool, and very talented, but comes across as homely and clumsy. Her mum and dad were in the audience and she even forgot the words to one song called "Hopeless", which, ironically, is about being just that!
The band were awesome and KT certainly doesn't stand alone, with a bassist, guitarist, keyboards/random sounds guy, a brilliant percussionist (I'm not calling him a drummer because he played far more than just drums), and two backing singers, playing, between them all, a HUGE number of different instruments.
The songs were great, and we had fun, and enjoyed a class act.
Martyn Joseph at Marlborough Town Hall
I was almost certainly too young and too cool to attend this aging, accoustic folk-rockers latest tour, but we love him to bits and we've caught the last 2 tours (and previous gigs too), so I've already lost any credibility I might have had. :-)
We've seen MJ with accompaniment before - a single keyboard player at a gig at Bush Hall in London. But this time he had a little band of sorts. There was a very cool-looking and talented female bassist playing double bass and both fretted and fretless electric bass - not all at the same time of course. And a very un-cool-looking but equally talented wind-instrument guy, playing tenor sax, clarinet and...yes really...the recorder!
I won't say much about MJ. He was on good form and the new songs, which have grown on me more since my album review, sound great live. Though I prefer "Kindness" unaccompanied...it has a certain kind of emotion and tension when it's just the accoustic guitar...it's longing for more sound around it..."how I miss you/my angel and my reason how I miss you". (Though I'm just listening to it again and there's a hint of piano and electric guitar on the album version...so I'm wrong there. I do prefer the album version though).
What did amaze me at this gig was the teamwork, humility and restraint of the musicians. The wind-instrument guy hardly played at all. He only chipped in when it was needed. He didn't, pardon the pun, blow his own trumpet.
There's a great metaphor in here for how we should live our lives. Quietly working in the background, not demanding attention, playing along to the tune of our creator, but remembering always that it's His work. He's the lead, we follow, we play, and if we demand too much attention that will detract from His glory!
Music is a great gift and I left both gigs thankful for the talented people who write and play these songs to bring us pleasure.
Friday, November 16, 2007
No logo?
[Note - the original idea for this was to include pictures of the logos mentioned but I decided this was probably not legal and so removed them and just did my own "representations", in the hope that that's allowed. Look them up on an image search if you want the real thing!]
"Maaaarketing..." said an alien on Radio 4's "The Now Show" some time last year...he was amused by the fact that humans bottled water and sold it at extortionate cost to one another.
"Yes, this is amusing. Marketing - hahahaha".
Which pretty much sums up my understanding of the topic.
The issue of "corporate re-blanding" has been bothering me for a while. A certain company quite close to my heart has recently scrapped its well-known logo and put in its place the name of the company, written in a bold, sans serif font, in a variety of colours...which is exactly what a similar company had done a couple of years beforehand.
But why? Why scrap an image that's recognised around the world and replace it with the same thing that everyone else is doing?
Some examples.
Welcome Break - you've all stopped on the motorway services and experienced the wonders of their toilets. They used to have a nice old fashioned picture of a swan coming in to land above their name.
I never quite got the swan thing. Presumably swans like a gigantic fried breakfast halfway through their migration or something (do swans migrate?), but it was recognisable and kinda homely...welcoming. So what's with the new "logo", which basically looks like this...
This one particularly irritates me because NOWTHEYWRITEEVERYTHINGINBOLD UPPERCASESANS-SERIFANDITSREALLYHARDTOREADANDITSOUNDSLIKETHEY'RE SHOUTINGATYOU. Not actually very welcoming at all.
Marks and Spencer: Wow - I realise that I've not seen the name in full for a while now. Yes, they're doing it on the high street too! The old, angular logo was just a name and a magic little ampersand, presented on two lines in a nice shade of green. But it was a well-recognised name.
However, M&S have actually changed a lot. They used to be seen as a stuffy old supermarket that only sold its own brand food to old people, but for many that view has changed. Their new logo is modern and reflects that change but I'm still left wondering if they could have come up with something more unique than their initials in a curvy black and greeny-yellow...this is not just any logo, it's a smooth, sophisticated, trips-off-your tongue logo...my cheap imitation is simply something like:
The Co-op. Possibly another story of a stuffy old shop modernising - the old logo's loopy, lowercase, blue letters laid out in a square formation, firmly reminding me of shopping with my granny. Like M&S I like what the Co-operative are doing but surely they're just jumping on a bandwagon with the new look...which isn't far off something like...
Even charities are at it...internation Christian development agency, Tearfund, had their name in two fonts - with and without serifs, two colours - deep green and clean white, two weights - normal and bold, with a nice dandelion head in an orange box next to it. But even charities modernise and we now have nothing more than...
(I should point out that the "t" should be cross-shaped with no curly bottom. This is probably important, but I don't have a standard font that looks like that!)
It's a silly thing to have a rant about but what bugs me is that all the skill and creativity seems to have gone from marketing. Let's just take a company name, optionally abbreviate it in some way, pick a modern typeface, and choose a couple of colours. Anyone could do it? Couldn't they?
If I had the time I could write a computer program to randomly re-brand company names in this way. And people get paid a fortune to do it?
So...to any marketing people out there...what's stopping me?
Alien 1: Here, buy this
Alien 2: I already have this
Alien 1: "Marketing"
Alien 2: Okay then, I'll buy it
Alien 1: I have laughed so hard I have accidentally passed what passes for alien wee-wee
Alien 2: Put it in a bottle, you could sell it to the humans
Both: hahahahaha
"Maaaarketing..." said an alien on Radio 4's "The Now Show" some time last year...he was amused by the fact that humans bottled water and sold it at extortionate cost to one another.
"Yes, this is amusing. Marketing - hahahaha".
Which pretty much sums up my understanding of the topic.
The issue of "corporate re-blanding" has been bothering me for a while. A certain company quite close to my heart has recently scrapped its well-known logo and put in its place the name of the company, written in a bold, sans serif font, in a variety of colours...which is exactly what a similar company had done a couple of years beforehand.
But why? Why scrap an image that's recognised around the world and replace it with the same thing that everyone else is doing?
Some examples.
Welcome Break - you've all stopped on the motorway services and experienced the wonders of their toilets. They used to have a nice old fashioned picture of a swan coming in to land above their name.
I never quite got the swan thing. Presumably swans like a gigantic fried breakfast halfway through their migration or something (do swans migrate?), but it was recognisable and kinda homely...welcoming. So what's with the new "logo", which basically looks like this...
| WELCOMEBREAK |
This one particularly irritates me because NOWTHEYWRITEEVERYTHINGINBOLD UPPERCASESANS-SERIFANDITSREALLYHARDTOREADANDITSOUNDSLIKETHEY'RE SHOUTINGATYOU. Not actually very welcoming at all.
Marks and Spencer: Wow - I realise that I've not seen the name in full for a while now. Yes, they're doing it on the high street too! The old, angular logo was just a name and a magic little ampersand, presented on two lines in a nice shade of green. But it was a well-recognised name.
However, M&S have actually changed a lot. They used to be seen as a stuffy old supermarket that only sold its own brand food to old people, but for many that view has changed. Their new logo is modern and reflects that change but I'm still left wondering if they could have come up with something more unique than their initials in a curvy black and greeny-yellow...this is not just any logo, it's a smooth, sophisticated, trips-off-your tongue logo...my cheap imitation is simply something like:
M&S
The Co-op. Possibly another story of a stuffy old shop modernising - the old logo's loopy, lowercase, blue letters laid out in a square formation, firmly reminding me of shopping with my granny. Like M&S I like what the Co-operative are doing but surely they're just jumping on a bandwagon with the new look...which isn't far off something like...
The co-operative
Even charities are at it...internation Christian development agency, Tearfund, had their name in two fonts - with and without serifs, two colours - deep green and clean white, two weights - normal and bold, with a nice dandelion head in an orange box next to it. But even charities modernise and we now have nothing more than...
(I should point out that the "t" should be cross-shaped with no curly bottom. This is probably important, but I don't have a standard font that looks like that!)
It's a silly thing to have a rant about but what bugs me is that all the skill and creativity seems to have gone from marketing. Let's just take a company name, optionally abbreviate it in some way, pick a modern typeface, and choose a couple of colours. Anyone could do it? Couldn't they?
If I had the time I could write a computer program to randomly re-brand company names in this way. And people get paid a fortune to do it?
So...to any marketing people out there...what's stopping me?
Alien 1: Here, buy this
Alien 2: I already have this
Alien 1: "Marketing"
Alien 2: Okay then, I'll buy it
Alien 1: I have laughed so hard I have accidentally passed what passes for alien wee-wee
Alien 2: Put it in a bottle, you could sell it to the humans
Both: hahahahaha
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