Cancel the celebrations

Friday Jose and me went round his pseudo-uncle’s office for his music sharing group thing. I brought a mix CD made with low qualityish MP3s which was frankly a bit embarassing to follow J.S.Bach’s organ music with, but hey ho. It’s impressive how listening to high quality organ music drags me back to Taunton School and the enforced chapel in the morning. And pretty far removed from Wellspring’s wurlitzer. Anyroad, made for a nice change and afterwards I watched Kill Bill 2 into the early hours. Yesterday I rambled into town snapping any cars that looked like where they were parked. And the occasional anatomically correct cow pinata. Grabbed some ‘new’ DVDs, Capote, Requiem for a Dream, American Visa and (just to get the bargain price of 4 for 100 pesos) The Wedding Crashers (I think Monica said it was a laugh…). Back to the house for a nap then Jose appeared and we went scouting for a location to do some more poetry/filming stuff. There’s a modern art museum I hadn’t even heard of in La Plaza del Arte, with lots of sculptures and suchlike outside which should be perfect. I used one of the pictures to update pinguino frog’s propaganda 10 page a bit. I don’t know if it works in Explorer though, as i mentioned earlier… afterwards, off to Jana and Victors for a meal that included such treats as mandarin, fennel and baby spinach leaves salad, couscous garlic and chicken. And brownies. House prices weren’t mentioned which is an excellent sign for any dinner party. Avian flu, requiem for a dream, scrabble and suduko kept us chatting mind.

Today lazy as you like. This site was down for some reason earlier. Hope that’s not a recurring thing. We’re off to Sarah’s for her birthday later. she’s cooking summink for us. Which should be grand. I’ve been listening to a few new podcasts of late. For webdesign, there’s this english nerd and his mate talking about design issues at boagworld.com that’s really informative, then NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me is now available for download, rather than streaming which is tidy, and then there’s a fledgling podcast, Total Pod Catastrophe which is v. promising. I think I’ll shove one on now and do the dishes, before a starbucks coffee and off round young Sarah’s. Happy 28th, if you’re reading, Sarah 🙂 . Aquarius?…

Had a nice afternoon/evening yesterday. First round Amour Fou to sort out some computer problems and catch up on Anel and Claus’s teutonic adventures then on to Goa to eat our own weight in curry. A & C gave me a bottle of Shnapps which will doubtless help stave off the non-existant cold round here. Tonight’s festivi-dees include peeps coming round here for pizza and drinks then Bar Calavera at 10:30ish for some Pocilga Beat, choons and ale.

Word of the week: Pocilga. Literally a pigsty. As is this place looks like a pigsty. Unlike my tiny, freshly-painted, new office for example. (give me a few days…)

…using a combination of knowledge from my PHP classes (I’m about to sign up for the advanced classes for next week) and this page on how to Search and Replace using PHPMyAdmin so now the apostrophe issue is cleared up and there aren’t enough other errors to make it worth my while. My Spanish blog‘s another story though, I ended up going in and editing each entry by hand… Luckily there aren’t that many pages.

So, it’s still raining and starting to get colder just in time for Stu’n’Anne’s visit. Hope they don’t mind too much. Atticus is certainly a bit bothered by it all and is showing early signs of SAD. He’s missing M&D too, mind, who phoned last night to say they’d spent 15 hours on the road and had made it Los Mochis, of all places. They’ve set a new record, they’re probably somewhere near the Canadian border if they’ve kept up the pace.

We watched Pan’s Labyrinth again last night, as Sita hadn’t seen it. I’d forgotten how powerful a film it is. It’s the ultimate fable on rejecting authority and a gruesome depiction of post civil war Spain. I saw the Devil’s Backbone (El Espinazo del Diablo) t’other week too which takes place in the same era but doesn’t have as clear a division between fantasy and reality. Still fine viewing though. Had a game of Scrabble too. I got all the good tiles…

In terms of the HTMLery I’m going to be putting together a shopping site for a high-end artesanal jewelry store to complement their flash site soonish which’ll be interesting and a chance to practice my PHP skillz. Also I read the readme file that came with the photoblog theme and it explained how to have thumbnails on the archive page, so I sorted that out. Looks quite nice, oi reckon. Shame i’ve now got two blogs that don’t quite render right on IE6 though, but frankly IE6 users deserve all they get.

And that’s all for today. Next up, dragging Atticus through the rain to pick up El Público with its weekly events listing, Ocio, and then paying the phone/interweb bill, rent, and PHP course… it’s going to be an expensive day this one…

Fancy checking out the beta phase of my latest creation? Well in that case, hie thee hence to Sinescopio- Diseño Web y Traducción desde Guadalajara, Mexico. And tell your spanish-speaking web-site-needing friends 😉

Just testing to see if you can embed flash objects in blogs… If there’s a corporate advert for Serenity below, then mission accomplished:

I think I remember this bloke as a kid drawing Paris buildings, he’s come a long way…

It reminds me of Borges‘ short story, Funes el Memorioso (spanish, english, english wikipedia entry). Borges’ fictional encounter with a man who is blessed/cursed with a memory that remembers everything in minute detail even the position of the clouds at a given moment.

Plans today: Redesign bloody agaveweb with me new corporate branding…
Explore the possibilities offered by this legally dubious web 2.0 website that appears to have everything, after a quick test with Senser, Black Box Recorder, Bomb the Bass and Art Brut…