Ok, if the blog suddenly falls of the face of the earth, worry not – it should be back up shortly. Turns out fasthosts really suck as server providers. Or Bright Meadow is just getting too darn popular.

Anyway, looks like I’m exceeding my monthly bandwidth ( 😛 ) I do have a solution to this in the form of a years free hosting from Media Temple (the card is sitting on the desk right now, thanks Bryan!) but I actually need to grit my teeth and do the whole migration thing.

Ugh.

And eek! Because it’s scary!

Anyway, please bear with me through this (potentially) buggy period. Things will hopefully be shiny and new soon 🙂

I’m gonna keep posting, and y’all keep commenting, and hopefully if I ignore the problem it will go away 😉

It’s odd, what sets me off to blogging. I had to take the morning off work as there was a workman from Bob’s Plumbing (no joke, that is the company’s name!) coming round to do something technical to the boiler here at Meadow Towers. Non-urgent work, but work that had to get done before the cold weather comes back – knowing my luck if they weren’t looked into now the repairs would become urgent just when we were starting to freeze in our beds. ^*1*

Now I am so completely snowed under at work at the moment (the Energizer Bunny has had no admin for the past nine months… The resulting backlog and mess has to be seen to be believed) that I can’t really afford to take a morning off, but then again Moose was even more unable to take the morning off, so I had to do it. I quite enjoyed the extra hour in bed 😀 I had all these grand plans of what I was going to do this morning as well – I would catch up on emails, I would write some content for the poor blog (I have been neglecting it of late, sorry), I would… Oh, all kinds of things.

Do I get any of it done? No, of course not. For starters I am incapable of ‘catching up’ with emails. Some things are never gonna happen, no matter how much we may want them to. Blog posts? Don’t be silly. Part of the problem was that Bob the Plumber spent a fair amount of time drilling holes into the wall between my room and the boiler cupboard – hardly conducive to nice computing. The other part of the problem was, well, day time TV. Much though it sucks, I still ended up spending my precious morning off loafing on the sofa watching crap on Freeview. So I got nothing blogged.

Then what happens – I’m sitting in work surrounded by enough piles of paper that it looks like I’m building a fort around my desk and I get all inspired. Bollocks.

Luckily I’m able to fire up Outlook and write myself an email with the germ of the idea in it, but I do find it very hard to just leave things at the ‘germ’. Once I get an idea, I like to sit down and just write till the idea is done. I can leave it at the final polishing stage easily, but anything less and I get all antsy. I don’t like leaving things half finished and on top of that I am petrified that when I get back to something half-written, I won’t be able to finish it off. That the muse will have deserted me (this has happened on more than one occasion).

Aw crap. I clearly really need to get me a job where I can write for a living. The more and more I think about it, the more and more that sounds like a wonderful job. Not journalism – the whole sniffing out stories thing has never appealed – but… something. The dream, dream? Get a gig like Carry in “Sex in the City” and write a newspaper column (or, ok blog if you insist) about something that interests me, or failing that my life, and that pays enough to keep me in the style to which I would like to become accustomed.

Failing that, I would love to be an editor…

Anything but what I am doing and what I have the qualifications for, basically.

Anyone got any ideas how I can make this dream a reality? I would be really, really grateful! Make you a Minion and everything 😀

Endnotes:
^*1* Meadow Towers is lovely, just really badly insulated. In the winter it is freezing to the point of being able to see your breath if we don’t have the heating on full blast. In the summer it can get sweltering to the point it’s hotter inside than it is outside. Other than that, and the lack of outside space, and the no-pets thing, it is a dream apartment.^Back

You might have been asking yourself why I wanted to join 9rules.

It’s the people of course.

How can you not want to be a part of that?

And don’t forget to check out their scrumptoulicicious new look. It’s more than just a pretty new face as well – lots of shiny new bits to play with and explore. I’d tell you which communities Bright Meadow is in, but that would spoil all the fun of looking 😉

Last Sunday I completed the Race for Life 2006 in Southampton. My reasons for deciding to do the 5 km run (that’s around 3 miles, give or take), can be seen on this post. Suffice it to say, I’ve lost lots of people I care about to cancer, and I know there many more who are battling the disease at the moment.

The Race for Life is an annual women only event organised by Cancer Research UK. All the money raised through sponsorship goes directly to the charity – all admin costs for the run etc are covered by the entry fee paid by all the runners – so you can be assured that any money you donate will go straight into funding the fight against cancer.

This is a cause I care passionately about and, I promise you, this will be the only time I ask you for money (till next summer rolls around and the 2007 Race for Life). Several of you have already sponsored me and you have my heartfelt gratitude and thanks. Several more of you have said things along the line of “damn it, I missed it. I’ll sponsor you next year”. Why wait till next year? The online sponsorship page is still open and will be till the 30th of July.

So how did the Race go? Well, I managed to beat last years time and got home in under 50 minutes. The actual time is somewhere between 45 minutes and 50 minutes because the girl with the watch (Moose) and I got separated at about the 2 km mark and I’d been finished a little while before I remembered to nab someone with a watch and do a time check. Moose managed it in 43 minutes! (Big woot to Moose!) I was no where near as fit as I was last year, or as fit as I wanted to be – I had grand plans to run the majority – but it was just too hot and I’m just not built to move at any great velocity I am afraid.

My thanks also to illyna and Super Girl who looked after house-keys etc, waited around for an hour on a blazing hot Sunday afternoon, and met us at the finish with large bottles of water. I didn’t take any pictures this year but the ones from last year basically tell the same story. Lots of women, lots of sun!

It’s a cliche, but every little really does help, and I would love to reach my target of £180. Whether you decide to give 50p or £50, I appreciate it. Sponsoring is really simple – go to the online sponsorship page, click on the pink “sponsor me now” button at the bottom of the page, and follow the instructions. If needs must I’m also still accepting sponsorship via paypal – if you want to use this option (though I do recommend and prefer the official sponsorship page) contact me and I will let you know the details.

Thank you again to everyone who’s already sponsored me, and thank you in advance to anyone else who decides they are going to do their little bit for a very worthwhile charity. The closing date for sponsorships is the 30th of July – just over a week left, so you’d better get a wiggle on 🙂

Cas

I’m starting to rediscover del.icio.us, and I love how it now knows when I tag something ‘research’, I’m likely to also tag it ‘toread’. Ditto when I use ‘collaboration’, ‘socialsoftware’ is presented as a recommended tag.

I like it when software learns and presents sensible choices like that.

I want to share a secret with you.

One of my guilty pleasures is going through Flickr, looking at the random assortment of pictures you get when you use their ‘explore‘ option.

For people not yet aware of what Flickr is, it is (at it’s simplest) an online service that lets you upload and share photos for free. On top of that though, it is a massive community of users. You can find pictures of anything on Flickr, from holiday snaps to pictures that look so professional you’d expect to see them in a gallery.

In fact, I like it so much, I just shelled out for a Pro Account – as I only ever spend money in extreme circumstances, this might clue you into quite how much I like it. I was going to go for broke and the two year option, but then I had a moment of future-shock. Will they even be around in two years time? Will there be something better on the scene? My gut tells me they will still be around but… I’m no fortune teller. That, and I have no spare cash – the one year option of $24 (roughly £14) was about all I could stretch to.

When I started using Flickr a year or so now, I thought the 200 photos you get on the free account was more than enough – and it is. It’s taken me a year to max it out. What happens when you uploaded your 201st image, is the 1st image goes into hiding etc. It is still there online, but it no longer appears on your ‘photos’ page. I held out from paying till a photoset I really liked disappeared into the ether. That, and with the Pro account you can have as many sets as you want (I’ve had to resort to using tags as jury-rigged sets this past year). Oh, and a 2 GB monthly upload limit.

I’ll stop now 😛 Basically, the free account is perfect for casual use, and enough to let you find out for yourself if you want to spend the money or not. You don’t get nagged to upgrade as some services do. If you haven’t got one, go get a Flickr account today, then share the URL in the comments so we can have a look 🙂

I use Flickr extensively as the online repository for my digital pictures – either quick snaps I have taken to illustrate a moment, or whole collections of memories – and often times what I blog links to Flickr, or what I flickr links back to Bright Meadow. (Thanks, by the way, to Paul for a great definition of the new verb ‘to flickr’). Whilst you can view just my Flickr stream, or read just the blog, you kinda miss out on part of the fun. Both contain facets of my online life, and more and more my ‘online’ life is becoming part of my mainstream life – it’s starting to get now that I’ll refer even work colleagues to Flickr if they want to see my holiday snaps. My friends have long been stopping by Bright Meadow to check I am still in the land of the living (my inability to answer email is getting so far beyond a joke as to become almost legend). I’ve got a mental list of friends who are happy to appear in snaps online and those who aren’t. I’ve got plans for something I’m rolling out in a little while that will tie my use of Bright Meadow and Flickr even closer together.

On top of that, I love the community of users. The ability to comment on people’s work, add notes, favourite them. Get feedback. Make contacts. Join groups. There are groups for the oddest of things – the railways of the Isle of Wight for example.

At least once a week, more when I am bored, I will load up the “Interesting in the past 7 days” page, marking photos I like as ‘favourites‘, downloading some for desktops, then hitting refresh to get the next batch of great images.

It is this ability to ‘favourite’ images that sold me on Flickr. For the longest time I would see images I liked, then resign myself to never be able to find them again (the option of physically bookmarking them just seemed impractical). Then I discovered that if I clicked the little star at the top left of a photo I liked, Flickr would bookmark it for me and I would always be able to find it. Sweet!

It’s also Flickr I have to thank for some truly awesome desktop images – I have about 200 images the Mac rotates through on a daily basis, supplying me with two amazing new desktops each time I start up the computer. A good 70% of these have come from Flickr (the rest are film stills, promo images, and pictures I’ve taken). For those worried about copyright etc, Flickr lets you chose if people can download your images or not, and also lets you set a creative commons license. It’s never going to stop evil people reposting work as their own if they are really desperate too, but a community is all about sharing. And there has been at least once case I’m aware of where mainstream media used a picture off Flickr without permission or attribution to the photographer, and he won his copyright case (I wish I could remember where that link disappeared to :/).

I can think of one other service that’s building itself up to directly take on Flickr (Zooomr, but I can’t tell you more about that because it’s down at the moment due to a DOS attack and upgrade issues. I’ve heard some people praise Zooomr, some people who aren’t such fans. Google, of course, has it’s own attempt, but that doesn’t work with Macs, so 😛 to them.

As I said, I like Flickr, and it’s gonna take a pretty impressive service to make me want to switch. It’s definitely one case where the total is greater than the sum of all its parts – it’s simple and does what it does brilliantly. What more do you need?

Now, if you will excuse me, I am off to plug in the scanner, and make the most of all this new storage space I’ve just got 😀 So many pretty pictures!

Flickr, Zooomr, Google Picassa

I’ve decided that every office should have a man with a good smile. They are just so nice to look at you understand. They don’t have to be single (in fact it helps if they aren’t because then you can ogle in safety). They just have to be… easy on the eye. Makes even the hardest day go that little better.

I’ve also realised that a good smile on a guy is important to me. More important than I gave credit to before. Give me the most ‘handsome’ man in the world and if he doesn’t have a good smile, he does nothing for me.

J had a real sweet smile. I remember this one picture from the start of our relationship – he just had the sweetest smile, seeing it tipped me over the edge from quite liking to really liking.

shanks had a great smile on him too, though his was more on the lines of a cheeky grin – gave the clue to his personality. It wasn’t the kind of smile you relied on to bring you cups of tea and hold your hair back when you’re feeling sick. It was the kind of smile that took you out dancing and didn’t bring you home till the sun was just starting to come up.

And the CC had this wonderful slow, secret smile that started at the corner of his mouth and ended lighting up his entire face. Sometimes I’d just turn around and catch his smile starting as he was looking at me. I was never totally sure what prompted it, but I knew it was a good smile without an ounce of malice behind it. Made my knees go wibbly and my stomach do backflips to see it.

It’s the way a smile can make a fairly average face suddenly full of grace. First time I met Jeff, nearly two years back, he didn’t make much of an impression on me. He kept to himself, didn’t mingle with the rest of us, which was fine – some people don’t like to mix. He just didn’t register on my radar beyond being a fellow course-mate to say ‘hi’ to whilst waiting for class to start. Then one day he decided to join us in the courtyard for a cup of tea between seminars. Someone told a joke and *boom* his face changed, he changed. He was no longer a nonentity to me – he was a guy with a damn cute smile that made me want to know him better. It was goofy. It was thoughtful. It was generous. It was… Jeff.

Matt is another person who had a smile I’d go a long way to see again. Everyone loved Matt. It was impossible not to with his smile.

I used to laugh when I read romance novels where the heroine can tell everything about the hero from his smile. I still do laugh. It is unrealistic – for me at least facial clues are tricky. I hate scenes in movies where there’s lots of ‘eye-acting’ because I know I’m missing things, not getting the full picture. If someone tries to send ‘messages’ with their eyes at me, I fluff it. So much of it is intuition, knowing a person really well, and guessing. How am I to know that the signals I’m getting from someone’s expression are the signals they are trying to send?

I don’t.

But something in me is rigged to respond to smiles. Some smiles don’t work on me. There’s nothing wrong with them, but sometimes it just doesn’t flip the switch to make me let down my defences. It’s a chemistry thing I guess. I might still like you, talk to you, call you friend, but that extra zing will be missing. I can even think of one or two people whose smiles mildly repel me.

Most often though, it will be like with Jeff: I won’t have a preference either way, then someone will smile and it opens my heart. I think his smile is one of the reasons I think David Tennant is such a great Dr Who. A fairly unassuming face. Ordinary even. Then he smiles and… yup. That’s a good smile he’s got going on. If you can get your hands on a copy of the DVD, I do recommend watching Casanova (the Russell T. Davies BBC adaptation, not the Heath Ledger film).

What defines a good smile? I couldn’t say. I just know it when I see it.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad we’ve got our very own Dr Who in the office – I just caught the tail end of his smile today and it made me glad to be at work. I already had him pegged as a decent chap, now I know he is.

People say I have a good smile. I don’t know – it’s just my smile, I’ve always had it. But if it is a good smile? I’m glad. I can’t be the only one out there rigged to like smiles.