I'd not even drank any...
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Not Inspired, Inspired
I realise that for a long time I have been very uninspired by a number of things that I used to be very passionate about. Music has become muted, the Internet is dial-up, visuals sepia. A few things have have made this uninspired state seem more dramatic, such that it is now identifiable. This coming into focus has sort of inspired me to write this post, and then do something about it!
First up: The Internet, or more correctly the World Wide Web. There was once a time when those three W's would make my neurons explode with ideas. I had things I wanted to find out there in cyberspace, things I wanted to put out there (other than random blog posts). Now it seems the web is just a place to sell things on various "social networking" sites. The user experience has become homogenised to the point of being an identical set of click-throughs. Where once I saw dreams, ideas, new horizons now I just see cheap CD's.
I do occasionally get excited about webby things but they are either mundae, work related or more about some technology geek-out. In most places the content of a page leaves me cold. I'm as bored of the internet as I am of TV - probably for similar reasons. I guess I've moved out of the target market, so that content is no longer aimed at me. I suppose that is a good thing (who wants to be a target) but as someone who has historically been quite "into" the web it leaves me at a bit of a loss.
Visuals, or more specifically me creating them and actively engaging in that process, is a tough one. I don't think I'm disconnected from it, or bored of it, more that I don't have time to engage as deeply as required. A ten minute flick through DA or Flickr every few weeks isn't really enough to consider oneself engaged. I do a bit more photography than before, but nothing like enough to satisfy any creative urge. I haven't done a photo-manipulation for years (well there were two a month ago...), likewise for any kind of design/typographical stuff.
Music is a tricky one. I've probably bought more music in the past year than in the past 6 or 7 years preceeding it, mainly due to having a salary these days. But a lot of the CD's I've bought have been back fill - getting the CD of the MP3's I've had for ages, filling in gaps in an artists discography. There's very little "new music" in what I've bought. Why is that? Well, partly I don't have the time to trek through record stores and go to empty gigs every week night.
There's also a massive failing in radio and music press to cover anything I'm interested in either intelligently enough to make me want to read/listen or at all. Music magazines/websites are either painfully pretentious or aimed at the pre-pubescent. (One exception is Stereogum!)
Last but not least, there's a lot of shit out there, and wading through it gets you rather smelly. People don't have (and don't need) and kind of quality control they record songs on their laptop, using free/pirate software and upload to MySpace. Don't get me wrong, I've stumbled upon some amazing music on myspace for which I am extremely glad, but there's not an easy way to interact there (the site is dreadful, admit it!) and I can't dial up a bunch of new tunes at random.
I've used podcasts a bit (again Stereogum!!) but they don't really solve the problem (I'm not sure what the problem is...). I have more than three weeks worth of solid music on my computer - why do I need more? It's like a crack habit.
The catalyst to this post was reading a NY Times article on Trent Reznor. Love or hate his music, you've got to admit this guy is a genius, a generous one too! The whole way that Year Zero was "marketed" was phenomenal. More like a piece of Brecht theatre than an album launch. The recent releases of Ghosts and The Slip really brought NIN into the "digital age", and set a high benchmark for what people should expect. These MP3's were beautifully packaged, for want of a better word. Each track with individual art work. Splendid. Inspirational.
So, what to do? Where to go? How to progress? What is my "next action"?
Well first up, I want to get inspired by the internet again. I want to create things with the wide-eyed amazement of my 16 year old self. One thing I plan on doing is writing a little script that makes a podcast from a bunch of artists on MySpace. Half of the code has already been done (must remember to blog that...) so it'd really just be making the podcast xml - simple!
Next, Visuals. Hmm, well YANU need a decent web presence. Time to get on that, I think. I worked out how blogger style sheets work a while ago to help Chloe with a web page so maybe it's time to put that knowledge to good use! This place could do with finishing off, too. I've also got a ton of photos from Iceland to sort through.
Music, well again it's about time, and making the most of what you've got. I'm playing in two bands, one as a hired gun (The Uphills) and another where I'm more central (YANU) - I should be making more of this! With The Uphills I get to goof around and play loud solo's, fine. In YANU I used to write more of the music. Recently I've not been as involved, busy boy, and I think I'm going to put my mark back on what we do. I think that we've lost some of our experimental edge and are kind of rehashing the same ideas. Time for a change!
One common thread in this is a lack of time. But these past two days I've got loads done, I just had to get off my arse and do it. So, I think next time I'm mindlessly clicking through the web, bored to a coma, I'll stop myself, think about what I'd like to see or hear, and go off and make it!
First up: The Internet, or more correctly the World Wide Web. There was once a time when those three W's would make my neurons explode with ideas. I had things I wanted to find out there in cyberspace, things I wanted to put out there (other than random blog posts). Now it seems the web is just a place to sell things on various "social networking" sites. The user experience has become homogenised to the point of being an identical set of click-throughs. Where once I saw dreams, ideas, new horizons now I just see cheap CD's.
I do occasionally get excited about webby things but they are either mundae, work related or more about some technology geek-out. In most places the content of a page leaves me cold. I'm as bored of the internet as I am of TV - probably for similar reasons. I guess I've moved out of the target market, so that content is no longer aimed at me. I suppose that is a good thing (who wants to be a target) but as someone who has historically been quite "into" the web it leaves me at a bit of a loss.
Visuals, or more specifically me creating them and actively engaging in that process, is a tough one. I don't think I'm disconnected from it, or bored of it, more that I don't have time to engage as deeply as required. A ten minute flick through DA or Flickr every few weeks isn't really enough to consider oneself engaged. I do a bit more photography than before, but nothing like enough to satisfy any creative urge. I haven't done a photo-manipulation for years (well there were two a month ago...), likewise for any kind of design/typographical stuff.
Music is a tricky one. I've probably bought more music in the past year than in the past 6 or 7 years preceeding it, mainly due to having a salary these days. But a lot of the CD's I've bought have been back fill - getting the CD of the MP3's I've had for ages, filling in gaps in an artists discography. There's very little "new music" in what I've bought. Why is that? Well, partly I don't have the time to trek through record stores and go to empty gigs every week night.
There's also a massive failing in radio and music press to cover anything I'm interested in either intelligently enough to make me want to read/listen or at all. Music magazines/websites are either painfully pretentious or aimed at the pre-pubescent. (One exception is Stereogum!)
Last but not least, there's a lot of shit out there, and wading through it gets you rather smelly. People don't have (and don't need) and kind of quality control they record songs on their laptop, using free/pirate software and upload to MySpace. Don't get me wrong, I've stumbled upon some amazing music on myspace for which I am extremely glad, but there's not an easy way to interact there (the site is dreadful, admit it!) and I can't dial up a bunch of new tunes at random.
I've used podcasts a bit (again Stereogum!!) but they don't really solve the problem (I'm not sure what the problem is...). I have more than three weeks worth of solid music on my computer - why do I need more? It's like a crack habit.
The catalyst to this post was reading a NY Times article on Trent Reznor. Love or hate his music, you've got to admit this guy is a genius, a generous one too! The whole way that Year Zero was "marketed" was phenomenal. More like a piece of Brecht theatre than an album launch. The recent releases of Ghosts and The Slip really brought NIN into the "digital age", and set a high benchmark for what people should expect. These MP3's were beautifully packaged, for want of a better word. Each track with individual art work. Splendid. Inspirational.
So, what to do? Where to go? How to progress? What is my "next action"?
Well first up, I want to get inspired by the internet again. I want to create things with the wide-eyed amazement of my 16 year old self. One thing I plan on doing is writing a little script that makes a podcast from a bunch of artists on MySpace. Half of the code has already been done (must remember to blog that...) so it'd really just be making the podcast xml - simple!
Next, Visuals. Hmm, well YANU need a decent web presence. Time to get on that, I think. I worked out how blogger style sheets work a while ago to help Chloe with a web page so maybe it's time to put that knowledge to good use! This place could do with finishing off, too. I've also got a ton of photos from Iceland to sort through.
Music, well again it's about time, and making the most of what you've got. I'm playing in two bands, one as a hired gun (The Uphills) and another where I'm more central (YANU) - I should be making more of this! With The Uphills I get to goof around and play loud solo's, fine. In YANU I used to write more of the music. Recently I've not been as involved, busy boy, and I think I'm going to put my mark back on what we do. I think that we've lost some of our experimental edge and are kind of rehashing the same ideas. Time for a change!
One common thread in this is a lack of time. But these past two days I've got loads done, I just had to get off my arse and do it. So, I think next time I'm mindlessly clicking through the web, bored to a coma, I'll stop myself, think about what I'd like to see or hear, and go off and make it!
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Another neat Quicksilver trick
You can choose an application, put it on the shelf (,) then choose another (and another, and another...) and open them all at once. Handy if you need to fire up a bunch of things first thing in the morning!
Monday, June 02, 2008
Hiveminder scripts
I've made a couple of little scripts that hook into hiveminder. Hiveminder is a really nice web based GTD tool. I've pretty much replaced Omni Focus with it, mainly because I need something that works across multiple machines easily - web based is the way to go! It also has a well documented API - which is always nice to see. So, the scripts...
First off there's a simple todo script, which'll add a new todo (like filling in the brain dump box, but from a script). There are two neat features to this script, which I like.
Firstly you can hook it into Quicksilver (a must for all Mac users!) by placing it in
Then tab to the second pane type todo (or as much of it as you need to) and press enter:
If the task gets created Quicksilver will give you a nice "Task Created!" message - ahhh:
But what happens if the task isn't created? That's the second neat feature. If for whatever reason a task can't be added (for instance you are on a plane without network) it'll write the task to a little SQLite database. The next time you sucessfully add a task to hiveminder the database is polled and all the tasks you've queued up locally will be uploaded too - neato!
The second script was something I'd discussed with Tim Barrass - some kind of GTD shuffle. We thought it's easy to write a bunch of lists, but if everything is about as important as everything else choosing what you do becomes quite hard. So we went all Apple and decided to make a simple shuffle program. We then remembered that we both had full time jobs, busy lives and didn't live in Silicon Valley. The idea was sort of shelved. Until now!
The Hiveminder API made coding up a quick task shuffle dead simple. Again put it in the Quicksilver actions folder, invoke it (type taskshuffle in QS) and it'll randomly choose a task from your todo list and take you to the appropriate page on Hiveminder. Slick. At the moment there's no weighting by priority (patches welcome, I'm not very good at setting priorities so it's not that useful to me) but it shouldn't give you a task you can't do before completing another.
The scripts are both available from my subversion repository, leave a comment if you use them/have problems with it etc.
First off there's a simple todo script, which'll add a new todo (like filling in the brain dump box, but from a script). There are two neat features to this script, which I like.
Firstly you can hook it into Quicksilver (a must for all Mac users!) by placing it in
~/Library/Application\ Support/Quicksilver/Actionsto use it invoke Quicksilver, press . to enter text mode, write your "brain dump":
Then tab to the second pane type todo (or as much of it as you need to) and press enter:
If the task gets created Quicksilver will give you a nice "Task Created!" message - ahhh:
But what happens if the task isn't created? That's the second neat feature. If for whatever reason a task can't be added (for instance you are on a plane without network) it'll write the task to a little SQLite database. The next time you sucessfully add a task to hiveminder the database is polled and all the tasks you've queued up locally will be uploaded too - neato!
The second script was something I'd discussed with Tim Barrass - some kind of GTD shuffle. We thought it's easy to write a bunch of lists, but if everything is about as important as everything else choosing what you do becomes quite hard. So we went all Apple and decided to make a simple shuffle program. We then remembered that we both had full time jobs, busy lives and didn't live in Silicon Valley. The idea was sort of shelved. Until now!
The Hiveminder API made coding up a quick task shuffle dead simple. Again put it in the Quicksilver actions folder, invoke it (type taskshuffle in QS) and it'll randomly choose a task from your todo list and take you to the appropriate page on Hiveminder. Slick. At the moment there's no weighting by priority (patches welcome, I'm not very good at setting priorities so it's not that useful to me) but it shouldn't give you a task you can't do before completing another.
The scripts are both available from my subversion repository, leave a comment if you use them/have problems with it etc.
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