peteashtondotcom

At a recent book launch (read: free booze and canapes lig) we met a nice young lady from Alphabetstreet who used to work for “the premier source worldwide for information on the canmaking and rigid packaging filling industries”.

Specialist publishing is the new black, IMHO!

For those who want to know where I got the BP name from, look here and scroll down 2/3 of the page.

We’re thinking of moving over to BT Internet. However, I would seriously be interested in hearing any bad stories about said service before any money changes hands. What hidden bits are there?

Experimented with very lo-fi online shopping at Island Spice and was very impressed. 59p a bag and they arrived in four days, postage paid. You have to print out the order form and, using a pen, tick the spices you want, and then, using an envelope, post the order off with a cheque. How innovative! This could be the future!

The News of the World paedophile listing has riled me, but this article says it more eloquently that I could. Shame it’s in the Guardian. If only the rest of the press would take this line…

From a tip from Jez I’m trying a second tracking service, the subtly named eXTReMe Tracking.

This cowboy thing is getting better. Frank and Tom Mclaury - “together they had eleven children”. Multiple male pregancies in the Old Wild West! The mind boggles!

Weird cowboy shit, and check out the music!

Playing about with Ditto.com, an image search engine, I entered Tom+Hart to find stuff on said cartoonist and was presented with this list of images. Lots of cowboys, an estate agent, a map and one of Tom’s panels saying I’ll take any of you on! at the bottom. Nice!

Tom Hart’s site

Figured out style sheets (pretty easy really) and hopefully sorted out the Javascript errors some of you were getting. It was the fault of the tracking service (or rather my bad copying of their scripts) that was the culprit.

Radio 2 continues to surprise. I’m currently listening to Mark Lamarr sitting in for Jonathan Ross and it’s very good radio. Whether this is me getting old or Radio 2 re-positioning itself to my era I’m not so sure, but Mark is currently chatting to Billy Bragg and playing The Small Faces. Perfect Saturday afternoon listening.

Bookseller news (the rest of you can ignore this): The boy Evers is leaving! Stuart has gotten a job at Macmillan as some kind of assistant editor! Leaving do on August 4th.

Started reading up on DHTML so I can get cracking on this style sheets malarkey, but I fell asleep. Not because of the book I hasten to add. I was genuinely tired. However, I was listening to a very experimental performance at the Proms on radio 3 which, as I was drifting off, was introduced as combining new technologies with classical music. The hallucinatory images of music within mark-up tags were most curious and will haunt me for days.

Today was spent epos training for work. A few months ago the company invested rather a lot of money upgrading their computer system but neglected to train anyone in how to use it properly. This is being rectified and having sworn and cursed the bloody thing I now know, at least theoretically, how to make it do what I want. A lesson learned there.

This doesn’t help with the cash tills though. We don’t have dedicated cash tills. We have a Wintel computer that pretends (or rather, “emulates”) a till. Which means it slow and prone to accusing you of doing things wrong when you did everything right.

(fascinating stuff eh?)

Apparently this is a photo from the set of Star Wars episode 2. I guess the hunger for empty hype has not left LucasFilm then.

Mildly amusing spoof here

On the notsosoft blog I came across a web tracking service, Stats4all.com who I’m now using to see how many of you buggers are looking at this site. God knows what they’re doing with all my info (why does a web service need my phone number? I gave a falsey) but it seems they’re happy to just give me banner adds to ignore on their site…

I’d be more than happy to hear if anyone knows of a better service though, as this is the first of it’s kind I’ve played with. I really want to know where people are coming from.

Matthew has done a brief biography on his site, and on it he links to Web Darts!

The Swedish James Kochalka fan site!

We finally made it to Tate Modern today. No queues but it was packed to the gills with people, leading one to speculate that all this “open access to the arts” is a nice idea in principle, but in practice…

It’s weird being surrounded by amazing and important works of art yet at the same time having the urge to get the hell out. We shall try again on a Friday or Saturday night when the gallery closes at 10.00pm. We might actually have a chance to look at something from a distance of more than a foot. Or failing that wait a few months until the masses have a new toy to lay with.

Ooh, I love being a cultural snob!

Looking on Goggle I noticed that BugPowder, while bottom of the list, is judged to be nearly as “important” as Diamond and Last Gasp, based on their “patent-pending PageRank technology” which judges not only how many links there are to a site but the “importance” of those linkers (if you get me…). So, who in the world of “important” sites is linking to me?

More seriously, if you have linked to BugPowder, could you let me know so I can reciprocate the favour. Ta.

Simon Gurr, who readers of my old fanzine Vicious will know as “the guy who did the Dredd article-strip”, emailed today, which was nice as I hadn’t heard from him in an age. His site is rather slight at the moment (he’s thinking of animating said strip for it, btw) but has a nice flash entry for a Swatch competition.

It for that Internet Time concept which is apparently Swatch’s attempt to brand internet time and make us all use their clock rather than the 07:15:16 -0500 thing that happens currently. A nasty idea. Thankfully it doesn’t look like it’s getting off the ground as anything more than a publicity stunt, but beware and oppose it.

Well, it wasn’t me but some other member of this household who was looking at uglypeople.com but you’ll never guess who was found there.

Boris Johnson! Public school arse and editor or the Spectator (in that order).

Well, I never!

Been busy the last few days redesigning focalplane.com, the sister site to BugPowder which houses my dad’s photography and writing. This has my first experiments with the wonders of Javascript. Woo!

I’ll be starting work on the new BugPowder site on Thursday. Tomorow I go swimming. Yes, really. Swimming.