peteashtondotcom

Currently I’m in Banbury, Oxfordshire, staying with my sister Lucy and her husband Jeff in their new house for a week. The main reason for being here (other than to visit) is to work on their garden so that when I get to the farm in a fortnight I’m not completely soft and crap. This has already proved itself to be a good idea.

Woke up at 9.00 and by 10.00 was in the garden with Lucy talking about what they want to do. I happened to watch for the first time the television program Home Front last week and, for my sins, it struck a chord. The plan is to dig two vegetable patches and a flower bed, and then construct a new section of fence to give some privacy - today was just a digging day.

After an hour of digging up the turf of the first patch, I stopped for a cuppa and read my book. Soon I was fast asleep. On waking at 2.00pm I had some lunch and dug the other bed and half the patch. At first I didn’t think to use gloves and now have a large stigmata on my right palm, with a matching blister on the left. I’m also completely knackered, which is why this entry is somewhat less than inspired.

It will get better, that much I’m sure of, and already I’m enjoying it. But right now I just want to sleep.

The PC is going into storage tonight. I will have computer access for the next fortnight, first at my sister’s in Banbury, and then at my mum’s in Winchester, but this is the last post from London.

I’ll probably be going for a quiet drink tonight. If you’re at a loose end and have my mobile number, feel free to text me!

Last Christmas I went to my mate Graham’s flat for the day and had dinner with an Brian,. an American warblogger, although he said he didn’t like the phrase applied to what he does any more. But he definitely blogs from a political perspective. While we were introduced to each other with a “hey, you’re both bloggers!” we found the only blog we both knew about was good ol’ Doc, an exception with proves the rule. Doc’s quite political but has also been involved in the net for a long time (he co-wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto, required reading for anyone thinking of making money online).
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Revolution is not an AOL Keyword* (via Jez)

FreeFilter is a free open source version of the stuff that powers MetaFilter. Interesting…

Dear diary. Bush still doesn’t ‘get it. I tried making my feelings clear but he’s too busy ignoring me, he is such a jerk. Everything in his life is just Saddam, Saddam, Saddam and I am sick of it.

On the plus side, I think my hair looked pretty good today. Also I went frolicking at Paektu Mountain and the rainbow came out again. After dinner some of my subjects sang me a song because I invented Outer Space.

Much funnier than it should be, especially the IM conversations between him and GWB.
(via MeFi)

If you’ve been following the date-stamps on my posts over the last few days you’ll know that my sleep patterns have gone all hat-stand again. No job, no structure, a computer - all to be expected and it’s not worrying me. I know that in a couple of weeks I’ll be on the farm with no possibility of sleeping in or staying up all night, so I’m kinda enjoying it for the last time in a while.

That said, I’ve been trying to correct it before the weekend by staying awake all night and then keeping myself going through the day. Unfortunately it normally ends up with going to bed at a reasonable hour and then sleeping for 12-14 hours straight, but no matter.

Anyway, what happened today was I decided to watch a movie. Digging through my old collection of tapes I found Miller’s Crossing taped off the telly years ago. On the same tape following it directly is Barton Fink. Half an hour into Miller’s Crossing I fall asleep. I’m woken up by a phone call a few hours later, by which time Barton Fink is about half way through. As well as both being Cohen Brothers movies they also share a lot of the cast. John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, okay, at least two. And I got Judy Davis and Marcia Gay Garden confused for a while there And those three (or two and two halves) just happened to be on screen when I fell asleep and when I woke up. Very confusing!

As eyes of the world focus on Iraq, the rest of the world’s hotspots get hotter - a good reminder and summary that there are other fucked up things going on the world. Remember Kashmir? It looks like it’s all kicking off again…

I’ve installed Gallery on this site here. Nothing there at the moment - it’s for photos from the farm. It was great fun installing it. Took me right back to installing MT what with all that telneting blind.

The Guardian’s Online section has a good selection of Warblogs today. I’m particularly taken by Stuart Hughes’ Northern Iraq Weblog. As a BBC reporter in Iraq he not only writes about the events going on but links to articles he’s reading and posts up photos taken on the ground.

I am at a loose end this week, or what?

Loosen the lips and blow:

Another place Dave C and I went to on our long wander around London was the Playlounge toy shop. Aparently (and this ain’t confirmed) it related to the Magma bookshop chain, and it definitely has this feel about it, as well as sharing some of the stock range. Progressive in it’s outlook, sharp in it’s design and lovely to be in. Soundbite would be “it’s like one of those toy shops with trays of stuff priced at 10-50p, only here they’re priced from £5 to £50″.

What I liked about it was all the stuff in there was stuff I’d love to have but would only be interested in for five minutes. So I’m able to have the stuff in my hands for five minutes without actually owning any of it. Result!

It’s on Beak Street, off the bottom end of Carnaby St. Well worth half an hour of your time.

I’ve taken the plunge and eabled TrackBack on this site. Like XML before it, it was one of those things that I’d been aware of for a while but never quite gotten my head round. Thankfully, I don’t really need to understand how it works too much. This beginner’s guide from the MT kids helped somewhat.

Where Have All The Muslims Gone? asks Angieji, an American school teacher who’s noticed her middle-eastern pupils and their families are vanishing without warning. Whether she’s right or wrong to be worried, it’s something that needs to be asked. After the US government rounded up Japanese-Americans in WWII for ‘homeland security’, what’s being done this time?

via Andy R. Update: more background on MeFi.

First up, Dave noticed that the central supports for the Hungerford Bridge look like squids. Never noticed that myself before:

Cypherpunk’s Mixed Bag is a blog that looks like it done by someone in India, or an Indian living elsehwere. Unclear from the text but they’re part of the Indian Bloggers webring.

Anway, it’s a current affairs blog, obviously war based at the moment, and I found it quite readable and offering a fresh perspective.

Anyone know of other non-American, non-European blogs, specifically talking about the war?

[Update 27/3] Just read through it again and I now don’t find it readble or offering a fresh perspective. I find it the mirror of tedious pro-Bush, pro-war blogs. Methinks the desire to find a non-Western POV blinded me somewhat. Sigh…

Just realised why I’m getting so many hits from people searching for Salam’s blog. Typo. Oh, how we laughed….

Today Dave C came up to London and, in the middle of a very enjoyable stroll around the centre, we popped into Forbidden Planet on New Oxford Street on a whim. On a bigger whim we had a look around their huge “toy” section, half taking the piss and half gasping in amazement at the range of… things… on sale. Then, on the way out, we saw this cabinet of Action Man-style figures of famous soldiers, fictional and non.

Done a new about page for the site. Not happy with it.

Here’s an idea. I want everyone who knows me to write a paragraph for an about page for this site. Put them in the comments section. Nothing gushy and nothing too sarkey - just things you think might be of interest. I reserve the right, as ever…

Came across Gareth’s Modern Life is Rubbish weblog while looking for stuff about those Anti-Esso Poems On The Underground that have been cropping up of late, and while he does mention them the blog as a whole looks pretty keen. I’d keep an eye on it if I was staying in blog land. But I’m not. So you’ll have to.

Just completed the templates for the new Farmblog. Normally I’d just unleash it on you and tweak it once everyone complains, but the first time this comes into play I won’t be around to fix it. So, does it work in your browser and/or does it make sense? Feedback please.

For the techies out there, it’s one of the standard MT templates with some tweaking off the style sheet, mainly the colours.

As blogging becomes ever more widespread and new applications of the format and software increase in their variety, there is perhaps a need for a catch all phrase for weblogs that have what we can call a traditional look and operation. Therefore I propose the phrase tradblog.

In my personal case, I am about to run my farmblog which will not be a weblog in many respects: it doesn’t relate to the web in any way, it won’t be published regularly and won’t even run in reverse chronological order. So when describing my web publishing enterprises I can say currently I run my farmblog, but I ran a tradblog for a good three years before that.

Tradblog. You know it makes sense.

Now that the Guardian and other mainstream news sources have picked up on Salam Pax’s blog it looks like it’s tipped over into the general consciousness. I was wondering where comments like the first to this post on this site were coming from, and it appears that peteashton.com is quite highly ranked when you search for certain combinations of salam, dear, raed and blog.

While this is a nice thing in some respects it does mean my site is about to be inundated by redneck, blinkered opinion jockeys unable do anything but troll and rant. So please don’t feed them.

Sometimes I think Google is something of a curse.

Everything’s okay on the Raed front. Interesting comparing his observations of Baghdad with the journalists’.

Doc’s wondering about “Embedded” reporters, something which had crossed my mind of late:

Here’s a question: Should the “embedded” adjective serve as a disclaimer for possibly biassed coverage? Is it misleading for a journal or a broadcast service to say a reporter is “with” rather than “embedded with” some cavalry or brigade?

Interesting, this w.bloggar thing. It’s a desktop Windows application for writing weblog posts offline. Should prove useful for getting my farm blog posts ready without using up the dial-up. Let’s see if it works!

I’m having great trouble planning the web format for Volume Three of my online blogging thing. Which is not only to be expected - I haven’t started it yet - but also probably a good thing. So I’m using this post to try and bash out a few ideas.
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I’m now up to eight photos on the Mirror Project.

As you might have noticed, I’ve been tweaking the main page quite a bit lately, gearing up for a major redesign over the next couple of weeks. Since I’m off to the farm without a computer, entries are going to be longer and more sporadic, very different to the current weblog.

In other words, Volume Three is about to start. Quite excited about this! The only thing I wonder is, will it still be a weblog, or should I call it a journal? Oh, the semantics of it all are so vexing…