Pete Ashton’s Blog

I’m going to take a month off from journal-blogging (or whatever you call it - meblogging?) partly because I just can’t think of anything to write about at the moment, and while I know that’s not a problem worth worrying about it’s niggling at the back of my brain and potentially stopping me doing other stuff (for if I can’t blog then what can I do?) But also, partly, because it just seems like a nice idea. In January I’ll come back and for the first time in four and a half years there’ll be a gap in the monthly archives which will never be filled. I like that notion.

Though I’m not really going away. The Linklog (main page, left) and mp3blog (main page, right) will continue to run, as will my Flickr “stream” (should I actually take any photos). I’ll be posting to BugPowder and maybe even TRS2 along with the usual scattering of comments elsewhere. And of course there are the archives (main page, left, down a bit), though you’ll no doubt not bother with them. Why should you when there are so many other blogs around? I know I wouldn’t.

See you in January then. Have a good one.

All this email spam for Rolex watches is just so retro. They’ll be spamming for 8-tracks next.

Had something of a the writers block this last week, which happens. Often. I did go see The Incredibles and recommend it to everybody for all the reasons you’ve already heard. Monologuing… Heh… And I got that fluey virus that just everybody who’s anybody has been having of late which was kinda annoying because apathy, lack of motivation and a sniffle are just such unusual symptoms for me.

Agency work has been minimal - two days last week, one day this week - and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get better before the new year so I’ve taken the plunge and done a Hire Me page. I’ve got a couple of leads for some web design work and now I’ve got something to show them. This could prove rather effective as a week or so of web-work will garner the same cash as a month of temping and I’m sure, if it pans out, I’ll look back and wonder why I didn’t do it earlier. And then I’ll remember the apathy and lack of motivation…

Anyway, let me know what you think of the page (by email rather than in the comments please).

When I wasn’t virusing I bashed together Imagesmith, a little site for my mate Kath who’s making a go of freelance photography. It was quite an interesting experience as she didn’t like my original idea and I didn’t like her idea and because she’s a mate I told her so, but eventually we went with her idea, because it’s her site, with a few of my ideas in the mix and I think it’s worked out okay. The back-end was fun to play with, integrating Javascript rollovers with Movable Type. I’ll maybe write it up later.

And also on the webmaster side I moved my mum’s Yoga site over to a new domain because we’d been meaning to for a while but mainly due to her free OneTel webspace had become FTP-inaccessible for some reason OneTel can’t figure out and the info thereon was getting out of date. The only problem is Google still loves the old site and despite indexing the new one hasn’t ranked it so high. So if you have a weblog that Google likes and want to do my mum a favour…

This happened a couple of weeks ago and I forget to mention it. At work I was stuck with this annoying guy. He wasn’t annoying in a really bad way, but I wasn’t looking forward to working with him for another day. He had that inane chatty thing going on and after a while the desire to shout “oh, shut the fuck up!” was overwhelming. And it wasn’t me being in a bad mood or anything - I’d been having a really interesting chat with this Pakistani kid about all manner of stuff - this guy was just a jerk. Towards the end of the day it emerged that he was from Zimbabwe so in an attempt to maybe have an interesting conversation I brought up the subject of Robert Mugabe. Bad move. He starts ranting about how all the Zimbabwean exiles and asylum seekers are “fakers” who are “lying”. However, he offers no proof (or if he does it’s garbled with incoherence) and a prejudice is settling in my mind. You see, I don’t really have a strongly held opinion about Zimbabwe. I know the situation there is pretty fucked and that Mugabe is if not a bad man then certainly a certifiable nut-job, but in my limited experience of African politics these things are much more complicated than they first appear with many historical post-colonial factors and so on. However, what this jerk didn’t know is that a while back I was working with another Zimbabwean who was in exile enjoying asylum in this country. Only this guy was not a jerk. We talked about stuff including his strong desire to “go home” at some point and when the job finished we went to the pub.

So, based on this limited experience I’m falling in with the opposition. I know this is somewhat glib decision on what for some people is a very important issue, but this guy was such a toss-bag, y’know?