Pete Ashton’s Blog

We just had the maddest sky here in Bournville tonight.

It’s been humid and hot all day today, not in a terribly oppressive way, just like the weather wants you to be aware of it in a gentle prodding kind of manner. A thunderstorm kicked off about 6pm but must have been really localised because everything on ground level was glowing in the evening sun. Naturally there was a rainbow, a double one that what completely visible from end to end. We thought that was the highlight but we were wrong.

The storm clouds moved off to the south but really slowly given that we’ve had no wind all day. To the north of the flat the sun was setting into blue skies, blasting its dying beams directly into the dark clouds which reflected them onto the brickwork of Bournville. It was quite magical.

And then in the last few minutes of daylight this happened.

Wowzers…

After that nightmare of upgrading this site to MT 3.2 where they’d fixed all the little bugs that I’d previously assumed were how things worked and have provided the most complex default templates ever css-wise and a comments structure that needs some serious meditation to get your head around (and still isn’t working on the Linklog and Podcast sections), well, I’m kinda at a loss for something to write about that isn’t fucking tedious and boring. Actually, I probably will write about this experience soon but only once I’ve figured out a way to make it interesting. I think I’ve got the angle but it needs work.

Anyway, today was a return to Moseley for the first time since the tornado last month. It was kinda weird in that there’s still a lot of scarring - trees roughly butchered back, roofs still half-tiled and workmen absolutely everywhere - but otherwise quite normal.

I was there for some post-tornado work myself. Jez and Nat were replacing their fence which had be crushed by a big tree and since I painted it last year it made a perverse kinda of sense for me to paint it again. Plus I’m absurdly available for odd-jobs at the moment.

It being a stunningly lovely day it was really good to be out in the sun getting mucky again. I miss these kind of jobs. I occasionally think about moving the huge pile of bricks at the end of the drive a few feet to the left just for the hell of it and then moving them back to the right the next day. I wonder if this constitutes a problem.

In the pub on Saturday, along with demanding the right to punch old ladies who let their dogs shit on the pavement (with the wonderful mental image of his dog Badger “sweating bullets” because he’s been trained not to shit while on a lead), Jez had talked about “contributing to the hobby deficit” or something which seems to be related to the mass of niche things that have proliferated in this country of late. Stuff like Carp Fishing magazines in high street shops and model railway museums. When he mentioned today he was still thinking about it, it occured to me that if this is a proliferation it’s might be because people, probably men mainly, don’t tend to have a speciality any more regarding their jobs, or at least not one they care about. If you’re some office drone entering data and processing invoices you may well have a desire to actually be good at something interesting, like driving a train or building furniture. So you have a hobby and get really really good at it.

Oddly enough I had a similar conversation with an old flatmate years ago about how, he theorised, hobbies were part of an ancient initiation right for boys who hadn’t made their first kill yet. Once your hunt an ox or kill an enemy then you’re accepted as an adult in the tribe. Before that you’re missing a purpose so you get really really good at something relatively inconsequential, like football statistics or comic book artists. Since we have a lot of blokes doing boring jobs they don’t care about which don’t give them the same sense of purpose as hunting an ox… Hey, I’ve just discovered the origins for the rise of the adultescent!

Someone, I think it was the professional fence-putter-upper, say the phrase “mad as an ox” today. Do oxen get mad? I always thought of them as pretty docile creatures that pull things like wagons. Checking in the dictionary the term refers to a castrated bull, which explains why I can’t remember ever seeing an on specifically. I’d just assumed they were docile bulls. Still, “mad as an ox” has a nice ring to it.

And then after painting it was over to ex-housemate Sam’s new flat, also in Moseley, to set up their bemusing WiFi router, which I did. Go me! Now she and Charlie can comment on each others LiveJournals and IM each other from separate rooms. That flat will henceforth be referred to as the “House of Squeeee” for that is the kind of LJers they are…

In other news I haven’t been reading any weblogs since Friday. No reason, but the catching up is getting a bit daunting (350 unread posts, not including linklogs). Hope everyone’s okay.

I think I’ve got my blog back…

If you’re upgrading to Movable Type 3.2 you should be okay unless you’ve got your own custom URL setup which uses MTEntryDate for the Monthly archives. In previous versions you could get away with this but seems they’ve fixed this anomaly, and rightly so, so you’ll need to change it to MTArchiveDate. Because this is a rather obscure use of the tag, probably only implemented by me and some guy in Bulgaria, the error messages won’t explain it properly and it’ll only be when you’ve decided to rebuild the whole site from scratch that you’ll figure out what’s going on.

But then rebuilding from scratch is never a bad idea. This site was getting a bit ragged, not that you’d notice but I was noticing. Three years of tinkering has left a lot of cruft about the place and some of those plugins I’d been using were a little bit rough to say the least.

So here we are. Spangly new design for the main page and weblog inspired by the inside-front-cover of a French comic I was reading (or rather, looking at the pictures of) - Il Pleut by Jean-Philippe Peyraud published by La Comedie Illustree, to give full credit. If it’s been translated into English since 1998 I’d like to know.

Most stuff in the new spangliness should be stable and working but there may well be “issues” and I’m aware of some tidying up that needs to be done in places. I’m also trying out a new comment spam prevention system which seems far too simple to be true, so let me know if it’s acting like a surly bouncer on your asses.

And I’m not completely sold on this shade of beige, or whatever it is. #fffaee is what we’re currently using, feel free to suggest a close alternative.

I’ll hopefully give a full guide to the new features later. Or not. Maybe I’ll just let you figure it out.

(Not tested on IE / Windows yet. Some things can wait until morning. Works in IE / Windows now.)

I’m about to upgrade this site to MT 3.2. It’s a bit of a weird one because while I’m sure the basic procedure will be fine (and they’ve improved the upgrade system by all accounts) there are enough widgets and plugins I rely on that there’s a good chance things will go a bit screwy. So bear with me. All will be sorted by the end of the day. I hope.

Since Plinth have no web presence, nor it seems any strong desire for any form of publicity machine other than word of mouth, it’s up to me to inform the world that their second gig is later on this evening at the Flapper and Firkin in Birmingham. Here’s a map. It’s about £3.50 in for three bands. Plinth are headlining and should be on about 10pm. I should be getting there about eight-ish. Those of you who like teh rock should try to come along. You’ll like it.

Report from the last gig.