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These things are temporally subjective so don’t take this as a blanket dismissal but I’m getting bored with colour film. Yes, I’m mainly using expired stock put through unsuitable cameras but I have my digital Nikon for “proper” photo stuff. Maybe my love affair, however, brief, with expired film is over? I dunno.

What I do know is this photo, the original, I kinda like:

while this photo, monochromed with no other adjustments in Lightroom, I really fucking love:

So it’s Ilford all the way for the summer. Anyone got any Delta 3200 sitting around they don’t want? (yeah, right…) Actually, has anyone had any experience with Mailshots for buying film online? Their prices seem pretty good for when one can’t be arsed playing the eBay game.

The photo is of Bill Callahan playing at Academy 2 on Friday. Best gig in an age, especially as the crowd was sparse. Everyone was already at ATP I guess.

Camera nerd notes: shot was taken with an Olympus XA2, a pocket film camera favoured by pro photogs of days gone by as a backup for tight corners. It’s got a good lens and I like the 2sec exposure. It only meters down to ISO 800 but I stuck 1600 in for this shoot and it worked fairly well. I think 3200 might have been better though. I went with the XA2 because there’s no point trying to get an SLR in the Academy. I think I may well use it again.

No idea why it feels like Friday, and the realisation that it isn’t Friday isn’t a problem. It just feels like it for some reason.

Technically today was day 9 of the Moseley Leaflet Drop. Here’s where I’m at:

I reckon it’ll be finished tomorrow. Notable how I’ve subconsciously left Russell Road until last. This is the road in Moseley with the longest drives and the minimum of shortcuts between them. And it’s very long in itself. I didn’t deliberately leave it ’til last, it just happened that way.

In today’s exciting Pete News I’ve taken another step in the great MT > WP migration. The Linklog, which used to live over at peteashton.com/linkfarm because it was once called the Linkfarm but I changed my mind and never bothered redirecting the directory, has now been fully integrated into the blog. Look at the sidebar and glory at the months stretching all the way back to 2003. You might even be tempted to click on one and play Linkrot Roulette.

All the old URLs from the individual Linklog posts all redirect to their new homes, which is really just an exercise in seeing if it could be done. It can, but part of the solution was changing at the permalinks for month of April 2007. Where they were once 2007/04/name-of-post/ they are now 2007/04/name_of_post/ and there’s nothing I can do about it. Actually there is something I can do about it but I really can’t be arsed so I’m in denial. If you’ve linked to an individual post here in the last month that link will now be broken and you’ll end up at the incredibly useless 404 page which I really should sort out at some point. But I don’t think anyone has because I haven’t really written anything interesting of late. Okay, a quick look on Technorati shows a couple so apologies to them.

Possibly worth noting that while the whole process was vaguely tedious the only part where it really got on my tits and made me want to throw the bloody computer out of the window was while setting up a new template within Movable Type where it kept throwing up error messages for the MTEntryDate tag even when I removed that tag from the template. After an hour of tea and swearing and wishing I still smoked I realised it meant the MTEntryDate tag in the Archive Mapping settings which doesn’t matter for Individual Archives but throws a mad wobbly in the Daily ones. The only problem I had with WordPress was looking at the CiB templates and wondering why they didn’t match the Peteashton HTML pages for, ooh, at least 20 minutes.

What else… Oh, the archives are a bit tidier with the links / posts dichotomy consistent throughout. And that’s about it.

The next step is to import the actual blog posts and do the redirects for them. And then to get on with the job of making this place look like mine rather than a slightly mangled template. That header has to go for starters.

In other news I went to an awesome gig on Friday but was shooting film so you’ll have to wait until I get that back from the lab tomorrow before I tell you about it. In the meanwhile here’s a photo of a slug:

A month ago I did a short presentation at the Creative Industries Convention in Birmingham showing off the Created in Birmingham blog to about 200 people who were waiting to hear Ken Loach speak. I didn’t write about it at the time because I was still kinda ill and it took me a few days to recover but also because it was really weird and I didn’t know what to make of it. Still don’t really, but it looks like I’m doing another one, albeit not before such illustrious company.

The July Out of Hours networking event at the Light House in Wolverhampton will be about blogging and I’ll be on the panel. It’s on Monday 2nd July and I’m guessing runs from 5.30 to 7.30pm.

You might want to take this post as advance warning that naval-gazing posts about what blogging is may start to dominate this site. I’ll try to keep them to a minimum and flag accordingly.

I’m becoming acutely aware that there are a hell of a lot of unanswered emails on my computer, some related to the blogs, some of a more personal nature. You know you’re in trouble when you haven’t replied to your mum yet.

In short, all is good. Just busy with work. And the leaflet delivery, while progressing fine, is mildly exhausting.

For reasons too tedious to explain I’ve switched maps. Here’s where I’m at after six mornings. By my reckoning I’ve got another 4 morning to go. I might be behind schedule, I’m not sure. the left-hand “lung” is less dense but it covers a much wider area. Can I do it? Oooh, the tension.

I’m not much of a punctuation fascist, mainly because I often get it wrong myself, but quotes used for emphasis always amuses me. Check out this site picked unfairly because they’re by no means alone in this.

We can also offer a full ’script to screen’ digital production service using our ‘talent pool’ of creative professionals.

What this tells me is their talent pool isn’t actually a talent pool. It’s sort of like a talent pool, or at best what some people might call a talent pool but which we can’t legally describe as such, hence the quotes.

it’s like when a tabloid prints the headline “Trial of ‘Evil Pervert’ Starts”. They’re not saying he’s an evil pervert, just that someone has been quoted as saying such. Or when someone offers you a cup of coffee but they’ve only got decaf or that shitty powdery stuff that isn’t really coffee so they make quote signs with their fingers while saying “coffee”.

I get what they’re doing, but in a world where we have underline bold and italic why would you want to use quotes to ‘emphasise’? or am I missing something?

Last night found me at The Cross in Moseley for a performance by The Destroyers at an event organised by Jibbering Records, a record shop that survives the digital age by doubling up as the cultural nodal point for Moseley.

The gig was more than sold out. I think there might have been legal capacity issues. And everyone was into the band. Everyone. It was madness. Hot, sweaty insanity.

The Destroyers appear to be at that point where they need bigger venues, which is great for them but a bit of a shame as tonight the boundary between the band and the audience was blurred and it was a good thing. That said, I think they’d prefer a bigger stage.

Go see them soon.

(More photos)