Art and photography. I’m sorry. There is an excuse, but how much of a valid one you think it is, I’m not that bothered. I’ve been busy. Trying to configure a Vista machine at work, then migrating all the data of the old XP machine, reformatting and doing a blank install on that machine, then copying all the data from my XP machine to the old XP machine, and I can take mine home and install Linux again.

Confused?

You should be. I’ve planned this out. I should be sleeping, I was up at 6am and I’m up early tomorrow to go to the beach. But how long is a piece of string? It’s my 3rd month with my girlfriend, and I’m doing something a little special for her. So I’ve no time at the weekend.

What did you see today? I saw a few things of personal interest, I saw things coming to fruition, I saw my girlfriend (that nearly killed me on my bike), I saw blues skies and dark clouds on the same day.
In detail:
Things of personal interest. I went into the local art shoppe and had a mooch around. Noticed some rather expensive watercolours, some fine drawing pencils, and something caught my eye: A dipping pen. I have loved calligraphy since I really got interested in fountain pens, and have recently been seen in local stationers looking at cheap calligraphy sets. It’s a dirty habit, and one I must stop. However, this caught my eye because the nibs were relatively cheap, although I couldn’t get a price on the actual pen shaft itself.
Things coming to fruition. Today saw my training manual for the Content Management Systems nearly into final drafts, ready to be ported into Indesign, ready for printing and binding. That’s been a long road. The other long road has been trying to get domains mapped for one of our clients. They already own a lot of domains, and needed them all to point to the same site. That’s been the long and tedious tech road. It’s nearly over.
I saw my girlfriend. We’d had a bit of an ‘apart’ weekend, not in a a bad way, but in a ‘because of circumstances’ way. So I made the effort after work to get the ol’ mountain bike out and cycle a total of around 14 miles to see her. It was worth it. We had a dinner together, sat and chatted. I really shouldn’t have had so much food, as I felt quite ill on the way back. It was good though. I’ll be seeing her again tomorrow evening.
Finally, I saw blue skies and dark clouds in the same day. Lunchtime saw some fantastic weather as I mooched around town, yet the middle of the afternoon saw some horrendous dark clouds. I almost thought that it might have rained off this evening, but thankfully the dark clouds disappeared.
So those were a few things I saw today. What do you see?

I was trawling my favourite writing-based forum (fountainpennetwork) and found this:
http://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=37221 - it just goes to show you how strange people can get when fountain pens get a hold on you…

I am bored this evening. I’ve written some poetry about the setting sun. I should read some poetry to inspire myself in this artform.

Anyway, I’ve been on the fountain pen forums, namely foutainpennetwork, and just fantasizing about pens I can’t afford. There are a couple of ‘fantasy’ pens, a couple of ‘nice’ pens, and some ‘I can afford this’ pens too.
Fantasy pens include a Namiki Bamboo, but at £169, it’s not cheap. The other is a Nakaya Urushi Cigar Piccolo, an awesome pen of beauty, but that’s in the range of $3-400. The problem is, even though these are luxury pens, I would write with them every day.
Nice pens include the Lamy 2000. Nice designer style pen.
‘I can afford them’ pens are mainly Rotring Core’s (I love the Rotring’s, but I only have a rollerball), and Tombow Objects, in almost all the colours. I wouldn’t mind one of the modern Parker 45’s.
So there we go. I’m a pen addict too. I love to journal, and I guess blogging is another variant of the blog. But I will journal more personal things than what I blog, and keep the blog to the varying things that make my life interesting. Plus providing links to all the tech stuff I learn too.

It’s a lovely evening out there. I’m sat in front of my laptop at home, with a curtain stopping me from being blinded by the sunlight. Crazy.

I’m planning a couple of changes to my PC at work, a new case, restructure some of the internals and I’ve been looking up PC cases. Now I’m planning on leaving the laptop and doing some writing, possibly some poetry, as my girlfriend loves that kind of thing, and I haven’t written anything noteworthy for a while. Maybe this is the creative thing I need. I’ve discovered fountain pens, a great tool for writing, far better than a rollerball, ballpoint or even a pencil, and there’s a feeling of quality that comes to a piece of written word in fountain pen ink.

So that’ll be my evening, unless my parents call by and want me to fix their pc. Hope not. It didn’t boot, so it may still not be booting up. Ahh.. The life of an ubergeek.

So here’s something I wrote about 8 years ago…

‘Without You’

I can do without this.
Tension, gripping me like a vice,
Consuming what I am, who I am,
I’m dazed. Confused, I don’t know which way to turn.
So I turn to You.

I know I’ve done it wrong again,
I’ve been there before.
You’ve found me there, filled with the tension,
of being hurt, lost, lonely, but still lovely,
In Your loving sight.

You’ve seen it all before, many times in my past,
So why do I hide in shame?
I know You knew me from the start,
And will until the very end,
Also through all the times between.

Where do I go in times of trouble,
To You, my true friend, companion and saviour,
You lift me from the hassle and tension,
Show me a different way through it all,
And Your love shines my way.

Monday.

I’ve been back to work for an hour and I’m going round the twist. I’m trying to configure our computers to share my localhost web server so we can show websites from any machine in our network. You’d think this way easy.

Also, we need a webcam capable of showing pencil drawings over a network - again, not easy.

Finally, Vista is coming. Do I know anything about Vista? No - I’m primarily a Linux boy.

Yesterday when I went shopping I had a moment of madness. I always feel somehow I can be more creative, do something artistic. I’ve done poetry, creative writing, and photography, but never felt any great satisfaction. I am a visual person by nature, and have always had a desire to do something visually artistic.
So there I am, in this shop and I spy a watercolour set. I look at it. It’s reduced in price by quite some amount, and I pick it up. I also purchase some extra watercolour paper, pay for it and leave.
I know it’s madness, it will take me some time to re-acquire and gain new skills. I am looking forwards to creating some art.
All I need now are some more brushes, probably some decent sable ones. A lot of time and lot of patience. I may even scan some results for people to look at online. I could create a separate gallery page and have my photography and paintings there.

Sad news today. Nemo, my last surviving Cosby Gourami, has died. He was named Nemo due to an unusual affliction which would periodically affect his right front fin, meaning he would have to swim using only his left, much like the Clownfish in ‘Finding Nemo’.

Nemo was aged approximately 3 years old. I had never expected him to survive for long with this infection, and became very used to it happening.

It is sad to see the end of the fishtank, as he was the last inhabitant, but it now means that the 4′ fishtank can now be started. I don’t have much room, and it is a case of the 2′ or the 4′. It’s going to be a bit of a long term project, as funds don’t allow for much. The great thing about this is that you can’t stock a tank quickly, it has to be done progressively.

Yes, at last, the weekend has landed. The weather was ok, so me and a friend went out mountain biking for the first time in a couple of months. We rode a trail that skirts round the edge of one of the local mountains, but goes up high enough so there’s a decent downhill the other side of it.
After recovery from that, I popped into town and spotted my girlfriend. She had been to the library to get some books. Reading is helping her to relax quite a lot so it’s good she had a few more books to get through.
Now I am waiting for my father to ring so I can go up and visit them. I also have an ulterior motive in that a training course I have written needs to be proof-read and tested for clarity. So it’s vital that is done this weekend, as I can then make revisions next week and have it all ready for the following week.
I’m enjoying using Wordpress, it’s a good system, fairly extensible, but my only issue is the whole tag thing. Categories cannot be accessed from a cloud, it’s a checkbox list that is more annoying the larger amount of Categories you have. As this is a new blog, it’s not going to have much, but I know over time it will have many many more.

And it comes when I should be nicely tucked up in bed…

Just going to do a little to-do list:

• Tweak the header image - scan a photo from my collection.
• Get the exported database of all my old blogger entries imported.
• Eat the rest of the pack of Cheddars.
• Add more functionality to the site.
• Define the site’s aims and objectives in a couple of separate pages.
• Scan the rest of my photo’s and have a download page.
• Go to bed so I can get up and go mountain biking.