Tonight I finally got back to the chicken-scratchings (read: notes for a piece) I started on when I first got the digital piano a few weeks ago (interrupted by too much work, then too much dead mouse, then too much anti-work depression) and much to my surprise, I think it's actually heading in some not too hideous direction. But it's becoming too sprawly (after 5 bars) to do very much more at the piano, so tonight I hoiked it into Finale and cleaned it up and adjusted and added another couple of bars. And what a brain-strain that was - haven't really used Finale in - ouch! about a year and a half, so have forgotten how to do, well, pretty much anything. Tomorrow I must print out the list of keyboard shortcuts. Seriously thinking about buying a MIDI interface for the piano very soon too. And a printer so I don't have to keep hassling the poor flatmate. My my, the list of things to purchase just never ends, does it?

Got a new CD over the weekend - the boy bought me the soundtrack to O brother, where art thou, which is one of my favourite films ever, as a belated Valentine's Day gift cos he couldn't be here for the day itself. He's such a sweetie - and he knows me so well :-)

On Sunday I decided to bite the bullet, be brave and go forth and Make New Friends by joining in the London flickr group's February meetup in Islington. I'm very glad I did - they're a fun bunch, and I'll definitely go to more. It was a very grey day, however, but perfect for a bit of an experiment I've been meaning to do for a while now - going monochrome. I decided to spend the day shooting only in monochrome (which on my camera means sepia rather than black & white - I'm not sure why Sony did that...). It was an interesting excercise - I found myself focusing more on textures and contrast more than colours, which gave a whole different way of considering potential subject matter. It was interesting too to see what worked and what didn't. I'll definitely try that again sometime.

Also been doing a bit more cooking, which I've been meaning to be braver about (brave because of lack of beloved KitchenAid heavy-duty stand mixer) and finally tried out one of the recipes in my Dandoy Biscuits cookbook which I brought back from Brussels the last time we were there. I was quite proud of myself really because I pretty much managed to work out the recipe without the aid of a dictionary. I did check a few things, but mostly my guesses were right (the main exception being that what I translated as "a soup spoon" was actually "a tablespoon") so I felt rather chuffed. The recipe I made was "Le cookie" - chocolate chip cookies - and one hell of a mixture, I can tell you - you need muscles like a prize fighter to mix it all up (200g of butter! 400g of assorted sugars! half a kilo of flour!) but it turned out absolutely superb in the end - and so much mixture! I only baked up about a third of it, which made about 20 large cookies, and have frozen the rest in 2 batches to see if it will make good refrigerator cookies. Cross fingers! If it will, that would be awesome because I don't think I have my usual refrigerator cookie recipe here with me. Anyway, fortunately the flatmate is doing sterling work with helping to eat them. I'm just trying not to eat too many... could be fatal!

"You want me to focus? At a time like this??"

# posted by minim @ 10:36 PM 0 Comments

Still reading this book on Dada and surrealism (well, I guess that's not too surprising as I only started talking about it yesterday), and into a section where they're talking about contrasting techniques between the two. It's interesting that this book doesn't mention music at all (except for a brief reference to John Cage when talking about chance processes), so I was reading about the different techniques used by Dada artists and having a think about Satie's music and wondering what sort of direct connections can be made between pieces like the Musique d'ameublement and collage techniques. Might have to research this a little further and see what I find.

Odd that there are no composers (that I've ever noticed) connected with surrealism, but I guess their return to more traditional media such as oil painting perhaps was not so conducive to musical creation... then again, maybe the equivalent in music to surrealism was atonalism - new mode of expression, old formal structures... hmm... this requires further thought and research, methinks... probably complete poppycock and I'll be hugely embarrassed to come across this post in the future. Um.

# posted by minim @ 12:04 AM 0 Comments

I hate that I hate my job. Well, I should probably qualify that - I hate 90% of my job, and I hate that the fact that I'm so bored with the 90% I hate that it affects how productive I am in the 10% I actually enjoy. On a positive note, though, I have discovered the source of my dislike, and in so doing have discovered a little something about myself - which is that I don't like wasting my time doing things which in no way improve whatever it is I'm working on.

The 90% project is a classic example because at least 60% of that 90% is spent on fixing things and doing things the long way because the tools which have been developed for us to use don't work properly and somehow it seems impossible for anyone to actually fix them. The remaining 40% sucks because we don't help people to do a better job of their jobs, or make it easier or faster for them to do their jobs - we don't teach them anything, we just change things slightly, thereby ultimately actually making their jobs a little harder.

I don't mind boring work, so long as it improves... something, anything. But boring work that just supports the status quo or even makes it worse for someone just makes me mad. And depressed. Which kills morale. Which means that even though I have two really interesting projects at the moment, I can't pull myself together enough to work on them, even though I want to and they're both for people I admire and (needless to say) will make things better (although possibly not easier :-) for a whole bunch of people.

Here endeth the rant.

I've been wanting to post for a while, but was trying to avoid the rant, but I guess it's better to rant and be done with than to keep bottling up said rant until it becomes a rank rant. Hmm.

*insert quick change of mood in a telephone booth*

I've been reading an awesome book lately which I bought myself at the Tate Modern after perusing their current permanent collection hanging of dada and surrealist work. The book is Dada and surrealism: A very short introduction and is quite an eye-opener. I've known a little bit about both movements and have been fascinated by them for quite some time now, but it's great to see their development and interests placed side by side for comparison.

I wondered when I first started studying Erik Satie why it was that he was involved in dada and not surrealism - his work seemed to match very well with the little I knew about surrealist art that it seemed a bit odd that he didn't follow through. After reading even the introduction to this book, the reason opened right up - after the relative anarchy of dada, surrealism was more of a proper movement, more structured, more rules - everything, in short, that Satie was against. On top of that the book outlines different political agendas, their approaches to publicity and all sorts of apparently peripheral but in reality integral elements to both movements. Fascinating.

I totally love London. I knew I would, but I really, really, really love it in a way that I never could love Sydney, or even Melbourne. I took three days off work the week before last (boy, was that a long time ago) and mostly spent it in art galleries. Day 1 was the Tate Britain (cool Hogarths, awesome Stanley Spencers and interesting Turners), Day 2 the National Gallery (oddly taken with the Degas - I didn't expect that; also my vote for the best hot chocolate in London), Day 3 the Tate Modern. I love that there are three such awesome galleries in the one city (and they're just the big ones!) and that you could spend so many, many hours there. Drop in the droolworthy V&A and the British Museum on top of that and you might never emerge.

One thing that particularly amazed me was the fact that the Tate Modern are in the process of rehanging their permanent collection - they're actually rotating the artworks so you see different things they have in their vaults! I don't think the AGNSW have done this since the dawn of time - every time I go it's the same Jeffrey Smart (don't get me wrong, I adore Jeffrey Smart), the same Robert Klippel (if you've been, you'll know the one - the wooden lady in the tub of spikes), the same bits and pieces over and over again. Thank God for the temporary exhibits. But I guess this also explains why I never went very often.

So I got all worked up and ended up buying myself some art materials - some aquarelle pencils (because often in museums you either can't take photos or can only take them without the flash) and some lovely charcoal pencils which were on sale. Unfortunately, these sorts of purchases only lead to Attempts at Art. Oh dear.

Why have 63 people looked at this in the 4 days since I posted it? Why have 2 people I don't really know very well faved it? Why?? Why???

I also bought books of walks, which I am wont to do from time to time. I took the boy out into the country to do the Cookham walk, which brings me to another reason why I love London - for the princely sum of £9 and an hour's travel (if you don't count the hour we had to wait in Maidenhead), we were entirely out of the city and walking across fields of turnips, looking at cows and wide open countryside, then deep into woods and far from anything. Absolutely amazing. We saw Stanley Spencer's house on our way through Cookham, but got hopelessly lost at the end of the wood because the path had changed and we had to go in a completely different direction. All marvellously enjoyable though, and we ended up in Marlow (not even on the map in the book :-) where we had a delicious pub dinner (parsnip & cheese soup, followed by steak & chips. mmmm) and hopped back on the train to London. Nothing like this exists in Australia - everything's too far spread out - both the cities and the countryside - to walk from one village to another in Australia is an all day hike, in general - here it's a gentle stroll of an hour. Just glorious. Ahhhh!

# posted by minim @ 10:30 PM 0 Comments

I'm thinking I should post more code snippets here because the number of clever JavaScript things I worked out in my last job was considerable, but because they were all stored in our inhouse knowledgebase, they all got lost when I left. Silly me without the forward-planning whatsit.

So, here's the latest. It's not quite done yet (still doesn't work well in Opera) but I'm going to come back and work on that and see if I can't get it to function properly there too. What you are about to see is...

Update, 25 April 2006: I've now fixed the code to be cross-browser across all the major browsers around at the moment. Find the updated code in "The amazing whole-cell link - part 2"

The amazing whole-cell link

To start with, here's what it does (unless you're browsing with Opera, in which case it doesn't):

First up, make your link in the div that you want to be entirely linked:

<div class="outer">
<a href="x" class="stretchylink">Link this</a>
</div>

then do your styles:

<style type="text/css">
.outer {
border: 1px solid #cc0000;
padding: 0px; //the padding will go on the link, not the box
width: 120px;
height: 45px;
}
a.stretchylink {
width: 112px;
height: 37px;
_width: 100%; //hack for IE
_height: 100%; //hack for IE
padding: 4px; //makes the space between your text and the box edges
display: block;
}
.stretchylink:hover {
background-color: #cc0000; //sets the hover colour for the whole-cell link
}
</style>

So there you go. I haven't been able to test it on a Mac at all, so could be oddness there - if you find that, please let me know which browser & version and I'll add it to my testing list for when I get access to a Mac.

# posted by minim @ 9:44 PM 0 Comments