A limp cheese sandwich and a public pee

I open the car door as far as it will go and step out in the expanse of space, saunter to the boot, put the buggy up and park it next to the car.  I swing the bear out and into his seat and we make the short walk from the mother and baby spaces to the lift.  The lift is light and bright, we press the button and head to the shops.

Typical as typical can be, we need a nappy change almost immediately but no problemo, a short trip up to the baby change in the nearest department store and we’re sorted.  We take advantage of the complimentary nappies and wipes, and I spend a penny quickly in the cubicle within the baby changing room.  There is plenty of room for Grandma to wait on the chair by the fresh flowers.

A few wide aisled shops later, with happy chatty shop assistants who contribute to entertaining the bear while we pay, and we’re ready for lunch.

We head to a department store we know and like, and choose a nice table by the window to people watch.  Plenty of space to park up the buggy, and a high chair arrives from a helpful staff member.

We choose fresh whole grain sandwiches with a variety of fillings for me, Grandma and the bear (who takes a mini sandwich selection from the kiddies section), as well as sticky cakes and cups of tea, with a smoothie for the bear.

What a lovely day.

Hold up, hold up….. (as they say in rap type songs before they reeee-wind).

Now I live in Oxford, and I don’t know about your home town, but this certainly isn’t a picture of my average shopping trip.

The car park has no mother and baby parking.  I usually scrape the door on a pillar as I try to get the bear out.  Once I had to get the car seat out and place it on the floor, then park the car after failing to get him out from a miniscule space.  And the lift stinks of wee.

Baby changing facilities are grotty and never have a toilet in them, so if you’re alone and need to go, you either have to cross your legs or go with the door ajar so you can see the baby.

When we stop for lunch, I balance my son on my knee while we try to eat.  Although large, the eatery we’ve chosen only has a small number of highchairs, all of which are taken.

Now, the main reason for this post – children’s food options in department stores.  Ooh yes I’d like the crayfish and rocket on rye please, and yes of course my son would be very happy with the limp cardboard white bread and processed cheese sandwich.  A meal deal you say?  Great – a carton of bright e-number filled orange juice and a packet of Cheddars, perfect.

Not convinced…

Why is it that these places assume that children won’t eat anything you eat? Granted we’re pretty lucky that the bear is ruled by his stomach and has a very wide appreciation of all things edible, but come on – a little variety wouldn’t go a miss.

What are the general child/baby facilities like in your home town?  I feel a petition coming on!!!!

By the way, the department store we ate in was Marks & Spencer.  They really ought to know better.  However I should add that I forget now what the accompaniments to the floppy sandwich were, but they weren’t especially inspiring.

I’d also like to add that the best child-friendly restaurant we’ve found is ASK – good kids menu, colouring book and stickers for entertainment and no frowny looks from the staff when olives start being hurled around.

Flats and Sharps

Surprisingly, this evening I have found the time to restring/retune my faithful SG. Unsurprisingly, it still sounds as though it is being played by a tone-deaf, rhythmically-challenged, geriatric, arthritic left-handed camel. From Gravesend. Actually, I’m not that surprised. Just disappointed that I continue to sound like Bonnie and Clyde. Instead of Bonnie Raitt. Still, you want to see it?

Tonight has been ‘a boy’s night in’. Apart from restringing the SG – and getting very tempted to get my acoustic out for a tune-up – I have had a film-fest. The Bourne Identity. What an awesome film. There are cinematographic sequences in The Bourne Identity that could have been shot by Luc Besson. That’s high praise. I view Luc Besson as one of the finest producers of high-speed action sequences we’ve ever been blessed with. But what I love about The Bourne Identity is the attention to detail. There are flashes of authentic spook tradecraft, and it’s a pleasure to see such things being used correctly.

Saturday afternoon I’m going to a rehearsal studio to shoot film. If you’re in the OX area and you’d like to join me, let me know – I could use another photographer! I aim to be there for an hour from 1pm, and will be photographing and videoing just about non-stop. Ideally I’d like to come away with 150 shots as well as video footage, so another lense on the job would be more than welcome. I’m looking for a mix of aspects; close-ups, ultra-close-ups, groupwork, action portraits. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t done it before, just come along and snap away.

Professor Steven Hawking and Professor Leonard Mlodinow will, no doubt, both be criticised for their lack of religious understanding, once the precise detail behind their published thinking – that God did not create the universe – has sunk in. It takes a man of extraordinary moral backbone to make this declaration, but for two such eminent scientists to haul themselves in to the God-botherers’ firing line is stunning. We know that the Roman Catholic branch of this superstition have gone as far as to employ scientists, to enable greater understanding of academic study. But the other branches of this flat-earth organisation that studiously refuse to believe empirical evidence will continue to shove their ostrich-like heads in the sand. Which makes me wonder why so many people follow these irrational beliefs?

Documenting Dogs Running Free, Dubber-style

Last week I wrote a post about Dogs Running Free, a collaborative musical project that I’m doing next weekend with Nick and Spence. Since then I’ve recorded demos of a few song ideas and thought about how best to present the project online.

Part of the idea is to finish as much as possible within the 3-day recording session, and not to spend weeks afterwards editing video and mixing tunes. But I don’t think it’s going to lend itself to a live broadcast (most of the time we’ll probably be plugging things in and thinking). What we need is a curated archive of video and audio footage, without having to do too much curation…

Associative vernacular whuh?!

It just so happens that I was reading a blog post by Andrew Dubber the other day called Music and associative vernacular media, in which he describes an event at which he did exactly this. A bunch of musicians were brought together to write, rehearse and perform some music over a few days, and it was all documented online by giving the performers Flip cameras and asking them to “point them at whatever they thought was interesting”. Their short video clips (between 30 seconds and 3 minutes each) were uploaded to a blog throughout the day, given a title and tagged with roughly predefined keywords. In this way you can build a simple video archive that the audience can explore:

Because what’s interesting is not the video itself, but the way in which that video potentially links to other, related videos from within the same context – and makes connections from which narrative meaning can be constructed.

Call it associative vernacular mediation.

So you might see a short video of me talking about an idea for a Hammond riff, and when it’s finished you could follow a number of links – to other videos of me talking, other videos featuring the Hammond, or other videos related to that song. There’s no fixed way of exploring, you just watch whatever catches your eye. Like Dubber says, it’s an interesting way of “making internet”.

Rather than make a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the project, or subject the musicians to a Big Brother-style reality show production, the aim was to use the more conversational, rough-and-ready ‘vernacular’ attributes of the world wide web – and, for that matter, allow them to select what should and shouldn’t be filmed.

Wait a minute – who’s dream are we in?

I’m using Dubber’s idea to solve a practical problem, but it’s very interesting to think about it from a higher, more academic, level. If you’re at all interested in this sort of conversation, you should definitely follow Dubber. He’s a clever dude:

This project is, in part, intended as a provocation and exploration toward what a natively ‘read-write’ form of music mediation might be in the digital environment. And while it could be argued (and often is) that this sort of technological intervention ‘devalues’ music, or that the deprioritisation of a controlled, ordered, finished and idealised definitive product constitutes a form of cultural net loss, that proposition does have an air of nostalgia to it, and also asserts an ideal form of mediation that is always problematic and conservative.

I would argue, as a form of media communication itself, rather than simply something that requires mediation, music (and the activity of making music) is not simply a fixed artistic expression, but a very human activity – a set of practices, shared symbolic meanings and discourses that connect people: the people making the music as well as the people for whom the music is performed.

I’m getting excited about this project now (can you tell? ;), and it’s going to be great fun seeing how (and if) Nick and Spence get into the online side of things. Xander is coming along in his usual role as genius behind-the-scenes producer, which should ease the pressure. After all, we are there to make music!

There will be a Tumblr to collect all the videos, and follow me, Nick and Spence for the inside scoop. I imagine we’ll be hashtagging everything #dogsrunningfree too.

Thursday 1: Jennifer Lea Lampton, "Wordpress is better than Drupal"

Live demo

Want to get content into Wordpress

“Dumb” copying and pasting seems to work OK

Appearing is pretty bad, but oo, I have lots of themes. Really quick to switch them, and it just works.
Installing a new theme – JUST WORKS. So painless

Awfully large header. Can we change that?
An editor. So we can!

My mom has got images of horses too. What can we do with that?
Hey, we can create a gallery. Let’s do that.

Now we can add some images. Upload one. There’s small boxes for a bunch of information. But we can add them.

Can I make a page for my gallery to show on?
let’s look in plugins area.
[note that the plugin is already installed. Plugin discovery is still not simple.]
how about that link? No, that’s not it.
[gets a bit lost]
maybe google knows. Hey, FAQs for NextGEN gallery. There it is.
That works. I have a gallery.

I have a site

When I log into a wp site, I have straight away links to doing stuff.

What happens when I want to add wysiwyg to Drupal? Wp is just there.

What if we have to set up wysiwyg? It’s like twelve steps.

What if I want to set up tags?

What if I want to change how it looks? “Hire a themer.” OK, how do I do that?

How do I add images? How do I get image cache? What’s that?

Has anyone ever set up a calendar on Drupal?

How does my mom upgrade things on Drupal? “Use drush!” There’s this place called modules, but apparently that’s wrong.

What’s a page? It’s a content type. Maybe something with panels. Something your browser spits out. Maybe it’s a view, or a category listing.

Posts? Depending on which bit of UI you used, you might get that word.

What are themes? Are they skins?

Are categories taxonomy?

We do things because that’s the way we do it.

Developers like to build new stuff. They don’t necessarily care when there’s existing stuff.

Developers don’t care about looks. They think their job is done when it sort of works.

Developers don’t care about ux if they can use drush.

Drupal is sort of a blank slate. You can put blocks where you want them, but why would you?

Wordpress is a finished product.

All you have to do is satisfy market need. Wp is behind us, but they can move fast, and they’re looking at us.

3.0? Their blogging engine turned into a content management engine.

They’re catching up pretty quick. What happens when we’re left in drupal-is-fun land, alone? 

What do we need?

Distributions? Yes! All that time saved.
“so many distributions can be really confusing”
Wordpress has three. So we could say we do e-commerce.

Wordpress has direction. It makes good products, but it’s more top-led

Does e community need to make distros or a better blank slate?
Both.

“officially supported”
What does that mean?
“not just supported by one company, but supported by core”
How does that happen in the module lifecycle? we need to come up with some kind of standard, or a way to get acceptance. How do we do this? 

Drupalmodules.com – one guy has an attitude of “I can do this better on my own.” big security risks. Big problem for drupal reputation. It’s not right.

“we don’t ship a product. We need to ship products.”
Is it n ot too late to chase wp as a blog product?
“No.”
One thing we don’t have is a great team of salesmen. Wp has that. Whether we can take over their space, I doubt. But we have to figure out how to do the whole vertical.

“OpenAtrium – already done? And now we’re feeding back into the community.”
Yeah, but how do you know about OpenAtrium? Because you’re already in the community.

There is no drupal.com
“as more companies start working on distros, we’ll get a middle ground.”
How quickly can we do this?
Developers get so excited about all these technologies that prototypes sometimes don’t get finished.