1 October, 2007

Into the second week of holidays and I am starting to relax again and foster some of that creativity. It has come, these holidays in the form of web design. I’ve been having a great time working with Drupal and flexing my theming skills on any web site that comes my way. I’m really liking the the freedom to addfunctionality and mess with templates without the need for a programmer. It’s not the XML/XSl combo that I really like but the PHP templates approach is okay. Equally reassuring is the fact I can still put together a reasonably decent XHTML/CSS layout with a decent visual style. A few terms of teaching and it’s easy to feel a bit of a munter. Always describing and demonstrating without actually doing can lead to some insecurity, especially when students ask questions you know insideout but can’t remember. My apologies to Scott at PunkRockAcademy for hijacking his web site and experimenting with it. Luckily an ocean and a few timezones separate us so he can’t easily beat me.

A few days ago I was biking into town and passed a police cordon on Stanmore road. A guy had been shot by a police officer the night before. This is very much in my neighbourhood and it had its impact on me. Like any story there are two sides but both sides of this story are sad. A guy, who had pretty much lost it for the night and sounded like he’d been through a bit in the previous days, and a police officer who arrived on a pretty messed up scene and made a decision to shoot someone. I’ve noted before that things seem to be getting tighter and tighter in our society with very few ways out for anyone. It’s scary how fast someone can fall away with little support, probably because everyone else is hanging on for dear life as well. What are we going to do when things really get tough? We’re staring down the barrel of our key resource becoming really expensive and quite large changes to the way we live. If we are all racing along at such speed that we have no way of stopping at all how do we support each other when things get rough? If our economy starts to droop which, in a country that seems to be dropping productivity in favour of…well nothing really, it likely will and opportunities to earn money change are we, as a nation, ready for that? I imagine that when something as simple as the cost of petrol doubles we will see anger and finger-pointing. Will we also see people supporting others and finding new opportunities? I certainly hope we don’t see more people losing it and certainly no more shootings.

On a brighter note, the garden is looking really healthy and our fruit trees are all starting to leaf out and put on blossom.