19 July, 2004

I sometimes wonder if trying new things all the time is a good thing. It always feels like you know nothing and that you’re always cocking up in some way. It’s often nice to simply do something that you’re reasonably good at. On that note, last weekend was spent doing Part 1 of a Polytech course in textile printing. A small class that spans two weekends and covers the basics of screen printing, stencilling, mixing inks etc. Despite knowing very little about the technical parts, so far it’s been good fun and my screen is now degreased and all covered in emulsion eagerly awaiting my return with a design to set into it. I can see myself getting into screen printing and hopefully it’ll give me some motivation to carry on with The Trouser Project. Roll on the next session.

I have bitten the bullet with the home page of this site and finally made every component on it a separate object that gets pulled in. The home page is now made up five distinct areas that are all held in separate content files. Word, the news feed, the mood graph, Current Joys and Music Playing today are all brought together dynamically to present themselves on one page. Why bother? Well, I can now keep all the old entries for each component while presenting only the latest. This is fairly important as this is essentially a diary of my life and the overall picture is as important as the day-to-day stuff. It also means I can present each component in different ways if I want to which is an important part of future proofing the content. I’d hate for XHTML to go out of vogue and have to transfer all that content to a new format. Bugger that for a joke.

We bought a little olive tree last night. It is now settling in on the back porch before being repotted to a larger container. We got a small guava tree a few weeks back. I was a bit surprised to find this variety can handle frosts down to -5 degrees. It is also now sitting on the back porch waiting for summer. I noticed the worms have started reproducing (big time) in my little Worm Bin so I’m guessing that by summer they will have started to become quite the little composters. It’s nice when a plan comes together.

If anyone is wondering where the interface switching has gone, it will be back soon. The new infrastructure requires a slightly different approach for switching XSL files which we’re currently working on.