Well, merry Christmas all.
The water was extremely cold today but there were no heart attacks or sinking eccentrics... Funny that the RNIB lifeboat goes up the coast in 60-minute steps as crazy people all along the south coast rush into the freezing waters :-)
Darn, I've just this second dropped the last of my beautiful Salins-les-Bains coffee bowls:-(
Of course I've still got a bunch of coffee bowls but this particular crop of bowls dates back to my eighteenth summer when I worked as a runner on the Franco-American Films SA production of a 30-second spot for Banania (The prop-master had bought a bunch of different bowls for the shoot and I was given the surplus ones).
Anyways, it's just a bit of crockery but for some reason I never thought I would break it. Funny to feel sad about a pot, but over the years, I've had many wonderful (mostly pyjama-clad) moments drinking steaming, milky coffee with friends...
Couple of weeks ago I was on hols in Avignon with the whole extended Falby clan and we all wrote games for the evening's entertainment. Margaret, Nicki's mum came up with a devilishly difficult Balderdash (I knew only two of the ten words) and I did a pub-quiz.
Don't know if you've set a pub-quiz before but this was my first go and and was way more difficult than I had anticipated. It's not enough to find things people might not know--you need to try and prevent folk getting bored and you need to make the questions relevant to your audience. In my case I had an audience of three 70-year-olds, three 40-year-olds, two teenagers and Clemmie who is six now and was supposed to be in bed (she helped by numbering the questions and that's her below trying her first diabolo menthe).
Tricky stuff.
At the end of the evening Billy--who knows about these things--reassured me that I had got it about right as the two teams scored better than average but not so much as to make it seem easy.
I'm on the flight back from Chicago listening to Laura Cantrell's version of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald while flying over Lake Erie (which is kinda weird) and was going to do a little work (and write some stuff about Seed) when I found the quiz questions in my bag.
So I thought I'd share them before dropping the sheets in the bin:-)
Well, of course with the interweb y'all have the answers to hand, but (as Barney the Purple Dinosaur would say) it's fun to try and guess them the hard way first...
Hey, Jed's on TV :-)
Helping Clem with her homework. The brief was "what would you do" and the required media was "any" which I felt was vague and demanding for a 5-year-old.
Undaunted, Clemmie wanted to make a film but I had to point out this was going to be a little challenging given the time we had. We ended up with a Keynote file. She made the time machine slide herself and did all the thinking. The words are all hers. My contribution was to suggest a structure and be her dtp operator:-)
The cool bit was watching her work out what was needed both to make her machine (lots of levers) and to actually get to Laura's place. It took a couple of minutes but she eventually worked out she needed to know both a place and a date (the date is spoken to the time machine using the on-board microphone and the map of Wisconsin is included above the catering tray).
Wow, John Hardy and David Coates aren't just medical doctors, they're voice-over artists:-)
John offered me this fantastic arthroscopy footage after my operation. The arthroscope is hooked up to a video encoder which captures live footage for post-operative review. When I first received the disk it was just raw footage. After hearing about the number of arthroscopies on YouTube, John (who is not only a world-leading Orthopaedic surgeon but a painter, internet guru, web marketer and now film editor and voice-over artist) decided to have a go at an edited version.
The result is a complete transformation, a view of the whole op from me on very powerful drugs to the final phases of the joint smoothing, the whole thing narrated by the two doctors.
Oh, and before I forget, John was mortified by my earlier "before and after" pictures. He wanted me to point out that the surgery is very non-invasive and the recovery is usually very speedy. The following shot of my knee was taken roughly two weeks after the operation, the stitches are out and you can barely see the entry wounds:
OK ma p'tite puce je te souhaite bon courage pour ton examen :-) Grosses bises et super-maxi-câlins de ton Papa!
You know you're a Mac OS X user when you tend to forget about computer problems. I've carried a system-repair disk in by bag for the last 10 years but since about OS X 10.2 I haven't used it in anger. Most problems can be dealt with with a combination of fsck -fy, booting in target mode or the plain old disk utilities app.
So yesterday afternoon, I'd been working like an absolute dog all week trying to define a page-personalisation technique that meets the demands of the client in France while keeping to our company's brand values and interaction principles when the document I opened looked slightly different...
After faffing about for a bit trying to figure out what was up (I figured I must have done a "save as" in the wrong place late last night or something) I realised that my entire project directory was an image of where it was at 1 o'clock the previous morning.
I effect, my file system had been through a wormhole, a temporal disturbance or whatever and had resulted in me spending most of Saturday saving files into nothingness, a parallel universe (Spock with a beard etc etc).
Gordon Bennet, this one was new to me. Turns out it's to do with journalled file systems -- as far I get the concept, the OS maintains multiple states of your file system and repairs and readjusts in real time.
So anyway, I haven't used a commercial disk utility in years, but late last night Alsoft's DiskWarrior saved (most) of my bacon.
So here we go again in the garage and last I checked it was -2° but on the plus side, I'm listening to Weekend's La Varieté album and I haven't heard old Alison Statton in ages:-)
Well, I didn't have the camera with me but this morning we put the pedals on the bicycle and Clemmie pedaled away. She can ride a bike, yay!
It's great, actually, because I've been feeling a bit like I've been letting the side down in the parenting department. All the travel to France and the doing second projects on weekends means I haven't been able to spend as much time with Clem and Hal as I'd like to. So knowing she can swim a length of the pool no problem and ride a bike makes me feel a bit like I've helped some:-)
Clementine, il s'est passé quelque chose d'abominable aujourd'hui. Je te l'indique ici pour quand tu reliras ces pages, tu t'en souviendras peut etre...