The View from the Spaghetti Factory (proper redesign coming soon!)

So… I decided it was high time I made a proper serious grown-up work-related site, saying what I do and how you can pay me to do it for you. At the moment, there’s only a brief mention in one of the pages on this site, and that’s not exactly earning me money.

So, anyway… I opened up a text editor and typed all the usual HTML structural bits… head, title, body and various divs for the main bits of the page. And then I opened another file for the CSS. And then it occurred to me that it must be about three years since I did any of this stuff properly. Whenever I’ve rewritten this site, the music site or the uk.music.guitar site, I’ve always just recycled old code; apart from replacing all the tables with proper CSS and installing the Greymatter blogging software a couple of years ago, most of this basic template has remained the same since early 2001. And the upshot of that is that I’ve forgotten all those routine coding tricks I used to use automatically. Nothing like professional web design stuff, but little details I’d found which enabled me to create okay-looking sites with the minimum of code.

I looked through the CSS for this site, I looked at a few of the excellent tutorial sites linked from Jeffrey Zeldman’s ‘externals’ page and I glanced up at the big ‘DHTML and CSS’ book on the shelf.

And then I decided I’d just nick a load of code from other people’s sites. I’ll let you know when it’s done…

This won’t mean much to people who weren’t at the University of East Anglia, but never mind. We’ve all got bits of nostalgia floating around in our brains.

When I arrived at UEA back in October 1987, there were five options for living on campus. Norfolk Terrace and Suffolk Terrace were the award-winning Ziggurat-shaped constructions dominating the area around the UEA broad. Orwell Close and Wolfson Close were much smaller and more exclusive, probably best suited to mature students. Finally, there was Waveney Terrace, a snaking four-storey building constructed mostly from unpainted breezeblocks.

I lived in Waveney Terrace for two years, and while I was sad to hear of its imminent demolition, I can’t really say I’m surprised. Students expect more luxury from their halls nowadays, so the en suite rooms of Nelson Court and Colman House (which would dominate the foreground of the picture below if you saw that view today) are going to be a much more pleasant prospect. Even at the time, the news that you’d been given a room in Waveney would produce looks of shocked sympathy on the faces of your friends. Little breezeblock boxes, arranged in long corridors of around twelve rooms, with the shared kitchen and bathroom at one end. Even when they painted the walls in time for my second stint, they got it horribly wrong… industrial grade semi-gloss paint in a fetching shade of “gents toilet off-white”.

But you know what? I loved the place.

During my first year, I was allotted a room in Waveney before I’d really seen the campus properly, but when I came back after my year abroad, I actually *requested* a room there. I’d done my homework. I knew that, beneath the bold modernistic architectural veneer, the Suffolk/Norfolk terrace rooms were a good few inches smaller and the furniture was bolted to the floor. Pah! To think those laughing-faced fools dared to call Waveney a prison… I rearranged my functional Waveney furniture with the gleeful abandon of a FREE MAN! Maybe it’s all to do with the “creativity born of restriction” thing I’m always banging on about (in relation to music, anyway) but the forbidding appearance of the Waveney rooms seemed to inspire people to make more effort with their rooms.

But of course the main thing was that we didn’t know any different. Even the properly plastered walls of the other residences didn’t represent a particularly huge leap in the luxury stakes, especially not by modern standards, but that didn’t matter. It was all about personalising your little space, listening to your favourite albums and making new friends over a two-litre plastic bottle of cheap lager. I suspect that sort of student life has now vanished for good, along with the notion of higher education for its own sake, but that’s market economics, I guess…

Just a follow-up to the previous entry, really. A collection of links relating to the aftermath of the London terrorist attacks…

Good comprehensive sources of information can now be found on the BBC’s dedicated mini-site and the Wikipedia entry.

The group (supposedly) responsible for the attacks claims that “Britain is now burning with fear, terror and panic in its northern, southern, eastern, and western quarters.”. Yeah, right. One way of showing your defiance is to post a picture to We’re not Afraid!

For people who want to make a more public show of their fearlessness, there’s a pledge over on Pledgebank to organise a public demonstration. They need 2500 people in total… an hour or so milling about in London isn’t much to ask, is it?

Above all, we’re British… when stuff goes wrong, our main worry is how long we should keep a respectful silence before we can start emailing jokes to each other. Some sincere and well-meaning Americans started a LiveJournal community to show their sympathy for London. And it’s so sweet of them. It’s just that… well, they kind of misjudged just how unsentimental we can be. Read London Hurts for yourself, starting at the bottom of the page.

There isn’t much to say which hasn’t already been said umpteen times.

Of course, we’d been told that a major terrorist attack on London was inevitable, but when it’s just a possibility, even just an *inevitability*, it’s always going to be tomorrow. It only becomes tangible and believable when it’s today.

With the initial flush of information and statistics now over, the media are still in full flow, desperately trying to fill the extended news slots they feel obliged to dedicate to the tragedy. TV reporters are standing in the rain outside every London hospital, gamely parroting everything they’ve learned about the number of patients, the type of injuries, the determined faces of the staff. The red bus and faithful tube train have already been described as precious icons of London. No doubt the newspapers are trying to decide just how many pages to dedicate to the disaster in tomorrow’s edition. The royal wedding got 16 pages? Then no less than 19 will do! Of the terrestrial TV channels, ITV impressed me by managing to establish a few real facts much more quickly than the BBC this morning, but then spoiled it all with their ridiculous “TARGET LONDON” logo on the evening bulletin. I really don’t want to see the tabloids tomorrow.

But at the end of it all, the important points can be covered in just one line. People, just like you and me, were killed on their way to work by other people stupid enough to think they’re following their religion.

Life goes on, though, and Jeremy has the best description…

Based on a suggestion I remembered someone making ages ago, I decided to have a go at making up a little blow-by-blow account of how I recorded a piece of music (specifically “Monochorduroy”, as described previously).

The full explanation is on the Guitar Collective forum, while the actual podcast (please be gentle with my bandwidth!) is here…

The Making of Monochorduroy (13.6MB)