Octopus Street Art in Digbeth
Girl with red headband
Found in Digbeth on my lunch break
Log Pile
Throwing mud up a wall
In my experience, learning is like throwing mud up a wall. On the first throw some will stick and some will fall off. Then on the second throw more will stick and so on and so on.
Whatever it is you want to learn or create, there really is no substitute for lots of hard work and practice. When first starting out you may cringe at what you have produced or may even find yourself comparing your work to that of much more experienced people, convinced that you’ll never be as good as them.
Nevertheless continue.
Keep on down your chosen path and if you feel the end is getting no closer to you, then you’ll have learnt a very important lesson in learning itself – the end of the path should never be reached.
If you get to a point where you truly believe that you have learned everything that you need to know, you’ll stop trying and, ultimately, stop caring.
Never let this happen.
You should keep throwing mud up the wall, metaphorically speaking, and when you think the wall is well and truly covered, move round to the opposite side and continue.
Just keep learning, keep getting excited about what it is you do, and keep working hard.
The people you admire and compare yourself against will have, and probably still are, going through similar thought processes to your own. They themselves will have their own heroes whose admiration they’ll seek and to whom they will compare themselves.
And who knows, keep working hard and you may just have people looking to you for inspiration in the near future.
WordPress as my IndieWeb Foundation
From the very beginning of its creation, WordPress has been all about empowering people to publish online.
It now has a huge user base and a community that is always working to update, improve and extend it.
That’s not to say that you need WordPress to become Indie, in fact many people use a whole range of CMSs — some even custom-built, but WordPress is a great solid foundation to start from.
When deciding to move towards the IndieWeb, I was already using WordPress and began in the simplest way I could think of — publishing status updates on my site and then simply pasting them into a Tweet or Facebook update.
Although the idea was there, I was missing the link between the original and syndicated copies. I had the desire. All I needed now was guidance.
Indie Web Camp
The Indie web camp site has been — and continues to be — an invaluable resource for me and many others. All the people I have spoken to in the IRC channel have been super friendly and guided me through certain areas that I found tricky.
If you need any help whatsoever, just ask in the IRC channel, or ask me and I’ll do my best to help. The first thing I did when I discovered the IndieWebCamp site, was follow the getting started guide.
I couldn’t do a better job of guiding someone through the process of getting their website indiewebified, so I will simply link to it. Because of the fact that the IndieWebCamp site is the best resource out there, my own posts on the subject will be specific to my own implementations and any gotchas that I found.
As you level up, you can track your progress on the IndieMark page.
An IndieMark is a set of metrics that show how ‘IndieWeb’ your site is. At the time of writing this post, I am half-way into level 2. One thing to always keep in mind is that it is okay — and encouraged — to implement each thing one step at a time. Just have fun with it!
WordPress Indie Web Plugin 2.0
The WordPress indie web plugin calls itself the IndieWeb version of WordPress’ Jetpack plugin and it really is. Once installed, it provides you with direct links to download and install recommended plugins for getting your website on the IndieWeb path.
I installed all of them at once without reading what each one did and so got myself into a bit of a muddle. However as I work through each one I shall be writing it up under the tag IndieWeb and share what I learn from them.
Sharing to Social Networks with SNAP plugin
SNAP is a WordPress plugin that enables the automatic posting to your chosen social networks when you create new content. I have forked SNAP in order to add extra features that I find I need.
For example, I have added the ability to post to twitter as a reply to another tweet and have it link the newly created tweet as a direct reply to the targeted tweet.
I have also made it easier for myself to write quick status updates and post them out to silos as duplications of the content.
And that concludes my first steps in transitioning to the IndieWeb. As I accomplish more, I will write it up and post it under the tag IndieWeb.
Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking
Today I rediscovered one of my all-time favourite albums — Roger Waters’ The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking.
Although known mostly for his work with British Rock band Pink Floyd, some of Roger’s best work — in my opinion — was in his solo albums. Though to be fair his Pink Floyd work is incredible.
The concept, as envisioned by Waters in 1977, rotated around a man’s scattered thoughts during a road trip through somewhere in Central Europe, focusing on his midlife crisis, and how he dreams of committing adultery with a hitchhiker he picks up along the way.
Along the way he also faces other fears and paranoia, with all of these things taking place in real time in the early morning hours of 4:30am to 5:12am on an unspecified day.
The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking — This concept album was offered to the rest of Pink Floyd along with the early concept for The Wall. The band went on to do The Wall and Roger completed Pros and Cons in 1983 as a solo piece.
From Wikipedia.
It features great guitar work from none other than Eric Clapton as well as featuring Jack Palance, who takes on the role of the Hell’s Angel in the story.
To be honest you could do yourself a favour and listen to anything that Roger Waters has created.
Chrysta Bell At Oslo Hackney
On Friday 11th April my Girlfriend and I drove down to London for the weekend. It was a great weekend, with the nucleus of this trip was to see Chrysta Bell on her tour.
Who is Chrysta Bell?
Chrysta Bell is an artist in the truest sense of the word. Her voice is one of those that can both charm and haunt you. She commands the performance with such force that it is difficult to explain in mere words. You really need to experience it first hand.
She was touring on the back of an album produced and co-written by David Lynch. David Lynch is definitely present in both the album and on the night itself, but this isn’t just a case of “David Lynch produced it, therefore it’s awesome”. The album is awesome, believe me, but it is due to the equal talents of both David and Chrysta combined. Each on their own are unique and hugely talented, but together they produce something even more special.
I first heard Chrysta Bell in a song from David Lynch’s film Inland Empire. The song Polish Poem was used in the film to such a haunting effect. As soon as I found out about the Album they did together This Train, which Polish Poemfeatures on, I was immediately hooked on the music they were making together.
The Gig Itself
The gig itself was out of this world. Anyone who has seen Twin Peaks would be hard-pressed not to imagine themselves stood in the Road House, watching Chrysta in front of that red curtain. At least that’s how it was for me.
Her vocals were both soothing and haunting, with the melodies weaving throughout the crowd. Her band were great also. Chrysta, of course, was centre stage, but the band weren’t just a faceless few who played the music. The four of them as a whole played the songs with a firm understanding of each other’s rhythms and timing.
The performances that stood out for me were Swing with Me and a new song they played, the name of which I can’t remember. The only song that wasn’t performed that I would have loved to have heard live was Polish Poem. I can only imagine what that would have felt like. The venue did have a 10pm curfew, so maybe Polish Poem would have been performed without the time restriction.
After The Show
When the show was finished I was both happy and sad. Sad because a great show had come to an end, but happy because my Girlfriend and I got to meet Chrysta face to face. I had previously spoken to Chrysta over twitter and I arranged to buy her earlier album, Bitter Pills and Delicacies, directly from her. after the show.
From my own conversations with Chrysta, it is obvious that she cares deeply for her fans. I wasn’t surprised to see her mingling with the fans both before and after the show.
Thanks, Chrysta.
Cherlene’s New Album
Any fans of the TV series Archer will know that — while the rest of the ex-ISIS agents are figuring out what to do with a literal tonne of cocaine — Cheryl/Carol has renamed herself to Cherlene and is on her way to becoming the star of outlaw country music.
Archer is one of my favourite shows on TV at the moment. As well as this I have been getting into listening to more country music thanks to this post by Andrew Clarke. So imagine my surprise when I found out that a full album of both original and cover songs sung by Cherlene herself had been recently released for digital purchase. Woooohoooo!
But this isn’t just a novelty TV series album filled with parody songs. This is actually a genuinely good country album. The songs are actually sang by country artist Jessy Lynn Martens, who is also classically trained on violin, mandolin and guitar.
The album also features a duet with none other than Kenny Loggins on a country version of Danger Zone — yes, it’s that good.
Cherlene Track Listing
- Danger Zone feat. Kenny Loggins
- Swing Shift
- Midnight Blues
- 40 Miles of Mountain Road
- Baby Please Don’t Go
- Cherlene’s Broken Hearts and Auto Parts
- I’ll Burn It Down
- It’s All About Me
- Eastbound and Down
- Chattahoochee Coochie Man
- Gypsy Woman
- Straight To Hell
If you only listen to one song from this album, listen to Danger Zone. But I promise if you do, you’ll probably end up listening to the whole album.
The Dvorak Keyboard
When I took a trip to Paris a few years back, I had to pop into an internet cafe to find the location of a place I was after. Because – it seemed – I was hopelessly ill-prepared.
So I paid my money to the nice man in the corner; sat down; quickly typed my search and hit enter, only to find I had been presented with an empty results page. It seems Google didn’t recognise ‘me wenith’ as a Parisian Live Music Venue. This is how I was introduced to the French keyboard layout.
In telling this story today to a friend, he introduced me to another layout that I had never heard of – The Dvorak Keyboard (also know as the Simplified Keyboard).
The Dvorak Keyboard was originally patented by Dr. August Dvorak and his brother-in-law, Dr. William Dealey. It was developed to be an improvement over the well-adopted ‘qwerty’ layout that we still use today. The design of the Dvorak layout was based on much research into how people typed as well as percentages of the time spent typing in varying areas of the keyboard. It was stated that the Dvorak Layout would make it easier to type common words with the minimal of movement and finger strain.
Despite the research and slight adoption of this layout, it never really made it into popular use and so the ‘qwerty’ layout is still the primary keyboard used on western computers / devices to this day.
Jumping the Shark
The term jumping the shark, I discovered today, is an idiom that is a way of describing when a television show’s quality begins to decline. It originated from the television show Happy Days in its season five premiere, where The Fonz literally jumped over a contained shark on a beach front.
This was quite a step away from its usual family and adolescent related story lines set against the nostalgia of the 1950s.
The usage of “jump the shark” has subsequently broadened beyond television, indicating the moment when a brand, design, or creative effort’s evolution declines.
Wikipedia, Jumping the shark