North Korean propaganda

I’m ahead of the game at work – all I have to do tomorrow is brief my colleagues to take on my roles while I’m away next week, install a set of DTP software on a G3 mac, set up a location manager location so it can be used in our Edinburgh office and have two brief production meetings.

My weekend and travel are almost sorted: Elly, Ian and Jane are coming here on Saturday for an afternoon of relaxation in St Andrews, then we head back to Ian and Jane’s in Stirling for a bit, then I stay over at Elly’s and disappear on Sunday morning on a macbackpacker’s tour of Scotland.

I have finally realised why the 2300c wasn’t reaching the internet – it needed a microfilter between the DAA and the phone point. DUH! So now it can talk to the internet at all of 14000 bits per second by modem (or at 10Mbps via ethernet and the router.) This is set up on MacOS8·1 on the SCSI hard disk I’ve installed into the DuoDock. Once I’ve uploaded this piece of boredom, I’ll check the modem and router on the internal ATA hard disk which has MacOS8·6.

Anyway, practical upshot is it is now ready to lend to Celia so she can try to get online, always assuming her MS actually allows her to use a mouse or graphics tablet.

Thereafter, all I have to do this evening is edit an objection I’m writing for the Community Council, text Ewan and pack for my holiday.

Julia and I are going though a fairly friendly period. I’m enjoying her friendship and the tension of keeping together a marriage which wasn’t working is no longer in the way.

Gosh, I wonder what will go wrong!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY EMILY!!!!!!

This headline is from Reuters so it must be true

2323

So far today had been very pleasant. I’d been on time for the bookshop opening today. I’d restrained myself from walking out with piles of worthy tomes but had seen a few candidates for christmas presents. I’d had a pleasant lunch at the cellar bar with Gavin and Lisa and, latterly, Jane Ann. Julia and I then had an enjoyable hour’s conversation, including talking about moderately personal things. I’d expressed curiosity about something and even though I was very curious about it, managed not to insist too hard and, as far as I can tell, not pissed her off. For very recent exes, we seem to be doing OK.

However, I’ve just called Ewan to ask when tonight’s drinking competition would start. His and his mum’s oldest cat, Odie, had just been put to sleep, so now isn’t a good time. I think Ewan will be quite upset and his mum will be devastated.

• is alcohol our society’s drug of choice?
• did I drink so much of it last night?
• did I wait until this morning to vomit?
• am I staring at a screen when my eyes want to be soothed and I can hardly create a cigarette?
• am I going to do it again this weekend?

Yesterday was Ewans’ birthday. Ewan is the son of a former girlfriend: this relationship finally died about 5 years ago. About a year ago, I thought I’d pissed off Ewan enough that he’d never want to see me again. However, yesterday he texted me, asking me to join him for drinks to celebrate his 18th birthday.

He was drinking in Aikmans (aka the cellar bar) with some mates (Ben, Nick, Alison), his mum, her best mate and her best mate’s boyfriend. I recall drinking

1. a pink of orange juice and lemonade
2. at least one goldschlager
3. a staropramen

then moving on to the Raisin where we played a couple of games of pool and I drank

1. at least 1 apple sourz
2. a pint of stella artois

The young ones and I came back to Mycelium Mansion to pick up some sleeping bags. Alison demonstrated how Skye lassies are built tough by not wearing any of her outdoor clothing. NIck, Ben and Alison disappeared rapidly but Ewan and I chatted on for a while until I realised that if I didn’t go to bed I would embarrass myself in at least one of two ways, if not both.

I woke this morning at 9·30, feeling more physical pain than I’ve experienced in years. My stomach relieved itself of the last remnants of chyme and I crawled back to bed. I’ve slept on and off until about 6pm when Ewan called me to ask me out again – I’ve promised him a kamikazi drinking match…

I will go out later but I’m not intending to do the match until tomorrow night. I hear Ben and Nick also puked and Ben is not capable of standing even now.

My well-known sapophobia leads to this:

Congratulations! You’re Aragorn!

Which Lord of the Rings character and personality problem are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

OK, so today at work I actually did some DTP. I’ve also discovered why Adobe abandoned PageMaker after version 7. It’s not because InDesign (Adobe’s current DTP application) has more features (even though it does). It’s not because InDesign isn’t optimised for OSX (it is, even though nothing feels optimal under Panther on a 400MHz G4). It’s because version 7’s files easily become unopenable! The file’s links table dies, it can’t update links to graphic files and makes the mac beep loudly every time a link fails. There is no way to stop it trying short of force-quitting your mac. Under OS9, this invariably leads to a force-restart.

The workaround? Use ResEdit to tell the file it’s a PageMaker 6·5 file, then open it in 6·5. 6·5 is blessedly stable and has all the features 6·0 and 5·0 had, and can import multi-page PDFs as graphics. It’s the Word 5 of DTP. OK, enough of that.

I was invited to a meeting of people who want to promote Fair Trade. Only 7 of us (me, a local FT campaigner, two student FT campaigners and 3 older St A residents) but it’s a start. There are two aims:

1. do Fair Trade Fortnight (1–13 March 2005)
2. try to make St Andrews a Fair Trade town.

So I will be trying to persuade CC to promote FT via Event and via sponsoring FT awards in FT fortnight, creating a web-page showing where you can buy FT products in St A and maybe producing local propaganda. Here’s hoping someone in the group has a few decent design ideas! Other ideas batted about were about profile-raising via

• Alumnus Chronicle
• local football club
• St Andrews Citizen, etc

so that local outlets are pushed into stocking FT products.

Wish us luck!

…. this is what I think and hope it would look like. The full-size version is here.

The creator is here.

Thanks to and for turning me on to this.

Weird going back to work after a three-day weekend, and not enough sleep last night. Me and my big mouth!

Achievements today:

• got the community councillors into the palm (swiftly followed by an hour repairing the ravages of two failed synchronisations with my work mac)
• sorted the backlist and frontlist schedules
• ate jackfruit curry
• spent almost no money
• had a reasonable IM conversation with Julia
• installed Norton on the 2300 and sorted both HDs
• er, that’s it really

What needs done tomorrow?

• chase up where tow books due today have got to
• post letter to customs/ParcelFarce telling them what they can do with the £190 customs charge
• get working on 15 imprint and title pages.

Somehow I think I could be making better use of the time…

Thanks to and for alerting me to a CV or GWB’s utter eviltude and disregardance of even the most basic rules for a corrupt leader, namely ‘don’t get caught!’

The 9/11 Commission’s final report is tonight’s bedtime reading….