Hugh_C's blog about food, photos, music, video editing & other lesser codologies

My current workhorse is a TiBook 800MHz – a 15″ PowerBook G4 which I’ve had since May 2002. It has been a great machine and has served me well for over three years, but it’s beginning to show its age. Getting a bit chipped around the edges, not the racehorse it used to be (!) and I’m getting slightly electrocuted under certain conditons. I also think it’s time for a dvd burner which I don’t have.

What to do?

I have a limited budget (three kids and a mortgage) and I was thinking of a G5 iMac or, if rumours prove true, one of the new widescreen iBooks. Alternatively, another PowerBook. Basically I have to decide if I’m going to be portable or deskbound. I’m probably going to miss portability, so chances are it’ll be a ‘Book of some sort.

For the current models, the prices look like:

Eur 1,329.75 ex VAT iBook 14″: 1.33GHz G4 (512 MB SDRAM)
Eur 1,924.79 ex VAT PowerBook 15″: 1.67GHz G4 (512 MB SDRAM)

Six hundred euros in the difference.

Started thinking about recent movies I’ve really enjoyed from an editor’s perspective, and one that springs to mind is 21 Grams, a fairly bleak piece of movie making but brilliantly edited by Stephen Mirrione.

The first time I watched 21 Grams, I was fairly disorientated for 20 minutes or so, and then the whole non-linear theme became less confusing. In a sense the movie started to wash over me. Brilliant performances by Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro. I suppose this non-linear way of telling stories is a lot like the way memory can work, not necessarily sequential. 

The whole non-linear telling of the story can also be likened to the modern editing process – it’s easy to see how chunks of scenes could easily be moved around a timeline with ease. What must have been difficult though, is keeping sufficient distance from the story in order to evaluate the restructuring processes. Objectivity can be difficult to come by in the late stages of a cut, and drastic changes are often hard to assimilate.

Sometimes I need to go and have a good hard stare at a blank wall.

So I’ve put up a more traditional about page, available from the top navigation bar, and on that page I’ve added an email address, an alias to my normal .mac address. It’ll be interesting to see if it’s harvested anytime soon. I also tried doing one of those random imageg php things you can see on the banner above, but with mixed format images – i.e. portrait and landscape, and while the random php script worked fine, the mixed results just looked stupid.

Might try doing one of the random banner things in one of the other templates.

I know I’m a hobbyist and not a professional web person, but it seems to me that the documentation for Movable Type is deliberately obtuse and only after hours and hours of fiddling, have I been able to achieve anything. It seems that you need to know a little php, html and a lot of css to achieve anything worthwhile. Perhaps this is just because mine is an individual non-profit installation, and therefore pretty much unsupported. I guess the folks at Movable Type need to make a living too.

Trying to find out how to use a navigation menu in the banner. Having difficulties with margins and padding in an attempt to get the tiny type aligned.

OK so I realise that it’s just my ignorance of the way stylesheets work. I’ve used the tag “padding-left” to move the text to the right. Must try to find some sort of CSS primer somewhere.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to use the mysql support built into MT to display a random image in a banner, in an attempt to create dynamic content instead of plain old boring, static content. I’ve been able to load images into a database (I think), but when I try to echo them to a page it looks like gobbledegook, must be something weird with my encoding. So I found a php script instead which seems to more-or-less work, but the randomness gets stuck sometimes and images get repeated.

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This is sitting on the 2nd installation of MT, because I managed to screw up the first one by moving the location of some directory or other and stuff got broken. So I decided to go again, except this time I incorporated mysql support, pointing at a mysql database I had set up previously on another server. What I have yet to figure out is where the blog data actually gets stored – is it somewhere on this webserver or is it somewhere in the mysql database itself? Not sure how to determine which of the two.

Director: John Butler
Production company: Fish Films
Client: Tourism West