wirehead’s Neighborhood

i didn't manage to meet too many of last year's goals, but i did get several of them done and some of the others i made a bit of progress towards - i borrowed a flute for a few months, even though i didn't get to buy one, and that was grand and made me realise how much i've missed having one. so most things on the list i did get at least partway towards even if i didn't get to a point where i could tick them off. i think the only one i totally failed on was the weight loss - i went backwards - but one out of a whole list isn't bad, i think. still, aiming to do better with this year's list. there've also been some surprise achievements in 2009 which i couldn't have foreseen - 2 performances of my music and a film score commission for a start, selling a score, and tons of random travel for a follow-up!

• start work on recording a cd of piano music with my friend cashman
• enter one call for scores
• work on my ear training a little each week, or at the very least once a month
• write a new piece for consideration for this year's london new wind festival (the mob who played my pieces of eight last year)
• explore some of the unlistened-to corners of my cd collection
• upgrade to the latest version of finale - this can't be too hard - it's a claimable expense!

general creativity

• keep an illustrated journal/sketchbook for the year as a way of trying to draw more regularly (but i'm not going to try to shoehorn myself into this one as to how often i do it or commit myself to filling the book)
• if finances and time permit, i'd still like to do another course at central st martin's - maybe the drawing london on location one once the weather warms up a bit more
• knit a hat and gloves to go with the green strangling vine scarf that doesn't match anything
• try recycling some yarn into a new project - help to clear some of the worn-out jumpers i'm not wearing without having to throw them out
• bake pumpkin scones
• try to clear some of the collage materials i've got lying around by working in my composition journal/new journal every couple of months so the collection doesn't get too out of hand or irrelevant
• finish writing my web book. i'm about a third of the way through the first draft now, but if i leave it too long it won't be relevant. aiming to have the first draft finished by the end of june, final draft no later than october
  
• learn enough crochet (*shudder*) to do a crochet cast-on for knitting.

health & sanity

• bring my weight under control again. i'd like to have it down to under 70kg by about august (i'm 76kg at the moment, thanks to a year of no exercise and the excesses of christmas), and be able to maintain that right through till next christmas
• as part of point one, i want to start doing some regular exercise again, preferably of a couple of different types - wii, walking, yoga, etc. obviously this has to wait until the sprained ankle is fixed...
• walk part of the thames valley path
• cook at least 5 recipes out of my new greek cookbook
• eat less sugar. i want to cut out buying sweets pretty much altogether
• take more time over things and do more things that force me to take time over them, like drawing, knitting and baking. get out of the habit of rushing everything
• try to learn some techniques to deal with the headaches without drugs, seeing as how they seem to be becoming a semi-permanent part of my life - pilates, perhaps, maybe some stress management stuff
• allocate one evening per week again for composition, plus one hour per other evenings for getting essential admin stuff done - updating accounts, writing emails, paying bills, clearing my inbox
• re-read getting things done
• get back to doing my weekly review every week, however roughly
• clean up my desk at least once every couple of weeks
• declutter a bit - get rid of some clothes that i can't wear in public, read and dispense with at least 2 books
• cull the damn time out magazines. fed up with the huge pile.
• sleep
• take regular weekends out to do bugger-all
• review my commitments, social networks, chores, and see where i can simplify and/or cull.

travel

• do at least two of the following travel things i want to do before we leave the northern hemisphere:
  • barcelona
  • prague
  • walk across luxembourg
  • spend 2-3 days in the louvre
  • visit the palais de tokyo in paris
  • properly explore the garden of the musée albert khan in paris
  • walk through the bois de boulogne in paris (sensing a theme here?)
  • go back to cornwall with djeli and spend a good full day at the eden project. go to tintagel
  • spend a weekend in the tate in liverpool
  • holiday in the lake district
  • visit a german christmas market
  • road trip through italy
  • corfu
  • go back to the greek islands
  • do a residential cookery course somewhere - greece, italy or france, probably
  • go and visit haiku in sweden
  • edinburgh
  • bruges
  • go off somewhere on my own for a week/end of composition
  • attend a summer festival
  • attend dartington summer school

other

• clear my debt with djeli
• buy a new camera if i find one i like and can afford - this one's causing me too much stress, and then disappointment when the photos turn out rubbish (not to mention time trying to fix them in potatoshop)
• have a real birthday party while we still have friends (plural) in the country
• start making regular backups of my computer

annoying jack

So it's that time of year again. I suspect I may be a little earlier than usual, but if I am I lay it at the feet of the Royal Mail who have me in all of a tizz trying to work out how late I can send Christmas presents to Australia without strike action meaning they won't arrive till March or something.

So the usual applies - this is intended to guide those who want to give me a present but have no clue where to start - it's not intended to beg for gifts from anyone who didn't intend that thought when they came here! It's a long list for the simple reason that I like Christmas to be full of surprises and a long list gives more scope for surprise. I've also tried to include a variety of budget- and long-distance-post-friendly options so you should find something appropriate here - if not, feel free to deviate and invent - hopefully this should give you a few ideas.

If you do decide to send me something from this list, please email djelibeybi what you've chosen, to avoid possible doubling-up. If you don't have his email, let me know :-)

(Sorry it's a little half-baked - one of the problems of blogging a list like this on your iPod on the tube is you can't look anything up and I'm past my bedtime now)

So without further ado, here we go!

Vefa's Kitchen - Phaidon's big Greek cookbook Thank you, Buffygirl!

Hummingbird Bakery cookbook

Le Creuset Poterie lasagne dish in red or red-orange
Le Creuset Poterie ramekins or mini casserole dishes w lids - 6 for pref in red or red-orange but 2 would make a perfectly acceptable start

Amazon vouchers *again* - I think this is the third year in a row that these have been in here and still no takers *sigh*

Book of David Hockney UK paintings from Tate shop (when I get a chance, I'll hunt out the actual name of it. Big book. It's got all his Yorkshire paintings in it, including the ones he's started doing which are a combination of photos and painting)

CD: Nico Muhly  - Mothertongue

Camera - Canon G11 or Panasonic Lumix TZ-7 (I think - need to double-check the Lumix number. Will do that this weekend. I doubt there'll be a rush for this one in the next couple of days though...)

An original artwork by Simone O'Callaghan - I've always wanted one of her prints and her prices are ridiculously reasonable. Ask djeli if you need her email address.

Wooden knitting needles - interchangeable ends circular set (link will come when there's time...)

Row counter

Shoulder massage device - something designed to remove tension knots, not just feel nice. I would love you forever if you can really find something that will take out knots. Doubly so if it will fit tidily into a handbag.

Colinette chunky yarn - yah. yummy stuff. can't remember the name (see earlier note re: weekend)

Sock knitting books! There's a couple of them, but (again), I'll need to look them up

2 skeins Koigu sock yarn - so can actually make socks with it this time (one skein per foot, in case you're not a knitter and you're wondering - can't get a whole pair out of one skein!)

Artists' sketchbooks book

iTunes voucher (must be in ££s though - AuD can't be used in the UK store) - lots of little digital helpers I'd like to get - the full version of Karajan ear training for a start!

... and if all that's not enough, there was a lot left over from last year's list too - anything not formatted with strikeout is fair game :-)

i've suspected awhile that i'm a very picky individual. today i think i have confirmed it. i've been looking at online accounting packages. my issue is that i have myob accounting plus for windows. i've had it for years, and it's been pretty good. i went for accounting plus because i wanted the ability to track stock of scores (which i've never had a need for) and for time tracking, but that came with a bunch of payroll rubbish, and i haven't upgraded since about 2003 because they've never implemented multi-currency support (or hadn't when i checked a couple of years back. i've stopped bothering to look) and i didn't need all the super-dooper payroll calculations that seemed to be the only true upgrades in the rather pricey package. the real issues with what i have are that:

1. it's windows-based, so i have to get at it via parallels, which is simple, but slow, so i avoid it
   
2. it offers way more features than i need and then i get confused
3. because i don't use it often, i go through a steep learning curve every time trying to remember where to put stuff, and - most heinous of all -
   
4. it draws its currency based on the system currency, so i can't even have one account for australian dollars and one account for pounds - it's all of one or all of the other. and it drives me nuts working with my uk finances with $$$ everywhere

so yes, i'm picky, but because it has so many issues and i'm avoiding using it, i'm really not in control of my finances (slim as they are, but that's all the more reason to understand them) and am always horrendously behind with working out stuff like, y'know, tax and invoices and things.

so today i went a-hunting for an online app that would help me out. something to manage my personal finances, at least in the uk, preferably in australia too (hey, i'm not unreasonable - i don't expect it to do everything!), although with the acknowledgement that separate accounts might be best for maintaining separation between the two (because i lodge tax returns there and here - must look into what i can do to stop that). ideally i'd like to be able to shift my own australian business finances into the australian part and generate invoices, pay bills and whatnot and produce the reports that my accountant needs. and i need it to preferably be free or at least cost seriously minor ducats - i don't earn that much in a year and the aim here is to at least get a grip over my finances, not work my way to a vast fiscal empire. so i've been ahunting and i've found it particularly interesting noting what is disqualifying all these services, none of which seems to be quite right. it's a learning experience - and especially from a web design perspective - that i think will be valuable for djeli's and my super-secret project which we're working on right now. so i thought i'd inflict what i found on you, dear reader. sorry about that. you can stop reading, you know.

• free agent central: fantastic support for UK finances, import and easy categorisation of bank statements, at-a-glance charts, money owed/owing, etc., subscribable calendar of tax due dates (nice touch!) and on-the-fly calculation of tax due. even a nice little page for working out one's self-assessment tax return which looked like it would help do away with the accountant a little. but: minimum £15 a month - ouch! £150 a year gives a nice little discount, but is way, way way out of my budget. free 30-day trial is nice, but pointless if the monthly fee is beyond me. sad about that
  
• freshbooks: i've heard quite a bit about this one, but it looks very US-centric, couldn't find any indication that it supported UK requirements at all
• curdbee: great-looking service, nice site, seems easy to use, multi-currency support - set your base currency then you can set each customer's currency individually (nice!). free account does almost everything except estimates, pro account only $5 a month, so eminently affordable. but it doesn't do banking, only invoicing, so doesn't help with tracking the overall state of my finances.
• mint.com: i had high hopes of this one - all about budgeting and so on, but seems to be US-only. i guess you might be able to use it if you entered everything manually, but that would just be stupidly painful. shame. they have an iphone app and everything :-(
  
• workingpoint: looked quite good... until i found that it auto-generates a public profile for you (why??) which put me off a bit... and then i discovered that it's US-only which wiped it entirely
• openair.com: i was interested in my initial reaction to this which went: 'eugh! ugly site. omg they've used the word "solutions"! this ain't for me'. so i gave it a moment and analysed. the ugliness of the site destroyed any hope i might have had that the user interface would be clean and easy to use - it was cluttered with banner ads and hard to read. 'solutions' is a word i associate with high-end corporate business - definitely not for me. even when i made myself stop and look closely at the site to try to find information about the product i wanted, i actually had trouble. the solutions page did list their various levels, but the pricing page just said to contact them. poa? no thanks!
• saasu.com (formerly netaccounts): another messy site. hard-to-read navigation is never a good way to start. i got excited when i saw the 'use it free' button, but alas it was a red herring - the free account only allows 15 transactions a month - who thought that one up? the next level up is $AU25 per month - about £12, which is still a bit steep. multi-currency is supported but you have to pay an extra $10 a month for that... no chance. shame. i like supporting the australian option in software, but not for that kind of outlay.
• easybill: well, that was kind of expected: invoicing only.
• blinksale: likewise
• iggsoftware.com: at first i was put off by this. it's not a web service, which was what i was hoping for - they do mac apps, plus the layout of the site has the app iBiz (invoicing and time-tracking) larger than iBank (finance management) so i didn't even register that the latter was there for a moment. then i didn't like the idea of separate apps, but on revisiting the site, iBank could well be an option for me. for $59.99 it's a modest-ish outlay, no ongoing fees. nice that it has an iphone app; annoying that you need mobileme to run it. it does multiple currencies, but doesn't seem to do invoicing at all... i guess that's why they do iBiz, but why not integrate them? feels messy... and from what i can see from their forums, some users are feeling this too. intrigued, but hesitant. i like the idea of being able to track my banking both here and in aus from the one place...
• lessaccounting: this one looks pretty good, but the pricing and signup page is vague at best about what you get with the free account ("limited use of invoices & expenses, accounting reports") but it's made clear that bank accounts aren't available until you pay $20 a month. so cheaper than the others, but still more than i'm willing to pay for something that doesn't do everything (it can't support bank accounts in more than one currency, although it supports multi-currency invoicing) but it's probably on the consideration list.
  
• liquidaccounts: another ugly, hard-to-read website. far too much information in all-caps, making it hard to read. oh, except for the bit about £15 a month plus vat. after that what it did was pretty much irrelevant.

so that's twelve options, no sale. but i've narrowed it down to a shortlist at least, consisting of free agent, ibiz/ibank and lessaccounting. if anyone knows any alternatives, i'm raring to keep testing!

update: an addition to the list, but not, i fear, the shortlist: jumsoft money for mac. it has all the functionality, but unfortunately lacks finesse, so you can't link transactions together (withdrawal from one acct to a deposit in another, or a withdrawal from a bank account to pay off a loan account) plus it doesn't export proper accountant reports, but it's a nice start on an accounting app - give it a few more years and it could be a real contender. so heigh ho. back to the drawing board.

another update: found another 4 options. quicken online is actually free(!) and while information about things like multiple currencies was limited, i figure i might as well sign up and see what they had... but their registration will only accept a US postcode and wouldn't let me leave the field blank, so that one's out of the running. geezeo hides all but the most high-level info about their service inside videos. i couldn't be bothered sifting through them and frankly it all sounded a little mickey mouse. perhaps this is lame and i should be pursuing these sorts of things further, but really - there are so many products out there, if they can't be bothered to differentiate themselves, then i can't be bothered to waste time on them. sorry. next! buxfer has the benefit of providing, nice and upfront, a demo version of the site - don't read about it, have a wander! it looks pretty nice, but there are no tooltips that i can see on the buttons (in firefox) which means the interface would take me too long to learn. and finally wesabe, which looks like it could be quite good but they seem focused on the community aspect of their service, which is something that doesn't interest me in the slightest. i'm testing ibank at the moment, and so far am pretty impressed with it! pretty straightforward, easy to import data, categorise it and do things like pay off loans that aren't using regular payments (e.g. family loans), and it seems their iphone offering has been updated so that mobileme is no longer a requirement for syncing. we could have a winner?

whoops. just trawling through the facebook backlog while i wait for very large, very slow files to upload and discovered that back in april i was tagged by not one of my friends, but two of them for this meme. guess that means i should do something about it :-) and now you should too, eh? consider yourself tagged!

alcohol: lyme bay blackcurrant wine
believe in god?: yup
chocolate: hotel chocolat. i don't think i need to be more specific than that, but if you insist, this season's must-have chocolate is their strawberry & mint cream, enrobed in vanilla-ey white chocolate. i don't think 'enrobed' is too strong a word for this one.
d&d character: pass. the closest i'd get to this is the cyberbunny
eggs: omelette with ham, cheese, chives and a few little mushroom slices
food: greek. or french. or italian. something simple, no cumin.
gemstone: peridot
hairdresser: vicky at vidal sassoon
icecream: pine-lime splice
jeans: m&s bootcut (cos they do a short leg-length so i never need to get them taken up!)
karaoke choice: last thing i sang at karaoke was mika's 'grace kelly'. whether that was something people would want to hear again, i don't actually know.
i want 100Mb Internet access to my home: no. i NEED 100mb internet access to my home. especially right now when i've been waiting about 4 hours for this wretched file to upload
left or right handed: right
music: oh do i have to answer this one? too bloody hard. today have been listening to delius and grechaninov. oh and lots and lots of rowley while i write this film score :-D
nationality: australian with aspirations to become british as well
operating system: os x. never thought i'd write that one.
perfume: ck one
my mp3 player is a: red ipod nano. well, they call it red; it's sort of pinkish really.
quest: fame and fortune
rant: lack of support for proper tagging of classical music
seafood: not really. prawns are ok. i prefer fish.
twitter: tweetdeck
uncontrollable urge to: not have a dayjob
vice: twitter
what i wear to work: pyjamas
x-men character: wolverine
yesterday i: worked on a film score, watched warren beatty and ben kingsley in bugsy, ran a sound test on digital sound file formats (we're sticking with mp3 because the sound improvement of lossless over max-quality mp3 isn't enough to justify the effort of converting our 700+-album soundfile collection) and ripped 15 cds
zodiac sign: aries

i'm sending out a question for anyone who does web dev work, or who closely follows trends in web interface development (not the behind-the-scenes stuff). i find myself in the position of quietly creeping up on a time when i will need to go forth and find a new dev contract... and the realisation suddenly dawned on me that i actually haven't worked *as* a web dev in over a year now, because my last contract, while having web-devvy elements, consisted of masquerading as an "e-learning technologist". (Edit: I should probably say that I have more than a decade's solid coding experience, so I don't need to learn the basics, just to update my skillset a bit)

of course, i keep an eye on the web standards' group's marvellous "links for light reading", i browse magazines and regularly peruse a truckload of webby blogs, but right now i need to give myself a little refresher course - and i'm being overwhelmed by the information on what's happened in the last year, so i ask you:

1. what new technologies/skills/approaches from about the past 18 months do you think are the most important?
2. what are you most commonly asked for (e.g. ajax, css3, mobile web, whatever)?
3. which dev blog could you not live without?
4. if you read any paper dev magazines, what are they?
5. what, if any, webby book or article changed the way you think or work in the past year?

any and all responses will be leapt upon with delight and a thirst for knowledge :-)

finally, i have finished flim-flamming around and made a big decision. it involves technology purchases, and that is always an exciting sort of decision to make. recently i've been fretting about mobile phones. i want the iphone because it's gorgeous and does everything i want it to (and all my friends have them now too and spend their time comparing apps and i feel left out), but it's useless for the art project i'm working on because it doesn't support flash. so i have to buy another phone sometime for the art project and was looking at android, but that's still too immature and as the project won't really get off the ground for a few months, if i'm realistic (because my collaborator and i need to talk about what we're going to do again now because our last plan was crushed by her phd supervisor, so we need to plan and think before we even start to code and test), it's probably more sensible to look at phones for testing closer to the time we'll be doing the actual testing, to give android a chance to show what it can do. i had been going to buy a netbook for when i go back to work, in the hopes that then i could actually continue to compose through the period of servitude, but i'm concerned about weight, now that i've discovered that my neck is showing signs of greater-than-usual-for-my-age wear and tear and that one of the discs is bulging out of place a bit and getting close to a nerve. so last night i sat down and made up a big table in evernote discussing the pros and cons of all the various devices under consideration, which was a very interesting exercise and i am delighted to announce that the winner is...

ipod touch!

it has all the functionality of the iphone except the actual phone and the camera, for about the same initial outlay (but of course without the phone plan) and not having a plan attached leaves me free, if need be, to get a phone on a plan when the time comes to pick out a testing phone. it's significantly lighter than a netbook and more subtle for new contracts where one might not necessarily want to sit down in sight of one's co-workers at lunchtime with a computer when they could get concerned that you're trying to do two contracts at once or something. it has wifi access. and a truckload of apps - my productivity tools all have iphone/pod apps, plus i discovered some fabulous looking apps for music last night - a keyboard one which allows access to a full piano keyboard which you play with your fingers - should be useful for confirming intervals, working on melodic fragments and multi-touch allows you to play chords too, which would be very helpful. there's also an amazing-looking ear training app which would be incredibly helpful for me. and of course you can get metronome and tuner apps too, as well as a rudimentary notation tool (although it doesn't play back yet, which i think makes it a little limited for now). if i put on my prophet hat, i do feel that if the major notation packages, finale and sibelius, end up making versions for a mobile platform, it'll most likely be the iphone/pod, plus of course there's always the chance that apple will release a version of logic, and there's no way that would be available on anything else.

so i have made my decision. now i just have to try to hold myself back until i have a job. or at least the prospect of a job. or at least am looking for a job. um.

it's funny. ever since i started on trying to fix my brain a few years ago i have these random moments of revelation. while skiing i realised that my absolute terror of falling/slipping stemmed from the time i was bushwalking in the blue gum forest with my parents and slipped on casuarina needles and fell over a cliff. today's revelation relates to desks.

djeli and i have been discussing workspaces in the house because while i'd managed to achieve a setup that was working for me while he was away, the lack of space in our house means that it doesn't work when he's around. he has the whole of the spare room for his workspace while i have to take what i can find, something that isn't at all conducive to sustained work on creative things. so we've been talking about what can be done, given that the loungeroom is public space and so interruptions and laundry happen there, and the bedroom sort of likewise in that if i work on the bed i have to pack everything away entirely every night when he wants to go to bed. i can't work on till i'm ready to go to bed even, plus i find i sleep badly if i'm working on the bed all day because there's no separation of work and rest places and i feel like a slob. but the built-in desk in the bedroom is minute. it's barely wide enough for a laptop, with pretty much no elbow room. its one consolation is that it has a nice little bookshelf above it, where i keep all my music and art books, and it's a space where i can blu-tak up bits and pieces relating to what i'm working on on the wall.

i discovered when i first moved out of home that i don't like staring at a blank wall when i'm working. i like to have either a window or a large space in front of me. in lilyfield i had a room to myself that i hardly ever used for a variety of reasons. part of that was because the desk was too small and the window both too small and too high to see out of when i was at the desk.

now i'm staying with my friend in dundee and have been very taken by her tiny 1940s fold-up desk - you know, one of those ones that have storage space in them and divider-pots for pens and envelopes and things, but the desk part folds up to contain the whole thing so it takes very little room, and have been thinking about how that might be a solution, to have something like that beside the minute desk in the bedroom, so it would take up minimal space and give a little more surface space for when i need to spread out.

ANYWAY, to the point, which is the revelation. i've been wondering for years, without really thinking about it deeply, where this need for space and light in my work area comes from and this morning it just came to me in a flash and i suddenly realised that it's because i *used* to have that! when i was in high school, my mother had the clever idea of extending all the bedrooms in the house by adding bay windows to them. the bay windows in my father's study and my bedroom had desks built into them, so i had a desk that was very nearly the full width of the room, surrounded by large windows on four sides (in front, sides, plus it had a glass roof). the light in the daytime was fantastic and when thinking i could stare out into the beautiful pittosporum tree outside the window and see pictures in the leaves. when i worked there it never occurred to me that i might not want to sit at a desk, that i might want to move to the couch sometimes or otherwise shunt about the house, whereas i seem to have spent all my time since i left home doing (or wanting to do) just that in an effort to find some sort of work area where i could actually work.

the space i was using before djeli came home was the closest i've got to the ideal in the 10 years or so since i left home - we have a double-gateleg dining table that sits in a corner of a large bay-window-like niche in the loungeroom. it's a nice space but not really terribly useful so it tends to get used for drying the laundry because it's close to the kitchen/laundry, near self-contained so it doesn't seem to intrude into the living room, has plenty of light and a heater for the winter. i fold out one side only of the table, so there's still not a vast amount of desk space, but i just love being by the window. it makes concentrating so much easier and enjoyable. so i think there's a lesson learned here. let's just hope i can put it to good use and find a space i can set up properly and get some work done in!