Skin of Stars

I’ve had many jobs. My full CV is unprintable in a comfortable digest. Though all were useful in their own way, it was still a means to an end. Rock superstardom… so four years ago I decided to retool in what was then a time devouring hobby. So far, things have been going pretty well. I got a decent degree and have had two awesome jobs in a row, the second of which I still happily work at (whiteoctober).

I’ve been keeping my head down for some time now. I’ve really been wanting to get good at what I’m doing before I start to think of other things. But I’m happy to say that recently I’m starting to ‘get it’ with many of the techs that I’m using. I know I still have sooo much to learn, but it’s a good feeling to be making progress.

Oh yeah, I use Ubuntu for both work and play now. Good times

Hmm, what else is new… I move in a couple of weeks, to a place in Headington. At the moment there are five of us living in a four bedroom house in East Oxford. It’s fun and communal and all, but I’m really looking forward to moving in with just myself and Emily. You should check her blog by the way: emilychiang.wordpress.com.

Actually, I think that’s it for now. Take care.

Hello all, it’s been a while. The Skinofstars site has been languishing in disuse for some time now. Like I’m sure many others, I’ve found the transition to micoblogging is all too easy. Sometimes though, one wants to write something a little longer and long gaps are not helpful when you finally think of something. So I guess I’m just posting to get rid of some writers block really.

For the six months since my last post (my, that is a long time!) I’ve been working at Studio Lift in Reading. There are five of us; two designers, two coders and a multi-talented boss. We fill our days making like this and like this (bad linking! using Movable Type. This is the same blogging platform that is used by the BBC, The Guardian, ReadWriteWeb and various others. It comes in both Commercial and Open Source offerings and is perhaps one of the most venerable of blogging systems.

Does that mean I’m going to talk tech now?… sure (jump?). Movable Type (mt) has just released its 5th version. This places more emphasis on managing multiple blogs within a site structure. Very useful if you’ve ever tried to manage multiple blog instances (how many blogs do you think The Guardian has?). There is also a new emphasis on social communication (see Motion).

The system is written in Perl but because the publishing is static files you can drop pretty much any scripting language in without any problems. My current language of choice for server-side is PHP. You hook your language in with mt using their own markup derived syntax, and to be honest for a simple blog you never have to touch another language. Let’s look at an example which will iterate over a collection of the last five entries:

<mt:Entries lastn=”5″>
<h2><mt:EntryTitle /></h2>
<p><mt:EntryBody /></p>
</mt:Entries>

There is documentation, with my favourite page being the tag reference, but otherwise there certainly isn’t the same breadth of documentation as you would find with something like WordPress. Perhaps the strong ties with the commercial side of the software, it was increasingly license prudish at the Open Source blogging party, has been a hindrance to a warm and fuzzy community embrace. Still, some big media hitters use it so they’ve certainly got something right.

Well, as I said, I work in Reading and my crappy car’s wiper motor has broken so I’ve got to get up early and catch a bus. It’s been nice to talk to you again. Thanks for putting up with my tech chatter, I expect that you’ll get variation soon enough as we head towards the General Election

Night Night.

Two days later and its New Years Eve and I was working. I’ll admit that this was a night that I wasn’t looking forward to. I always feel this night of all nights is the biggest of disappointing nights of the year. There again, I think I can just be a misery sometimes, which was something I did well on this night. I did have some fun though, there were nine of us working upstairs around one till, a night of continual weaving but sooo busy that the evening flies. I like work to be busy . This bar dance was set to a soundtrack of the Sharpees who played better than the last time I saw them, though I have to admit they are still not one of my favourites. In all honesty though it would have to be one hell of a band for me to have a covers band as one of my favourites… and at least they didn’t play Mustang Sally! The shift finished at some ungodly hour, so we went on to a party in Margate in the home of **On The Rag zine**. It was a house gig but unfortunately we missed the bands, new boys ‘Cubs’ and one of my favourite locals ‘We Are Carnivores’, due to time. Shame really, I would have put up with the bleeding eardrums you get in house gigs for those two.
nye, newyearseve, work, sharpees, cubs, wearecarnivores, ontherag, ramsgate, margate

I recieved a letter from the court service… fear.. had they really found me?! I slowly opened the envolope and pulled out the pink paper… jury duty! Wuh?! How terribly exciting, though I have had to defer though due to school… erm, not sure I can talk about that, if not then I’ll just edit this post ^^
juryservice

Luckily I’m getting a good few shifts while I’m here, lots of last min calls but thats fine by me. One of my more recent shifts has been real relaxed but I’m starting to be aware of a necessity of a more appropriate part time job. Not sure exactly what that is at the moment but its certainly something I need to think about. Answers to ‘life, the universe and everything’ on a postcard to 42 Hitchikers Way…
work, career,

Well there is a summary of the past few weeks in an entry that probably takes as long to read. Hopefully once our interwebulation connection is rectified I can summarise my return to Thanet in more bitsize pieces.