Sleep Interrupted

The new album by The Cooper Temple Clause, Make This Your Own, was released on Monday. You can listen to Damage, Homo Sapiens and Waiting Game — along with their entire back catalogue, it would seem — on their web site. You can also watch the videos for Homo Sapiens and Waiting Game on the ubiquitous YouTube. I’ll even make it easy and point you to the right place at Amazon and Play.

If you like the new artwork on the album and their web site you might be interested to look at some more of Richard Sweeney’s work. The “sliceforms” are particularly cool!

A piece of trivia for you: The Cooper’s track 555-4823 is named after a telephone number in Back To The Future. Now you just know you’re going to have to watch it again to find out who it belongs to…

There are simply too many classic films I have not seen and, worse, probably won’t get round to seeing unless I get some help. So here’s the plan: On the first Saturday evening of each month will be convened Film Club, wherein a classic film will be watched. And… that’s about it really. The theory is that by making an arrangement it’s much more likely to happen.

Suggestions for classic films for the first meeting are welcome. A good working definition of “classic” is if you tell someone you haven’t seen film X and they reply, “You haven’t seen X?!”. So for me, that would include The Godfather and The Shining.

I enjoyed looking back on my goals for 2006 and it got me thinking about the new year. I’m going to try and make these goals measurable rather than just some fuzzy resolutions; I think that will improve my chances of living up to them.

• Get a new job. I’ve been at Anite for five and a half years and it’s time to move on.
• Stay in contact more. Specifically with my extended family. I have a lot of cousins and when we were growing up we saw a lot of each other but as adults it can be years between meetings. Most of us met up over Christmas and it was commented that we can’t rely on our parents to organise gatherings any more.
• Finish decorating downstairs. And I mean really finish.
• Learn Ruby, Ruby on Rails and Python. Learning C# last year has whet my appetite and I think it’s time to redress the balance and learn some of the more interesting, cool languages and technologies. I was given the Programming Ruby book for Christmas, so that’s a good start.
• Have a coding project. It’s been well over a year since I gave up the FFL and I’d like to do some coding outside of work. Obviously it will have to be something that doesn’t take too long. I have a couple of ideas in my head and I’m quite interested in some of the work that’s being done on the future of user interfaces.
• Cook more. I enjoy cooking but I don’t do it much. I’ve volunteered to cook on Saturday evenings. Let’s see how that goes.
• Blog better. Not more, better. One of the things I wanted to do when I started this blog was write about technical issues but I’ve not managed it often. Hopefully I can rectify that. I want all my posts to have some sort of value; less trivial rubbish. Of course, triviality is in the eye of the beholder.
• Redesign the blog. One of the things I enjoyed about the FFL was dabbling in the graphic design side of things (although not very successfully). It’s a total vanity project but I’d like to change this blog’s design to something other than the default. I’m not good at plucking ideas out of thin air so any suggestions would be welcome.

Update: I guess I’m not destined to get one of these lists out in a single go. I forgot to carry a few items over from 2006:

• Reduce my carbon footprint.
• Run 5k.

A happy (if belated) new year to you all! So how did I do on the goals for last year?

• Hand over the FFL: Done, although no sight of it since.
• Finish decorating the lounge: Not done but then I seriously underestimated the kitchen…
• Redecorate at least one of the “difficult” rooms in our house: The major work in the kitchen and dining room is done but as ever it’s the finishing that’s proving time consuming and difficult.
• Sort out the remaining bits of exterior paintwork on the house: Done, although I copped out and paid someone to do it.
• Tame the last wildly overgrown border in our back garden: Done.
• Sort out the small rust patches on my car before they get any worse: Nope.
• Blog more: My db-fu tells me I posted 65 times in 2005 and 103 times in 2006.
• Persuade at least one of my friends or family to start blogging: I think I can claim at least partial responsibility for both the Tims starting. Result!
• Invent The Best MMPORPG In The World Ever. Eh?
• Teach Ben to throw and catch: Now this is a classic living-through-your-children item. I throw like a girl and I want to spare Ben that embarrassment. What I didn’t realise is that Ben has to be physically and mentally capable of throwing and catching first. He’s certainly got better over the year. Perhaps the goal should have been “learn to throw”.
• Make moves in the right direction towards becoming carbon neutral: This deserves a whole post but basically I doubt I budged an inch.
• Go running more often: Well I ran a bit, perhaps more than the previous year but I certainly didn’t hit my goals.

That’s about 50-50 in my book. It’s interesting to see how some of my priorities have changed in just 12 months.