Just so.

I nodded so emphatically at this that my head nearly fell off.

Happy

What a busy day/week/month/year!

Good though, all of them. Very good.

I'm 31 now. I like that.

Will post properly soon.

of RSS and netiquette

To say that my friend Hamish changes his electronic particulars as often as he changes his socks would be unfair, he doesn't go through socks that fast. ;) OK that's a gross exaggeration: He's had the same domain name for as long as I've known him, but he does like to fiddle with the details. I've long since lost track of the number of things which have appeared before the @ as his email address, but I'm pretty sure it numbers in the double digits which is impressively inventive! Periodically he also likes to tear down his whole website to start over. I get it, that kind of a striving for perfection... but it also highlights how much of a house of eCards our modern interconnected existences are, because changing the details of one's online presence invariably breaks a bunch of the stuff that other people had built up to keep in touch.

So Hame's just completed one of his 'tabula rasa' reworkings of his site, and in doing so he borked the LiveJournal friends feed I (and assorted other people) used as a convenient way of keeping in touch with his blog. Bit of a nuisance but for the time being it just meant I wasn't reading his blog and, lets face it, he's only across the hall so I'm hardly out of touch with what's going on in Hamsterland. Anyway it came up last night in one of those "I blogged about..." conversations. He mentioned something he'd mentioned online, and I fessed up to having stopped reading since he'd pulled the feed I was using.

Just to be clear, I don't mean to suggest there's anything wrong with Hame changing his stuff - it's his stuff after all - but it got me thinking about how I relate to all this virtual-self stuff.

Personally, whenever I've made significant changes here at splateagle.com I've been meticulous about ensuring that - as far as possible - they don't wreck the way people use it for keeping in touch with me. That is the point of the place after all. For example when I changed the site structure to its current form a few years back I moved the blog page to a new place. So I told people who I knew had the old location bookmarked, left a note up at the old location and checked my referrer logs periodically for the next few months to check the move hadn't thrown people too much. That just seemed natural and polite to me, an extension of telling friends and family your new address when you move... but with all the myriad ways other people now connect with each other where does our responsibility for this stuff end?

Most people abdicate responsibility for managing their online self by using a pre-packaged platform like LiveJournal or FaceBook, where someone else decides what does and doesn't get supported, arguably better solution until the 3rd party you've entrusted your stuff to moves/loses/changes that stuff and you have no say in it...

Later in the evening Hame prompted me to try Safari's RSS handling feature again, and it turns out that - since I last looked at it - it's matured into a better way of pooling the various friends' blogs I read, than the LJ solution I'd been using. It now seemlessly finds and compiles the broadcast feed on everyone's blogs... except mine!* Drat. Need to fix that as soon as I can work out why...

*for some reason the feed for my page only appears (in Safari) if you point the browser directly at it here

Afterglow

Right. I promised to blog about more interesting things than my tech-woes didn't I? ...then I buggered off and spent a couple of weeks with assorted visiting guests, doing bits of The Festival, playing tourist in my home town, occasionally hopping in the car* to belt off around the highlands, and hanging out in pubs with friends quite a lot. Plenty to tell you about then. Where to start though?

Well, Festival stuff seems as good a place as any: What have I seen? On the good comedy side it has to be Aeneas Faversham Forever which was - predictably - brilliant, but no gamble as I've been a fan of theirs since back when they were just Improverts. Flip side of that coin would be The Big Value Comedy Show which was a gamble... and not good - one of the four acts didn't show, of the remaining three, we kinda wished two had taken the fourth's lead with only the first being actually funny. I wish I could remember the compere's name as he did a (frankly) heroic job of keeping the night from simply being unpleasant. Away from comedy, I saw a compelling performance of On the Waterfront, (attended by its 93 year old author, which was kinda neat) and then there was the powerful-if-perplexing experience of Dorian Gray which genuinely surprised me since I don't think of myself as a ballet person (let alone a contemporary ballet person) and the whole idea of basing a ballet on the work of an author whose greatest strength is dialogue seemed perverse and fundamentally flawed. It's not, it's genuinely brilliant.

That about sums up my Festival so far, off to something at the Portrait Gallery tonight with the gang, and might catch a last fling show on Saturday night if the mood takes me, then it's Fireworks time Sunday (unless I decide to skip them) and then we start to get our city back from the bloody tourists**

... speaking of <Aussie accent>bloody tourists</Aussie accent> my mate Eric was staying with me for most of the last week, and a very welcome tourist he was too. It's a little inconvenient having such a good friend who lives on the far side of the globe but unsurprisingly we picked right up where we'd left off as soon as he made it through the arrivals gate at EDI. I managed to make a start on returning the favour of playing host/tourguide and flatmate from my month spent in Perth, we did assorted tourist stuff in the city and managed to almost overdose on castles on a whistle-stop tour of the Highlands. Also unsurprisingly Eric got on famously with my crowd here*** which made for a hectic but really fun week socially.

I took a long weekend the weekend before last too, this time so I could hang out with my big bro. We bolted off up to Sutherland and got some implausibly great weather for the few days up there while we alternated between visiting old childhood holiday haunts, and playing in my car, which my brother is now insured on and fell for almost as badly as I have :D I like sharing my toys, although there are a vanishingly small number of people I'd trust behind the wheel of Hobbes.

So that's a skim-reading version of my past couple of weeks, I need to cool off on the car trips for a while because between the Highland trips and my two week road trip round France last month (did I mention that?) I've spent a small fortune on petrol and oil. Actually I'm looking forward to a less hectic few weeks anyway, maybe even getting to spend the odd evening in doing nothing****. Right now though I need to go and get changed for tonight...

*I'm still giddy every time I go anywhere near my car - I'm grinning like a loon now at the thought that it's actually my car... can't imagine that feeling going away any time soon. ...that said nothing has gone expensively wrong with him yet either ;)
**OK, that never actually happens. Tourists are a constant here, but the human tide ebbs significantly after the Fringe ends, though to be fair it's already noticeably less congested around here since the Tattoo finished
***I beamed when on his last day he said: "I don't think I've stopped laughing once since I got here" I really love the way that (on the whole) my friends get on with my other friends
****The other night at the pub Liz paused mid conversation to try and recall when she last did nothing, and realised that it was back in June sometime - I've not been quite that busy but not far off!

did I say two months?

124 days!! Time Machine popped up this morning to tell me it was worried that it hadn't backed up in 124 days, and was there a problem? I thought it must have been confused so I double checked, and my Sad Mac post was back at the start of April... my 'puter broke a third of a year ago.

Anyway seems the brain surgery was a complete success and Flash is back to his old self, so all's well and I can start posting about something more interesting than computer problems. Promise.

:)

Flash!

Ahh ahhh!

He's got a new logic board!

:)

</geeky 80s scifi & Queen reference >*

My beloved 'puter is finally fixed and back with me in full working order. 's got about two months worth of software updates, application patches and back email to download though and I need to sleep so that's all the posting for now.

*unless you got it of course, in which case that song will probably now be stuck in your head all day - a fitting fanfare to my Mac's triumphant return dontchathink? :D

August?

How?

Yes I know I've gone all rubbish again with the posting (or lack thereof) but I'm still missing a limb without my 'puter. The short version of that saga is that so far eBay has failed twice to deliver a replacement, first one turned out to be the wrong Mac and went back, second one never showed up at all (PayPal have my refund listed as "pending") however yesterday an unexpected glimmer of light appeared at the end of the tunnel so fingers crossed I might have Flash back to his old self soon.

In other news I've been on holiday - two weeks' road trip through France with a long stay in the Vendee with Mum & Dad, some floor tiles, a little too much sun for my shins, a long awaited trip to the Marais Poitevin, and of course a visit to the chateau for pancakes! I also stopped off in St Malo all-too-briefly and in Cambridge to see some very good friends I'd neglected, who nonetheless kindly made me barbeque dinners and took me round their lovely city including an evening at an excellent outdoor production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

I have some pictures of my travels and I'll post some of them when I get my life back Mac sorted.