I live in Lancashire, work as a graphic/web designer, and relax by gardening, doing Aikido, reading science fiction and drawing.
poppy alexander change and decay in all around I see
Welcome to my pages.
The hills are shadows, and they flow
from form to form, and nothing stands,
they melt like mists, the solid lands,
like clouds they shape themselves, and go ..(Tennyson)
Blade Trinity
Sat, 11/22/2008 - 14:33 — poppyHere's my basic categorisation scheme for movies: A is obviously top stuff; B is typical B-movie material ie I like it but I'm not saying it's especially good. C is just about passable, D is dreck. I put Blade 3 at C, along with Chronicles of Riddick. The titles are great, but then they often are in bad films, as if someone realises the product isn't so hot and ups the budget on the packaging.
Plot in June 08
Wed, 06/04/2008 - 22:52 — poppySowing and planting season is just beginning to turn into harvesting season, and it's quite exciting. The weather is not so bad as last year, so the slugs haven't been so bad, though still a problem. They've had all the lettuces bar two in a pot which they haven't found yet.
Tales of Earthsea, Miyazaki jr
Fri, 05/23/2008 - 20:54 — poppyAtmospheric but confusing. It's a long time since I read the Earthsea books, and this animation doesn't bother with explaining plot points. Why are the dragons there, and how is the girl a dragon? Who is Sparrowhawk and why is he involved?
It's nearly very good. The architecture is lovely, great pillared halls, castles and ancient crumbling towns. In one scene Sparrowhawk comes over a rise onto a great deserted beach strewn with the huge hulls of abandoned warships. What is lacking is the strong storytelling heart, that would have us care for the folk that inhabit this impressive world.
Drupal progress
Sun, 02/24/2008 - 18:26 — poppyI finally manged to get Clean URLs to work on my test Drupal site. First I had to enable mod-rewrite for Apache (a2enmod rewrite, advice from http://www.epicarena.com/c/Linux). Then check that php was installed - yes, it came with Drupal. Took me a while to work out how to get the test page to work though. Then had to change Apache2.conf to AllowOverrideAll and AccessFilename .htaccess. Finally enabled RewriteBase/Drupal in .htaccess, and it worked. The page I mainly used was http://drupal.org/node/15365.
Commuting Haiku
Sat, 02/23/2008 - 23:16 — poppyDawn dark city rain
Seagulls spin
racing porpoise cars
books and more books
Thu, 11/22/2007 - 22:43 — poppySix months down the line I'm still with Amazon, but Alibris has come and gone. I'm currently trying out Biblio.com, and Biblion.co.uk, its smaller UK-based cousin.
More on bookselling
Wed, 07/04/2007 - 01:00 — poppyI decided to run a 2 month trial of bookselling on Amazon, noting expenditure, income, time and pleasure (or lack of it). That has now completed. I have broken even financially, and have accumulated 180 books listed. Does this constitute success and is it worth going on?
I've fallen victim to ebay disease (ebalo?)
Fri, 04/06/2007 - 01:00 — poppy
I just hate getting rid of stuff. Finally I decided to sell a couple of books I got from a fleamarket, and a DVD and it worked! Wow, this is an easy way to make money. Or maybe not quite .. I seem to have spent the last week laboriously listing knackered old books that will sell for .99 if that. Not to mention the hours spent trawling round the car boot sale wondering why everything looked like such dreck.It's already made more than the Tshirts, though, so definitely worth a try. I carry on for a couple of months, then do an assessment of time/enjoyment/financial gain
installed Drupal
Wed, 04/04/2007 - 01:00 — poppy
I looked around a bit at various cms's. Squiz looked interesting, but more aimed at the local govt side, and also quite small still. Zope and Plone have a lot of corporate charity and business sites. I was looking for something that lent itself more to the arty. phpNuke and postNuke seem more gaming community. Mambo and its cousin Joomla! have a lot of small business users. Drupal includes The Onion and Gallery in its users, and seemed to have artists and photographers, so I thought I'd give it a go.
Escaflowne
Thu, 03/22/2007 - 01:00 — poppy
I have to admit the giant robots nearly put me off to start with. Not that I've got anything against them, but in the end I don't really get them either. Maybe it's a boy thing. These ones are well animated and fight almost like real swordsmen. But why have giant robot swordsmen? Why not just swordsmen? Anyway.
