Elements or Lower

1. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something about Tigger reminds me of Bruce Forsyth.

2. It would have been quite touching had Darby been established as Christopher Robin’s daughter. But she isn’t.

3. Judging by Daisy Duck and Ludwig von Drake, Donald Duck doesn’t talk like that merely because he’s a duck. He’s actually got some kind of motherfucker speech impediment.

There’s little I can say about the finale of Battlestar Galactica that hasn’t already been said, except to note that it’s one of the few times a TV show has managed to turn a lengthy, multi-season episodic structure so successfully into a single, cohesive narrative. Sure, there are a handful of loose ends, but it’s important to distinguish between a loose end (Starbuck’s scar) and a deliberate ambiguity (Starbuck). What’s more, the spirituality manifest in the finale was there all along, but we’d chosen as an audience to explain it away. Who predicted that when Head Six spoke of God’s will, she was telling the literal truth?

Moore and Eick didn’t have an ending mapped out when they began, but unlike many (*cough* George Lucas *cough*), they’ve been quite honest about it. Nonetheless, the seeds that they planted were treated carefully and responsibly. It’s a difficult trick to juggle their harvest with the demands of providing a climax to the drama, and a resolution for each character.

I only hope that, in a couple of years, Lost can deliver a conclusion as satisfying as this.

I’m happy to admit that I’ve developed quite a soft spot for much of my daughter’s favourite television. Kids’ TV is at its best when peppered with little gags intended for parents, such as Ming Ming’s asides in The Wonder Pets, or practically anything in The Backyardigans. So it was with pleasure that we hauled ourselves over to Milton Keynes on Saturday afternoon for Nick Jr’s Jump Up event.

The event is set up to have a stage show, featuring a variety of characters from the channel’s trademark shows, surrounded by a selection of food stalls and themed activities around the perimeter. Tickets are free but strictly limited, and of course the whole event is a grand exercise in brand loyalty — ours is not a CBeebies household, and that’s the way the organisers would like to keep it.

Zoë, naturally, was just a shade overexcited and certainly overwhelmed, and after a couple of hours was more than ready to be taken home. This helped spare us much of the dramatic queuing for the various perimeter activities — that, and the fact that Zoë’s at the very youngest point of the target demographic, so almost all of them would have been beyond her.

The staff were friendly, and entirely unfrazzled by shepherding around 3000 very small children, together with their parents. The weather was glorious, the ice cream welcome, and the venue spacious. But that’s not to say it was an unqualified success: there are a handful of things that sprang easily to mind that could have turned it from good to great.

The queues for each of the activities were colossal, and small children and long queues in hot sunshine are a recipe for trouble. Much of the event felt like it was designed for a smaller number of visitors, in a venue able to accommodate a great many more. The longest queue, from what we could tell, was for the Thomas the Tank Engine bouncy castle. It needed more of these, even if they weren’t as strictly themed.

And whilst seeing her favourite characters on stage was lovely, I can’t help thinking that the kids would have adored being able to actually meet them in the flesh, as it were. Not for nothing does Disney have Mickey and Pluto patrol the grounds of Disneyworld, and although anyone who signs up to be accosted by a riot of toddlers whilst in a giant foam suit deserves every penny they’re paid, I’m certain the effect of Dora, Fifi and Piper O’Possum roaming the MK Bowl would have been just as successful.

Finally, and I don’t want to be churlish, but the stageshow went to great efforts to make it clear that you can see Arnie and Barney, or Stephanie and Sportacus, or Pablo and Uniqua, every day on Nick Jr — we know this already guys; that’s why we’re here!

It’s been troubling me that, having started a companion tumblelog to this blog, it got tender and regular lovin while poor old lowerelement.com remained cobwebby and unsatisfied. But a couple of weeks ago, it occurred to me that (a) Tumblr generates RSS that I could easily write a program to consume, and that (b) Blosxom has the most comically simple API to create new posts: just save a text file in the right place.

So today I set about implementing a crackpot scheme based on these trivial observations. I’ve now set up a little Perl cron job to grab the RSS from Tumblr, parse it, and store each feed item in a database. Where an item in the feed is new, the program generates a simple text file with its title and content, and saves it to the server. Blosxom does the rest.

Consequently, my tumblelog is now merged with the main blog. I’ve only kept a couple of the most recent posts, below. Yes, one of them is a syndication of the Buy Our Honeymoon blog. We update that quite often.

I’ve also been profoundly unexcited by the Haloscan comments system, previously found around these parts, and have heard the siren song of Disqus. So, for the second time, it’s out with the old and in with the new. Haloscan opened comments in a popup window, styled in a way that wasn’t so much old school as homeschool, whereas Disqus embeds the comment thread in the page itself, and is altogether more modern in both appearance and underlying code. In Haloscan’s favour, it’s very easy to export the old comments as XML, and so if I can figure out how to import these into Disqus, I’ll be sure to do so.

In other news, I arrived at the Dome just before 9AM today in the hope of upgrading my iPhone. Turned out that o2.co.uk was wrong, and the store at the dome had opened early after all. Consequently, I found myself 58th in line, with no chance of a 16GB phone. I’m not sure whether all stores operated a similar method, but the O₂ staff were sensible enough to assign deli-style numbered tickets to each of us, so that we could wander off to Starbucks and, if we fancied, perhaps the Tutankhamun exhibition, and then return to our place in the queue. When it became clear that, thanks to O₂’s robust and not-at-all temperamental system, I wouldn’t be able to expect to make progress for hours, I took the opportunity to bike home along the river, work on the above, and then bike back again. I finally got my upgrade at 14:43 (according to the receipt), a full six hours after I first arrived.

Mind you, having comprehensively shattered the screen of my old one about a month ago with my fat arse, it’s all worth it.

It’s anniversary season for Andrew.

Ten Years.

In July 1997, I set up Article Seven. My original intent was to provide graphic and web design to students organisations, with a greater emphasis on the former. But I quickly discovered that this wasn’t really a viable market niche, and that I was far better at getting things to work properly on the web than I was in print.

Although I was fortunate enough to be able to keep everything afloat, it took two years for the company to really find its feet, when I was brought on board to redesign the web sites of both Woking Borough Council and FISITA. Those relationships have lasted to this day, and form the vast bulk of the work I do. I barely feel like a freelancer: it’s like being a staff member at each place. I’m invited to Christmas meals, mentioned in Annual Reports, discussed in the staff magazine.

I moved to Woking in mid-1999, and noticed that the Council’s site contained a page of links to local companies, so I emailed them asking to be included, and offering to reciprocate by providing a consistent set of button images, since the navigation buttons on their site at the time had been clearly built from a variety of sources over time. It was my very great fortune that the Council were just about to start a tender process for the redevelopment of their site, to which I was invited to submit a proposal. At the time, I was able to promise a lot for very little money, and by spring 2000, the new site was launched.

Since that time, the site’s been redesigned a couple of times, and the Council have sponsored the development of the Content Management System that now powers their main site, community site, intranet and kiosk sites — together with SurreyWaste, The NPC, Monks and, of course, FISITA and FISITA 2008.

The initial creation of the CMS has consequently been the professional highlight of the past 10 years, although having my work nominated for an award, and being mentioned in an O’Reilly book (page 114 — what a thrill!) were inarguably bigger ego inflators.

Five Years.

And in July 2002, we moved from Woking to Greenwich. Article Seven, which had been run from the world’s best shed, grew up and found a proper studio, behind and under which we live.

I love it here, always have, and I can’t imagine wanting to move again for some considerable time yet. About a month ago, Tesco’s opened down the road, Marks and Spencers moved into the garage a couple of hundred yards away, and The O₂ opened its doors. I honestly don’t know which of these pleased me more.

Just beyond the Maritime Museum, there’s a shop selling nautical paraphernalia that proclaims itself as “the first shop in the world,” being a few seconds west of the meridian. I’m about four seconds east of the meridian, and thus by the same logic, the last web development bureau in the world. I rather like that.

Two Years.

30 July 2005, my wedding day. A happier whirlwind of a day I couldn’t have asked for, followed immediately by the most carefree, indulgent and fun three weeks of my life. I really can’t believe it’s been so long already.

Shelley and I are as close now as we were then — closer, in fact, due in no small measure to working together on our honeymoon gift list service and the birth of our fabulous daughter, Zoë.

Zoë’s ten months old now, and seems to believe that Daddy is Mister Potato-Head, with removable nose and ears.

Life is good.

So Zoë is now a whole quarter of a year old, and my hermitage must end sometime. Some observations, by way of rehabilitation:

1. Zoë is so preternaturally disinclined to cry when out in public that people seem to believe we must be adding valium to her milk.

2. To eat and poo simultaneously is the sole prerogative of babies and Elvis.

3. The missus has finally given in to the cult of Livejournal.

4. Steriliser manufacturers seem to believe it’s their mission to make their products the loudest thing in one’s house. Wake up everyone! The bottles are ready! The bottles are ready!

5. The bottles are ready!

6. In recent days, Zoë has put herself into a bedtime routine, begun to grip objects and learned to laugh. She rocks.

My beautiful daughter, Zoë Charlotte Green, was born today, her due date, at 6:32AM, weighing 7lbs 9oz and measuring a respectable 54cm.

Mother and baby are doing brilliantly, and I have an obligatory scotch and cigar awaiting me.

1. Whilst Kate Bosworth is a fine actress, Rachel McAdams would have made a considerably better Lois Lane.

2. The Dawnseeker, the debut album from Sleepthief, is practically a checklist of my recent musical tastes. Throw a real orchestra in there and watch me dribble.

3. Charlie Brooker is entirely correct in everything he says about Doctor Who, and is furthermore generously capable of making me weep with laughter in a variety of media.