Pete Hindle

I’ve got some changes in my life coming up ahead, and I’ve been thinking about how I’m going to be focusing my attention. One of the really big thinkers in this area is Merlin Mann, and in a post on his blog he lays out some points for dealing with the constant flow of stuff we get from the internet. I like them so much I thought I’d share them here:

• identify and destroy small-return bullshit;
• shut off anything that’s noisier than it is useful;
• make brutally fast decisions about what I don’t need to be doing;
• avoid anything that feels like fake sincerity (esp. where it may touch money);
• demand personal focus on making good things;
• put a handful of real people near the center of everything.

From dealing with the art world, I’d say that the first and last items on that list seem to be so important. But I guess it could be applied to a lot of different areas. Check it out: Better, by Merlin Mann.

I often seem to myself like some sort of internet-appliance-made-flesh. And this month, we have the phone bill to prove it, with a massive overcharge for 47gb of ‘excess internet usage’. Thanks, BT! I love you too!

However, after my last post I managed to climb out of my stained office chair, throw on some clothes, and accompany Paul Grimmer on a video shoot. Paul was awarded a Triparks residency earlier this year, and he has been shooting high-definition video across Northumbria. He offered me the chance to go with him this week, and I got really excited and said yes without really thinking what it would mean.

What did it mean? Well, getting in a car, driving a while, getting out of the car, looking confused for a bit, getting back in and driving to a hill and then carrying a bad-ass tripod for a bit. Of course, that was just what I did; Paul, being a seasoned pro, carried the camera.

Paul was looking to take panoramic shots of the area, and we didn’t manage to get many before the rain rolled in.

While he shot the hills, I was looking at the countryside. On a bike, this is the sort of area I guess you don’t see, and I would like to go back there sometime. Even in the downpour that followed, the landscape was quite fun.

As an aside, I must point out that my recent injuries left me confined to a few small rooms for the best part of two months. This means that while a lot of my friends are complaining about this seasons horrible weather, I’m just happy to be outside.

Eventually, the rain got the better of us, and I convinced Paul to go back to the car for the thermos of hot coffee I’d brought with me. But not before mugging for one last shot - check out that water saturated look!

I’d like to thank Paul for letting me accompany him out to the country for the day, and if you want to follow his progress on the Triparks residency, check out the blog hes doing with fellow artist Bridget Kennedy here.

I woke up this morning with very little on my agenda, and decided to take myself to the local Sainsburys - the posh end of the supermarket spectrum. It’s about twenty minutes walk from here, and that’s a good stretch for my leg (which is healing nicely, thanks).

When I got to the supermarket there was a stall giving away free yogurt outside - something you don’t find at Morrisons. Trying one of the yogurts, I was asked my opinion by one of the pair of people running the stall.

“It’s a bit gloopey”, I replied. They looked blankly at me.

“What do you mean?” asked the girl behind the stall, looking puzzled. Now, I swear I’m not making the word gloopey up. I’ve heard it somewhere else, surely. Even if I had, it’s not like it would be impossible to guess what it could mean in relation to yogurt.

On the other hand - and I don’t want to be rude here - but if you spend your day giving out free yogurt to people, I’m pretty sure you don’t want a breakdown of how words are created from onomatipea. And honestly, I was pretty afraid of explaining the word ‘onomatipea’, which I only learned because I had to do an English AS Level in 2000.

Hello.

I’m thirty now. I’ve been thirty for just over three weeks.

It’s much like being in my twenties, despite what other people told me. I was promised that being in my thirties was the shiznitz.

If you, or someone you know, have an idea of what I should do with my thirties, please put it on a postcard and send it to the usual address.

Thanks,

Pete

Reader, I was fugged.

I was walking back through town when I felt somebody touch my arm. I turned, and saw a lady in her early thirties, not unattractive, who started by saying “Excuse me.” A polite greeting, which was appropriate as I didn’t know who she was. Perhaps she thought she knew me, or maybe I’d dropped something and she was going to tell me.

“I couldn’t help notice that you had a limp” she continued. At this point my expression must have hardened. I expected to be offered a lucky glass bead for a pound, but it was what she said next that really surprised me.

“I’m a Christian, and I would like your permission to pray for you.”

I could have said a lot of stuff. It would have been the nicest thing to say “why, thanks”, and move on, but that’s not really what I was thinking. It would have been Quakerly of me to say “you should do what you think you need to do”, and then move on. But I dislike being singled out because I’m different from the herd. I don’t like being the object of misplaced charity. And I don’t want to think about how many times this had done this to other, more vulnerable people.

So I looked this woman in the eye, and drawled the world “no” in a manner left no doubt that I thought very poorly of her, turned, and left.

Inside I was furious. I’d been trapped into a position that I would never want to be; I either ratified her choice of faith or had to act like an asshole. And there was nothing I could do about it - it’s like a version of the question “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?“, to which there is never going to be a good answer.

The term “charity mugger“, or “chugger” came into being to describe those people who stand on street corners and used people’s guilty conscience to goad them into signing direct debits to charity. I’m coining the word fugger to describe somebody forcing you to acquiesce to their faith - and although next time I’m going to try to be more considerate to their beliefs, heaven help them if they think they’ll get off as lightly.

As mentioned below (I think…) I’m in the process of recovering from having a dislocated kneecap. This meant that for about two weeks I could hardly walk, so I holed up at my girlfriends folk’s house with a stack of books from Amazon.

Usually, we like to feel that our lives are heading somewhere. Going forward, pushing on, making progress - but being forced into doing nothing was not such a bad thing for me. I find it easy to fill my time with distractions, and the fact that I was unable to go out and waste my time meant I was truly concentrating on my studies.

When not studying I also found some time to make a few decisions, and do some paperwork. One of those decisions was to get rid of my mobile phone contract, which led to being put on hold with T-Mobile for about fifteen minutes. Rather than spend that time with a phone glued to my head, I put the phone on speaker and got on with some work.

On Hold with T-Mobile

I was curious as to how the ‘gallery’ function worked, after seeing Brenda’s beautiful collection of images called ‘Fence‘. Most of these images are of the time that myself and the other people from the Waygood’s Radio Club.

For a long time, I had a website under the alias petehindle.textdriven.com, which suited me fine. I love the written word, and I like to do a lot of things with computers that really rely on having a firm grip on the power of the written word. Hence, I felt, having the word ‘textdriven’ really let other people know that I was going to be writing.

But I know that some people are not as word-oriented as I am. Topsy, for instance, really functions as a visual person, and I have to wonder if perhaps I should include more of my cameraphone wanderings within my blog-posts.

ScribeFire is a rich-text blog posting… thing… that I’m trying out to see if I blog more. It works within the Firefox browser, popping up inside the window you are using when you click a little icon.

This is my first run of using it. I’m writing down my impressions of as I go.

The setup was pretty easy for my wordpress-based blog, and I got presented with the editing function after a few minutes of clicking ‘confirm’ dialogues. The text editing area is displaying the text much larger than I would usually have text, and it’s pretty ugly (but that could be due to Firefox 2.0).

It seems to have the same trouble with text links that most in browser rich-text editors have. It also has a bunch of ’social sharing’ buttons that are all the rage these days, accessible in a different tab. However, the button don’t have the traditional “y-on-its-side” icons. Also struck by how small the area is.

Time to test the publishing.

Update: Well, it worked. However, the interface is nowhere near as fast or as good as the actual interface supplied with Wordpress, and I found no way of putting tags or categories into the post. Perhaps I’m missing something, as it was only my first time of using it, but using the inbuilt interface (and that of Mars Edit or similar) it’s simple to add taxonomy.

Extra Update: The developer of ScribeFire, Christopher Finke, pointed out in a comment that I can add categories from inside the-bit-of-UI-to-the-right. I’m testing that, and he’s right (but I can’t figure out why I ignored that section on my first run - maybe because it was taken up with empty space?) However, I am tweaking and editing this update from within ScribeFire, so it’s capable of dealing with most of the stuff that I would normally have to do when editing.

Kudos must obviously go to Mr. Finke, for being able to deal with ill-informed criticism from people with very little programming skill.

The idea for this post comes from Andy Ihnatko’s series of first-run reviews. He’s much cooler and better at writing than me, so I suggest you check his stuff out.

Click here to see the map I’m talking about.

Being offically ‘old’ this year, it’s my ambition to ride the route know as the coast to coast before I become thirty. As part of that ambition, myself, Alan, and Brian did a training ride today along some of the excellent cyclepaths in the area. We were riding into the strong headwinds on the entire trip out, giving us an average speed of about 10mph, and at one point one of those old gnarly cyclists with legs like granite sped past us.

(I think we got pwned, but Brian says it’s something to look forward to - being old gnarly cyclists, that is, not being pwned)

On the way back we stopped off for a beer and burger combo at a Lloyds sports bar on Newcastle’s Quayside. Although it was only midday, already there was a hen party wearing masks at the bar. I felt a little self-conscious in my cycling gear, but mainly knackered.