I just finished putting together a website for my pal Aidan. It’s got a sort of lo-fi hand-crafted vibe that can only rally be achieved by ignoring as many rules of ‘good’ web design as possible. Which is a good thing. In fact, it kind of got me in the mood for a bit of digital fiddling around and so I think I’m going to give my own wee corner of cyberspace here a bit of a going over (again).

Anyway, check out Aidan’s site. It’s good.

I’ve finally managed to update my OS X menu bar Saltire hack to display the input source as Scottish rather than British. It now looks like this:

Get it here.

I recently found myself in the Yahoo! UK headquarters in London when Trish and I dropped by on our way to Munich.

It was the first time I’ve ever actually seen the Yahoo! logo anywhere other than on a computer screen and the web. And obviously what I’ve done here is photograph it and upload it straight to the web for immediate display on your computer screen.

It was quite strange seeing it though. There it was jumping right off the wall like a big fat cheery object, looking like it had never seen a pixel in its life.

And so what was I doing in the Yahoo! HQ?

As it turns out, Yahoo! just love the site here and have earmarked it as their next big acquisition. Apparently, they especially like it when I write about things like my cat have trouble crapping properly and want to buy me out for a cool £1 mil.

Okay not really.

I was going for lunch with the head of the Yahoo! UK Search division, no less. Who, apart from having a very fancy-sounding title, is called Salim and is a friend of Trish. And a top bloke he is too. We had sushi and chatted about art and the web and dressing up as Santa.

Last week I was in Munich doing a show at Galerie Ben Kauffmann. I hadn’t seen Ben in ages… well, since the last time I was over there and so it was good to see him again.

I’ve been making paintings in the studio for a while now and I chose six of them and took them over with a bunch of recent drawings.

The gallery is a tight space and sometimes those can be the most difficult to install work in… but it all went well. In the end I showed three of the paintings and nothing else and I think that totally worked and looked good.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes mid-installation shot for your viewing pleasure:

The opening was really good and it was great to see some of the guys I met the last time I was over. Then we all went and drank an awful lot of very good beer in a pub that was supposedly Hitler’s local when he was young. Obviously it wasn’t a theme pub. But it was very nice, as was the beer… and the people who made Trish and me feel very welcome.

I had a great time and it was a nice way to kick off the year. Especially given the fact that I drank about fourteen bottles/big Bavarian glasses of this crazy clear beer and woke up without a nasty hangover.

Result all round.

Hello hello hello. I’m back. And even though I have completely failed to bother my arse to post anything here for some time now… I am back. Back again. Don’t panic, here I am.

This post is a bit like a hairball. A great big hairball of inane shite that I’ve been dying to cough up for ages. Maybe it’s so big now that I’ll choke to death. Who knows. Let’s find out.

A few of the things that have happened during my recent cyber-absence(s)

Nutters Die

Some sort of cosmic safety recall demanded the immediate return of Ivor Cutler, Arthur Lee, Syd Barrett and James Brown. Also reptile pesterer Steve Irwin. The planet is a measurably less interesting place without them. I take my hat off and raise a glass to them all.

When Bees Attack

I saw a news report on TV about a road accident involving angry bees for the second time in a matter of months. Amused, I checked the internet and was amazed to find that crashing into bees is, in one form or another, extremely common. See: crashed into bees.

All Tomorrows Melvins

I got a last minute ticket for the ATP Nightmare Before Christmas and jumped at the chance. I went from having never seen The Melvins to having seen them twice in twelve hours… and then three times in a week when they play Glasgow the week after for the first time in ten years.

And nobody really knew about that gig (including me) thanks to the incompetence of the promoter. Hence the ten year wait. A fact that Dale Crover pointed out as both he and the crowd waited to see if anyone was going to actually turn up to see them this time. Annoyingly the promotion was barely better this time around and for a while it was kind of embarrassing because the crowd numbered less than twenty. So I shouted to Dale to tell him that it’s the promoter who couldn’t give a fuck, not Glasgow gig-goers and how there was nowhere to actually buy tickets… but he didn’t seem to believe me. (The only place to get one in advance was online, thus incurring a total of £7 in fees on an £11 ticket.) In the end they drew an okay crowd but it’s a shame because they are definitely the best band on the planet and they probably think that nobody in Scotland gives a shit, when actually loads of people totally do, it’s just that finding out about their gigs and getting a ticket is like some sort of biblical test.

Aaanyway. They played and they totally rocked. They were even louder and heavier than you might reasonably expect. Flipper supported and they were just absolutely awesome. Bruce Loose is some frontman.

And so I managed to resolve my ten-years-without-having-seen-the-melvins issues. Well, more smash to bits than resolve. Mission accomplished.

Boy With Disemboweled Squirrel

I missed what was the single best photo opportunity of the year. It goes like this:

I am walking past the park when in the distance I see a young kid standing in the middle of the pavement doing suspiciously nothing. As I get closer I see that he’s about twelve years old and is just standing there holding up a stick like he’s standing guard or something. I see that he’s got a friend standing beside him and decide that there’s a reasonable chance an attempted mugging is about to commence.

The road is too busy to cross so I take my chances and continue my approach. As I get closer, the toerags just stand there looking like they’re not going to let me past and pointing this big stick in my direction (which has some sort of indeterminate woodland foliage type stuff hanging from it).

And then at the last minute as I’m actually trying to get past these kids, in one of those sudden reality shifts that you sometimes get, I realise that the big stick is now pointing right at me and it doesn’t have woodland foliage stuff hanging from it. It has a freshly disemboweled squirrel hanging from it.

It certainly doesn’t look like a squirrel at first glance, but it is. The ex-rodent’s entrails are unwound, dangling down and trailing on the pavement for a metre or two. It’s eyes have popped out and it’s face is mangled. The kids just have these sort of hypnotised expressions.

I’m caught totally by surprise and all I do is advise them to throw it away on the grounds of hygiene. And then only as we go our separate ways I realise that I have missed one of the greatest spontaneous photo opportunities to ever present itself.

And so it goes.

Some pictures I found kicking around in my phone

Glaswegian Weather

Business as usual for the Glaswegian weather…

A sky like Thor’s arsehole. Rain pissing on you long enough to make your bones damp.

Found Photos

It’s always strange when you find an anonymous photograph lying in the street. Here are photographs of two such photographs.

Stunt Cat

I was over at Nick‘s place when I witnessed this one. It’s difficult to make out but the arrow is actually pointing to a cat. A cat who is clearly three storeys up on a Glasgow tenement roof. I watched him casually stroll along the very edge of the gutter and up onto the tiles. The roof was obviously not made of hot tin.

This is a rushed post because I got back home, on Tuesday night and haven’t posted. And now, in ten minutes I’m going to the airport to go down to Tate St. Ives to see Nick‘s show. (I get to go because I wrote the text for the catalogue.)

I’ll post when I get back but in the meantime here is a photo of my miraculously unscorched feet. Who’d have thunk it?

These are my feet. As you can see, by a hilarious biological coincidence each one measures almost exactly a foot in length. Very handy (no pun intended).

Anyway, in about an hour I’m going to catch the train to London with Trish where we’re going to go to a seminar by one of those crazy life-coach guys that you sometimes hear about.

The only reason that I’m going is because the fairly expensive tickets have been paid for by one of Trish’s clients. The whole thing lasts a brain melting four days and I have got absolutely no idea what is in store for me. I mean, I can imaging… it’s just that I’m trying not to.

What I do know is that the whole affair culminates in walking across hot coals. That’s why I’m showing you my feet. I don’t have the faintest idea whether or not this is a good thing to do.

I’ve still been hacking OS X on the MacBook. Making it do things that it shouldn’t. Or things that it should. Depends on how you look at it. One such tweak is the changing of the flag icon in the menu bar. As a Scot, it only seems right to have a Saltire up there rather than a Union Jack. Like this:

If you want, you can download the OS X menu bar Saltire for use on your own comp. I’ve done all the hacking and packaged it up all nicely so it’s just a drag-and-drop affair. And I’ve also included some roll-you-own instructions so if you are that way inclined you can change the flag icon to anything you like.

When I switched over to the MacBook I lost a lot of email. Actually I lost it all… a whole two years worth. After a couple of recent near misses (more like omens) I take regular backups of everything but one way or another, this time my email folder melted and with it went every single piece of electronic correspondence of the last two years or so.

The funny thing is, it’s not really that much of a disaster. At first I though it was… and then I realised that it wasn’t. And it isn’t.

The only things I’m a bit sad to have lost are the numerous emails to and from The Shrig which were always funny, the replies that I got from Doug Allen and Gary Leib when I contacted them out of the blue and, get this… all of my $P@|\/|. I was saving all of that junk and going to make it into some kind of epic prose poem mash-up. The highlight was an absolutely inspired (if they weren’t automatically generated) spam name that still makes me laugh.  albatros anton.

Anyway, I’ve fixed my email account (agaaain) so if you sent me something and it bounced, sorry. And of course my virgin junk folder is filling up already. I might even have some material to rival the mighty albatros anton. Someone has already referred to me as ‘Wayfaring Tree’. How they ever came to know my nickname I’ll never know, but there you go.

So that’s what? Two posts in three weeks or something. Yes well there’s a good reason for that and that reason was created by Apple and is called the MacBook. Oh yes. I flogged my powerbook to a man in a cafe slightly over two weeks ago and used the money to purchase a shiney new black MacBook. A BlackBook. What follows is an unbiased appraisal of said piece of hardware.

Why I Think The (Black) MacBook Is The Best Computer Ever Created

1 Look at it. It’s black. This pleases me in and of itself but what it also does is make the comp look retro. Old school, if you will. And not in a sort of crap, trendy, try-too-hard kind of ‘retro design’ way… In a totally amazing wait-a-minute, that incredibly powerful computer looks a lot like a ZX Spectrum, sort of way. (This is in perfect accordance with the computers I have been designing in my head for a very long time now. It makes me very happy.)

2 The build quality is excellent. The whole comp just feels really solid. And the matte finish is so amazingly good. I’m touching it right now. Prrr.

3 The keyboard, the screen and the trackpad… hats off, v. good, gold star. The bits that you have to look at and touch to get it to actually do anything. They approach perfection.

a It’s the first Apple comp to have a glossy screen and I wasn’t sure about that at first. I really liked the matte display on the Powerbook and wasn’t looking forward to lots of reflection. But I was worrying about nothing. It’s much brighter and cripser with richer colours and unnoticeable reflection. I like looking at this screen more than any other thing in the world at the moment.

b The keyboard is something I couldn’t really care less about as long as it had buttons to press. Or so I thought. The keyboard is amaaazing! (And I don’t use the word amaaazing lightly.) It’s hard to describe exactly how or why but this is the best keyboard ever. In the whole history of keyboards. Imagine that.

c And the trackpad. Ah, trackpad. Widescreen format, two-finger scrolling and I swear there’s a really light microswitch in the button. Let’s just say that this is the second most rubbed in my life at the moment.

And then there’s all of the other wee things that make a huge difference. Like the magsafe power adapter that connects magnetically. So you can tangle yourself up in the power cord and it just pops off the side without yanking the comp onto the floor or anything. I did this. It works.

And the latch. It too is just a magnet. And for various arcane reasons this is a vastly superior solution to keeping the lid closed in an aethetic and practical fashion.

This is basically just an incredible computer. Really well designed, well built, functionally excellent and good looking.

Now I’m not going to get carried away just because I think that this is the best computer ever made but I will say this: If you don’t love the (black) MacBook with every fibre of your soul, I don’t want to have anything to do with you.

The ZX Spectrum
The first computer I ever owned. Back in 1982 when I was seven.

The ZX Spectrum Tribute BlackBook
The computer I own now. Operating system hacked to give it the appearance of a ZX Spectrum.