Personal Blogs

For the introduction of my H808 ECA I've visualised a Movie Poster.

This comes from a Sunday Newspaper, in 1975.

This image, along with some shots of the diary went into a blog in 2003. In 2006 I tried to establish which paper this image came from and failed. You'd imagine something right wing like the Sunday Telegraph, though it is more like to have been the Observer, or even the Radio Times? Strikingly there was no view taken on this pose looking for all intense and purposes like one of Hitler's Aryan few. The thinking behind it was that by 2025 we'd all be mixed raced, bald (for no apparent reason) and semi-naked due to our ability to control the climate.

The only reason I chose this as my personal movie poster for now is a desire to reconnect to my youth and a sense that I had a future, another 14 years at least! I wouldn't mind getting fit again too, overweight at 90kg and doing no exercise for several years has me far, far, far from this absurd image. Though age 19, with hair, this was me courtesy of swimming every day for an hour or more and sailing/windsurfing in the summer and skiing in the winter. Heady days.

Politically I should mention here that I swing between green, yellow, blue and red ... ocasionally even purple. I blend my vote too, rarely voting for the same lot between local and national elections and often preferring the independent choice. At uni I was a member of both the Conservative and the Labour parties

Who cares? I do. I can keep them all at arms length, especially the two parties that keep asking me to stand ... oh yes! My busy body considered an asset in local refuse collection, building, transport and various pollution issues. I should keep my mouth shut, but as you can see, I don't and it isn't difficult to point content like this (editted) to a person that matters.

For the conclusion I've visualised a Film Review.

I've also done a cartoon of one of the course authors as a weightlifter with the words RESEARCH on one end of the bar and the word PRACTICE on the other; the idea being that you get mentally fit by doing a work out that balances research and practice.

Where I come unstuck is with the PDP matrix.

From Drop Box

I look at this and I see a train station message board on some concourse such as Crewe with few destinations of interest. I'll have to work on this.

The least  I want is the Message Board at St. Pancras International with Paris, Lille and Brussels written up, though my most inspired train message board will always be Gar du Nord, Paris. As a teenage my jaw always dropped to see destinations like Berlin, Moscow and Turin, where across the channel pre Eurotunnel you were supposed to get excited about Ore, Doncaster and Birmigham International

Any ideas? Perhaps if I visualised it as an Advent Calender? Or a box of chocolates (life, is after all, life a box of chocolates according to Forrest Gump).

Ideas on a plate please.

P.S. A reminder to myself to dig out a collection of scrapbooks from 1987-88 when I was at London's, School of Communication Arts and perhaps a reminder to start doing this again. Or do I? I'm getting into the habit of photographing things that catch my eye, uploading, cropping and fixing, then tagging and putting them online. Perhaps I'm a candidate after all for the e-diary, a record of everything, all day.

There's a piece in the New Scientist this last fortnight about the merits of not only keeping a diary, but digitising every moment of your waking life. The piece opens with the suggestion that at this time of year everyone is buying a diary; they're not. Most of us buy a diary in August as an academic diary if you have anything to do with educaiton (student, teacher, academic or parent) is a much more logical thing to have to carry you through the shool year. In any case, who cares where you start your diary if its digital or even a Filofax insert.

There's criticism of the Five Year Diary format, those diaries with a few lines to cover the day's events - where did Twitter get their idea from. A few lines every day is far easier to achieve than a page or more per day. I should know, I've been at it long enough.

Parameters, as any writer will know, matter.

They contain what might otherwise be a stream of never ending unconsciousness

Deadlines and word counts are helpful.

I wish I could do the research against the clock too. I have to give X hours to each topic, I would happily give x weeks and a some stage in that week I'd see I could press on for a month. I get this way when my curiosity is taking me off on a mental ramble.

The idea of keeping an objective, digitally record of everything you do does intrigue, not because of the data it captures, though I've had a few years that would be fun to re-live, but what it misses out. This is the idea of a researcher at Micrsoft who is recording his every action (and motion). However, the process misses out how you feel, and what you think.

And would have to be deactivated going through airports, going to the bank or Post Office, swimming with the kids in a public pool ... there's quite a list.

'It's a matter of love,' wrote Nabakov, 'the more you love a memory the stronger than memory becomes.'

How is such strength afforded a memory that remains on the surface of the mind, as there is no need to make the mental effort to embedded it, or to recall it, other than watching it over like a movie. A very bad, very dull, badly lit and performed movie.

'By having everything in e-memory you don't have to remember anymore.'

On the contrary by short-circuiting the implicit, instinctive natural memories making myelination process of the brain you are replacing something fluid and static, albeit it a multitude of snapshots.