prolific.org

Avatar

ISSN 1568-2218 | Established 1999

New digs



Maar wat is het?, originally uploaded by Caroline.

Moved office today. The new building is uglier on the outside, but a lot better on the inside. It’s huge, white, modern with some off kilter details. Lovely restaurant with an open-air rooftop bit. Three Wii-rooms, one for each floor. Of course my network patch was broken, so I was off line the whole day, but the upside was I got a whole lot of work done without distractions.

Did I mention I loathed the 90s?

Anyone watch Pop on Trial, the 90’s with Stuart Maconie, Caitlin Moran, Goldie and Paolo Hewitt on BBC 4? Oh. My. God. The. Smug. Goldie’s the only one I didn’t want to throttle. He seemed a lot more interesting than previously suspected. Hewitt, Moran and Maconie represent everything I hated in the British music press in the 90s. The insular, anti-European, suspicious of anything attempting to be more than entertainment vibe. No mention of U2, of course - the band that arguably dominated the early 90s world wide. Paolo ‘I’m so far up the Gallagher’s arse my face looks like I’m permanently smelling poo’ Hewitt especially I wanted to gag. I don’t know who said it and I’m paraphrasing but, yeah, the 90s… all about Thatcher’s children run amok. Fuck Oasis and Loaded and lads and ladettes.

Short trip to Dub

ireland-met.jpg

‘Mostly dry’. That doesn’t sound too bad then. I’m hopping over to the Emerald Isle for a day’s worth of photo recce (for a shoot next month), perhaps some shopping, and a late night 30 Seconds to Mars show. Not that I’m a big fan or anything, but I’m sure both band and audience will be a sight to see.

Talking about a sight to see… (Yeah, grasping at straws here) Torchwood S2e02… now that’s more like it! This director gave Barrowman much less time and space, which cut down on his showiness. Now all they need to do is clean out his ears… that’s the only reason I can think of why he is always SO MUCH LOUDER than the other actors. Or is it just the Tom Cruise school of acting?

Loved the Monster of the Week. The woman playing Beth did so awesomely and the steely eyed sleeper dad was just the right amount of creepy and silly.

I need pop

There’s too much rock in my life. Too much white boy angst. My own Last.fm radio station depresses me, so I tend to tune into Mike’s since our musical compatibility rating is ‘High’, but he’s got a lot more Kylie, Sugababes and Britney Spears in his playlist.

So help me out. Post your pop recommendations for 2007/8, singles rather than albums, in the comments and fill my life with earworms.

A Cubicle Carol, ho ho ho





Mr Alpha Tone, a member of Whedonesque, has many talents.

BBC beta homepage

bbc.jpg

I hadn’t visited the BBC homepage for a while and when I had a look this morning a largish button said: ‘Try out our new, customisable homepage’. So I went and did just that. On first glance, it certainly improves on the current, unimpressive (the international one in particular, which is just a series of links grouped together) home.

This beta page is quite simple, with a few visual flourishes allowed in the larger image top right. Clicking the coloured buttons underneath it will change both the image and the rest of the page’s supportive colours, and the image itself might go over its own set border (the top of the woman’s head sticks out in this picture, as does a tree in the frosty blue Garderner’s World picture and the locks of David Tennant’s cartoon head in the orange ‘Pilot the Tardis’ option. You can make some, but not too many, changes to the content.

There’s a choice of various headlines and an option to localise your page, sadly not to anywhere outside of the U.K., so I’m stuck with London weather. Not everything works as it should yet (duh, beta) as dragging blocks into different columns will not always align properly. But I appreciate the return to larger images and the effort to make BBC’s home more appealing. Now can it stay ad-free, please? And will the underlying content also take on this new look?

Gent memories

Gent, kermis

I could tell you about the time I spent in Gent, but then I’d have to… you know how it goes. One lasting memory? Perhaps the very honourable Mr B, composer, Northener, keeling over as he gets up from his seat in Café des Arts. Says he: ‘The chair is drunk. Not me.’

As for the city, the little I’ve seen of it: small, tidy, quaint here and there and a little posh in places. And absolutely lovely service and kindness everywhere we went. Yuji, at Café des Arts, especially, put up with our whims with a smile and once he got the go ahead from above, was generous with the bottles of local spirits. Please, my Flemish friends, never let yourself be annexed or even influenced by your Northern neighbours.

I’d recommend Hotel den Yzer to both budget and more upmarket travellers, if you can give up on luxury for a minute. Almost monastic in its simplicity, its authenticity will warm you. Old world charm beats the creepy vinyl seats in the nearby Ibis hotel any day.

The music was poignant, the temperature icy. The sun shone brightly, the company was dear. Bring on Christmas.
More details at Hydragenic.com

Wanted: PHP programmer for Zie.nl

Want to work with me? For my day job, I am looking for a PHP-programmer (m/f). The company is based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. check out the (Dutch) job ad, or drop me a line.


Het profiel
- HBO werk- en denkniveau;
- Minimaal 2 jaar werkervaring met PHP, MySQL, (X)HTML, CSS;
- Kennis van XML, XSLT, Flash-actionscripting is een pre;
- Ervaring met communities, social software en tagging is een pre;
- Ervaring met objectgeoriënteerde ontwikkeling in PHP is een pre;
- Je hebt goede contactuele eigenschappen, bent optimistisch en denkt in kansen.

Wij bieden
Een
afwisselende baan, met vooral jonge collega’s die betrokken,
getalenteerd, kritisch en open-minded zijn. Je werkt in het INIT-gebouw
in Amsterdam. Een inspirerende plek die goed per openbaar vervoer te
bereiken is.

Interesse
Mail je motivatie voor deze functie met curriculum vitae en voorbeelden van door jou (mede) gebouwde sites naar talent@dag.nl, t.a.v. Sonja de Wit. Neem voor vragen contact op met Thijs Viguurs, 020 – 562 2740. Voor meer informatie kijk op www.DAG.nl/werkenbijDAG

Whedonesque supports the WGA writers’ strike

fans-support-180.jpg To show their support for WGA writers currently on strike, members of Whedonesque.com, the Joss Whedon community weblog, delivered pizza to the picket lines at Universal, L.A. with flyers stating “You fed our minds, we’d like to return the favor.”

The gesture was much appreciated by Whedon-related writers and others on scene:

“Seeing you guys with your pizzas and your poster… It was very touching…”,

“It was such a touching gesture and they were hungrily gobbled up.”,

“…your pizza was well-appreciated during our picket at gate 1.”

Plans for more pizza runs and other efforts to support the writers are currently underway. Some writers expressed surprise. In general, TV shows writing staff do not have close relationships with their fandoms, but the Buffy, Angel and Firelfy communities have always been as passionate about the actors as they are about the stories and their writers.

Editable banner images are available to post on your blog. Other fandoms are encouraged to join in.

Why strike? Brian K. Vaughan, executive story editor on ‘Lost’ explains.

Evidently Chicken Town



John Cooper Clarke, As seen in the movie Control.

Next,