I Am Pete Ashton

Had a hack at the beard today. I’m currently trying to grow it into something I can be proud of at the Supersonic Festival in the autumn, so I’ve got a good 9 months to work with. For Christmas I got a beard trimmer which is great for getting rid of the sprouty bits up to a certain length and for tidying the edges but where I really fall down is actual shaping. I’ve never done anything creative with my beard – it’s always been the result of not shaving, a sort of anti-grooming – and I’m cack-handed as fuck.

It’s okay, but only just. The moustache, which I felt was getting a bit bushy, is now quite the opposite of bushy. The cheekbone areas where I’ve been shaping the edges are slowly getting larger. The sprout of long hair on the chin is most certainly not tapering into the rest of the face. And finally there’s a glorious bald patch right under my chin where I forgot to put the gradation whojamaflip on the beard trimmer and took it right down to the skin.

I kinda joked that I’d do something like this in the summer. Facially it’s looking less like a joke.

(Epic thanks to Fi for her assistance today, without which it would have been much worse.)

A follow-up to my post on wiping my MacBook and starting from scratch whilst assisting my mother in New Zealand with her getting used to her new iMac.

On the plus side, I’m discovering little features Apple have introduced over the last few years that, because I’ve upgraded with my settings intact, I never noticed. For example, you can set the password lock on sleep/screensaver to only kick in after a specified time rather than every time or not at all. This is incredibly minor but it’s nice and something I would never have found.

On the negative side I also reinstalled all the applications and am having to go through the preferences switching off all the irritating shit. Removing Ping from iTunes, muting Skype’s incessant blooping, the All Files view in Finder and countless other tiny little things that I’d completely forgotten were how things were supposed to be. Eventually I’ll it back to how I like it but it’s been a useful exercise.

And the main reason for doing this was to purge the MacBook of invisible irritants I’ve introduced over the last five years so it might run smoother and that appears to be working. I’m seeing a lot less fan spinning for certain.

It just feels a bit like someone has tidied my room. Nice, but wrong.

Extremely busy and productive day today. Started with a driving lesson (which was okay but I think I’m at the plateau of incremental improvements for a few weeks which is rather frustrating) and then – BOOM! – straight through the todo list. Still a few things left on it but I’ve definitely cleared a path, which is good as it was starting to get a little too daunting. I can feel the tendrils of Project Multiplication where I’m doing lots of seemingly little projects that don’t turn out to be as little as they first appeared, and I don’t want to get into one of those situations again, but it looks to be okay.

The two Big Jobs are both under control and on schedule.

The two new courses I’m running are announced and starting to sell (which is a huge relief!)

The weird thing I’m doing with Antonio is taking shape.

Email inbox is just hovering slightly above zero.

It’s all good.

Today I had a brief meeting at the Moseley Exchange with Maria who runs the front desk and wanted to talk about an event involving me. It turned in to Social Media Group Therapy which I’ll be running there on March 6th. I’ve been wanting to get away from the “I shall give you the answers” schtick which I’ve never been comfortable with and move towards something closer to peer learning, so a “group therapy” model, although it started as a joke about how business development for the self-employed is pretty much like counselling, really appealed. I think people in the same boat are much better at answering each others questions once someone is there to help them frame them, and that’s the job of someone in my position. Not to be The Expert but to help them see the metaphorical wood for the figurative trees.

Anyway, it’s on March 6th from 6pm and costs £25 for 2 hours. If it works I’ll do it every month.

After than I opened the final bottle of ale Fi’s brother got me for Xmas – a bottle of Samuel Smith’s Yorkshire Stingo at a quite evil 8%. Usually I accidentally down my first pint in short order but this one still has a third left after a good hour. It’s lovely, mind you. Just a little daunting. Smells like whiskey and tastes like liquorish. Thankfully I just have the one bottle…

Funny thing is my only real experience of Sam Smith’s is those weird pubs in London I would drink at where they’d sell really cheap pints of bitter that were pretty rank but after a few you didn’t mind and after all they were like £1.50 or something circa 2000-2. The notion of their beers being well brewed and really yummy causes some major cognitive dissonance.

Went kite flying today which was oddly relaxing with a little bit of exercise on the side. I was a bit crap at first but Fi is something of an expert and showed me how to do the pull-down thing to get it high in the air. And once it’s up there you just watch it floating. It’s a stunt kite, so it has a tendency to flip around, but I liked trying to keep it as still as possible.

I was also thinking about how best to attach a video camera to it, of course. I’ve had this 808 keychain camera on my, um, keychain for a month now without finding a use for it, after all. The problem with the stunt kite is it’s like a hyperactive puppy, never staying still, but it also points in completely the wrong directions.

So tonight I ordered a box kite. Apparently they’re rather boring, as kites go. If the wind is strong enough you can just peg them to the ground and they stay up. Sounds perfect.

Now I need to find places in the centre of Birmingham without any overhead cables. Curzon St?

There’s something I’ve been struggling with in relation to the Internet for the last few years. Every so often it comes to a head and really bug me. Usually it then fades away a bit but it’s always there.

I was attracted to zines, comics and other forms of non-mainstream media when I was a late-teens for some reason I wouldn’t want to speculate on with the benefit of hindsight. But the communities that surrounded those scenes, be they the nerds hanging out at the comic shop or the chin strokers who listened to John Peel and liked it, have played an important role in my life. I can dress it up in all manner of positive language but, bluntly, they have allowed me to filter society. Most people annoy the hell out of me. It’s not their fault – they’re just doing what they’re doing – I just have a bit of a misanthropic streak and for my own sanity I have to find ways to filter them out.

Being an early adopter of Internet things is one way of filtering. Usenet-era tech nerdery isn’t my thing (it’s a little too Aspie even for me) but the blogging scenes of 2000 onwards hooked nicely in to my zines obsession, spreading out to Flickr, Twitter and so on. Which is where it’s all started to go a bit wrong.

Twitter is now as mainstream as it is possible to be. Yes, you only see the people you choose to follow, but one of the features of the Twitter model is how information bleeds across the networks. It can be a good thing because it prevents the sort of echo-chamber phenomena that people who hate the Internet insist it enables but it also exposes me to the sort of people, or rather the sort of mindsets, that inflate my misanthropy.

It’s usually little things, most of which are perfectly normal pieces of human behaviour which I know to be harmless. And I know I’m just at bad at blurting out prejudiced, ill-thought-out brain-farts. The problem isn’t the people. It’s the fact that I can’t filter them anymore.

It’s all too connected. And the irony that this trail towards connectivity was blazed by misanthropes like myself isn’t lost on me.

I’m sure it’ll correct itself soon enough. People like me will find a way to filter again. Maybe they already have and I haven’t stumbled upon it yet.

Pioneer’s lament. File under elitist wanker.

After my down day I decided to work my way back up. Did some shopping, did some tidying, moved my desk from the living room into Fi’s office where I’ll be working through the winter, and rather rashly decided to wipe my Macbook clean and re-install everything. The poor thing is getting on a bit and I’m trying to do more work on the Mac Mini at the desk rather than on the sofa so if I can render it as more akin to an iPad than a workhorse it might help… things… maybe… Or at least prepare me for when it dies and I replace it with a tablet.

I’m also curious to see what a Mac is like when you set it up as new. I’ve switched off so many defaults over the years that some things are a right novelty but I’m trying hard to work with them before giving up and switching them back to how I like it. I’m half a day in to backwards scrolling and it’s not that annoying this time around. Text substitution and spelling correction lasted til halfway through that first paragraph. The other reason for doing this is my Mum has a new iMac and if I’m going to help her with that I need to be on message.

And then Fi came home, which was lovely. We had a talk through about how I’d crashed when she was away and while I’m not going to go into details suffice to say it’s not some tedious dependency thing, which would be scary. I just need a presence. Which I will ensure I have next time.

Yesterday evening, having finished a chunk of work at around 8ish, I had a bowl of noodles and watched some nature documentary. Halfway through I found myself drifting off, so I figured what the hell, catnap. I woke up at 2am, which was rather annoying as I figured I’d be aware all night now.

Still, I went to bed anyway, settling down to a podcast. When that finished an hour later I found myself drifting off again.

To cut a long story short I woke briefly at 8am and 12pm but didn’t properly rise until 3.30pm. A rough calculation says I slept for 18 hours.

I don’t know what happened and I’m reluctant to draw any conclusions. Symptomatically this implies depression, and I have noticed that my meds can stop me feeling depressed but don’t always alleviate the physical symptoms. Kinda like how paracetamol stops the pain from a cut but the cut still bleeds.

I also know I haven’t been eating properly this week nor have I gotten much exercise. It’s been a bit of a recipe for disaster really.

On the plus side, Fi is back tonight so the presence of another should help.

I’m really not very good at being on my own these days. Next time Fi goes away for a week I really should make better contingency plans.

I don’t think I’ve fully adjusted to living in a multi-roomed house where I have access to all the rooms. The process of moving my between them whilst staying on topic often defeats me.

Say I’m working in an upstairs room and realise I need something from downstairs. I make my way downstairs and, being an efficient sort of chap, think of something else I could do when I’m down there. I do the second thing but then find I can’t remember the first. I have to return upstairs to put myself back into the context that created the original need and come back down determined not to let my mind wander this time.

This happens so much that today a mutation emerged. I’ve moved my desk to the living room to keep warm but still have a lot of stuff upstairs, including the mighty white board which I’ve had screwed to the wall. A few minutes ago I was at the white board, wiping stuff off and adding new things. When I finished I went to leave the room but stopped. Maybe it was because I was empty handed, maybe because the white board didn’t feel like a primary need, but I was convinced I’d forgotten to do something. I paced the room for a few minutes, looking at stuff in case it was the stuff I’d forgotten I’d wanted.

It seems I’d started doing the thing I’d come upstairs to do and in the process had forgotten I’d come upstairs to do it. Finding myself doing something but subconsciously aware that I’d forgotten something I assumed it was the thing I’d decided to do as well as the thing I’d come upstairs for. That there was nothing else to do didn’t help as the absence of a thing is very similar to having forgotten a thing. It was only when I started making my way downstairs, back into the original context, that I remembered that the thing I’d done was the thing I’d intended to do and not the other thing that had caused me to forget it.

I wonder how it’ll mutate next?

I’ve moved the desk downstairs. Fi and I had been talking about sharing an office over the winter. She used the downstairs front room as her office while I have the upstairs front room, previously the lodger’s room, for all my stuff. But it’s bloody cold up there and the radiator is ineffective so it’s not ideal. Meanwhile Fi has a gas fire in her room which tends to be nice and toasty. Since Fi starts work a good few hours before me and I tend to work in to the evenings we shouldn’t overlap for more than a few hours so it should be okay. All that’s needed is for me to move.

Since I’m on my own this week it doesn’t make much sense to keep the central heating on so I figured I’d move in to the living room. The desk is in front of the small sofa, my back is to the telly the computer is here. It’s a bit screen heavy at the moment. There’s the telly, the Mac’s monitor and, when I’m on the sofa, the Macbook. And it’s certainly not sustainable. Fi was wincing when I showed her over Skype. But it does mean I can keep one room warm without worrying about wasting heating.

The only problem is the bedroom is freezing now. I went to bed in my clothes expecting to strip down as I warmed up and woke up in my clothes. I suppose I could move the bed down here too…

Today I left the house. Matt Murtagh and I are planning something and we needed to meet up and polish off the details before it could go live so we met at the Victoria for tea. It was a fruitful meeting. It always feels good doing stuff with Matt. The power dynamic feels about right with no one person leading. I respect his strengths and he respects mine. If we can pull off this something I’m really looking forward to how it develops.

I also went shopping for a coat. It’s been a mild winter and I’ve been getting away with wearing the leather jacket through the Christmas, but the cold snap that kicked in last week reminded me I needed to either embrace the tattered corpse of my old parka or bite the bullet and buy a new winter coat.

My first stop was the Rag Market which turned out to be closed on a Monday. Obviously they aren’t interested in the “hates shopping so goes on quiet days” market so screw them. Next I went to Milletts where I recently been buying my shoes meaning I was comfortable in there, plus I’d heard they were in financial difficulties so might be having a price-slashing sale. They were but £60 still seemed a little high given I didn’t think I’d be wearing the coat up a mountain any time soon. I just need something that is fairly warm and large enough that I can pad it out with jumpers, of which I have many.

Eventually I found what I was looking for in Primark. I don’t particularly like liking Primark given their prices imply the shoddiest of shoddy labour relations and I would happily pay a bit more than £22 for a winter coat. But I do like the way they lay their shops out. No fuss, no pretension, no confusion, just nice and simple. You want jeans? Here are jeans. You want pants? Here are pants. You want a winter coat that isn’t too fancy and isn’t too dull? Here you go.

I realise this is an insulting to people who love clothes as McDonalds is to foodies or Urban Outfitters is to vintage aficionados, but it’s how I am. Clothes are not important to me.

I would prefer to shop at a Fair Trade Primark though.