Tuesday, November 6

 

 

The morning started with wet air and a cycle ride on fully inflated tyres.

As I get off the tram I walk past a tree with huge drops of water hanging from its branches and twigs. The water in the dark light looks like [insert clichéd simile here] and so I photograph it.

I will spend the morning performing two tasks at once: the final work on the miaww site will also serve as the final preparation for the CMS class this afternoon. I will get stuck in a php problem that completely baffles me. I know how to do this, I will think, and yet I will not manage to get it to work.

Rufina will interupt me with a problem with Gulp, which she has installed on Cloud9 to manage her experiments with Sass. I will scarcely understand her problem, let alone manage to solve it. We will spend an hour with her talking volubly about the fact that everything works, but very slowly. I will suggest that it sounds like a browser issue.

I will then have a quick lunch involving crispbread and Tesco vegan cheese. This, I will decide, definitely counts as the most cheese-like alternative that I have tasted. They do a vegan blue cheese and I intend to try that as soon as I can get to Prisma.

I will spend almost all the afternoon performing a step-by-step demo of the miaaw site for the CMS students. I will shjow them how I made a grid-based static site and how I transferred the code to a starter theme in WordPress. I will do it all over again in front of their very eyes. During the course of this I will solve my php issue and at the end three people will say that the process makes a lot more sense now.

This will take so long that I will have to email Scott to tell him that I need to postpone today’s online chat until tomorrow. He will agree.

In the evening I will settle down to watch the Doctor Who episode that I missed last Thursday on television. I will watch it on YLE Areena, the internet service. I will then watch next week’s episode because I will spot that they have adopted the interesting policy of releasing them on the web first. The BBC broadcasts an episode on Sunday evening and then YLE puts it online the next day, before showing it on television the following Thursday.

Interesting, I will think, as I catch up with my viewing. This series has become more human-sized and down to earth, and less mythological and magic realist. I will switch off wondering whether the tone will change in the second half of the series, with villains that actually seem to pose a danger.

My guess: not really. I will feel happy to get a surprise, though.