Wednesday, November 7

 

 

The air felt so wet as I cycled to the metro that someone could have sold it as moisturiser. I would have bought some.

I started the day by making Jutta a cup of tea as she raced in late and began teaching before she had taken her coat off. I went in to talk with her and then began preparing my demo for tomorrow.

At 11:30 we had the first meeting of the reading group that Sophie has organised as part of the same initiative as the miaaw podcasts. Seven of us met on Zoom: Gary Anderson, Steven Hadley, Alison Jeffers, Nick Mahony, Frances Northrop, Sophie and me. I failed to record it due to an infinite loop technical hitch. I couldn’t record it without the permission of the owner of the channel, but I couldn’t give myself permission because I already owned the channel. I promised to work out who me am in plenty of time before the next meeting.

We spent an hour or more discussing matters arising from the Cultural Democracy in Practice report that 64 Million Artists prepared for the Artc Council of England. If we intended to stick to a line by line critique of the pamphlet the the meeting failed. If we intended to use this as the starting point for a roaming discussion that circled the pamphlet and the issues it (accidentally) raised then the meeting succeeded.

We all agreed we had spent an hour usefully and agreed to meet again next month.

When I returned to the miaaw website it occurred to me that I should have based it on a 10 pixel foundation. I had opted to make the font-size of the html element 16px and then build everything else in rems and percentages. This worked but involved mental arithmetic whenever I wanted to make something an equivalent of, for example, 27 pixels.

I went back and changed the root element to 10px and then recalculated all the styles. Now, if I want to make something the equivalent of 27 pixels I make it 2.7rem. Simple, with no arithmetic involved.

I sat for an hour changing all the html and css, and checking it at every stage. I have taken to working live on Cloud9 and then downloading the theme every now and then as a backup. This worked very well as I rebuilt the theme with a notional grid of 64px (or 6.4rem), and all the heights in multiples of 8.

Website finished I head home to deal with the cat and clean the house a bit. I leap on the metro at the front which means I find myself the last person in the station at Puotila. Everyone from the rear of the train has already left. I look at more examples of the art that Helsinki has commissioned to fill in blank advertisements on the metro. In Hakaniemi they have strip cartoons. Here they have the visual equivalent of ambient music.

Irma will arrive home with a variety of foodstuffs for serving as tea. At 18:30 Sanal and Teija will arrive for tea.

We will spend the evening chatting about Helsinki politics, the Finnish Indian Association, international outsourcing, and more.

They will leave shortly before 22:00.