“groovy mother...”

Doing Things Is What I Like to Do

I promised myself I wouldn’t rise to it. If someone tagged me with that “5 Things You Don’t Know About Me” meme that’s been going around for the last month, I’d ignore them.

Earlier today, Danny tagged me.

1. In my final year at high school, I got a better grade (B) in my Higher Grade English class than I did in Higher Computer Studies (grade C). I appealed the Computing one, and it was bumped up to a B.
2. Despite my natural geek tendencies, I’ve spent much of my life determined not to pursue a career in computing. As a teenager, my dream job was to work as an advertising executive.
   
   After discovering how hard it was to break into advertising, I applied to study Maths at university. At the last minute (during Freshers Week!), I switched to CompSci. The reason I switched isn’t important, although I did realise years later that it was based on a misunderstanding.
   
   And as I approached graduation, I was determined not to end up like most CompSci graduates in Edinburgh, working in the basement of some bank. So instead, I aimed at becoming a pop journalist, submitting sample reviews to “Smash Hits”. They didn’t write back.
   
   After the dotcom bubble burst and I got laid off, I spent almost three years working in the basement of a bank. It was as bad as I’d expected.
3. My fantasy dream goal in life is to be a panelist on Radio 4’s Just a Minute. My dream used to be having my name printed on a record sleeve, which I achieved a few years ago through pretending to have been at Glastonbury.
4. Rod is short for Roderick (not Rodney, as some suspect). For the first few years of my life I was called “Rory” for short, but at the age of 9 I decided I wanted to be called by my full name, so from Primary 4 on it was “Roderick”.
   
   I remained Roderick through high school until I left and took a year out before Uni. During this time, I worked at a library where, after introducing myself as Roderick, folks got to shortening my name to “Roddy”. “Roddy Begbie”?! I fucking hate how that sounds.
   
   Thus, I decided to shorten my name even further to prevent any future Roddyness. On my first day at university, I started introducing myself as Rod, and I’ve been that way ever since.
5. When faced with single-pole double-throw lightswitches, I don’t like it when the lights are off because both switches are in the On position. I will go out of my way to turn off lights by throwing the On switch Off, even if it means walking downstairs in the dark. (Luckily, albeit somewhat annoyingly, the guy who did the electrical wiring in our house didn’t use SPDT switches, so if one switch is Off, the lights stay off. Oh, the number of lightbulbs I’ve changed unnecessarily!)

And now the time where tradition dictates I tag others… Messrs Cheever, Del Vecchio, Martin, Sandler, and Miss Russell: Go!

The not-particularly-secret Diary of…

If you’re reading this, then I’ve thrown the switch. After almost five years on Movable Type, I’ve shifted over to some homespun blogging software (which I’ve codenamed threequarters)

The reason for this? Over the last few years, the MovableType “community” has pretty much dried up. While there are still a few souls pushing out plugins, they’re of decreasing quality and usefulness. When you only know enough Perl to be dangerous, hacking around in code to fix the authors’ bugs isn’t much fun, and prevented me from really building anything myself.

So here I am on a site powered by the lovely Django framework. There’s less than 500 lines of my code (templates excepted) powering the whole thing, and very little copying and/or pasting. Finally, I can do crazy things like including my Flickr photos in-line with my main blog entries, all cross-referenced by tags. Madness, I know!

It’s all still a little rough round the edges. There’s probably some Unicode screwups, images might not show up correctly, and I’ve yet to think about comments. But at least now I understand the programming language, and can fix all those things.

Happy new year, everyone!