It’s been a while since my last post here. I’ll try and recap.
The course about horses was useful. I learnt a few useful things, mainly ORBITS. I’ll attempt to recall from memory each point:
- Outline - if you drew a line around the horse, how would it look? Is head in the right place (on the neck is generally a good start), etc?
- Rhythm - is the pace even or do some strides take a little longer than others?
- Balance - where is the horse’s center of gravity? Horses tend to have a ratio of 60/40 on their front versus hind legs. What you want is 50/50, so hind legs should come forward more with each stride
- Impulsion - is horse putting some effort into the gait or is it half asleep? Whatever the tempo, you want the gait to be active and full of energy
- Tempo - the speed of the gait, i.e. how quickly is the horse making each stride.
- Submission - is the horse listening to you, the lunger, and paying attention?
Obviously there’s a lot more detail I could go into but not at 2:30AM. I’ll see if I can make a separate post with it in sometime. Pester me about it.
Since that there’s been another weekends vaulting. Although very close to Christmas (weekend before, leaving me travelling home on Christmas Eve (what did Adam say to his wife the day before Christmas?)). For once I wasn’t asked to coach very much despite the lack of our most excellent coach, although with several Clwyd vaulters missing and other coaches and groups that came along I think there were plenty. So I got a bit more pressure to vault instead.
Stand is getting more and more comfortable each time I do it, perhaps because I can practice it on public transport. It’s perfectly acceptable to stand up on a train, and to a lesser extent, a bus, although standing on one leg for more than a second or two tends to attract a few odd looks, I’ve discovered. OTOH scissors is not so easily practiced without a vaulting barrel.
I noticed a couple of days ago that a second oil drum has appeared in the garden. This brings having my own practice barrel a little closer to reality. The trouble is for the project to continue it now relies on my father, as he is the only one with welding skills, and not the company with oil drums to dispose of. It gives me a little more to consider: fixed handles or vaulting roller? 5 or 6 feet high? Pink or brown? Actually, purple and green, as Larry Boy (google it), may look nice. I was thinking of adding a red hand print at one end and naming the thing Wilson. Seen that somewhere before, I’m sure…
On the job (hob? yob? Depends where tha’s from dunnit) front, there’s still not a lot that particularly interests me. Trouble is, people ask and I say ‘web design/development.’ But here’s what I have experience of: PHP, MySQL, Linux, Apache, XHTML, CSS, some JavaScript, Photoshop to a basic level and a very tiny bit of ASP I did a very long time ago and forgot. That’s a fairly complete skill set in itself. There are a few jobs out there where these skills are what they’re looking for. OTOH, it’s all self taught. That is I don’t have paper produced and signed by external sources saying I can do these things.
I’ve recently found a company nearby that specialise in PHP development and training. I’m not looking for a job there as I doubt I have the level of knowledge they’d be looking for, and they don’t appear to have much on offer anyway. The training side looks interesting, though. I’m hoping when I start claiming jobseeker’s allowance I’ll be able to get funding from elsewhere for the two courses I want to do (totalling £350, still a fairly hefty sum even if I had an income, although still less than a copy of Photoshop, which I couldn’t use without forking out for a windows license or a mac as well so isn’t a lot of good to me right now).
I’ve started having driving lessons again. I had a grand total of 5 while I was working at Clwyd. 11 months later I had my first lesson in Birmingham. Going by stories my instructor has been telling me, I’ve remembered a huge amount considering the gap. The advantage is there’s a lot we can skip (’this is a seat belt, this is the steering wheel’) and lets me get on with the fun bit of driving. We recapped on controls and did left turns to begin with. Next lesson was roundabouts (which didn’t go amazingly well, which I’m going to blame on hills and whatever was distracting me that day) and a single right turn that went horribly wrong. Finally, last week we dealt with encountering traffic, more left turns, some right turns that went very well from the beginning and a single roundabout that also went very well. If I could just avoid parking on the curb (considered a serious fault and will result in a failed test) at the end of the lesson I’d have been entirely happy with it. Still, I’m feeling more confident about driving. I hope the next one is as good.
The last thing I’m going to report on now is bandnet.org.
Unfortunately I’ve decided to start it again. Fortunately it’s developing fairly quickly thanks to the better use of OOP, existing code and some idea what I’m building.
In doing it again also means a new theme. I hope you looked up Larry Boy: it’s that colour. Since only my laptop runs windows, and therefore is the only thing I can run Photoshop on, and my laptop under windows doesn’t support the full resolution, and therefore aspect ration, of my LCD monitor, I decided to play along and make the purple very purple. Purple and orange is taken by Jamendo so I went with a darkish green instead.
So far implemented is account registrations (both user and artist, using a lot of shared code so very quick to develop), logins, very basic profile page for artists (again, a lot of shared code so user profiles will be very quick to write - waiting on development of the templates files which display it all), a basic selection for which account to upload file to (artists of which you are a member or your user account - that’s right, users have privileges to upload to their profiles, although this will be limited to photos for users).
Basically, that’s it. I think for the sake of getting something done quickly I’m going not going to put much effort into the template yet, instead focusing on making the data available to the template engine. That way backend can be tested better while frontend is being worked on.
Which means I’m already nearly where I was with the previous code set without having spent anywhere near as much time on it. Only thing that had the current effort doesn’t is nearly complete upload handling, basic license stuff, image resizing/caching, a more complete template for the profile pages and a few other small, easily implemented bits. So once those bits are done again I’ll won’t feel quite so bad about it.
On top of bandnet there’s a couple of other project ideas I have; some small, some less so, one huge! I guess it’s fortunate that this huge one just adds a few bits to something I was hoping to do in bandnet anyway, making it quite justifiable.
Anyhow, the time has been going forward for a while now (someone really should do something about that!). So at twenty to four ay em, Mr Higgy finally makes the terrible error of clicking publish. Good night!