More photos up on Flickr.

At the moment new content is principally confined to pictures of my drunken, gurning friends. I do look rather wistfully at the interesting artistic photos others post to Flickr, but until I shake what is turning out to be a lifetime nasty virus and get out a bit more it'll be the gurning I'm afraid. Then again, if you're reading this there is a fair possibility that you are one of my drunken, gurning friends. In that case you may be delighted, or better still appalled, to see yourself commemorated online in this way. Anyway, link to my Flickr stuff is as always over to the right here under links.

I am assuaging my hatred of the cold and interest in remote places by scouting the web reading what I can about Saint Helena Island in the South Atlantic and also Antarctica. St Helena is warm, and Antarctica I think we all know about. One of the principal attractions of St Helena is the colonial architecture, which I will visit the instant they get their airport; right now it's two ships a year or something for access, which would explain how the place has remained so unspoilt. But there will be an airport by 2010, which will simultaneously ruin the character of the place while allowing the cheerful but impecunious locals to earn a few bob for pretty much the first time ever. These things are never simple. Google the place and you'll see what I mean. There isn't a lot of stuff on the web about it, and there seem to be other islands by the same name in the States which means you need to get South Atlantic in play in your search terms.

Antarctica on the other hand is fairly well documented, certainly from the human habitation point of view. Why on earth I am such a sucker for these remote places is anyone's guess, but I imagine the relative simplicity is a large part of it; if you spend as much time as I do pondering the ins and outs of art and culture and the complex web that ties disparate elements of them together then contemplation of what it must be like to be somewhere that makes the simplest thing rather difficult can be pretty grounding. And isn't freedom to be found in absence of choice? So I continue my crusade to keep abreast of the affairs of remote islands via the web. It's an effective form of de-cluttering as they go. Wikipedia as ever remains a useful starting point; one looks up, say, Antarctica and then scouts the links at the bottom of the entry. Don't know what I'd do without it.

If it's not too cold outside there are some pictures of the far-from-remote Botanic Gardens I really want to nail today, so there's a project for later.

I do find it a bit irksome having to use Internet Explorer to customize this Blog.

Although there is claimed compatibility with Firefox, certain operations involving editing the appearance of the blog cause the whole tab to shut once I either cancel or save the changes. I've no doubt that this is down to some sort of combination of my pop-up blocking and Javascript settings, but I've spent plenty of time mucking about with these and I am still no nearer to a solution. It's a right pain in the arse. After all this time it seems that we still have no easy way to persuade a browser to do precisely what we want. For all my general satisfaction with Firefox and also with Opera, both are very capable of just turning round and being really annoying under certain circumstances. It's bother me less if I were the only person using Blogger, but if the most popular sites are troublesome - for whatever reason - this is clearly a major problem. Maybe it's Blogger's fault. I don't know. I'll just have to keep firing up IE to do the appearance changes.

Right, that's it.

Everything is now pretty much as good as it's going to get on my Flickr site. There will of course be new pictures going up all the time, or at least as quick as I take 'em. But what is there already is now pretty well organized, and the particular bugbear of my camera - the red-eye - expurgated as far as possible. I have discovered the many advantages of not just leaving the camera in auto mode, since there are a whole load of specific settings that can be used to better suit any given scenario. Still, most of the pics of people would never have got taken at all if I'd had to muck about too much. They're "of the moment", you know...

I don't suppose I'll ever win any technical prizes, but I'm still deciding how much I care about that.

Just before I finally knock it on the head for the night,

how does one know when one is a real nethead?

Answer: When one finishes maintaining one's Flickr photos and on a whim looks at the most recently uploaded ones tagged with Oxford. Sure enough, most of them are mine. Mixed in, however, are a smattering of other people's. Hmm, one is of a street near me in the snow. Hang on, it was taken a couple of hours ago. I look out of the window. Yes, it takes a massive amount of technology, countless people and servers on the other side of the world to let me know what is happening outside. It has indeed snowed heavily for the last few hours. Makes me want to stay up and go out at dawn taking pictures!

I just put a load more photos up on Flickr.

This fit of enthusiasm owes much to discovering the Flickr Uploader tool, found here. Really takes the sting out of it all. I love Flickr. The only issue for me with Flickr, as with so much on the web, is whether or not to spend the rest of my live browsing through it. Few of the photos I post there are technically very good, as I only have a fairly rudimentary compact camera. This may shortly change, but then I'm feeling poor and also quite inclined to see how far I can push the gear I've got. We'll see. I don't edit or alter the pics, by the way, since I'm pretty idle that way. So let's not get into any lengthy debates about exposure or composition. Yes, I could and probably will tart up the photos in post-processing and editing. No, I haven't yet. They all mean something to me. Let's hope I'm not entirely alone in this :)

One thing I have become aware of recently, though, is how much I love photography. For about a year now, since I bought my little Olympus, I've been taking a few pictures most days as well as going out specifically with photography in mind. I have become so used to documenting my life in this way, or at least my frequent walks, that I now feel naked without the camera. It was earlier this evening when this fully dawned on me. What also dawned on me is how nice it is to have a camera so compact and indeed robust that it is always practical to carry and use it. If I had a digital SLR, would I have it with me all the time? I doubt it. And the best gear there is is useless when you've left it at home. I also think that there are considerable advantages to an unintimidating little camera. People who are camera-shy often overcome it just because they see that it is a cute little device.

I love my Olympus Stylus thingy. There's no other way to put it.

Being generally keen on things geographical

I was interested to come across Geograph. It's a very simple idea. For each Ordinance Survey grid square in the UK, an area of something around one square kilometer, there is at least one photo. At the moment an impressive 47-odd percent of the UK has been covered, and of course there are multiple photos for many squares. Fascinating. This could be viewed as being like a sort of Flickr/map hybrid. You can submit pictures to the project, and of course perform searches using various methods. My grandparent's small village in Wiltshire, which does not even warrant a pub, yielded about ten images for example. I think this is a great idea, as longtime readers of my efforts will be well aware that I have a constant hankering to tie the online and offline worlds together more closely. Or perhaps more accurately see them tied together more closely. Still, I've done a little bit to help by alerting you lot to Geograph haven't I?

Now I must tie beer and myself together a little more closely I think. Bye for now...

It seems that, although I have easily moved

the old link-dump that was (and is) Inchoate Satellite from old Blogger to new Blogger, it is not possible to combine it with this 'ere Still Inchoate. A bit of a shame that, as I'm all for keeping things simple and together. I stuck nearly 1200 interesting links on that Satellite, after all, and it is if nothing else a pretty good record of what I was webly doing at the time. I mean, occasionally people even commented on it. Can you imagine...

Still, boring. Blog-bore supreme. I mean, with a live broadband connection in front of one, who needs to look at someone else's idea of a good time, right? Or am I the only one who tends to use the web as an unfocused psycho-geographical tool for exploring the world? I just like to wander. As I do my real life wandering, and I have to admit that this is in a pretty limited radius around my lair for the most part, my reactions to the environment are as much to do with the weather and the imagined lives of the people I see and the memories evoked by certain places as they are by the physical reality of what is there. Moods can be evoked or dispelled, alternate lives explored, and other people's houses lived in - if only in the imagination. Imagination, of course, has a pretty seamless interface to "reality", as any scrutiny of eyewitness reports of anything soon shows. And the psycho-geography of the web is all the richer for being able to see text and images (live, if on web cam) mixed in together. What a way to travel. Without, of course, the people on the whole. But this is a minor detail...

Still, I suppose that all web content tends to be generated by people at source, so all that is really missing from this huge networked electronic palimpsest of the world is the smells and the ability to move freely in physical space. Imagination will fill in most of the rest. It would be fascinating to compare a virtual traveller's experience of a city with that of a real visitor, wouldn't it? But you'd fairly quickly run up against problems of filtering out subjectivity, and none of us is any good at that if we're honest.

Off, virtually, to St Helena for me. It's not an exile, it's a hobby.

I'm no fearless urban exploration fiend,

but for those like me who prefer to do these things vicariously here is the daddy.

I made a few simple resolutions for the new year.

Realizing that such major steps as becoming a paragon of physical virtue are not likely to lead to any happy result, but serve merely to cause one to shake one's head woefully at one's every wrong turn, I simply decided to save a few quid and a bit of wear and tear by being less drunken than I was for several weeks over the festive season. I don't feel that this is at all unrealistic, since Oliver Reed could have managed that one. Other resolutions are all to do with the getting together of the proverbial shit. I like this sort of resolution, because it serves as a substitute for actually getting one's shit together. Admirably.

What's the difference between resolutions and a to do list? None that I can see. Except perhaps that there is a little bit more virtue attached to keeping a resolution, and I am all for anything that incidentally rubs off a bit of virtue like creating a patina on an old brass kettle in reverse.

Accordingly I have resolved to do, and in some cases have actually done already, the following:

• Assemble all the music I have that I actually like in decent VBR MP3 form so that I might actually listen to some of it from time to time in various locations - which locations, woefully, do not frequently include in front of my very nice stereo. I feel that I probably only have this because I am a white boy from Maidenhead and it is integral to my self-esteem. But there you go. One day I'll get it in the same room as me.

• Continue to take photographs as often as practically possible. I'm delighted that these days my life is so well documented. Oh that this had been the case in the past. Still, we didn't have cheap digital cameras then, and no doubt when the power runs out we'll be back to vellum or post-its or whatever. Maybe wax cylinders. For the time being though there's no reason not to get everything digital and handy, provided a large element of clunky old analogue is kept by for a rainy day.

• Essential home maintenance. Well, I got the boiler serviced and I have replaced the leaky old mixer tap in the kitchen and tracked down some of the leaks in the plumbing. So this one is quite well on track.

• To sort out the parlous state of my clothing with a view to enjoying a bit more female company. Women care about these things, whereas I famously do not. There is a middle line, and I need to tread it.

• Continue to put a fair bit of time in on Second Life with the aim of either getting pissed off with it or getting thoroughly involved with it. Either way, it's the sort of thing that has always intrigued me so there exists the clear need to explore it thoroughly.

• To actually get away for a bit this year. It's been four years since I went away for five days. It's about time. Maybe I can not be ill for long enough to do it this year.

No doubt there is a lot more. But I am involved in various creative projects at the moment, so even if they are not what I'd ideally be doing I cannot self-accuse of getting nothing done. And it is still mercifully not very cold, which regular readers will know causes a large boost to morale only partly dissipated by the lurking feeling that this heralds the end of the world as we know it.

In the interests of working remotely,

even if it is just elsewhere in my tiny kingdom, I have invested in an up-to-date laptop. Well, the hard drive had died in the old one, and in any case there wasn't a great deal I could do with an elderly PIII with 256 meg of memory and - most limiting - a maximum screen resolution of 800x600. The screen size drove me mad, being now thoroughly used to the big 19" LCD monitors I have on the two desktop boxes. I do like to see what I'm about. No doubt the old laptop will get fixed some time and used for hazardous duty like streaming dub to my living room or writing blog entries from remote locations such as coffee shops, something I've long thought tossy in others and am naturally keen to try for myself. Become your enemy, I always say.

Hampered somewhat by post-Christmas low stocks in the shops and a terrible urge to get something which could run Second Life at a clip, I was forced (that's my story) to push out the proverbial boat. Now I have a laptop of such brutality that it astonishes me. 2 gig of ram, half a gig of dedicated graphics memory (dedicated) on Nvidia 7600 hardware, a couple of 120 gig drives, huge wide screen and so on. Oh yes, and every burning capability there is plus HD DVD playback (!), ability to receive and record digital TV, Bluetooth and all the rest of it. It's a frightener and no mistake, so much so that my desktops look very feeble by comparison - and they are themselves pretty brutish.

Paying for it will be the real frightener. At least I got a great deal.

Armed with this new unit I aim to be able to do anything anywhere, at least as far as computing is concerned. Now all I have to do is get on with it...

Happy New Year

to one and all!