I am part way through redesigning snailsnail.com. It has long been in need of it and finally yesterday (or was it the day before?) I got inspired and started hacking out a design.

And this is where we are as of right now – this is what a design of mine looks like when it’s half way done – basically most of the positioning is done – the header and the navigational links are done, you can’t see it but the footer is done, and now I have to put the stuff into all the boxes.

I have no idea how professional web-designers do this kind of stuff, in fact – it would be kind of nice to find out. Personally, I follow this process:

1. rough a design out on paper.
2. use a vector design program (my beloved inkscape) to create an image of the design.
3. on paper again – rough out the html structure of the page – into <div>s and so on
4. in dreamweaver (or alternative text editor (I basically only use dreamweaver as a text editor — it has very nice auto-complete) I write a barebones  html file that has all my divs nested correctly and with id’s or classes assigned plus place-holder text in them.
5. in dreamweaver also I write a css file which has empty definitions of all classes and id’s and link it to the html file.
6. In the css file I colour-code all the divs using html’s basic colours (which you can define simply by typing the word – red, cyan, black, etc).
7. I then work on layout – positioning all the elements correctly on the page.
8. I start a somewhat mixed-up process of exporting background images from inkscape which are linked to in the css, filling in proper content for the html file (replacing place-holder text with real text including <h1> tags, etc and images) and plugging in other style refinements (fonts, etc.)
9. Troubleshooting! The design is more or less done at this point and here is where I start fine-tuning things – juggling padding and margins and so on – re-exporting images where I’ve messed up and things don’t line up properly, and so on.
10. Test in IE and panic! …. then give up….   I always intend to start out from the beginning with testing my design in different browsers – but inevitably don’t bother and do it all in firefox. Finally I have to check it out in another browser and discover that everything is broken (thank you microsoft). I run through a period frantically googling for solutions to my problems before eventually just kind of giving up and pretending that everyone in the world uses firefox.

Anyway, we’re in 8. at the moment – although I haven’t done the finer parts of 7. yet.

I haven’t actually got much done today, because Davide and I popped out for an explore of the barrio [neighbourhood] – we found a bookshop which looked cool but was a bit overpriced, a place selling homemade wine for 1€ a litre (not half bad either) and finally we popped into a bar for cañas [small glasses of beer] and tapas. Then we decided to cook ourselves a feast – we made a crab-meat and parsley starter, followed by breaded mussels with tomato and finally stuffed squid. Unfortunately we overcooked the mussels because we were too involved in a game of backgammon, but everything else came out deliciously. Anyway – back to the html grindstone.

PS. – I am still not doing very well at keeping this blog up, as you may have noticed. I don’t see this situation improving anytime soon, to be entirely frank. However, you may like to check out the fotolog every so often, as I’m much better at keeping it up to date.

Last night I went out and spent my last money for the month on an Indian… which is fairly weird in Spain. And the food, to be honest, wasn’t that great. I don’t know much about Indian food, having come to it late in life, however, I know far more than your average madrileño, it seems, and I found myself menu advisor – a role to which I’m not suited. Furthermore, I had one of my “Help, I can’t speak Spanish” days and I got pretty lost in the conversation.

Today, however, I got up early(ish) and spent the morning working on Sunday Project #03, which you can watch down the bottom of the page, if you should so wish. Then I cooked myself a steak and eggs and spent the afternoon playing backgammon and genial (a board game I haven’t come across before that involves placing hexag0n-shaped symbols on a board and scoring points).
We bought my flatmate for his birthday a couple of weeks ago a set of table tennis bats and balls with the intention of constructing some kind of a net to turn our dinning room table into a table tennis table, however we hadn’t got around to it until I decided to top off the afternoon by making one out of corrugated cardboard and duct tape – worked a charm. My flatmates as I speak are bashing balls around the living room.

Here you can watch the last two snailsnail Sunday Projects:

a snailsnail Sunday Project from snailsnail on Vimeo.

a snailsnail Sunday Project – The House Where I’ll Once Live from snailsnail on Vimeo.

Some time ago secret mystery project 25 got mentioned. Secret mystery project 25 was a series of illustrated stories that I wrote as Christmas presents for my family. Later I expanded the project and wrote poems for friends as  well.

These stories and poems I’ve collected together into a book which, thanks to the miracles of technology, you can buy and read and put on your book shelf.  You can buy it here.

Now, hold on a minute, that’s a bit cheeky isn’t it, me selling presents I made for people?
Well, yes.

However, I’m not actually expecting anyone to buy the thing and I thought it would be a good exercise for myself – learning to use publishing software – an experiment in designing a book which I’d like to have on my shelf, and then also I put a lot of effort into those poems and stories and I thought it would be good to make a little more of them.

You can also buy a cheaper pdf version instead of the physical book, however, if you would really like to read it but would rather not pay then drop me an email or a comment and I will email you the pdf version.

Below is a segment of one of the stories and a poem:

Phyte

for Sarah

Stella was, she had always thought, an ordinary, boring sort of a girl – plain of appearance but not hideous, ungifted in sports, average academically, with a few good friends and a few more acquaintances, an older brother she largely ignored and parents out of whose way she kept as often as possible. That was until that August, shortly before the new school year, when she woke up at three am with a feeling of dread filling every bone in her body.

The shadowy figure standing upright as a telephone pole beside her bed whispered softly in a language she didn’t recognise and everything went black, like the deepest sleep she had ever encountered.

She woke up in the morning feeling as freshly rested as ever she had after a night’s sleep. Her alarm clock sounded thirty seconds later and she got up wondering about the dream that she was almost certain was not a dream. She went down to the kitchen and made a glass of fresh orange juice, wondering why her mother wasn’t up and dressed and getting dishes out of the dishwasher and why her brother wasn’t moodily thumping around upstairs.

She came out of the shower, now pretty certain something was wrong – the house was eerily quiet. Still wrapped in her towel she knocked on her parents’ bedroom door. Silence. Slowly she opened the door and peered in. Her parents were both there, in bed, under the covers.

“Mum? Dad? Shouldn’t you be up?”

Nothing. She walked in and approached the bed with trepidation, each step more convinced something terrible had happened. Their heads lay side by side on the pillows and their faces were a terrible shade of white. She reached out and touched her mother’s cheek. It was freezing cold.

Cuerdas y Tinta

para Laura

En tinta gotear de
Cuello hueco sinew (tendón)
Pergamino y ácido y papel
Empapado en químico
Alquimia – plata, plomo
- Gris oscuro, plateado, curvas y
Lineas. Cuerdas desde los rincones
A la piel. Polvo, brillar. Un solo
Hilo rojo lentamente
Corriendo entre palabras
Susurrada en museos
En frente de los cuadros.

I cooked dinner last night.
And I was quite proud of what I made.
We started with mussels in a creamy cider and bacon sauce,
followed by homemade Cornish pasties,
finished off with a choice – carrot muffins topped with a lemony creamcheese icing or  nutty honeycoated muffins (or, indeed, one of each).

All fairly successful, if I do say so myself… except… the only thing is – gravy. How do you make gravy? I have, over the years, tried many different approaches and yet it always, without fail, turns out horrible. So the pasties were a little dry and could have done with gravy – why do I have this culinary blindspot?

I can, however, make a fairly good non-Newtonian fluid.

Thanks, as ever, go to my much more culinarily accomplished sister, who provided not only the recipe book with the muffins in but also the sugar to go in them, the cases to dollop the gloop in and the tray to hold those colourful cases which have unfortunately now run out… on to boring white ones.

See above ^

Most people have probably seen these already elsewhere, but for if not, here are two videos I did recently:

You Can’t Get Drunk If You Don’t Drink – A snailsnail Sunday Project from snailsnail on Vimeo.

I like finding things in the street. This was easier in my last flat where people discarded things all the time. Here the pickings are less rich, however, most mornings there are a few old gents rifling through skips, and I’ve found a few things. I have a bathroom cabinet complete with mirror and horrendous beige paint which I mounted on my wall and where I keep my still-undeveloped roles of film and my head torch (close by the door for when some part of the obligatory dodgy spanish wiring trips the circuit breaker; I have a selection of comics and illustrated natural history books (which is where this sketch came from); and, most recently, I picked up a wheelchair with a hole in a seat for pooing through, which is what I’m sitting on right now as I write this – it’s much more comfortable than my Ikea dinning room chair that I was sitting on before (before that I was borrowing my flatmate’s swivel chair – until I leant back too hard and snapped the back off (though now it makes a not-too-bad footrest)).

Incidentally, on a slightly tangential note, the title of this post comes from a song from the film ‘The Sound of Music’ which, for unknown reasons, is titled ‘Smiles and Tears’ in Spain. I like this version of the song, from the film ‘Dancer in the Dark’, which is called ‘Dancer in the Dark’ in Spain.

Well… someone came….

First, a note.
In my head the title of this post and the above sentence (both of which will be explained shortly) are variations on the phrases “No one died…. Someone died” spoken by Keith Mandemant, swimming pool night attendant, in an episode of The Day Today (You can see him in this clip). I don’t know why, it’s not an especially funny clip, certainly not the best of The Day Today, but it’s a soundbyte that’s stuck in my head and which pops up from time to time, sometimes in variations (as above), and which has been floating round my head this week.

So, anyhows, to explain.
This Monday I started a new job, it’s the same old, same old in many respects – that is, teaching English, but it’s for a company that doesn’t suck one hundred percent (like my previous one) and that will actually pay me enough to indulge in my passion for making ridiculous amounts of cakes (I made 48 muffins yesterday) (and pay my rent), so it’s been a difficult week, even though I haven’t had an enormous amount of teaching hours it has been difficult getting used to a new timetable and it’s always a bit of a mental exercise wrapping your head around new ways of teaching, new timetables, new systems, etc. so my brain’s been humming at full throttle, I’ve having difficulty sleeping and having horrible dreams of repetitive anxiousness.

Anyway, the week’s gone well and I think this job’s going to sit well with me, however, and on to the title, I don’t know if you’re supposed to tell this sort of thing, but whatever…. One of my clients in Universal Music, you know, the record company – I teach there four mornings a week, at least in theory, because this was my very first class on Monday and…. no one came…. not a soul… oh well, I thought, as I twiddled my thumbs, at least it’s not difficult, sitting here. Day two (that’s Tuesday)…. no one came…. and that’s when I started composing this blog post in my head – though this time I had at least remembered to bring a book to occupy myself with… Day three… someone came – one out of a theoretical class out of five. And it was quite a good class, I think. Day four (Thursday)….. No one came. So there you go. Weird. Hopefully as January comes to a close things will normalise. Frankly I’d prefer to teach a class than to sit like a lemon, fool that I am, perhaps.

My classroom at Universal has a number of platinum disks on the wall and I was wondering how easy it would be to steal one, replace it with a fake, melt it down and sell the metal – unfortunately, I realise, upon reading wikipedia, that there’s probably not much point in attempting such a scheme. Never mind. If anyone else has any get-rich-quick schemes I’ll happily lend an interested ear.

also, forgot to mention, that game that I wrote the music for, you can play it here.

Ah, yes, blogging, what was that?

Various thing to tell, we’ll start with a little domestic bliss though.
Last Sunday it snowed in Madrid, quite a bit actually – a couple of inches at least (which is a lot for here). My flatmate had never thrown a snowball before, so it was obvious what we had to do….

Before that, however, we’d had quite the day. We got up late, I forget why – it might have had something to do with a little wine the night before, then we played cards together – an Italian game (though, let’s face it, it probably ain’t just Italian) somewhat akin to rummy – Davide (that’s my Italian flatmate, in case I haven’t mentioned it before) taught us the game, and then proceeded to be trounced royally. I won, of course (actually, not of course – I’m terrible at rummy). After that, and we’re talking about 4 o’clock in the afternoon here, I cooked a full English breakfast for the troops (tired after a hard afternoons cardaging)  - by which I mean – bacon, sausage, black pudding, toast, scrambled egg, hash browns, baked beans, fried tomato, fried mushrooms, brown sauce – many of those ingredients brought back from the uk by me (thanks for the sausages mum). This went down pretty well, and so then I taught the kids how to play backgammon, we went through a couple of games with me giving tips on strategy, pointing out mistakes and explaining what I was doing, and then they started beating me, which is rubbish – I think I taught them too well. I was starting to get my second wind when I went to my bedroom and spotted that it was snowing (no windows in our living room), we all got rather excited, bundled up, and had the mother of all snowball fights in the street around our flat. I discovered that slippers don’t make the best snowshoes and fell over, several times. Thankfully no more were teeth lost (it was the squirrel’s fault). So there we are, back where we started, a perfect day with the flatmates which we finished off with a few more games of backgammon and a little whisky.

More soon, promise.

As I’m so ambulatory between computers at the moment I’m using Google Docs to do all my typing, and I’m doing quite a lot of typing, often late at night. I just came across something that my revision history tells me that I wrote at about one o’clock this morning, I don’t remember typing it at all.

The tears were followed by beaming smiles all around and a smile from the woman that could have cut a liquorice in two. She stuttered a quick response and backed down – raising her wig in defiance of the stiff breeze summoned up by a quartet of american army helicopters which hovered nearby ready to dispatch untold death on the supposed militants below, actually a small band of school children who’d got their hands on some pavement chalk and were ruthlessly defacing a series of small terracotta pots placed on the terrace by a Miss Ealing Summers, as part of her attempt to grow her own herbs for use in the kitchen. Miss Ealing Summers has never taken a course in cookery, nevertheless, she fancies herself quite the mini-masterchef and often imagines inviting round scores of non-existent friends to her place for a nice soiree, a dinner party. Her flatmate, frankly, things her cooking skills overrated and has attempted on numerous occasions to ban her from the kitchen, to little effect, because Miss Ealing Summers cannot imagine the possibility that she might not be a culinary ace whizkid.

I feel that it might be a good time for a holiday, which is a good thing, because I am having one.

Here are a few more things that you should now about my flat:

• We just bought new wine glasses – they are enormous and the wine tastes better.
• At least once a week one of us falls asleep on the sofa. Last week I did it twice, right now Kris is sleeping just to my right.
• We also just got library membership – which means we have access to a lot more films (which, excitingly, are free to rent from the library in Spain… how come nobody told me this before!?). Tonight we watched Do The Right Thing by Spike Lee. I don’t understand why Spike Lee never managed to make a better film. We have five more films in the pile waiting to be watched. (We also watched Sweet Sixteen (by Ken Loach) this evening).
• The cat is in heat again – something needs to be done about this.
• We experimented with a political change in coffee consumption – comunist coffee – unfortunately it tasted like wee…. burnt wee. Back to fascism.
• Mortadela Siciliana does not exist.
• Sometimes, it is definitely certain, we let the flat get a little bit too dirty.
• All the blankets in the flat were handmade by Kris’s mum. They are awesome.
• Kris’s mum also made us croquetas… unfortunately they went bad before we got to eat them.
• At least 66.67 percent of us are stupid, deaf, or just have altzheimers.

my flatmate and I took fotos of each other:

In relation to the aforementioned secret mystery project 25, here are two of the reference images I’ve used to draw from:

I think I mentioned some time ago a desire not to have anything more to do with singstar style games, turns out that resolution came unstuck last night. We had a dinner and singstar-athon, which was unfortunately cut short by the arrival of the police… oh, young people today, they ain’t what they used to be. The food was awesome (I didn’t have a hand in it) and my made some of my standard postres – fruit scones and caramel shortcake, which went down well. I also whipped up another batch of jarabe de goma (a kind of syrup) so that we could make pisco sours (typical peruvian cocktail).
I’m still under no kind of illusion that I can sing, but I did manage to win one round in Spanish, which was a feat to be particularly proud of I’d say.

I am writing this post with my laptop going through the TV. This
basically means that everything is impossible. It’s impossible to read
this text, it’s impossible to see colours, because for some reason it’s
coming out in black and white. Also, the resolution is really low. Do you
kids remember how once we all had minuscule resolutions? I think
everybody, especially software designers, have forgotten that, which
explains all these weird line breaks – it’s the only way I can actually keep
my text on the screen, I’m pretty sure no one even considers that
800 * 600 exists any more, outside of mobile devices I guess.

I wrote a little thing yesterday:

SO IF YOU CALLED MY YOUR
BUTTERFLY FOOL AND CRASHED
THE PRESIDENT’S PLANE INTO THE
ROOF OF YOUR OLD SCHOOL
I’D BUY YOU ROSES AND
A PACK OF CIGARETTES AND
TAKE YOU OUT FOR A
NIGHT OF FINE DINING, AT
LEAST A NIGHT OF THE FINEST
DINING THESE PARTS CAN
OFFER. YOU DON’T LIKE
THE SAME MUSIC AS ME
AND YOU CAN’T BREATHE
UNDERWATER NEITHER, AND
SOMETIMES YOU SCREAM PRETTY
LOUD AT THE TELLY, BUT
THAT’S ALL RIGHT BY ME. I’LL
TURN THE TELLY OFF AND
GET INTO NEW KIDS ON THE
BLOCK AND WE’LL TAKE HOLIDAYS
IN THE DESERT, OR AT LEAST
I’LL RENT FOR YOU A BOAT
WHILE I EXPLORE THE DEPTHS.