morning is broken - where did the sun go

Morning is broken - where did the sun go

After a very positive first week at my new job, the second week has been less successful. As the work area is awaiting an accomodation reorganisation, I have simply been hotdesking, finding an empty desk to work at. However where initially there was a desk handy for my colleagues that was available for three days a week, this is now no longer available, so I moved to a more remote desk, but that too will become unavailable on Monday, so I've no idea where I'll be sitting from then on.

There is also the issue of a couple of boxes, of the usual personal tat, that you lug about with you, which is not really an issue when you have a desk, but becomes an issue when you are deskless.

All in all, my choice of Christmas reading "Detox your Desk" now seems somewhat ironic.

Of course these things have a tendancy to turn on a sixpence, falling into place unexpectedly, but it is always a mistake to rely on providence.

My gut feeling at the moment, is just to let the powers that be know that I am finding this hotdesking a nuisance, and start looking at other posts. I don't really want to just go for any post, this current post would be a tough one to beat, but you cannot really strip out the hotdesking aspect. In theory things should sort out in March, but I don't get the impression that folk are talking about March, like they really believe it will be March.

At least flagging up the issue now has the benefits of clarity and straightforwardness. Being realistic offering someone a post and then expecting them to just work from whatever empty desk they can find, really is a pretty big ask. By tolerating the situation I run the risk of making it seem acceptable.

Not much else to report - still very dark all the time, which is a bit nightmarish - leave home in the dark, get home in the dark - I've seen the movies, nothing good ever happens at night.

I think I might try and work up a systematic list of migraine triggers to keep an eye on.

I have been playing around with dot mac, though I must confess that I am still struggling to get my head round what exactly it does. Granted it offers email, but then you can get that from google for nothing, the galleries and webpage just seem a bit tricksy. I remember coding stuff by hand, so I'm a bit resistant to any gee whizzery, if I don't know where the files are stored and the like. The backup is useful, but I'm not really sure how it works, or how I would actually use it if I needed to. I back up to external hard drives anyway, so it is not essential.

Anyway I suspect that I will keep the contract, simply for the sanity factor that it will synchonise my calendar and diary across my desktop and laptop computer. However I am quite sure that Apple could have built in such bluetooth synchonising functionality into a Mac without the need for dot mac, but chose not to, so they could charge for it. There are plentiful options to do a bluetooth synchronisation to a PDA device, so I cannot see the logic of not providing the functionality to actually synchronise to a computer.

The functionality available for Leopard and Tiger interfacing with dot mac differ slightly, making me slightly more befuddled, I might upgrade to Tiger for the desktop, but then again maybe not. All the peripherals work fine connected to the desktop, so probably best to let sleeping dogs lie. More ram would be useful though, when I feel brave about poking about the innards of my computers.

Still there is a long list of IT upgrades and purchases to look forward to. My Christmas spending spree was only just the beginning.

I've also bought a couple of the Clifford Fonts off of FontShop. Now I'm no Font purist, so I'll doubtless confuse fonts and faces. Anyway the whole world of fonts has apparently moved on since they came on sheets from Letraset, and even since they came on CDs, where you got all different sizes and styles for the same font.

The Clifford face is designed by Akira Kobayashi, and is a serif font, which has a nicely handcrafted, almost calligraphic quality. It does however confusingly come with various different variations. I first bought one of the three small caps versions, which has big capitals and little capitals, and is a pleasant variation on using bold all the time. Then I bought a matching normal font face. However you cannot simply bold these faces, as you normally can with electronic fonts. I'm not sure if this requires another font face.

Another confusing thing is that there are special characters like two F, basically a more attractive version of ff that respects the aesthetics of the two letters appearing together.

However I really don't know how you would make this special character appear when required, without going through the text and doing it manually.

I suspect that I am getting into high end typographic niceties here.

Suffice to say, they are exceptionally attractive fonts, though clearly not an essential item. I like just displaying them in large font sizes, just to admire the precise cut of the letters.