mike[space] dot net

Woodwork is a brief tale that I came up with as a writing exercise in 'flash fiction' i.e. write it straight through with minimal editing. I've tidied it up a bit more since finishing, cleaning up the sentences that stood out as clunkers to me. Click the links below to take a look:

• PDF
• RTF

Unbelievable. After taking a week off for my metatarsal (suspected, but unconfirmed), I started running again on Tuesday. The run went well, if a little slowly, and I figured that I would probably be able to make up for lost time in advance of the race next weekend.

I spent a bit of time over the weekend trying to work out how to import all my old blog posts (pre-New Zealand) into the website. Sadly it didn't all work out, as the version of mysql i have on my laptop doesn't match up with that of the my hosting provider. So now I have to work out a different way of dealing with the import. A little disappointing all in all ...

As you will see in the footer, the content on this site is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence. All original content (unless otherwise stated) is Copyright (c) Mike Smith. Images or embedded content are obviously copyright to the original creators.

The basics of the license are as follows:

you can distribute and display the work, and even make derivatives, so long as you:
a) don't make any money off it.
b) give me credit for the work.
c) maintain the same licensing criteria on any new work.

Today, I woke up in the mood to sort out my website. So that is what I have done. Much of the change will be completely invisible to you, as it has mainly been about updating the backend software to a more recent version - I am now running drupal 5.10, instead of the antiquated (and probably insecure) 4.7.2.

This started life as a small whimsical email, and I quite liked where it went. So a few weeks later I took the original email, and expanded it to become more of a tale. Then over the course of a day or so I tweaked it, and then declared it done. Available in rich text and as a PDF below.

• PDF
• RTF

This page is being written at the beginning of my decision to start publishing some of my writing online through this website. The basic intent is that once a fortnight, a new story will appear on this site. The nature and quality of that story will vary considerably. My intent at this point is that they will be short (between 500 and 3000 words), and will not be massively edited or tweaked. They will come out of my various writing exercises that I undertake, such as freeform writing, specific descriptive tasks and the like.

To explain my earlier tweet I realised I had made a bit of an error in clothing choice this morning, as I walked down the road and got a couple of funny looks. I was off to Adam's today to help him with painting his house, and had dug out an old t-shirt for the event. This was a t-shirt I won for the dubious achievement of drinking 8 pints of beer at the Cask & Bottle. It was 96, and the T-Shirt bore a picture of Saddam Hussein with the words "First the Challenge, then the world" (the challenge being the drinking that had earnt me the shirt.

Off the back of the TV review in the observer yesterday, I decided to have a little watch of Maestro, and it was every bit as brilliant as Kathryn Flett said. Watching Goldie nail it all at the end was fantastic, but it was also just fascinating to really see what happens to an orchestra with a bad conductor. Peter Snow was genuninely awful, and he did well not to just give up. I don't know how interesting it will continue to be over the series, but I shall definitely be keeping an eye on it for the next couple of weeks.

This weekend was Nick's stag do down in Bournemouth. On Friday, I was buzzing from a successful week's writing, and feeling a little grumpy about taking the weekend out just when things were starting to go so well. But I headed out on the bus at lunchtime to begin the schlep down to Bournemouth. I had my first journey in a hybrid car as Dave currently has a Prius (after his continual problems with getting his car fixed, he just seems to get bounced around the various cars that come available at work). It's a little weird when it's so silent as the electric motor glides it around the car park, and the animations to tell you where the power is going seems a little over the top, but overall I was pretty impressed - the mileage is awesome.