Reggie Thomson’s Diary

I went out on Thursday to take some snaps - see my photography_blog. The weather was beautiful, but the wind still very cold.
I met Hiroshi Shimura on Clare Bridge. On Friday, I attended his DVD viewing at his exhibition at Clare Hall. There were some great morning misty scenes from Grantchester.

I’ve just ordered a Sto-fen Omni-bounce direct from America.

A pleasant day for mowing the lawn.

I’ve updated the structure of the diaries to put important links on the left, with the right sidebar coming after the body of the postings.

This looks great on Firefox, but the right sidebar has disappeared in IE6.0. I’ll have to check what’s happened tomorrow.

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear

This is one of the songs in “South Pacific”.

It was somewhat out of place. There was no hint of any hatred in the play.

I disagree strongly with the sentiment. Hatred is not a lesson we learn, and few would admit to teaching it. Fear is a natural reaction, especially in an unfamiliar circumstance.
We teach ourselves how to hate, merely by copying what we see, hear and feel around us. As dependent babies and children, we need food and comfort, so we desperately try to fit in by copying. Very quickly, any copied hatreds become part of our cultural identity - complete with detailed rationalisations for them (all copied, rarely thought-through).

No group within a society has ever “Got to be” taught the norms of the group - culture is assimilated. Rather, we need to be taught to examine ourselves and to be willing to lose face with our past behaviours and words.

I enjoyed the play “South Pacific” at the ADC. I had wanted to buy the DVD in advance, but at 15 quid, it is too pricey.

The story line is too thin for my liking. The guys in the row in front seemed to cringe at the weak lines.

The acting wasn’t bad, but at times seemed to lack a sense of Drama - pauses that highlight the feeling, for example.

Now here is an amusing anecdote. I don’t go with the crowd, so when I booked last Saturday, I chose a seat not in the centre, or near to others, but fourth in from the right, leaving two empty seats to the left. At the time of booking online, the theatre was mostly empty. Some individuals had taken end seats.

On the evening, the place was packed - except for two seats next to me. I wonder what that says about human psychology? Of course, maybe it says more about me. Next time, I’ll leave three and see if they get filled in.

The old diary.php program now links through to the WordPress version, though I have yet to customise the style.

It took a while to sort out my timesheets this afternoon.

I ate out this evening - Sainsbury’s best salad selection in the luxurious surroundings of All Saints Gardens.

Bought “West Side Story” DVD in Borders. I could have got “Spirited Away” for four pounds less than at Tesco’s.

I finished off a few projects today, and did some admin work. This included replacing a toilet handle, and putting up some 300W earth-burning lighting. I’m the office handyman, it seems. And though I say I have environmental principles, I will submerge anything for the sake of money.

There were more people at the Chinese lesson tonight, and listening to the mp3 recording proved rather fruitless. I want to hear clear sentences at normal speech. I can then create an mp3 with just those sentences, and transcribe them onto the website. Maybe I’ll just type in some of my scrawled notes. I no longer write in Chinese characters in class, as I feel I can progress faster on my own, and writing in pinyin helps me to concentrate on pronunciation, which is more important at this stage.

I’ve signed up for another ten weeks.

On returning home, I seemed to surprise a gang of about five or six youths who were acting suspiciously around the neighbourhood cars and property. I phoned the police on the mobile - but I refuse to pay for five minutes just waiting in a call queue. By the time I got through to a human on the landline, the youths had disappeared.

I host a number of websites on a Godaddy server.

Today, I had to restore one of them from the online ftp backup, since the index.php was inadvertantly deleted by the owner.
However, when completed, the site continued to give a message saying the site was unavailable.

All of the files were correctly listed in the directories, and I even created a .htaccess file with the line “DirectoryIndex index.php”

This didn’t work.

I even tried disabling the website and re-enabling it, to no avail.

I had to restart Apache for the website to become visible again.

I’ve just completed the mamoth task of converting my old diaries to WordPress format. All I need to do now is to get the old diary.php linking through to the correct pages.

So, welcome back, after a two-and-a-half year break from the daily diary.

With all the door slams from 26 at 02.50 this morning, I didn’t get to church, choosing instead to catch up on broken sleep.

I tried to do some more listening to last week’s Chinese lesson, but something went wrong with the recording. I only managed three sentences, and decided it wasn’t worth keeping them.

There was no need for lunch today: I munched my way through the box of Thornton’s Chocolates I was given yesterday. The doggie bag of Japanese food provided nutrition for the evening.

Relaxation tonight consisted of watching “Spirited Away”. Now that I have a daily blog, I’ll start dividing up my comments, I think.