dwlt

Not that I see a lot of theatre, I’m sad to report, but I find it hard to imagine how I could ever see a play as superbly written and performed as this.

Four days on, I’m still processing it.

Time will tell if I’m any good at it, but screenwriting it is. I’ll be working with my former business partner on this, which is pretty cool on its own, but even more so that we’re doing something like this.

I hope you have a fantastic day, and here’s to a year full of wonder, love, focus and good health.

Ha! I managed to get into the Introduction to Screenwriting class.

It was pretty fun, and we had to break into groups of three (or in my case, two, since there wasn’t quite enough people) and devise a 15 minute short in just 30 minutes, then pitch it to everyone else in the room. It was fun trying to devise a story to tell – though I got the feeling some of the other people already had a specific idea beforehand, because it was just too polished when they did their pitch.

Anyway, we came up with a story of two comedians competing to win a prize of their own show at the Edinburgh Fringe. They have different styles, but backstage they overhear each other rehearsing the same punchline. They take an instant dislike to each other, and hilarity ensues (we were a bit vague on this bit!). At the end, they hear the audience cheering wildly, and it turns out they ended up on stage and have won the contest as a double act.

Turns out that the “backstage sabotage” device has been used in a fairly successful play called Noises Off, but I hadn’t heard of it until afterwards.

Anyway, good fun, and I’m glad I managed to get in. Next thing to blag: free entry (via a press pass) to the Edinburgh International TV Festival. :-)

All I have so far are some ideas for biopics on famous creative people who I think might make interesting subjects (I haven’t done any research to see what might have already been made about them, though).

That’s all well and good, but I need to figure out some original story ideas too.

I’m going to try and get a ticket for this tomorrow.

I’m watching this on what I like to call dwltv¹, and I’m enjoying it. Watching it (as with other well-written shows and movies) makes me feel all inspired to actually write creatively.

¹_{Actually, I just made that up.}

I’m supposed to be doing something on day two of this, but it doesn’t seem to be listed, so perhaps I’m not. I’ve made some slides anyway, and I should figure out what I’ll actually say at some point.

I’m having fun experimenting with Keynote, though.

3-Aug:
4-Aug: Done + run
5-Aug: Done
6-Aug: Done + run
7-Aug: Done + weights
8-Aug: Done + football
9-Aug: Done + ill-advised run

I got some ankle weights at the weekend, so I’ve added them to my regime.

From Stuff by Paul Graham:

And unless you’re extremely organized, a house full of stuff can be very depressing. A cluttered room saps one’s spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there’s less room for people in a room full of stuff. But there’s more going on than that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what’s around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.

I’m having a cake flown in specially by one of the lesser superheroes – hope you’re having a great weekend, and that you have a wonderful year to come.

Now available by the same method as the counter:

!http://www.dwlt.net/kivamap/david4234!:http://www.kiva.org/lender/david4234

If you notice anything weird on your map, such as the sea turning green, please let me know. :-)

I have map generation working now, which you can see in the attached image – it even handles the many islands of Indonesia properly! Samoa is very difficult to see, since it’s only about 4 pixels on the map. Still, it is there.

What do people think about the size of the image? 43T makes it a bit smaller than I’m generating it, so click on the image to see the actual size.

I’ll update once I have the real service up and running.

So how do you use it? To get the image file, you just use the following:

http://www.dwlt.net/kiva/david4234

Replace the “david4234” bit with your Kiva lender name so you can get your image, of course. :-)

To use it within 43T as I have above, use the following:

!http://www.dwlt.net/kiva/david4234!:http://www.kiva.org/lender/david4234

The image will only update at most once per day, so bear that in mind if you think the count is wrong. Also, I’ve just noticed a bug, where it counts refunded loans (I didn’t know that could happen), so right now it’s actually one too high for me.

Happy Birthday! Hope the year to come is kind and generous to you.

I found a site that had a little logo detailing how many loans he had via Kiva, but there was no detail on where it came from. So, I’ve spent a couple of hours making my own (see attached sample).

Unfortunately, some arcane incantations need to be spoken unto the server by my ISP before I can make this available to you all to use. All you’ll need to know is your Kiva profile name from your lender page (when you log in, go to My Portfolio, and then My Lender Page).

Once the service is actually available and working, I will of course post again letting you know how to access it.

Now, does anyone know where I can find free images of a political map of the world? I want to generate Kiva maps.

Burnout Self-Test

You may be at very severe risk of burnout – do something about this urgently.

Hm.

Not quite how I would have ended it (although my prediction before reading the last six books was spectacularly close), but then I didn’t sell 20 million books in 2 days.

_{And I really don’t like epilogues.}

Just a few hundred more pages to go…

I hope you’re having an outstanding day, and that the coming year works out a whole lot better for you than the last one.