Hey Internet people! Here is my latest month’s worth of daily creativities. Due to the great Flickr washout, it has taken me more than two months to do 28 days of creativity, but I’m reasonably back on track now!
There are some fun things here too; my personal favourites in this batch are What Makes Maurice and Trashbot Junior; maintaining my standards of occasionally-genius visual nonsense!
Finally: I have restored everything from my Something Creative Every Day project which got washed away last month.
It will never be the same but it’s as good as it’s going to get! You can see the fully restored set here, or you can just keep an eye on me on your favourite social networks, as I should be getting back into doing daily creativities again now everything is back.
Thanks to all for their patience and support!
Last month I encountered a bug that wiped the past year of my Something Creative Every Day project off the face of the internet.
It didn’t take very long to work out what had happened. I had upgraded to a newer version of Apple’s Aperture than I had previously been working with, and the newer one brought built-in Flickr integration, which long story short, ate the entire set I had on Flickr.
What happened was a classic synchronisation nightmare – it synchronised, but the wrong way around. Aperture chose its empty version as ‘the Truth’ and deleted everything that was already in the Flickr set; it didn’t just remove existing items from set but totally erased them from existence.
Aargh! As soon as I discovered the data loss, I got in touch with both Apple and Flickr. Much to my surprise, I got a reply from Apple within hours, apologising and asking for more information to nail down the bug. It took Flickr almost three days to reply to my message, in which they completely misunderstood the situation. In all, it took two and a half weeks of ridiculously slow responses, having my support case closed on me, and writing to Flickr’s product manager, to get Flickr to tell me they can’t do anything to restore my stuff and that it’s Apple’s fault.
Which brings me to where I am today.
I managed to glean most of my descriptions from Google’s caches before they disappeared off the face of the earth, but some were already gone from the cache. I am left having to manually find more than 300 images and restore them back to my Flickr account, and in doing so, I will have lost everybody’s comments and favourites, my tags on all of my images, all the pools and sets the images had been shared with, and crucially, all of the links will be different. So if anything has gone beyond Flickr, it’ll be dead now too.
It’s gonna take me a while to work through everything and reinstate it all. I have made a start though – today I restored this month of missing images, which includes my inventory of everything on my desk; one of the most popular images from my SCED project so far.
When the restoration project is complete, normal SCED service will resume. Wish me luck!
For some silly reason I have agreed to partake in Hospital Bike Club – along with some of our officers, I shall be embarking on a two-wheeled journey from Hospital’s HQ in South London to Brighton on Saturday 8th October, before Hospitality Brighton that night.
I have been given the relatively easy end of the bargain here, because unlike my colleagues, my two wheels will be propelled by a tiny engine. This doesn’t make it much less daunting for me though – the trip from SE26 to the Brighton seafront in itself would be pretty much the longest journey I will have ever taken my tiny 50cc Vespa on in nine years of owning it, and my journey doesn’t even begin there, as I have a thirty-mile ride to the start line too.
Still, I can’t complain too much – Edgar, Riley, Zac and Tom will be doing this using the power of their own bodies while I buzz along with them, handing them sugary drinks and kendal mint cake to keep their energy up! Lilly may also be joining me to ride on the back, as it would be fun to film the event Tour de France style, with her facing backwards with a camera. We’re not sure on the legalities of that, but I will document the event one way or another!
So why are we doing this?
Well, aside from fun, we are doing this for charity! We are raising money for MIND, the mental health charity, which is a pretty awesome cause. You can donate money on our Just Giving page here. And if you don’t think my mammoth Vespa trip is worth it, then do it for the chaps who are actually pedalling the whole way!
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What a time for this to happen – just as this nice interview with me was posted, somewhere between upgrading my version of Aperture and my Flickr account, the past year of something creative every day has been completely wiped out. I don’t think I have much of a chance of reinstating it, but I have written to Flickr to ask for their help. In the mean time, please excuse all the broken images and links you will find with anything relating to the past year of something creative every day.
Facebook and I don’t get along. I’m not a tin-foil-hat, but I consider Facebook to be a privacy catastrophe, so I have so far managed to avoid it at all costs.
Hospital have, on several occasions now, attempted to railroad me into signing up, with varying degrees of failure – one of my least successful attempts involved Facebook deleting my account as they wouldn’t let me use the alias Creamy Horse. What a hate parade.
Despite my concerns, I have since managed to come to a compromise with the platform: I now have a page. This seems like a reasonable compromise to me – it means you (that’s right, you!) can like me now, and I have a presence there instead of an uncomfortable void.
So what do you get for liking me? Well, that’s not something I can answer, being as inexperienced as I am with the day-to-day workings of the platform. I will be posting links to stuff I post here, which might be of interest to you if you don’t want to have to deliberately visit this site to see if anything is new. I may also start linking to daily creativities if I can wire it up too, but I had a spot of bother attempting to do so earlier today. Oh well. One day at a time!
It feels like a lot longer than it has actually been since my last monthly roundup of daily creativities. I guess this is a good thing, as it means I have missed less days than I felt like I had over the past month. A better month in hindsight than it felt like at the time – my favourites include the Amigos and Treadtill, reminding myself I can kinda draw, and of course the Plush Space Shuttle was amazing too, just in time for its final voyage. I’m still sad that NASA wouldn’t retweet it though.
I made this little (or maybe not that little) ‘U Gotta B Crazy’ button today, to help drive a bit of interest in London Elektricity’s new Remixes!! album. Who can resist hitting a big red button like that?! It’s ridiculously simple, but the nice thing about it is it uses HTML5 for browsers that support it (AKA Safari and Chrome), and falls back to Flash for browsers that don’t support HTML5 in the same way (damn you, mozilla hippies!).
I’m told it also works on iOS too, but I can’t really confirm that – the old iPhone I have here is still on iOS 3.x, where it doesn’t seem to work quite as well as I would’ve liked.
Feel compelled to put it on your site?
Sure! Here’s the embed code:
U Gotta B Crazy!!
It’s taken a little longer than usual for this monthly roundup of creativities. In the past month I set to work on my webshop, which took a lot more time and energy than I was intending – so much so that I ended up having to take a week off from SCED to pull it all together. The shop is live now, and you can read about it in the previous two posts here on Notes. Cool!
So with the shop whirring away, I am back onto the dailies, and here are the most recent 28 of them following my last monthly roundup! It’s been another happy month in my brain as I’ve come up with some ideas I’m pretty proud of. Anatomy of a beast and the Subourbon biscuits are probably the two strongest, but I also like Cecil’s ride and the previously blogged Me and my fridge a lot too.
Let’s hope the next month will be just as funtimes too!