a lot of stuff and nonsense from eclectech

Motherhood has been on my mind recently, so it seemed appropriate to deal with it in an animation. I also thought that having the audacity to plan making an animation so close to baby's due date would guarantee an early (or at least prompt) appearance but no, so here you go...

Milk Pistols (700KB Flash).

Labels: flash animation

It was the second birthday of the Open Rights Group yesterday. They've done some fine work over the two years, summarised in their new report, and I'm looking forward to seeing how they progress further. With that in mind I'll be sending them some more cash to help them along, particularly as they have a great offer from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust to match the amount they raise from donations.

Their eVoting and Release the Music campaigns have probably been of most interest to me over the last two years but the current example of government incompetence with digital data is as good an example as any as why the organisation is needed.

Details of how to support them can be found on their site.

In the spirit of being open with ones bits a non-org related birthday penguin is available on my site under an attribution-noncommercial-sharealike Creative Commons licence.

Labels: open rights group

Apologies for the girl talk, but my job for the day is to put together a play list for my upcoming hospital trip. It turns out to be a rather unusual task; what music do you want to listen to when you're trying to squeeze out a baby? One possibility of course is that when the moment comes I won't care, which makes my job for the day decidedly easier, but on the off-chance I get picky I want the right selection. It's making me listen to music with a very different ear.

I've ruled out masses of music I like (and part of me feels would be highly appropriate) for being too shouty or dancey. If I came away from anything from the physiotherapy antenatal class it's that managing stress and controlling breathing should help; picking music designed to make one shout and jump probably isn't wise. So no California Über Alles or I Can't Decide then.

The problem with quite a lot of my more laid back and mellow music is that they have very emotional lyrics. I keep finding tracks, thinking "that'll be perfect", listening to a little and realising in my current slightly hormonally challenged state it makes me want to weep. Again, maybe best to avoid.

Current list is a strange and unexpected subsection of our music collection. Lots of instrumentals or lyrics I don't understand due to being in another language. Sigur Rós, Buena Vista Social Club, the soundtrack to Amelie, the Penguin Cafe Orchestra... not what I expected to choose but they feel right.

Some old favourites as well of course. Tom Waits is essential, but I've selected older, croonier material rather than the more chaotic, shambolic albums of recent years. Some Nick Drake because he's associated so strongly with days when I was doing little other than relaxing, and Spiritualised for the same reason (to be honest Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space is on the verge of the 'making me cry' category, but is too lovely not to include).

Hmm. Nine albums and a few selected tracks. That should do it. I suspect I won't notice if it starts to loop.

I should probably apologise in advance to the midwife though.

Labels: blether

... is the size of your duck.

Despite the amusement I occasionally experience when I misread a spam subject I've finally decided that I need to move over to a new public eclectech email address as after 7 years online mail@eclectech is getting far too many emails about duck size.

I'll run the old address for a wee while longer, and will set a sensible bounce message to let people know what's happening, but in future please send emails to hello instead of mail at eclectech.co.uk.

Ta.

Labels: blether, silly joke