dang
ovan
.com

About a month ago I was going to write the usual prosaic end-of-year stuff about what I was going to try and do better in the coming year, but the very thought of it bored me so much that I wanted to chew off my own hands to spare the world and myself such uninspired rubbish. You’ve heard it all before, I’ve said it all before. But I felt this time was a little different, so instead of a generic statement of purpose I thought I’d wait a bit and give a statement of progress. Or several, rather. One for each of the “resolutions”.

I’ll start with a quick one; Photography.

Problem: I found I had stopped taking photos entirely, due to combination of apathy and crapness of camera. I thought this sucked. Solution? Get new camera. Take lots of pics. Huzzah!

Progress: Camera got: Panasonic Lumix. Wide angle for a digicam and small enough to fit in my pocket all the time, even when out at night. It also has the fabled anti-shake thing and can take a string of photos in a row. Me likey. It’s taken a while to get used to having a camera on my person again though, so photos have been a little sporadic, but a few are on flickr now, including what might be my best/favorite picture ever, shown below. (Larger resolutions here.)

Still to do: RTFM! As good as automatic mode is on this camera I still need to read the manual to work out how to do things… well… manually.

Early this morning I was having a pirate dream. A pirate captain was threatening me with a weighty cutlass while his crew looked on jeering. At some point I must have gotten bored of this scenario because the me-character grabbed the cutlass and starting slicing the captain up. He was most upset. Then I apparantly thought that the bloodyness was getting a bit grim and so I switched to banged him over the head with the flat of the blade in a slapstick manner. Then I woke up. As I flailed at my phone-come-alarm-clock I hit the wrong button and it switched into mp3 mode, half way through the song “I Need A Holiday” by Scouting For Girls, the part where it repeats the line “I wish it could be sunday when I wake up every day” over and over.

So true.

So here I am at dangovan.com and here I shall stay! For ever more if all goes well. I haven't had a chance to sort out what the place looks like yet so it's still pretty ropey. I just took the out-of-the-box template that was closest to what I wanted it to look like and started ripping it apart, but I badly underestimated how much ripping would be needed. Finding such dodgy work put forward as a professional piece makes me feel both smugness and despair, but at least it saves me from having to start with an empty page, which I hate. I think it's going to be pretty good when it's done, which is really great because it's been a long time coming.

Unfortunately the massive amount of work that needs doing here means the actual writing of blogs is still on hiatus: I've got a small pile of would-be blog entries that I haven't yet written, and most of them probably never will. In the mean time I might write about progress here, or about how the inevitable new year's resolutions are going, or a random rant about the weather. It doesn't really matter because nothing's ready for "launch". As soon as that fateful day comes I'll up the witty and turn the insightful to 11 (For about a week.) but I'm in no particular hurry to get there.