This blog is one year old today. One year and a day but anyway, today’s lazy post will be something of an indulgent review and a general encouragement. I’m going to put my feet up and watch Star Wars Uncut – The Director’s Cut, a 400+ clips crowdsourced home movie mashup and I think you should do so to. It is brilliant. Here it is.
If you can turn yourself away from the eclectic wonders of the web or just want idly read something while you’re eating your breakfast, erm lunch dinner, then here’s what yours’ truly served up over the last year. A hardened blogger would have his post set neatly divided out topics, each naturally connected to the others. With me, you got an impossibly wide range of life, tech, politics, cooking, cycling, chess and the lame ‘random’ scattered across 736 Categories in 637 Posts containing 423,153 Words. Sadly there are also 1,159 comments mainly from barrel scraping calibre commentators. The real tragedy is that almost half of all those comments have been replies from me; clearly I’ve been sucked into futile debates which are never read. Let’s face it, who reads the comments?! No more comment replies from me. Talk to yourselves.
Luckily the statistics are automatically generated, using a computer. Here’s my top seven posts of the last year.
LIFE
Bit of a mop up category, this one. Seemed like something worth discussing on a Monday morning too, which is why it started the list. Got to include my favourite what’s in a name story, to talk about self indulgent parents and had the inevitable pop at Downton Abbey. Christiania’s 40th birthday got a mention and I called attention to the importance of the second best way of walking from Brighton to Lewes, with a video. Life incorporates the inevitable random topic.
TeCH
Being only a pretend geek is still popular with other pretend geeks. By the way of traffic counted in to my tech posts, there must be plenty of them. Certainly I wrote How to install Blender 2.5 (2.57b) on Ubuntu 11.04 – the Natty Narwhal as much for my own benefit as anyone else’s (I thought I might have to do it again, for some reason) but it is called up in bucket loads every day. Other big draws w posts on android phone flashing, which is a polite word for hacking but not in the celebrity spy sense but otherwise it was just stuff which tickled me blog ears at the time.
POLITICS
I’ve been a blatant Green Party activist on this front but with doff of the cap to our elected comrades, if I’m allowed to go off message like when our leader voted against NATO intervention in Libya. Neatly straddling both law and politics, how to give a witness statement to Occupy London was my best topic cross-over. Having initiated the professional input for Occupy London’s legal team I later despaired of it’s muddle and indecision. Yet I’m proud to have helped out. I stand by every word I uttered here:
Then came the OccupyLSX judgment. I wound up the year by publishing the plans for Thatcher’s funeral lest anyone had been confused to the constant references to the thieving Tory bastards. I accept the complaints.
COOKING
Cooking in the Cave documented my attempt to live the good life. From earth to kitchen to plate. Firm favourites are those recipe attempts you wouldn’t follow.I probably learnt more about taking videos than cooking. Pasta Bake is my most embarassing effort and Red Dragon Pie my best, although my first attempt to make hummus wasn’t bad at all. Hell I did learn to cook!
CYCLING
Basic reportage only on this front and not real topic tie ups. Efforts to produce cycling footage were hampered by technology to begin with but I did put together a nice film and some other thoughts on the topic. I couldn’t resist the obvious nod to the master, Jerome K Jerome. I’ve still got big expectations for this topic.
CHESS
Blogging about chess was always going to be a tall order and so it proved to be. Got one lucky break with an invite to the premier of Bobby Fischer Against The World. Neil Tasker’s return to his local chess club after nearly losing his life falling down the Railway Club’s dangeous staircase proved to be another hit. Part way through the year, the vague idea of posting my own archive of shoddy games quietly slipped way but there has nevertheless been persistent traffic for my game against John Smuts, Luke Rutherford becoming Sussex County Chess Champion, a game between myself and the aforementioned Neil Tasker (he’s a popular fellow), a record of the Brighton & Hove Chess Club tournaments 2010-11 before a certain fellow got airbrushed out of them, even the one he’d won. Popular in France is the story of me setting up an international chess match tradition, ahem, and there’s the inevitable traffic for my chess game graphic tool, with which you can embed an animated chess game anywhere by calling up the tool and creating a webpage on the fly. It’s only mine because it’s on my blog but someone else wrote the code. Finally, chess connected to politics uncomfortably by me insisting using factually accurate chess nuggets of wisdom as analogies for political situations in the UK today; breaking with the literary tradition of mentioning the great game only misunderstand it.
Along the way I’ve had a lot of fun, lately with the legal woo brigade’s poster boy and various other sporting characters. Definitely my writing has improved, although today will have to be an exception. Feeling rather ragged after passing my 17th Edition electrical wiring regulations exam yesterday, against all expectations. Let the second year commence!