BBC Radio 4 are running a series of adaptations from the early novels of John le Carré. The first dramatisation (of Call for The Dead) was on yesterday morning and enjoyed it immensely.

One of the most enjoyable performances I’ve ever heard on the radio was the author reading his own work (Absolute Friends). He sounded like a madman jumping around the recording booth no doubt, doing the accent for little Mustafa and his mother Zara in broken Hungarian then jumping into eurobanker English and back to that lost boy Mundy and his head prefect voice, which lé Carre mimics well, considering he’s the son of a disgraced con-man / social climber. He knows his characters well and obviously cares about their voices beyond the page. Listen to this short interview on Front Row if you’re interested. There’s more lé Carre archived on the BBC’s website- he’s an writer well worth investing some serious time to. Remember this is the author of The Constant Gardener, that bitter melancholic story which was turned into an unlikely Oscar winning film. Much more than simple espionage plots. His new novel A Most Wanted Man does sound interesting.

Here’s a quick fix for a CSS issue that has plagued my K2 installations of the Extended Live Archive (or Better Live Archive as it is now called) plugin. See below, notice all the text is jumbled as if there were no line space between all the items. This appears in Safari / Firefox on the mac, I don’t know why this hasn’t been solved elsewhere.

You need to navigate to the plugin directory in your wordpress install, then under ‘af-extended-live-archive/includes/’ you’ll see a file called ef-ela-style.css open this in a text editor and change the lines:


#af-ela-post-chrono li, #af-ela-post-cats li, #af-ela-post-tags li {
position: relative;
font-size: 1.1em;
line-height: 1.7em;
color: #bbb;
margin: 0 15px;
padding: 1px 20px;
}


to:


#af-ela-post-chrono li, #af-ela-post-cats li, #af-ela-post-tags li {
position: relative;
font-size: 1.1em;
line-height: 1.7em;
height: 1.7em;
display: block;
color: #bbb;
margin: 0 15px;
padding: 1px 20px;
}


Enjoy. Oh, and Meta Comment has an Archive Page again!

Although about as technologically gifted as a gorilla’s bum, The Leither (a local magazine I occasionally contribute to- if only in loud hand gestures and stilted opinions) has signed up to Twitter this month. This is a piece I wrote to celebrate this move. Although technologically akin to turning up late to a student party with three empty bottles of blue nun in a ragged paper bag we’re tweeting…

twitter is the latest online service to be hyped to such a lofty a lofty degree, in a rash of himalayic superlatives, that you could be forgiven for thinking it offers a cure to swine flu, a solution to toxic debt, or the answer to life’s persistent questions. it does not.

twitter (once you’ve signed up at twitter.com) lets you share a few choice words with friends. think: “anyone fancy a film tonight?” don’t think:
“anyone fancy a beer with the editor?” your message is limited to no more than 140 characters known as a ‘tweet’.
tweets can be trivial “i’m at the beach, mmh Seafeild”, or it could be a link to an article you’re reading, a photo of your new puppy. simple stuff you’d like to share. once logged in you can find and add friends near and far (you can choose to ‘follow’ bands, there’s a few celebrities on there… @BarackObama) their tweets will appear on your homepage where you can reply to messages or just keep an eye on what’s happening. friends can choose to follow you by searching your name or through invitation. by connecting with these other twitter users you create a global conversation, accessed easily through your phone, IM, mobile browser, or old- fashioned web. at home at work at play.
Read On »

Eliot Shepard’s photos on Slower.net were always an inspiration for my early party photography, his back catalogue begins (or, rather ends) here. Well worth a peek if you’re into oddly beautiful street photography with a dash of genius in his messy (and fairly spontaneous, you’d imagine?) compositions.

I snapped, this [above] slower.net-esque photo on Friday at the Leith Festival programme launch (that’s right there’s a launch for a glossy booklet). The photo is not my style, anymore, but it’s fun. Don’t-cha-think, and hey that tray is 4 years older than me!

I don’t have a clue how to explain my 9-5 life. Recently I’ve noticed, when trying, I either play-down the creativity (and freedom) I have in my job or fail to mention it at all. I think I’m a graphic designer, but I’m not really sure… the deal is I work for a small family-run (not my family) print/design place in Edinburgh (Leith to be exact). We’re a busy, happy bunch, the company is very much established and our customers are all sorts- from nice nobodies looking for a one-off poster print for someone’s birthday, to the ‘clients’ who are mainly architects or local businesses who don’t have in-house designers (a flyer here, a brochure there- mainly business cards) then there’s the advertising agencies or PR firms who need rush print jobs or print finishing and then we have the nobodies who think there somebodies who don’t want to spend any money, but want it now – miserable rich bastards, Edinburgh’s full of them.
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