PigPog

There’s a pond just before Tiverton Parkway station, which is mainly used for fishing. I thought it might also make a good spot for some photography. I did take lots of photos, but unfortunately it was a bit dull under the trees, and very few turned out at all usable.

I quite liked the look of this telegraph pole on the way back:

After that, Sam liked the idea of popping in to a garden centre we’ve passed a few times with some interesting wicker sculptures outside, called Secret Seeds.

First: cream teas.

We ordered, and took seats outside at tables on the lawn. There were ducks. Ducks came to see us, clearly anticipating our scones.

There were some impressive cliffs in the distance, on the other side of the road – we must find out if we can get to anywhere closer to them for a bit more exploring.

A moorhen arrived and did a funky little dance number for us, making sure we’d remember him when the scones arrived.

The ducks weren’t going to be outdone, though. They had no dance number. They had only one more trick available to them.

Demanding scones with menaces.

Gimme scone, or I will eat you.

We did get scones, and we did share with the ducks and moorhen, but we were too busy eating and throwing to take pics at that point, so we can’t prove it.

And it didn’t eat much of my leg.

I was only taking shots to experiment with the exposure modes on my Nikon D40, but as I was finishing up, I snatched a couple of shots of our light shade that I thought might be good for something. That something turned out to be experimenting with black and white. Practical Photography magazine had a monochrome theme in their latest issue, which gave me a clue on making better mono images, with more options for tweaking.

Their tip was to use the Channel Mixer rather than just changing the colour mode. Their instructions were all for Photoshop, but it translated pretty easily to The GIMP – just find the Channel Mixer under Filters, Colors. Tick the box for Monochrome, and play with the sliders to get the look you want. As the magazine said, the best results seemed to be when the slider values added up to around 100:

For my next experiment, I did the same thing with the next image, but added some heavy tweaking in Curves, to get a much dirtier effect:

Neither are wonderful images, but they both have some interest, and I learned a fair bit just by playing.

Taken with my Panasonic Lumix, and tweaked just a little in Photoshop Elements.

… biding its time until the scones arrived.

Picture taken at the tea room near Secret Seeds in Cove, Devon by Sam using a Nikon D40.

For those of you who believe that pride comes before a fall… here’s the fall. Well, it wasn’t a fall as such, more a brief dangle off the wagon to see how far away the ground was.

Last night was one of those I’ve been really good, how come I’ve only lost half a pound? moments. I’d had three days on Slimming World’s “Success Express” plan, I walked further than I’ve done in a long, long time over the weekend and as far as I was concerned, I’d had a good week on the plan. Mr Scale, however, was having none of it and declared a loss of only half a piddling pound. Oh poo.

On getting home early from group but too late to be bothered to prepare anything properly, I went into full *whatever happens on Monday night stays on Monday night” mode and ate and drank far too much. To quote the legendary philosopher Captain Slow…

> Oh cock.

A quick add up estimated my syn consumption to be somewhere around 60. Again:

> Oh cock.

(Does anybody know when Top Gear is back, by the way?)

So I guess that will be one of those new-fangled Flexible Syns days. Apparently, when the pressure gets too much, it’s possible to increase your syn allowance to accommodate things like weddings, meals out, unexpected binges, post-group trips to the chippy. You just return to normal the day after and you should see a weight loss. So that’s what I’m doing – getting back to business today, tomorrow and for the rest of the week. I hope it works!

We’ll see next week. The journey continues…!

Well, that was certainly a day of big changes for PigPog. I hate doing upgrades to the site, because all it takes is something very small to go wrong, and there’s a lot at risk. It all went reasonably smoothly, considering how much was happening.

• I upgraded Drupal to version 5.x.
• I switched PigPog to use the new default theme, and customised the colour scheme. I always feel a bit bad about not making a real custom scheme, but this way is so easy, and I’d probably never manage to make anything that matches the default theme’s simple but pretty design.
• I’ve moved the content we don’t want to concentrate on any more to a new section, so it’s not using space in the top bar any more.
• I’ve installed a new Flickr module for Drupal, which makes it a little easier to add Flickr photos to posts, and lets us do a few things with blocks too.
• I’ve tried to give GuitarPr0n its own theme back, but only with limited success.

We need to make a new logo still, and there’s a bit of work to do to make the feeds work as they should, but I’m pretty happy with progress.

Summary: Expect PigPog to change around a bit over the next little while – some things will move, and it may start to look a bit different. It’ll probably take a week or so to settle down, but we’re doing a bit of ‘rebranding’. PigPog is becoming PigPog Visual Arts, and tightening its focus to concentrate on less things, but hopefully to cover them better. We’ll be trying to make it a bit more about us, too (Michael and Sam), and putting more of our stuff out there rather than just talking about it.

If you’re interested in why we’re doing this, and what’s likely to change, keep reading…

If you’re at all regular around here, you’ll probably have noticed that PigPog hasn’t been updated very much in recent times. There’s no shortage of things available for us to cover – anything creative is our area. We have reached the conclusion that this is probably our biggest problem.

The Problem

By focusing on such a wide area, we’ve given ourselves some difficulties:

• If the site was really covering a decent amount of stuff in all the different types of creativity we claim to cover, the stuff on the front page would flow past so fast you’d never see it all. We’d be overflowing people’s RSS readers and getting new content all over their carpets.
• We’re not experts on much of this stuff. We don’t mind covering stuff we’re not really expert at, but we’re trying to cover stuff here that we’ve never tried and have no experience or knowledge of at all.
• If we’re being honest, we’re not even interested in some of these things. Neither of us really have much interest in a lot of the craft stuff we’re trying to cover, which probably makes our writing on the subject truly awful. You’d probably rather read about stuff from someone with some passion for it.
• Even if we were interested, and knew about all this stuff, we just wouldn’t have time to keep updating the site. We both work full time again now, so we only have a limited amount of time to put into the site – especially if we’re going to actually do anything creative rather than just writing about it.

Possible Solutions

So, what to do? We spent some time considering our options, and we had a few ideas:

• Keep the site as is, but get more people to help out with it. Other people could take over covering some of the stuff we know nothing about, and we could keep doing some of the stuff we can do. The difficulty here is finding people who want to spend their time writing for our site, without wanting anything much in return. Then we’d have to manage them and keep track of who was doing what and when.
• Drop the Craft section. This is the biggest problem area for us, so losing it would reduce the problem a lot. We’d still have much too much stuff to cover, though.
• Narrow the focus to just the things we’re really interested in, while keeping a few other ‘side projects’ on the go in another section. This feels like the best choice for us right now.

Change of Focus

What’s the focus going to be? Well, we kind of already gave it away in the summary at the top, but ‘PigPog – Creativity Anywhere’ will be changing to ‘PigPog Visual Arts’. Our biggest area will probably be photography, but touching on other stuff like drawing and painting (so I still have an excuse to go on endlessly about pens).

Changes

The changes will be happening bit by bit, and may take a while to complete. We’re not organised enough to have any sort of test or staging environment for PigPog, so you’ll see the changes as they happen, probably including a few tries at things that don’t quite work out.

• We won’t be deleting much, if anything at all. The content we have now in areas we don’t intend to cover in future will still be here, just not quite as easy to get to. We’ll have a link at the top of the front page to get to the ‘other stuff’.
• URLs shouldn’t change, at least as far as we can avoid it. If you have any articles bookmarked, the bookmarks should still work just fine.
• Our personal stuff – blogs and photos and such like – will come out front a little more. We’ve been hiding a bit, which doesn’t make much sense when PigPog is really about us and what we’re interested in.

Upgrading

We may take the chance to have a go at upgrading the software PigPog runs on, Drupal, to the latest version while we’re doing all this. If you arrive and see blank pages, or database errors and such like, that’s probably why. Just try again after a little while. We’ll try very hard not to break things for too long.

The Future

Well, we don’t really know how things will work out, but we hope this will bring PigPog back in line with what we love doing, which should make it fun for us again. That should mean we actually enjoy updating and adding new stuff.

This.

[image:2823 size=small]
Hamperin’ for a pamperin’

Monday night was party night at group, and by the time we were finished with everything I had plenty to celebrate…

Weight Loss

A respectable two and a half pounds which takes my overall weight loss to 4 stone 11 pounds or 67lb or 30kg.

Slimmer of the Month

I got my mitts on the Pamper Hamper for the fourth time, having lost 14lb during the month of August. I was impressed by the presence of tea in the hamper, so whoever left that, I thank you!

[image:2824 size=small align=right]

Slimmer of the Week

I also managed to get my mitts on the fruit basket. Kudos to whoever brought in the giant tomato.

String Challenge

At the beginning of August, we all measured our waists with string – avoiding the horror of seeing the numbers on a tape measure! Monday night was the final of our month-long challenge and we measured ourselves again, and compared the difference. The results were impressive all round, but with a loss of 7 inches the winner was, er, me.

I began to suspect I might have been pissing off my fellow slimmers by winning everything.

[image:2825 size=small align=left]

Woman of the Year

We then had the group vote for Woman of the Year. We had to decide which who had been the most inspiring, had the most impressive loss, and generally turned their life around and was an all-round good egg within the group. Nominated for the award was myself, Angela and Lyndsey. Both Angela and Lyndsey are great fun to have in the group, always have lots to say, and always manage to make me laugh. Both of them have had impressive weight losses, and have stuck to the plan well despite threats of wedding receptions, children’s birthday parties, and weeks of nothing but jacket potatoes and beans. They, along with (nearly) every other member of the group were more than worthy of a vote, but the majority of the group decided that they really didn’t mind me winning everything going, and voted me their Woman of the Year.

This means so much to me. When I joined Slimming World at the end of April I was at a fairly low ebb – things hadn’t quite worked out for me on the job front, and I was feeling crappy, worthless and very homesick. Going to the group on a Monday night has helped me move on from that, and have something to focus on. Having the support of the girls in my group really spurs me on, and as I go into another week, I’ll keep polishing my little star-shaped paperweight, and look towards the rest of my journey to my target weight.

So, for the coming week, I’m trying Success Express which is interesting, and mixing that up with the odd Original and Green day here and there. I’ll be back next week to report how I get on.

The journey continues…

First full-length shot I’ve liked in years!