scruffian

About 9 years ago I started writing a haiku every day. I’m now up to 3257 haiku. I have recently started another project where I write a new song every day. I would like to get to 1005 songs. I’ve done 26 so far. You can follow along on https://1005songs.wordpress.com/.

A few weeks ago someone on Instagram asked me to write a song for their 10 year old son’s birthday. The brief was simple:

His name is paul and his turning 11.
His birthday is on the 15th of January,
he is like merman,
Unicorns and color blue. Also, his favorite show is the pj masks but he’s in love with spider-man lol.
he love to eat cake a lot.
You’ll probably wanna mention is puppy Chloe too. They’re best friends. Thanks.
His nickname is muffin,
Brief description about him: would be he’s well articulated, a positive thinker, vibrant and he speak Spanish so well.
Core fan of zayn malik – and his all time favorite is ( Let me )
I would love those things about him mentioned in the song
Upbeat and time frame should be 1:30 secs

oscarhuffman_

I thought this sounded like a fun project so I said I was happy to help out. I agreed to it without asking for payment – writing songs is fun and I wanted Paul to have a nice birthday. As it turned out I was offered $200 for my trouble, but this wasn’t my motivation and I was sceptical that the money would ever arrive.

I sent a quick demo at first to see if my idea was on the right lines:

He seemed pleased with this attempt:

Awwnn – Ben this is awesome I love it. When do I get the mp3 format

oscarhuffman_

So I decided to do a better recording and really make it into a nice song for Paul’s birthday. This is the finished result:

However once I sent this it soon became clear that this was not a genunie request but an attempt to steal money from me (I won’t go into the details).

Nevertheless I found it hard to believe that someone say things like this if they didn’t mean it:

I appreciate your talent
I’m a big supporter of talent – I don’t joke with music and writers cause it takes major time and creativity to come up with something

oscarhuffman_

On 15th January (Paul’s alleged birthday) I sent him best wished and asked the user to send me a video of him listening to the song so I could see his reaction. I haven’t heard back…

So instead I’m sharing the song here in case there are any boys called Paul who have a birthday soon! Happy Birthday Paul!

Music

Books

Good Omens – Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchet

The Diary Of A Young Girl – Anne Frank (Again!)

Screen

Killing Eve – season 2

Murder Is Easy

Blogs

I’m not going to list everything I read in December, this is just an excuse to link to Matt’s blog so I get a pingback! Happy Birthday!

Last week Rich Tabor and I spent the week thinking about how to improve color and typography variation in Gutenberg. The result was this pull request.

I made a demo video to explain our intentions and how it works, but unfortunately the video was too big for GitHub, so I’m adding it here, and I’ll just link to this post.

This was a really fun little project, I hope we can find a way to land it!

Music

Books

• Unruly – David Mitchell
• Nocturnes – Kazuo Ishiguro
• Fight Night – Miriam Toews

Screen

• Killing Eve season 1
• Dunkirk
• Where The Crawdads Sing

I had an idea that it might be interesting to share what media I have been consuming each month. October was a lot more about creating than consuming, but I still found time for some music and books.

Music

Books

Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari

Atonement – Ian McEwan

The Last Devil To Die – Richard Osman

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow – Gabrielle Zevin

TV

Finished the last series of Ghosts.

Today I wrote my 3000th haiku. (I also did posts for 2000 and 1000). This means I have been doing this daily haiku thing for getting on for 10 years.

Sometimes I wonder if I should stop posting haiku. Why follow such a strict form? Why not focus on something more long form? Should I place more emphasis on quality rather than forcing something every day?

One of the lessons I have learnt by writing a haiku every day is that, even if it seems incredibly difficult to say anything, there are always words if you let them come. The important thing is to keep on creating, regardless of how you’re feeling and whether you even like the things you make. The act of creation is it’s own reward.

The discipline to post something every day has given me the confidence to keep creating even when it seems hard to go on. This has lead me recently to start posting a song I am practicing every day.

I think I’ll keep going with the haiku for now, while I still can.

Does your team have documented team values?

Someone asked me this question and my immediate thought was “blah that sounds boring”. After bouncing some ideas around with some friends, we came up with a way of making it more fun.

The idea was to use Dixit cards to help us. We played two different games:

Game 1

Lay out 9 cards. Everyone decides in their head which card they think best represents the team and the team’s values. When everyone has decided we share together which cards we chose and why. I wrote down the reason for everyone’s choice.

Game 2

Give everyone 9 cards each. Each person takes some time to secretly choose which card best represents the team and the team’s values. Once they have chosen they lay out their nine cards and everyone else tries to guess the card the person selected and the reason behind their choice. Again I wrote down the reasons for each choice.

Compiling the list

This exercise gave us a list of about 20-30 values that we see within the team.

From this we combined and simplified the list into the following items

• Shipping things now, while building for the future
• Being open with each other and supporting each other with kindness
• Everyone brings their own skills and perspective, stronger together
• Role models in the community, leading by example
• We value simple elegant solutions

I hope this was a bit more of a fun activity than having to sit and think without the prompts.

I have been working on a straw bale studio for almost four years now! I thought it was time to share the work I have done and my updates in a more organised way so I created a new blog to collect everything together:

http://strawdio.wordpress.com

I am a big fan of woodcut (and linocut) printing – I think they look amazing. Something about the imperfections in the printing process really appeals to me. I particularly like the work of Lou Tonkin and Nick Hayes. The latter designed the Right To Roam website, which looks amazing.

I thought it would be interesting to try to create a WordPress theme that emulates that effect without having to go to the effort of creating wood/lino cuts! Of course it will never look as good as the real thing, but the effect is quite interesting I think:

This is a Block theme, which means it takes advanatage of a lot of the latest Gutenberg features – you will need to be using the latest Gutenberg plugin if you want it to look at its best (or wait for WordPress 6.1!).

This theme ships with an inverted style variation, so you can make it dark. I may add more style variations in the future if there is interest.

The theme is also designed to make it very easy to customize – for example it’s trivial to make the left column a different color, or to make the whole site a different color. If you’re interested in Block theme development I encourage you to have a look at the code.

Woodcut is available on the WordPress.org directory and on GitHub.