Since my eldest daughter has returned from university, things have been changed around in her room, and the ethernet cable I’d arranged to emerge from beneath the laminate floor was no longer in the right place for her desktop PC. Tried the wi-fi option, as I had installed an access point a few years ago for the convenience of moving the laptop around. Guess what? Network access on her PC kept cutting out, even after I’d moved the wi-fi access point to just above her room. Late last night I resolved that lifting the edge of the laminate floor and re-routing the network cable was the best option. Today I set to and took the beading up from the edge of the floor, and then had a thought that this was a good opportunity to put in a proper socket where the computer now is, running some 2.5mm twin and earth cable around the edge of the laminate and then putting the beading back down. Neater than running trunking round the skirting board. Since the room had been re-arranged, the PC had been running off an old extension lead I’d run under the floor a few years ago when the floor was originally put down. Yes I know. Felt good to put it right though and install a proper wall mounted socket. The Marmite is now in stately glass jar, stored the right way up.

All this meant that writing I had planned for today didn’t get started until later, but get started it did. I’ve done a bit more on writing definitions of media analysis terminology for the A-Level handbook, and some more on the introduction to my own short volume of poems Mandrakes and Pin-Ups, soon to be published through my own company mollybleed.

The movie is a triumph of representation. Eastwood has succeeded in exploring the ethnography of the Hmong people with sensitivity and respect. As one of the cast points out in the “making of” doc on the blu-ray extras, he could so easily have used professional Chinese or Korean actors, but he chose to cast from the culture he was trying to represent, and his care in bringing to public consciousness a people that most would not claim to know much about, definitely shows.

On one level this is kind of Magnum Force meets Up, but on so many other levels it is much more. It won’t win prizes for experimental narrative, but we don’t need experimental narrative every day of the week. Only alternate days. Consume as much beer as you want, stay as thin as Clint, polish your Torino, making sure you get down low to check for smears. Oh, and while you’re out there, fix the neighbourhood will you?

A Serious Man will please those who hark back to the earlier, more experimental output of the Coen brothers and lament their more mainstream ventures of recent years. Of course, the reality is not so polarised. The movie definitely lives at an opposite pole to the garbage that was The Ladykillers, and has none of the tributes to conventional comedic values that made Burn After Reading so easy to watch. At the same time, it also doesn’t have the (in my view heavy handed) darkness of No Country For Old Men or the fairytale life affirmation of Raising Arizona and The Hudsucker Proxy. The best characterisation of A Simple Man I can give is that it represents the Coens’ venture into a style much more typical of Jim Jarmusch. It also has quite striking stylistic similarities to Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth, one of my favourite ever films. The central pairing of Michael Stuhlbarg and Richard Kind is entertaining, if a little gross at times. Definitely worth checking out of you’re a Coen Brothers fan and you don’t mind doing a bit of hiking through a narrative, rather than being propelled through it at high speed.

And the whole blu-ray experience. Our CRT TV finally got stuck in standby irretrievably, a week ago yesterday, so we sallied out and replaced it with a Panasonic Viera, LCD 32 inch. Not spectacularly specified, but LCD technology is now a match for mid-range plasmas and they’ve sorted out the viewing angle issue. The room size also doesn’t really warrant a massive screen. SD picture quality is excellent, and that’s an important factor as there is likely to be a heck of a lot of SD programming for quite a while to come. Blu-ray is of course very clear and very sharp, and it has a noticeable edge on upscaled DVD. 1080p has just over twice the resolution of standard def. Those are the figures. That’s the effect. Party on. For those of you who are wondering, yes Dolby TruHD and DTS-HD do downscale automatically to their legacy counterparts, seamlessly. The overwhelming answer to the blu-ray question is “Why would you not?” And, er, forget Blockbuster: their blu-ray selection is crap. Rent them from the library for half the price.

Since opening a Twitter account in March I’ve sent over 5000 thoughts into the micro blogging vortex. Micro blogging is obviously easier than traditional blogging, because each post is a work in its own right, and they don’t take long to do. Grow a tiny thought, snap it off, drop it into the furnace and watch its ore render down into the hot, liquid hive mind. All the while, things are happening in the real world and people are doing things in the real world. Or are they? At first, I found Twitter liberating. It gave me a sense of structure that I’ve always found difficult to create in my everyday life. Accomplish a task, say that you’ve accomplished it and then move on to the next task. A kind of accountability. Before long, though, the tasks are taking longer because you’re stopping to check your Twitter responses and send out the thoughts that you were planning while you assembled the first two pages of your Ikea wardrobe. So then your Ikea wardrobe takes the whole day. (Exaggeration for effect.) I’ve also found myself redrafting tweets in my head, in that soulless void between the blank DVDs and the kitchen utensils in Asda. Which means that putting the shopping away is pretty much an obstacle in the way of committing that tweet to the ether. The cycle unwinds. Your life unravels.

But that’s only if you accept the somewhat Luddite and reactionary distinction between electronic media and real life. It used to be commonplace to accuse people who read for a large portion of their lives of not living in the real world; but literacy will be saved from widespread stigma because of its symbiotic relationship with knowledge and education. Literacy is a requirement for using the internet, and the internet has created new forms of literacy and many new forms of interaction based on those new forms of literacy. Yet people will continue to assert that the internet is not real life. Friends that you have on Facebook are not real friends. People who follow each other on Twitter are not real friends. You converse with them, debate with them, make a conscious decision to read their thoughts, share jokes with them, watch their interplay with each other, look at their family photographs. Still, some would not have it that they are real friends unless you regularly talk to them on the phone or spend time in their physical company.

Anyone who has immersed themselves in Twitter has experienced at least one crisis of Twitter Faith. I’m using capitals there to annoy people who see Twitter as a total waste of time. Many can’t even say “Twitter” or “tweet” without at least a frisson of amusement in their voice – most notably the phone girl on The Wright Stuff. (It is always a girl: I’m not gender stereotyping.) Anyway, Tristram Shandy be damned. I was talking about Twitter Faith. There are times when you think “Wait a minute. This is madness. I’m not accomplishing anything, and I’m running out of things to say.” My latest episode was last weekend. It was prompted to a large extent by the esteemed horror and thriller novelist Sarah Pinborough and the accomplished writer and director Julian Simpson deleting their Twitter accounts almost simultaneously. I was alerted to it by one of Sarah’s updates on Facebook. As writers, I think they’ll both understand and won’t mind me saying that their Twitter presence was in each case based on a constructed persona. I do it too. I decided early on that the medium was meaningless unless I’d adopted a position before the 140 characters were up. That position then has to be compressed and consequently sometimes distorted. These distortions give it an edge – an edge made sharper and more dangerous by the speed of the updates, more so as you follow more people. But the challenge lies in controlling tone and ambiguity so that misunderstandings can be corrected quickly. Doesn’t always work. Hence some people unfollow – an act I confess I have trouble not taking personally. But that’s just me. Julian and Sarah went with the flow, did it effortlessly, did with frequent use of taboo language which as a practising teacher I’m simply unable to match online, did it without giving a flying fill-in-the-missing-word about who unfollowed them. They were entertaining and engaging, notable highlights being Julian’s recent “holiday” and some exchanges I had with Sarah about the most recent episodes of Torchwood.

Twitter is different things to different people. (Yes, I know, but I’ve learned that avoiding all clichés is a mistake.) To some it’s just unwinding over a glass of wine and sharing views on X-Factor contestants. For me, the bottom line is that I have real friends online, who I have never met. I’m aware of all the safety issues, but it is now possible to meet people and become friends with them without ever sharing their physical presence. That may happen. It may not. But it is not a prerequisite for friendship anymore. So, I was sad to lose Sarah and Julian as friends on Twitter, but I’ll be staying in touch with them through the other available channels. The thing that hit me hard on Saturday was that they are both writers. I aspire to write more, to be a better writer, to have the discipline of self-denial that it takes to be successful. I therefore admired their decision and wondered if I should follow them. Quixotically, I hope to develop my writing while maintaining my Twitter habit and new found Facebook habit. I like to think that in specific ways social networking has honed my writing. Facebook is nicer and more chilled. I’m tending to hang there when I need some headspace.

So, for Julian and Sarah, it’s “Time Enough At Last”. Just don’t break your spectacles. As for their tweets – “tears in rain”.

Every holiday since my teaching career started, I’ve begun each break with a head full of all kinds of improvement projects. Have I ever accomplished the full list? Well – I’ll leave you to fill in the answer to that from your own imagination. This one feels different. There is a momentum that will escape me and remain unexploited if I don’t keep up with it. DIY, academic progression, assessment of coursework, business development, creative writing, website development. Let’s see.

Michelle Obama has the same natural eloquence as her husband. Inspiring. Parallels with Kennedy are obvious but inescapable. Much has been made over the past several years of Bush’s inability to marshal the subtleties of language (charitable description) to the extent that it has become something of a mass media cliché. But the fact remains that skill in manipulating words is life-changing. Witness international diplomacy: the destinies of millions determined by verbal spin. Would Bush have had the wherewithal to get those missiles removed from Cuba? It’s not just about posturing. How you sell the posture is absolutely critical. For the first time in many decades the world’s biggest power is in the hands of an ethical salesman.

1635 characters. Feels good to escape from the 140 character limit for spell. Now back to The Discipline Of The Twit. See you there people.

First dark morning of BST. Leeds Fest tickets on sale tonight. Not sure what’ll happen with that. Don’t have time to queue at HMV. Don’t really hold out much hope of getting any tickets online. It’s really irritating that they don’t announce the headliners until minutes before the tickets go on sale. It’s not as if they’ll have any trouble selling the tickets. Seems almost as though they want the process to be chaotic.

No-one was really to blame. A fileserver somewhere in California adopted the foetal position and stopped responding to requests. My online world was in suspension and I started to imagine myself touring the streets of a deserted New York in a fast car with only a dog and some plastic dummies for company.

All hail the techies at Dreamhost who restored the illusion within a time frame that allowed me not to see too many real-world horrors.

It’s all about adding content now. The odd little tweak here and there, but the structure is in place and the content is the thing.

Remember to back up.

Part of the reason for posting this is to nudge the Christmas Tree off the top spot. It has to go. Funny how we live Christmas from November until late December, and then suddenly it has to go. Don’t normally leave it until early February though, but I can seen the thought process whereby that electrician wanted to keep it going all year round. That blues period in January can be crushing. I think I offset it to a large extent this time, but I didn’t zap it away. Still lurking in the shadows, holding my coat and snickering. Nothing beats that time when we had to go in on 2nd January.

Bored with snow and ice now. Should keep the bugs at bay in the summer. Should prune at Half Term.

Good in a way that a band have done a cover of Desolation Row, but MCR have made a bit of a dog’s breakfast of it. What does a typical dog’s breakfast actually consist of?

Hey ho. Fast forward.