hissy

I'm really not looking positively forward to the first working day of the month on Monday. I really needed to have spent a much greater amount of this week re-aligning things from 2009 to 2010, particularly untangling the multiple little bodges and fiddles applied to what were originally nice clean flexible tables before everyone decided that they wanted to keep merging and splitting departments and ignoring the headcount but not the cost of contractors and various other irritating fiddles which interrupt and impede the clean flow of data. More easily-solved but by no means any less tedious to repair is the current fashion for changing budget code or budget code name every few months. It will take much willpower to remember to head outside for a walk at lunchtime , though I shall try.

Despite having sore eyes from having been peering at irritating data all afternoon I popped into the ECA on the way past on my way home to observe the oddly-dressed students in the main hall seemingly little different from their exhibited mid-year creations and to pop to observe hope (and her photo-student-colleagues') stuff-on-wall. Good stuff, and good chat. The end at which her exhibits is hanging is the most interesting end and was also the easiest end to see as the far end was blocked by people seemingly (if I was correctly interpreting and tracking hairstyles) hanging around near the pictures for which they modelled so that they could bask in the fallout of complements paid to the photographs.

Back home, preparations for sticking things in storage prior to redecoration continued. In the vague hope that I might have enough time to poke through them at some point this spring, my box of old photographs will remain in the flat whilst a number of other things are packed into the pile of printer-paper-delivery boxes salvaged from various workplaces over the past couple of weeks. Last weekend about eight were filled with all the books deemed least likely to be required or wanted and after a few evenings of not getting round to filling any more I filled another three this evening with video and audio cassettes on the grounds that the video hasn't been connected to a television in this flat for at least three years and that I'm not going to have time to both look through old photographs and listen through old tapes. I had a quick poke through the photos after hauling the audio cassettes from under the bed as I knew of a few that could easily be used for a looking into the past thing as reminded by MAIT the other day. After a few recent pokes I'm reasonably familiar with the contents of the albums but went a little deeper into the box, knowing that I'd end up cursing my past extreme carelessness with prints and even more so with negatives. Whilst the prints are usually safe there are a few cases of a few sets being bunched together in packets, sometimes after major chunks of either were extracted to frame or stick in an album. This wouldn't be so bad were it not for the absence of negatives in most of the packets, meaning that recovery of missing or damaged prints might not be possible and reconstruction of sets would have to be done just by guessing and attempting to match the content. I'm hoping that there'll be a packet or two somewhere containing no prints but just lots of strips of negatives, safe and mostly grouped together ready to be stuck into the negative-storage sleeves I picked up the other day. I at least found a couple of candidate local-view-in-the-past pictures, a couple of formerly-lost strips of negatives of particularly important prints of which enlargements or reprints had been ordered and the prints and negatives of one particular occasion which I'd been hoping to be able to find in order to backblip.

I knew that a fair few of the audio cassettes in the box would be four-track masters from various things, but was absolutely not expecting any of them to be dated. Whilst my past self still deserves soundly berating for not always keeping negatives with prints even though I always carefully held prints by their edges and never wrote on the back with biro in case it leaked through I mentally lightly credited myself with the forsight to mark the dates of two reasonably notable (and reasonably well-photographed) events, one of which was backed up by the date written on a videocassette that I'd completely forgotten about. All dates are now stored electronically and a small quantity of archive blipping may now take place, starting with 24/09/2995, though possibly not until after I've had a sleep as it's getting quite late. I've had a quick listen to one of the more interestingly-date-labelled tapes but shall try and refrain from keeping too many out of the storage-headed box as I'll probably not get round to digitising them in the near future.