as days pass by

This weekend, Dunstan Orchard opened up his house to five visitors: myself, Jeremy, Jon, Andy, and Richard. So we drank a lot, and ate rather exceptionally well (and who’d have thought you could make a pizza base from shortcrust pastry? I’ll be trying that one) and did weird activities.
For example, what were you doing at 1am on Sunday morning? I bet you weren’t in a field turning your companions into angels. Or at least, if you were, it was of your own choice and I bet that your feet weren’t as cold as ours. And, if that wasn’t cool enough, I got to see the Cerne Abbas Giant again, upon which many predictable remarks were made, and I got to ~~impress~~ bewilder everyone with background knowledge about whether it’s Helith or Hercules or Nodens or Oliver Cromwell or just some guy with a big dick.
I learned many things this weekend. For example, I learned that people who take good photos do so by taking a lot of photos, all the time. I was under the impression that great photographers would just be walking along the street and see something that looked great, and whip out the photo to immortalise it forever on ~~film~~ a big JPEG. Not so! At first, I thought that perhaps great photography had been reduced to the Shakespearian Monkey technique of just taking pictures of everything and throwing away all the crap ones. However, this is also not so: there’s something of both. I wish I had the artistic ability to notice stuff that would look cool; the guys took pictures of gravestones, of cherry blossom, of grass, and I’d never even think to try that. This, I suppose, is why I’m not a very good designer!
I also learned that loads of people have Macs—at least, loads of people who are designers have Macs. Having seen a couple up close and personal this weekend, though, I’m not revising my current opinion, which is that they seem pretty cool and look very pretty but they’re not worth the money and I’ll stick with Linux. I want a nice light laptop to carry around all the time, though.
More learning experiences: the first stage of finding out about stuff is still to Google for it, but the second stage is to IM someone who might know. I’ve got half a dozen people in my IM friends list, so I shall be adding to that—if you run IM stuff and don’t mind being contacted, let me know!
Oh, and I learned about Dunstan’s dog, Poppy, who is very amusingly hyperactive, but also repugnant and malodorous at times; Dunstan doesn’t mind this (being, as he is, anosmic), and about a neat idea for another bit of Javascript weirdness which I shall write as soon as I get a chance.
Great bunch of guys, especially when they look like angels. Thanks, all.