Re-writes
this week, I had a magazine editor get back to me asking me to rewrite a tutorial. I had written for them. This is quite rare, at least for me. I can't remember the last time I got asked to do significant rewrites on an article. However, when I re-read the piece, it was obvious, the editor was quite right. It wasn't that there was anything particularly wrong with the style of the writing, but I had pitched it at completely the wrong audience.

The feature was for PC plus, a magazine aimed at a really techno-savvy group of readers. The sort of people who build their own PCs. In fact many of them are probably the sort of people who write their own operating systems. And here was I giving them step-by-step instructions on how to open a document.

The magazine has just changed the way it lays out its tutorials. Instead of having the tutorial written as a block of text (which is unusual, but which I quite like because it means you don't have to be quite so prescriptive and you have room to talk a little bit more generally about techniques) they are now going for a more traditional layout for their tutorials (where each job is broken down into a series of numbered steps). In changing from one style of layout to the other, I lost my grip on what kind of reader I was aiming the article at.

It's a tricky one, because the kind of tutorials I write for the magazine are showing people how to do quite complicated things, but with freeware software they can get for nothing. Whereas m is of the readers, if they are at the level of experience, where they want to do those things, are probably quite capable of obtaining pirated copies of the top-selling software packages. In some ways I'd like to be able to work with (for example.), 3-D studio or photoshop. However, it's not really on to admit that your readers have in all probability, nicked most of the software you use in your tutorials.


Nature
I’m now really feeling as though I may get to the end of the work I’ve got on. I've got the animation for the castle queued up and rendering on all the machines. I've pretty much finished and safety video (I've got a couple of shots to redo, but it's all under control) and I'm now making lists of all the stupid little jobs I've neglected over the last few months -- things like doing my accounts, tidying my desk, clearing my inbox and backing up all the files I'd be in deep trouble if I lost. Who knows, I might even be up to do some Christmas shopping before Christmas Eve.

Just as I'm ready to start doing this, another job turns up. It's the science journal Nature, and they want me to do an illustration for their cover. Actually, it's rather a nice job, and it should be quite relaxing. In comparison to the very detailed and fiddly work I've been doing on the animations over the last couple of weeks.


The extinction of Trex
I also have finally got an e-mail from the company who wanted me to do a poster of Tyrannosaurus rex. At the beginning of the year, the same company wanted me to do a human anatomy poster. I did an awful work on the project, including spending £300 of my own money, buying a 3-D model of various parts of the human body, and got the project almost finished, only to have the company decide they didn't want to use it. I was a little reticent when they asked me to do the Tyrannosaurus rex poster, in the middle of the year. However, I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. Again, I did a lot of work on poster, and it was nearly finished when the company came back wanting to do the image of a completely different way, which would have meant me starting from scratch more or less.

I told them, then that they needed to either give me a firm commission (in other words, a promise to pay me even if they didn't use the work -- which is the way most engagements of artists work) or at the very least, agree to pay me an additional fee for the extra work I would have to do.

They decided to try a reworking of some of the image elements I'd already done and I did agree to do a bit more work on spec in shifting the images around to try to make something that would work.

Today, finally, they decided not to go ahead with the poster. No surprises there, and to be honest I'm not really annoyed about it. I had kind resigned myself to this being the final outcome.

Doing my taxes
I decided really quite responsibly to spend Friday getting all my accounts up to date. In preparation for doing my taxes. I managed to do some of the dull and irritating work in the morning, popped out to grab something for lunch, and returned to discover I'd locked myself out. Lisa had gone to IKEA, with Sam (the only other person with a set of keys), and I knew they'd be there most of the afternoon.

It was raining, far too hard to do any Christmas shopping. So reluctantly, I was forced to spend the afternoon, sitting in the pub reading a book I bought on Lordship Lane.

Its book called “bad science”, written by a guy named Ben Goldacre, who writes a column I always read in the weekend Guardian. Basically it's about the way people get intentionally or unintentionally hoodwinked by pseudoscience or badly done science. So, the column covers everything from how to fool fingerprint detectors using household jelly to why people end up dying unnecessarily because they abandon proper medicine in favour of homoeopathic nonsense.

I always find the columns entertaining, if a little shocking.

The first part of the book was concerned mainly with homoeopathy (apparently a really good homoeopathic “cure” is one where the active ingredient has been diluted to a level at which -- and this is no joke -- if the entire universe was filled with water, there would be one molecule of the ingredient in it) and the way clinical trials can be skewed by the researcher’s subconscious intentions.

It's fairly obvious that if in a trial, you don't take care to make sure that neither the doctor nor the patient knows who is taking a placebo and who is taking a real drug you’ll mess up your results. However, I was quite surprised by the degree to which this kind of mistake is made in real trials, and the degree to which the results are affected.

Apparently they've actually done analysis, to discover that simply by letting the person doing the testing know which patients are taking which drugs, even if they don't tell the patients, the results could end up being skewed by 40%.

The power of the subconscious is pretty impressive - which made me wonder how it was that I managed to lock myself out on the one day in the year when I was supposed to be doing my taxes, rather than a job I actually wanted to do.