If only it was true. My nephew introduced me to his cousins by announcing I could draw anything. I wish. However I did, over the Christmas period, drew for him Spiderman, the Hulk and Batman that he could colour in. Certainly nothing exceptional, but fun to do.

I’ve also taken to doing lots of really quick sketchs these days. I carry a sketch book, a pencil, pen and eraser in my bag now. Sadly I don’t really get the chance to sketch everything I’d like to sketch, its simply not possible with small kids. You can’t tell them to sit and wait for five minutes while I do some scribbles on a pad. So in some cases I’ve taken to snapping a picture on my phone and then when I have a quiet moment, sketching from the image on the screen. Not particularly great, but the best I can do.

So I gathered up some of my best sketchs:

I find it’s fun and liberating trying to rush the sketch and just get something down on paper and at the same time trying to find the right details to capture what made you pick up the pencil. Something like the way to beat procrastinating about writing: just write something, anything, as quickly as possible. I’m finding more and more that I’m not just sketching the object, but whats around, beside and behind it.

I particularly like drawing the buildings in Paris. You just keep adding details and the picture gets more and more elaborate, the longer you’re at it.

The great thing about sketch books is that they are not just practice, not just reference, but also inspiration to yourself. In fact I’ve ditched my electronic PDA as my note taker and reverted back to an ordinary notebook and pen for those reasons. I can do little sketches, draw lines and arrows beside my text and the notes themselves become inspirations for my writing. And now that I’ve finally got my desktop back at home, I can finally get back to doing some serious writing again.

Related Posts:

• Dead Desktop PC = More Drawings
• Final renderings and access to an A3 scanner!
• New Lost Heroes Image: Renegade Chosen Matthew
• Some new art work: Meave and Dead Eyes
• Playing with the Lost Heroes RPG: “Book of Gods” Cover

I only a few minutes to blog today, on the last day of 2008. I may not even get to finish this post, depending on when my son wakes up from his nap. I don’t have a checklist or wishlist of things I had planned to do this year. Nor do I intend to do it for next year. Too many things have happened this year that it would be unfair to summaries as a bullet point in a meme. The scary thing is that it only seems like yesterday that it was the previous Christmas as I can vividly remember what the kids got then and now.

I hope everyone had a nice Christmas and that next year brings you good things.

Related Posts:

• “This is my uncle, he can draw anything!”
• The value of presentation continued
• Fuck content, it’s how it’s presented that matters
• My Three Axioms of Not Being a Dick that Discriminates
• My thoughts on the new Doctor Who Episode (S06E01)

Yep.  A new version for you all. A new permalink widget, integration with Geo Mashup plugin (for all your geo-positioning needs), enhanced user permissions and some 2.7 testing. You should be able to get it shortly from wordpress.org or via the new plugin update system in 2.7.

I won’t be around for Christmass/New Year so they’ll be no support really for bugs and fixes.

My original intention was that the next release of TDO Mini Forms would include post editing. I’m afraid this isn’t going to manifest till the new year. I wanted to do some intial ground work by adding the enhanced user permissions and creating a widget class (which was used to create the two new widgets in this release) first but when I had done that I started to procrastinate just a tiny bit and when I procrastinated, I ended up bug fixed or add the new widgets so I don’t think it was time wasted!

Lots of bugs got fixed: slashes in posts, breaking comments, errors during upload, ’0′ not being accepted in text fields as valid values, slow loading of admin menus when you have too many users, recaptcha not working in AJAX mode and a few more other little things.

The new widget Permalink allows you to let users set a different permalink for the post. This allows you to let users submit links that when a user clicks on the post, they’ll be redirected to the URL. The Geo Mashup integration widget is based on the original hack of hitekhomeless and its something people have been asking for a while now. It seems to work fine on my test setup (but there are some minor display issues if using a heavily customised theme).

Also, I’ve created a Widget class. If you’re not into code don’t worry – if you are, I hope in the new year to write up a very simple tutorial on how to create your own widgets to add some fields to the form and process them after submission. The new widget class really simplifies it.

And yes. TDO-Mini-Forms is compatible with 2.7 and I’ve now updated the info on wordpress.org to reflect this.

So enjoy and have a Merry Christmass.

Don’t forget, this plugin is free, however if you found it useful you can show your appreciation via a small donation, buying me a book or giving this plugin a high rating on wordpress.org!

Related Posts:

• Update on TDO Mini Forms
• Where has TDO Mini Forms plugin gone?
• Pet Projects, TDO-Mini-Forms and Forums
• An alternative to TDO Mini Forms?
• And another release of TDO Mini Forms is out the door!

You’re going to hate me. Sorry.

• Figure out what to get everyone… check!
• Get Alice to write Santa letter… check!
• Buy presents… check!
• Wrap presents… check!
• Put up Christmass lights… check!
• Put up Christmass tree… check!
• Put up Christmass decorations… still to be done but will be done by the end of the week.

Related Posts:

• My daughter wants to be a Ninja!
• Cthulhu by my six year old!
• “This is my uncle, he can draw anything!”
• Last day of 2008
• A christmass gift to all TDO-Mini-Form users!