Engine Punk

Remember when the future was good ? A Vintage Thing? Or not a Vintage Thing? That is the question. The best Vintage Things are obvious. They are high performance cars and motorbikes that are either rare or look great, an engineer or designer's dream come true. It's a very simple definition but occasionally I like something just because it's odd. And I'm often surprised by what I stumble across and get enthusiastic about. And some of the Vintage Things have been dangerously close to the kinds of vehicles I have come to despise. See what doesn't make a Vintage Thing. what doesn't make a Vintage Thing. During my teens, I went through a passing phase of drawing multi-purpose vehicles. I drew them everywhere and got into trouble at school for doing so. I didn't break windows or smoke, I just filled my rough book with drawings. At the time, I felt particularly inspired by buses and coach designs from the 1950s and early 60s. I was exploring a different...

I checked my website stats over the Christmas hols and found this. Now, I know that I had not been publicising my enterprise as assiduously as I might have done while revising my book covers but this looked a bit disappointing to me. Back in the summer, my Anarchadia site was getting nearly 700 uploads and 200 unique visitors a month. During August this fell away to almost nothing. Then it occurred to me that since smartening up my Anarchadia site in Serif WebPlus X2, I'd omitted any stat counter code. I didn't know how. Fortunately, Serif WebPlus offers on line help and pretty soon I had identified where to insert the code from Statcounter. A couple of page loads to test that I'd spliced things in properly and everything was set up again. Suitably encouraged, I found where to insert the code on my blogs, too. Boy, am I glad I did! When I checked Statcounter again about a week later, I found that my Anarchadia websit e is getting 40-50 visitors a week with about...