Month: June 2002

Nothing much to talk about. Its Monday, I have the day off and I’m not doing anything. I do fancy watching something, choices so far are Magnolia, Fight Club or some Angel. Just a few more websites to catch up on and then maybe write some if I can get into the mood. Walking home late last night I had a couple of ideas for something I want to try.

Actually I do want to add I had dinner with some friends last night, which in itself was good, it was nice to see some people I had not seen in a while. But what is really worth mentioning is, it was the best pizza I can ever remember having in my life. I’ll have to find the name of the place and post it so you can all share the joy.

Its pissing down here, I really would not like to be outside in that. Good thing I decided my wallet wasn’t quite ready for a trip to the comic store this afternoon.

I’ve covered some of this before and it is by no means anything new or secrets of the universe or indeed secrets of me. Feel free to drop off now, its not gonna get any better, but I feel like typing.

This weekend one year ago I was in Bristol. I had just started seeing my then girlfriend and we were spending the weekend together. The Saturday night we were suppose to go and meet some friends of mine for dinner, it was an event that had been planned on and off for some time and had just never happened. Anyway we had finally gotten some time alone and were sitting on the couch talking. My girlfriends flatmate and another friend were downtown doing some shopping, we had managed to get rid of them for a while and were to meet them and then go on to dinner.

So anyway my mobile rings and its my girlfriends flatmate, message is short and simple, something is wrong, can you come downtown and meet us now. It’s pretty safe to say that I knew then, I mean a message like that can only really mean one thing. So the backstory. My friend Matt was never really healthy, he had some transplants when he was younger and his life was complicated as a result. He was in and out of hospital his entire life. A couple of weeks before this, the doctors had found something wrong and they didn’t know what. So Matt was in hospital under observation for a while. One night I met another friend of ours and we went in to see him. Being a hospital visit and all that you have to bring something and well FHM and a couple of FHM specials were the perfect trick although his mother did disapprove.

Anyway we spent a couple of hours there and talked for a while and generally just hung out. That was the last time I saw Matt. Back to Bristol and we made our way downtown. That sinking feeling was there all the time, there was always a chance until you heard the news but there wasn’t really. But we met the others and it was all over, girlfriends flatmate confirmed the news and that was that. I don’t know exactly what happened for the next few minutes, there was a number of phone calls to various people but that is all. I do remember ringing my friend and cancelling dinner and telling her why and then at some stage going back to someone’s house and that’s that.

Over the past 10 days I’ve met more new people than I have since I moved over here and went into the office. Tonight was strange but kinda cool. I was sitting on my own waiting for some people and this girl came up to me and I thought she asked if she could have the seat next to me and I said “yes”, turns out she actually asked if I was on my own, because she was there alone and didn’t know anyone and wanted to talk to someone. Anyway we sorted things out and spent the next while chatting. Really nice girl and we seemed to be getting one, fairly cute too (always a bonus, but not single). So that was all that. Going to see her again at some stage tomorrow and introduce her to people so she’s not alone.

I could never do something like that, it’s just not me. I’m not good in people situations at the very least nevermind going along a complete stranger and just talking to them. Last weekend was tough enough, going to dinner with a large group of people where I was pretty much the complete stranger in the group, but that was ok as there were other new people and the people in general were all nice and welcoming.

I know a person who has a lot of friends, a hell of a lot. More precisely she thinks she does, what in actual fact she has is a lot of acquaintances and who has such a high opinion of herself considers them all dear close friends who worship her. Anyways not to get side-tracked, the thing I don’t get is she uses these “friends”, if she can get something from them, or they can do something for her, they get attention and become for a very brief time they centre of her world. Anyways it sucks and its a damn bad way to treat people.

I have to admit I am very glad this was a short week. While I would have liked more time to work on one of my projects which has a couple of bugs I need to get sorted, only having 3 days in work was nice. I have Monday booked off too so another long weekend will help I hope.

I got into the habit of creating a folder a day on my Mac and keeping the updated files I was working on in that folder. Its not something I normally did I was confident enough to solve anything I might have fucked up, but as I was quite unsure what I was working on I figured it was a good habit. And it has turned out to be just that. Something has gone pretty badly wrong to the point of I can’t even track down where it went wrong, nevermind what went wrong, but this afternoon a lovely simple command “compare two files” on the current version and a version that I know is working is letting me map out exactly what has changed and should lead to a fix early next week.

Ah on other fronts, this weekend could I suspect turn out to be really really shit and it looks like its about to start off that way. Judgeing from the text I got about an hour ago it is going to start off a day sooner than expected and who knows where that will go.

The man in charge of archiving and maintaining electronic copies of Norway’s most important historical documents is dead and so is access to those archives.
So the director of the Norwegian cultural center is pleading for hackers to help him crack the center’s password-protected database.
Dead Men Tell No Passwords
***
The internet is changing China profoundly, breaking down the stranglehold on information held by China’s communist rulers. The Chinese are now the second biggest internet users in the world. Last year more than 56 million of them logged on from home, and that number is growing by 6% a month. But the Chinese state will not give up its monopoly without a fight – and using the internet to express dissent in China is still a very dangerous game to play.
China loses grip on internet
***
India’s military is seeking final authorisation to invade the Pakistani side of divided Kashmir in the middle of this month to destroy the camps of Islamic militants.
India plans war within two weeks

They are already fucking insufferable. 🙁

I have something very important to share with you all today. I hope you will take it with you and think on it.

iAdelantado, la Argentina!

COME ON ARGENTINA!

First words out of my mouth this morning “oh fuck”, and no not for any of the good reasons. I vaguely remembered turning my alarm clock off and that it had been well more than a couple of minutes ago. Looking at the clock it was 09:19. Not too bad, I thought it was going to be a lot worse. In work by 09:55 which wasn’t too bad at all. As a good point tho, I have slept really well the past couple of nights

Mozilla 1 is currently killing my machine. I cannot run it, the program stalls as soon as it loads. I cannot kill it, it doesn’t like it. Yesterday I had to hold the power button down to get rid of the fucking thing. Today at least I can still run other stuff but I suspect I will be rebooting shortly.

The writing I was talking about last night went far better than I thought actually and I may have kinda turned it into a fantasy. Prose wasn’t working, I never really thought it would so instead I did some looking up of others and turned it into a script. First page worked out pretty well, I can see it and I’m just trying to note that down for a possible artist. OK so yes if and its a big if this actually gets anywhere and I stick with it I might just go looking for an artist…

See what I mean about fantasies?

Note to self:
Do expenses

for a new forum that I may aswell just post here too.

Name: Dave Bushe (hence the snappy domain name)
Age: 22
Location: London ex Dublin
Orientation: Hetro
Relationship status: Single
Favourite comics: Daredevil | Starman | Barry Ween | Astro City | Sin City | Top Ten | Strangehaven…I could go on here
Favourite comic writers: Bendis | Winick | Rucka | Gaiman | Ellis | Moore
Favourite comic artists: Ross | Hitch | Winick | Gene Ha
Sexiest Male character in comics: Dream
Sexiest Female character in comics: Death
Favourite musicians: Radiohead | U2 | Smashing Pumpkins | Moby | Queen | REM
Favourite movies: Shawshank Redemption | Fight Club | Magnolia | Platoon
Favourite TV shows: 24, West Wing | CSI | Angel
Favourite novels: Fight Club | Lord of Light | The Stand | Around Ireland with a Fridge
Favourite game: Civ 2
Last three comics you bought: Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud | Frightening Curves Johnston/Chaudhary | Strangehaven 13&14 Gary Millidge
How did you lose your comics cherry?: A friend got me started on X-Men along time ago, the only way was up.
Tell us a secret: When I started looking for some non X-Men stuff, someone suggested Top Cow…I believed them for about a year.

Just rough answers on the favourite stuff, like most I could go on for quite some time about them.

…I want to get off.

Sometimes it just feels so pointless. I mean a prime example this week is I put some effort into fixing a problem because I felt it was important to the service and it was important to me. This work was then deliberately broken yesterday. A project was put live with full knowledge it was broken. Nice huh, I tell you it really made me feel good. What made me feel even better was I get to now fix this new problem, although I was successful in getting it pulled till fixes could be put into place.

It just seems all so pointless. I feel like I’m just being ignored, well ignored isn’t the right word, probably better to say not listened to and it feels shit. I’m suppose to be listened to, at the very least because of my job and lets face it my not insignificant technical knowledge in that area is a bonus. Fuck it tho, its another example of what is the point.

Thinking back to a previous life, having someone who by every possible definition of the word was incompetent was probably damn good thing for the team. It covered so much, for me anyway. I never noticed anything else and I have to wonder how much of a distraction this situation was for others. I suspect that in the long run it did a lot, and I have to think that is a very bad thing. I wonder how things would have been different. Back then I worked for a company that tolerated incompetence and then some. Good things I moved on from there eh?

Moving swiftly along, on the good news front I am really starting to feel more comfortable on the calls, I still feel out of my depth but that’s less and less every time. I’m actually looking forward to some calls these days which I have to take as a good sign.

And finally, I can’t write. I accept that but you know what, I want to. So I’m gonna go write some. I doubt you’ll see it here, certainly a year ago you never would have heard of it but maybe. We’ll see how it goes. I have an idea that I want to work with and I’m slowly building on it, its just the actually writing it all out that is the pain so instead of stating more of the obvious I’m gonna go and give it a try.