the black hole that is my blog

Oh also. I was reading a PRD (Product Requirements Document) the other day and one of the features was actually described like this:

“allowing u to control”.

For FUCK sake!

Really pleased to hear The Shield returns for the second season on the 1st of July.

Finished off Chasm City, and I enjoyed it a hell of a lot. Started off Redemption Ark the sequel to Revelation Space and I’m looking forward to getting into it. Sat in the park for a while listening to Hail To the Thief and reading. It was good, it was calm. If the weather keeps going like this I could see myself doing a lot of that.

CSI isn’t holding my interest as much these days, they need to go back to the stories where the main characters are interesting and playing off each other. Without that, there isn’t really any compelling viewing. The forensic stuff may have been enough to get the show started well but it needs to be built on.

I need a bike. I really do. In weather like this watching people sail by in the park is really making me miss my bike. I had better space to ride it along the coast back in Dublin but the park is a good start here and the riverside does give quite a bit of a straight line.

As I was walking across the river this evening to get home, I saw someone who looked very like someone I use to know a few lifetimes ago. It got me to thinking about a few things from back then and one in particular stood out.

A few years ago, a relative of mine was getting married. This one is going to be kinda vague for what will I hope be obvious reasons. I was at the wedding (not the wedding proper, but the afters), as were my parents and quite a bit of my extended family. I didn’t really want to be there, I had originally but that all changed.

I found out something which I didn’t like (and still don’t like) and it well it annoyed and disappointed me. The two people getting married had been together for a long time, years and years as I recall. They had also just bought a house, or were in the process of buying a house.

Well, as it turns out there was a third person involved in the relationship and as it happens it’s a small world. So I knew all about the third person and indeed a lot more detail than I had ever wanted to know. One of the things which really got to me was that I knew it wasn’t over.

It all seemed so pointless. They have a kid now and I hope for their sake it’s all working out. I’ve not heard from anyone to the otherwise so I hope so.

I’m reminded of someone else. I only met her a few times, she was a friend of a friend. A close friend of a really close friend. She was young, smart, and really really cute. Last time I saw her was at a night out and she looked stunning, absolutely stunning. Heads turned, perhaps it helped that she was not wearing much, but heads turned.

Anyway she had a boyfriend. Well, actually she didn’t. She had someone else’s boyfriend (perhaps even husband I’m not sure but I think it could very well have been). They didn’t get to spend much time together and while he kept talking about leaving his other half for her, it was never going to home and I think she knew it. So this guy had whomever he had and this stunning girl who any number of people would have killed to just date for a while.

She really really liked him tho. It was a touchy subject for quite a while but I do remember somehow I was talking to her about it once and she was fairly upset, no-one could understand what she was doing with him and she got some grief about it. She knew what she was doing with him, she really really liked him

She deserves a hell of a lot better.

***

I was also thinking today that I really need to get an address book up to date. I don’t have one. I have AOL and my old outlook address book for email and my phone for phone numbers and I’m completely useless at noting snail mail addresses so sitting down and putting the time into saving everything somewhere would be time well spent. I’m thinking PDA so I can sync it onto a few computers and aswell as that I want to export it onto AOL in someway so I can have all the details stored on the host. In theory then I should be able to get anyone’s details at anytime. I shall have to look into spending some time doing this.

I saw something the other day which I found a little scary to be honest. I saw some numbers for a personal ad site and well I was impressed too. How many people actually use these things? The numbers were quite specific in terms of country base and there were more than 3 people using them. I know Friendster is huge but they do a good job at not coming off as a personals site. Hmm I don’t really know where I’m going with this but I always thought there was a certain stigma associated with them. I guess that’s a lot less in this internet age which makes a hell of a lot of sense. Given that I’m talking to someone who I met online about this right now I guess there isn’t really any stigma I can throw against them without coming out as some sort of hypocrite.

The phrase perfect contradiction just popped into my head for some reason. I think it has some context with the word hypocrite. I did say that somewhat tongue in cheek as I’m sure I am a hypocrite in some ways. Anyway that was a random interruption to our regular programming.

Now a less random interruption as I think it is time to leave it for the night.

I hate the fact that David fucking Beckham’s football career is the first fucking headline on the news. Look around the world for fuck sake.

Everything is out to get me today.

I got that tool working nicely in the end, working very nicely I must say. Having two screens to work with was really helpful.

But.

Another tool has suddenly decided I am not authorised to use it anymore and has pretty much stopped me in my tracks. And as it turns out everyone on my team is no longer authorised so I can’t have someone do a couple of minutes work for me and let me move on, no that would be too helpful.

Fuckers.

I have permission to exist again and I can indeed logon as and when I wish.

I’m booting classic for the first time in a long long long time. It’s nice and quick on my beauty of a Mac.

Neil Gaiman’s blog continues to rock and this entry had me giggling.

I’m close to giving up here. I need to run a specific tool on my Mac. It only runs in classic so hence I booted classic. I then found that I had the tool installed but it wasn’t in the configuration that I wanted. So I reinstalled it. Now all that’s left is to install a plugin. The plugin is of course a stuffed file. Classic doesn’t have Stuffit Expander installed. Ok, no problem off I go to our software drive and lo and behold Stuffit Expander for Windows. No sign of the Mac installer. One quick IM to IC asking for the location of the file leads to a *shrug* go download it from the web response. So I did.

While I was downloading I was reading Neil’s blog. I know I spelt the word giggling wrong so I copied the whole entry to the clipboard with the intent of spellchecking it in a local app. So tabbing into the app to find that my keyboard shortcuts are broken in this build. CTRL+N gives me a new web browser and not a new document. Fine, so file -> new -> text document. Paste. All good, click spellcheck. “The dictionary could not be opened because the file is damaged”.

I have no idea what I have done to deserve all this.

Chasm City I was up late last night reading this. The bastard has done the exact same thing as with Revelation Space. Towards the end of the book he throws out this awesome concept and it just stands there smacking you in the face with it’s sheer genius. I’m getting close to the end of it and I’m really looking forward to finishing it.

I sat in the park for a while this evening reading. It was really nice. I sorted out the transfer of files from my old Cassiopeia to my iPAQ and then straight back into Chasm City. About an hour out there to the sounds of R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People and then I found I was having trouble breathing and my nose was all blocked. A minor case of hay fever it would appear. Ah well, came back home and chilled for a while.

I’m watching Ninja Scroll a manga one of the guys in work lent me. It’s very blah I guess, nothing noteable about it at all. West Wing is coming on in a few minutes and I’m looking forward to it.

I really want a keyboard for my PDA now. It would actually have me using it so much more. I can’t get my head around the writing on it and the on-screen keyboard isn’t quick enough. But having a plug-in keyboard would have me sitting anywhere rolling it out and tpying and that would be good. Sync it and posting some entries could be really good. It would certainly let me get more thoughts down as they happen.

If you want to talk to someone, talk to them. Email then, send them an im or how about going for the old ring them chesnut?

Phrase of the day: twag him.

Lunch did involve the park and sunshine and chess and a 3 – 0 win to me. I rock 🙂