Month: July 2003

I am glad to report this evening worked out quite well. Sat in Starbucks reading for a couple of hours and finished off Dead Air. An excellent read and highly recommended. Then I jumped on a bus to Fulham Broadway and I went to see Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. Complete shite but I can’t think of a movie I’ve enjoyed more in a long time. It was funny with a really great cast, all in all complete trash but entertaining trash. Well worth seeing.

Walked back home afterwards in the rain and it was really nice. Last week I dug out my discman for the first time in a while and I’ve been playing Damien Rice’s O into the ground for a few days. It’s been the soundtrack to my day and in particular my walk home. It almost led to me getting killed as I was completely lost in it and not paying as much attention to the road as I should.

Track 10; Eskimo has become my favourite track and in a novel way (for me anyway) it’s because of the opera singing towards the end of it. It’s absolutely perfect for the song and I love the sound of it. A quick google has informed me that the opera singer on Eskimo is Doreen Curran and she is in fact singing in Intuit. Things really have changed in my taste over the years. Had I got the money to spare I’d pick up another few copies of this album and send it on to various friends. May have to do with just using the interwebnet.

It had me thinking when I got home that given the choice between meeting a nice girl and spending the rest of my life with her or having music in my life for the rest of my life, I don’t know what I would choose.

Oh in the scary news of the day the trailer for Tomb Raider 2 actually made me consider seeing it. I don’t remember being too impressed with the first one at all and I don’t find Angelina Jolie attractive at all. Shall see how it goes.

Picked up issue one of Kurt Busiek’s Arrowsmith last night and it’s a damn good start to a series, this one shall be going on my pull list. Nearly didn’t happen I was walking up Charing Cross Road heading towards Comic Showcase and was so caught up in the music that I walked right past it. Got a few other bits and bobs too, nothing special so far but I have high hopes for Andi Watson’s Complete Samurai Jam.

Can you believe it’s about to be August? I don’t know where the year has gone to. Some has gone to plan, some has not. I guess that is to be expected. Wonder how the rest of the year will go…

Some interesting stuff here: Blogging By The Numbers. They reckon there are 3,471,464 blogs between Live Journal, Blogger and DiaryLand with 1,631,535 of them being active. I’d imagine there is quite a Moveable Type/Gray Matte/Other user base not counted in there but they are interesting numbers anyway. Apparently that works out as 2% of people online have a blog. Interesting.

My sister moves back to Dublin in about 3 weeks time. She should be there until July or so of next year and then she plans to move back to Japan, Kyoto this time. Seems to have a job there all sown up and one that comes with a place to live so it should be easy enough to move. So sometime over the next few months I shall try and get back to Dublin for a weekend and keep my parents happy. But these days that probably entails far more than I want to deal with. I was thinking tonight as I walked past one of the local pubs that I wouldn’t mind having another couple of nights out with my dad but again that would I am sure entail more than I can deal with.

The number 040 is haunting me these days.

The internet is boring me lately. I’ve read all of the blogs I follow and despite most of them having new content, nothing has really grabbed my attention. I’ve not chatted much with anyone lately and no new sites are throwing themselves at me. There was some massive traffic on the V while I was offline for a few days over the summit but of the, musta been a thousand messages plus, nothing really jumped out.

So I started writing here at 11:30 and it’s now just gone 12:30. Not really sure I have much more to add but I don’t want to hit “Post & Publish” just yet. I often will do this. I’ll type out what I have to say and then just leave the window open while I surf adding thoughts as they come to me. Sometimes and just like right now I don’t know what else I have to say but I just feel that I have more and I shouldn’t hit that button just yet. Some of it stems from wanting to move away from lots of short posts which was pretty much all this was when I started blogging way back. I prefer to have bigger posts covering whatever I want to cover rather than 10 smaller posts covering them. Paragraphs just make more sense I guess.

Whoo hoo. I have an AOL blog! It’s about time. I’ve been wanting to have a real look at these babies for a while now. On Monday I shall be looking into this a hell of a lot more and seeing what I can see. I do still wonder if I can sell the idea of a public dev blog to anyone. Anyway IM looks cool and I see one of the beeb guys has already screenshoted it using a UK account. This shall be of interest to some folks I expect.

It would appear that is that. It is going on 1:30 now and I don’t have anything else to say and I want to go and get some sleep. I dislike the fact that tomorrow is Sunday, the weekend does not last long enough. I don’t want to have to go to work on Monday, more time off would be such a good thing.

Anyway it’s time to get some sleep. I do think that’s enough typing for today too.

So all quiet on the western front so far. I’m enjoying Strays by Jane’s Addiction a hell of a lot. Note to record companies, I streamed this on Monday morning and instead of just capturing the stream I bought the album.

Been reading and watching TV so far. I’m thinking about going out and sitting somewhere and reading and then a movie later.

Sorta thought about heading into town but it’s London Pride and I imagine it will be quite busy and more than likely my bus won’t actually run all the way into town today. Might wander along Kings Road but more than likely not, just head up there to the cinema. Then again I see that there are several late night showings just down the road. Perhaps I’ll hang on and wander around. That sounds quite fun, just leaves the few hours till then for entertaining.

Well, dinner of some sort out I would guess (not pizza) and Starbucks with a coffee and a good book (Iain Banks’ Dead Air) are pretty much top of the list and that leaves plenty of time to wander along to a cinema.

*shrug*

This coming Wednesday looks like it’s going to shape up to be a pool night, hopefully get some people out for a laugh and then Thursday is a cinema night with a load of us off to see a preview of T3. Looking forward to that one a lot.

Lets see, what else?

Interesting discussion during dinner on Wednesday night (which did lead to some comments about how we were renowned for our dinner conversation); suicide. One point which was made a few times was an old adage that if there is anyone on the planet who cares about you, you can’t kill yourself as it’s not fair on them. It is a good point but I don’t really agree with it all that much. Yes, suicide is ultimately a selfish act but at the end of the day if things are bad enough that your prepared to go through with killing yourself, things have to be kinda bad. And I don’t have a problem with that. If you are that unhappy in life and it’s not looking like it’s going to get better, I don’t see why you don’t have the right to end your life. Perhaps a more organised way of going about it would be good but at the end of the day it is your life to do with as you please. Just my two Euro.

Work is very much a CYA area at the moment. I have to admit to have been waiting for the meeting I had yesterday afternoon, to be honest I expected it a little earlier. The outcome wasn’t particularly bad but I do intend to take further issue with it on Monday morning.

Sleeping has been pretty fucked up this week. I was in the office early for a few days and being at my desk by 8am is a foreign concept but it had to be done. Woke up around 10 this morning which wasn’t ideal, another couple of hours would have been nice. I’m feeling tired already. It will pass, it always does.

Food soonish I think, no idea what though. Maybe just a hotdog and some fries maybe a wander around to find something nice.

My computer is a piece of shit and I hate it. I can’t afford to replace it and it’s beyond repair (I think) so it leaves me pretty fucked.

Goodnight and fuck you world.

There are a couple of great big holes in my life over the past year I guess it is. One is fairly obvious, the other in hindsight is also very obvious.

Weekend plans are pretty small, still got 3 discs from season 1 of The Shield to watch and that’s about it. Everyone in the office has given Charlies Angels 2 a big thumbs up as being lots and lots of fun so I do want to see it and may do so tomorrow. My flatmate is gone away for week so a quiet weekend on the couch doing nothing is very possible. Tonight will also be quiet, the 4 regulars for heading out are not around, so I’m thinking about heading into town for some comics and then home to read.

In fact I think I like that plan a lot, but may even modify it to stay in town and go and see something in the cinema. Shall see how it goes. I’m certainly not feeling 100%. You know what you feel like when you suddenly realise that you have not eaten for a while and are loosing energy and becoming lethargic? I’ve felt like that since yesterday morning depsite having had full and even in some cases healthy meals!

*shrug* perhaps a little apathy here aswell. More later maybe.

With a capital J.

I’m feeling quite a bit better now, took some neurofen as soon as I got home and West Wing making me laugh hysterically at one stage I think helped.

So the summit is over and I’m going to back at my desk tomorrow. It’s taken a hell of a lot out of me, much more than I expected. Overall it was good, I think we have some very solid results to build on and the start of a roadmap. It’s pretty much covering a year and I could be involved in more than I had originally thought. Not sure yet if this is a good thing.

Actually I did want to say something else on the summit front. I think I held my own quite well and I know that I contributed a lot. I’m happy with that, it’s not all that often something like this comes up so I’m very happy to think that I handled it well.

Having said all that, thank fuck tomorrow is Friday. The weekend is going to be good. I am going to sleep late and take it easy. Another cinema event I think.

There has been lots of other stuff over the past few days, but a couple of them require more thought to get down here than I really want to spend now.

The phrase “existing in London” rang very true with me today. I don’t really know how to even go into that one and it’s probably not something for here but it’s up there right now. Reminds me of an old Radiohead line I really like; “I’m not living, I’m just killing time”.

Not heard anything from my parents since Wednesday night so I assume there has not been anymore calls. I’ll catch up with them over the weekend.

I’m tired, everything else can wait until tomorrow.

I’m tired and I feel like shit. The past three days have really taken their toll on me and I want to just go home and sleep.

I have some new West Wing on video thanks to Shug and I’m looking forward to that lots. I wish I had tomorrow off work, I could so do with the sleeping late. Guess Saturday will just have to do.

More later, maybe. Depends on whether the asprin kicks in or not. My head hurts lots.

So I was at a network summit yesterday and interestingly enough I learnt some things about caller id. It is interesting to note that you cannot actually block it. You can with hold it from the other person’s view but it still goes through. The networks always have it.

Why is this interesting?

Well, the person who left a voicemail on my parents home phone last night telling them that I had been killed in car crash but who withheld their number is I think going to find this piece of information interesting.

Good timing on your part tho, seen as I wasn’t online at all during the day as I would normally be and I had my phone turned off. By chance I was grabbing email before dinner and my desk phone rang.

Off to day two, when things really get interesting and then another work dinner tonight. 2 free meals in two days running. It’s been a while since I’ve had anything like that from work 😉

Well today was interesting in a good way.

I have a much better understanding of our network now and how we manage it. This is a good thing 🙂

Dinner now.

I’m out of the office at a summit all day tomorrow and maybe some of Wed/Thur. Could be interesting, no scrap that, it will be interesting and very relevant and I’m kinda looking forward to it.

Anyway I have just decided that I don’t care about writing anything else here now.