Month: September 2003

Never again…the biochemistry of hangovers

So I woke up this morning and I didn’t feel very well at all. I would have stayed at home in bed but I really had to go in and see what I could get done. It was a fairly productive day. I didn’t actually get all that much done I found it really hard to concentrate but what I did get done was good and managed to get quite a few things back on track.

I have an on going issue with one of the guys that I work with which came to a head this evening and I have no idea what to do about it. I’m more than fed up with being ganged up on by someone else who is simply doing it to get at me. It seems to have just been taken to a level above me so I shall send an email when I’m back in the office and have a CC list on it.

I’m pretty much already off tomorrow, I tried to get home this afternoon but of course the call I have to be on was at 17:00 and I had to be there. Went home right after that and sat around doing not much. I watched Eyes Wide Shut which I like and played some Blood Bowl. It was one of my better showings.

I had my sister hassling me on AIM this afternoon, I have to plan my weekend at home already so that we can all go out to dinner and not clash with her busy social life. While not quite telling her where to shove it… so anyway Friday night we are all going out to dinner locally. Not sure about the rest yet, pretty much just taking it as it comes.

I should read more. Use of Weapons is a good book, well written but it’s not dragging me in and so I’m finding it very easy to put down and come back to later which I don’t really like.

I feel like I should be following up on what I kicked off a couple of nights ago. I am offline as the phrase is these days but I feel like I should be doing it here aswell. I’d like to about a couple of things but it’s all work and so ’tis not the best place for it.

I should go and sleep but I don’t want to. I’m not going to be able to lie down and go to sleep quickly, I’m going to be lying there and not sleeping. So I want to go and have some hot chocolate and then go and sleep.

It’s cold here, it’s gotten cold here this week. It was bad yesterday, really bad leaving work yesterday and today was more of the same.

Well I’m warmer now with a hot drink finished and I’m starting to feel like I should go and sleep now.

For the first time in a long time when I opened my blog to check it had all published I scrolled down a little and started to read. That was some post from last night, some post.

I think, I think I like it.

I have a cold. I hate it. I’m feeling really shit and there is no way at all I can’t go to work tomorrow. I’m so stressed over this project and I have to go in and work on it. I also fucked it up today. Sometimes I get too wrapped up in the bigger picture when all I need is to zoom in and look at a few lines of code.

About 5.30 after bashing my head against my desk for an hour or so I decided to throw in the towel and go with my first thought. The new(ish) requirements just were not technically possible. And they are not. So I spoke with my boss and I made a call to the product manager and let them know. Then I left work and put it out of my mind. Got on the bus to take me home and it struck me how stupid I had been. Yep, absolutely it’s impossible…but if I change one tiny little factor, one single argument with the piece of code it’s possible. Sure I’ll have to compensate for it a little later and it’s gonna cause a couple of minor issues but of course it’s fucking possible and I should have known that from the start. So I’m annoyed with myself over that. I’ll go in and write the code in the morning and send a couple of emails with instructions about it while kicking myself.

Sometimes the big picture isn’t important. It’s not the destination that counts, its the small twists and turns to make sure you get there. It’s good code too, it’s what I use to love doing a couple of years ago and I use to be damn good at it. I’d never (rarely) have fucked up like this, 5 minutes after I’d been asked I would have it written and ready to go. I’m rusty, that’s all. I don’t need to be doing it for my job anymore and so I’ve lost the touch. Which is in it’s own way a shame, cause I was damn good at it. Better than most of my peers.

Anyway I hope this cold goes away soon but somehow I just know that I’ll still be suffering with it come Thursday. I’m going to go and have a cup of hot mint chocolate and then I’m going to go to bed and get some sleep. I’m cold, I want to lie down and get warm and not worry about things for a while and hopefully wake up in the morning feeling better.

The next person who says “but it worked in Germany” is going to get screamed at. It may well have worked in Germany but it’s not fucking work for the UK you shower of cun….

Ahem. I’m a little stressed right now.

So it’s just going 11.20. I have done the three things I mailed myself to remind myself to to. My 10:30 call was one of the most productive I have had and I’m feeling tired but focused and working through it.

So it’s been a long time coming. I wasn’t able to sleep tonight so I thought I would go back on the electric interwebnet and sort out some stuff.

It’s a little strange. I’m in such a different place than I was back then and I shudder when thinking about it mostly. But then again it was also a great thing, a really great thing. A lot of people who are important to me came about because of this.

Toronto was a fucking blast my friends. Things like that don’t happen too often and it is a damn shame. I’m always going to have fond memories of that trip.

That email by the way took me 90 minutes to get to the stage I was ready to send it. That’s a whole lot of time for a few short paragraphs but I wanted to try and get it right, I owed it to a few people. I’m just sorry so many are gone without getting it. No-one but me to blame for that.

I could play the blame game, and it is tempting. I’m pissed off that it happened like this. The last time I saw Rich was sitting in his front room drinking and smoking. After that I think I had one voicemail and maybe two emails. That was 3 years ago. I remember being mad as hell and a little embarrassed at times but ya know fuck it, I suspect I was as much to blame as anyone else…and drop the suspect part. I get it.

That really was a whole other life. The events in Dublin which lead to it all kicking off were such a big part of my life. These days they are a minor footnote in history. I suspect I’ll be doing memory lane this coming weekend, I’ve got at least one person to talk into having coffee with me. I’m hoping I can work that one out but she may be a few counties away, I just don’t know.

Sometimes I think of those times and I want to go back. They seemed so simple and yet so complicated. In the world which I live in now, they were nothing. Silly childhood dreams no, dreams isn’t the right word distractions maybe?

I do know what brought all this on tonight and I’ll tell you cause I’m in the mood to tell you. I already mentioned that I wasn’t able to sleep. I was thinking about people I’d like to meet next weekend back at home. So I was thinking of one person who I’ll mail in the morning and then I was thinking about the group the two of us hung around with way back then and it struck me there are a quite a few of the Saturday night cinema gang I’d like to see again and find out how they are doing. I suspect most of them don’t feel the same way. Anyway that brought me back to the whole “Resistance” stuff and full circle to that night out in Dublin with Rich and everything that came from that.

I think I like growing up. I certainly prefer me now than I was back then. I was believe it or not fairly naive and innocent (minds out of gutters) but I’ve learnt better, the hard way like we all have to eventually.

I’m guessing not many people will understand this posting fully, a couple should, one of them got a mail to come back so I could have her read a draft of the email but ’twas not to be. I don’t know who else from then reads this on a regular basis. No-one that I know of, I should change that for at least one person, if not a whole bunch of them.

Man, I do miss the simpler times. Now I’m spinning back in time to just before that and blue uniforms and a small wall next to a set of doors. You know I think I’m going to take my camera up there at the weekend and get a photo of somewhere that at the time was just a place to chat and eat lunch but now looking back is so much more to me.

I want to actually take photos this weekend. I want to share how special Dublin is to me and I know that sounds silly and I know I’m not going to be able to and I know I don’t want the pictures for me. Somethings I’ll never forget but somehow a picture will speak a thousand words and you’ll understand me when you see it.

God I hope that wall has not changed.

I’ve sent myself two emails while writing this to remind me to do stuff in the morning. They were to email someone, speak with my boss about a handover and put more business cards in my wallet. I always do the last when I’m going somewhere, just in case. I rarely use them but they are handy to have and if there are people that I run into, then I can just give them a card and hope to catch up.

God I just thought of someone I’d not talked to a long long time who I miss. Emma. She was a girl in college who in our second year we hit it off. We knew each other in first year but never really talked. We became really good friends in second year (no more) and I’d so love to be in touch with her again. I don’t have her number unfortunately. I lost it a long time ago. I don’t know how else to contact her and do you think I can remember her second name? Fuck no.

Although having just thought of that, I think I know someone who might and indeed I owe him an email. He’s in touch with a couple of the lads from college who might just have her details and that would just be awesome. Man I’m a really bad friend at times. Third email gone to myself to remind myself to do something. You know what else is funny about that? I just signed the email. Ha, you gotta laugh.

Man I don’t know where all that came from, it’s as if the floodgates of memory opened and it just started flowing. It feels right typing and I want to keep going. It’s going 4.15 in the am and I have to be up in 4 hours to go to work. I don’t feel tired, I feel fired up and like a lean mean typing machine…or not, my fingers are starting to get sore. Most of this is done at speed and boy have my typing skills come on. Barely any spelling errors so far and it’s all good. Shame other skills are not as easily developed.

I guess everyone will understand this, maybe not the details but the mesh of thoughts. Everyone has a past, everyone’s past comes back to them every now and again. It gets easier, sometimes it hits hard.

One of the things in the mail I sent was a reference to a friend who is no longer with us. For the first time since then it wasn’t that hard. I don’t think that sounds bad but I somehow feel that it should. It just wasn’t. He was on the list of people to be thanked, so he was. It’s good I think. It’s a bit of a downer but, jesus actually no. I don’t want to talk about this, I don’t want to try and justify it. It was easier to type out than it has been before and that’s that.

I’d like to post some song lyrics, it feels right but I don’t know what. The soundtrack right now is Echo & The Bunnyman’s The Killing Moon on repeat for the third time or so I guess something from that would do it but no. It’s got the actual music going for it at the moment, I’m not even paying attention to the lyrics.

Right now I’m so happy to have a computer with an internet connection and a blog to be able to spill this out onto. I guess I’d have fallen asleep by now but I think I prefer this way. No, I know I do. It’s not going to read very well in the morning for me and it’s more than I would normally go into, but right now this is me. As much of me as I can put down on paper.

I’m going to be annoyed now trying to think of her second name. When I try and concentrate on it now I come up against this block which isn’t painful but it kinda says stop thinking about it, if you think about it, it will never come back. H seems very prominent. I know it’s not Harris but that’s there for some reason, I don’t know why. Gah it’s going to annoy me a lot now. Hayes, it could have been Hayes.

Well, I guess that’s that. It is enough, don’t you think? I’m going to go and try and get some sleep now. I have a 10.30 meeting in the morning which is important and which I suspect I’ll be doing quite a bit of the talking at aswell as walking some people who are damn smarter then I through a bug and my solution. Somehow I see some coke in my future, early morning future that is.

So I watched Stargate and sorted the guts of my cd collection while I was at it. I’ve been wanting to do it for a long time, I had a lot of cds lying around out of their cases so I took the whole lot down and got stuck in. Took pretty much the whole hour to get the mainly sorted. Missing a few cds and a few cases. They’ll be splattered around somewhere. I found my Kings Of Leon cd which I have been looking for the past the fews. So I’m listening to that now.

My PDA has been bad lately. It keeps doing a hard reset and it’s fucking me off lots. I keep meaning to bring it down to IC and have it sorted but it’s just not happening. Good time to get it out to bring in to get looked at in the morning. I’m missing it a lot more than I thought. I was using the scheduler far more than I thought and I’m missing things.

Anyway I’m watching Enterprise and it’s the first time in a long time that I’ve seen one. I really like the open sequence rolling through the history of flight and all that but the song is just bad. A nice typical piece of Star Trek music over it would have been really nice. Won’t Paramount please just get rid of Rick Berman and let someone else have a try? Voyager was shit, Enterprise isn’t doing well and Nemisis was shit.

Gotta head over to the shop in a few minutes and pick up a few bits and pieces.

Again with thanks to Hugh, I’ve spent my Sunday afternoon watching three new episodes of West Wing and they were really fucking good.
There may be pool later tonight or I may simply watch Stargate SG1 and Enterprise on Channel 4 before moving onto a movie for the evening.

So I watched Spirited Away this afternoon and it was pretty amazing. Easily the best 2d animation I’ve seen. Interesting story, some nice concepts beautifully put together.

Anyway headed into town and met a couple of the lads for a pre cinema drink. That was all well and good and then we went to see Underworld which was quite simply shit. There was no plot and no acting. The mythology was also in a word shit. Vampires don’t faint because of blood loss and they don’t need CPR to bring them back, they are the undead!

Couple more drinks after and then home.

Picked up Endless Nights in town.. wow. I had to stop reading after the Despair story, it hit, the last page made it.

Future Me, nice concept well executed.

Gah, going to sleep now.