Month: June 2004

I’m sure you have heard the saying: life’s a bitch. Usually it’s true. Every now and then when the scales are balanced up, life works out that it owes you one and gives you a little ray of sunshine.

I’ve mentioned some people in here before that I use to know way back when in Dublin. Some of them I’ve not heard from in over 5 years. One of them I managed to get back in touch with last year and she put me in touch with a few others and we are all back talking. This is a real good thing as far as I am concerned.

That was one circle of friends. The other, the college friends I just wasn’t in touch with…until tonight.

In the space of about 20 minutes, I found an old mobile phone (and by old I mean 8 years old) which I thought I had lost when I moved over here, I found a charger which would work with it, and I managed to get into it’s phone book.

Then I sent a couple of text messages. I wasn’t expecting all that much really. To think that people would have the same mobile numbers as they did when they were full-time students half a decade ago…well it’s a but much. But life seemed to think otherwise and I’ve heard back from both of them.

It’s pretty damn cool if I do say so myself.

In the other good news for the day. I mentioned last week that I needed some old information for an application and that I did not have it. Typically, my mother did and had it to me a few minutes after I mentioned it on the phone this afternoon. So that’s good news. Tomorrow I will finish that off and get stuff into the post before I go away. Of course I say that now but I really do need to knuckle down and do it.

I shall also mention again how SHIT I am about doing something as simple as going to the post office and sending things. I owe my sister and several V members stuff. I have to get on top of that.

I started looking at flights to Dublin earlier today. Need to get back there for another weekend soonish. Was thinking around the first couple of weeks of August. My parents are away for 3 weeks at the end of the month and I don’t really want to overlap with that. Tho if flights are cheap I may well, I still have keys afterall.

Next interview tomorrow. I’m for some strange reason not that worried about it. I should be but I’m 100% certain that I can do the job and that I should get it so that’s helping quite a bit. I have a couple of ideas for it too, tomorrow morning I’m going to spend some time preparing.

How can you not have an email in this day and age? I mean really, what’s that all about? (Phrase stolen from Iain or Mark, whichever prefers).

I have to iron in the morning. I should go and get some sleep.

Fucking PDF files. Fucking cunts. Put the fucking application form in an EDITABLE format so that I don’t have to try and scrawl on 8 fucking pages. So much effort for so little reward and I can’t even do everything I need to do in it. Fuck sake, cunts.

Acrobat is fine, I can use commenting text boxes to fill in details but when it gets too much, I need to move items around so I have enough space to fit things in. But for FUCK SAKE. I really don’t see the need for this.

I can’t type this morning. It’s just not working.

I want to go away now. I don’t want to have to come in tomorrow and if I could, I’d take the extra day off and go sit in a field now. Instead I’m left at my desk blankly staring at my Termbase and listening to some Machine Head.

Neither are working.

So I’ve borrowed some Slipknot from Patrick and it’s on loud.

Man did I sleep well last night. It was shortly after 1 when I actually made it into bed. I’m reading Motley Crue’s The Dirt and it’s an excellent read. Completly and utterly debauched and in places heartbreaking. So I kicked off another few chapters of that and it just kept going. Not the best idea but glad to say I feel fine for it this morning.

For the second time in a week and indeed the second time in a year or so I had to iron a shirt. No tie, I’m not going that far tho I suppose I really should. For an external interview, it would have been suited and booted but this is an internal with my boss who sees me day in and out wearing whatever. So grateful that it’s casual wear here.

Starting to get less excited about Glastonbury. Yesterday was rainy and cold and kinda miserable and the forecast for the rest of the week isn’t looking all that great tho it does pick up. Yesterday at least I could get home in a short time and get warm and dry, not going to have such an option this coming weekend. Having said all that, fuck it. I’m going to have a good weekend and there are some great bands coming up that I want to see. Highlights of the weekend for me will be Kings of Leon, British Sea Power and Hope of the States. All at pretty clear times too.

Now to the interview.

I should sleep. I have my first interview early tomorrow morning. The last thing I need to do is stay up late online. So I am going to try and keep this brief.

The weekend’s music has, well it’s been varied. In just over a 24 hour period, I’ve seen, amongst others James Brown, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Christy Moore and Bob Dylan. That’s pretty damn varied.

I was looking forward to Dylan more than anything else and if I had to have picked, I would have traded everyone else for him. When you go into something like that, you can’t help but be disappointed. Dylan himself was fine, took a couple of songs to get going but he was fine. Ronnie Wood from the Rolling Stones had guested with the Charlatans earlier in the day. He came out with Dylan too and played the first couple of songs. Seemed to leaving after the third or but we could hear the mike picking up Dylan telling him he couldn’t leave. So he played through the full set. And the set was the disappointment. I was hoping for and indeed expecting it to be one big singalong. It’s Bob Dylan for fuck sake, 40 years of tunes to play out of. It’s a festival so I was hoping for a few of the greatest hits. No such luck. I didn’t seem to be alone in not being overly familiar with the entire set. The only time the crowd was able to sing along was for the single encore Like a Rolling Stone. Colour me disappointed.

I just did a news google for the Fleadh to see if there was anything on the web about it yet. There isn’t. There is a Telegraph article about Dylan being set to play there and the last couple of lines sum everything up perfectly. I wish I could write like this. I really do.

“I have witnessed it time and again. People go to a show as individuals and emerge as a kind of community, pouring out into the night, still singing the last refrain. I think we go to such events to sing our songs. And if Dylan turns up to sing them with us, so much the better.”

We didn’t get to sing our songs and I missed it throughout and I miss it now.

I feel a little cheated and a little disapointed. I only have a right to the latter I guess, some of the disappointment spreads to myself for being a Dylan greatest hits man. I have Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks of course(!) but that’s barely the tip of the iceberg. The encore was fantastic, the crowd were so into it and I think there was a huge feeling of relief all around. We got a biggie, we got something we knew and far more importantly, we had one of our songs to sing.

Tomorrow, I will sit at my desk and I don’t doubt I’ll spend much of my day with Bob Dylan. For the sake of my friends and colleagues, I won’t sing, at least I won’t sing out loud.

Chili Peppers good, sound SHIT beyond belief and worthy of a Monday morning phonecall.

Drinks after excellent 🙂

I hate not being able to sleep. Went to bed shortly after 10 last night to read and was still wide awake at 12.15. Got up with the intent to do some writing for a while but just messed around on the net instead. Slept pretty soundly after that. It’s cooled down quite a bit around here so that helped. I was actually cold when I work up this morning. This of course led to me staying in bed longer than I should have…ah well. I had some very strange dreams too, very strange and very real. Woke up wondering about lots of things.

Caught up on Ultimate Spider-Man some really good stuff in there. The Venom arc isn’t great but overall I really like the way Bendis’ writes Peter and the people around him. Good stuff. Looking forward to more.

After two weeks of temperatures in the mid to late 20’s and no air conditioning, it is now bloody cold in the office as there has been rain and a large temperture drop. I may have to break soon and put a jumper on.

I hate PDF files. Sure they are good things but when it’s a bloody application form and I’m not filling it in by hand, I don’t want to have to go and get a trial version of Acrobat and put in loads of bloody text boxes. It takes way too long and is fucking ackward. Bastards make it a fucking word document next time. I am determined to fill this in and send it off today but it’s fucking tough and I don’t have all the infomation I need to hand 🙁

Hopefully some of it will be contained in my old diaries which I really need to remember to look into tonight. Otherwise I shall fill in another form and that will be that. I hate forms.

Tonight I am planning a quiet one. There shall be a beer after work (making it 4 days running which isn’t good) as one of the lads has just had some good news.

My Amazon order just arrived (and I know one of my orders to the US just arrived too). So I’m pleased. I have some new music to listen to, the first Nada Surf album and then a Muse album to give em a chance. Then tonight I have a nice new Ultimate Spider-Man hardback to work through. Looking forward to it, been a while since my last Bendis dose.

Just been checking out the Glastonbury lineup and it’s not as bad as I first thought. There are at least 10 bands I want to see, 3 of which I’m excited about so that’s good. Looking forward to it. This time next week I’ll be finishing work and ready to go 🙂

I found myself drifting off in thought a second ago. The damn air conditioning is still broken here and won’t be fixed until the weekend. So it’s pretty nasty around the building. It doesn’t help for concentration (still looking for that single line). It was pretty strange, there was a name in an email which just triggered some memory dominos and lead me to a thought I’d not been at in a while. Couple of seconds later I’m sure I must have sat straight up in my chair realising where my mind had wandered to and that was the end of that.

I’m sure that sounds filthy, but it really wasn’t.

Anyway my heads all over the place this week. I’ve got stuff on in and outside of work and lots of nagging little things from both. So it adds up and I’m tired and hot all the time. Another busy weekend coming up. Should be a great one, Chili Peppers on Saturday afternoon and the Fleadh on Sunday. Really looking forward to seeing Dylan. Hope for a couple of the classics and fairly sure he’ll deleiver. It should be a weekend of great music and hopefully some nice (but not too hot) weather.

I’m reading Baracuda 945 by Patrick Robinson. It’s a techno thriller I guess like Tom Clancy but not as good. Some of the dialogue is really stuffy, in particular the first 2 chapters or so. But it’s fun and I can speed through it. Get about 100 pages done on the bus journey home which is good. I do like reading books like that every now and again. Popcorn entertainment between the really good stuff.

I’m trying to compose an email in another window. In fact I moved over here to blog to procrastinte a bit before I send it. It’s not a bad email and it’s probably not all that important but it’s the type which I worry about getting right. I really don’t want to come across too strong which I’m often told I do. While I’m quite sure it’s fine, I’ll leave it another while, re-read it and then send it off.

Guess I better get back to it.

A pretty good day so far actually. I’ve had a result on a project, it’s being dropped! I’ve got a meeting about another one later this afternoon which brings me right back to the basics and a part of the service which I usually enjoy working on.

I’ve actually had to go and look in and look for source files for the first time in a few months and I’m enjoying it. It’s a part of my job which I do enjoy, not sure how much if at all I’ll be doing of it going forward (fingers crossed) so it’s good to get into it now.

Now if I could just find the single line of code I need to change….

So iTunes Europe appears to suck. The following artists are lacking
Radiohead
Metallica
Bruce Springsteen
Stereophonics
The Frames
The Pixies (just the 1 new track)

I consider this to be very poor. Bought a few things but don’t see myself using it very often at all. I’ll keep an eye for new content and the odd song which I like but overall, disapointed.

Patch day today for Eve, lots and lots of changes and a few small problems. I am completly rejigging my setup and will have to see how it goes. Not much time to play over the coming weeks, will be away quite a bit.

Am tired and annoyed and going to go to bed now instead of writing more.