Month: March 2005

“The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I was trying and failing to explain some thoughts on the push and pull of information to someone via email yesterday. It stuck in my mind a lot and I was thinking about it for most of last night. I had decided to write another email today to try and explain it and then to use that email as the cornerstone for a posting.

The email is gone and I think I made sense. I don’t think I’ve managed to get everything that I wanted down onto the screen but I got distracted. I wanted to check that I was using the word meme appropriately. I tend to use it in an internet email/LJ/forum context and I wasn’t sure that it was reflected as such. So a quick Google for the definition lead me to scrolling down the answers page and hitting the Wikipedia entry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

And man did that throw some new thoughts into the mix. Starting with the quote from Mr. Emerson above. That first line hits pretty hard. Is it writing to understand and to turn a key? It sure seems to be at sometimes. Sometimes it’s even meant to be. It doesn’t always work but it’s worked at the important times so I’m sticking with it.

Scrolling down a little more, it goes into “language as a virus” and other such thoughts. To be honest, I’m not currently sitting comfortably enough to do anything more than skim the entry at this point. I’ve heard the phrase, I think I know what it means, at the least I know what I think it means but I can’t take that any further right now. It just seemed worth noting. It ties into writing to understand so well, so a topic to come back to at some stage.

***

On a complete side note. For some reason I’ve been coming back to two Beatles tracks the past couple of days. Penny Lane and Eleanor Rigby. The latter is easily my favourite Beatles track. I’ve alot of time for a few of their tracks, overall I think they are overrated but I do admit that I didn’t (and still don’t) see the impact that they had on the world so I can let some of it slide. Anyway those two are the soundtracks to this post.

Dylan on the otherhand I see the impact of almost everywhere I look. So much owed to a single man. I really hope that Never Ending Tour hits the UK again soon. That will be a go every night without a fucking doubt. There isn’t anything posted for after April, although a new album does have to be recorded, there seems to be a whole lot of time to go and do some tours of the rest of the world. You know I think I’d try and do some Dublin dates there too.

I’ve just installed my first ever Linux system. I should have done it years ago but I’ve only now actually got a reason for it. So it’s running on an old box on my desk for a proof of concept type thing for a little while. No, I’m not just running command line. My terminal-fu is week. Next up a purl upgrade and some Apache and then it’ll all be set and ready to go. Looking forward to getting to play with it. It’s nice to have something, nevermind something new to do. Not knowing quite enough to know exactly what I am doing is however, annoying. I don’t get why I can’t create a folder in usr/share when I have already su. It’s causing a slight bit of hassle. But it’s fun to work on and the multiple workspace is beautiful, so very beautiful. I thought Windows was bad for having to run updates after a reinstall but this has 211 outstanding updates. Ouch. I’m not sure the box is stable enough to do all that.

4 day week, 4 day weekend, 4 day week. This makes me happy. I have no major plans for the weekend. Well I say that now but it’s actually all falling together nicely. Friday I’m going to walk Regents Canal (subject to weather) and some more Regents Park to take some photos. I hope to have some company and find a nice pub somewhere for a quiet lunch. This should be a good day. Saturday is Mr. Watson’s birthday and there shall be drinks. Sunday may perhaps be more of the some. I like the idea of a quiet enough one in the Big Chill Bar. I shall see how that one goes. Monday is gaming. A few of the lads are coming around and we’ll be playing some Halo and indeed whatever else we think of. So not so quiet after all.

It always seems to be 4pm when I come to actually post in blogger. This has been going in a variety of ways since early this morning. There was a CoH post first, then onto Linux, then the first piece. And now it’s all rolled into one.

I also just removed the del.ico.us stuff as I wasn’t really using it. I may use the space to expand the quotes which I draw on so much around here. I have to do something soon, it’s been an ongoing nag at myself for a while now.

***

Nerdy CoH stuff follows

Last night I did the Terra Volta Respec trial…again. This time I did it with my level 24 Defender. I wasn’t planning on it, but I got a tell asking me if I wanted to give it a try. I was about to say no, but the tell said they had a full team and were ready to go. So I figured what the fuck and went for it.

We slaughtered it. Less than 90 minutes and minimal deaths. 2 stupidly on the first mish in TV, by people not paying attention and then just a couple towards the reactor. So I got most of the way to 25, I kept everyone alive most of the time and I have a respec which I don’t really need just now. I’m not sure what to put in there. I’m thinking about opening Stealth and dumping Manoeuvres. I’m pretty much pure defense, I cannot solo anything. I have two attacks, neither are slotted. I guess there is the option of rounding out a little but I prefer to play this one as support. I considered respeccing out Recall Friend and Resurrect in order to get up to phase shift, but I think those are two of the most important parts of my defender. Someone falls in battle, I have them back on their feet in seconds and going strong. So many times I’ve TP’d someone just as they are about to die and had my heal queued. So I’m going to keep them and maybe just open up stealth a little more. I’ll save the respec for a while I think.

Anyway it seemed way too easy. I should have thought to check what the slider was at. I do want to do it again with my main, not sure what I to do with him either but I um, I want the badge.

So after that I spent some time in The Hollows. I was playing a new alt in there the night before and I was in way over my head but it being The Hollows there were lots of other heroes around and they came to my rescue more than once. So I figured I would do the same for a while. A speedster healer can cover a whole lot of ground around the main areas pretty quick and save a lot of lives. So that was fun. I’ve seen many a team decimated trying to get to a mish in there so it’s good to sometimes get a helping hand or indeed a helping TP. I’ll probably do that again for a while tonight.

And now home.

Said to me on the phone now.

“Sometimes I think I should just go work in McDonalds”

Oh I’m missing you
I’d give all for the price of a flight
Oh I’m missing you
under Piccadilly’s neon

Missing You
Christy Moore

10.54 this morning, the reason for Friday’s problems dropped into my outbox. And of course it’s related to something we had dismissed and of course it now makes perfect sense.

Bastards.

I’m still in the whole not reading thing. I know I only mentioned it a few days ago, but it feels like so much longer. I need a book that I’m excited about in order to get back into it. I was wandering around Waterstones this afternoon looking for something to jump out but I got nothing. It’s almost a shame I got a preview of the new Richard Morgan a few weeks ago otherwise that would have so done the trick. It’s annoying, it makes my journies longer or at least seem long. There is one slight advantage, I concentrate on the music. The lyrics become more important, it’s not just background, it’s all there is.

Alex and I went to see The Machinst this evening and unfortunatly it was pretty shit. The writer had obviously seen Fight Club and Momento and just played off them, badly. Christian Bale wasn’t bad, in places he was really good but he was working with a really poor script. Best thing about it was the trailers before hand. I am so excited about Batman and perhaps even more so Sin City Cannot wait.

On a comic related subject, I’ll be having me some of this Absolute Watchmen.

I see it’s confirmed that Yahoo have bought Flickr and indeed parent corp Ludicorp. I’m sorry to see it’s not Google or indeed us but hopefully it’ll loosen up some of the restrictions around limits and that.

…when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

We had a problem on the service yesterday. It was first reported on Thursday night and by 1pm on Friday there were a whole lot of people looking at it. Including me. I still don’t know how I got dragged into it but I did. It didn’t sound too strange when I first heard about it. There were 4 or 5 possible plausable reasons for it. But as the day went on, every one of those reasons was knocked out of contention. There was the strangest fucking reports on it. Everytime I came up with a reason for it, something would come in to prove that was not the case. Roll around the end of the day, and we have gotten no-where with it and I mean no-where. So a few of us carry on and spend the next 3 fucking hours and on a Friday night bashing our heads off the wall, brainstorming, looking at code (we are talking sheets of paper and highlighters here), all to no avail. Sure we found a couple of minor things which we’ll address on Monday but not a single reason for what was going on. Around 9pm, we gave up on orders from management to go home. The problem seemed to be dropping off and indeed I’ve just checked my mail and it’s quiet today but I still don’t have a fucking clue what caused it. I don’t even have anything improbable to go on. One thing it did really flag is that we need some serious work on our escalation policies. The three of us who were there working on it, well we weren’t the ones that should have been doing that and yet somehow we got dragged into it. That’s another one for Monday morning.

It bugs me and it’s going to bug me until I find out what it was, I really hate when I get involved in trying to solve a problem like that and not either being able to solve it, or find out what it actaully was. So yeah, it’s going to bug me.

On a similar line of work related thought. Brand is a huge word. I’ve only really picked up on that in the past year or so. It’s interesting to have to think about the brand from the behind the scenes point of view. I am generally not too pushed about brands. Apple probably being the biggest exception. I can’t think of a higher quality tech brand, nevermind more inovative. Lots of people mention Nokia in the same breath and it may well just be my lack of interest in mobiles, but I don’t see it. They make decent phones but that’s really it. There isn’t a huge amount of inovation product or brand wise. I thought I had alot more on this but I don’t seem to.

Music, segue. I fucking love it. I love it when a piece of music just moves into the next one *perfectly*. Mars Volta was a good example of this last week. They just got on stage and played straight without a break between tracks or a single word for about 40 minutes. The songs (noise in some cases) just shifted together. They started, they played and the music changed from one into another and I fucking love it. Planxty from the Live 2004 cd are the ones which have really had me thinking about this. Track 12 starts off as The Raggle Taggle Gypsy and that plays on, then the finale on it shifts from being a finale to a build up and it’s Tabhair Dom do Lámh. I love it, it’s one of those perfect moments in music. There isn’t anything else but that transition, that segue. The skill it must take to be able to play and then to be able to play at such a level to go from one to another, it’s astounding. It’s just pure magic.

Luke, a friend from work was playing a DJ set a club off Oxford street last night and a few of us had promised to go along and support him. I had planned on going home and having some dinner and getting changed and then heading there but the work stuff changed all that. So I got there around 9 and we kept going until 3. He’s a House DJ and House is so not my style of music. It was, to be honest, not as bad as I was expecting and there were a couple of decent tunes. Luckily enough I was not alone in dissing the music so a couple of us just sat back with some drinks and chatted. I was really impressed by how good a DJ he was tho. It may have helped that the two warm ups were not brillant but Luke really got the crowd going. It was very easy to see that he was into it and pass that along. So it was all in all a good night. Which made two for two.

Thursday night was messy to say the least. Latymers in Hammersmith was the venue for St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. Lots and lots of Guinness and home around 1am. The nice Irishman behind the bar was passing out free shots and some of them went down really well. He just arrived at the table with a tray of them and left it there. All a good idea at the time. The music was Irish all night, there was much (really bad) singing along to anything from The Dubliners to U2. A good night with good company. A whole lot of people in pain on Friday morning. Such a good night tho. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and there was an great turnout.

Tonight is a birthday party for one of the lads. It’s just down the road in Camden but I’m thinking I really need to just arrive later. It started at 3 but I don’t think I’d survive a third night on the trot. So I’ll head down there later on.

Still no fucking KOTOR 2 patch despite lots of reports that it’s done. I’d really like to get playing it again.

I have written a comic script. Well, more precisily, I have adapted something for a comic strip. It’s small, just 5 pages and I have an artist ready to start drawing. It should go up here in a few weeks, I hope. I think it could come out quite well, Rich has expressed an interest in trying to draw a strip for a while and I’ve been meaning to get a script together for a while. I just need to get some panel layout down on paper and pass the whole thing onto him. Something to do tomorrow afternoon I suspect.

I have come to a decision, I know it’s a little early but I’m going to have a mid-life crisis. It may sound stupid, well forget may, it does sound stupid but of late I have increasingly been thinking about age, specifically mine and indeed everyone else around me. I really need to make a serious effort to focus less on living for today and more on living for tomorrow. I do the former really well, I don’t really do the latter at all and I should. It’s really stupid and I think I know what brought all of this on bit it’s still been in my thoughts alot. In fact it was a pretty big discussion on Thursday night although after lots of pints it kinda meandered along a bit too much. So anyway, time is fleeting.

Fucking Blogger is really sucking these days. It takes sometimes 20 minutes to get it to post and then it does it 3 times. I’ve been using Moveable Type i work for some stuff and I really wish fucking Readyhosting would support it’s requirements so I could change over to that. I have to take the del.ico.us stuff off the side, I’m not using it enough.

So here’s a cool link relating right back to the first couple of paragraphs:13 things that do not make sense.
It goes without saying that number one should be women. I assume this is just an oversight and will be corrected shortly.

Party time.

Brand.
Married.
Age.
Outage.
Holmes Quote.
Past possibilities.
Friends.
Good nights.
Love.

I can’t type now, it’s way too fucking late. Tomorrow…maybe.

Last night. I wish I could say that it went downhill after the tray of shots arrived, but by then, well the singing had already started.

A good good night.

I had a demo scheduled from 12 – 1 today. It went really well but it overran quite a bit so I didn’t get to lunch until around 1.30. We decided to wander to Tescos and then sit in the park with a sandwich as it was a lovely do.

However it was agreed that it would be just rude to pass the pub with decent beer garden and not have a Guinness. I’m never one for being rude.

And now this evening. A whole lot of the people around here are turning out for what promises to be a long and messy yet fun evening of sculling Guinness.

May the road rise up etc etc etc. I’ll be in the pub. Tomorrow morning’s going to hurt and I just offered well more got enlisted to attend a two hour meeting on Safety and Security strategy over lunch time tomorrow. Must remember painkillers for the morning, and perhaps a new liver.

“People are defined by three things. Their heads- how they think. Their hearts- what they feel. Their dicks- who they fuck. At the end of the day, each of us has to answer one question. One, not so simple question. Who am I?”

Oz