Month: May 2005

Not as badly as I thought I would be. I wasn’t looking forward to today so much, I’m taking on a lot of extra stuff for the next couple of months covering a colleague who is away. I’m already covering quite a bit of other new stuff and every now and again it feels like it’s going to overwhelm me, it never does and it’s not just all for me, there is another person doing it with me and more support than I could possibly ask for from the rest of the team which rocks.

So it didn’t start too well this morning, there was an email already mentioning that a report was a day overdue. It was of course a bank holiday here and that was fine but it didn’t help that I did not even know what was meant to be in the bloody report. It took a while on the phone to figure out where I was. I should have made sure I was copied on everything from a week ago so I knew what I had to build on. Ah well, I got it all forwarded onto me and then I was able to sort it out.

I’m a lot less stressed now than I was, I’ve spent the day working on both of these other projects and so far so good. Everything I need to do is done and done pretty well I think. I probably had no real reason to stress and indeed I probably don’t have any reason to still do so, but it never really works like that. I’m going to stress anyway, that’s just me!

At the same time, it’s nice knowing that I’ve made it through day one and it’s all gone well. OK so it’s not much but it’s meetings and calls and people and deadlines and information sharing and other such fun, it’s business as usual but most importantly, nothing went wrong and so thusly I shall continue.

The weekend was good. Friday was a couple of very quiet drinks with various people in various places. It was really nice outside and so we all sat out and chatted which was good. Saturday I wandered around for a while and picked up some comics for the first time in a while. Nothing much of any interest and I’m really going to cut back on what I’m reading. As soon as Bendis on Daredevil is over, it’s the end of singles for me.

Saturday night…well that was messy. A few of us hit The Ship for Guinness, good music and good company and all three were plentiful. Then Neil and I carried on in Crowbar just up the road. I had no cash left on me at that stage so I was using plastic…and of course there was a minimum. So a couple of rounds in there meant bourbon shots and my god did I feel it. Around 2am Neil was heading off, I had a half a bottle left and decided I would stay on to finish it. I stood up from the wall I was leaning against and the entire room spun really really badly. So I got out of there and struggled home. Sunday morning, painful…well…make that Sunday afternoon.

A couple of quiet drinks with Alex that evening which was nice as we haven’t been out for a catch-up in a while and then an earlyish night.

Monday, just general faffing around before meeting Alastair and another friend for a preview of Sin City which was excellent. I enjoyed it a whole lot, nothing quite looks like it and the visuals were every bit as good as expected. Cast were all excellent and some seemed to be having whole lots of fun with it. Over around 9, a single pint for a post-mortem and then an early night to bed…

Except that I was bored and I logged into CoH…*ding* 38. I have no idea what power I want. I think this is going to have to go to test and then perhaps a respec. I don’t want more toggles but I may be very limited in my choices.

Tonight, out to dinner after work and then it’s Wednesday already!

Ok so the current PPPoA network in the UK is being toned down at the moment and PPPoE is having it’s day. It’s a simple update to the modem drivers and that one has gone fine on two computers.

But it’s completely fucked what I laughingly refer to as the network here. My computer has the modem in a USB port and it does all the connection. Then a network cable runs into a hub and then Alex gets a cable from the hub and all is good.

Your typical gateway setup, I’m 192.168.0.1 on 255.255.255.0 and she’s 192.168.0.2 and uses mine as a gateway. ICS is all up and running the PPPoE connection is shared and once that’s active it creates the LAN and bingo things are away.

Except Alex’s computer can’t see a single thing. I can’t ping anything, I can’t get any sort of connectivity yet it insists it has a network connection and all is fine. If the internet connection is not active on my machine, her laptop will call it…despite as far as I can tell it not acknowledging any connection.

Is there something I’m missing with ICS through PPPoE?

Yes I know I should just get a router but why bother spending the money when it’s perfectly workable this way (in theory…)

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/ has updated.

Go.

I’ve been thinking about a phrase Dave used “the culture I inhabit” and something just struck me and it’s maybe one of the things that I was trying to get across.

Back when, it was the culture that brought people together and the culture that mattered.

Now, the culture brings people together but it doesn’t matter at all, it’s the friends that matter.

And that is a big difference that I am disapointed not everyone has learnt.

At the end of the day, I think I’m just disapointed.

I expected better.

Queen Adreena in Islington Acadamey last night were excellent. Lots of fun, lots of thrashing, lots of loud music.

A good couple of pints before hand and still home by a reasonable hour.

It was all good 🙂

Ok cool.
Fly London to Glasgow on Monday the 20th
Fly Glasgow to Dublin on Thursday the 23rd
Fly Dublin to London on Tuesday the 28th.

All booked and the times I good and I am sorted for that.

Everything is sorted for Download and that’s all good.

Yay for an organisational morning!

Perhaps a litte cranky later in the evening’s at the moment…

Sometimes I laugh at my friend Mary. She has this thing about being an empath and various things along those lines. Often I laugh at her but every now and again something connects and I think she might be right.

Today has been one of those days. When I’m not feeling well and so not in work I do two things as standard. I leave my phone off and I block pretty much everyone on IM. I leave open family and a few close friends and that’s about it. It’s just so that I can get on with not working really so that if I want to just fuck around online for a while I don’t get bothered. Most people can’t tell that I’m not at my desk if I’m online and an annoying number of people use my home IM in work. (Note that doesn’t mean my friends, it’s just the people who assume it’s my work im…like those nice pro net people for example).

Anyway after that little aside its’ been one of those days because two people got in touch out of the blue. Both of whom had something related to them in that spiel last night and both of whom passed through (or sat rock steady in) my thoughts for a while.

Strange.

Family are starting to report in. I’ve heard from several of my cousins today and they are running through the photos. Hopefully I’ll have them all labeled soon. Some of them are excellent photographs in themselves. Others just astound me, the amount the world has changed since the middle of last century is just plain astounding.

Work tomorrow. Queen Adreena in the evening and then it’s Thursday and everything should settle back into it’s swing. Hurrah.

Fandom, god I hate fandoms. They really hack me off every now and again. Sometimes I just want to go somewhere and read something about a show I like. And I do, I use the very sane All TV alongside the V and it’s good stuff. The Buffy nerds go OTT every now and again but at the end of the day a) I’m one of them and b) they get slapped down. But in general, there is no fandom there, it’s just a few people hanging out talking about a show they like.

Every now and again I poke my head around LJ for stuff and it pisses me off every time. There is a time and a place for fandom, it’s your early teens. Every single other part of it needs to just grow the fuck up. None of it is worth it, none of it. It actually doesn’t take long to learn this. I don’t know what it was for me. I don’t know if it was just the time where I was seeing such a change in my life, moving to London being the big one there and striking out on my own as they say. I still like everything I liked, I still like Star Trek and I probably always will but my god no-one has to live with the trappings that seemed to come with it. There is nothing that I care about enough to go out and watch episodes at a con or a meeting or anything like that. If I can’t get them through current channels then I’ll just get them from a friend or wait and enjoy a DVD box set.

That has me thinking. I always thought, and it was a common viewpoint at the time…at least I thought it was but what did I really know back then…that the Dublin meetings all died off because of lack of advertising and so lack of new blood.

In hindsight that was wrong. There is no new blood. There was an artificial bump because of Buffy but that soon died. There is no killer app for it, there was somewhat of one within the social scene but that didn’t mean paying into a hall, that meant paying at the bar for a drink and ya know socialising.

I wonder if perhaps in the long run, those friends of mine did me a favour. I wonder if that was a start of some sort, a wake up call?

I don’t know. I know that I had fun and I never lost any money on it and I have some good memories and I still have some good friends. At the end of the day, you know I really can’t complain about that. What’s more I’ve gained some friends or perhaps regained but certainly built a real friendship with some people from back then in recent years and I’m very very grateful for that. It’s funny that whole thing still when I think about it. It’s not often, I’ll just see something or my I’ll pass by the cons section within my bookmarks and that’s that.

It’s all good as they say, it’s all good.

Don’t even get me started on fucking fanfic, at least when we throw ‘Mary Sue’ ism’s at Ellis or the like they are getting paid to write. The best thing ever about fanfic came from a discussion on the V where one of the regs was telling the story of a fic circle his wife ran in. There was an argument about someone having used a character someone else created within their permission and the following quote is attributed:

“It is not acceptable to use someone else’s character EVER. They don’t belong to you. It’s unprofessional and nobody who would call themselves a writer should EVER do steal someone else’s characters for their own stories.”

The mind fucking boggles, BOGGLES! And yet (watch me tar here) that is how I would see most fanfic writers. Ok it’s a very broad taring but ya know what fuck it. If you have a story to tell about two characters and it’s a *good enough* story, you should be able to write it around two original characters. Is that so hard? I’m sure there are talented writers out there doing fanfic, it’s just such a waste.

So, on that one, to sum up and in short; grow the fuck up children!

– That all started as a little bullet point…it carried on.

– Yet again, I was going to bed hours ago and I wanted to get the first couple of paragraphs down and it just carried on.

– Sometimes I have no idea where my head is at or what brings it there. It just seems to flow along wherever it wants to. I don’t know what strikes it off, or what makes the connections but all of a sudden boom, all of my thoughts are consumed and I don’t know how to get out of it.

– 24 is bag loads of awesome. So stupid, so much fun. I must go and write some fanfic now about the continuing adventures of Jack Bruce Bauer Banner!

– See how I worked a nerdy joke in there? It’s not mine, I stole it from All TV it was probably Dan, he’s funny like that.

– You know, I was actually thinking about going to a con earlier today. Nothing in specific and not to the actual con, but to the bar if some of the old crowd were going along. I must have been having a mad moment.

– And I hit a browser window for a break for a mo and the mood has just gone and died.

To sleep, perchance to dream…

My mind is all over the place today. I could blame it on not feeling so well but I don’t think that’s it. I don’t know what it is tho.

Lets see:

– There are two people that I dread ending up like. I’m fairly sure I won’t but the idea scares me.

– Sometimes I do wonder about brutal honesty, would it make things easier? Would it even change anything? Is it worth it? Does anything need changing?

– Veronica Mars is fun. It’s not as good as it’s talked up but it’s quite witty and amusing and I like that.

– Today, the music has been the 22/20s. Good stuff, better live.

– I did the washing up, I did some washing and I cleaned up around my computer. I feel like I accomplished a lot and yet I did not.

– Episodes IV, V and VI are excellent. VI is under-rated. I did rewatch them over the weekend and enjoyed the hell out of them.

– I struggle to imagine being with someone for years, nevermind decades. Photos of my grandparents getting married in 1942 hit me, that’s such a long time. Also, they looked good, really good.

– Sometimes I do wish I was closer to my family, most of them are good people.

– I need to take more photos, I need to make an effort.

– Karaoke, I dread the very word but it may be unavoidable.

– This week gets stressey planning wise. I need to sort out lots and lots of things. Scotland and Dublin to start with. I may have to drop Edinburgh, I don’t know if I have the time.

– I need more space. If I had somewhere to put my crap, I’d do so much better. I really just need to buy shelves and more shelves.

– I really should get around to dumping some comics on eBay.

– I can’t find my copy of Pete Milligan’s Enigma, I think I may have lent it to someone, although I should ask my flatmate. I want to re-read it quite badly.

– Apparently there was a big Buddhist festival yesterday, I have been promised more quotes. Maybe one of them will answer everything with something that makes a little more sense than 42.

– Just talk. It’s really that simple. Unless you have come to a decision (and it’s possible) to give up and walk away from something or someone, then just talk. Don’t assume, ask. Ask and be patient. Strange a concept as it is (and it is), not everyone works in the same time as anyone else.

– Just talk, if only it were that simple.

– Ha, the song conspires with me. “Hold on, to the thing that you love, hold on”.

– Queen Adreena on Wednesday night out in Angel. Should be fun I think. A couple of solid tracks at the least. Ugh I have to get in early Wednesday morning to leave early. I really hope I’m feeling better for that, either way has to be bed early tomorrow night.

– Oh, yes. Welcome to the wonderful world of being a grown up. It’s not anything to know that someone finds someone physically attractive. Everyone is past the point where that’s worthy of oh, I don’t know, tattle I guess. That sorta thing ended in school.

– Struggling to find something to read prose and comic wise. I know what I want…kinda but I don’t have anything to deliver it.

– Why can I not survive without coke in the office but I barely touch the stuff at home?

– I guess the answer to my email was a short and sharp “no”.

– Can anything just stop? Short of death, is there a stop?

– Disassociation. It’s a good word.

– I have had a life recently as my flatmate but it. I need to continue with this.

– The theatre is calling. When I get paid later in the week, I should do a ticket roundup.

– No music, no life. Everything sounds better live.

– I should sleep, it might help settle my stomach.

– I really don’t like seeing doctors. I don’t know why. I’ve never had a particularly bad experience with them (they may have had with me…) and it’s generally been good news but it just seems like it’s always bad. I hate it. But on the other hand it’s always nice to get good news from them, sometimes it’s really really fucking nice.

– Live fast, die young. When does the living fast begin?

– Oh man oh man. If I had the money I would like nothing more than to just walk out the door tomorrow and go somewhere and keep going. A note and an email to say I’m away for a while and then the wide open road. I’d need my camera and someway of blogging and posting photos but man I would be gone like a shot. I don’t care for how long, just a few months of me and the world. That would rock so much, maybe someday…

– It’s my current mood but it’s scary how much someone can mean so quickly.

– I need a proper monitor stand at home. I really should have some wrist rests too, I’m really getting to fear RSI greatly.

– Dublin’s calling but it’s a siren song.

– Something that has always and continues to astound me; languages. I get the general idea and I can speak 3 enough to get by but what I can’t even understand is thinking in another language. I know that’s meant to be the definition of fluency but it astounds me to think that someone can think of something and form words or ideas or anything like that in anything but English.

– Which reminds me. I don’t care what the language of the internet is. I think that some aspects of localisation and internationalisation are a waste of time. I, as someone whose first language is not their own especially don’t feel it is worth fighting for in many cases. For anyone whose language is not English (any countries version), absolutely. L10n and i18n should be done 110% but for any English language, fuck that, it’s a waste of time and resources. I don’t wait, I gain nothing by waiting for an EN_GB or EN_IE version. I get my software as and when and I get using.

– Love Movies, Hate Piracy. Sure, no problem but only when you get it into your think skulls that in order to combat piracy you need to play in the global market. Don’t delay something by 2 months (Sin fucking City) outside of the US, it just encourages piracy and rightly so. Why should I wait? What do I gain? Love Movies sure, now show some love back.

– Ugh so about that sleeping…

– It has been a while since I typed like this and it’s taken me about 40 minutes. I like it and I miss it.

– Now to really sleep.