Author: davebushe

Word of yesterday: Obfuscate.

Word of the day: pretentious.

I have another idea, but it’s very very pretentious. I may do it anyway.

I am annoyed.

Look to your own people to support you before you go and ask the world. There is no need for anything like that when if you simply talked to your points of contact here we could have cleared it up within moments.

Waste of time and effort and resources. After all, that’s what some of us are here for.

Fuckers.

I must admit, I thought it would last longer than this. Morale has dropped like a fucking stone around here. Seems the office change is just going to make the day a little easier but not have anything like enough effect to really help us out.

We are hiring around here at the moment. It’s an interesting position, nothing even worth applying for, I’d be laughed out the door but the long term goal of it is to change that and I like that. I don’t have a huge amount of faith in it but then again I’m somewhat of a cynic. Perhaps too much as it’s certainly a label I have around here but as I do say, I’m never really wrong about it 🙁

Strange day here. Been all over the place really and it’s showing music wise. I’d love to have just put my feet up and read for the afternoon but that sorta things is fairly frowned upon so I couldn’t really.

I aim, like last time, to take advantage of the fact my flatmate is away have a big cleanout. It’s added to this time that I want to get a whole lot of my comics into order and to flog some of them on ebay. Most of what I really liked I have replaced in trades already and I intend to with so many others. Ah the joys of comics. I also really really need to get some shelves in and get things into order. I have overflows on DVD, books and on CDs and it’s all really bugging me.

I just got an email from a friend, one in an ongoing conversation. Sometimes I forget that I know some scarily smart people. I guess it’s not all rocket science but the things that perhaps make perfect sense if I *think* about them just come so naturally to others. Almost spot on to, in a scary but also not quite so bad way. I just don’t know. Sometimes, I just don’t know. Apparently I worry too much, sometimes I think I don’t worry enough.

Perhaps it’s just worrying about the wrong thing. Sometimes I do a whole lot of that.

Man it’s quiet around here. It’s actually not, we are back in the ignorant fool country. If you have an office, the door is there for a reason. I hate people who have all their meetings loudly with the door open. It’s not good. So lots of headphones but there always was. In a space where there was 6 of us last week, there are now 2. So much more spread out and much less noise to signal as perhaps some could accused of being. So I like that, the idea of having some personal space again is quite nice.

Gah. I need to get home and walk Hebe. I also need to find something to do. I should watch a movie. For some reason I rarely sit around at home reading. I guess it’s having the computer there and so many things I can do to waste time on there. Every now and again I’ll read in my room but not enough.

I have to have a holiday this year. I am unsure I can afford it but it has to happen. It just has to happen. I need to sort everything out and put aside some extra money for a few months. Getting the ipod dented my reserves. It should be a very simple matter like so many other things, it never is.

It always taunts on the horizon and then other things just fall into place and it’s all crashing down. I have to get Dublin, Download, Scotland and Dublin out of the way and then the rest of the year is pretty clear event wise. So perhaps later in the year, October is the aim I can leave the country and see some more of the world. I don’t know where, I really don’t. France or America/Canada are big possibilities but at the same time I want more, give me more!

Sod it, they’ll fall as they do and I’ll pick them up and restack them as I always do. Welcome to my life.

Word of today is most certainly: arbitrary.

Sometimes I know exactly what I’m going to sit down and type here.
Sometimes it haunts me until I am able to sit down and type it.
Sometimes I plan it out for hours before hand, usually while I’m walking.
Othertimes I just sit down to type and a somewhat orderless flow of thoughts hit the page.

Last night, definitely one of the latter.

First off, two of you lazy fuckers spent too much time on here in the office today! Do some fucking work for fuck sake! I can be pretty sure who one of you is, the other confuses me. The two prime suspects don’t fit and I’m trying to figure out if the third one does. I wonder if I put comments back on and make some comment about S Club 7 will I suddenly find out for sure that my boss is reading this..again.

Anyway.

So I’m not quite sure where I am.

This morning was office move and it went pretty badly actually. It took till well after midday to get one of my machines up and running, the other two are still down tonight. But you know what, I don’t care. It’s so nice to be back in the real office after 10 months of hell in the rented area.

The mood shift within the team has been astounding, I do wonder how long it will last but my god there may be some happiness going in there. At some stages throughout the day it did feel like we had never left. Coming back from lunch was just autopilot, down to the spot I usually tap on Strev’s desk on the way in. So that’s all good.

***

I’ve just read Blanketmen by Richard O’Rawe. He was one of the senior IRA commanders in the H-Block during the now legendary hunger strikes of the early ’80s. It’s spectacularly easy to read style wise, content wise it’s pretty damn tough in places. Some of the content, indeed some of the main thrust of the books has stirred up quite a bit of controversy, perhaps that was some of the point. The author’s epilogue, his stated reasons for writing the book are painful to read and indeed read as honest and sincere but I don’t think that I can take away from it that the IRA Council sacrificed so many of their men for political gain. Not the IRA of the 80’s, not the IRA of anytime. It doesn’t fit. It’s a fascinating view of Gerry Adams back then in places, and that’s another huge debate. So it’s only fitting that I’m following it with his Hope and History: Making Peace in Ireland, the first chapter of which deals with the very same subject.

It’s funny, it’s a whole lot of things more than funny, perhaps mainly sad, but a turn of a page can go from such sadness at a death or even the treatment of a person to, I don’t know if happiness is the word but I’m going to use it anyway, happiness at the death of another.

I was going to follow that by saying
“Can you admire someone for doing something for a reason and despise another for doing the same thing for the same reason?”

But you know what, you look at the world today and I think the answer is clear. Ok scrap that, it’s not clear at all but you can’t argue with anyone fighting to free their country, you just can’t. Terrorism and all that becomes a whole lot more acceptable against a foreign invader, it becomes something else entirely. Guerrilla warfare does not equal terrorism, the words, the actions, the everything, they are not interchangeable, they are not. Freedom fighters over the years have been called terrorists until they achieve that freedom.

It’s scary to think how this was within the last 20 years. It’s just madness what the British got away with. Then again, I guess the Americans are getting away with it right now.

Way to deep for much more, probably past that point though. I don’t know if I can order my thoughts in anyway on the matter, on a way that I can live with them myself and a way that I can then explain them. The

***

Alex has gone back to the US for a couple of weeks. So poor Hebe is stuck with me. She’s lost at the best of times but without Alex around she is so completely lost. She just sits around (more than usual) waiting for her to come in. Looking in her eyes at the best of times, the loneliness is so deep, adding to it must be a killer.

Pets *shrug* I dunno. The loneliness that we humans can feel is so massive, how much can our pets actually feel?

On another controversial topic, suicide. I have no problem with it. I see no reason at all for it not to be legal. If you really feel that bad and things are not going to get better then fuck what people say about maybe things getting better and you have all that to live for etc etc. There is only one person who can make that decision, and that’s you. I read somewhere a long time ago and it’s stuck with me that you should never kill yourself as long as there is a single person out there who cares for you because of the pain it would cause them. For a long time that was one of my core thoughts on suicide, well I’m not convinced it was, I think it floated into what I am trying to say now and it’s smart smart thinking but the very act of suicide is a selfish one. What else could it be? A selfless one ridding the world of waste? Bollocks to that, that’s just an excuse there is no reason to kill yourself because you think the world doesn’t want you, the reason is if you don’t want the world.

Note: not suicidal! I’ve been meaning to blog this for a long time. The last time I tried to write about it I heard that a friend of a friend had killed themselves and so it got shelved. I’m sure there will be a connection to someone somewhere again but I can’t help that.

So the Pope died. Big fucking deal, force for good and all that…or a force for anti-abortion, anti-condom (a bit hard to say thus pro-AIDS, but the thought has passed), anti-women conservative. Still a force for good, not so in my book.

Now I wonder if I can cover anything else likely to get me in hot water with *someone*

If I could get the actual thought process down onto the page, I don’t know if it would make any more sense. At least then I could play around with the order and ya know move some things around and make a nice straight line of thought.

I think, perhaps and I’m not sure on this but right now, this second it feels right, Ireland, my Ireland is an ideal and nothing more. The romantic vision I hold at times, is not the Ireland I left and isn’t the Ireland to which I will return.

I wish it were, man oh man do I wish it were, nothing would keep me away.

– I hate politics.
– I hate not being able to say what I think.
– I like nights out with good people.
– I don’t like not knowing how to build better relationships…indeed friendships with some of said people.
– I dislike not knowing what to say.
– I dislike knowing what to say but not knowing how.

I had to stop reading my book on the tube on the way home for fear of crying. I’ve stood in these spots, I’ve walked these streets and these heroes. These great great men and women stood there too, and then they died there.

I just don’t have the words.

At least it’s Thursday. The week has gone by pretty quickly. Which is good, I like 4 day weeks. I’m hoping for a big improvement around here next week, on Monday we move back to the main office out of the rented hell hole we have been in for about 9 months. In fact, we are going back to the desks we had just before we moved. So that’s good news, at the very least we should be all feeling a whole lot healthier.

I’m fighting with MySQL and Fedora Core 3. It should all be running but the system doesn’t even want to acknowledge it’s very presence. Annoying. Painful on my eyes too, I’m running through a switch box so I can’t actaully get correct drivers up and running so hello flickerville. I have a horrible powerpoint I have to review today and the very thought just makes my eyes hurt even more. Ugh.

Just one of those days I guess. I don’t quite know why but it seems to be gloomy all around.

I bought an iPod last night. 40gb photo version. To cut a long story short, my discman and a couple of CDs were stolen just after I had coffee with a friend. Of course they were the new CDs I had bought on Saturday and brought into work luckily enough to import so I have copies of them. About £40 worth of CDs and a broken shitty old discman. Insurance should cover it all. It makes me smile a little to think how happy they’ll be to have gotten away with a couple of old Irish folk music cds. Anyway my flatmate is off home to the US next week. I had planned on getting her to bring me an iPod back thus saving a good few quid because of stupidly high prices in the UK. But that would mean it would be 3 weeks before I had anything to listen to going to and from work and indeed anywhere else. So figuring the money I would save getting it from the US would be the cost of the CDs and a new discman again, I went to HMV

Apple are *so* good at design. Even opening the box was a thing of beauty so well laid out and put together, much kudos to them for that. I’ve filled it with 33gb now today between my work computer and my home computer. Quite impressed by the photo part. I only threw on a couple to see what it was like and it’s good quality, as good as what I see on my digital camera when I take one. So that’s cool. But it’s just a music player and that’s all it will ever be for me.

At this point tho, I would to state: THIEVING CUNTS!

Apparently carrying a camera all the time is freaky. I’m not using it as much as I’d like but it is there in my pocket anytime I do want to. Always handy for those kodak moments etc.

I managed to find away around my reading block too. I went to Borders and after a good 20 minutes moping around the fiction I hit upon history. So I’m reading Tim Pat Coogan’s 1916: The Easter Rising. He’s a great author and easily the foremost on modern Irish History. I’ve read several of his books to date and always enjoyed them. I also picked up Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures): True Stories From A Warzone as the cover caught my eye and it sounded interesting. So hopefully those two will get me back into the mood and I’ll get going again. I really wish I had not gotten that Richard Morgan preview, I’d have loved to pick it up last night or the time before and get stuck into it. Ah well.

Tonight, pool with the lads. It should be fun and so far we still have most people going along.

Flexibility.

It’s a big word. It’s used around here alot these days. We are having alot of internal talks on flexible working hours and work life balance and stuff like that. The most inflexible flexible working hours was introduced an hour ago, you could change your start time to be within a 2 hour period but you had to do it every day. So there was no way to say come in and leave an hour earlier on a Thursday if you wanted to do a course or anything like that. So pretty useless in my opinion anyway. But it’s getting better, lots more talking about it and it sounds like it might actually become a little more flexible which would be good.

The other way it’s been talked about or indeed around is the actual work. As far as I’m concerned you have to be flexible, you have to be able to give and take. You don’t just do exactly what it says on the piece of the paper and you fucking well don’t sit around and do nothing until you get that piece of paper. That really pisses me off. It then can become a nightmare to actually do anything and move forward and it wastes my time and everyone else’s time. I really hate it. CYA, bollocks just do your fucking job, it’s not up to me to tell you what that is, you know what it is and you know how to do it, so just fucking do it. Slightly annoyed by that one there as you may be able to tell.