Author: davebushe

After over a week out of the office, I’m back at my desk this morning and it doesn’t even feel like I’ve been gone. By 11.30 I have no motivation as usual. I do have a deluge of email to work through, I’ve gotten through the important parts and I have a 1 to 1 with my boss this afternoon so that should cover the rest.

While I was waiting for my email to finish downloading (25 fucking minutes), my sister sent me an IM. Turns out she ran into someone I was in school with in Tokyo of all places, and he recognised her. I’ve not seen him in around 7 years, and when he last saw my sister it would have been at least 7 years ago and she’d have been 3 classes below. Small small world.

Yesterday was a long day. I got up early to head into town to the St. Patricks Day Festival and spent the afternoon listening to some live Irish music. It was good fun throughout. Then off to Brixton to see The Mars Volta. That was an expierence. I don’t think I’d go and see them again but I’m glad I did.

I really hate that point in a day dream when there is a sudden realisation that all it is is a daydream and it’s fairly ludicrous. Really, really hate that moment.

By about 3pm today I was very very bored. So I figured I’d go out for a walk with my camera. I’ve lived next to Regent’s Park for over a year and never even been into it. So I spent about 90 minutes wandering. Not many photos, nothing jumped out but it was a nice enough walk.

When I first got there, I had to walk past the Zoo for about 10 minutes to get into the Park itself. I don’t remember the last time I was in a zoo and I was going to go in and spend some time there. At least I was till I found it it was £14 just to get in. A little more than I was prepared to pay and so I just walked and walked.

I got home and Alex suggested pub this evening so I’ve texted the troops and will be heading up to the Washington after dinner. It shall be a light evening for me anyway, I’m not really in the mood for pub but it shall be a better evening than anything else I was able to come up with.

Being an idiot I headed straigt to the Tate Modern this afternoon. I got there and got inside to find all of the ticketing offices closed and no signs up at all for the directions to my exhibt. A quick scoot around found a poster for, and some directions on how to get to the Tate Britain about 7 tube stops away. Good thing I had allowed a whole lot of extra time for walking around and taking photos. So I made it on time no problem at all.

It was a good exhibit, I don’t know anything about art other than what I like. Turner’s work overall was the most impressive of the three. I liked his paintings of the burning of the Houses of Parliament alot, Monet’s 4 afternoon paintings were also excellent. For single paintings, Monet’s Venice at Dusk is deserved of it’s fame but the single painting to jump out and hit hard was also Monet’s ; Waterloo Bridge: Sun in the Fog. It’s not something that images do justice to. I like it alot.

I’m still not feeling 100% so I figured I’d take the riverboat back to the Tate Modern and continue with the planned photo taking. I hadn’t realised how cheap it actually is. Not all that much more than the tube and somewhat more plesant! As soon as we got moving it brought a rush of memories back. The last time I had been on a boat was in Tokyo in November 2002. For some reason I just flashed back to that bigtime. Anyway that was good and I wandered around for a few hours taking photos. Nothing major and all are up on Flickr already. Not that many photos but I did walk for 3 or 4 hours which was nice given I’ve been cooped up at home most of the week.

I’m pretty tired as a result and will crash pretty soon.

It’s Friday now. The week is finally over and it’s not been a good week. I’ve missed two gigs because of this fucking cold so I’m not impressed. I had today off work anyway. I’m booked into to see the “Turner, Whistler, Monet” exhibt at the Tate this lunchtime. I’m going along to that and I hope to spend some time wandering around the Tate and taking some photos. So update on Flickr later.

I hate been off work for so long. Aside from having to catchup on everything when I get back, everything seems to happen when I’m not around. I met a friend to hand over the tickets on Wednesday and he filled me in. Sounds like lots of hopes have just been dashed. So there is the joy of that to go back to. Yay 🙁

I’ve been mainly doing two things this week. Playing games and watching some DVD’s. Neil lent me the first two seasons of Oz recently and I finally got around to watching them. Excellent stuff. HBO seem to just have this knack for doing drama and doing it well. For a first drama show, it certainly laid a whole lot of groundwork to get more out the door. I shall have to track down some more seasons. Speaking of HBO, the new season of Deadwood is excellent. So good, such a good cast. Looking forward to more of this a whole lot.

Games wise, I succumbed to Knights of The Old Republic 2 and my god is it buggy. It’s a whole lot of fun when it works but talk about your rushed release. I have to wonder what sort of QA was done on this. Not just minor bugs but I don’t think I can actually go any further in the game as I wasn’t offered a quest that I need. It’s huge fun when it works as you would expect from a game which lets you build your own lightsabre but so buggy. I’m not going to be happy if I can’t play more till the patch comes out.

And on a similar note the trailer for Episode III finally graces the public. I’ve been waiting to mention this for a while. It’s good, it could even be very good but ya know we have all been here before. The movie isn’t going to live up to it so drop those hopes right back into the pit where they belong.

Now I gotta go to get to the Tate.

Welcome to Saturday night at home not feeling well instead of being out with say a lovely young lady.

*sigh*

I only know it’s Saturday night because my flatmate told me just before she went out. I left work early yesterday not feeling well at all and went home to bed On the way I stopped off to pick up some night nurse to help me sleep. My head was so bad that I had to unplug my radio alarm clock as it was too bright. So I went to bed around 5.30 having taken about a dose and a half of night nurse. Well that did two things. The first one, it knocked me the fuck out. I slept pretty much straight away until 11.00 the next morning. It was a good sleep. The second thing it did and man did it do this, dreams, I dreamed like I hadn’t in a long time. So real, so vivid, and so solid in my memory. The strange thing is one of them was perfectly normal and wasn’t so much a dream as a dream about me sorting something out. The second was way out there but no less real at the time. The first (naturally) links directly to my life, the second not so much. That was the note to self I left earlier to write about.

I seem to have kicked off a flickr craze. It’s shot around the office and my family and lots of people upping to pro. Glad to see it, it’s a good service and deserves some support.

I played some CoH today, more than I intended infact. I just completed The Manticore TF. It was pretty easy overall, shame the team was bit loopy otherwise we’d have had no deaths at all. Mainly fun. I’ll ding 36 soon.

I’ve also caught up on a whole lot of TV Lost has cemented itself nicely as the best thing on television. So well written and so well acted. Show of the year without a doubt. 24 continues to entertain which is good. It’s fun, a whole lot more than the last season. Alias has picked up with the two parter and that was fun for a change. The show was broken because the arc was too over-blown, the solution was not to remove the arc (and the fans 3 year investment!) but to scale it back and find a balance. I’m hoping they’ll keep this up.
And I love the internet. Screener DVD’s of the first two episodes of season 4 of The Shield. Most importantly, Glenn Close NOT annoying! A good character and a good performance. She takes nothing from the show and seems to add a whole lot. Two fun episodes nicely showing the new status quo and setting up the season ahead. I’m glad. I was worried this would tank after 3 excellent seasons.

Note to self for next time. “Death Of Superman”, CoH, capes and fly.

Now I’m going to bed.

Dreams, they complicate my life.

I realised late last night what the answer to the 64 thousand dollar question is.

It can be easily summed up by a Radiohead lyric, and indeed a song (right till the end anyway).

Fitter
Happier
More productive

Last night, I saw Festen at the Lyric West End. It was an excellent production, the cast were all excellent. I can’t really say I enjoyed it and I don’t think you are suppose to enjoy it. I’m very curious to see the film it was based on. Some of it seemed really out of place. Bringing the sisters boyfriend into it felt like it was jammed in so there could be some levity allowed with the racist jokes. It didn’t add anything to the play, in fact I thought it took a whole lot away. There was a very subtle underplaying with by Patrick Robinson that he was the outsider watching what was going on and not knowing what to do but that didn’t actually lead anywhere. I do hope it wasn’t forced in for levity but I have my doubts. Well worth seeing, although most definitely not something for a date!

I finished Cryptonomicon last night. I had about 100 paged to go at 12.30 when I was going to get some sleep but I was enjoying it and I wanted to finish it. I’m disappointed and underwhealmed by the ending. It took so long to tie it all together as just being a treasure hunt. There was so much build-up throughout the first 700 pages and then so little payoff. I really liked some of the characters and I really liked some of the writing, in fact there was an excellent excellent 400 page novel sitting in there. I do have another couple of his books but I’m going to have to take a break and read a few more lighter pieces in, good thing I hit Borders late last night on the way home. Not that I really needed to, but I like getting new books.

The new Mars Volta album arrived this morning and it suffers from many of the same problems. If ever there was an argument against self-production, it’s this. Some really good bits dying to get out among what in some places degenerates into noise. I generally have headphones on in work and sometimes don’t even notice what I’m listening to, but this actively pulled me out and annoyed me a whole lot that I had to turn it off before even making it to the end. It may well just require a full sit down and listen but I don’t know if I can approach that again anytime soon. Not sold on first listen at all. I’m hoping it will work better live in a couple of weeks time.

Flickr, I upped to Pro and I’m actively putting lots of photos up there. Archives as far back as a trip to Japan in 2002 and I hope to put stuff up there on a more regular basis. Unsurprisingly, my username is davebushe. My sisters joined up and is uploading hundreds of snow festival and fire festival and other photos. Seems she has a backlog of thousands that she never got around to organisiing. My parents have signed up aswell, just to be able to see what we have to post. They get the family catagory from the both of us while we fall into each others friends and family catagories. Some photos

And now the pub. Then home for a quiet night.

Pool last night was fairly dire to say the least. A single win at 9 ball which was really only as the result of a very unlucky foul. A fun night tho with lots of beer.

This week has been strange. Two good lunches so far. Most days I play chess with Dave and it’s fun, I enjoy it. We are both getting better but we only play for fun. Fridays is nominally team lunch day but that is more often than not just a couple of us.

Yesterday I ended up in a Weatherspoons for lunch and it was surprisingly nice, really nice. They seem to have done their food up a good bit and I was very impressed. We only went there as it was away from the office and a nice change but I’ll be going back on a much more regular basis. Today was a followup to Friday where we went out for Pizza for a birthday lunch. It was good fun with really good company. So yay. Chess tomorrow and then there is another lunch on Thursday which it’s starting to look like I’ll actually be attending.

It’s still embaressing photos ahoy around here. Yet another camera from Saturday night has appeared and there are over 200, possibly closer to 300 photos form it. Most are shit but have much merit depicting some friends having a good time. Others are not so shit and are in fact really quite sweet. Then there are the who are those people we are with and the OMG WTF moments. Probably safe to say some of those won’t be making it up to flickr.

Interupted. More later.

In the cold harsh light of Monday morning, there are a whole lot of photos from Friday night. Some of them are really good, some of them are not so. They’ll be up on My Flickr profile tomorrow and some may go up here depending on how much effort I put into them. A few need cleaning up but on the whole it’s a nice set with some friends having fun…and drinking alot.

I tag most things on flickr as friend only so you’ll have to be a contact to see the good ones. There are 99 from me to go up and another 60 from a friend here which I shall probably add up too. Some chaff but lots of wheat. It’s made the morning far more bearable here, there has been a lot of gathering and laughing at them. Some are really awful in a funny way and some are really quite sweet.

I’m liking my little camera quite a bit. I need to be doing some more stuff with it. I have gotten into the habit of carrying it, but not of ya know using it.

The rest of the weekend was quiet. Went along to Alex’s birthday party for a while on Saturday night but I really wasn’t in the mood so didn’t stay for too long. Tonight is V poll where I expect to loose pretty badly but it should be fun. Fun evening.

I finally got around to watching some of the Des Bishop DVD’s I picked up last time I was in Dublin. The standup was very funny in places and I’d like to get to see him live sometime. The RTE show I’m not sure on at all. The gist of it is a documentary following Des around while he spends a month working and living on minimum wage. Some of it goes as far as to be harrowing and in places resonates a little too closely, but it’s sometimes hard to forget that despite you see him suffering and surviving on very little cash, he’s a (presumably) well paid comedian making a TV show. It doesn’t always take away from it, and don’t get me wrong I think what is on screen is pretty genuine it’s just a little hard to feel so sorry for him…sometimes. Othertime’s it’s easy, too easy. Last episode to watch tonight after pool.

Optimism. It’s such a strange and unfamiliar feeling. And yet there it is, bubbling below the surface, well it’s way more than bubbling, it’s running rampant and it *really* needs to be slapped down. Or something along those lines.

I’m listening to, and enjoying the new Moby album a whole lot. I’m not sure it’s going to last more than a few listens, it’s catchy stuff possibly just fluff. I liked Play a whole lot. It’s overplayed because of the ad sales of course but it’s got some excellent tracks on there. 18 had some good moments but overall not as good an album. I think this one will fall in between that somewhere. I’d love to have gotten tickets to see him at Garage. I saw him at a big stadium a couple of years ago and it wasn’t bad, in as small a venue as the Garage, I’d say he would be excellent.

I’m loving Firefox more and more. It’s a fine fine browser and this particular extension is rapidly proving it’s worth Ad Block. It does exactly what it says on the tin but it does it really well. It’s wildcard blocking is really nice, just load up a few of the top level domains and band ads across the board just disappear. It has the added option of a flash overlay for easy right-click and block. I like that so much. My auto-update does not seem to be working tho. I know that 1.0.1 is out but I don’t seem to get anything when I go looking. It may well be due to language packs. I don’t want to do a manual install as I’ll overwrite all of my plugins.