It’s a quiet morning here on the third floor.

I have a nice new pencil.

I don’t like doctors. I’m sure it can all be traced to a bad experience I had with one when I was younger but that’s not in anyway an interesting story.

Today was not really a good day. There was nothing really bad about it, it just didn’t come together for me tho. Tomorrow hopefully will be better. I intend to get more sleep than last night anyway (damn you Alastair Reynolds) and then take it as it comes.

I did begin to sort out my address book. I was on a conference call this afternoon which went quite a bit off on a tangent for a while so I took the chance to begin.

Hit the pub after work as one of the lads had a really shit day and was plainly in need of a drink and a chat so a few of us went over for a quick one. There was nothing but coke for me, I’m still in taking it easy mode. One thing I did find out, which to be honest left me amazed I’m still alive was the amount drunk on Saturday night. Pat had kept count of the rounds gotten in throughout the day and night. I know how much I had before he arrived so this leaves us with a grand total of 15 pints of Ayinger white beer, one pint of Ayinger-Pils and 5 whiskey and cokes.

That’s 16 pints and 5 shorts. Jesus fuck. No wonder Sunday morning was so bad. It is worth noting that the groom to be was gotten a shot with every round he had leaving him with 13 pints and 15 shots (2 doubles). Small wonder he hasn’t been seen in work since then.

This day next week I shall be at R.E.M. and Mull Historical Society in Brixton Academy and then the following morning I shall be off to Glastonbury. I am looking forward to this like you would not believe. A few days off work combined with some of the best music in the world. How can it go wrong? I’m really hoping for a good gig from Sigur Ros. It should be the highlight of the weekend and will in theory blow everything else away

It’s the middle of June already. My doesn’t time fly when your having…um fun? 2003 certainly is flying by.

I don’t think I got enough sleep last night. I feel like I should be in a really foul mood but I’m not quite there. A little more work and I could be. The people who decided to hold a meeting in the fucking corridor a few feet away from my desk really got on my nerves.
My tools are still not working as they should and in fact I’m pretty sure I’ve broken something as a result. Unfortunatly I can’t fix it without the fucking tool and it’s all going to hell. I really want to put my fist through the screen right now.

It almost goes without saying that I am loving the new book. It’s had me hooked after the first chapter and I almost want to strectch it all out for a long time. But then again I want to rush through it and find out what happens. I’m very glad I have another one lined up afterwards.

I hate Americans. I’m listen to a bootleg of Sigur Ros playing in Atlanta earlier this year. I’ve been collecting full concert bootlegs from around the world for a few months now and this is about my 12th full gig. It’s very easy to tell which ones are from gigs in the US. They are the ones with people clapping and screaming, and random whooping. It’s Sigur Ros, shouting “hell yeah” repeatedly isn’t exactly in keeping with the music now is it?

Coming to the end of Milano, a simple piano getting quieter and quieter there are a group of people taking it in turns to scream. Compare this with the London recording. The same song, there is silence even after they finish the song. It holds for a few seconds until someone actually realises that the song is over and the spell is broken. Then the clapping and cheering begins. It’s annoying me as it’s a really really great recording. No noises from the people around, just the band and the general crowd stuff. Could even be a soundboard recording.

Anyway, I hate Americans.

Oh yes, the Radiohead lyrics thing I talked about last week. After some pressure from Radiohead themselves, Warner have backed down and lyircs should be available again fairly soon. Green Plastic Radiohead.

the black hole that is my blog

Oh also. I was reading a PRD (Product Requirements Document) the other day and one of the features was actually described like this:

“allowing u to control”.

For FUCK sake!

Really pleased to hear The Shield returns for the second season on the 1st of July.

Finished off Chasm City, and I enjoyed it a hell of a lot. Started off Redemption Ark the sequel to Revelation Space and I’m looking forward to getting into it. Sat in the park for a while listening to Hail To the Thief and reading. It was good, it was calm. If the weather keeps going like this I could see myself doing a lot of that.

CSI isn’t holding my interest as much these days, they need to go back to the stories where the main characters are interesting and playing off each other. Without that, there isn’t really any compelling viewing. The forensic stuff may have been enough to get the show started well but it needs to be built on.

I need a bike. I really do. In weather like this watching people sail by in the park is really making me miss my bike. I had better space to ride it along the coast back in Dublin but the park is a good start here and the riverside does give quite a bit of a straight line.

As I was walking across the river this evening to get home, I saw someone who looked very like someone I use to know a few lifetimes ago. It got me to thinking about a few things from back then and one in particular stood out.

A few years ago, a relative of mine was getting married. This one is going to be kinda vague for what will I hope be obvious reasons. I was at the wedding (not the wedding proper, but the afters), as were my parents and quite a bit of my extended family. I didn’t really want to be there, I had originally but that all changed.

I found out something which I didn’t like (and still don’t like) and it well it annoyed and disappointed me. The two people getting married had been together for a long time, years and years as I recall. They had also just bought a house, or were in the process of buying a house.

Well, as it turns out there was a third person involved in the relationship and as it happens it’s a small world. So I knew all about the third person and indeed a lot more detail than I had ever wanted to know. One of the things which really got to me was that I knew it wasn’t over.

It all seemed so pointless. They have a kid now and I hope for their sake it’s all working out. I’ve not heard from anyone to the otherwise so I hope so.

I’m reminded of someone else. I only met her a few times, she was a friend of a friend. A close friend of a really close friend. She was young, smart, and really really cute. Last time I saw her was at a night out and she looked stunning, absolutely stunning. Heads turned, perhaps it helped that she was not wearing much, but heads turned.

Anyway she had a boyfriend. Well, actually she didn’t. She had someone else’s boyfriend (perhaps even husband I’m not sure but I think it could very well have been). They didn’t get to spend much time together and while he kept talking about leaving his other half for her, it was never going to home and I think she knew it. So this guy had whomever he had and this stunning girl who any number of people would have killed to just date for a while.

She really really liked him tho. It was a touchy subject for quite a while but I do remember somehow I was talking to her about it once and she was fairly upset, no-one could understand what she was doing with him and she got some grief about it. She knew what she was doing with him, she really really liked him

She deserves a hell of a lot better.

***

I was also thinking today that I really need to get an address book up to date. I don’t have one. I have AOL and my old outlook address book for email and my phone for phone numbers and I’m completely useless at noting snail mail addresses so sitting down and putting the time into saving everything somewhere would be time well spent. I’m thinking PDA so I can sync it onto a few computers and aswell as that I want to export it onto AOL in someway so I can have all the details stored on the host. In theory then I should be able to get anyone’s details at anytime. I shall have to look into spending some time doing this.

I saw something the other day which I found a little scary to be honest. I saw some numbers for a personal ad site and well I was impressed too. How many people actually use these things? The numbers were quite specific in terms of country base and there were more than 3 people using them. I know Friendster is huge but they do a good job at not coming off as a personals site. Hmm I don’t really know where I’m going with this but I always thought there was a certain stigma associated with them. I guess that’s a lot less in this internet age which makes a hell of a lot of sense. Given that I’m talking to someone who I met online about this right now I guess there isn’t really any stigma I can throw against them without coming out as some sort of hypocrite.

The phrase perfect contradiction just popped into my head for some reason. I think it has some context with the word hypocrite. I did say that somewhat tongue in cheek as I’m sure I am a hypocrite in some ways. Anyway that was a random interruption to our regular programming.

Now a less random interruption as I think it is time to leave it for the night.

I hate the fact that David fucking Beckham’s football career is the first fucking headline on the news. Look around the world for fuck sake.

Everything is out to get me today.

I got that tool working nicely in the end, working very nicely I must say. Having two screens to work with was really helpful.

But.

Another tool has suddenly decided I am not authorised to use it anymore and has pretty much stopped me in my tracks. And as it turns out everyone on my team is no longer authorised so I can’t have someone do a couple of minutes work for me and let me move on, no that would be too helpful.

Fuckers.

I have permission to exist again and I can indeed logon as and when I wish.

I’m booting classic for the first time in a long long long time. It’s nice and quick on my beauty of a Mac.

Neil Gaiman’s blog continues to rock and this entry had me giggling.

I’m close to giving up here. I need to run a specific tool on my Mac. It only runs in classic so hence I booted classic. I then found that I had the tool installed but it wasn’t in the configuration that I wanted. So I reinstalled it. Now all that’s left is to install a plugin. The plugin is of course a stuffed file. Classic doesn’t have Stuffit Expander installed. Ok, no problem off I go to our software drive and lo and behold Stuffit Expander for Windows. No sign of the Mac installer. One quick IM to IC asking for the location of the file leads to a *shrug* go download it from the web response. So I did.

While I was downloading I was reading Neil’s blog. I know I spelt the word giggling wrong so I copied the whole entry to the clipboard with the intent of spellchecking it in a local app. So tabbing into the app to find that my keyboard shortcuts are broken in this build. CTRL+N gives me a new web browser and not a new document. Fine, so file -> new -> text document. Paste. All good, click spellcheck. “The dictionary could not be opened because the file is damaged”.

I have no idea what I have done to deserve all this.

Chasm City I was up late last night reading this. The bastard has done the exact same thing as with Revelation Space. Towards the end of the book he throws out this awesome concept and it just stands there smacking you in the face with it’s sheer genius. I’m getting close to the end of it and I’m really looking forward to finishing it.

I sat in the park for a while this evening reading. It was really nice. I sorted out the transfer of files from my old Cassiopeia to my iPAQ and then straight back into Chasm City. About an hour out there to the sounds of R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People and then I found I was having trouble breathing and my nose was all blocked. A minor case of hay fever it would appear. Ah well, came back home and chilled for a while.

I’m watching Ninja Scroll a manga one of the guys in work lent me. It’s very blah I guess, nothing noteable about it at all. West Wing is coming on in a few minutes and I’m looking forward to it.

I really want a keyboard for my PDA now. It would actually have me using it so much more. I can’t get my head around the writing on it and the on-screen keyboard isn’t quick enough. But having a plug-in keyboard would have me sitting anywhere rolling it out and tpying and that would be good. Sync it and posting some entries could be really good. It would certainly let me get more thoughts down as they happen.

If you want to talk to someone, talk to them. Email then, send them an im or how about going for the old ring them chesnut?