Electric Quaker II

End of another coffee break

But before it fades out entirely, I figure I’ll mention the incredibly vivid dream I got woken up from, because I came out of the whole enterprise looking really awesome (in my head, that is. I don’t imagine it’ll translate so well, but that’s your lookout, not mine). Typically, I’m hazy on the background but there was a duel, and everything, plus generic Regency backdrop, and fancy house. Whole thing was in black and white, though, which is really quite unusual for me. I can’t remember why we were fighting, which is a shame since I’d have liked to know, and I did ask the chap who checked the wadding, but he said he wasn’t allowed to talk to me.

Very nice flinters, is most of what I remember, and I picked the one on the left out of the box because I can clearly remember thinking that I ought to have taken the one on the right instead, though I couldn’t work out why, except it had a different pattern of hatching on the grip. Surprisingly the other chap was weirdly faceless, in the sense that I couldn’t quite make out what he looked like, although I vaguely knew he was a nasty piece of work and was probably the one in the wrong. Very tall thin bloke, blond hair and a black cane, presumably in order to make it clear he was the bad ‘un, but I remember thinking not being able to his features was a bad start to aiming at him… Presumably to save getting a new background curtain we adopted the film-friendly ’10 paces, turn, fire’ routine, and I think I’d got to about my eighth stride when the sod shot me in the leg from behind, which stung.

Awesomely I improbably executed a very nice spin with the whole extended arm thing (which I’m fairly sure wouldn’t work, I think the balance of the barrel would be wrong given the angle I was at) and managed to get him in the arm, with consequent winning & obvious disgrace for cheating in a duel in front of all the witnesses what had helpfully appeared alongside the bank (of the river. I don’t know why there was a river, but it served for somewhere to put witnesses) I remember thinking he was a fool to cheat in front of witnesses (or, indeed, for either of us to fight anywhere within a thousand yards of witnesses at all) but somebody said his second chappie had told him I’d cheated already and switched the flinters so his didn’t have a ball in it, though I evidently didn’t, since we both got shot. (Did I mention the bit where I was awesome and pirouetting with a leg gone dead on me and still got him square below the shoulder? For I was dead cool, and everything.)

Anyway, he buzzed off to live a new & quiet life in the Foreign Legion, or somesuch Godawful fate, and I got to keep his awesome house, as I recall, which had a fabulous library with tea + cake and a fire… And then we had the traditional fade-to-random-chase routine, obligatory in all dreams since 1697, and I found I’d fetched up in India and was running away on an elephant with an orderly who kept shouting at me. Woke up shortly after, feeling very groggy. I don’t pull out of REM sleep with any grace at all.

Pop psychology interpretations welcome, why not.

(Though personally I’m inclined to put it down as the fault of too much Lovejoy, listening to Moonlight Shadow and (at the end, at least) Flashman. O, and you get No Points for identifying the novel I apparently thieved that library from, though I suppose we should be grateful I didn’t inherit the crazy housekeeper along with the rest of the house. Am assuming the duel-y dude wasn’t Max, hard to imagine him going around shooting people in the leg…)

Still, I’m surprised it’s stuck with me this long, most of the stuff my brain comes up with vanishes before the kettle’s boiled…

Update, in the manner of an unhelpfully-titled pile of generic.

Been listening to a lot more Billy Joel lately, especially at work (not least because I keep forgetting to take my MP3 player to work, so I’m using the N95 instead.).

I do concentrate better with music in the background, as long as I know it relatively well (otherwise I have to keep breaking concentration to listen to the words!), so it’s nice to have an office where nobody minds on the grounds that ‘it does help you concentrate, especially when you’re doing something repetative.’ Colleagues WIN, I think…

…On the other hand, there’s something very, very wrong-feeling about playing Red Alert 3 while a background copy of Winamp belts out, uh, Leningrad.

On the plus side, every faction in RA3 seems to have adopted the traditionally Soviet policy of only employing women with tight-fitting costumes as their chosen military liason to the Completely Untested Commander With No Experience Of The Week…

Back still hurts. Knees still hurt. Left elbow seems to be setting up to hurt on a regular basis, the bastard. If I’m snappish that’s possibly why. The backache is a sod because I don’t know what will set it off, and the elbow is making me really irritable because it’s never happened before, so I’m not used to it giving out knee-style pain, which is making it much harder to ignore the damn thing than it would be if it was just a knee, and only doing what I expect of it. /whinge

Upside: field trip to the archives today, I’m looking forward to that!

I think that’s everything, for now, though.

A word of advice…

…to those who have leather jackets, shaved heads, and ‘L-O-V-E’ and ‘H-A-T-E’ tattooed over their knuckles:

Don’t wear chunky gold-coloured signet rings on your little finger.

A pair of fists that proclaim ‘LOVE’ and ‘HAT’ are never going to look cool.

Just a thought…

‘If Tyler Durden knew how to change a tap, he wouldn’t have to punch people in the face.’

Today’s blog post title comes from a nice little essay by Ferrett, whose LiveJournal I read.

Since it’s less than a fortnight since I was spectacularly failing at changing the washer in a tap (although, to be fair, a plumber had previously said the whole thing was seized; I was mainly there as a checking-he-isn’t-a-lying-git capacity), that one struck a chord.

I’m feeling fairly cheerful, at the moment. I expect it’ll wear off presently, when I finally come to my senses, but I’m doing OK. I was a bit worried when I went to bed yesterday, because I’d developed a splitting headache behind my eye, and I thought it could be caused by the mixing of wine and whisky last night, but I’m fine this morning, so I was probably just tired. Still am, actually.

(I think work ought to give me an incentive to get out of bed in the morning*; we only have a single storage heater, so getting out from under the covers means making my knees start to hurt unless I immediately get some trousers on, except that [because we only have one storage heater] any trousers I can find are also really cold, and turn out to speed the chill into my bones. Plus, y’know, it’s a bed. Nobody likes getting out of one of those, even to make their phone stop playing ‘They’re taking the hobbits to Isengard, when it’s nice and warm and cosy.’)

I have spent most of the last few days having meetings. The first one was with Hugh Preston, who is the Admissions Dude** out at what I think of as DILS, but which now seems to be simply DIS; the Department of Information Studies. It is looking increasingly like doing a Masters is a sensible thing to do; not only do I get the M out of it, but (because of the way the course is carefully set up) it’ll qualify me for membership of CILIP, too. Both of these things seem to have a fairly immediate impact on the kind of jobs one can get, so it’s looking like a good plan.

The second meeting I had was with Mike Smith, whom I may have mentioned before, way back when I was being a Student. Essentially, he is awesome (which I’ve thought for ages, but he gets bonus Awesome because it turns out he seems to really like me, as well, which is shiny) and will give me an academic reference, which I’d need to actually get onto the aforementioned course.

I’m still a little torn between doing the course Part Time and doing the course Full Time. The main difference is that if I do it Part Time it will take 2 – 5 years, and I have to be in a Relevant Job, but I can start this April and the University will pay my tuition for me while I’m working here (until the end of June), and after that I can run off to The South, or something. With the sole exception of that last point, all of those are both Pros and Cons pretty much equally.

If I do it Full Time it will take about 12 months, I don’t need to worry about finding a Relevant Job or else in the meantime, and I have to stay in Aber for at least 9 months (although once I’m down to the actual Writing A Diss stage, I can go and do so from ‘pretty much anywhere.’ These are all relatively positive, and the only major problem is that I will magically Not Have Anything Paid For, although since the University would only be paying the first two or three months of my tuition if I went Part Time, that’s not so huge a thing as it might otherwise sound.

So… we’ll see.

And that’s all you people are getting from me, for now.

O, except I finished the Allied campaign on Red Alert 3, and I really need to write to EA at some point, to find out why they’d preffer me not to buy any of the games they’re releasing.

(Yeah, I know I keep banging on about this. It just bugs me that these people are sufficiently retarded to think that making a game with invasive anti-piracy measures which you don’t get on the inevitable pirate copies will encourage people to pay hard currency for the inferior copy-protected version, rather than pirate it for free. I just can’t help but feel that anyone incapable of spotting the FAIL inherent in that philosophy is probably someone who shouldn’t be allowed metal cutlery, never mind influence over the gaming industry…)

Anyway, I don’t mean to keep you from your surfing with an argument you all know and agree with; I just figured all of the EA executives might swing by on a Googlewhim***, realise they’re all cretins and commit seppuku in pennance…

Enjoy…

* Money doesn’t count. Or, at least, not this ammount of money.
** Actual title may vary.
*** You can use this word. I don’t mind.

Must be winter…

Every day this past fortnight that I have woken up I have done so with my left knee killing me and my back playing hob so as not to feel left out. After a remarkably mild year for that kind of thing, I’m out of practice at the whole “constant background pain” thing, which is a right bugger.

I had toothache the other week, and that hurt like crazy, as well. (Although, to be fair, I find that re-assuring, since it means I now have a dentist such that I’ve not got toothache all the time and cease to notice it.)

Next month I have a dentist’s appointment, in (of course) Shrewsbury. Very kindly they’ve given me the time off work gratis (rather than my having to book it from annual leave). Only for this one occasion, of course, but all being well I won’t need another check for at least six months, so I hope I can dodge that bullet and hang onto my leave for when I need it.

Wedding venue scouting was good. It actually did me a Hell of a lot of good to sit and re-read all the brochures everyone sent me, just so I could remember how angry they made me. I mean, seriously, who in the name of God sends out brochures that say (when you boil off the insincere congratulations) “You will give us large sums of money in used Treasury notes, and in return you will get to do exactly as we tell you, eat what we tell you to, throw yourselves out building you’ve paid to use when we tell you to, and then you can give us more money.”

…I think what baffles me more than anything about that is that it must work, or it wouldn’t be profitable to keep doing it. I just find it annoying. One of the things I like about Prospective Venue A is that it gives a firm impression of being flexible. It gives a fairly strong impression of Turquoise as well, of course, but mainly it’s an impression of flexible. And I think the turquoise will be quieter with the shutters open and the lights on.

And, finally: if you’ve not seen it already, zoom your browser* now to this beauty of a story over at El Reg, which has got me literally laughing ’till my eyes watered, and everyone looked at me funny.

*’chug’ in IE

Wow. This is just frying my brain!

Quick post before I get back to whatever desk I work at on Friday afternoons!

I read a lot of webcomics, partly because it helps me to work out what day of the week it is while I drink my morning coffee (For example; if it’s a day without a new Candi, but with a new menage a 3, and not a new Darths & Droids, then it’s Saturday, and I can go back to bedn without bothering to finish filling myself with caffeine).

But this is the first time I’ve discovered a webcomic told through the medium of a Round Robin game.

Lots of different artists each get one panel to advance the story, and that panel can contain as many frames as they can fit in that one panel. The effect (so far as I’ve managed to read it!) is fabulously anarchic, and very funny. Or, at least, it’s got me sniggering over the keyboard, which is typically a good sign, even if it is confusing everyone else in the room.

O – and did I mention that it’s a round-robin style comic where the only fixed element of the plot is that there’s been a murder? Win!

It appears to live over at http://whokilledroundrobin.blogspot.com, and you can read full pages as they happen from this link here.

Unless, y’know, you were all going to spend your Friday afternoon being super productive, or something…

“Pretty much spot on”…

…and other good ways for an optician to describe the glasses you’re wearing.

Buzzed over to D&A this morning (I say “buzzed;” I was there until the bank shut, which is going to slow everything down a bit). It seems there’s been some very minor shift in my left eye, but the difference is “less than half a lens” so it’s not actually worth changing my prescription. Win.

On the other hand, since they had a sale on, I’ve got some new glasses, because the frames on my normal ones are now three years old and getting a bit fatigued-looking. That and it’ll give me two pairs of glasses that have the anti-glare protection, which I anticipate being useful in the event that I get any insurance, ever. Which, to be fair, I will, it’ll just cost me lots.

It’s not the “costing lots” that I object to, per se, it’s more that the reason it costs lots is because they think I’ll use the car to get drunk and try and impress girls by doing dangerous things. I find that insulting; it’s like they think I’ve got to be 23 without realising that there are better ways to waste petrol than trying to make women fancy me. Pouring it down the drain, for instance, or into the water supply. Bah. I shall cough up nonetheless, and then fling the damn machine off the road when I fail, yet again, to tell my left from my right, I expect.

Anyway, I’m getting new glasses. More encouragingly, the optician woman seemed to think I was likely to stay on more or less the same prescription I have now for the forseeable future, which is a big step up from the last time I went and had lights shone at me.

I’m still finding work fun, and I’m still finding work tiring; come Thursday mornings I’m really having to struggle to get out of bed which, when I’ve got a reason to get up and start doing things, is unusual for me. I think, however, that I’ll get back into the swing of things relatively well; I’m still getting more sleep than I was when I was commuting from Wallingford, so I think it’s just a matter of adjusting to having a routine that revolves around more than “when the CoD4 servers are least busy.”

In other news, I was listening to, er, something, on the Radio yesterday, and caught a fabulous quote, viz:

“The Potteries, in the North of the West Midlands, are an unlikely setting for a revolution…”

Yes, that’s right, there’s never been a Revolution in the Midlands. All those integrated kilns and transport networks are just an example of a cottage industry that was allowed to get out of hand.

Well, it made me laugh. But then I had to slog though an entire Geography project on How The Industrial Revolution Changed The Area*. It seemed to involve a retail-cum-business park, but I could be remembering a different trip.

Ah well. On with the Weekend Tasks of Everything I Didn’t Do This Week…

*I didn’t actually do the project, I think I just handed in a few scrappy sheets of A4. But I was meant to do it, which is good enough for me.

Another weekend gone

But I have to say I’m enjoying the weekends a lot more now that they’re an interlude of time off, rather than just another part of the vast expanse of nothing that forms the bulk of my existence.

Of the five people I’ve spoken to on the phone this week, three have said how much more cheerful I’m sounding (and the other two aren’t people I speak to often enough for them to know how I normally sound anyway).

I discovered yesterday that my little tinny electonic alarm clock, which gets me out of bed by cunningly playing a very tinny, monotone, rendition of one bar of Lone Ranger-y finale bit of the William Tell overture until I stumble out of the duvet and thump it, doesn’t actually require re-setting. I’ve been dilligently making sure it’s primed to go off at 07:30 in the morning every time I’ve gone to bed this week, but it turns out that it automatically re-sets as soon as you hit the ‘off’ button.

That spoilt my plan to lie-in yesterday, but it did put me into a nice shallow sleep full of cool dreams about the Crimea, narrowboats and assorted awesomeness, so I forgive it for waking me on a Saturday.

So far this weekend I’ve had Yet Another Driving Lesson, in preparation for Another Driving Test on Wednesday (*sigh*). I’d really much preffer it if they’d just hurry up and give me a pink liscence now; I’ve been learning since 2004, and I know for a cast-iron fact I’m a damn sight better than some of the bloody clowns on the roads these days. Frankly, by this point, the question of whether or not I pass the test seems to be pretty much coming down to luck.

(F’rinstance, the reason I failed last time, on paper, was “Bad observation on a parallel park.” But the reason I displayed bad observation was that I was parallel parking after starting to move out from where I was pulled up to be told to parallel park, and paused while moving out, to let a cyclist go by in the opposite direction. Which meant I was very slightly on a wonk when level with the parallelising car. Ordinarily that’d not bother me, but since this was The Test I fretted over it¹, and was thus gawping out of the back window like mad, trying to make it work out OK. That was Bad Observation, which was a definite fail. Although it would’ve also been just as Faily a Fail if I’d gone out and caused a nuisance to the bloody cyclist. I’m not trying to say I didn’t deserve to fail for the badness, I just think the fact there was badness was due more to chance events than a lack of technical comptence on my part. Actual competence, yes, but I knew what I was doing. It’s not my fault the hypothetical Boy Racer had to potentially slow down a bit.)

Well, ‘s give it another shot when we get to that, shall we? Although “Shot,” in the context of Penparcau might be an unfortunate choice of words.

This afternoon I’ve been doing further ironing whilst watching Firefly, which took me a mere two episodes, instead of last week’s four, so I seem to be speeding up as my arms remember what they have to do.

That doesn’t include the extra 30 minutes I spent trying to force the new ironing board cover to attach itself to the ironing board, though (Paul: we have a new ironing board cover, the old one was manky and wearing thin). Thank-you Woolworths, for your generously providing a one-size-fits-all that doesn’t until you take a Swiss Champ to the bugger (Paul: we have a new ironing board cover. Do not attempt to unpick the string binding it to the underside of the iron-rest. It’s a right pain to sew on with a Victorinox).

Meanwhile I’ve played through the whole of S101 [Link to S101 at Abandonia, a site where a large number of the screenshots seem to be from the Island of Horny Women. Hmm. A better link might be this one…], and am now started on S201, which, though I’ve been playing it for, hmm… *does maths* sixteen years I’ve only finished once, and now I can’t remember much of what to do.

O, and I’ve done all the washing up, although I’m about to create some more, unless I decide to just go hungry. That would be less effort in the long run, I suppose…

Still, given that I did pretty much zilch yesterday, and only really got round to Being Domestic today, I’m fairly pleased. I like having a structure to me life. Even if it does involve getting up at 07-30 and coming back home at 18-00 (and, actually, that’s a big step up on when I was commuting to Oxford, where I’d generally spend at least twelve hours from every day outside the house).

Going to go shower the bathroom in little bits of beard trimmings, now; trying to keep the thing to a respectable, summer-y length, rather than the usual “Neglected Russian Bear” I’ve been touting since October.

Apologies for the minor Meme spate yesterday; I was trying to write this, but it didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, at the time!

1. I do a splendid line in fretting. It is a measure of how concerned I was that I fretted over How The Park Would Go, rather than my more typical background frets of “What If a Plane Loses Its Engine Over Jordan Hill?”²

2. Yeah, an actual HTML-ed footnote for a change. Pretty snappy, eh reader? Doesn’t work in the LJ version, though. Lack of external linkage, presumably.

I’m getting up in the morning

But it’s OK, because I’m going to be paid to do so (eventually; in the meantime I’m living on rice* so I can keep feeding the electricity meter).

Yes, tomorrow I return to the exalted ranks of the employed taxpayers (as opposed to the unemployed taxpayer, which is what I’ve been since October. It’s been a while.)

I’m not looking forward to continually walking up the Hill, mind; I reckon that’ll either be uncomfortably hot or wet and miserable, depending which season we’re in, and I’m not too great at moderating my speed; I tend to hack up the thing at pretty much ‘As fast as I can go,’ which means my calves start acheing like mad by Bronglais, but never mind.

I’m guessing I’ll get me a UWA email address again, which will be nice (although technically, I guess it will be my first ever UA email address, but that just sounds odd to me. I really ought to go to bed about now, and, indeed I’m just starting to feel tired (because I was up until 03:00 while a download finished this morning, so I’ve had something of a long day.)

I was going to get an early night, and be in bed by 22-00 this evening; that doesn’t seem to have worked out properly, I think because I’m just not used to that anymore. On the plus side, my sleeping patterns tend to iron out fairly neatly once I’ve got an actual routine to work with (the lack of a proper solid routine really got me down in the first few months after I left the Bod.) so I’m sure it’ll all be good.

Meanwhile, I think I’m just rambling, so I direct you to look at my shiny little favicon (LiveJournal users click here) which ought to be displaying in the title bar (if it isn’t, please do comment to that effect, and I shall swear at it). I downloaded it all by myself from those amazing people over at KTAB.co.uk, y’know, the ones that make the amazingly funny semi-regular news satire and parody site, although since Statto is in Japan just at the minute, we’re not writing anything until he brings me back some Ghibli DVDs :-)

Anyway, I’m going to post this, finish up going “Ohhh!” [emph. on the h’s] to Nathan Fillion’s awesome entrance as Captain Hammer in Dr. Horrible, and shove off to bed.

Have fun!

*Not just rice, obviously, because then I’d die. The reason I’m living mainly on rice is because it’s cheap, so I can still buy meat, and thus get some actual Newtrition(TM) into my diet.