I don't believe the weekend I just had. Seriously, I don't believe how utterly cack it was. Am I, as Scary Ross insists, "paying back karma at a vastly accelerated rate"? Did I torture and slaughter cute, furry animals in half a dozen past lives? Was I really Genghis Khan's personality trainer, or the guy who fired Torqeumada for being too soft? Allow me to explain....
So it's Friday night. I've been out over at the Psycho's for the evening (that's my ex-companion/girlfriend/emotional torturer and now best friend, she's a clinical psychologist) and get back in fairly late. Feed the cat and rabbit, then decide to go to bed, since I'm so tired after the week of work. A bad start to the weekend, as I sleep incredibly badly and wake up at about 7am... aaaargh...
Since I'm awake, I do the food shopping. I despise food shopping. It's not just that it seems such a waste of time, but I really dislike this whole 'hygienic' thing in supermarkets. I like my food to be at least vaguely natural, even if I'm just going to throw it in the microwave ("Chicken Ding", as they say!). Supermarkets have all these vegetables that look so perfect they should be plastic, fruit that tastes sooooo natural that it's more like concentrated fruit juice in solid form than the original thing and meat that apparently comes from square fish, square chickens and rectangular cows. Must make life incredibly easy for the farmers, I'll happily admit: I mean, they can just place all the cows and chickens in neat piles, since they should stack properly. :)
So I shop, and lug several large, heavy bags of stuff back home. An hour or so later, Psycho phones and asks me to get her a bunch of stuff, too, 'cos she has a bad back - so I get to go round and lug stuff twice, as with almost every weekend. Oh joy. Anyways, I get back home and spend the afternoon faffing around on the PC before I head out for the evening with her.
Late, I return home and decide, since it's Sunday tomorrow, to figure out why my DVD drive has been playing up and refusing to play any DVDs, simply preferring to spit them out instead. Time for a quick BIOS flash (since I'd done one before and it didn't like it very much), and also, while I'm at it, I decide to flash the main PC BIOS, since the version I'm on is about as useful as a snowball in a gunfight. Bad move, obviously: the PC churns and whines, and beeps when I switch it back on... but doesn't do anything else.
"Aha," says I, "I'll bet it's the same problem I had last time, where I just need to take the BIOS battery out and reset everything to defaults, and Bob's a monkey's uncle."
If only life were that simple. Several hours later, I'm still tinkering, rebooting, tinkering, rebooting, tinkering... eventually, I decide to give up. After all, it's 3:30am and I'm tired. Another night of bad sleep later, I thankfully awaken at around 9am, which isn't so bad. Coffee, toast, strawberry jam and back to sorting out the PC. Sometimes, I hate my PC. This time round, I actually had it built for me, so sick was I of messing around with internal stuff and the hassle of building everything, ventilating it all and so on. Of course, the disadvantage of this is precisely what I ran into: no awareness of what's in the box...
After several hours, the damned thing still won't work. By this time, I'm absolutely fuming, of course. Thankfully for my PC, I'm reasonably zen, even when I'm fuming. I don't beat it to a messy, silicon-spattered pulp, at least. By late afternoon, I'm ready to kill someone. Psycho calls to see if I want to (i.e. have no choice but to) wander down to a local cafe for a while, for drinks and chat. This seems reasonable, particularly since I needed a target for my homicidal thoughts. The evening passes, and I get back earlier than expected, since she has an interview on Monday morning and went to bed early.
Finally, I fix my PC: stupid little changes in the BIOS correct the problem and it starts up, but still won't read DVDs. Great. I just lost a day of potential gaming, downloading, and of Ghost Recon with Scary Ross to a stupid-ass problem that wasn't even fixed afterwards! Gaaaaah!
And what's the worst thing to happen? I get in to work this morning to find out the clocks have gone forward an hour, so I'm late, have missed a meeting, have to reschedule a training session, and nobody thought to announce this to me. Of course, my PC would have done, but it was dead at the time. So now I'm an hour behind, and typing this... and fuming...
It's Friday at last. POETS Day, as they say in the UK (P**s off early, tomorrow's Saturday!). I turned and woke about a dozen times last night, and ended up wide awake about an hour before my alarm clock went off (at 6:30) this morning. I'm not entirely sure why, to be honest, but having a bad night's sleep is really annoying when one arrives at work to find a monstrous pile of jobs waiting. What I wouldn't give to be sitting at home with the cat on my lap, a film playing and munchies at hand. Ah, well, I suppose this is why they pay me, after all.
I am therefore thankful, as someone who doesn't enjoy drinking dozens of cups of coffee every day, for the sweets (or 'candies', no doubt) that I ordered ages ago from ThinkGeek - caffeinated mints. Yummy as anything, and they keep me awake on days like this, where I'm deleting tons of uselessly imported data, trying to figure out SQL queries for data analysis, keeping an ear on the war in Iraq and wondering just what I'm going to eat tonight, since my fridge is empty.
There's a thought. Exam question: "Food shopping - the bane of human happiness, or just another one of those things one has to do? Discuss."
Man, I love this game. I play it in co-op with Scary Ross. We are just so bad at it, it's hilarious. NMM Weapons mod, or the British Marines Commando mod if we're going in hard and fast (and getting killed quicker).
Oops, must run... here come the bad guys! Pow! Blam! Kaplowey!
I'm angry this morning. Recently, I converted from being a UK contractor, earning large quantities of money and paying normal, reasonable taxes, to a French full-time worker. This caused something like a 60% pay-cut immediately, which was a bit of a shock, but the company I work for is incredibly generous on benfits, so I was happy.
However, today I discovered that the 60% of my salary that the governemt siphons off every month is not all I have to pay! That's just the social charges... you know, unemployment benefit, medical cover, pensions, all that stuff. On top of this, I have to declare my revenue and pay normal taxes. Now, don't get me wrong, at heart I'm a socialist/capitalist mix: I'm all for paying some of my revenue (OK, 60% is pretty damned huge...) so that the less fortunate folks have enough to live on, while retaining enough for myself to compensate all the hours of work. I believe that we should all support our human brethren, no matter how horrible they are, since all life is valuable and some of us simply didn't get a good start in life.
I do, however, take umbridge at paying 60% of my income for this, then paying even more later to line the pockets of corrupt politicians and their mistresses. That's horrific. How this country survives, I do not know. Then, of course, there's all the strikes for pay. Until this morning, I was really angry at them, too - after all, the majority of them are government employed and shouldn't be complaining. However, this morning, I found out that I earn almost as much as a Chief Medical Officer type position for two hospitals at the same time! Oh my good lordy me! How underpaid is that?! Wake up, government!
Add to this the fact that they didn't send me any documentation and that I can't do the return online (bah!), and I'm going to get a 10% overdue increase, too. Once I've downloaded all the forms and filled them in, of course. Ah, the joys of administration.
Serious social change needed here, and I hope it comes quickly: I can't afford to pay this....!
You know, these days I wonder how I ever did anything with a dialup connection. I mean, 3k/s is just soooo awful. I've been sat here for 20 minutes wondering whether my screen is going to update or not, and it looks like it isn't. So I'm going to switch to my cable connection. Why wasn't I using it anyway? It was busy, dammit. And I'm bloody-minded. What's the use of having more than one PC if one doesn't use them all the time?
In a way, dialup is sort of like the old "fit a whole game into 20Mb" challenge: with the advent of huge drives, of PCs with 100Gb of space becoming standard, you'll have noticed the bloatware in games. 3 CDs. 4CDs. 6CDs... and most of that is video. At least, I hope it is - I'd hate to be the programmer who tried to explain that the game was so badly programmed that it took 6 CDs to fit it all in.
Speaking of games, I recently came across Freelancer. Not only is this the wonderful graphical update to the Privateer titles, which were excellent, but it's a massive improvement. OK, so it has its shortcomings - primarily the very limited mission system and, for me, the way one has to follow the story right from the beginning if one wishes to advance through levels, which defeats the 'freelance' idea - but it really is a great game. And it fits on ONE CD. I couldn't believe it! All this, and well-programmed, too.
Life is good. But so is sleep, and it's nearly 1:30 a.m.
I've only smoked two today, which is probably why I'm so annoyed by little things. I just thought I'd mention that.
Gahhh, I'm getting fed up of project requirements. You ever have one of those projects where you have no real requirements written down, and half the people who are providing you with details of what they want are only working on the thing with about 3% of their brain power?
I have.
So I've done all this data analysis on their information, provided them with an overview of what I need from them to make the thing work, what's missing and so on. I do two days' work, solid, to get their data into a preparatory system so that it's all ready to go for testing and so on. OK, so half the mandatory stuff is missing, but I can fake it, provided it's only going into a test system. Of course, we'll need this for the production system.
Then they suddenly realise that when I say "half the fields marked 'mandatory' are empty", it's a problem for the final version. "We can provide that data," they say.
So why didn't you, then?! Gaaaahhhhh! Now I have to go and empty my preparatory system, manually, and re-prepare everything for when they've given me the updated data, which they apparently were holding back in case someone invaded their office, in case it was a top-level military secret or something equally beyond my comprehension.
I want to go home. There's a chocolate cake in my fridge that I could not only have a more sensible conversation with, but that I could then eat. Chocolate calms my nerves. Just ask Scary Ross.
Quote of the day from Iraqi TV (paraphrased): "The interruption of service this morning was due to technical difficulties." Yup, a Tomahawk missile's a pretty big technical difficulty....
Good afternoon,
I thought I'd start a little online journal, the day the war started in Iraq. It's things like that which make us wake up a little to the fact that the world is huge, with billions of people going about their daily lives, and that we're all just tiny little dots on the surface of a tiny little dot in the universe. Infinitely small, as they say.
Of course, with my astounding technical ability, it's taken me ages to get this thing working. Not that it's difficult, or anything, just that I'm incompetent, and very busy. :)
So what about this war? What can I say? Well, I'm 100% opposed to it, and to all wars, being a pacifist at heart. It's doubly bad since it goes against any UN resolution (not that there was one, of course), which pretty much defeats the point of having an international security council. Might is right, it seems.
On the other hand, I have to say I'm 100% with the troops there: although I hate war, killing and all maltreatment of living things, these folks are doing their duty as they swore to, and deserve our full and entire backing. I'm a Brit, and proud of our Marines' and other troops' skill, dedication and ability.
The thing that's annoying me today, though, is the press: why, oh why, does *every* journalist feel the need to be negative and question absolutely everything anyone ever says? Is it, as Scary Ross (a friend in the UK) reasons, because they feel the need to express the fact that we live in a free society where they *can* question things? Is it the desire, as I suspect, to find scandal and somehow prove their worth as journalists?
Who knows? All I can say is that it's extremely annoying when people are dying on both sides to hear some idiot worrying about whether it's entirely true that Umm Qazr is 'safe' or not... bah, humbug.
Spike