I was reading a blog today (how unusual, eh?) and I suddenly realised how much sentences like "Non-smoker, little drink, no drugs" annoy me. It's such a huge double-standard that it really peeves me.
As a smoker, I have suffered being a social pariah: the looks, the comments, the not-so-subtle coughs and waving hands. I accept this and, personally, I won't smoke near children, babies or in enclosed spaces with non-smokers. Having said that, I don't quite know what I'd be doing in a cupboard with a non-smoker, anyway, but that's beside the point.
I can understand the concept that smokers 'infect' the space of non-smokers. It's true that secondary smoke is dangerous. It's true that, if you don't like the smell, it's extremely annoying to have someone light up next to you. This is not something I have difficulty with: I will smoke in the open air, in my own apartment, car or in a smoking room. I won't smoke in someone else's home or a restaurant (unless I'm sitting a decent distance from the non-smoking part). Here in France, people are generally less of a bunch of Nazis on the subject, anyway.
What I don't understand, however, is the attitude that alcohol is not a drug. I dislike alcohol, intensely. I have seen too many close friends descend into a liquid hell that's very difficult to escape from. I have seen other friends attacked, insulted, abused and generally mistreated by drunk people. Personally, even when I wasn't a smoker, I have always preferred to be sitting beside someone who's puffing a cigarette than next to someone who's off their face, drunk as a skunk, loud, obnoxious and offensive.
Of course, the simple answer is that alcohol has the financial support of some of the biggest and most successful companies in the world. It's "socially acceptable" to be drunk, despite the fact that it causes or helps cancer and other diseases and causes thousands and thousands of deaths and injuries from drunk driving, fighting and other related stupidities.
Not that I would ever stop anyone drinking or smoking: that's their choice and, as long as it doesn't affect those around them, they can do whatever they wish to with their life. Such is the wonder of individual choice.
But please, stop treating alcohol as if it were different to any other drug. By all means, smoke near me. Just don't breathe on me with your beer-infected halitosis, don't expect me to think you're funny because you can't control yourself, don't tell me all about yourself because you're drunk and think you're interesting and don't laugh and talk at massively high volume because you've downed so much beer you can't tell the difference between what you're doing and what's normal.
Personally, I can't wait for the first person who tries to sue a beer company, Marlboro-style, for the damage alcohol has caused his or her liver. That'll be great.
P.S. I found out why my comments weren't appearing on that other blog: the owner had weird names on the comment buttons, and I was previewing my notes, not submitting them. D'oh!
Apparently, it's National Poetry Month in the US. At least, that's what Flowerhead says, and I believe her.
It seems a bit odd to me to have a poetry month (it exists all the time, after all..!!), but I can understand the idea behind it. Although I now live in France, I'm originally English... and I can tell you that the two countries have very different attitudes to poetry!
In the UK, I grew up with a very standard view of poetry: a bunch of flowery words that were trying to be clever in saying something simple; crusty old men wearing tweed jackets and dreamy-eyed, sexually frustrated, middle-aged women in flowery dresses reading nonsensical verse and trying to believe that love could really be that beautiful; smart-ass 'artsy' types spouting crap to impress the intelligentsia. You get the idea... not a very good image, basically!
Over here in France, things are very different. This country loves its artists. They are respected, honoured and generally strike awe into people. Of course, there's still the smart-ass contingent who sport their stupid little goatee (or smaller) beards, wear those thick-rimmed spectacles and think they're better than everyone around them because they're vaguely philosophical. Thankfully, these people are easily spotted and avoided.
French people, in general, love poetry, philosophy and the arts. Of course, that's a terrible generalisation, but what I mean is that the country loves them: they are taught in schools on an equal level with the sciences, and everyone gets a basic grounding in the greats. It's a very different attitude.
So anyway, here's my contribution to Poetry Month (even though I'm not in the US) - my favourite sonnet, by Michael Drayton:
Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part.
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me;
And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I myself can free.
Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of Love's latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies;
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up his eyes--
Now, if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou might'st him yet recover!
I wonder if any of you remember that Ian Dury song? "Reasons to be cheerful... 1, 2, 3..." - I only remember that bit of it, but it popped into my head when I decided to sit down and write about last night.
As an aside, I just realised that one of the blogs I visit regularly has vetted all my recent comments. As in, deleted them. I couldn't remember all the posts I'd commented on, but at least the last three were missing. I find that somewhat insulting - not because they trimmed comments, which is their right as blog owner, but since I hadn't said anything nasty or rude or anything. Oh well, I'll see if any more disappear...
And now on to last night's drama...!!
As you know from yesterday's blog, I headed off to see Psycho last night expecting the worst. I did a bit of shopping on the way, for Diet Coke (the no-caffeine, no-sugar version, which she drinks an awful lot of as part of a diet - the bubbles fill up the stomach, you see, and reduce hunger), fruit juice and some other stuff (like something to eat, for me).
When I arrived, Biscotte was scratching at the door. This is a good sign - it means Psycho is probably asleep. So I let myself in after a gentle knocking gained no response. Yes, I have keys to her apartment, as she does to mine. She may be my ex, but she's still my best friend and is welcome whenever she wants: this has, in fact, saved us both a couple of times when we've forgotten our own keys and the other has had their second set with them. It's also useful when she has a burst of exercise-fever, since I still have her running machine and stepper here (not enough room chez elle) and more open space to do stuff.
Biscotte spent a few minutes doing her normal survey of the building's corridor and being cuddled - she loves having an evening stroll - and I discovered Psycho was indeed asleep. Deep breath, and wake her up.
Surprisingly, the evening went better than I expected. She was very depressed at 'losing' the job (although she never had it to begin with), but was less vocal than I had anticipated. I cooked one of her favourite things, to try to cheer her up a little, although I'd used all the salmon the night before, so I couldn't make her absolute favourite thing. I'd also had the sense to grab a fresh mango and stock up on Taillefine chocolate desserts (0.9% fat) and some blackberry yoghurts (0% fat) - she ate loads of nice stuff to calm her depression, without putting on the kilos.
She was, as I said, less talkative than I expected. As the evening ended, however, she opened up a bit and told me how she felt. Losing that job was a real kick in the teeth for her. It had been something to look forward to and a recognition that she wasn't completely useless and unemployable. Thankfully, she still has a training session available to her, I believe, to set her up as a workplace psychologist. She'll check the details on that today, I hope, and stay mentally active while looking for another job. I managed to reassure her that she will find work, and even to get her to smile by the time I left - a couple of Friends episodes helped those smiles along a little, too.
So, all in all, the Evening Of Doom wasn't as horrid as I thought it would be. I even remembered to pick up some milk on the way home, for my breakfast this morning!
I thought I'd squeeze in a late entry tonight, to do PromoGuy's Monday Mission. This should be amusing.
Tomorrow morning, I will update you all (if you are, indeed, becoming plural these days) on the events of the Evening Of Doom And Despondency, which wasn't as bad as it could have been. Anyway... on with the Mission!
The Monday Mission:
1. For yourself, what truths are absolute? Are there any absolute truths in the Universe?
There are, indeed, absolute truths. Some things are just defined and solid and cannot be changed. For me, an example of such a truth is "All humans are created equal". Another is "The Earth turns. Day becomes night. Life goes on." Yet another is "Cat pee stinks".
2. Do you believe that you are still "teachable?"
Absolutely. I learn new French words and expressions every day, and am determined to learn Japanese. No one ever ceases to be teachable, except by choice.
3. To do something well, in most situations, requires study and practice. What's the most recent thing that you have done well as a result of study and practice.
The thing I do best by study and practice, and most often, is to lie convincingly. Terrible as it may sound, it's true.
4. If you had the time/money, what do you want to lean how to do more than anything?
Fly a helicopter. I've wanted to do that for years.
5. Those around us may often try to intervene, but ultimately each individual is responsible for the choices they make in life. Tell me about a recent situation where you had a decision to make, and those around you tried to influence or direct you. Were they successful? Was that "help" welcomed?
"Should I bail Psycho out of her debt situation yet again?" The friends were split 50/50. The cat meowed an indeterminate response. The plastic alien simply stared. In the end, I did it. Why? Because in France, if you don't pay off your debt, your bank account gets sealed for 10 years and you can't have a cheque book, credit card or anything else in that time. This seems overly harsh to me.
6. Things are much easier to accept when they are given by invitation rather than being forced upon us. When was the last time you rejected something because it was forced on you? How did it happen? Did you hold a grudge about it? Was it ever resolved?
Tonight. Psycho tried to force me to take something to sleep better. I refused. I hate medicines and pill-popping for every situation. She took it well, I hold no grudge (it was for my own good, in her book) and it's resolved. She won't try to force that issue ever again, and will content herself to suggest things.
7. Are you the sort of person who questions everything, or are you able to accept things without someone providing you tangible proof?
If I trust the person enough, I will accept things. There are only two or three people in the world who I trust enough to do this.
BONUS: Ooo baby, do you know what that's worth?
I do indeed. If you're very good, I'll even sell it to you, for a small finder's fee and a little profit. And no, I don't take cheques.
Depression is coming. Doom gathers on the horizon like dark clouds warning of an impending storm. Four figures on horseback can be seen in the distance, galloping towards me. They are the Horsemen of the Psycholypse: Joblessness, Lackofsleep, Adolescentattitude and Absolutenegativity! I run, but I cannot hide. The phone continues to ring. Six times in four hours. If I answer, I am doomed. If I do not, I am still doomed.
Yup, Psycho didn't get the job she wanted. So now I not only have a lack of sleep to deal with, but also an intensification of her negativity, depression and do-everything-for-me attitude. This evening's going to be like walking into a morgue on Everybody's Depressed Day. Oh joy.
I need a cigarette. And some coffee.
whooooooooooosh!
That's the caffeine hitting my blood stream and finally kicking my body into gear. Phew. It's a relief to be properly awake, instead of in that vague, hazy-grey area between sleep and the waking world.
I've been living on caffeine the last few days: for some unknown reason, I suddenly stopped sleeping normally on Friday night. I haven't had a proper night's sleep since then, so I'm all edgy and twitchy. The caffeine helps to calm that, and makes me at least remotely useful in my job.
I really don't understand why I can't sleep properly. Caffeine intake aside (and it doesn't affect my sleeping patterns - never has unless it's coupled with sugar), I've done nothing different. Yet I've only slept an average of somewhere between 5 and 6 hours a night for the last three nights. And to make matters worse, I put my relatively new boots (from Shelley's of London, Carnaby Street, if anyone cares) on today by mistake, so I'm squeaking and squelching as I walk around. Most embarrassing. And I shaved badly this morning, due to beng half-awake. So I keep finding parts of my face with a single whisker sticking out of them. I hate that.
Especially because I keep having to go to the coffee machine. Like right now. And all that coffee means more trips elsewhere, too, if you see what I mean!
Normally, I don't need much sleep anyway. I average about 7 hours a night at most, and anything around 8-9 hours is a massive sleep-in for me. However, 5 hours really isn't enough, and waking up at 5 a.m. really takes the biscuit. Of course, the cat was happy because he got lots of cuddles as I tried to go back to sleep.
Perhaps it's the reduction in nicotine that's doing it? Now I come to think of it, I did recently drop from around 15 cigarettes a day to 5 a day, but it's been at least a week now, so that phase should have passed a long time ago. I'm getting exercise, so it can't be something related to being horribly unhealthy, either.
I just don't get it. I need more coffee, here.
Thanks again to Ruthie (spot the link in the blogroll on the left, there!), another amusing little doodad. This one's free association, week 12 apparently. Why do I always miss the beginning of these things? Because I'm reactive and not proactive, of course. I'm a techie. I've been on help-desks. I wait until the brown substance hits before moving my skinny butt. Anyway, I digress...
By the way, it works better if you say the words out loud, not just think them. And I was wrong about colours yesterday - you were right, rockinronnie, less is more (and as for what men want... well, we're all different: that's my point). I like the slightly tinted boxes on the left, there, though, so I'm going to keep them. I might make them green, or orange or something. Or not.
Today, I got rid of those little images I use for a 'control panel' for each post - the web, alien, spider and so on. I suddenly realised that I'd put them there to avoid having words, then had to put a control panel up anyway... so I had pictures and words. Duh.
OK, so this is a risky blog to write, in a way. The risk is my comments list filling up with bile from ladies (or other females) who want to vent. Of course, I don't get many visitors, so I'm probably safe, and I'll also point you all to item number 20 on the list of 100 Things About Me. Here goes.
I seem to be running into an increasingly large number of female-run blogging sites that hate men. Of course, this may be due to the way I search, the fact that they're listed off other blogs I visit or just the effect of the moon at this time of the month. It could also be due to the fact that I am awake at 7:40 on a Sunday morning and I don't know why, but I must admit to finding it somewhat depressing.
A bit of background: being a bit of a feminist at heart and an egalitarian, I have never had any problem with the idea that women should be equal to men in every walk of life (except the obvious things like carrying the babies inside them, which we men simply can't do yet!). I hate macho assholes, condescending males, male chauvinists and their genre. I was brought up to respect people as people, not as genders, and have always stuck to that. I've had male and female bosses, male and female underlings (purely people I supervised, not managed), male and female friends and so on.
I have been the object of sexism, losing jobs to females because they were female, and have swallowed it because it was the early 1990's and the push for equality was a good thing - I felt I was doing my part therein. I work daily with women who are more talented than me, and I recognise this. They are my equals, until they prove themselves better or worse. Simple as that.
A bit of web background: I keep running into comments on "grrl" sites, which I normally enjoy reading for their up-front and sometimes amusingly bitchy commentary on life, that say things like "All men are the same!" and "Tell it like it is, grrl! They're all assholes!" and so on. This is just so sexist and out of date that it gets me down. And the worst? "They all just want one thing!" Could someone please tell me what this one thing is that I'm supposed to want, as (presumably) a representative of the rest of the male population? I mean, I'd hate to choose the wrong thing and disappoint all these women when I say "Well, you know how I just want that one thing and all - so where's my DVD writer, bitch?"
And if it's supposed to be sex that is the one thing I want, well - it's been so long since I had sex or even cared about having sex that I've forgotten what it smells like, let alone what it feels like.
How would female readers feel if I were to post a blog about a girlfriend being a total bitch, a total princess who I did everything for and she didn't appreciate it one bit? Or that one of my friends slept with two guys in the same month and was a tart, a ho, a heartless cow? If I had comments added by a bunch of macho assholes that I was "telling it like it is" and that "all ho's are the same"? I would expect to see my site swamped by feminist complaints, and rightly so! Now, I understand that it was trendy for a while to do the reverse-sexism thing, much like the reverse-racism thing had its moment, but please: we're in 2003 now! This time has passed. Move on. Get a grip. Stop blanket-insulting genders, races and whole groups of people because you had a bad experience.
So please, as a caring male who really isn't an asshole and really doesn't want just one thing in life, I'm asking nicely: stop being a bitch because it's trendy. Stop treating males as if we're all the same. Bitch about the individual, by all means, but not all of us. That's just pathetic self-justification via the criticism of others and will earn you contempt, not the trendy praise you seek.
[P.S. Yes, I know that having a 'women' category reduces the effectiveness of this complaint. I have a 'men' category, too. I simply chose that title because this post is intended for a female audience, not because it covers anything gender-specific that could be seen as tarring all women with the same brush. So there. Nyer. *chuckle*]
A just-before-zonking-out-for-the-night blog, in order to point all my faithful reader (for there is probably only one, hehe!) to Ruthie's blog. A visitor who I didn't even know I had, due to the anonymity of the Internet, and who made her presence felt by giving me lurv, baby! Well, OK, so it was actually just a comment, but hey, that's lurv for a nerd like me, right? :)
You'll also find the original link on her site to this Name Meaning finder thingummy that I thought I would also try... so what's the result (with my real name, not my Internet pseudo-personality!)?
Meaning: Crown - this I already knew, since my father was a preacher and named us all with Bible names (thankfully no Ezekiel or Methusela...). My name comes from Greek, though, which is odd since the Bible's Hebrew!
Motivation: Has a sense of adventure - ha! That's about as true for me as if they wrote "Has twenty-seven legs"...
Character: Respectful of others - oh, alright then...
Feelings: Warm towards others - despite my feeble attempts to hide behind a callous, stone-hearted, cynical exterior, I am indeed warm towards other people. I make friends very easily (although rarely true friends) and get along with almost everyone I've ever met.
Intelligence: Is a quick witted and bright person - uh, wha? Who said dat? I can't really judge my own intelligence, but would like to think I'm above average, at least. Quick-witted is reasonably accurate, except when it comes to talking to charming women, when my vocabulary is reduced to "thbbbpttttpp, uh, inglegarblegooplydoo".
Spiritual: Believes in harmony - absolutely. I'm a Wiccan, after all. :)
Nature: A high spirited person - what's that supposed to mean? I act as if I'm on cocaine all the time? I screech hysterically at the slightest provocation? I'm fun? What? I don't get it...
Inherent: Shows qualities of a nimble mind - without having one, presumably? Heh... OK, so I learn fast and have never specialised, preferring to learn a little bit about everything than a lot about one thing. I would class that as nimble, purely for jumping between subjects, not for any speed of thought.
Colour. That's what's missing. Yes.
I've decided I really need some colour on this blog. It just looks so... sparse. Spartan, even. It's not that I like clutter, although if you saw my apartment you'd laugh out loud at that comment, nor is it that I'm having a Feng-Shui moment. I'm definitely not having an "I must change something here or my head will explode" episode, either. I just think some colour is needed here.
Of course, with my unhealthy love of black and purple, a redesign might not be a very good idea. I'd have to re-do the title image, too, if I had a coloured background. Perhaps I could just tint those boxes down the left, there. I could perhaps put a background colour or light image behind the blog entries. Hmmm. Blue's been overdone, though. Green can be a bit too... pastel, or too strong. Yellow's just horrible. Red? Definitely not. Let me think about this.
(Edit: I finally finished the 100 Things About Me.)
Here's this week's Friday Five:
1. What was the last TV show you watched?
If we're not counting "on video/DVD", then it was Tracker, Adrian Paul's sci-fi series thingy. If we're counting pre-recorded stuff, it was Friends, season 7.
2. What was the last thing you complained about and what was the problem?
The fact that I had no money left by the 15th of the month, purely because I am currently supporting Psycho. Getting up and going to work every day, for 8-10 hours, to be in debt by the end of the month is not fun.
3. Who was the last person you complimented and what did you say?
My original boss at my current job (from more than five years ago), who I hadn't seen for ages and get on really well with. I told her she looked really healthy after she'd been back home to New Zealand for a couple of months.
4. What was the last thing you threw away?
The wrapper for a Bounty bar.
5. What was the last website that you visited?
A work intranet site for mailing lists. I was looking for the one for mobile phone bill queries for work-issued phones. They said I had run up a bill of over $2,000 in December, but it's not even my phone. Thrilling, huh?
I just remembered something that happened to me a while back that made me chuckle. What prompted the memory was seeing that the 20th episode of season 9 of Friends was aired this week - news that is fairly inconsequential, but reminds me I need to buy the VHS release as soon as it arrives in France. That'll probably be November, if they stick to the normal schedule.
So this memory, yes. It was quite a while ago when I was discussing the series with a colleague. She's a charming, beautiful young lady who also enjoys the show and I had simply remarked something along the lines of:
"You know you're addicted to the show when you identify yourself with one of the characters, no matter how unrealistic it all is."
Her reply?
"Oh, but Chandler's a nice guy!"
It took a moment for her to realise that I hadn't actually said who I identified with, and that this might not be seen as a compliment.
Thanks, Tania. And incidentally, you were right, and it was a compliment.
I finally sat down and watched the (now a couple of years old) film, Me, Myself & Irene tonight. I've had it on DVD for some time now, which in itself is surprising as I am neither a fan of Jim Carrey nor of Renée Zellweger. I suppose I was tempted by a region 1 DVD with Icelandic subtitles. Or not.
To avoid mincing words, Jim Carrey used to annoy the crap out of me. I thought he was excellent in The Dead Pool and in The Mask, but hated the Ace Ventura films and everything he did during that period. What turned my opinion around enough for me to consider watching him again was The Truman Show, which was an astounding piece of work and showed that this stupid-grinned ass had more than a bunch of silly smirks to display. So how was this offering?
Well, I must say I enjoyed it immensely. I expected very little - from the directors of Dumb and Dumber and There's Something About Mary (both of which I chuckled through, I should add), I anticipated some laughs, a simple story and a lot of silliness. However, given a multiple personality story, this one had a touch more potential.
Carrey is excellent in both his roles, as the two personalities of the lead character: particularly towards the end of the film, when he fights himself, he shows remarkable ability and physical talent that I haven't seen for quite some time. The first person who sprang to mind as a comparison was Charlie Chaplin, but that's probably just a mental knee-jerk reaction to physical antics. Admittedly, the story itself is pretty thin, but that's not important - the vital part of the film is the characters, and how they grow and change.
Zellweger unfortunately doesn't get to make much of her role, remaining pretty much a foil to Carrey's twin personalities. That's a shame, as she's a good actress (although I don't particularly like her myself, I can at least recognise that she's not cardboard!). The viewer learns little of her past, and what is learnt doesn't really matter: OK, so this is really a showpiece for Carrey, but I like all my characters fleshed out, thanks very much.
However, the funniest, best and without a doubt the most rewardingly funny parts of the film are those shared by Carrey's character and his three children. Carefully caricatured, while retaining dignity and style, these three black guys are absolutely hilarious, particularly counterpointed by Carrey's oh-so-whiteness. The film is worth watching purely for these scenes, in my opinion.
So, all in all, an enjoyable evening. My recommendation? Buy it if you see it going as a budget title: it's the sort of film one can watch several times with different friends, or purely when one doesn't want a serious, heavy film, but some pizza and chuckles. Top marks to the Farrely brothers for smooth direction, and to Carrey and company for being convincing, charming and funny.
Top of my gaming list at the moment is Tropico 2: Pirate Cove. The first title in the series, as well as the Paradise Island add-on, were excellent. So what's it all about?
Well, the original Tropico placed the player in the role of El Presidente, newly elected ruler of a small island. One built buildings, encouraged farming or industry, exported goods and tried to keep the population happy - pretty much a standard God-sim, as they call them. However, what set it apart was two things: firstly, the humour in the simulation was very tongue-in-cheek, with excellent jokes and comments (both written and audible) to keep the player chuckling throughout. Secondly, the AI of the game was quite remarkable: individuals would walk around the island living their daily lives, regardless of what the player did. They would get up, go to work, come home, go out to the pub or restaurant - all of which was governed by their personal desires and preferences. A superb (aside: why do so many people misspell that "supherb"?) piece of programming which produced a top-class game that's still installed on my PC despite my purchasing it as soon as it was released (in March 2001!). If you want more info on that one, drop in and read Mike Dorn's review at The Wargamer.
So what's the new title? Well, Frog City have developed (along with, I believe, PopTop Software, who built the original) a new Tropico, based on 17th Century pirates! With an economy fuelled pretty much entirely by plunder and capturing prisoners (for ransom or as slaves, presumably), the focus will have changed dramatically from the first title. The game still maintains a sixty-year spread of play (something that seemed silly to me in the first one, unfortunately - why can't my first-born child take over once I'm too old, eh? Europa 1400: The Guild let me do that...) and, I trust, the same sense of humour and fun that was in the first.
However, one additional thing really annoys me about this game. Several months ago, I proposed an interview with the development team for the site I write for sometimes. They agreed and I came up with a bunch of questions for them: things I really wanted to know because I loved the first title so much. They never answered the questions. Poopy-pants to them!
News: PromoGuy has a report on a NINE DVD set of the Alien films to be released at the end of the year - check out the "Loving the Alien(s)" blog for more info. This one goes in at number 2 on my must-buy list!!
(I also updated the '100 Things About Me' again today, with two dozen more things!)
I know, I know, I just posted. But I found this at Gamer's Nook and couldn't resist the posting. Top job. Ha!
I sometimes wonder why people bother sending spam emails. I most frequently wonder this when I receive 625 spam emails in one morning, with between 15 and 25 of each title. You see, I have one of those domains (not for this blog, but for my main email and site) where any_address@the_domain will be delivered to the webmaster of the domain... i.e. yours truly.
Now, looking at this morning's deluge of incoming crap mail, I can divide them into several categories: repetitive porn spam, normal porn spam, anti-spam spam, other software spam, loan spam and other financial spam.
(Oh, and while I think of it - if you're reading this: "Hi Lorraine and Leah!" *grin*)
(Updated: 100 Things About Me)
Porn Spam: this is my favourite kind of spam. It so obviously targets the young, single male with formulaic invitations to discover something 'new', 'different', 'never seen before' - and of course all you need is a credit card..!! The things I like the least about them are the huge numbers of repetitions (such as 15 copies of the same message with the same title) and the rather graphic nature of the ads. The blatant commercialism is hilarious, particularly when coupled with the awful english and the total disregard for whose mailbox it arrives in: for all these people know, I'm a ten year-old female. These get SpamCopped without fail.
Software Spam: these really annoy me. They're always for stupid, useless or old software that someone's managed to buy in bulk and is desperate to ship. I already own three times as much software of the same type and wouldn't buy a copy from some idiot spamming me in the first place! I mean, what's better: buy at $19.99 from an unknown, insecure and totally dodgy place, or at $22.99 from a proper site, with a year's warranty? Hmmm, difficult choice, that one. Of course, the most ludicrous of these are the spam mails selling anti-spam software... SpamCop!!
Financial Spam: does anyone actually go for any of these stupid schemes? Does anyone actually believe that the 417th Mr. Nboto from Nigeria really does have $30 million he wants to repatriate and all he needs is all your account details? One day, I shall answer one of these and ask them for their bank details so I can initiate transfers... anyone answering these scams would have to be so immensely gullible!
Unfortunately, of course, there's little we can do about spam. It's like junk mail: it's impossible to stop. Personally, I filter everything and I send a ton of responses to SpamCop: OK, so it costs me 20 minutes of my time, but it gets spammers blacklisted, their sites closed and makes their lives difficult. That can't be a bad thing.
However, my real question is this: does anyone actually make any money from spam mails, apart from the people selling email address lists and those being paid to spam by mad advertisers who believe it's a trustworthy medium? Has anyone out there actually answered a spam email, ever?
Woooo, I've seen a bunch of sites doing this, and I thought I'd add one for myself. I have a feeling I won't actually reach 100 in one go, so I'm going to steal another idea, and do, say, 10 a day for 10 days. I'll post a linkie-poo in a day's blog if and when I update this list.
(And yes, it's in the extended bit. Press that arrow wotsit just down to the right, there!)
100 Things About Me (yeah, like you care anyway!):
1. I only own and wear black clothes, although some are a little grey now.
2. Well, actually, I have a blue jumper, but it was a present. I do wear that.
3. I'm an omnivore. I will not, however, eat rabbit, duck, venison, ostrich, horse meat (can't remember the proper name!), veal, pork or several other meats.
4. My rule for meat-eating is based upon what I would kill to eat if society broke down tomorrow and I had to hunt my own food.
5. I own a hand-crafted longbow (not made by me).
6. I think cats are the best animals in the world. Better than humans.
7. I live within a stone's throw of the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.
8. I once climbed the gate to that cemetery at night, to bury one of my pet rats. Shhhh.
9. I have never broken a bone, but have had two sets of stitches.
10. I once spent 10 days lying on my back because I slipped four discs and trapped 6 muscles. That was one huge ouchie.
11. I collect things, sometimes obsessively.
12. I play a lot of computer games - probably too many.
13. There is always more chocolate than real food in my fridge.
14. I hope aliens exist, and would understand if they thought we were foul creations of nature.
15. I have talked to trees in the past.
16. I have blue eyes.
17. I have four sofas in my apartment. Only one of them is mine.
18. I am trilingual: English mother tongue, French almost fluently and Bullsh*t very fluently.
19. I lie too often, but never about anything important.
20. I am a feminist and an egalitarian, but not politically correct about either.
21. I am severely phobic of spiders, but not of bugs, snakes or anything else (yet).
22. I understand Freudian Castration, but not Lacan's 'Petit objet a'.
23. As blogged, I have a love of east asian women.
24. I would rather spend an evening with a good film and the cat on my lap than out on a date.
25. No, Ross, that wasn't a metaphor.
26. My favourite film is The Seven Samurai, but The Wicker Man and Sonatine come a close second and third.
27. I have had three girlfriends in my life. All of them cheated on me, except the first, and were dumped for it.
28. I have never cheated on a girlfriend, and never will.
29. I still don't know why the first girlfriend and I broke up.
30. One of my best friends died of cancer at age 24. He never saw his son, who was born a month later. If I could have taken his place, I would have.
31. I have a tattoo, that I designed myself.
32. No, it's not there. It's on my arm.
33. I'd like to think I'm a geek, but my technical knowledge isn't that impressive. I suppose that makes me a nerd.
34. And I don't care.
35. I always try to accept everyone for who they are, and never judge them.
35. I've never been accepted for who I am, but that's OK.
36. I wear glasses. I don't want to wear contact lenses.
37. I don't particularly like blondes (in a romantic sense).
38. I actually love going clothes shopping with women.
39. I hate going clothes shopping for me.
40. I have been invited to go shopping with several beautiful women, and will do, one day.
41. Preferably in summer, for beach wear. :)
42. I'm skinny. Very skinny. Around 140lbs (65kg) at 6 feet tall.
43. I have a degree in computer science, but never did the third-year project.
44. Cancer and madness run in my family.
45. Why 'Lobster'? That's a private joke between me and one of my ex-girlfriends.
46. Favourite actors: Jean Reno, Jackie Chan, Mel Gibson, Rutger Hauer, Danny DeVito.
47. Favourite actresses: Winona Ryder, Sigourney Weaver, Susan Sarandon, Jennifer Connelly, Carrie Fisher (so I have a thing for Princess Leia... so sue me!)
48. Favourite authors: Roger Zelazny, Carrie Fisher, Starhawk, Kazuo Ishiguro.
49. I would most like to have been able to meet Albert Einstein. He sounded like someone who was a lot of fun, as well as a genius.
50. If I suddenly had a million euros/dollars tomorrow, I wouldn't know what to do with it.
51. To me, happiness is more important than money, which is more important than sex, which is less important than most other things.
52. I love my job.
53. I consider myself extremely lucky to work for a very, very cool company where my colleagues are also my friends.
54. I hate office politics, and thankfully don't have to deal with them at all in my current job.
55. I never want to be in a management position.
56. I much prefer to work with machines (computers) than with people.
57. I understand relationships very well, except if I'm in them.
58. I am a nice, honest guy. I hate that. But not always.
59. I can live on very little money, and have a habit of lending the rest to friends. One day they'll pay me back.
60. I am a pagan. More specifically, a Wiccan.
61. I refuse to give advice - I only give opinions.
62. I speak much more politely in French than I do in English.
63. That doesn't mean I can't string together a heck of a bunch of insults and curses in both languages.
64. I dream in French or English, sometimes both, in colour and with a soundtrack.
65. My dreams are like films - once, I even had a dream with full, rolling credits at the end!
66. My favourite materialistic things: PC, coffee machine, car, plastic alien, statuette of Bast.
67. My favourite non-materialistic things: cats, waking up three minutes before the alarm on a sunny morning, walking barefoot.
68. I smoke Winfields. I recently cut down from about 15 a day to 5 a day, just because I felt like it.
69. And no, I am NOT suffering from withdrawal, dammit, ALRIGHT?!
70. Seriously, I'm not. I get addicted to things easily, but also give them up easily.
71. If I had to date someone, I'd rather be with a smart girl than a pretty one. Honestly.
72. I have four brothers and no sisters.
73. I often feel that, as I get older, I am becoming more boring.
74. I don't want to get married or have children.
75. I hate what humans have done to this poor planet, but couldn't be happy without a PC.
76. I have long hair, which I haven't had cut in five years.
77. Two things no girlfriend could ever change about me: my choice of clothes, my choice of haircut.
78. I have the annoying habit of smiling and/or laughing when it's not appropriate (like when I'm being fired or dumped).
79. I have a reputation at work and where I live for always smiling, no matter how bad life gets.
80. I was the only member of my family who did not cry in church at my father's funeral: this is because I didn't want to, not because of him. He was an amazing dad.
81. I am extremely lucky to have had wonderful parents and grandparents. My mum is still alive and is still wonderful.
82. One of my grandmothers lived to be 102. She saw the entirety of the 20th Century (born 1899, died 2001), and was mentally aware of life right up until she died. That is just too cool.
83. I failed my history and English literature exams, but got an A for French, even though I didn't study (hated it!) for 5 years, and only started learning 5 months before the exam.
84. I don't leave the toilet seat up.
85. I have a habit of speaking my mind, especially to upper management. This has not resulted in me being fired. Yet.
86. I can't tell if a woman is interested in me or not. I always assume they're not.
87. I don't believe in revenge.
88. If reincarnation works, I'd like to come back as a cat with an owner like me.
89. I'm too lenient with my cat, but he understands and doesn't push his luck too often.
90. I have hands that never stay greasy: a wash with tap-water or a quick licking (for food) and they're fine. The only grease that sticks is chicken fat.
91. I hate getting animal urine on my hands when I'm changing their litter trays or cages. The smell sticks to me like nothing else.
92. I dislike roll-neck or polo-neck jumpers, because I hate having things constricting my throat.
93. I don't like dogs, but they like me. They all think I'm a bone and bite me.
94. I have only met two dogs that have not bitten me, in the last 30+ years.
95. There are many things I wish I could go back in time to change, but I have learned to live with them. Experience makes us who we are.
96. I use the word "woooo" too often.
97. I'm generally easy-going, but I can be really picky and pedantic, especially when it comes to grammar, punctuation and spelling.
98. I used to teach (computer courses), but don't have the patience any more.
99. I hate travelling, particularly internationally.
100. I love to drive.
There you go. 100 really incredibly useful things you really wanted to know. And in deference to number 96... woooooo!
Ho hum. The Easter weekend is over, and it's time to go back to work. Here in Paris, all the little sheep-people have come home from their holidays, blocking the roads and getting terribly upset with each other. That's something that always amazes me here: virtually everyone goes on holiday at the same time.
Take last week as an example - there must have been maybe four people near my desk at work, when there are normally at least a dozen. This week, there will be a dozen. In July, half the population of the city will leave to go on holiday. In August, they will come back and the other half will leave. For an Englishman this is very strange behaviour, but the French are a people of tradition and custom.
Anyway, my alarm went off at 6:30 this morning, which was a bit of a shock after three days of waking up reasonably late (around 8:00am, if I'm lucky enough to sleep so late). I dragged myself out of bed and flopped in front of the PC: thankfully, I am a lucky individual and can work from home just as easily as from the office! After a short wake-up period, I got my skinny butt in gear and did my Tae Bo workout - my chosen form of exercise that I do every couple of days. And no, I don't look like Billy Blanks.
And now, to work. I have a thrilling document to produce today, and a bunch of email to answer and stuff. Ooooh, what's this? A note from a Vietnamese lady, a friend of Psycho's, who I quite like (but who she hates!)... interesting...
O-hayo gozaimasu!
I've always had a fascination with Japan and Japanese culture. It started young, with an interest in samurai and ninja activities, continued through what could be described as an unhealthy preference for Japanese women (although I've never actually had a Japanese/east asian girlfriend: I find them too beautiful for words and wouldn't dare ask one out) and is maintained by a love of Japanese films, culture, language and virtually anything else related.
Note that I said films there, not anime or manga, both of which I despise intensely. I'm talking about Kurosawa's Shichinin No Samurai, Takeshi Kitano's Sonatine, Ang Lee's Yin Shi Nan Nu (OK, so it's not Japanese, that one, but it's so good it deserves a mention!)...
Fortunately, I work in a global environment: I have actually had conference calls at stupid times of the night with people in Japan to discuss projects we're working on together. I am lucky enough to exchange email and ideas with people based in the Philippines, China, Japan and several other countries in that area. That's one of the great things about the modern world: we're slowly pulling down all the stupid barriers that lie between us as humans.
Unfortunately, every time I try to learn Japanese, something stops me. It's never the same thing twice, of course, but it seems that Life really doesn't want me to learn this language. I've heard that a third language is always a struggle, too, but it's such a gorgeous one! It sounds lovely, it's so funky and I really, really, really want to learn it! I'm determined, I'm energised, empowered, agile and other buzzwords that don't mean anything! Get out of the way, evil language-stoppers of Life - here I come to learn Japanese!!
News of the day: now this is too cool for words... I know the guy who monitored this operation! And I thought I'd ping rockinronnie's blog today, which for some reason I hadn't yet visited until he posted a comment. Daft, really, since I'd seen his link via Flowerhead. Gomen nasai - itte kimasu!
| Edit | - Mean and horrid extended entry. You were warned.
I shouldn't do this, of course. I should only write nice things, and in a new blog entry, but that makes the pages fly by too quickly. However, this is just too much. I just visited the blog at girlrepair.
I wish I hadn't. Quite apart from the 50+ requests for cookie installation (so many, I eventually just hit 'Block All', which is really rare for me!!) upon arriving, and the ludicrously large graphics on the first page that would make this unreadable to anyone without ADSL or cable, the only words that came to mind were "pretentious Mac user".
Pseudo-poetic artsy scribblings that will undoubtedly please some people (and the less "I'm an artist, I can write disconnected words" stuff is actually reasonably interesting), but fail to impress me at all.
...resist posting this one. This is perhaps the most bizarre idea I have heard this century.
And no, I won't be tuning in to watch, thank you very much. :)
For once in my life, I thought I'd actually take an interest this morning in the news. Normally, I don't bother: the news is just a list of horrible stuff that's already happened somewhere else. It's too late to do anything about it. Isn't that depressing?
Anyway, I went and looked at some of the goings-on in the world, and found some amusing or interesting little tidbits. First off, we have a German man who had his favourite means of silencing his wife confiscated... is that bizarre or what?
Secondly, some good news in from China: there are still Pandas in the wild, living in reserves. Lovely animals.
And how about this for someone willing to take risks? That is just so cool: I'd love to hop on board if it all works out.
Of course, there's also bad news: money talks as usual, with the US Government backing the music industry in trying to force Verizon to reveal the name of a peer-to-peer sharer with 600+ albums on his list (or something). Interestingly, at work, we've recently received a warning email asking us all to remove Kazaa and other sharing apps from our work machines, just to be safe. Didn't have 'em anyway, so nyer!
And to finish, although I've never been a fan, Bob Hope turns 100 on 29th May this year! Go, Bob!
Is gratuitous self-promotion permissible on a blog that I write? I mean, I spent the time to set this thing up, even if I didn't actually write the software to do it. Surely that gives me some sort of reasonable claim to promote whatever I want? Or do I need to kowtow to the surfing public, be politically correct and carefully choose every word and expression such that it doesn't offend anyone, all in the fear of losing a visitor?
Is my brain being invaded by government mind-control rays? Should I wear an aluminium hat to deflect their evil beams of malicious intent? What if I were to say that I hate women or men or Jews or white folks or black Chinese homosexual hippies? Just how far can protection from bad things be taken before it becomes dictatorship and we lose our freedom?
Actually, none of that really has anything to do with the link I wanted to put up here, but I just wanted to sound all philosophical and artsy-fartsy. I just remembered, on seeing the Fan Fiction link on the left, that I wrote a story ages ago, based in EverQuest and posted it there. I thought I'd do a bit of gratuitous self-promotion and post a link to it. So, if you have some time spare and want to read several thousand words of fantasy, then come back and abuse me for being a crap author... go here!
I've just been sitting here wandering the web, looking at blogs and stuff. I'm astounded by how many there are out in the virtual world, and by how many are good. Of course, there's a fair few that are awful (mine included), but that's life. As usual, the one thing that annoys me the most in online publishing is the lack of spelling ability.
I know, I sound like a miserable old bugger if I say that, but it really does annoy me. I mean, how difficult can it be to spell-check the text, even if you can't spell very well yourself? The frightening number of people who can't tell the different between "there" and "their", the huge number of errant apostrophes and all those stupid little mistakes that are easily rectified really get my goat. I can live with Americans not being able to spell "colour" or "aluminium" properly (*chuckle*), but I really have no time for individuals who can't be bothered to spell correctly when they're publishing to the world.
Anyway, I thought I'd ping a few sites I found and list them here for your perusal. Most are blogs, but a couple are not. You might enjoy them. You might not.
Mechanical Muse
Whatsthatsmell? - a brand new blog that's just appeared. Could be interesting to watch the development!
Latin proverbs and locutions - just found this one in my bookmarks. Very odd.
Geek News Central
PromoGuy
There you go. I should probably get my skinny butt into gear and do the shopping now.
I dropped in on Flowerhead again today and noticed this thing that apparently a lot of bloggers do weekly: The Friday Five. I figured that, even though I'm late, I'd do it...
1. Who is your favorite celebrity?
Male: Jean Reno. He's a great actor, doesn't rely on pretty-boy looks for success and is very modest when he's interviewed. He's very cool. Female: Winona Ryder. OK, not the most sane celebrity in the world, but she's lovely.
2. Who is your least favorite?
Male: Christian Clavier. He's pompous, bourgeois and a horrible person. Female: Andie MacDowell. She's pompous, bourgeois, a horrible person, can't act and is ugly.
3. Have you ever met or seen any celebrities in real life?
I once stopped Leslie Grantham (Dirty Den from Eastenders) getting on a tube train in London, by accident. He's very, very tall, he is. I was also once on a tube with the Minister of Transport while he was inspecting their new trains. I don't know if he counts as a celebrity, though.
4. Would you want to be famous? Why or why not?
No. I'd rather be respected.
5. If you had to trade places with a celebrity for a day, who would you choose and why?
Matthew Perry (Chandler in Friends, amongst other things). It must be great to be known as being a really funny, smart guy. Getting to act with Courtney Cox-Arquette and Elizabeth Hurley can't be too bad, either. He always looks like he's having so much fun while making his films and TV series.
There y'go. Late entry, but whatever.
In all the rush to rebuild my pages (yeah, OK, so it's taken me an entire day... but hey, that's rushed when you don't know doodly about CSS and haven't written HTML for about 5 years!), I forgot this piece of news:
Psycho got a job.
Yup, that's right. She landed a job. It's not exacly what she's looking for... well, actually it has about as much to do with the job she wants as I have to do with colonising Mars, but at least it's work. She'll be starting next month, which means my bank account has to survive paying for both our lives until the end of May, but after that she'll be more self-supportive. This is good news.
Of course, every silver lining has a cloud: the fear of her first real job out there in the big, bad, scary world populated by ogres; the stress at having to work with a whole bunch of new people; the growing up she'll have to do; the fact that the pay wouldn't even cover her rent and food for the month, let alone all the doodads she buys (do all women need those things?) - all of this is causing a bit of a depressive moment for her.
Thankfully, I have a couple of excellent Reese Witherspoon movies she hasn't yet seen and the first eight series of Friends on cassette, all in French. That should keep her spirits up until she has to brave the void that is independance.
Go Psycho!
It's back! Oh boy, what a long, long rebuild this was. I worked on the site for about six hours yesterday (the whole evening, no less) to get the main page back to normal and add a couple of extra things while I was there.
Firstly, you'll notice a 'Profiles' link under the calendar, where I will (soon) add a page with information about who I am. I'll also include some of the other folks who I talk about (fear not, I won't put anything personal in for them... just some background blah-blah).
Secondly, I left the 'Search' box in from the basic Movabletype template: I have no idea if or how it works, but it was there and cost me zero effort to leave it. What the hell, right?
Thirdly, there will soon be another box with a pic from my webcam down on the left. It won't be anything very interesting, I can assure you - probably just the view out of the window, or looking into the dump I live in. I just thought I'd add it... because I can.
I've also rebuilt all the templates for the site, with the exception of the monthly archive (which will be next) and a by-category archive (which doesn't yet exist). The individual entry archives (recent posts) and all the comment stuff is now prettier and works properly.
In the process of doing this, I've learnt a huge amount about style sheets and the Movabletype templates. It's been very interesting and very enjoyable, despite the fatigue issues. If ever you have a website that falls over and dies in a gurgling mess of HTML, may I recommend a total rebuild? It's terribly gratifying.
So, what's next? Well, I will rebuild the monthly archive template, add the cam image, then either look at the by-category archive or pings and trackbacks. Then I'll need to do the cleaning in the flat, because my head will have exploded and made a horrible mess! To work!
P.S. I just discovered Flowerhead's Blog: anyone with that name and such a healthy love of cows must be wonderful. A cheery, amusing blog for those bad, bad days... drop in and see her.
Yup, I just screwed up my blog pages. That's what you get for changing style sheets and templates at the same time - and, of course, not really knowing what you're doing! Ho hum. I'm looking at the positive side of things right now - this will give me a somewhat enforced opportunity to re-start my template and style info from scratch, and to properly understand it all. This seems a much better idea than to run to a backup (yes! I had one!) or to update someone else's basic info like last time. Thank you, Movabletype, for having the basic templates and style sheets on your website, and for making such a wonderfully robust product - nothing lost, despite my incompetence!
I just found an excellent tutorial on CSS over at House of Style that should remove this huge mental block I've had since the darned things were invented. I used to code HTML by hand in Notepad, you see, and unfortunately got a real job just before CSS, XML, HTML 4 and some other funky stuff arrived. Hence, I had no more time and never got the chance to learn them. Time to rectify that, I think.
Oh, and yes, this does mean that these pages are potentially going to get very weird in the next few days, until I decide what I want them to look like!
Make that three boxes over on the left - I figured out that horrible, horrible calendar. Well, OK, so it isn't horrible. It's lovely. It's just a pain in the proverbial body part when you consider my limited CSS and DIV tagging knowledge!! Hey, it works - who cares if the code is ugly...? (No, don't answer that.)
Oh, and I added the number of comments to each recent post, just for Scary Ross. Next up, the comments and archive templates. Once my head stops pounding...
I've finally updated some of the style sheet and content stuff for this blog - just the easy bits for the moment (although, being a neanderthal, even that wasn't very easy!). On the left, you should now see two boxes. The first contains a little quote, thought or something followed by five random links: a computer subject, a gaming subject, a blog link and two other general sites of interest. Both boxes should also look 'cleaner' now, as they have slightly smaller text. As in their original format, the style sheet and javascript basics came from Works In Progress and have been manhandled and abused by me. Enjoy.
Two cups of coffee and I'm set for the day. Well, at least until after lunch, when I'll have a third to avoid that moment of sudden fatigue caused by having a full stomach. Caffeine is a wonderful thing. Apparently, according to surveys, people who drink at least one cup of coffee in the morning are 40% more effective at work than those who don't. Of course, an extra 40% of absolute uselessness isn't necessarily any better...
It seems that the human body becomes accustomed to associating certain things with caffeine. In the US, one can buy alarm clocks that make no noise: they simply exude the smell of fresh coffee, and this wakes up the body enough to rouse it from sleep. Presumably, the brain recognises the smell of coffee and associates it with caffeine and therefore with waking up. Darned clever, that.
For me, the thing that wakes me up the most in the morning is taking a hot bath. I'm not a shower person. They've always annoyed me: they're supposed to be 'invigorating', but since home-installed showers are rarely powerful enough or hot enough to do their job properly, one always ends up trying to rinse off shampoo or soap with a trickle of lukewarm water. Taking a hot bath, however, shocks the body into realising it's the morning without battering it with jets of cold water.
Of course, the best baths are those taken just before hopping into a bed with nice clean sheets. None of this hurried washing, no bathing with intent to purify (if you don't understand that, too bad), just lying there and soaking. Women are professional bath-takers, of course, and do it better than most men. Personally, I don't really see the point of the candles and I know that the glass of wine is a bad idea since the hot water dilates the blood vessels; thus eating or drinking while soaking is not particularly good for one's health. After a nice long soak, a warm towel, then into bed and ahhhhhhh, blissssss....
Anyway, I should be working. Oh, it's lunch time... yummy.
Oh my goodness! Scary Ross just sent me this URL to The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century. It's a weblog, and the link goes straight to the archive. You just have to read this. Blogs save lives.
Lordy me, I missed a day! Can't have that... I shall have to get myself back in gear.
Thought for the day today comes courtesy of Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet. Excellent, that one. And to think Scary Ross tells me I'm like Spencer... bah, humbug! *grin*
Things are pretty busy at work this week, with lots of meetings again. This explains yesterday's lapse in blogging. I also have a fair amount of tech stuff to do and some documentation to write. I'm not too keen on the last of those. All techies are aware that documentation is essential whenever we work on something - not, of course, for the users, who rarely read it anyway, but more for the future techies who will have to deal with the same code or application. It's kind of a professional courtesy to write up whatever we do. Even if, as in this case, the previous techie didn't bother and I've had to learn it all the hard way.
One of the more interesting 'asides' of work is helping out with this hosting service - OK, so I don't actually do very much, but am on the virtual helpdesk email alias thingie. In the last month or so, we've had four requests for help with Movabletype - everyone's taking up blogging! So we're looking at setting up a neat centralised service now, which should be cool. It won't change anything here, of course, but I just thought I'd mention it.
Back to work.
Ah, the things one finds when it's almost 2 a.m., the poachers in EverQuest aren't dropping the loot for the associated quest and one has five minutes to kill before bedtime.
First off, an Al-Bundy-must-love-this game, Bikini Karate Babes. Oh dear.
And secondly, Elvira's new film is out on DVD and VHS (and the soundtrack's available, too) - Elvira's Haunted Hills. After the sheer trashy brilliance of the first of her films, this one is a must-see.
Ho hum. Bedtime.
The phone rang at 8 o'clock this morning. It was Psycho. She's never awake before 10 in the morning, and usually only because I phone to make sure she's up and won't miss whatever appointment she's supposed to be at.
"I woke up at 7 this morning. So I waited an hour before I phoned."
Why, thank you. And the 70 minutes I just spent on the phone to you, talking about absolutely nothing of any importance, are just what I needed first thing in the morning on a Saturday. Especially when you can use them to remind me of half a dozen things you want me to do for you. And the fact that you never listen to a damned thing I say anyway makes me feel so special. Yes, I have that song you wanted. I told you that a week ago. No, I didn't go to Picard (the shop, not the bald Star Trek guy) when I did the shopping yesterday, as I said at least three times throughout the evening. And why am I so private, why don't I confide in you when I feel crappy? Hmmm, let me think...
Oh, you have to go and take a shower? I know, why don't you call again in half an hour? Oh, you will? Excellent. That way I can feel like I'm being watched and don't actually have a life of my own. How kind.
I was watching a French TV film-cum-pseudo-documentary called L'Odyssée de l'espèce (the Odyssey of the Species) last night and had a bunch of thoughts. First off, I should explain that it's a dramatisation of the evolution of the human species, from apes onwards. It has both its positive and negative aspects...
To begin with, the visual effects are impressive: plenty of computer creations of what the predecessors of humans could have looked like, of long-since extinct (or evolved) species of animal, some lovely visuals of mountains forming and so on. Many of the effects are very well produced, although some of them look a little like they come out of computer game cut-scenes, to be honest. In addition to this, there's a lot of fly-by shots of gorgeous places in the world - wide, rolling savannah, mountains and so on.
Secondly, the story - for it is a story in tone as well as content and not a documentary as such, since no one actually knows what happened - is well-written. It flows, it keeps the viewer's attention and it makes sense within its settings. It also presents many aspects of the theory of evolution in a very accessible way. The invention of tools, the reasons for standing on two legs and many other aspects of human evolution are presented as little parts of a big story.
Thirdly, the content is excellent for young people asking where humans came from, or learning about evolution. Nothing major is missed out, from the australopithec to homo erectus, neanderthals and homo sapiens, and the little mini-stories held within contain humour, sadness, adventure and all sorts of attention-grabbing moments.
On the other hand, I really disliked the whole thing. Presenting current theories as fact has always been one of my pet hates: admittedly, it's difficult to put "perhaps" or "probably" into almost every phrase, but simply presenting things as "this is how it was" is not good. It amounts quite simply to a form of brainwashing, for want of a better expression, much the same as forcing people to accept a certain religion or other set of ideas without questioning. Even the "possibles" of why apes first stood on two legs, how they discovered tools and so on are presented with a little too much certainty for my liking.
Some of the visual effects also turned me off somewhat. Specifically, very near the beginning, the still half-ape humans seemed, to me, to show expressions in a fashion that didn't feel right. Now, I'm no expert on apes or on pre-human species, but if for a moment we accept that humans are descended from apes, then I would expect them to act like them. I've read a whole bunch of books on human behaviour and body language in the past, that made a lot of sense, and too many of the film's choices fit more with modern humans than with apes. Admittedly, the producers of the film undoubtedly tried to make a sort of mix of human and ape behaviour in showing expressions and emotions, but there are too many touches of modern bearing for my liking. Given that these creatures are supposed to exists several millions of years ago, I would hardly expect them to show expressions that are much more social and recent.
However, the worst thing in the whole film is the awful narrative. Don't forget, I'm a scientist - the horribly dramatic and supposedly poetic voice-over through the film really had my teeth grating. Of course, it's French, so emotion and drama are expressed differently to the way I am accustomed (being British), but even so it sounded more like a boxing commentator mixed with a Mills & Boon author than anything else. Ick.
All in all, it's a good introduction to the theory of evolution, but I would hate to think of someone watching it without a pinch of salt (or several hundred) handy. Primarily for children who question where we came from, and definitely not for me.
Watching the news last night was an interesting experience: US troops in Baghdad, the Baghdadi residents smiling and cheering, statues of Saddam Hussein being pulled down and so on. The best thing was seeing all the happy people cheering the troops as they came through the city.
Now, I'm not silly enough to believe that all those people are really genuinely 100% happy that Bush decided to trash their country (for whatever reason... there's no need to get into that), but I'm also not silly enough to believe that they were all just cheering because the Americans were carrying guns and were, effectively, their new rulers. Somewhere between the extremes that journalists would have us believe are reality lies the truth: after many years of repression, torture, dictatorship and living in fear of the person who lives next door, the Iraqi people have finally had what they wanted in the original Desert Storm campaign (and no, I refuse to call that a war - it was a skirmish. It wasn't long enough to be a war). They finally have the right to say what they think.
OK, so there are the vocal folks who beat pictures of Sadman with their shoes, who cheer the Americans, who pull down statues and so on. However, there are also the other people, those who just look relieved. One report on French TV yesterday showed a taxi driver giving the film crew a lift to their hotel: he was smiling and laughing, genuinely happy that Hussein was no longer in power. I don't think he honestly cared who achieved it - all the people calling Bush a 'hero' should really redirect that title at the men and women who did the fighting! - but his happiness was visible. He and his family can finally live again, without looking over their shoulders all the time, without wondering what atrocity their maniac leader will commit next, without fearing that their neighbour might be a member of the secret police and have them dragged off and tortured for accidentally burping while saying Saddam's name, or something equally ludicrous.
So, all in all, and despite my 100% hatred of war, there's a good outcome. Now, call in the UN and let them sort out the mess, get the Iraqi people back on their feet with a democratically elected government, and let them enjoy the fruits of their labours and of the oil that lies in their country.
But please, please, please don't destroy their minds by broadcasting MTV.
P.S. Proud of the British troops, I am! Damned fine people.
It is a quiet moment. Meetings are finished, and I find myself at my desk, watching quietly as over 300 users' synch folders are deleted from the servers (that's what you get when you don't use the app for six months, dammit!). The sun's still shining outside the huge window beside me, and I just can't wait to drive home with the roof down. Scary Ross also told me today that one of my favourite films of all time, "Remo, Unarmed and Dangerous" comes out on DVD in July. That's the best news I've had in ages!
So here I am, thinking about the things I need to do to my blog page. So far, I have come up with a shortlist as follows:
(a) I really need to look at the template I use for the blog archive, since it's starting to have more posts in it, and clean it up so that it's readable.
(b) I also need to look at the style-sheet and template I use for the main blog page. The large type is beginning to annoy me for some reason, and I'd kinda like to put the category graphics over on the right-hand side, to use up less vertical space.
(c) I need to build in some more content on the left, under that 'Recent Posts' box. A box which, incidentally, I am beginning to dislike - the text is big, the border is ugly.
(d) I've been considering one of those dandy calendar thingies that marks the days blogs are posted on and allows visitors to jump around to different days. That sounds complex, though, and I'm not the smartest bear in the woods.
(e) I'd like to get category filtering working, which again sounds complicated.
(f) The whole trackback and ping thing sounds intriguing, although since no one even reads this, let alone links to it, it might be less than useful. XML goes in the same bucket.
(g) I need more chocolate in the fridge.
OK, so there's my job list. Now all I need is the time to do them. Daydreams....
I have six hours of meetings today. What fun.
(Well, OK, so they're meetings with really cool people and on interesting subjects, but I can't actually admit that I don't mind, now, can I?)
I was thinking about my comment the other day - the one where I met a Japanese gamer in EverQuest - and how our world has changed over the last twenty years or so. When I was young, it was really quite unusual to travel abroad and to meet foreign folks. I remember my best friend when I was between seven and eleven years old, who visited San Francisco. At that time it seemed like a place so far away, so different and unusual. I never had foreign friends, it was strange to have a French Assistant at school and the people who had visitors from other countries were posh.
Now I live in France, working for an American company and sharing my days with people from all over the world. Just a few years ago, the team I work in went out for lunch (someone was leaving to go to another team) and we were all sitting in a creperie. I looked round the table and remembered seeing, amongst the twelve people there, folks from Ireland, England, Scotland, America, Columbia, Denmark, the Netherlands, New Zealand and France - that's nine different nationalities in a dozen people, all of whom I could call friends!
Just imagine how different our outlook on life must be, with so many different cultures and customs all mixed up and exchanging ideas! Isn't that incredible?
Chasing the, clouuuudds away,
Cooooooome and play, where the air is sweeeeeet...
Ah, what a gorgeous day it is today. Absolutely toe-curlingly cold this morning, with an evil wind blowing as I staggered half-awake to the car park, but now the sun's out and it's lovely. That wind's still blowing, but I'm in the office so don't really notice. It's so nice here when it's sunny: I'm fortunate enough to sit by a huge window (presumably this is part of the company's security policy: put the freak in the window and scare off potential burglars!) and have a large plant just behind me. With the sun shining through the glass and a bit of greenery around, it's great. I slept really well last night, too, which is good news. The last few days, I'd been tossing and turning all night, getting about 5 hours' sleep maximum and it was starting to tell.
Psycho has an interview this afternoon, which she's been whining and moaning about all morning. Ah, the joys of interviews and finding that first job after University. Call me jaded, call me a cynical old bugger, but it amuses me to see her stress. Not in a nasty way, just in a sort of "been there, done that, and there's a lot worse, I can assure you" kind of way. She really wants to find a job, but they're somewhat rare these days - especially in the psychology business, where there's way too many qualified people and not enough work. So I've been supporting her for a while, with the intent that she doesn't have to take a crappy job at McDonalds or something just to have food in the fridge. For her part, she keeps looking, keeps reading and learning new things and goes to interviews, about which she always complains.
Today's interview is a whole 90 minutes. Wooo, scary. Actually, that's a reasonably long interview, but I'm a jaded old git and I remember my interview for my current job - five hours long, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., with about six different people!
Good luck, Psycho! Hope you land this one, 'cos it sounds like something you'd enjoy!
My rabbit's not well. She's getting old now, but she's always been full of life, hopping around in the little indoor park I built her, grabbing food from my fingers when offered, attacking the broom I use to clean the area and so on. Since she's old (5 years old now!), she been getting grey fur here and there and has become a bit picky with her food, but she does fine. She's also trailing a lump of solidified poop behind her - this happens sometimes cos she has a furry butt and it sticks. The problem is she won't let me pick her up to try to extricate said poop from her fur. Lovely job, that, if and when she lets me. Rabbit poop isn't the most pleasant substance in the world...
Today I noticed that the grey fur under her left eye had gone. It's fallen out, or she scratched it off, and it doesn't look very pretty. Poor little mite. Thankfully, here in France, there's 24-hour SOS Vets who come and visit and sort everything out. So in the next 30 minutes or so she'll be examined and I'll know what's wrong. I hope it's just old age and nothing to worry about, but it concerns me because she's like family these days. OK, so she doesn't quite have as much personality as the cat, but she's been with me since I've been in France. We'll see what the vet has to say.
Oh, one more thing: the guy who was hurt in the car accident during the week's wife phoned today. He's doing fine, he's back at home, goes back to work on Monday and will be fully healed in a few weeks (scarring time, I presume). I thought that was nice of her, to let me know he's OK.
--Later--
She's OK. She just has a little skin infection, so I have to disinfect every now and again and take some fur for analysis in case it's something horrid. The vet was excellent: he cut her claws, managed to remove the poop-block and Rebecca (the rabbit) didn't even panic. Yay! She's OK!
So I'm in EverQuest and I'm bumming around in the Western Plains of Karana, grinding through level 49 by killing corrupt guards and handing in their bracers to the guard Captain (which, incidentally, is horribly long and boring to do, but gives great experience for a solo player). I drop in at Qeynos to pick up some malachite for pet summoning and bump into the alternate character of an in-game friend whose low-level druid I helped out recently.
The character's name is Konnichiwa, so I pop a note over saying "So you speak Japanese?". The reply? "I am Japanese." I love the internet. Where else could I have a chat in the middle of a game, with someone on the other side of the world?
Did your parents ever tell you that? "It pays to be honest," mine always said, but I grew up thinking, somewhere deep down, "It costs to be honest." Of course, all of us non-evil folks try to be honest when we can, but it's simply not practical 100% of the time. This explains the long list of films in the style of Liar, Liar and so on, where someone cannot lie for a day, and the messes that this causes.
Last night, I was honest with Psycho. I'd been pretty harsh with her the last few days, since one of my big problems in life is over-sacrificing myself for my friends. In trying, more recently, to defend my inner self from this constant assault of self-sacrifice, I over-compensate and become... not mean, but harsh. So yesterday I decided to sit her down and explain what is going on: hell, she's a psychologist, she should understand.
And you know what? She did. It pays to be honest more often than you'd think.
How many of you are nice guys? I mean, genuinely nice guys, not just "I'm a nice guy, now take me home, undress me and do unmentionably adult things to my lower appendages" nice? You are? Me too.
Of course, as all guys know, if a female calls you 'nice', it's the Kiss Of Death. I was going to say 'girl' there, but this is something that I have discovered doesn't change as one ages. To be called 'nice' is like being called 'nondescript'. We'd all rather be 'interesting' or 'mysterious' or even 'exciting', all of which generally mean "he's a total scumbag, but I'm going to sleep with him and marry him anyway". 'Nice' means, as a line in a book I once read said, "he's a great friend and you trust him and adore him, but you wouldn't f*ck him in a million years." I believe it was If You Can't Live Without Me... Why Aren't You Dead Yet?, which is a superb read. I may be wrong. It may have been (gasp!) a TV series.
So what is it about 'nice' guys that's so bad? Well, to speak personally, we're not seen as being very interesting or exciting. We're predictable, to an extent. If we say we'll be somewhere at a particular time, we're there. If we promise to do something, we do it. Birthdays are rarely forgotten. Flowers and other unexpected gifts appear randomly and for no good reason. We compliment. We listen. We're the ones women turn to when they get screwed over by the others. We don't blame our other half for everything, treat them like crap and sleep with other women. All of this, however, seems to be a sort of "anti-pheremone" for the vast majority of women and is the bane of our lives. Yet we persist, because we're nice.
Of course, nice guys are also renowned for ending up with horrible women. It's a bizarre state of affairs and can undoubtedly be explained psychologically. A good mother who's too maternal, encouraging a similar response in her child, who wants to help a lunatic cow and instead ends up sacrificing everything and getting dumped on, much like nice women with horrible men.
Apparently, I am officially nice. My boss showed me my work appraisal recently, and after the list of skills and knowledge and the list of things to learn and develop, to which other managers had added their notes, she had added "Really nice guy."
So I'm scratched from the list of eligible bachelors, unless I go looking for an axe-murderess. Hell, if even my boss can notice it, I must be seriously nice. Ain't life grand?
Ah, what a day today. It's sunny and lovely, if a little chilly when the wind whizzes by, and there's hardly anyone at work. There's a major strike on today here in Paris, of all the public services, to try to hold on to their pensions and retirement benefits. The government wants to align their employees with the private sector, which means that they'll have to work longer (probably) and get less money (from what I understand) when they retire. In a way, it seems reasonable, since we all work in similar jobs, but in another way I can see how they'd not want to lose their additional benefits. So anyway, there's fewer trains, metros and buses, the airports are running at about 20%, the Post Office is running at a reduced rate and so on.
Understandably, the roads were a nightmare this morning - took me about twice as long as usual to get to work today. On the other hand, since I work in high-tech, a huge number of folks are working from home today, thus making the office a nice, quiet place, with few queues for lunch and so on. Add the sunshine to this, and it's great! Now, add an all-day course on the internationalisation of applications by an amusing Australian chap, and the day's work is a lot nicer. Add the fact that I have to leave at 4pm to go to an appointment, and it's even better..!!
Nice to have a good day in the week, I must say. Life ain't so bad after all...
Wowzers, almost missed a day, there. Not much time to write at the moment, as I just got back from a car crash! Nothing serious for me, but for the other guy... ouch.
I was driving up a thin street, two cars wide, parked both sides. There's a car coming the other way, drifting slowly into the middle of the street. Now, I should point out that this is quite normal in Paris, where 80% of the drivers are completely stupid and mad, so I wasn't too worried. However, as I get closer, I start getting concerned because he's not pulling over into his lane. I honk the horn gently, to warn, just as a matter of course.
The guy driving almost seemed to wake up. He jerked his steering wheel over to avoid me, and overcompensated. Our cars passed, clipping wing-mirrors, but he jammed his into the back corner of a parked vehicle. He wasn't wearing his seat-belt, either, so he whacked his head on the steering-wheel. He was a bit shocked, to put it mildly.
So I just spent the afternoon with the police and ambulance folks, filling out forms, explaining what happened and, of course, making sure the guy was alright - he is, but they're keeping him in overnight, just in case. I even called his wife to let her know he was OK and give her details and so on. Of course, my car's not damaged at all, so the only insurance stuff is for him, thankfully. And he was pretty cool about it all, which is quite remarkable for a French driver (no offense, but Continental temperaments are not renowned for being easy-going).
Thank goodness we're both OK. His car can be fixed. Fixing humans isn't so easy.
Of course, the good news out of this is that I ended up missing the boring seminar this afternoon... hehehe...
Man, oh man. After I ranted and raved (and worked like a loon to catch up my lost hour) yesterday, I thought it was all done and dusted. But ohhhhh nooooooo, that'd be too simple. I'm sure life (or Life with a capital, since it seems to have a personality) just picks people at random sometimes, sort of like waving the crap-stick in their direction.
"Today, you will suffer, to counteract the holistic imbalance caused by some fat, macho, ugly, obnoxious, selfish, scumbag millionaire getting laid by a gorgeous woman. He is happy, you shall not be. So let it be."
Thanks, Life. I can't remember who the quote comes from, but I heard a great one: "How's life treating you?" "Like I slept with its wife..." Appropriate enough, since last night was just as bad as the weekend. Having caught up my lost hour via a work regime of blood, sweat and nicotine, I was finally able to wend my way home. The best moment of the day has to be the drive home: the sun's out and it's fairly warm here at the moment, so the journey was with the top down... ahhh, cabriolets are lovely.
The evening was, to put it mildly, awful. I won't go into detail, but suffice it to say that I'd rather have slept all day yesterday and not had to deal with it.
Thankfully, there's always the up-side. I recently reinstalled EverQuest on my home PC and started twiddling around with it again. It's been a year or so since I played (or rather 'gave up that addiction'!), and it's nice to drop back in on the game purely for fun. A few hours of sitting in a quiet zone and slaughtering kobolds is always good for my mood, and the enjoyment of exploring areas I never really visited remains.
This morning, things seem to be going better, too. I'm very fortunate in that my job allows me to work from home sometimes (officially whenever I want, but staying here all week would drive me nuts and I'd get nothing done!). Working from home means that I can drink decent coffee instead of the stuff from the machine at work, that the cat is around, which is always nice, and that I can concentrate much better on what I'm doing due to fewer interruptions. Days at home mean lots more done, and thus a lighter workload for the rest of the week, which is excellent.
Oh, while I think of it, one more nice thing yesterday: a young lady who recently finished her contract and left the company dropped in yesterday to say hello. She's lovely. A bit of sunshine in an otherwise cloudy day, no less. :)