As if HTML email wasn't bad enough, an increasing number of folks seem to be sending me messages on "email stationery". This wonderful invention, undoubtedly created by a genius of the order of those people supporting the Can-Spam laws, voting for Dubya and building 4Mb Flash introductions for web pages, is becoming the bane of my life.
Personally, I wonder if these demented individuals realise how I feel as the recipient when I see this:
I would love to know what possesses these demented imbeciles to believe that:
(a) I would want to see the vomitous pile of crap they put in the background
(b) I would want to spend another 200Kb of my bandwidth on downloading said vomitous pile of crap
(c) I am going to spend the time to find the message amongst all that visual diarrhoea
(d) I am not going to add them to my list of spammers
It's just so tempting to reply with my own stationery. How about a 5Mb uncompressed JPG... they should surely like the detail in such a beautiful background. Stupid arses.
At the risk of sounding overly sentimental, Little Voice is perhaps one of the most touching films I have ever seen, and also one of the most surprising.
Jane Horrocks, Michael Caine and Ewan McGregor all turn in superb performances, with Brenda Blethyn being a tad melodramatic but remaining within the bounds of believability. It's a real pleasure to see Michael Caine in particular, in a role of a shoddy, second-rate agent who believes he's found his passport to 'the big time' in LV. That man is such a great actor.
Bypassing Jane Horrocks' astounding ability to mimic people, it's also a pleasure to see her on the big screen again: she does a heck of a lot of voice work, but to be honest I haven't seen her in a major role since Life Is Sweet. She's a real star and can play demented, disordered, deranged or simply different people with such style...
As for 'Little Voice', the story is a fairly standard setup: unbearably shy LV has a talent, is discovered by the local agent, the road to riches and stardom opens... but love is in the offing, so which will she choose? That summary, however, is where the similarity to virtually any other 'standard' setup stops: LV does not want stardom. She doesn't even really know she has her talent, which is completely passive. Her choice is not between stardom or love.
Virtually nothing beyond the basic storyline is 'standard' here. There's no "*gasp* Wow!" surprises, but events turn in quite unexpected directions at all times. Many folks even complain at the end because "it isn't an end" or "it isn't what we want". That's another reason to love the film: it doesn't give the viewer a Hollywood (yawn) ending. It doesn't tie up all the loose strings.
It's like life: there's no tidy endings. Look past the obvious images at what's underneath. See the film for what it is, and enjoy.
Three more days until the end of the year. Three more days of work, then I can go away for more than a week, relax, play games, watch films and not switch on my laptop except to chat with Scary Ross. Three more days.
2004. Isn't it strange to think that we're already in the third millenium (and haven't yet managed to destroy the entire planet)? I still clearly remember being at junior school and thinking that the year 2000 seemed so far away. I wondered what I'd be doing when I was 'so old'.
From the age of about 16, I had this 'ideal job' that I wanted to find. I wanted to go to University, study computer stuff, then get a job where I would be well-paid, could go in to the office in jeans, have long hair and be a sort of local IT guru for my colleagues.
The amazing thing is... that's what I do. And I even get to work from home.
That is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous family crap
Or to take arms against a sea of annoying idiots,
And by opposing end them?
The wonder of Christmas Day. Mine will be spent protecting Psycho from the slings and arrows of her very own disfunctional family, while avoiding the same from mine.
Whether you celebrate Christmas, Xmas, Giftmas, Yule/Winter Solstice, the birth of the Sun King, Hannukah, Chanukah or just 'Happy Holidays', I hope that you and yours are well, and that we can all find a small spark of real feeling to express amongst all the commercialism and falsehood.
Have a good one!
Back to the office after a nice weekend of bumming around and relaxing. I have a meeting today that is seven hours long, so I expect to be running on a single brain cell for most of the day.
The big news of the moment, however, is that Psycho and JC are back together. He dropped in on Friday night and, as suspected, convinced her that it was worth another shot - not that she needed much convincing, to be honest. He's a nice chap (although not perfect!) and they may have something special going on.
Cool. Gets her out of my hair.
...after the beep. I'm too busy playing Silent Storm and working my skinny butt off to think of anything even vaguely interesting to say.
Normal service will probably be resumed. Some time. When I've had more coffee.
I don't know if any of you remember way back in March when I started this weblog. The reason behind it - but not the purpose of it - was "Operation Iraqi Freedom". Otherwise known as Dubya's Great Oil Company Takeover Bid, the war in Iraq was a huge surprise to many of us and woke me up a bit from the usual blinkered view of my own navel.
The big news is, of course, that Saddam Hussein has been captured. It'll be interesting to see how they decide to deal with the situation, but I have a suspicion they'll go ahead and do something stupid. Let's face it: Dubya is not one to give two hoots about right or wrong, what the rest of the world thinks or anything beyond getting re-elected. Knowing him, he'll probably execute the guy on national TV.
So there you have it: I have come full circle in 7 months or so, from starting a blog as the Iraq war was underway, to seeing the final nail in the Taliban's coffin.
In other earth-shaking news, it looks like Psycho's going to dump the new boyfriend. He's not 100% perfect. Can't have second best now, can we? *sigh*
Q: How does a student change a light bulb?
A: They hold it in the socket and wait for the world to turn around them.
If you're of working age and talk to students who are either still studying or just trying to find work, you're probably familiar with that joke and the associated attitude. Not all students are like that, of course - generalisations on that scale would be ridiculous - but rather too many of them are.
Now, I've been a student and I've been like that, so don't get all angry and upset because you're a student and don't like hearing the truth. None of us do, but sometimes some things need to be said, and right now I need to say this:
The world owes you nothing. Deal with it.
You think your lecturers are rough because they expect you in lectures at 10:00am and to finish your paper with only a week's extra time? Wait 'til you have a real boss.
You think life is "unfair"? I'd love to hear what your reference is, because it has never been fair to anyone I know.
You think any of us who work ourselves to death to pay taxes to fund your education give a rat's arse that you can't afford to go to Britney's next concert, to eat out this week or to drink twelve pints of beer this evening? Hah!
And if you think that when you leave the safe little cocoon of University, you're going to walk into a job that has the hours you want, the days you want, with seven weeks' paid holiday a year, a company car and all the other benefits... well, you can just fuck off and work the shitty jobs for a few years like everyone else.
Yup, you guessed it: Psycho's doing her usual adolescent/student "Life's so unfair, I don't feel well, I can't deal with the pressure" bullshit. Gosh, it must be hard to go to work for two whole days in a row. I don't know how I'd ever manage.
Well, this week is going nicely, isn't it? Psycho gets a job - or rather, goes for a free 3-month training course which involves a job at the end - and a boyfriend, I get lots of free time and my PC is fixed (seemingly)! Bliss.
It's starting to look like my PC problems might be hardware-related, again. For the moment, it's still unsure.
Having seen similar problems to this before on the same PC, I figured file locks and fragmentation might cause them. The last time the machine zipped up to 100% CPU frequently and stayed there, effectively locking itself up, it was because the drives were all over 90% fragmented (not good) and because a program I use was not releasing file locks properly. Consequently, they caused problems when I tried to read them myself and the system thought it should be denying or sharing access.
So, to start with, I started a defragger. Unfortunately, this crashed my PC (the BSoD yesterday), since it's a command-line defragmenter and obviously Windows didn't like it messing with system files or something! I had that 'hard error' failure that is so unhelpful.
Having seen my secondary PC give BSoD errors thanks to the wonder of Norton Internet Security 2004 (specifically Kernel stack overflows), I then thought it may have been that. So I uninstalled the whole thing and put Personal Firewall 2003 back on instead. Unfortunately, this did not seem to solve the problem.
This morning, since I'm working from home today, I have been trying to run the defragmenter again. I figure I might as well eliminate software probabilities before turning to hardware. One very bad lockup has happened so far (causing some 5Gb of data to be duplicated and found by a checkdsk run), but drive C: finished OK and right this second, drive D: seems to be chugging nicely along. Only three more drives to go after that!
It may also be the CPU settings in the BIOS, now I come to think of it. They reset themselves recently (causing a 400MHz drop in speed) and I may have set them wrong, since I can never really remember what they should be. It's all just guesswork for me when it comes to hardware.
I've also just remembered that I have SiSoft's Sandra (their benchmarking utility) here somewhere. If the software side seems to be OK, that should help me find out what's wrong with the hardware side. I just hope it's not something on the motherboard. Last thing I want to do is rebuild a computer. Again.
Just had this little gem sent to me by Tankman: Driver's Ed. The control system sucks, but it's amusing.
I also noticed my last two posts were published at the same time, one day apart. How odd. Must be an after-lunch thing!
Yesterday evening was full of life's little ups and downs. It started when I got home from work: Psycho had gone for a siesta in the afternoon and had asked me to call her to wake her up before JC arrived. This is quite normal for her. At the moment, she sleeps at least twelve hours a day - sometimes as much as sixteen hours - and rarely uses her alarm clock. It's one of those endearing qualities she has (read "bloody annoying habits") that sits in the 'act like an adolescent' category. She's always asking me to phone and wake her up, since she's in desperate need of the molly-coddling mother she never had. Of course, she doesn't think so, but then even Freud couldn't analyse himself.
So I called her to wake her up in time for JC's arrival, but it took a lot longer than I thought. She's a very deep sleeper and, after a lot of calls, she finally woke up because he was knocking on her door. She was, of course, annoyed as hell and as usual tried to blame me... most amusing when she checked just how many times I'd phoned.
The evening itself went well, for both of us. I spent my time watching films and series, burning a couple of CDs and messing with the computer. She went out to a restaurant with JC and, it seems, everything went well: he's cuter than she remembered (which is good) and is as nice as suspected. Being Psycho, she managed to find a couple of things to whine about, but they were fairly minor and I told her this morning to stop dwelling on them and just talk to him if he has habits that annoy her. Starting a relationship based on lies, secrets and keeping one's mouth shut is not a good idea.
Unfortunately, my evening took a turn for the worse at around 11:15, when I was just deciding to go to bed a little early for once and get some decent sleep. Rebooting the primary computer, the anti-virus came up all red, shouting "Tampered!" in every category. Most disturbing. Even worse was that, when I went to the page it suggested for solutions, there was no description of what was wrong, just how to fix it - by uninstalling and reinstalling, of course.
Uninstalling is always easy. The clean reboot afterwards, however, caused the disk checker to kick in on one of my drives... and it spent thirty minutes verifying, rather than the normal twenty seconds. Eventually, the PC came back up and I could reinstall the AV. Updating the DATs then caused the PC to hang, so another reboot was in order... time ticking by all too quickly, of course. Finally, everything was back to normal, so I kicked off the full system check and went to bed.
This morning, no virus problems were reported and I was completely knackered from lack of sleep. Very strange, after all those ugly red warnings last night! Everything seemed normal, so I kicked off a drive defrag and a couple of other things and came in to work for the massively important (not) IT Director visit. Unfortunately, if I try to remote control or even ping the machine at home, it's not responding. I even tried connecting to the secondary and remote controlling it, then remote controlling the primary from there... no luck at all.
My poor baby PC is sick again! *sniff*
Actually, I live in Paris, but that's beside the point.
So why am I living in hope? Well, today could be a big day for Psycho: she had an interview this morning, has a training session this afternoon and will see a new boyfriend this evening!
The interview is for a receptionist position in a clinique aesthetique: I'm not sure what that'd be called in English, but I suppose it's a beauty clinic, with the possibility of it also being a plastic surgery place. She'd enjoy working there and it'd give her some useful skills to put on her CV: telephone operator, keyboard stuff, scheduling and so on. She was badly stressed about it this morning, as expected, but hopefully will get through it fine.
This afternoon, she's headed to a training session. It's one of those freebie things run by the unemployment agency here (the A.N.P.E.) and is a course in first aid, dealing with emergencies and similar things in the workplace. It's not an incredibly useful thing in and of itself, but in her branch of work (psychology and working with kids and so on) will be a definite bonus. It's a surprisingly long course, lasting several weeks, so must be quite impressive. She should be there about now, learning to resuscitate people and use broken lamps to electro-shock people back to life... or something like that!
Finally, this evening, she heads out for a restaurant with a new boyfriend. This is, of course, the biggest news for me. Firstly, a new man on the scene should lift her spirits and give her something to worry about other than all those things that preoccupy her while she's unemployed: the lack of work, the size of her stomach, whether she should do Cindy Crawford's 'B' or 'C' workout and so on.
More importantly, a new man in her life will get her off my case! This evening will be the first time in weeks - nay, months! - that I have been at home on a Monday night. Normally, I would be over at her apartment, cooking for her and cheering her up. Someone else has that job tonight. Brilliant.
I should add that I am intensely happy for her: she's a lady who needs someone around. We're opposites in that sense, since I can exist with no friends nearby and still be happy. She needs a man in proximity, a man who'll cuddle her and look after her, a man who'll encourage and love her.
I've met the guy before - who shall be referred to as JC - and he's very pleasant. He's a year older than me (so six older than her) and, when I met him, was a bit of a hippy. Calm, smiles easily, seems caring and gentle. He's apparently had his hair cut since (booooo!), but he struck me as a genuinely pleasant person...
Of course, if he does nasties to her, I'll be forced to kill him.
Jackie had some interesting things to say about Ross being right, so I thought I'd blab on about that for a while, without going into a load of detail of specifics.
While I agree, to a certain extent, that "If being you happens to validate someone else's self-damaging behaviour, then that's life.", I have to say that it is also impossible to live in an isolation bubble. We all have contact with other humans and our interactions with them have to be taken into consideration when deciding on a course of personal action. This is even more true in a situation where one cares for the other person.
So I suppose the question becomes just how much you should curtail 'being yourself' for the good of someone else. Putting that another way, how far should you change your behaviour to support a friend and encourage a change in their life?
On the whole bastard thing, I also have to say that I disagree entirely. I would never be one, but not being a bastard is definitely a lot harder than being one, and pays off a lot less. That, I'm afraid, is the way life is.
"That's it, you see. It *is* your fault. By not correcting her erroneous (and self-damaging,) behaviour, you're validating her life model and making it persist. Hope you're proud of yourself."
Entirely true. Of course, it assumes that she has too little strength of character or mind to spot this herself and do something about it, which is also probably true.
Sounds like I should take those "Be A Total Bastard To Women" courses after all.
I spoke to my mum on the phone today - she called to tell me that the UK tax office is utterly insane, a fact of which I was already fully aware. Apparently, they will keep sending me (often threatening) letters for the next seven months, despite finally closing my business today: they have to do so in case there are creditors, or something. That's fine with me. Alternatively, I could pay them to stop using my tax money to send pointless letters. Yeah, right.
While we were chatting, she also told me that one of my nephews will be visiting Paris in March. He's already 12 years old (how time flies!) and it's a school trip to visit various things in the city and, of course, EuroDisney.
Surprisingly, he wanted me to know because he thinks it would be cool if his uncle turned up to say hello. That's really sweet. Since Paris is so small, I think it'll be entirely possible, so I shall do my best.
Ah, the blissful innocence of children who don't know what "social reject" means...
This morning, I took the big cat to the vet for his yearly vaccinations. Strangely, especially considering how much of his youth he spent there, Pie doesn't mind going: he talks a lot and doesn't particularly like being boxed and carried, but he's very calm. It helps, of course, that the vet I go to is an absolute gem: he's young, gentle, adores animals and chatters away softly to reassure them while he's sticking needles in them. His female clients are all nuts about him. The human ones, I mean.
Today was a good visit: not only were there two attractive females with cats in the waiting room, but a dog that was completely bonkers. Silly thing was over-excited to the point of rushing around and leaping at people to get cuddles. Considering I had Pie on my lap at that point, I was a little concerned.
Thankfully, I didn't need to be. The dog came running over and jumped up at me. Pie turned his head calmly, without moving his body at all, hissed at the mutt, then totally ignored it. Cool as a cucumber.
What do you get if you cross a population's mind-boggling gullibility with a love of massive profit? Corporate Politics.
I just don't get it. How can an entire population be so incredibly dumb or so utterly apathetic as to not only allow their leader to declare war on other countries willy-nilly, but to know their entire governmental system is putrefying under their very noses and not do a damned thing about it?
I am, of course, talking about the United States, but this stuff is getting just as bad elsewhere, too. Virtually every capitalist democracy is infested with greedy scumbags willing to shaft their own grandmothers for a fast buck. It riles me, it really does.
The blindingly obvious example of this is Bush declaring war on the country of his choice ("Now, which should we attack? Where's all the oil...") without asking the people who voted him into power, without the agreement of the international community and without a good reason or any proof to substantiate his claims. Everyone's aware of this. Yet he is still in power, protected by the many millions of those for whom he fights... the corporate big-wigs.
That subject has been discussed to death. I have only this to say, quoting directly from Herman Goering, Reichsmarschall and boss of the Luftwaffe: "...the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."
And now, on a much smaller scale, we have the new Feel Free To Spam Everyone law (thanks to Kasia for the link). It's not war and it won't cause any death, but it will certainly cause a lot of discomfort: basically, the US Government needed some ideas on how to deal with spam. Rather than turning to industry experts, they asked Microsoft, AOL and other big companies, who of course don't want spam to end at all! They'd much rather have it legalised so they can do it themselves and get in on all that (supposedly) multi-million dollar business that until now they had had to denounce as an annoyance. Congratulations. I wonder how many politicians accepted big 'thank you' payments for that one.
What's even more annoying is that the US is responsible for a massive amount of the spam I receive. I'm in Europe, dumbasses! I don't need US prescription medication, to remortgage my US home or to have a bigger penis with US-delivered drugs. Thanks to the pocket-the-money attitude of another country's government, I had over 1,000 emails this morning, of which maybe 100 were not bulk mailings.
So why doesn't the population do anything about it? Well, I guess there must be many reasons: goodness only knows what percentage of the voting population has the IQ of a rotting vegetable thanks to the wonders of MTV, what percentage is totally misinformed and misdirected by the carefully pruned news broadcasts on CNN, Fox and other stations (why deal with what's important when you can handle things like banning smoking or ensuring Arnie wins his local election as governor?) and what percentage has simply given up any hope of actually being represented. Everyone's been carefully herded and trained to worry about themselves and no one else. A huge TV and lots of possessions are more important than your kids' future. As long as you're alright, nothing else matters. The government is your friend. Roll over and give me your cash. Conform.
With great power comes great responsibility, they say. Bullshit, I say. I've never seen a more irresponsible bunch of idiots running a country, although the British seem to be giving it their best shot these days and the French are soon to follow.