Five more days. Just five more days and I'm out of here on holiday. Five days. Must... survive...
Filling in a bit of time until the guy who's supposed to be here today turns up, so I thought I'd do this thing I found somewhere I can't remember.
Descriptive, huh?
Name Four Bad Habits You Have:
1. Staying up too late
2. Bitching about my life
3. Letting Psycho get away with things
4. Working too hard for the pay I get
Name Four Things That You Wish You Had:
1. Less taxes
2. A best friend who's independant
3. Holidays
4. A job that didn't get worse every year
Name Five Scents You Love:
1. Cut grass
2. Apple shampoo
3. Freshly toasted (or baked) bread
4. Pepperoni pizza
5. The cat's natural fur smell
Name Four People That Know You the Best:
1. Psycho
2. Scary Ross
3. My mum
4. Myself (hopefully)
Name Four Things You'd Never Wear:
1. White clothes
2. Great big stupid-ass trainers
3. Baseball hat
4. Speedo swimming trunks
Name Four Things You Are Thinking About Now:
1. When's this guy going to turn up?
2. Only six or seven hours more and I can go home
3. I hope the reports I built work without any errors: that'd be totally cool
4. Wonder what's for lunch...
Name Four Things That You Have Done Today:
1. Fed the rats
2. Took the cat out for his walk in the courtyard
3. Worked
4. Drunk way too much coffee
Name the Last Four Things You Have Bought:
1. Fruit juice (for Psycho)
2. General food shopping
3. Cigarettes
4. Polyfilla (or Mastic as it is known here)
Name Five Bands/Groups Most People Don't Know You Like:
1. Avril Lavigne
2. Mylène Farmer
3. Erasure
4. Cowboy Junkies
5. The Man With No Name
Name Five Drinks You Regularly Drink:
1. Coffee
2. More coffee
3. Water
4. Tea
5. Even more coffee
First Grade Teacher Name?
- Which one's "First Grade"?
Last Words You Said:
- Uh... "Motherf@%king pile of sh#t" (sorry). One of my desktops wouldn't restart properly.
Last Song You Sang?
- "Like Emily" by All About Eve, in the car this morning.
Last Person You Hugged?
- Psycho
Last Thing You Laughed At?
- One of Weebl's animations.
Last Time You Said 'I Love You' And Meant It?
- Not a clue, it was so long ago.
Last Time You Cried?
- Last time I saw a film with someone's father dying in it. Guess I'm still not entirely over that.
What's In Your CD Player?
- the Tropico: Paradise Island install disk
What Color Socks Are You Wearing?
- Stupid question. Black, of course.
What's Under Your Bed?
- The floor
What Time Did You Wake Up Today?
- 7:00am. I overslept by 30 minutes, but it was worth it
Current Taste?
- Vending machine coffee
Current Hair?
- Long. Dissapearing frighteningly fast on top.
Current Clothes?
- Black.
Current Annoyance?
- Too much work that I don't understand, too little time, too little pay.
Current Longing?
- To be on holiday
Current Desktop Picture?
- The No One Lives Forever 2 Banana wallpaper
Current Worry?
- Whether I can actually do this new job or if it's all just going to be a horrible, embarrassing mess that results in me looking for a new job.
Current Hate?
- Bills
Favorite Physical Features Of The Opposite Sex (in order)?
- Smile, eyes, hair, shoulders, boobies, butt
Last CD You Bought?
- The Cure/The Cure
Favorite Place To Be?
- Home. Alone.
Least Favorite Place?:
- In the office
Time You Wake Up In The Morning?
- Normally 6:30
If You Could Play An Instrument?
- I'd be happy. Guitar.
Favorite Color?
- Black, although it's not really a colour.
Do You Believe In An Afterlife?
- Nope.
How Tall Are You?
- About *so* tall. 6 feet or so.
Current Favorite Word/Saying?
- "The avalanche has already begun: it is too late for the pebbles to vote."
Favorite Book?
- Of all time? The Amber series, Roger Zelazny.
Favorite Season?
- Autumn
One Person From Your Past You Wish You Could Go Back And Talk To:
- There's a whole bunch, for various reasons, but "wish" is a strong word. If I had to choose, it'd be the second girlfriend. It'd be amusing to tell her what a psychotic bitch she is.
Favorite Day?
- Today. A specific one? Sunday.
Where Would You Like To Go?
- Home, please.
What Is Your Career Going To Be Like?
- Messy.
How Many Kids Do You Want?
- None, thank you.
Favorite Car?
- Lotus Elise. I want one. Now.
Type A Line You Remember From Any Book:
- The End.
A Random Lyric:
- "And the way the rain comes down, hard, that's the way I feel inside."
Identify Some Of The Things Surrounding Your Computer:
- At work or home? Work: hub, monitor, another laptop, caffeinated mints, phone, plastic cup. lots of wires. Home: phone, cat tree, ADSL modem, monitor.
Remember school reports? Remember how you used to get a sealed envelope from the teacher that you were obliged to give to your parents, gritting your teeth as you hoped that no one had given you an "F" and written that you were a total failure? Ah, the joys of youth...
My school reports were generally good (well, excellent actually) until I hit the age of 15 or 16. Things really started going downhill around there and I was saved by a natural nerd ability with computers: without them, I doubt I'd have made it to university. The most annoying thing in school reports, for me, was always the teachers who wrote "Good, but could do better", "Not using his full potential" or some other such expression.
What these people never understood is that I do not wish to be the best in the world at something. I have no driving ambition. I am not in need of fulfillment by defeating my opposition. What I want is to do a good job, be appreciated for it and to go home at night and not worry about the following day.
Of course, these days my boss takes her turn at saying the same thing. She keeps going on about me being an intelligent guy, that I'm capable of this and that and blahblahblah. She keeps pushing to try to turn me into a manager or something. I keep resisting. "Not using his full potential."
One day, I shall have to explain to her that some people don't see promotion as their life's ambition.
One thing I forgot to mention yesterday was the woman who did the état des lieux (that's checking the apartment, of course): total weirdo.
To begin with, she appeared to be in her thirties but acted like someone over sixty: shuffling walk, mumbling to herself and so on. She also switched randomly between being friendly - albeit with a somewhat bizarre sense of humour - and extremely cold.
Personally, from having seen people in many, many different states of being, I would guess she was either deranged or on drugs.
It's one of those upsy-downsy days. Well, it's one of those upsy-downsy periods, to be honest. Today was the day Psycho and I met some woman from the rental agency to visit her old apartment and verify that everything's cool: it's nice to finally get that over and done with, even though they'll undoubtedly charge some money for the stuff that's in a rather used state.
Psycho's a user, not a utiliser. Everything she owns or is in the vicinity of ends up used - as in used up, broken, worn out. I tend to be the opposite, in that I still have things here that are ten years old or more and work perfectly. I'm not obsessively careful, I just don't believe in beating the crap out of something just because I can't be arsed to take a little extra time to look after it.
The bad news is that the 50,000 Francs I put in the bank to cover the guarantees (her parents wouldn't sign as guarantors - which would have cost them nothing - because they're odd that way, and I couldn't sign because I'm foreign) will take anything up to two months to come back. That was the money I was counting on to be able to afford a bit of a holiday next month and to set my bank account back at zero after buying my place. Shit happens, it seems.
Some other good news, however, is that the extra bit of the project I'm working on is turning out to be much easier to do than I thought it would be. This means one of three things: I'm better at this than I thought, I got lucky or something's very wrong and it's actually not working at all under closer inspection.
Any bets on which one of those is most likely?
I have a tune stuck in my head and no matter what I do, it won't go away. Even worse than that, it's a tune from a computer game. At least it's a nice, relaxed little ditty. Perhaps if I drill a hole in my skull it'll seep out.
I finally had a reasonably relaxing weekend - one email written on Saturday morning does not count as having to work, really, but it did get me a "Good move" comment from my boss. A good thing, considering I have no idea what I'm doing these days.
I spent both days of this weekend sitting around and doing very, very little. I have a feeling somewhere that this weekend was an indicator of how I'm going to continue my life: alone, sat in front of a PC (probably still playing Tropico¹) with the cat on my lap.
Not that I would have a problem with this, personally. It just seems to be the rest of society that has difficulty understanding the fact that I'm not interested in relationships. Of course, Psycho also refuses to understand it since she's in a period of declaring undying love for me (and consequently pissing me off really badly).
Why is there this obsession with relationships? I mean, I can understand that social interaction is important: I would never live alone without talking to anyone and working purely virtually. That'd be appalling. However, I don't get the push-push-go-and-get-a-girlfriend thing. Why does sharing your life with someone make you a better person?
Personally, I think it'd make me a worse person: I wouldn't be able to trust them, for starters, given my assumption that love doesn't last and the historical fact that every girlfriend has eventually cheated on me because I'm "too nice". I'd have to put up with the usual character assassination and guilt tactics that are so popular for manipulating men. She'd demand constant attention and affirmation of her wonderfulness (the usual "Oh, I'm so insecure" crap that infests my life). She'd probably want to spawn offspring.
Is it better to make the effort, to share my life with some pain in the arse, to procreate, overpopulate the planet even more and inflict the pain of existence on some poor, unsuspecting little baby? Or is it not, therefore, better for me to avoid making someone unhappy with my bad attitude (as any female readers will no doubt call it)? Is it not better for me to remain the sad, lonely old git and at least give a cat a decent home?
I mean, it's not like I miss the sex, now, is it?
¹ Incidentally, I watched an episode of Jake 2.0 this weekend... in which the music used was the same as that playing on the game (Tropico) on my main PC. How bizarre is that? Is that some sort of geek joke or something?
Whilst perusing the forums at my secondary workplace, I came across a discussion of 'Nation States', so I asked about it and was given the link.
This free online 'game' looks like lots of fun. Each player creates their nation state, then addresses issues once per day (or more) to decide the future of the country. Of course, it has all the associated forum banter and so on, but also provides a description of how the country works. The Community of The Lobsters now exists (in the Pacific) as a Liberal Democratic Socialist country. We'll have to see how it comes out, although I suspect that my people will eject me from rule within a week.
Can anyone explain why combat trousers are so darned sexy on smart women? Please? Thanks.
This entry is sponsored by images of Amanda Tapping.
It's going to be a really busy month, but I'm quite enjoying this new work at the moment. I have SO many things to do that it's really quite scary trying to figure how to meet all the deadlines. Still, I'm learning a heck of a lot in a very short time. Today is Proof of Concept day: I have to prove to myself that my (hopeful) solution for some squiffy SQL will actually work...
Oh, and Ms Jafer... yes, I promise I'll try to put some proper 'before and after' pics up soon. Sorry for that delay. Consider my wrists slapped.
Today is the first day of the new year - the new fiscal year at work, that is. From a philosophical point of view, one could say that it is, in fact, the first day of the new year in any sense, since the choice of 1st January as the start of a calendar year is arbitrary (and the Chinese would disagree with it). The only real measurement of a year is a natural one anyway - four complete seasons - and since we've destroyed the environment to a point where those seasons are totally screwed up, the definition of a year must be equally messy. I digress.
In this new fiscal year, I will be changing jobs. As with many companies, outsourcing is the way of the moment, so techie roles are becoming rarer. Since I've also avoided specialising in any particular area, my situation is tenuous at best. Should I explain that a little?
At heart, I'm a techie. I prefer working with machines than with humans, since the latter can be so damned annoying and stupid. However, I've worked in many different areas of the technology industry: on two different helpdesks, as a trainer, a system admin, a general techie and various others. My lack of specialisation has generally been an advantage, allowing me to cover a broad range of applications to a reasonable level of knowledge.
These days, of course, I'm older: the techie scene is generally one for young folks with quick, sharp minds. I'm not that slow, rest assured, but planning a little for the future and shuffling out of the faster areas into something requiring more experience and maturity is a good move. Well, except for the maturity bit. There's also the current trend to outsource everything technical to India or Pakistan or Mars or somewhere with cheap labour, which means that the tech job market in France is diminishing rapidly and only retaining the really serious geeks: I'm not good enough for that.
So I'm changing job to more analysis than tech work. It's going to be very odd to have my fingers on a keyboard purely to document and not to create, but I have a great manager who's very supportive and will push me at the same time. I need to hold out here so I can pay for the apartment as quickly as possible: once that's done, I can move to the Bahamas and sun my skinny butt on a beach all day.
Well, maybe not.