I have had my comments switched off this morning by the machine admins: some stupid-ass spam bot was hitting it so hard that the entire server was screwed by it. I'd love to know where the hits were coming from so I could send them a little present. F@!kheads.

Looks like authenticated comments might be necessary, which would mean upgrading to MT3, which would mean paying. Ain't gonna happen.

Running Spam Total: 4516

Silly user group. Last week they decide they urgently need one thing, today they decide they need the opposite. *sigh*

Today's Spam Count: 155
Running Spam Total: 1569

Why don't people leave messages? What is it about the simple "Leave a message after the beep" that is so difficult to understand? And why do they get so angry when they "finally" get hold of me?

If it's that important, leave a frigging message: then I know who phoned instead of Mr(s). Anonymous-I-Hung-Up-Sound.

Arseholes.

For the past two and a half weeks, I've been working my skinny little butt off on one particular project. I sort of screwed the initial analysis of what was needed, which hasn't helped at all, but there have also been several other stumbling blocks in the way. Quite apart from the bad attitude from certain other groups, I've found the lack of cooperation and unwillingness to do any of the real work quite infuriating. The fact that they screw it up when they do finally do it doesn't help, either.

However, this week, I decided that enough is enough. I caught myself whining like a spoilt little schoolgirl¹ on Tuesday and realised that I was just wasting energy that I could be using more profitably. Yes, there are things to complain about and it does us good to have a bit of a winge sometimes, but there's a limit to such things that had been passed.

So I sat Psycho down and spoke to her about it. She's a major whiner, as you all know, so I made it clear that this had to change, for both of us. Slippery slope and all that.

Since then, she's become much more bearable.

¹ Or like Psycho, if you prefer.

Today I'm pissed off. Really badly "don't f*@k with me or you'll regret it" annoyed. So I'm going to vent and tell you all about it, as if you really care.

First off, I've been oversleeping. I hate that. My alarm goes off at 6:30 and I expect to be up and around within 30 minutes. Today, I fell asleep again after switching off the buzzer and woke up just before 8:00. Traffic becomes horrible very soon after that time, so I got to sit in jams full of gimps leaning on their horns and waving their arms around in true stupid-ass impatient continental dipshit fashion.

Today is one big long meeting. A guy's coming down from Amsterdam to see me about the current project: we need to go through a great big list of details to make sure everything is as he wants it to be. That's not so bad - he's a great guy and knows what he wants, so there should be enough laughs to cover the boredom of slogging through the particulars.

On the other hand, the whole apartment purchase has taken a turn for the worse. The estate agent phoned last night to say that he wants to pay my deposit cheque into their account - an amount of money that I do not have and need the 1% loan from work to cover. Unfortunately, the loan will only appear once I have the final mortgage offer from the bank, who don't have it yet. The loan people are about as fast as slugs on tranquilisers, too, and there's the risk that they will want me to make higher payments (due to low interest rates at the moment), which might not be possible since I'm still supporting Psycho. I will have to pull out of the purchase if this continues, which would really suck.

Speaking of Psycho, she's really pissing me off by worrying about her own money problems and not giving a damn about mine. Those problems, of course, are largely due to over-spending (my) cash on stupid things and not having a job - a situation that doesn't seem to change no matter how many times I shout and scream about the fact that I can no longer afford to pay for everything. It amazes me how little she cares about my plans or desires.

Add to this a little conversation I had with my boss yesterday and I'm about ready to explode. Since most tech skills are being moved to offshore locations in high-tech industry these days, I will have to be careful that my work centres more around analysis and management stuff than the tech skills I enjoy so much. Plus, I've just been asked to be the project manager (in name only) for the reporting thing I'm working on, which will be about as much fun as having my kidneys removed without anaesthetic. Talk about the straw that breaks the camel's back.

So, all in all, I just need to finish today, try to explain to Psycho that she's a pain in the arse, get the bank to do their job, hurry the loan people along, speak to the agency and learn to do work that I don't like. Sometimes, I hate life.

That's what Psycho needs. I'm starting to really get pissed off with the way she treats me. Depression or no depression, I deserve better than this.

So there.

P.S. No apartment visits yet... photos as and when.

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.

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.

Recently, I ordered some DVDs through an online service. Normally, I expect to run into problems with ordering online, simply because I live in a different country to that in which my debit card is registered: it's a card from the UK (if I'm buying in Sterling) and of course I'm in France. Consequently, companies often can't pass the card number through their automated systems and I will have to contact them and ask them to do it manually. This is not a huge problem, but can be annoying, especially since it's all in Europe and the banks should really be sharing such information.

With this last order, though, I ran into a new face of the same problem, apparently caused by anti-fraud measures. The company refused to send the DVDs to France because it's not the UK. I find this somewhat bizarre. Their reasoning was that I had ordered goods from France on a UK card: the card number is fine and is verified without difficulty, but because it's a non-UK address, they won't send the DVDs.

Despite the fact that the card has my French address registered to it and that this address is the same as the invoicing/delivery address, their anti-fraud checks mean they cannot send the goods unless it is within the UK. Am I the only one that thinks that asking them to send the goods to a UK address that is not the one on the card, not my current address and not even someone with the same name is more likely to be fraud?

Stupid people.

Have you ever wondered just how inaccurate the weather forecast can be? Earlier this week, a few days of heatwave were predicted and, lo, they arrived. Three days in a row when the temperature reaches at least 39°C are enough to wipe out everyone's energy levels.

However, it was supposed to cool down a little this weekend and be positively pleasant by the end of next week. Instead, all of a sudden, we're now expecting the heatwave to go on until next Friday!

Now, I can understand how prediction must be difficult: the planetary weather systems are undoubtedly complex. What I don't understand is how different meteorological services can come up with different temperatures and weather for the same day, nor how they can be quite so astoundingly innaccurate! I mean, they do have several decades of records at their disposal and some pretty stonking big computer systems to analyse what goes on and draw their conclusions, right?

An example, perhaps? OK. For a start, let's drop in on Yahoo Weather, which predicts four degrees more than Méteo France... and seven degrees difference on Tuesday! Now, maybe they're taking their measurements in different places, but seven degrees' difference in the same city can't be that easy to achieve, particularly when the city isn't an enormous sprawling metropolis.

Of course, none of this actually matters, anyway: we can't really do anything about the weather, after all! It just gets me all riled up, this heat.

I have decided that today is "Uncooperative Bastard Day". After three days of courses which were excellent, I attended a 7 p.m. meeting yesterday (via telephone), only to be harangued by an American colleague for not debugging a problem properly. My explanations that I had been in courses all week, had not actually started debugging the problem - nor claimed to have done so - and was, in fact, simply stating that I hadn't looked at said problem yet were ignored.

Isn't it wonderful when people ignore the sentences, pick up on a single word or two and throw a wobbler about it? Stupid ass. He won't be getting any help from me today.

Bah, humbug. The Metro is on strike again today (or rather, the RATP, who run the Metro) as a continuation of yesterday's all-out no-work day. Consequently, it would take me about two hours to get to work: thankfully, I can work from home just as well as from the office! Before you say anything... no, that doesn't mean "not at all".

Now, I'm not very good at politics: it's not something that interests me very much at all and I don't really understand all the complexities of the inter-party relatonships and so on. However, I do understand that we're supposed to learn from history...

Unfortunately, I don't think many of the French strikers have studied recent English history. Back in the 1970s, strikes were frequent. Much like here in France, people were terribly disgruntled by their lot in life, by the changes the government was trying to make and by life in general. Consequently, they went on strike as a 'last resort'. The most famous of these was the miners' strike, led by Arthur Scargill, which went on and on and on. During my childhood, 'on strike' was an expression I heard an awful lot.

In the long run, though, it's interesting to see the result of so much striking: Margaret Thatcher. The general public became so annoyed at the continual striking, the demonstrations and all the social turmoil that the Conservative (capitalist) parliament remained in power throughout the 1980s. During this time, they privatised all the previously public services that they could, changed pensions, retirement and the entire social structure of the UK.

The vast majority of the people on strike here in France seem to be socialists, complaining that the goal of the companies they work for should be to look after them, not to make profit. They complain that they will have to work longer if the retirement regime is altered (as long as the rest of us, in the private sector - how horrible!) and so on. Note that I am leaving out the despair of those in the educational system, for whom I have sympathy.

So, what will happen? They'll stay on strike. The government will not budge very much. In the end, the rest of us will become so annoyed with the striking socialists that we will continue to elect capitalists (in the UK, 'strike' became synonymous with 'socialist', even though it's not... 'taxation' is!). They will continue to dig themselves a hole that they can't climb out of.

Such is life. I'm a capitalist-socialist: I believe in giving a part of my income to those less fortunate, but I object to people earning more money than me for less work when they're paid by the government (to whom I am paying said taxes). France is throwing itself into the same turmoil we experienced in the UK, but hopefully she'll come out the other side as we did (after much hassle) - with a system that rewards hard work, that tries (badly) to care for the less fortunate... and that doesn't go on strike all the time!

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!

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.

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. :)

I don't believe the weekend I just had. Seriously, I don't believe how utterly cack it was. Am I, as Scary Ross insists, "paying back karma at a vastly accelerated rate"? Did I torture and slaughter cute, furry animals in half a dozen past lives? Was I really Genghis Khan's personality trainer, or the guy who fired Torqeumada for being too soft? Allow me to explain....

So it's Friday night. I've been out over at the Psycho's for the evening (that's my ex-companion/girlfriend/emotional torturer and now best friend, she's a clinical psychologist) and get back in fairly late. Feed the cat and rabbit, then decide to go to bed, since I'm so tired after the week of work. A bad start to the weekend, as I sleep incredibly badly and wake up at about 7am... aaaargh...

Since I'm awake, I do the food shopping. I despise food shopping. It's not just that it seems such a waste of time, but I really dislike this whole 'hygienic' thing in supermarkets. I like my food to be at least vaguely natural, even if I'm just going to throw it in the microwave ("Chicken Ding", as they say!). Supermarkets have all these vegetables that look so perfect they should be plastic, fruit that tastes sooooo natural that it's more like concentrated fruit juice in solid form than the original thing and meat that apparently comes from square fish, square chickens and rectangular cows. Must make life incredibly easy for the farmers, I'll happily admit: I mean, they can just place all the cows and chickens in neat piles, since they should stack properly. :)

So I shop, and lug several large, heavy bags of stuff back home. An hour or so later, Psycho phones and asks me to get her a bunch of stuff, too, 'cos she has a bad back - so I get to go round and lug stuff twice, as with almost every weekend. Oh joy. Anyways, I get back home and spend the afternoon faffing around on the PC before I head out for the evening with her.

Late, I return home and decide, since it's Sunday tomorrow, to figure out why my DVD drive has been playing up and refusing to play any DVDs, simply preferring to spit them out instead. Time for a quick BIOS flash (since I'd done one before and it didn't like it very much), and also, while I'm at it, I decide to flash the main PC BIOS, since the version I'm on is about as useful as a snowball in a gunfight. Bad move, obviously: the PC churns and whines, and beeps when I switch it back on... but doesn't do anything else.

"Aha," says I, "I'll bet it's the same problem I had last time, where I just need to take the BIOS battery out and reset everything to defaults, and Bob's a monkey's uncle."

If only life were that simple. Several hours later, I'm still tinkering, rebooting, tinkering, rebooting, tinkering... eventually, I decide to give up. After all, it's 3:30am and I'm tired. Another night of bad sleep later, I thankfully awaken at around 9am, which isn't so bad. Coffee, toast, strawberry jam and back to sorting out the PC. Sometimes, I hate my PC. This time round, I actually had it built for me, so sick was I of messing around with internal stuff and the hassle of building everything, ventilating it all and so on. Of course, the disadvantage of this is precisely what I ran into: no awareness of what's in the box...

After several hours, the damned thing still won't work. By this time, I'm absolutely fuming, of course. Thankfully for my PC, I'm reasonably zen, even when I'm fuming. I don't beat it to a messy, silicon-spattered pulp, at least. By late afternoon, I'm ready to kill someone. Psycho calls to see if I want to (i.e. have no choice but to) wander down to a local cafe for a while, for drinks and chat. This seems reasonable, particularly since I needed a target for my homicidal thoughts. The evening passes, and I get back earlier than expected, since she has an interview on Monday morning and went to bed early.

Finally, I fix my PC: stupid little changes in the BIOS correct the problem and it starts up, but still won't read DVDs. Great. I just lost a day of potential gaming, downloading, and of Ghost Recon with Scary Ross to a stupid-ass problem that wasn't even fixed afterwards! Gaaaaah!

And what's the worst thing to happen? I get in to work this morning to find out the clocks have gone forward an hour, so I'm late, have missed a meeting, have to reschedule a training session, and nobody thought to announce this to me. Of course, my PC would have done, but it was dead at the time. So now I'm an hour behind, and typing this... and fuming...

I'm angry this morning. Recently, I converted from being a UK contractor, earning large quantities of money and paying normal, reasonable taxes, to a French full-time worker. This caused something like a 60% pay-cut immediately, which was a bit of a shock, but the company I work for is incredibly generous on benfits, so I was happy.

However, today I discovered that the 60% of my salary that the governemt siphons off every month is not all I have to pay! That's just the social charges... you know, unemployment benefit, medical cover, pensions, all that stuff. On top of this, I have to declare my revenue and pay normal taxes. Now, don't get me wrong, at heart I'm a socialist/capitalist mix: I'm all for paying some of my revenue (OK, 60% is pretty damned huge...) so that the less fortunate folks have enough to live on, while retaining enough for myself to compensate all the hours of work. I believe that we should all support our human brethren, no matter how horrible they are, since all life is valuable and some of us simply didn't get a good start in life.

I do, however, take umbridge at paying 60% of my income for this, then paying even more later to line the pockets of corrupt politicians and their mistresses. That's horrific. How this country survives, I do not know. Then, of course, there's all the strikes for pay. Until this morning, I was really angry at them, too - after all, the majority of them are government employed and shouldn't be complaining. However, this morning, I found out that I earn almost as much as a Chief Medical Officer type position for two hospitals at the same time! Oh my good lordy me! How underpaid is that?! Wake up, government!

Add to this the fact that they didn't send me any documentation and that I can't do the return online (bah!), and I'm going to get a 10% overdue increase, too. Once I've downloaded all the forms and filled them in, of course. Ah, the joys of administration.

Serious social change needed here, and I hope it comes quickly: I can't afford to pay this....!

Gahhh, I'm getting fed up of project requirements. You ever have one of those projects where you have no real requirements written down, and half the people who are providing you with details of what they want are only working on the thing with about 3% of their brain power?

I have.

So I've done all this data analysis on their information, provided them with an overview of what I need from them to make the thing work, what's missing and so on. I do two days' work, solid, to get their data into a preparatory system so that it's all ready to go for testing and so on. OK, so half the mandatory stuff is missing, but I can fake it, provided it's only going into a test system. Of course, we'll need this for the production system.

Then they suddenly realise that when I say "half the fields marked 'mandatory' are empty", it's a problem for the final version. "We can provide that data," they say.

So why didn't you, then?! Gaaaahhhhh! Now I have to go and empty my preparatory system, manually, and re-prepare everything for when they've given me the updated data, which they apparently were holding back in case someone invaded their office, in case it was a top-level military secret or something equally beyond my comprehension.

I want to go home. There's a chocolate cake in my fridge that I could not only have a more sensible conversation with, but that I could then eat. Chocolate calms my nerves. Just ask Scary Ross.

Quote of the day from Iraqi TV (paraphrased): "The interruption of service this morning was due to technical difficulties." Yup, a Tomahawk missile's a pretty big technical difficulty....