Naiveness

Although I added L

Tuesday, November 30th 2004 at 11:57 pm / Films / Permalink / Post Comment »

Advice

Ok, I suck, I couldn’t follow any of last nights advice to myself. Not again.

Tuesday, November 30th 2004 at 11:44 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Smorgasbord

So many things going on right now, things are all kinds of strange. It’s resulting in a mood which can often be described as nothing more than silly, as the emotions of happiness, sadness and hope clash in a smorgasbord of indecesion, unanswered questions and fear.

I just keep telling myself not to do anything stupid, relax, chill and go slow.

Monday, November 29th 2004 at 11:54 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Processed

Dear Richard Smith

This email is sent to you to inform you about the current status of your Nintendo DS pre-order. If you receive this email, this means that we have received your order and that it is in a confirmed state and it is being processed.

Your Order will ship between December 1 and December 10.

Excellent.

Friday, November 26th 2004 at 11:57 pm / Games / Permalink / Post Comment »

Raising

Just so you know, I finished off watching The Cat’s Meow, refusing to be beaten.

As expected, it meandered all the way to the end, not even raising much interest when the expected murder took place. A waste of talent, time and money.

Thursday, November 25th 2004 at 11:57 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Self-Imposed

I may as well remove the counter from the right hand side column, because with now far less than a month to go, I’m more than willing to admit there’s not a chance in hell Bearthing will be going into a wider range of testing before Xmas.

This has a lot to do with my high procrastination levels over the past couple of weeks, as well as the RealLife(tm) stuff that has eaten up any home programming motivation I’ve had.

I do however have a large amount of remaining holidays to take before the end of the year, so I’m tempted to dump them all together and take most of December off, in the hope that will let me crank through enough of it that I won’t be too far behind in producing something usable.

I’m really annoyed with myself for not being able to meet the self-imposed deadline, but that doesn’t seem to be helping me produce anything. And with a wedding to go to this weekend, the position isn’t going to advance much in the next few days.

Thursday, November 25th 2004 at 11:54 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Meandering

I finished the day tired, headachy, and a little depressed. So I thought I’d stick on a film to take my mind elsewhere for a couple of hours. I’ve now been watching that film for a little over 70 minutes, passing the half way point. And frankly, I’m finding it very difficult to continue.

It’s slow, meandering, dull, lacking in any kind of driving narrative, and has done nothing to help my mood. The performances are fine, but so far has given the actors so little to do, it’s difficult to judge fairly. It has however given me a way to cure some of my fatigue by allowing me to goto bed early.

The movie is The Cat’s Meow. I suggest you avoid it.

Wednesday, November 24th 2004 at 11:19 pm / Films / Permalink / Post Comment »

Trick

£50 to a Kenyan company and bingo, whatbook.com is mine.

This is of course a follow up to my previous entry complaining on how I’d missed out on registering it by an hour, after waiting six months for it to become free again.

Now the trick is to actually use it for something.

Tuesday, November 23rd 2004 at 11:47 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Reality

If my life were a reality TV show, always being recorded, then moments like the one that just happened would be captured for eternity, and I wouldn’t have to try and explain them with words.

Unable to think of something to write for tonight’s post, I was preparing to simply goto bed. On may way into the bathroom I knocked the toilet roll from the top of the radiator (where it often sits, since my bathroom is missing the fairly obvious addition of a toilet roll holder) towards the open lavatory.

Now somehow, and don’t ask me how, I managed to grab the end of the roll as it fell. But unfortunately it being a roll, all it did was unravel. But thinking if I just pulled fast and hard enough the momentum would be enough to whip it out, I kept on pulling. And, naturally enough, it kept on unravelling.

What this essentially created was a toilet roll hovering about an inch from the water in the bowl, rapidly decreasing in size as I kept unravelling it by pulling faster and faster, simply getting a longer and longer stretch of paper, desperately trying to stop it getting wet.

This was of course, something of great amusement as I finally managed to pull fast enough to whip it away from the toilet completely, having now unravelled 50% of it.

And then I came through here and wrote about it. Like a reality TV show that couldn’t afford cameras and hired a cheap writer instead.

I’m sure you’ll agree the entertainment factor is about the same.

Monday, November 22nd 2004 at 11:59 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Frog

This is the story that started my day.

Reading something so sad first thing on a Monday morning is not the way to begin a new week.

Monday, November 22nd 2004 at 11:59 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Dots

Sometimes a story comes along that requires no comment whatsover, it’s so amazing in itself.

Monday, November 22nd 2004 at 11:16 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Bubble

After finally working up some motivation to get some coding done, I had to spend it all on work code instead, with our latest project required to be fully functional by the 29th. I’ll hold off on my predictions of whether I think that date is realistic or not, but you can guess what I’m going to need to do every day until then if we want to have any chance. :(

Apart from that, it was an uneventful weekend. Basically just sitting contented in my own little bubble, playing bits of Half-Life 2 to break the monotony of the coding sessions.

Sunday, November 21st 2004 at 11:47 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Knight

Q. Which Knight came up with the idea for the Round Table?
A. Sir Cumference.

I laughed so hard at that.

Saturday, November 20th 2004 at 11:43 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Devotion

Today the latest Apple store opened in Regent Street, London. The BBC report on the opening talks about 5,000 people queuing to get in, some of whom had been waiting more than 25 hours.

I’m really interested in the social and cultural aspect of why Apple promotes such a loyal following in it’s customers. I can’t think of a single other company that has ever garnered such devotion, and they’ve had it for 20 years now.

The most obvious reason is the one Apple realised themselves, "Think Different". People like the idea of belonging to a clique of similar minded people, especially those outside the norm.

But there must be more to it than that. There are plenty of other underdog companies that don’t get the kind of love and attention Apple do.

Can the Steve Jobs reality distortion field really exist? Your ideas in the comments…

Saturday, November 20th 2004 at 11:20 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Equilibrium

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve heard the same word crop up in a number of otherwise unrelated conversations, equilibrium.

Equilibrium is achived through balance, something I’ve never been very good at in my life, which is why I found it strange to keep hearing it recently.

What has to be understood about me is that I’m a decidedly average individual, and more often than not, a bit of a retard. My school grades were nothing to write home about, I didn’t goto college or university, and I’m certainly not trading on my looks. I’m a company director in a successful company at 25, I’m healthy and have a nice home for one single reason - blind luck.

Sure, I can give the impression of somebody who knows what he’s doing, but the fact is I fall ass-backwards into success without even knowing it.

Which is just as well, because I’m ill-equipped for life in the real world. Going somewhere I’ve not been, meeting somebody I’ve not met or being in a situation I’ve not been in before terrifies me. I get nervous, self-concious and start worring about the minutiae of every situation. Even sitting on a bus can be a nightmare as I really do believe that everyone is staring at me. After I crashed my car I was too busy being worried about having to pick up the phone and phone the insurance company to be glad I was still alive, such is my fear of speaking to people I don’t know. As I slid off the road I was more worried about being in a new situation than I was about getting hurt.

I do my best to hide these feelings with humour, and at any opportunity I’ll wallpaper every crack with that defence mechanism. It gets me in trouble a lot though, because along with the humour comes sarcasm, and I open my mouth and say things I shouldn’t, which at school especially garnerned me a lot of negative feeling. Probably as a lot of the time, it’s not that funny.

So what about when my luck fails and humour doesn’t work either? Well that’s when things goto shit and I start making mistakes, as I make wild attempts to get through whatever situation I’m in.

What I tend to do is think back to any previous situation I’ve been in that has any relation to the one I’m in now. Anything that I can use. Anything I can learn from past experience to use as a starting point in this one. What went right and what went wrong when I was here before?

This seems like a reasonable course of action, especially since we’re always told to learn from history or be doomed to repeat it. But my problem is over-compensation, I take what didn’t work before and do the complete opposite, I even push a little further, just to see if it works out better.

And that’s where the equilibrium comes in, because more often than not I don’t end up with balance, I end up with broken scales on the floor. Chaos ensues.

You would think that once I knew something was wrong, that I would stop. But apparently that’s too easy, since as I mentioned earlier, I’m also a bit of a retard. So I push a bit further in both directions and see if that helps. But of course it doesn’t, I just get more smashed kitchen equipment. And then I panic, and become more of a retard.

Thankfully by this stage, luck always steps in and saves me. That whole ass-backwards thing again. But when it doesn’t, and I actually have to achieve proper balance, then I’m going to be in trouble, especially when it’s something really important to me. That day is going to petrify me.

I’m ill-equipped remember.

Friday, November 19th 2004 at 11:34 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Creative

I really like this list of ways to hack your way through writers block.

A lot of the points are good for more than just writing too, but any kind of creative process.

I still haven’t written more than 30 lines of Bearthing in over a week though.

Friday, November 19th 2004 at 10:38 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Mystery

Two nights in a row my phone has rung after 11pm. Last night I was in the bathroom at the time so was unable to answer it, and tonight I was in the middle of a quick Half-Life 2 session (which despite getting my hands on some travel sickness pills still made me feel sick).

Who is phoning me at this time? Is it you, dear reader?

If so, why are you phoning me at 11:50pm? And why are you withholding your number and not leaving a message on the answering machine? Or even talking, so that I might answer it once I know it’s you.

If only you could reply, then I could clear up this mystery. But alas, the Internet does not allow that.

Thursday, November 18th 2004 at 11:59 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Backwards

Signing up for Blockbuster was a chance to see all those films that for whatever reason, I just hadn’t managed to get around to before now. Which is why I added both Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2 to my list.

Unfortunately I forgot to indicate to them that they had to send one before the other (which is an option in their list administration tool) which is why they’ve now sent me KB2 before I’ve seen the first one.

I guess watching it backwards won’t be too hard, I mean, Tarantino does that to his films on purpose.

Wednesday, November 17th 2004 at 9:48 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Coat

I bought a new coat on Sunday, online of course, feeling that my current one wasn’t too good in the winter weather, and that it was time for something new.

It arrived today and is thankfully very nice, so it’s another win for Internet shopping.

But on returning to the site I bought if from tonight I see that if I’d bought it today I’d have gotten 25% off. And about the same on the jumpers I ordered too.

Oh bugger.

Wednesday, November 17th 2004 at 9:40 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Motion

As mentioned yesterday, I suffer from terrible motion sickness. This means that playing Half-Life 2 for any serious length of time is a constant battle between advancing one more level and trying not to fill the cracks between the keys with a combination of carrots and stomach juice.

In the past I’ve had real world motion sickness (from riding in cars, planes, boats etc) cured using some simple travel sickness medication, so I felt it reasonable to think that the same thing may help me for playing games.

So I took a trip to the Safeway pharmacy at lunchtime and asked for some. She asked if they for me, so I said yes, then she asked what they were for, how would I be travelling? I did think it a little strange as I told her it was for playing computer games, but I tried to best explain the situation in the time I had.

After disappearing into the back for a few moments, no doubt to talk to the pharamacist, she returned and told me she couldn’t sell me them because I didn’t want them for travelling, and that I’d have to speak to my doctor.

Erm, huh?

I commented to her that I should have just lied, and left.

Travel sickness pills are a normal over the counter drug. And since there’s plenty of other pharmacies to choose from, it’s going to be fairly simple for me to go into another one and be a bit more liberal with the truth. So what exactly were they trying to achieve here? Is there a problem with kids getting high on motion sickness medication? Are there side-effects I’m unaware of that would stop them selling to people who want to use them for methods of travel they’re not aware of?

I guess it’ll be tomorrow before I’m able to attempt a play session of longer than sixty minutes.

Wednesday, November 17th 2004 at 9:34 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »