Steve infected me with a post 5 things that people don’t know about you meme. Ordinarily I wouldn’t go in for this sort of pyramid scheme, but maybe this would be sort-of fun.
So, the 5 things:
- Steve and I go way back. It seems that we’ve both changed a little since then
- My favourite author is Isaac Asimov and I had read all the science fiction he had written before I was 16. When it was reported in the news that he had died, it was the first time I’d recognised a name in the obituaries.
- Despite the above, my favourite book is Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, the only book that makes me laugh out loud every time I (re-)read it.
- In an average week, I travel more than 214 miles by train, 38 miles by bus, but drive 0 miles by car.
- My brother and I used to collect and paint miniatures (all the well-painted ones are mine!) but I was never very good at actually competing with them.
Since I don’t have five friends with blogs, I’m just going to tag Rachel.
January 5th, 2007
Well, its 2007… Please excuse me if I’m being cynical and pessimistic, but to paraphrase The Who:
Meet the new year,
same as the old year.
Maybe this year will be different. I’m not making any new year’s resolutions, because I never keep them anyway. Instead, I’ll just put some things that I might want to do here and hope that their continued presence will shame me into doing them. Or, at least, making up some good reasons why I couldn’t.
So heres a list of not-new-years-resolutions:
- Give up smoking
This makes a lot of sense, seeing as the government here will be banning smoking in public places (where they are “wholly” or “partially” enclosed) from July this year. Also, the government seems to be trying to gradually ban smoking altogether by gradually raising the age requirement for buying fags. My prediction is that, over the next decade, the government will make it more difficult for people to smoke by restricting where they are allowed to do it and by restricting the sale of cigarettes by ever increasing taxes and regulations. Possibly, eventually, tobacco will be made a class C drug. I can see them making the case for banning smoking in private residences with children under 16/18 or where not all the residents have given consent. Anyway, long story short; probably better to try and give up now, as it will take some time.
- Be less uptight.
I get annoyed quite very easily. In some circumstances this is a good thing – sometimes in meetings getting a bit stroppy means you get your way, especially if you had a valid point-of-view in the first place. However, most of the time I think I just come across as a complete wanker. I’m going to extend this to include when I’ve been drinking, because I seem to be even more of a wanker then; just wandering off and leaving people behind, getting stroppy and verbally abusing people. Apparently, I gave the finger to some poor taxi driver in Tampa, but I don’t remember doing it. Regretted it the next day, too. (NOTE: I very infrequently drink sufficient quantities of alcohol to produce this behaviour and this may be part of the problem, i.e: I can’t handle my drink. However, I’m pretty sure drinking heavily more often, to build up my tolerance, is not part of the solution.)
- Be more punctual.
This one is either really easy or really hard, depending on how you look at it. Hard, because I’m habitually late and always have been. This probably stems from an underlying laziness that is pretty well ingrained in my character by now. On the other hand, it should be easy to make some improvement, because my punctuality couldn’t really get any worse!
- Save more money.
I should really divert about a tenth of my salary directly into my savings account, and have that done automatically. Its not that I don’t try and save already, but at the end of the month my balance is usually pretty near zero. This might be a case of spending increasing to match income, though, so a if the money goes into my savings account without me noticing then I might not spend it… Although I do want a new laptop…
- Figure out why Apache keeps hanging…
This is less important, but starting to piss me off that every few days either I or Steve have to restart this server because all Apache’s child processes have gone into some sort of infinite loop and pushed the load to 20!
Anyway, I want to reiterate that this doesn’t mean I’m guaranteeing to do any of these at any point in the future. At this point in time they appear to be good things to aspire to, however I reserve the right to totally change my opinion at any time without warning 
January 1st, 2007