Posts filed under 'Life'
Last weekend I went for an eye test, proving that I’ve become blinder in the past few years… (Yeah, I know. I should have an eye test every year…) So this weekend I went to get new glasses. Now I am poor.
I understand that glasses cost quite a bit of money, and I’m not complaining – after all; I prefer to be able to see than not. But there’s nothing like spending the better part of a grand to make you feel simultaneously excited and guilty.
I was going to blog about the new laptop I was deciding to get, but it’ll have to wait now. Which is probably a good thing, as the new Intel Core Duo laptops look very good – they’re breaking the 5 hour battery life mark with twice the processing power of previous laptops. The Averatec 1050 looks very nice, if it weren’t for the horrible burgundy colour lid (it isn’t dual-core, though). So, while I save up again, I’ll have plenty of time to decide which, if any, of the new Intel-based laptops are good.
Mind you, I did get some prescription sunglasses. They’re always very expensive, but I’ll look so cool 
February 26th, 2006
Last week I went skiing for the first time in like ten years. It was surprising how quickly it all came back, well… some of it anyway. Clearly, I’ve lost a lot of general fitness since then, because my legs really, really ached afterwards.
February 16th, 2006
Well, Rachel beat me to blogging about this weekend’s farcical attempts by me to put up a coat rack. Nothing particularly difficult, or so I thought. I mean; I’ve grown up in Britain, my Dad can do it and I’ve watched more than one episode of “Home Improvements” , so I must, by rights, be able to drill, hammer and generally DIY stuff, right?
Oh, hang on. “Home Improvements” was the comedy about the guy who was a walking disaster because he used “more power”… *sigh*
January 9th, 2006
I can’t sleep, something’s all over me,
Greasy. Insomnia please release me,
And let me dream about making mad love on the heath,
Tearing off tights with my teeth.
But there’s no relief,
I’m wide awake in my kitchen,
It’s black and I’m lonely,
Oh, if I could only get some sleep…
(Insomnia, Faithless)
Well, actually its Rachel’s kitchen, but otherwise accurate. For some reason, I can’t seem to regulate my sleeping patterns at all when I don’t go to work. Never mind, back to work soon…
December 31st, 2005
I used to be able, long ago, to sleep on planes, but apparently this useful and sanity-saving skill has been lost. There were all the usual impediments to sleep: a screaming baby, screaming kids, etc… I put my earphones in, wrapped my sweater around my head and tried to sleep for about 5 hours.
It didn’t work. So now my body has absolutely no clue what time it really is.
I was talking to a colleague who was also flying back on the same flight (but fell asleep instantly…) about what could be done to make flying more pleasurable. Just about the only thing would be to hook everyone up to some nice hospital-quality anaesthetics in the waiting lounge and bringing us around in arrivals at the other end. Just completely erase the experience of flying totally.
There wouldn’t be many takers to begin with, but I think people would slowly realise that travelling without:
- screaming infants/small children,
- airline food,
- extreme tiredness and
- DVTs.
would actually be far more pleasant. Because the last thing you want, after a really good holiday/ conference/ whatever is to spend 9 sleepless hours in a noisy tin can suspended 38,000 feet in the air…
November 21st, 2005
Commuting in London makes me feel even more like a wage slave than I normally do. Maybe its being crammed like sardines into a can with thousands of other bored, irritable card-punchers. Maybe its the silence, the one guy in the carriage who doesn’t know what soap is, the minimal eye contact.
Now, I remember why I hated living in London…
November 7th, 2005
So, about this time last week I was getting ready for the wonderful opportunity that is Travelling on Business. Having fun, drinking beer on the Company’s round, seeing the world… Oh, could I have been more misguided?
Obviously, I was wrong.
Nothing to do with the Company, though… but to do with some (possibly retarded) baggage handlers at Bristol “International” Airport. Basically, we were flying from a tiny speck of an airport (Bristol) to another insignificant regional airport (Bremen) and had to get a connecting flight through Amsterdam, or travel at 3am.
But there were “administrative errors with the paperwork”, or some other bollocks excuse (maybe that a large ‘X’, accepted as a signature across the West Country, isn’t good enough for international air travel) that meant we were delayed taking off for an hour and missed our connection. We were flying in a tiny little Fokker 70, I might add. Its true what Neal Stephenson says in Cryptonomicon (a book which everyone should own, read and re-read) about not dicking about with anything smaller than a 747…
So, we missed our connection and had the choice of a 4-hour drive to Bremen, getting there just after midnight, or staying in Amsterdam and getting on a plane at 6am to Hamburg and driving 2 hours from there. For some reason that I don’t remember, we stayed in Amsterdam.
The next morning, having got up at 4:30am local time (thats 3:30am UK time…) with just 3 hours of sleep, we were driving from Hamburg to Bremen. However, Bremen was having some sort of annual fair and the roads were a complete nightmare, so the 2-hour drive became a 3-hour drive. But at least I managed a nap in the back of the car…
I don’t blame the carrier for this, they helped as much as they could, but the damage had been done.
The moral of the story: always, always, always fly direct!
October 16th, 2005
So I signed up to the Telephone Preference Service in a (probably useless) attempt to stop the large number of spam telephone calls I’m getting. Its up to about one or two a day now, and always from the same set of numbers. Oh, and they hang up if you actually answer.
This is why we need SpamAssassin for mobile phones! Or at the very least a blacklist/whitelist feature to screen incoming calls. Of course, then they’d all just withhold their numbers or something…
I guess I’ll find out in 28 days whether it has done any good.
October 6th, 2005
I got quite worried about this little article, which (amongst other ubiquitous arguments about open source software quality) talks about the rights of employers to their employees’ out-of-hours hobby productions.
The only real reference I can find to this actually being case law is this nice Word document which says that (in “Missing Link Software vs. Magee) :
a computer programme written by an employee outside of working time and on his own equipment was made in the course of his employment because it was arguable that writing such programmes fell within the scope of the tasks he was employed to carry out.
Now… I might be a writer writing copy for a newspaper, magazine, or something, but when I write poetry in my spare time then its still my poetry. Even if the subject matter is related to my work!
I’d be grateful to anyone who can dig up some more concrete information about this case, as I can’t find any online anywhere. (Despite it being a matter of public record, surely?)
Steve says that his old Ts & Cs specifically exempt open source software from this, but I’m not so sure about mine…
September 28th, 2005
Next Posts