I have memories, clouded by sorrow

Found on Reddit: "I created a website so our executives could monitor the status of our web servers. They requested I improve it so they could "see it better" when Tomcat crashes. This is what awaits them... " (video link)

On BBC News: Living alone costs singletons an extra £250,000 over a lifetime compared to couples, it is claimed. Any pretty girls volunteering to save us both some money? ;)

Deus Ex 3: Human Revolution Preview . The original Deus Ex is the game I'm currently spending most of my time on, and it's good in many ways to hear that the second sequel is much like the first game. There are some warning signs in there though, and ultimately I'm still unhappy that we just take one company's creation and pass it to a completely different company to make a follow-up. We need to do more to protect the people who come up with the real creativity.

Google Wave is shutting down. It was an interesting idea but it seemed to be trying to do too much, and not well enough. Still, I'd like to see an email replacement one day. Shame this wasn't it.

Some of you may be familiar with lmgtfy, the site you send someone to when they ask you a question that they could have easily answered themselves with a web search. It turns out that there is a live updating version so that the wider world can see exactly what things people are asking about, or rather, the things some people are grumpy at being asked about.

I also found myself on the Transformers Wiki recently and was impressed at how all the memories came flooding back when I read through some of the summarised storylines. All the different continuities and stuff makes me angry though. Series 'reboots' and 'non-canon' stories just seem wrong. I think all works of fiction should be entirely self-consistent. This probably marks me as a geek. Or mildly autistic.

So, we're a quarter of the way through 2010 already.

Have you done a quarter of the things you intended to do this year, yet?

Almost every morning, as I walk to work, I pass a young woman walking in the other direction. She's quite short, reasonably attractive, always well-dressed as if she's going out for drinks or something, and never makes eye contact with me. Sometimes in the evenings, if I was late getting out of work, I'll pass her again as we travel in the opposite directions.

What makes this unusual, rather than a typical pedestrian commuter moment, is that she lives in my house. Specifically in one of the flats on the floor above mine. She seems to leave the house early every evening and returns the morning after. Perhaps she goes to her boyfriend's house or something but she seems a bit dressed up for a quiet night in with the other half. And what she wears is a bit too classy for her to just be doing night shifts somewhere. Intriguing.

Anyway, she would have had a rude surprise for her when she got back to the house today - the path between the front door and the gate was mostly submerged in about 3 inches of water. Hopefully her elegant boots are waterproof...

Hello world! Things have been rather mundane this last week or so, therefore there is little to report.

On Thursday on my lunch break I went to the 'Fuzz Guitar Boutique' in town, which is a quaint little shop that sells overpriced guitars alongside trendy jeans and t-shirts. Quite bizarre. Anyway, I asked them if they had the Boss Noise Suppressor pedal in stock, and they quickly determined that they did not. However - they phoned up their 'mother' store in West Bridgford which, lo and behold, did have such a pedal available. Did I want them to bring it over to the city centre shop tomorrow? No, I said, I'll go over myself on Saturday. Thus, on Saturday I went to the West Bridgford store, and asked the assistant for the pedal. It turns out they didn't have one. A quick word with his boss determined that they had sent it to the city centre store yesterday, because someone asked them to do so. Grrrr. I got back to the city centre shop a little later and they had it waiting for me on the counter, so my mission was finally successful. On a tangential point, the guy who appeared to be running the shop in West Bridgford looked to be the same guy who owns Millennium Music and thus the new SoundCheck store in the old SoundControl premises. Can one person really own 4 music shops in Nottingham, or was I mistaken? Hmmm.

Thursday night was band practice time where I ended up using the studio's Line 6 amp head, making everything I play sound like it's being transmitted over AM radio. I'd use my own amp head but it is heavier than six elephants and thus not worth the effort. Apart from equipment issues things are sounding pretty good and we should be able to gig this year, IF we can get enough time with our vocalist, and IF we can sort out the second guitarist situation.

I had Friday off work, but squandered most of that free time. From that point on it was typical weekend goings-on, a few 'quiet' drinks with jen_whitewave  et al in the Salutation on Friday and Saturday, with the added bonus of a visiting Diane on the latter occasion. On Sunday I went to Flaming Dragon with der_katzchen and wondered why they expect you to pay a service charge when you have to collect all the food from the buffet yourself. Ah well. All weekend, at pub and at restaurant, I have been trying to improve my tolerance for European lagers so that Wacken this year will be a bit more tolerable in the absence of readily-accessible cider. That's if I still go to Wacken at all, which is not guaranteed due to the somewhat poor selection of confirmed bands so far.

Since it seems like a useful skill to have, I started learning how to program ActionScript 3 at the weekend. However I must confess that I never even got as far as writing a line of AS3 code, instead just getting as far as writing the XML to open a blank window, before getting distracted. Oh well, there's always tonight. If I'm not too busy enjoying the poor voice acting in Deus Ex, that is.

Today I am back at work and appear to have lost my USB cable for my mp3 player. Since almost everybody else on the planet has an iPod the chance of being able to borrow a cable is minimal. Walking to and from work without music is a rather different experience.

Tonight is band practice, then I have nothing planned all week until Saturday when I might go to the metal night at J7, although I might not because the music selection was not to my taste either of the two times I've been so far.

Today was a good day. I woke up fully alert at about 7:30am, when usually I struggle to get up before 9. This might have been due to the blazing sunshine outside. And in the post I received the following:

• Raph Koster's "A Theory Of Fun" book, notable because I ordered a second hand copy aaaages ago that turned out to not exist, causing some degree of shenanigans;
• A package from Firebox Records containing the Ablaze In Hatred album that I ordered, and the Fall Of The Leafe album that I didn't - not the first time they've sent me extra albums (once sending my entire order twice);
• A ticket to see Agalloch and Dornenreich in Camden next Thursday - just gotta figure out getting transport there and back now! I'll probably get lost and die because I've never navigated London on my own before, so I'll just say that it was nice knowing you all.

However, these victories were offset by having to take my £39.99 'gaming' mouse back to the shop because the wheel on it is broken - it tends to spin while not actually turning the axis, which made it largely useless, and most importantly was severely impairing my Splinter Cell performance. Apparently they're going to "test it" and call me back in a day or two (or three). Grr. Funny how that fell apart in 6 weeks yet the cheap Packard Bell mouse here has lasted me pretty much constantly since I got it in 2002.

In other assorted news:

• 'my' book is out in the UK now, which is cool. I say 'my', but obviously I only wrote 3% of it. I'm supposed to be getting a copy sent to me, but that will probably end up in some courier's parcel depot 20 miles away as usual.
• I'm having fun with Google's Street View which is now available for several cities of the UK, including my own. My bedroom window is handily obscured by a passing bus so I can't look inside to see what I was doing when they went past with the cameramobile though. As a programmer I'm quite impressed at the way they've blurred out the faces and registration plates since I doubt they did that by hand.
• After 2 and a half years of living here, I've finally learned to use the timer on my cooker. I now have properly-cooked potato wedges rather than the usual over-crispified ones. Look out, Gordon Ramsay!

I will be doing social stuff this weekend, but not 100% sure as to what and where exactly. Watch this space. (Or don't.)

I wish software developers wouldn't insist on having the discussion forum for their software take the form of a mailing list. Email is ten times less convenient than a decent web forum, but still they persist. Having to do a Google search of the archives with "Messages sorted by" as an extra parameter is just a bit lame. Grr. I long for the day when I can get back to programming useful stuff at home, and not having to forever wait for help on mailing lists regarding some undocumented aspect of whatever code library I'm using.

Anyway, tiny rant aside. It's a new year, for what little that's worth, and I started on the 2008 survey that a lot of other people on here have done, but decided not to bother. Most of it is irrelevant, and the rest of it would just be me complaining about people in terms so vague that half of my friends would be worried that I was referring to them. I was not happy with how I was treated by some people last year, but this year will be different. Onwards and upwards. I'm still learning. Anyway, very abridged version of the End Of Year Survey:

- Compared to this time last year, are you:
i - happier or sadder? Significantly sadder, but more optimistic.
ii - thinner or fatter? 6 or 7 pounds lighter. Good stuff.
iii - richer or poorer? Richer, despite some ludicrous expenditure. Going out less has saved money.

And that's about all that matters, right?

Had an annoying pro-Palestinian march walk past my house today, and then be in my way when I got to town. No doubt this was retribution for my previous complaint about such marches. Well, I hope they all feel better about themselves, and I hope the 10 or 15 police they tied up during the process weren't needed elsewhere.

Music stuff is progressing, slowly, but consistently. By February I should know exactly what the situation is with The Band, and in spare moments here and there I'm experimenting with other musical projects. Sometimes it's easy to lose sight of the fact that it's hard to write in a style you're not familiar with, so I need to broaden my listening a bit. If only there were more hours in the day.

Heckler and Koch UK are based here in Nottingham (aka 'Gun City'). Convenient!

Not much other news really. Work is still too busy though I did get paid a hefty bonus today, which was 'nice'. I may spend it on an electronic drumkit. The Band has singer auditions next week though we really need some more applicants. I currently have four books on the go (one music, one game development, one teach-yourself-a-language, and one fantasy fiction) with another twenty-two on my bedside tables, waiting in line. I need to go to Leicester and/or Sheffield to consider getting another guitar. And I still need another bookshelf from Ikea.

That's about it.

I ended up having to face down two more bastard drivers today. The morning one was in a Range Rover, and the evening one was a double-decker bus, and neither would have stopped had I not physically been in their way. They can see I am going to reach the crossing before they will, so they've no excuse, apart from that they are twats. And yes, I will post this every few weeks or so, at least until I get run over that is.

My rent went up last week, but that's ok, because having looked around at other places, there was nothing this good for a similar price. There's plenty of better stuff out there, but once I factor bills in I would be paying about 50% more, which isn't worth it just to get a bit of extra space. I guess that if I really need more space I need to get myself a wife first and move in with her to save money. Who said romance is dead?

The internet's boring these days. And am I the only one for whom Wikipedia takes forever to load? It's becoming a much less useful resource now that it sometimes takes a minute to see the pages.

I've not been going out much recently, because there's either people I don't particularly want to spend time around or because there's not really all that much of interest occurring. Plus, the weather is dire. So instead I've been staying in mostly playing computer games, Oblivion on occasion but mostly Football Manager 2005, leading Wolverhampton Wanderers to 14th place in the Premiership 2 seasons running. Woo. It's a strangely addictive game, but it also reminds me of when I used to play football, and makes me wonder if I could have had a mildly successful lower-division career in that if I'd pursued that path years and years ago. It's interesting because there's always time for changing career in most cases, but most sports you have to do it in your 20s or that's it.

The band's a bit of a nightmare at the moment. I don't think we've had the same set of people go in for rehearsal 2 weeks running for months. After some premature optimism a few months ago, it's back to much contemplation and concern, but what can you do? it's not all bad though, as I finished a new song recently which is great, and have another one coming shortly which is also great. After that, I have a few more songs to work on, not to mention my modesty.

Today I:
- had breakfast at Costa Coffee and paid about seventeen trillion pounds for it (but it was nice enough);
- discussed practical ways of 'cheering the fuck up';
- consumed far too much food at my first experience of an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet;
- watched 2 magpies almost kill a squirrel outside my house.

More thrilling news as we have it.

Not much to say, so I won't say much.

I've plenty of social stuff lined up for the next 4 or 5 days, so hopefully that is all enjoyable. Barbecue season is approaching, which is good. In fact, I hope to get out a lot this summer, with the improving weather. But, I say that every year and it doesn't usually happen.

The BBC site has another scare story about Facebook. "We have discovered a way to steal the personal details of you and all your Facebook friends without you knowing." it says. What they mean is, "We have discovered a way to steal the personal details that you have chosen to make available, when you also explicitly choose to install an application from a company you have never heard of before." It goes on to say, "When you add an application, unless you say otherwise, it is given access to most of the information in your profile. That includes information you have on your friends even if they think they have tight security settings. Did you know that you were responsible for other people's security?" This last bit is blatantly false; you can get a user's list of friend IDs. That's it. Anything else they show is just the publicly available data that friend already has.

Anybody know if the Sound Control shop here in Nottingham has closed, after the chain went into administration? I hear some of the shops are still operating for now, but I don't know if that's one of them. Looks like I'll have to get used to going a little further out of town for my guitar shopping needs. I'd probably order stuff from Thomann in Germany instead if I thought I could actually get it delivered to my house effectively.

A third of the year is gone, and I still haven't achieved any of the things I set out to do by the end of last year. This is how lives are wasted, I fear! When I have time free, I have no motivation, and vice versa.

A random question for you all: what items or services can you buy which just make life a little bit easier, quicker, better, etc? I'm thinking of things like dishwashers, home delivered groceries, stereos that you can plug an MP3 player into, random stuff which might seem a bit frivolous but saves time and frustration.