Leaflet litter

A guaranteed way to annoy me and make sure you don't get any of my business is to leave leaflets on my car. It happens quite often at malls, even once while I was still sitting in the fucking car. Today however a new high was hit. Leaflets for a local business were put on every car parked at my office. Way not to drum up local business. Even better was it rained today so every car had a soggy leaflet jammed under the wipers.

Big week next week

  Sometime next week it is going to have been 20 years since I met my wife. I honestly don't remember the exact day we first talked but I do remember roughly when it was. I know it was just after my wife's (and my mother's) birthday and I had just got back to university after going home for my grandfathers funeral. It is scary to think of how much has gone on in that time and that it doesn't seem that long. I know things happened and I can remember a lot of it but it still seems strange that I've done more in my life with my wife than without her. I'm just looking forward to several more multiples of 20 years now with her.

Hello sun

  99% of the time when I get to work it is still dark, no sun to be seen. For a few brief weeks at this time of year the days are long enough that I actually see the sun before I am buried away in the office. So I would like to take this opportunity to say hello to the sun. Normally I only get to see you in the afternoon so it is nice to know you do exist in the mornings during the week.

Sunday posting

  Yet another Sunday of chores and lazing around, as all good days off work should be. Well maybe less chores on the really good ones but moving the lawns doesn't take too long really.

   Been keeping up with my old school friend who is going through chemo and he seems to be hanging in there. I think it is starting to get to him a bit physically since he is getting tired and feeling like crap a bit more now than at the start so hopefully whatever junk they are pumping on to him is having some effect.

  Finished the Pirates game yesterday, well the main story mode. I'm going through it trying to find everything as I do, I'm a bit OCD that way and I seem to have found a bug where one item won't reappear after it crashed the first time I collected it. Kind of annoying for someone like me but I'm sure I'll replay the game fully at some point in the future and get it.

  Got a free ice cream today for my wife with a buy one get one free coupon to cold stone creamery. My wife is saving some of hers for later but I finished mine off completely for lunch. So basically lunch today for me was icecream :-) . Oh and a few crisps. Nice and healthy. At least it is a sort of healthy pork roast tonight, yummmmm.

  Trying to decide how to spend the rest of the day now with my wife. Also get tomorrow off work as well (thanks military type dudes). No idea what to do though, not sure what I feel like right now. Bound to find something to keep us occupied though.

Arrrrrr

  Just got back from seeing the latest Pirates film. Pretty good although not as good as the first one but then that one was pretty damn good the rest of them since have had a hard job matching that one. Still I don't see it as a bad film at all as some people claim, maybe they just have too high standards. There were Pirates, treasure, sailing, sword fights, you know the usual stuff you expect. Also stay after the credits for a quick 20 second scene clearly leading to the next film. Only me, my wife and two other people actually stayed afterwards to see it so I expect most people don't even know about it. After reading this you do too, aren't you lucky?

  I now have an excuse to play the rest of my Lego Pirates game so I can understand the story the game is trying to follow along with.

  In other news we got my wife various pairs of cheap cool earrings including some really cute penguin ones. Now we just need some way of storing all of them when she is not wearing them.

  Planning stuff for my wife's birthday which is soon, well less planning and more getting things together. Main present is here, pre-present present has been given and other assorted small presents obtained. Food for meals on that day are also planned and just about acquired. It should be a good day.

Gah, stupid people

  Getting annoyed with a tester here at work, he comes up with these convoluted scenarios that could never possibly happen in real life. Take the latest one where it only happens if over a 1000 voice mails get left every minute on a box that only handles 600 simultaneous calls. How on earth can this actually happen. If you try this stupid setup you run in to a problem after doing this for a couple of hours. No shit sherlock, you are pushing the box much harder than it is intended to work. He then expects these bugs to be fixed and happily declares the product is fatally flawed. The only thing flawed is your brain dude.

Information gathering

  When playing games nowadays they gather a lot more information about what the player does and when than people realise. A lot of this information is sent back to the developers to analyse later and improve future games. One game that did this is Just Cause 2, a very silly game that I played last year. The developer just released a video with a visualisation of all 11.3 million player deaths due to collisions in the game world. It is nice to think somewhere in all those dots is me.

Stuff is happening

  Been fairly quiet on here recently but that is simply because I've been able to get on with my work at work. The new hires are coming along nicely, some more than others obviously, and the guy I'm "mentoring" is not a complete moron and can actually work things out on his own so he doesn't need too much guidance from me. The code I wrote has gone out to alpha test at one of our big customers and the next stage is almost complete so things are progressing really well for a change.

  My wife is actually getting better in her shoulder after a visit to the docs yesterday apparently. She just needs to wait for calcium buildups to break down and she should have full mobility back in her shoulder which is great news.

  Still looking at moving and if work cooperate it might actually happen. Things still need to sort themselves out with a lot of prodding from me but it no longer seems an impossibility.

  For some reason I have the Pirates Of The Caribbean theme song stuck in my head, it couldn't have anything to do with the amount of Lego Pirates Of The Caribbean I've been playing lately at all. I'm also in a slight dilemma there, the game covers all 4 films and I've not seen the 4th film yet. Even though it is not meant to be that great I'm still interested and want to see it so I understand the animated cutscenes in the game before I see them in game.

  Kind of annoyed with the bank at the moment. We just switched to a new account that had better terms and they keep locking the card associated with the account since we spend some money abroad, amazon UK specifically. They didn't do this before so WTF can't they just have the same spending profile as the old account. Effing annoying. What with changing that account and disconnecting the land phone line at home there has been a lot of updating information with people the last couple of weeks.

  Off to do some more work now, see if the other guy doing stuff for me has his section done so we can integrate them and make sure everything works ok.

Cat time

A couple of pictures since just cause. The first is entitled "pillow" for obvious reasons.

  The second is "feeding time at the zoo".

Addendum to High Tech Life

  One other thing I forgot to mention yesterday that makes it slightly more geekier. The guy with the phone with a card reader didn't actually have a signal so he couldn't connect to the network to process the payments. However someone with a phone on a different network did. So what did we do? Why create a local wifi hotspot on the phone that had a signal, connect the phone with the card reader to it and use that network connection to process all the card payments to the one guy who was actually paying the bill. Yeah, we play with tech toys too much.

High tech life

  Sometimes you forget how simple technology makes things. I've just gotten back from a late lunch with some ex coworkers and like most people in order to split the bill at lunch we didn't have the exact change for each person. So what do we do? Use a card swipe attachment on one guys phone to pay him via credit card so he could then pay the final bill. Not to mention one guy was running late so we used the GPS on his phone to work out where he was so we could wait for him to order our food without even talking to him.

  Life can be very fun and easy with a bit of technology not to mention the future is freaking right now.

Lego

  Had far too much fun with the latest Lego videogame last night. I think Lego Jack Sparrow is even better than "real" Jack Sparrow. There is just something about how expressive they make the Lego figures in these games with them not saying a thing at all that is really quite funny. Now if only real Lego sets were this cool, not that Lego isn't cool anyway, I spent a lot of my childhood doing the building of Legos and then dismantling them so I could build them again. For some reason I got more joy out of the building than the playing with them once they were complete.

Men & Women

  Feeling very sorry for my wife at the moment. Being a man I deal with some things that only men need to deal with, the daily shaving, the annoying fact that if you kick us between the legs we crumple up on the floor in agony, little stuff like that. My wife however is in agony at the moment like she is every so often and there is nothing I can really do to help or to understand what she is going through.

  Sometimes I'm glad I'm a man and only deal with man stuff as it were. But then again women get boobs which can be seen as a bonus from a mans point of view :-| (but then again when men get moobs it is a scary thing).

Not much

  That's what happened this weekend. After going away for the past two weekends with the caravan we didn't get up to much this weekend. It was nice since I didn't have to do too much driving around which can get tiring after a while. The last trip we did was almost 300 miles towing so it took a fair bit of doing what with the weather, wind and other traffic.

  This weekend involved a little light shopping, same game play and a couple of chores in the garden to fix the side gate and cut back some of the overgrown plants back there. We got it done fairly quickly which was nice and the weather is being quite pleasant for a change, not too hot but not cold either. If California stayed like this for summer it would be much more bearable compared to how it can get.

  Need to try and see if we can work out some way to move to a house we found that is near where our last trip was. Unfortunately it is all up to how work goes and how much help they will give me in moving and letting me not have to come in to the office every day. If we can pull something off it will be great since the place we have found is out of the way and reasonably quiet. It is everything we need for us to have the quiet life we want.

  Sometimes life is spent doing things you need to survive and not doing things you need to live if that makes any sense. I seem to spend far too much time making a living and simply doing stuff than doing the things I want to do with the people I want to. Obviously my wife is the main reason I want to do things and I want to do them with her but I'm screaming internally at all the other people in the world I don't care about that get in the way.

  Bah, this post is a bit too rambling and morose I think. Going to go try something else and be back when I'm not so dreary.

Bloody inconsistencies

  Bloody inconsistent dress sizes. My wife just tried a lovely dress that is the same size as multiple other dresses from that very same place and it would not fit. Other dresses from there fit easily yet this one did not.

  Get your fucking act together clothes industry, sort out your serious sizing problem.

Dumb suvery question

Numbers

  I've always had an affinity for numbers, not sure why. I can manipulate them, remember them, understand them and generally have no problem with them. Words on the other hand never really clicked with me. Anyway whenever I pay for something online I always use a certain card and could recite the card number, expiry and code off by heart for that card and any of the other cards I have. Just recently I switched the card I'm using to pay for stuff and after using it for a day can now remember the numbers with no problem.

  All I need to do now is find a way to take that memory for numbers and use it for important stuff like my wife. I wish I could remember everything we do, say and live. Some days though, after 20 years together now, I just can't remember it all and that makes me sad. I want to remember everything about our time together and it hurts that I can't.

Family guy is evil

  Family guy is an evil evil program. After watching the episode from the other day they reminded me how cringe worthy some parts of the 80s were. They showed this music video in its entirety that I managed to miss when it first came out by not actually watching much TV at the time (not to mention having a very specific taste in music). I realise growing up the 80s there are a few things that are just downright scary now but that video makes me wonder WTF people were thinking sometimes.

  I'll also let you listen to this equally evil song that they taunt people with as well.

Traffic

  No, not the kind you get on roads but the kind to websites. I'm still getting all sorts of google search traffic to one post/picture in particular. Kind of interesting what people look for and look at when searching has led to them to looking at something I posted. The picture I'm talking about is this one I posted last week and since that one I've had visitors (just to that picture) from all sorts of places. I"m slowly filling out the collection of European countries with a couple more added to the list today. Soon I'll have the complete set :-) .

  Anyway, it seems Nigella is a very popular person to look at (not that I can blame people), maybe if I posted more pictures I would get more traffic :-| .

The fate of a laptop

  Borrowed a cable from work to get the remnants of stuff off of my old laptop. Once this copy of ~120Gig of data finishes I won't need my old laptop ever again :-(. Bye bye old fella.

Interesting link about videogames

  I've said before that I enjoy videogames a lot, always have and always will. I'm not very good at describing the why or how they can actually be a method for inspiring thought and discussion but some people do a much better job at it. So I wanted to link to this article about the game Portal where it is used to teach about being human. I found it interesting but then again that is me. Read it if you fancy.

What people like

  Been nosing at my traffic stats and normally it is pretty predictable. However since I made this post about Nigella I've been getting traffic from various other countries. Apparently she is popular in mainland Europe and Australia. No other of my picture posts have ever generated so much traffic.

  So there we go, if you want lots of traffic simply post lots of Nigella pictures.

Finally a bit of peace

  Actually having a quiet morning today, only a brief interruption from a coworker on a different continent when I logged on. Almost felt like taking a nap it was so peaceful at work earlier. Other people are starting to show up now though so I should look like I'm actually doing something productive :-) .

  Thinking about how to get us moved to somewhere quieter a lot recently. Our trip away this last weekend really hammered home the point of living somewhere away from it all. It would suit us so well (as long as we have some form of internet connectivity that is). Time to really push work to make this happen.

Mad skillz

  I don't have them, at least not when it comes to photography. Some bastard managed to take this photo. Follow this link for the original.

Varied games

  A lot of videogames are more of the same but sometimes something different comes along. For me, as I said before, Heavy Rain was one of those games. A game came out today that looks interesting to me, L.A Noire, a police procedural detective game set in the late 1940s. I find it very cool that these different ideas are being explored nowadays given that the capabilities of videogame systems have expanded so much over the last decades. I think it is these new and innovative (for videogames) games that keep me wanting to try new things and see what happens. Of course I also like more of what I've played before and sequels to good games always get a look in from me (Infamous 2, Uncharted 3 and Elder Scrolls V Skyrim being some obvious examples) but new ones always bring interesting surprises and new experiences.

  This post brought to you by me seeing some fun videos of the game in action.

Am I wicked?

  It seems I must be since when I got in this morning I already had 5 more bugs to look at and I'm not getting any rest. This is all on top of the work I'm actually meant to be doing to develop new stuff. I should not have to fix stuff that was written by an incompetent coder who left months ago. they should have been forced to actually do a decent job.

  Found out where the extra money came from, I actually got a pay raise and it was backdated a bit. Nice, it seems the meeting where this was announced happened after I left for the day....

  Right with that quick update on me posted time to go do some more work. TTFN and all that.

The pile is shrinking

  Managing to get the pile of work reduced somewhat. So far today I have made sure we are going to be certified in China, looked at 8 different bugs and analysed them all and started to "mentor" the new guy who started here today. Now if only I could get as much stuff done for my home life as I can get done in my work life things would be great. I also might actually get to move on with my development of new code this afternoon, exciting huh? The first part of that new development goes out for alpha testing to the customer this week and it is looking good. Phase 2 is going to be in a few weeks for the beta test before we release in a couple of months.

  On a side note for some reason my pay cheque I got last week had more money in it than usual and so far everyone I've asked has no idea why. Talk about a nice but strange happening. Going to ping HR/payroll and see what is up.

I'm back

  Bet nobody really missed me :-) . Judging from the traffic stats is seems not...

  Anyway, back at work after some time away in the caravan. It was very nice being away from it all in the mountains. The car managed to towing with no problems and I'm getting better at navigating the road with it back there. Got through some tight spots (including the place where we were camping, trees within a foot on either side around a bend, up a hill and only just level....) with no problems except for managing to catch the jack coming out of a stop for lunch on the way back :-| . The jack got bent slightly so getting that fixed but otherwise everything went really well. We even went out on a boat on the lake for a few hours to explore and play around.

  Anyway, back to work for now, lots of stuff piled up the few days I was out. It seems some things just don't get done when I'm not here.

Modern times

  Been thinking about some things this morning. Yesterday evening my old school friend went in for his first chemotherapy session and while he was doing it he was posting pictures to facebook. What a strange time we live in where as someone is getting poisonous chemicals pumped in to their body in a hospital in an attempt to save their life they are taking pictures of themselves and the apparatus and posting it online for their friends to see. You have to admit keeping other people up to date with what is going on in your life is a lot easier today than it was. I mean I was sitting in the hair dressers reading these posts thousands of miles away, kind of cool really.

  I'm hoping it all goes well for him especially since he is also participating in a drug trial for a new treatment as well. He has 24 to 32 weeks of this to look forward to so it is going to be a long year for him.

Wednesday's Woman

  After my rant the other day I decided to do another of these posts. This time it is someone who really shows what I was going on about, it is Nigella Lawson.  She has gotten larger than she used to be and yet still manages to have a great figure and be very attractive.

Interesting to me

  The news that Microsoft is buying Skype is kind of interesting to me. (see this article) The fact that most of what I do is for VoIP applications for Microsoft Lync and also we are Skype certified is a good thing for my job. Microsoft consider us their best gateway provider so being aligned with them is very good news if we can get some of the Skype business.

  Even more interesting is when Skype and Lync are fully compatible with each other with full IM, audio and video integration which means even more business for us which means more money for me? (Hoping but there is good chance of that).

  Anyway, a bit of news that is probably only of interest to a few people but it could lead to new and interesting things to come.

My rant

  Ok, I know this has been a long time coming but whatever. I wanted to express this right as it is in my mind. It pisses me off to no end because of the crap it forces people to go through when they have no reason to not be happy as they are. I've seen it make countless people unhappy and most importantly it has made my wife unhappy which is why it pisses me off.

  The thing I'm talking about is people's self image, more specifically the image women have of themselves. It is kind of obvious that the prevailing image presented in the media is for women to be thin. This is bullshit. Women don't have to be thin to be attractive. Too often images of women are of people who have no figure at all. They are simply two straight lines down the sides, no hips, no curves, nothing at all to give the aura of being female at all. This more than often is achieved via simply being as thin as possible and yet this destroys any semblance of their true figure and shape.

  Now I know there are variations in body shape. You could read the wikipedia article about it for more details but even within the basic shapes there are no straight lines. Being able to pass as a man body shape wise does not make a woman attractive. Having no hips is simply not a nice shape despite how often you see it.

  I've posted pictures of people I consider attractive on this blog and every one of them actually has some form of shape. Yes some of them are thin but given the prevalence of that within the range of people I was selecting from (TV, film people) I had to work with that a bit. All of them have a nice shape in one way of another. I could select more to prove my point. A better way would be to point out something that struck me when I watched a TV program that was around for a couple of seasons.

  This show is Dollhouse, a show I enjoyed for when it actually told a story despite being buggered about by the television network in how the stories on the show should go. The whole point about it was to have a collection of "attractive" people who could be programmed to be whomever the clients of the dollhouse wanted them to be. To be honest watching the program I didn't see a single "doll" (I'm talking about female here, male is not my area of expertise :-) ) that I considered to have an attractive body. It wasn't until they introduced someone "normal" (who in fact ended up being a doll) that there was even the chance I would consider them nice to look at. The funny thing about this "normal" person? They were within the normal weight range for their height, had curves on their figure and didn't look like an anorexic stick insect. (In case you are wondering who I'm talking about here it is Miracle Laurie which is a silly name but so what).

  Hopefully I'm starting to get my point across here. Women end up convinced that what they need to do to be attractive is to be this tiny thin person and not the beautiful person they already are. They force themselves through all sorts of torture and stupid stuff just to conform to a "standard" that is totally ridiculous and unobtainable. I could go more on about how it is actually unhealthy to try to be thin, the fact that models have actually died from malnutrition trying to keep their "shape" (models being an even more extreme form of being thin) is a scary thing. People would rather virtually starve themselves to death than be considered "unattractive", this is not something that should exist.

  Please also consider as I write this I'm not damning plastic surgery. There are many good reasons for it from correcting something that simply can't be done naturally to enhancing other areas of the body. There is no reason not to have it if that is what the person wishes, I'm simply expressing what my feelings are on how women perceive themselves and what I personally consider attractive. If they want to have plastic surgery to change how their body is I have no problem with that. My wife has had some surgery to correct a problem and even though watching her there in recovery afterwards was one of the most harrowing things I've done (I literally almost passed out from seeing my wife in so much pain) I could not deny her need to have the surgery.

  I know not everybody is going to agree with me on this but I'm writing this down so people understand how much it pisses me off. I don't get angry much if at all really but this is one topic that really raises my hackles (other subjects being ignorant people and the supposed "right to life" movement in the USA trying to outlaw abortions but they are subject for another day).

  There is more I want to say on this subject and I want to illustrate it a bit more with some visual examples but I think I have expressed the feelings on my mind with what I have written here. I also want my wife to know that with the amazing figure she has right now she is the most beautiful sexy women ever.

It was a triumph

  Woot, managed a successful trip in the caravan this weekend. Towing it wasn't too bad despite the really high winds over the hill we had to climb to get to our destination. Really kicked the car around a bit. Other than that though I managed to make our way there and back without incident including a little wiggle through a car park to get lunch where I took the liberty of taking up half a dozen parking spaces :-) .

  When we got to the site everything worked as it should, "camping" like this is much nicer. Power, running water (including hot water) and all the conveniences are a much more enjoyable way to be outdoors than in some crappy little tent like when I was growing up. I think the only downside to all this was the huge drop in petrol mileage the car got. Down from a normal average of 20mpg to a mere 12mpg (10 when we were in the wind). Made filling up a little expensive but still cheap enough.

  Wearing a "new" shirt today, it is an old mens shirt of my wife that she used to wear that is now far too big for her. Even on me it is very baggy but incredibly comfortable. My wife has very good taste in clothes.

Tiny fudge

  I came across some old photos the other day and found this one of Fudge from when we first got him. He is barely 8 weeks old here.

Want to go home

  Crappy day at work today, I want to go home and be with my wife. Too many meetings today and an interview at 7am this morning meant I've not actually been that productive at all. Even right now as I type this I'm on a conference call discussing an upcoming alpha test of code at a customer. Not much to do with me other than the fact that I'm writing some of the code so they need to know when I'm going to be done (on time, duh).

  I'm feeling sleepy and hungry right now so might get some lunch so I can GTFO and go home on time. Looking forward to taking the caravan out this weekend and staying in it. A little bit daunting since it will be the first time but we shall see how well I drive around with it back there.

Boring picture

  In case anybody actually cares here is a picture of what the brake controller looks like installed in the car. Not particularly fascinating I know but it would help to know WTF I'm actually talking about when I wrote my previous posts.

  In case you are wondering where I had to wire it in to I pinched this picture off of the guide I used to do the work. This isn't my car but it is exactly like this. You can see the connector I had to wire up on the left and the brake pedal connector I had to tap in to in the middle just above the actual brake pedal.

  Anyway, kind of boring I know but a visual representation of what I did. Not too shabby given my usual clumsiness when doing manual projects (why do you think I became a software engineer?).

I didn't kill the car

  Fitted the brake controller to the car last night successfully. After it was done the brakes still worked as well which was amazing since I had to link up one wire for the brake controller to a wire from the brake pedal itself. Kind of a messy job since I had to carefully connect the wire to the connector at the pedal itself and then crimp other wires together but it worked (so far). Tonight will involve actually hooking up the caravan to the car and making sure the brakes actually come on when they should.

  Get to leave work a little early today since I have a dentist appointment this afternoon, never really have anything wrong with my teeth other than the one broken one I had when I got punched in the face as a teenager that has a cap on it. More than likely all that will happen is I will get a clean, get complained at for not cleaning properly and skip off on my way merrily until the next time (ok, maybe not the skipping part).

  Speaking of health stuff my wife still can't keep much if any of the food she eats down. We've tried quite a few things and nothing really sticks. Even if she hasn't eaten anything she still throws up. I wish I could find a way to make her feel better but she will get over it eventually. It is kind of bumming me out that she is so poorly at the moment.

  And with that quick update in to the world of me I'm off to test my code and make sure all this tediousness I've gone through actually does what it is meant to do.

Bleaching

  I've been bleaching. Virtually bleaching that is to remove any remnants of windows from my wife's mac laptop. It just couldn't hack it in the end for what I need to use so I restored it to its former glory and my wife can have it back in better than new condition or something like that :-) .

  As a result I've ordered myself a new laptop that will deal with what I have to throw at computers. Hopefully this one lasts longer than the mere 3 years the last one did.

Feeling uninspired

  I'm at the point in writing this bit of code where all I have left is the grunt work. I've put all the groundwork in and now it is just a case of fill in the blanks. I know exactly what needs to be done and how it should function, at this point it is simply a case of writing the code that does that. This is the easy annoying bit of writing code, if I've laid out what should happen where why can't the code then just come in to place to do that?

  Because of this almost drudgery aspect of coding my mind is wanting to shut down and go to sleep. I'm also not really feeling the joy of coding in doing this part of it. The joy comes from working out a design which will meet the requirements and seeing the end product in action. Also coming up with a elegant solution to a problem and seeing it come to life has that same effect. The actual work involved in just sitting there typing this stuff up though is pure slog. I know there are languages that allow you to express concepts in coding in a simpler manner but they have all sorts of drawbacks that won't work on the system we are using and like a lot of code out there at the moment it needs to be small, compact and actually fast. I know many of you won't believe it but most people only become aware of software when it doesn't do what they want when they want. If you don't notice it then it is doing its job properly.

  Anyway, back to typing stuff and staring at a screen in a daze.

I can't breathe

  Men are disgusting creatures, growing up in a house with my brother that was 3 men and 1 woman I learned that fairly early on. Even so sometimes I still get completely appalled at what they are capable of sometimes. I just tried to go to the bathroom here at work (yes, the water is back on thankfully). However I could barely make it down the corridor and only just made it in to the actual bathroom before an almighty stink drove me back to my desk.

  How the hell can you let that kind of smell out? What did they eat to produce such an abomination to the nostrils? Pity the poor womenfolk who have to walk down the same corridor to their bathroom. I ended up going to another floor in the building to try and escape.

  This post brought to you by my still reeling nostril hairs.

I should be a doctor

  I've decided that even though I'm crap at it I should be a doctor. There are two advantages to this, the first being I could look after my wife when she is sick better than I do at the moment. I feel kind of useless when she is ill like she is at the moment. The other advantage is that I would be able to earn ridiculous amounts of money just for doing a little bit of work or at least it seems that way when my insurance company sends me copies of all the bills they pay.

  Today is turning in to meeting day, so far it is 3 different meetings taking up almost 3 hours of my time today. Luckily all the meetings are virtual ones so we are all sitting at our desks doing other stuff whilst we are on these meetings. Therefore I'm actually being productive at the moment I just can't make any of the few phone calls I need to make at the same time.

  Also for those who care at all I finished another game last night Crysis 2 which is a very technically well done FPS game and much much longer than the usual for that genre. Normally I could power through the standard one in 4 hours or so (Call Of Duty especially) but this one lasted me at least 12 hours or so possibly longer. I also want to play through it again now that I understand the game systems better since it has much better variations in tactics than the usual FPS. Oh, and you would think by now that aliens would know not to invade New York anymore since they always get their arses kicked if they try (in the end).

Damn cats

  Well, I should clarify that post title. Damn cat singular, our cat Boots to be precise. Want to guess how many times he woke us up last night just so he could be followed to his food? After 6 times I lost stopped counting. It was a very interrupted night of sleep to say the least. For some reason he really likes being followed to his food so he can then proceed to eat sometimes. He will sit at the bedroom door scratching at it until I get up and take him to food. Even when we are up he will walk in to the room and sit there whining/meowing at us until one of us follows him.

  Needless to say because of this I'm a little frazzled today and not totally with it. Just what I need when I'm busy trying to get something done at work. At least the parts I need to sort out the car are here so I can get the brake controller hooked up this week. It is also probably going to be an expensive month with the treatment for Boot's thyroid problem, applying for US citizenship and potentially a new laptop for me all needing to be paid for. Not to mention my wife's birthday coming up soon and my 40th in a few months time.

  Right, off to write more code before the hoards descend on the office although at the moment we have no water here since they are replacing one of the main pipes apparently. Going to be interesting if they don't get that done quickly with all the people in this office.

Hiding

  Hiding has been the only real way I've gotten work done today. I took my wife's laptop and hid away somewhere from my cube. Mainly to try and get some work done and also to try and see how working with that laptop will go. It sort of works but isn't as good as my old laptop (RIP) and I don't think I've heard the fan on it work so hard in my life. Normally my wife's mac laptop is pretty silent but I don't think it has been below a small jet engine all day. Not sure how well this is going to go long term but it just about works.

  Been speaking a bit to my wife over IM today and she is feeling kind of icky. She can't keep any food down so something seems to have upset her stomach. Luckily either my stomach is made of stronger stuff (from growing up with my mother's cooking no doubt) or I didn't catch it. Hoping to be able to nurse my wife a bit when I get home from work and see if I can make her feel a bit better or at least more comfortable whilst she is ill.

Non stop

  Yet another fucking day where I sit down, log on and somebody needs my help already. I've been here two and a half hours and not stopped and it is only just gone eight in the morning. For once I would like to come in to the office, sit down and actually do some of my own work for a change. Not to mention some of the other things I like to get done during the day since that is the only time they can be done.

  Now if you will excuse me I'm going to go do my shit now that I have let out a virtual scream here.

Hello

  Just popping on whilst I eat lunch to say hello to whomever is reading this. Quiet day today with me playing games and my wife not feeling that great resting in bed.

  Due to a stroke of luck there will be a delicious dinner tonight. We managed to end up with all but one of the ingredients to my wife's "pork dish" as we call it, a wonderous concoction she came up with one day many years ago back in England that involves roast pork, sausages, mash potatoes, apple sauce, onions and stuffing. It is a delight to eat for us since we love pork and it's various products.

  Still waiting on the last freaking parts from VW to attach the brake controller to the car. They should have been here Friday but weren't, then Saturday but I didn't get a call to tell me they had turned up. I'm getting impatient now since I need these small parts so we can safely drive the caravan around and we are going away for a night next weekend in it.

  Anyway, a small snack has been consumed for lunch now so I wave goodbye until next time and hopefully post something a bit more interesting.