How on earth

  Ok, you see the odd weird product. Now via one of my podcasts I've become aware of this oddity that actually came out a year or two ago. You really wonder how on earth people think up this crap and that there has to be someone who actually bought it. I'm astounded that someone can come up with this crap. I doubt they will ever get rich off of it but still, what the hell.

Font of ideas

  I complained yesterday about not being able to come up with any ideas of stuff for my birthday. About ten minutes later my wife came up with several in the space of a couple of minutes. Clearly she has way more aptitude at this than I do, you should see how long I um and ah about finding presents for her. The ideas literally have to be dragged out of me and usually occur at a time when I least expect it. Sometimes they are good ideas and completely surprising to me wife, others they are not so good ideas. Since we are two different people I occasionally think of something that she really doesn't like and a thing I like about my wife is that she doesn't hide that. We both see no point in being polite if in the long run there is only going to be more problems. Still I think my ratio of good ideas to bad is pretty good at this point. I'm just not at quite as good a ratio as my wife.

Loot

  What do you do when you don't want anything for your birthday? Nothing out there takes your fancy and other than stupidly expensive things which nobody is going to buy you have everything you really want or need. I'm in that dilemma at the moment with my birthday a couple of weeks away. I browse around online shopping sites and I see nothing at all. I can only see the usual suspects of games that haven't come out yet or huge Lego sets which are impractical really.

  I think it is going to be one of those completely stumped years, I'm just thankful that our ipod speaker dock thing in the bedroom died the other day so that my wife could by us a replacement as my present from her.

  Then again I suppose you get to the point in your life where you really don't care about stuff. Other than things to keep you alive and other odds and ends to amuse yourself you really don't crave stuff and objects anymore. Not in the small tangible way anyway, maybe only in the large life and goal orientated way. Like moving house to somewhere that meets our lifestyle more. Small things like that :) .

Slow days

  Been working from home a lot with my wife recovering from surgery. I tried going to the office one day but my wife needed me back home so off I scooted. Days at home though seem to go slower, I suppose it's due to the not commuting which breaks up the day. Also I don't have to get up quite so early in the morning. Still, getting more time with my wife is nice, just being there feels great.

  The fun thing is that I did some work today and without the distractions of the office and the noise I solved one problem just in 30 seconds wandering around in the kitchen making lunch. I miss getting those sudden realisations of something and putting together an elegant solution to something. With all the noise and stuff at the office (I do my best work in the morning before other people are there) they seem to come to me less and less.

  Still my wife is healing nicely and there do not seem to be any complications or problems with the result of her surgery. I think the end result will look great in the end.

Pain

  When people are in pain they express it. They do this so that other people can help them and relieve the pain or help them in other ways. My wife is currently in a lot of pain due to the after effects of surgery but in the end there is very little I can do to help reduce her pain.

  Sure I can get things for her, help her move around as need be and be a good gopher husband as I should. But as to actually taking away the pain I'm as helpless as she is. It is just a matter of time and healing (with the eventual arrival of poop thrown in for good measure) that will take it away.

  It is a completely paralysing feeling knowing there is nothing you can do to help the woman you love. You want to hit out at the world and make it do something but there is nothing to do. It is one of the most frustrating things there is.

Stuck in your head

  I saw this trailer the other day and it has one of those stupid songs in it that stay stuck in your head. They are so simple that the repeating main chorus just goes on and on and you can't stop yourself. Go listen to the "original" (well most well known recording) and see if you get it stuck as well.

  Kind of like the good old Lions and Tigers (which if you've never seen you've never been on the internet). So let me see, what else can get stuck in your head. Certain images I suppose, I can still clearly see the one picture my friend took of my wife and me on our wedding day coming out of the church. Certain moments in time I can also still picture although as to the absolute accuracy I can't attest, just my recollection of them.

  I just want more of those memories, the good ones, the ones that stay stuck in your head. I've had so many of them over the years. Mostly good ones, a few bad ones (the car crash comes to mind). I can only hope that I get many many more years with my wife to form more.

Completionist

  When it comes to games I'm a bit of a completionist a lot of the time. Unless the game goes out of its way to make it boring or too time consuming to do something (hello 10000 kills in online competitive multiplayer in Resistance 2) I'll do it. I've got to that point in yet another game the other day. I've finished the main game and most of the side stuff, now there is just a few little things left to do. I now need to ask myself do I want to do those things and "complete" the game or do I want to move on to something else. I suppose it all comes down to when do you think something is finished?

  There are multiple points at which something could be considered finished, getting something to the point where it works, getting something to the point where there is absolutely nothing left to do or just doing something to the bare minimum. Depending on what this something is and whether or not you get enjoyment out of it decides how far you take that thing along to completion. Not a stunning realisation really but that summarises it nicely for me. If I enjoy it I'll take it as far as I can. If it is just dull work then I'll get it as far as it needs to be and leave it.

  Time to ask myself again, will this do? Enough blog post for today or do I want to write more?

If only I had a brain

  We just cleared up the final bit of leaves and huge branches mess down the side of the house now that next door is being cleaned up and the tree between the houses is gone. As part of it some very large branches needed chopping up and the chain on the chainsaw has seized up. Oh well I thought I'll use my hand saw. After doing a few branches a realisation dawned on me, I have a freaking circular saw in the garage that would be so much faster. One power tool use later and much less time and effort the mangled pile of large branches was a neatly stacked up in a pile and ready to be thrown away.

  The thought that comes to me now is why didn't I think of using the circular saw in the first place. I could have saved so much time and effort using a hand saw to chop up the branches I did do with that. I know my wife would have thought of doing it that way straight away so why didn't I? Clearly she is the brains and looks of our relationship.

Never finish

  Here at work sometimes it seems things never finish. Sure you get a feature done and out but then something else is still there needing to be done. It is an endless cycle of improving and changing with no end in sight. Clearly that can be seen as a good thing in that the product we produce will always get better (theoretically assuming that all new features are good) but it leads to me seeing a road where nothing is ever truly done.

  Heck, even at home nothing is ever done. Doing the gardening at the weekend and you get something done only to have to redo it again later on since those damn plants don't stop growing. Or cleaning up the house only to see it is messy again later due to actually having to live there. I just wish to have a break of continually having to do things that just need doing over again later on.

  It can be frustrating, never completely feeling accomplished since you get that niggling feeling that something else is going to come along and need doing at some point.

Internet randomness

  It is amazing the random things people put on the internet. Quiet often they don't realise that anybody can come along and see it. Take images for example such as are on the image hosting site imgur. Normally they are behind a random string of characters so you can't just guess a url and see a picture. Then take a clever person who works out the rough algorithm and writes a small program to find these pictures and display them randomly as demonstrated in this link. You end up with a random gallery of the strangest or most normal or downright crude stuff put on the internet where anybody can see it even if you didn't intend it to be that way in the first place.

  So what does this tell you about people? They don't understand technology that well? They have no regard for their own personal privacy? People have extremely weird tastes in what they like to look at? A lot of what people put on the internet is incredibly dull? Take you pick of any or all of those I suppose.

Dumb humour

  I read a couple of comics online every now and then. There is another one at explosm.net that has an occasional good one. They can range from the very crude to the stupid pun to just downright huh? Anyway try this one for size and see if you like it, sometimes it just hits the right spot humour wise for me.

All this other stuff

  My wife and I have been watching old DVDs of Dead Like Me over the weekend. I know I had watched a couple of them before but never got around to watching them all. My wife however had watched all of them. Going through them though it struck me at how many experiences my wife has had that I have not and vice versa. We do a fair bit together but then we have our own areas of stuff that we are solely interested in that doesn't interest the other one. For me it is obviously videogames, I put a lot more time and get more enjoyment out of them than my wife does. For my wife it is reading, she reads so much more than I do.

  Even though we have been together for over 20 years now there are still areas of our lives that don't overlap and we don't know every thing that the other person goes through. The one person you are closest to and love more than any one else is still partially separate from you in some ways. It's kind of weird and kind of good. If we were one and the same person what would be the point?

  This deep thought brought to you by god knows why this popped in to my head.

Wife luck

  My wife had another stroke of luck this weekend. She managed to pull a muscle in her thigh while we were playing tennis Saturday morning. It wasn't too bad at first but by the evening she was in agony. God knows what actually happened but throughout that night and most of the day Sunday she couldn't move around much at all. Eventually the pain died down through rest and drugs but even today she is hobbling along as she walks around.

  I'm not sure how she has so many things like this happen to her, she doesn't deserve that much crap. She has had far too much bad luck with her health these last few years so she deserves something better. I want to pass on my relatively good luck with health to her somehow so she doesn't have to deal with it.

Phrasing

  OK, quick pop quiz. Just having a conversation with my wife and I said "you need some of the bulk for longer term satisfaction". Now that could be taken so many ways since you have pretty much zero context for it that it is silly. That is the problem with just getting a small part of a conversation or larger piece of writing. It is far too easy to make something sound like it is taking a view one way rather than the way it was intended. Unless you go to the source and get the whole picture you can never really understand the original intent.

  Kind of sums up most US news reporting doesn't it? A quick bit of information with a few carefully selected phrases and you have your viewers thinking whatever you want without actually having to lie to them.

  My problem with words is that I phrase things so vaguely sometimes that my meaning gets completely lost on the person I say the words to and I then spend the next few minutes trying to convince them that I meant what I meant and not how they interpreted it. The other problem I have is that I waffle on for too long describing something and end up losing the person through disinterest.

  Words are hard.

Small changes

  Just got a call about a small surgery my wife is having soon. Just a slight rearrangement of when the various appointments are happening. The surgery has moved by a little bit and the pre-op by a few days as well. Keeping track of all of these things along with everything else takes a bit of juggling so that I can make sure I can work, get my wife to these appointments and stop any overlap or need to be in two places at the same time. Take in to account that the likelihood of us actually moving has increased and it gets really complicated trying to work out how far ahead we can plan.

  Still at least everything happens in the end and it all gets done even if it doesn't get done according to the original plan. A simple list of stuff to do is so vital sometimes.

Not much time

  Not a lot of time to do stuff other than work today so in order to cheer myself up here is a picture of our boys being the lazy cats they are.

Too efficient

  I think my wife and I are too efficient sometimes. On both Saturday and Sunday we had all of the chores/tasks we had to do done before midday. That left a lot of time for lazing around playing games etc. It is a nice position to be in, nothing you absolutely have to do and just stuff you want to do. Now if only I could get the work week like that and life would be even better.

  In other news we actually have a path down the side of our house. The side of the house that is by the neighbours, they who had the hell hounds kept there and are long gone now, used to be completely covered in leaves and stuff that dropped down there from a tree between our houses. Now that the tree is gone we decided to clean up as much as we could. We got half of it done before we ran out of room in the garden rubbish bin but it is looking better. Now I just need to give the guy who bought next door and is doing it up a call and see what he wants to do with the knackered fence between us. Hopefully he is going to replace it soon since we tried with the previous two owners and got nowhere. I really don't want to pay much for it so it depends on what he says.

  On a totally unrelated note I took a peek on google maps at the house where I grew up today. No idea what made me think of it but I did. Not surprisingly it is still there, doesn't look like it has changed too much. In fact other than more cars parked in the area nothing looks too changed to be honest. Kind of weird thinking about it, I spent almost 26 years in that house with breaks in between to go to university and when me and my wife lived in other places for 18 months. It just seems strange that it has been so long now that it really isn't part of me any more even though it was a huge part of my childhood. It would be even stranger if it wasn't there anymore like some houses. Luckily I don't have to go back to a place like that, not that it was bad, just limited. Now to make sure the place we live is better and better every time.