Given the amount of work that I've got through lately I'm totally gobsmacked at the realisation that I have, somehow, managed to read a few books over the past couple of weeks.
I'm a kind of "real world" person -- I don't care much for dramatic fiction (the Bible, for instance), nor almanacs or reference works (ever heard of the Internet?); but I do enjoy (auto)biographies and practical tomes.
Hancock's Last Stand: The Series That Never Was
, by Edward Joffe, tells the story of Tony Hancock's last days in Australia in 1968. Always a troubled man, the book chronicles the timeframe of a lifelong depressive heading down under to make a new TV series whilst struggling to come to terms with both his alcoholism and dwindling popularity in his home country.
Faced with the prospect of long seperation from his sometime partner Joan Le Mesurier and suffering a total crisis of confidence, Hancock arrives in Sydney and almost immediately slips into a routine of continual drinking, oversleeping and dismal performances only occasionally tempered thanks primarily to the efforts of the author, the producer of the series.
Whilst probably not of broad appeal (I don't know many people my age, let alone younger who know Hancock's work to any great extent), this insighful tome is certainly worthy of a read if you've any interest in mental health or addicitive issues and is a fascinating insight into the final weeks of the man once considered Britain's premier comedian.
On The Edge
- Richard Hammond is another story altogether. For those of you that don't know, Hammond is a presenter of Top Gear, a motoring show shown on the UK's BBC2 channel, who had a rather bad accident whilst driving a jet powered car in 2006.
If you did know that, don't read this book. If you didn't know that, don't read this book. Why? Because the paragraph that you've just read summarises 95% of the content. Following the de rigueur introductory chapters covering birth to celebrity, we are then subjected to hundreds of pages detailing the crash and the aftermath from his perspective. And his wife's perspective. And his budgie's perspective. The bloke who lives three doors along and bumped into him once gives his point of view as well, as does the postman, baker and occasional colleague.
It's badly written, hideously edited and stupendously boring. I don't think I've ever been so annoyed at spending my hard-earned money on an ink pregnated dead tree for a long, long time.
In complete contrast, Slash: The Autobiography
charts the life of the Guns N' Roses star using interesting, fluid writing (thanks in no small way, I suspect, to co-author Anthony Bozza), giving you enough detail to comprehend the growth and development of a rock icon whilst avoiding the monotonous "and an hour later I woke up again and had another poo" nonsense of Hammond's book. Telling the story of how Slash turns chaos into organised dishevellery in an almost Alchemistic way, the book is a fascinating insight into the world of growing up in LA in the 1970's. The jacket reads "I've always had to do things my way; I play guitar my way; I've taken myself to the edges of life my way; I've gotten clean my way; and I'm still here. Whether I deserve to be is another story."
And one that's worth reading.
I thought last night might be interesting and so it proved, only not quite in the way I imagined.
The firework display was anything but dull, thanks to several rouge rockets flying sideways into the crowd and the farm barns. Fortunately no serious injuries, though the vicar did take one on the leg. An act of God suggesting a change of profession, perhaps?
Suffice to say, everyone was pretty shaken up (fireworks going off inside corrugated iron barns sound much like I imagine the Mujaheddin announcing their arrival at an enemy base in Afghanistan would) and the event kind of lost its' shine fairly swiftly therafter!
Still, on the plus side, we got to go back to a nice warm pub to finish the night and everybody present has, I suspect, now developed a healthy respect for explosive devices.
Lunatic niece Anna finally arrived for a visit yesterday, having endured a rather harrowing journey down from London.
The first time she ever drove down by herself a couple of years ago, the clutch on her car exploded (you're not supposed to rest your foot on it girl...); this time she got within 50 miles and was happily zooming along overtaking everything in sight when, in her words, "the steering went wobbly and I saw my tyre rolling down the road behind me." Turns out her offside rear tyre simply, er, let go.
Fortunately she managed to pull over on three wheels (we'll buy her a Reliant Robin next now she's used to that), called the RAC and got to wait for an hour in the back of a cop car who'd arrived to look after her until the rescue service arrived.
Of course, having established that there was no damage to life, limb or car, our emotions quickly changed from concerned family to merciless piss-takers - perfect when you're planning on spending a night out at the pub, as we did. From 7pm until 3am. Ugh.
Good fun was had by all -- four hours at the Cyder Presse followed by 5 of us piling into Duncan's little Corsa car (he wasn't happy, moaning about stressed wishbones or something that no-one cared about after 10 pints) and heading up to The Globe in Torrington where Ady & I ended up playing (and winning, I think) doubles Pool against the locals for an hour. Always interesting when you're pissed.
For some odd reason, Duncan (not drinking, remember) decided to hang around so we got a free lift home afterwards ("... my poor car.. think of the suspension..."). We worked out this morning that we'd spent £170 between 5 of us, which is pretty good going. Ali must have been thirsty I suppose.
I'd like nothing more than a quiet night in, but that ain't gonna happen as the annual village firework party is due to kick off at Pickard's farm in just over three hours' time.
And the heavy drinkers are with us tonight.
Anyone got a liver for sale?
Woody & Anna would make a lovely couple. But their kids might be ginger.
Ady & I don't. Have ginger kids, that is.
He looks happier with landlady Jude
Whilst earlier on Mike and Chaz can't decide between Orange Juice or Beer
Just as my friend John Dominik says, if I say something three times I mean it.
Vista is shit. Vista is shit. Vista is shit.
Another frustrating few hours thanks to the arseholes at Microshit who decided the aforementioned product really was 'enterprise ready' at launch. Not content with losing DVD drives and running on bloody good hardware like a man with no legs through treacle, I'm confronted today with several situations that I simply can't resolve, owing to the complete lack of drivers for 64-bit versions. And that's without mentioning of course the fact that the present version of iTunes in an x64 environment can't import or burn CD's. Let me think now, what do we think are the two most likely functions required of an audio application?
Undercurrents in the marketplace do not bode well for Gates & Ballmer. Linux in the server room is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for file, mail, web and collaborative services, with Windows servers taking ever more of a back seat required only by those unfortunate enough to have to run bespoke M$ applications such as Exchange (hawk... spit...) and whilst some continue to question the maturity of Linux for the corporate desktop, the tide is surely turning.
The old "Linux is so much harder than Windows to use and administer, our productivity will nosedive and our support costs will rocket" tale no longer holds true, those that say otherwise simply have nothing constructive to contribute to the debate and doubtless mutter such nonsense mostly whilst rebooting their Windows boxen following yet another blue screen of death.
So why the hell do we have so many problems? Surely if we're not having to use Vista then I should be unconcerned at the many shortcomings of doing so? Well, you're right, but we're stuffed as our clients run so many bespoke (and in some cases, old) applications in the Windows environment that we need to be able to replicate their configuration and even doing so within a virtual machine on a Linux host doesn't take away the need to solve the ensuing problems.
That's my buggest bug-bear with Vista. It takes such a long time to fix it, and I hate nothing more than something wasting my time.
And if you need a platform for games that supports the latest video technologies, allows multiplayer participation across LANs and WANs and can also play your audio and video libraries without missing a beat, I have the solution.
Go buy a Nintendo Wii.
I've oft pondered how some people manage to get through life. Over the years, certain individuals have had me wondering how on earth they manage day-to-day, being obviously unable to, for instance, tie their shoelaces, open a letter or buy two items from a store at the same time. Now it would seem that math-for-three-year-olds is beyond many residents of one of our major Northern cities - http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/s/1022757_cool_cash_card_confusion. Be sure to read the comments, some of them are wonderful.Feeling somewhat under the weather today (no, it's not alcohol related) and not being especially productive so far, in stark contrast to yesterday when not only did I manage to put some long-standing work issues to bed (SQLyog is a great tool for admin & backup of mySQL databases), I also now have, courtesy of Woody, a functional stereo, repaired central locking and two whole reverse lights on my work car, not to mention some posh new carpet mats. Sometimes little victories count for a lot.
A mere three hours into the working week and already so many things have gone wrong:
- The taxman wants £5k more than I think I owe him
- Sage crashed on me this morning meaning one set of company accounts is now totally screwed up
- Another week has passed without a [long overdue] payment from one particular customer who obviously won't mind when their server goes offline very soon now ;-)
- An unusual power supply that I desperately need, purchased on eBay last week under the impression that it was shipping from within the UK on 24 hour service, turns out to be coming from China in 2-4 weeks
- The new Eagles album that we've only been waiting 28 years for is, basically, pants
- My 80Gb iPod is full up and I need a bigger one :-(
- The Dell laptop that cost me £1400 less than two months ago has gone wrong for the second time. What a bloody waste of money that thing is turning out to be
Still, never mind eh? As they say, things can only get better and given several of my 'issues' are purely financial, they're not really worth worrying about. It's a funny thing though - money problems are by far the easiest to solve (find some...) but invariably the most distractive (destructive?) and irritating of all. My philosophy so far as cash is concerned comes courtesy of Sid James circa 1958 - "if you've got it, spend it and if you ain't got it, get it." Guess I'd better knuckle down and do the 'get' part again for a while, for the piggy bank is looking decidedly hungry at the moment.
Oh yes, and if you were one of the many who tried and more importantly remain amongst the few still running Vista (hawk... spit...) as your OS of choice you'll find, sooner or later, your DVD drive will cease to function. It's happened, without fail, on at least one machine at every single client site that's got it. It's an easy fix -- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929461, but boy what a PITA. Service Pack 1 is due soon and hopefully that'll make things a bit more stable but I'll betcha it's still going to remain an already outdated, buggy, slow, insecure piece of bloatware. How I long for the halcyon days of Windows 2000 running against Netware servers... things just seemed to work then! I've been unfortunate enough to work on about 20 machines now running various incarnations of said retail packaged software shit and the only time I've seen one come *close* to XP performance has been on a Core2Duo running at 2.4Ghz with 4Gb of RAM, a 10k SCSI hard disk and 1Gb USB memory stick for ReadyBoost. Crap. Unmitigated, total, complete crap.
So, one of those days when I feel I either need to get back on the SSRI's or off the wagon then and given I'm all out of citalopram or fluoxetine, I guess I'll be having a pint later on. Cheers!
Whoever says that blogs serve no useful purpose other than providing cathartic therapy for their delusional creators has never been to a party at our house, where we always try and provide a balanced mixed of fun, alcohol and education. Never has this been more true than last night, where during our arranged-in-a-hurry bonfire party, Professor Chandler stepped up to the plate with his latest math lesson, viz:
+
=
And if that weren't education enough for one night, Dr Adam Cresswell then proceeded to demonstrate that if one stands legs akimbo, staring into the darkness whilst screaming prose somewhat akin to an All Blacks Haka, you can indeed raise long-sleeping demons:
So, once again, another fairly uneventful and boring weekend. Hope yours was a bit more interesting.
.. is it just me, or is Heather Mills-McCartney really the most delusional, arrogant, idiotic stupid bitch ever to walk the planet?
Sorry about that. You know how it is sometimes - you pop out for Pizza and by the time you get back it's eight months later.Whilst in many respects nothing fundamental in life has changed for me since I first started my original daynotes, followed by last year's scribbles from our extended trip down under, in several ways everything's different.For a start, we're now all a year older, with the Lemmings pack now weighing in at 99 years young. Chaz has the dubious honour of taking us to 100 what with his being the next birthday come March '08.Work-wise, I'm still plugging away with the same old techno crap, consultancy and project management though (usually) enjoying it more so than I have over the past few years owing to the current mix of content, clients and colleagues.On a personal level, it really has been a year of two halves. The pre-Australia partying and pratting around continued unabated upon our return until being rudely interrupted by Chandler* discovering he had cancer. Poor sod has subsequently endured 3 surgeries along with daily blasts of radiotherapy and chemo sessions, but is now, thankfully, on the mend. Physically, at least. He stills tells crap jokes and farts too much.Those of you who know us will however be aware that friends suffering a life-threatening illness is nothing new to us over these past few years and being hard, insensitive types, we've tried to not let it get in the way too much of the drinking, dining and casual sex that hitherto marked with absolute certainty that it was, once again, a day ending in the letter 'y'. To be honest though, come September we were all bloody knackered and waved goodbye (or at least au reviour) to the drunken and debauched life following a big party in the paddock for Ali's birthday. Partying (for me, at least) has been restricted to weekends since then, a tragic waste of one of my few natural talents about which I intend to make amends forthwith.The Wanderlust following the Australia trip is still burning strong to the extent that we're in the [very] early stages of applying for resident visas with a view to eventual migration down under. Meantime, our house is on the market - the eventual sale of which will certainly herald another decent [3-9 month] break and perhaps even mark the end of our lives as we know it. I've been thinking for some time about moving the business along and may well use the sale as my excuse for 'retirement'. We'll be so loaded, I won't even need to think about earning money for a good 4 or 5 weeks. We all want another trip back down-under to have a proper look at the employment, education and lifestyle opportunities in our chosen destination (South Australia, somewhere South-East of Adelaide in the general direction of the SA/Victorian border), us boys fancy driving across the US and Ali's definitely up for a bit more shopping in Asia, so we may well decide just to bugger off for good.As Jerry Pournelle is fond of saying, we live in interesting times.Oh, by the way, it's nice to be back. Again.*for the uninformed: Chandler is our friend Ian Chandler, husband of Jools, consumptor extraordinaire of strong European beer and the inspiration behind the blog from down under)
