04.02.10
Posted in Fun, Work at 12:34 pm by Mister JTA
Podcast No. 164: The Story so far:
Dan Savage has called a woman back; she’s been making extra money doing live sex shows on webcam, and her boyfriend is not happy about it (that is, once he found out she was doing it on the quiet, he wasn’t happy about it). Dan wants to know how essential this extra money is.
Savage: Is there something else you can do besides that? I mean, what’s your career goals besides fingering yourself on webcam?
Caller: [Laughs] I actually have two jobs now; I’m a librarian, actually.
My profession kicks arse
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03.02.10
Posted in Fun at 8:22 pm by Mister JTA
The murder mystery was awesome; I enjoyed it a lot more than the fixed form ones, which I think is because a lot of the important bits of fixed-form stuff are read out from booklets (assuming they’ve been made properly, which I’d like to point out is not always the case), and it’s nice to have extra leeway.
(Having said that, I think it needs a fixed-form into to act as a launching platform, so everyone can introduce themselves & possibly say where they were at what times, because that would leave me feeling less like I need to build the Statue of Liberty to stop this sort of thing [Man, do I miss having a foreign advisor. She kicked arse.])
But once things got going, it was really awesome. I genuinely think I did well early on because I wasnae stingy with the information (which I attribute entirely to having called up The Game of Diplomacy back when I was working at the Bod, and snippets of which kept coming back at me; there’s an awesome sketch Sharp does of the opening stages where a chap is going around saying ‘You’ve got to help me, Turkey’s sister is going to marry Germany’s cousin next week, if you don’t ally with me then he’ll roll right over you before I can even cross the Channel,’ and similar Lies Of Awesomeness [Italy, as I recall, gives up right at the start and gets drunk in the corner...]). Anyway, that was dead handy that was, and I offer to all of you the notion that it’s good to share information with someone you know you can trust to reciprocate with no ulterior motive whatsoever.
(Slightly dissapointed to find that book so expensive on Amazon, sigh. It really is very good; I believe it must be the source of the quote I can only occasionally find excuse to shoehorn into conversations: ‘A ruthless do-or-die merchant who’d knife his own granny in Spring 1901 if he got the chance.’ Hey ho.)
Anyway, the whole thing went awesomely, and it was really interesting to see the way the interactions changed over the course of the thingy. Plus I got astoundingly drunk by dint of mixing both blue and green cocktails - I employed what was, frankly, slightly suspect reasoning, and argued that blue and green paints can be combined so why not drinks - and then woke up without a hangover. I must drink more vintage champagne again at some point, so I can remind myself what a hangover feels like.
Awesome fun, as I say.
In other news, Miriam is well(ish) again. At least, she’s back and running on the requisite number of cylinders, which is important. Her central locking’s gone, however. By ‘gone’ I mean ‘works perfectly, but the actual keyhole on the driver’s side does bugger all, so to lock or unlock her from the outside you have to hike over to the near side door which I suspect is the sort of thing that will get old very fast, although it is just the sort of quirk that Miriam revels in having, and it’s at least better than having a sunroof that leaked whenever it rained.
O, and I’m working absurdly too much, but the Department is being a whole world of co-operative, and has cancelled every other lecture this week so as to leave me more time to play Tropico 3. At least, I assume that’s why they’re doing it, and that it’s an issue of co-operation rather than competence. (I’m nice like that).
Cheerio!
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08.09.09
Posted in Fun, General, Work at 1:04 pm by Mister JTA
Ah, Red Alert 3: Soviet March, I grow fonder of you as a ringtone day by day.
In this case, look you, because you’ve contrived to be the ringtone heralding an offer for part-time work. More than that, for convenient take-it-or-leave-it-and-be-paid-accordingly part-time work, which is liable to be dead handy for me with my collection of other commitments and overdrafts to satisfy all at once. Huzzah!
Therefore, presently, and assuming a clear health check and a green light from the CRB people, I return to work as a cleaner-type person (Undertakers, prostitutes and cleaners: always in demand, that’s us. And, considering the alternatives, cleaning’s not a bad job to be engaged in, all fun aside)
(Alarmingly, by my reckoning this brings my all-time interview:job offer ratio to, er… 9:8 (that’s what not having a driving license will do to you, that is). The reason I say alarmingly is because I assume my luck’ll have to turn eventually, and if it’s going to I’d much rather it dropped out now rather than when it super-really counts, but there you go - I don’t propose to complain too much, I just worry that it’s one of those things that only works when you don’t bank on it, and I’m not sure how to look like I’m not banking on it!)
Betimes, I’ve netted myself perhaps the most cool voluntary work I could have contrived, as a sort of giving-advice-and-opinions bod for a fictioneer. Can’t say I’ve got much experience of that sort of thing per se, but it’s giving me a chance to brush up on some very rusty skills I’ve not pressed for some time, so that’s nice.
O, and a heads up to the guy who just came up the drive and stuffed a ‘Do you want your drive to be pressure-washed?’ flyer through the door: talking loudly on a mobile below an open window kinda diminished the secrecy of the sentence “Mate, can you keep a secret, yeah? I’ve actually got another girlfriend she doesn’t know about.” (Bonus tip: if you must go about keeping secrets, you’ll find they work better if you don’t tell people regardless of how close you are to other bodies)
(A heavy blonde day even for someone as fair-headed as you, huh? You square-set late-teens six footer, you…)
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03.07.09
Posted in Fun, General at 10:17 am by Mister JTA
But before it fades out entirely, I figure I’ll mention the incredibly vivid dream I got woken up from, because I came out of the whole enterprise looking really awesome (in my head, that is. I don’t imagine it’ll translate so well, but that’s your lookout, not mine). Typically, I’m hazy on the background but there was a duel, and everything, plus generic Regency backdrop, and fancy house. Whole thing was in black and white, though, which is really quite unusual for me. I can’t remember why we were fighting, which is a shame since I’d have liked to know, and I did ask the chap who checked the wadding, but he said he wasn’t allowed to talk to me.
Very nice flinters, is most of what I remember, and I picked the one on the left out of the box because I can clearly remember thinking that I ought to have taken the one on the right instead, though I couldn’t work out why, except it had a different pattern of hatching on the grip. Surprisingly the other chap was weirdly faceless, in the sense that I couldn’t quite make out what he looked like, although I vaguely knew he was a nasty piece of work and was probably the one in the wrong. Very tall thin bloke, blond hair and a black cane, presumably in order to make it clear he was the bad ‘un, but I remember thinking not being able to his features was a bad start to aiming at him… Presumably to save getting a new background curtain we adopted the film-friendly ‘10 paces, turn, fire’ routine, and I think I’d got to about my eighth stride when the sod shot me in the leg from behind, which stung.
Awesomely I improbably executed a very nice spin with the whole extended arm thing (which I’m fairly sure wouldn’t work, I think the balance of the barrel would be wrong given the angle I was at) and managed to get him in the arm, with consequent winning & obvious disgrace for cheating in a duel in front of all the witnesses what had helpfully appeared alongside the bank (of the river. I don’t know why there was a river, but it served for somewhere to put witnesses) I remember thinking he was a fool to cheat in front of witnesses (or, indeed, for either of us to fight anywhere within a thousand yards of witnesses at all) but somebody said his second chappie had told him I’d cheated already and switched the flinters so his didn’t have a ball in it, though I evidently didn’t, since we both got shot. (Did I mention the bit where I was awesome and pirouetting with a leg gone dead on me and still got him square below the shoulder? For I was dead cool, and everything.)
Anyway, he buzzed off to live a new & quiet life in the Foreign Legion, or somesuch Godawful fate, and I got to keep his awesome house, as I recall, which had a fabulous library with tea + cake and a fire… And then we had the traditional fade-to-random-chase routine, obligatory in all dreams since 1697, and I found I’d fetched up in India and was running away on an elephant with an orderly who kept shouting at me. Woke up shortly after, feeling very groggy. I don’t pull out of REM sleep with any grace at all.
Pop psychology interpretations welcome, why not.
(Though personally I’m inclined to put it down as the fault of too much Lovejoy, listening to Moonlight Shadow and (at the end, at least) Flashman. O, and you get No Points for identifying the novel I apparently thieved that library from, though I suppose we should be grateful I didn’t inherit the crazy housekeeper along with the rest of the house. Am assuming the duel-y dude wasn’t Max, hard to imagine him going around shooting people in the leg…)
Still, I’m surprised it’s stuck with me this long, most of the stuff my brain comes up with vanishes before the kettle’s boiled…
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30.03.09
Posted in Fun, Reflective, Work at 4:39 pm by Mister JTA
Now with semi-random emboldening, to clarify what’s important in amongst all these words…
Well, since I’ve not yet had any frantic e-mails or letters or ‘phone calls of retraction, I guess now is as reasonable a time as any to leak some breaking news out into the public domain: UWA Aberystwyth would like to offer me a place on the Library and Information Studies course as a Masters student, starting on the 28th of September, 2009. Plus, on the basis of my having started as an undergraduate around the 28th of September 2003, and having graduated from UWA three years later, they’d like to give me 10% off my tuition fees, which is very nice of them!
All things considered, this is a Good Thing, since it means I’ll get not only a professional qualification that (as I understand it) will allow me to get membership of CILIP - dead handy, that is - but also a spiffy new degree, which will not only make me look like a well-rounded, clever sort of person, but which should also net me a little more cash, long-term.
Not only that, but in the event that I actually finish and get the thing, I’ll be one of a comparatively small number of people who hold not only a degree from UWA, but also a degree from AU. Yes, I think that is a really interesting fact. I’ll wheel it out at parties in the event people look like they’re getting bored of hearing about the development of MARC formatting*.
Jen is currently in town, which is awesome. Brief trip to pub yesterday, which included entertaining reminiscences about Apocalypse Wow! and other ghosts. Since I’m about to be returning to studenthood [terrifying thought, except I'll be able to stop paying tax and that], I find this heartening - I think Jen is the first person I met during my Fresher’s Week that I’m still in any kind of contact with outside of Facecoke, and that dun’t really count as contact. It was good, because the thought of going back to University as a student type was making me feel properly old, and while talking about t’Old Days didn’t exactly stop me feeling old, it at least made me more cheerful about the whole thing.
Plus, y’know, Jen’s awesome, so it’s nice to have her back in town :-)
Good news all round, pretty much!
Have fun!
You really don’t have to read this bit if you don’t want to. I can’t think why you’d not want to, but if you really don’t, you can shove off now.
*this is, in fact, really interesting. See, back in the 1960s electronic data storage was really expensive and any computerised library records had to be stored in fixed-length fields, which not only limited search capabilities, but also caused costly wastage when you had an author with a four-character surname being stored in a fixed-length ten-character field. So, on the one hand, you had some fields that, for certain items, weren’t long enough, but couldn’t be extended, and on the other hand, you had some that were too long, but couldn’t be shortened.
Sometimes this would happen within one record, and it really crippled the potential value of the emerging computer as an alternative method of record management (the standard at the time, of course, being the traditional 3×5 inch catalogue card, which also had limited capacity and couldn’t be relied upon to get regular updates unless someone remembered to check all the cross-references from one card to another - which was time consuming even for small collections.
The problem they had was that there wasn’t any way to vary the length of a data field, because you had to tell the computer that the Author Surname field started at character #20, and ended at character #30 - it was the only way the machine knew what order the data lived in, and nobody could think of a way round that (of course, the majority of librarians had little understanding of computers, and the computer engineers rarely thought of libraries as being a market for computers, since the established members of each profession looked on the other as the very anathema of what they stood for - a view which remains surprisingly common to this day, in spite of all the advances made in the past twenty-odd years).
Now about this time the Library of Congress had appointed a new committee which was supposed to be looking at their surplus of 3×5 cards. (Especially in the US, these cards were still pretty cutting edge - as late as 1900 most American libraries still had their catalogues printed in book form only, which made them amazingly hard to update - by comparison, the index cards were a dream come true, except that they took up too much room.
The committee, therefore, was looking at two solutions to the card storage problem: 1) Rent a big warehouse to store some of the cards, or 2) Rent a floor in a big warehouse to store some of the cards**. The LC was feeling pretty good about itself, around this time, because of course it wasn’t long since the 1956 Committee on Catalogue Code Revision had presented its findings (themselves a revision of the fairly shoddy 1946 rules), so they weren’t in the market to change the way cataloguing was done. However, it was at about this time that — Oi! You little bugger, I saw you open that new tab! Hey! O, now you come back here! Honestly, I was right in the middle of my story!***
*sigh* Bye, then…
**Some things change very, very slowly, it appears…
***Cite me!
[All humour aside, that is honestly a really interesting story. I’d be happy to finish it sometime. And kudos to Keith Trickey for clueing me in on it.
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19.11.08
Posted in Fun, General, Work at 11:41 am by Mister JTA
Been listening to a lot more Billy Joel lately, especially at work (not least because I keep forgetting to take my MP3 player to work, so I’m using the N95 instead.).
I do concentrate better with music in the background, as long as I know it relatively well (otherwise I have to keep breaking concentration to listen to the words!), so it’s nice to have an office where nobody minds on the grounds that ‘it does help you concentrate, especially when you’re doing something repetative.’ Colleagues WIN, I think…
…On the other hand, there’s something very, very wrong-feeling about playing Red Alert 3 while a background copy of Winamp belts out, uh, Leningrad.
On the plus side, every faction in RA3 seems to have adopted the traditionally Soviet policy of only employing women with tight-fitting costumes as their chosen military liason to the Completely Untested Commander With No Experience Of The Week…
Back still hurts. Knees still hurt. Left elbow seems to be setting up to hurt on a regular basis, the bastard. If I’m snappish that’s possibly why. The backache is a sod because I don’t know what will set it off, and the elbow is making me really irritable because it’s never happened before, so I’m not used to it giving out knee-style pain, which is making it much harder to ignore the damn thing than it would be if it was just a knee, and only doing what I expect of it. /whinge
Upside: field trip to the archives today, I’m looking forward to that!
I think that’s everything, for now, though.
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14.11.08
Posted in Fun at 2:48 pm by Mister JTA
…to those who have leather jackets, shaved heads, and ‘L-O-V-E’ and ‘H-A-T-E’ tattooed over their knuckles:
Don’t wear chunky gold-coloured signet rings on your little finger.
A pair of fists that proclaim ‘LOVE’ and ‘HAT’ are never going to look cool.
Just a thought…
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12.11.08
Posted in Fun, Reflective, Tech, Work at 11:56 am by Mister JTA
Today’s blog post title comes from a nice little essay by Ferrett, whose LiveJournal I read.
Since it’s less than a fortnight since I was spectacularly failing at changing the washer in a tap (although, to be fair, a plumber had previously said the whole thing was seized; I was mainly there as a checking-he-isn’t-a-lying-git capacity), that one struck a chord.
I’m feeling fairly cheerful, at the moment. I expect it’ll wear off presently, when I finally come to my senses, but I’m doing OK. I was a bit worried when I went to bed yesterday, because I’d developed a splitting headache behind my eye, and I thought it could be caused by the mixing of wine and whisky last night, but I’m fine this morning, so I was probably just tired. Still am, actually.
(I think work ought to give me an incentive to get out of bed in the morning*; we only have a single storage heater, so getting out from under the covers means making my knees start to hurt unless I immediately get some trousers on, except that [because we only have one storage heater] any trousers I can find are also really cold, and turn out to speed the chill into my bones. Plus, y’know, it’s a bed. Nobody likes getting out of one of those, even to make their phone stop playing ‘They’re taking the hobbits to Isengard, when it’s nice and warm and cosy.’)
I have spent most of the last few days having meetings. The first one was with Hugh Preston, who is the Admissions Dude** out at what I think of as DILS, but which now seems to be simply DIS; the Department of Information Studies. It is looking increasingly like doing a Masters is a sensible thing to do; not only do I get the M out of it, but (because of the way the course is carefully set up) it’ll qualify me for membership of CILIP, too. Both of these things seem to have a fairly immediate impact on the kind of jobs one can get, so it’s looking like a good plan.
The second meeting I had was with Mike Smith, whom I may have mentioned before, way back when I was being a Student. Essentially, he is awesome (which I’ve thought for ages, but he gets bonus Awesome because it turns out he seems to really like me, as well, which is shiny) and will give me an academic reference, which I’d need to actually get onto the aforementioned course.
I’m still a little torn between doing the course Part Time and doing the course Full Time. The main difference is that if I do it Part Time it will take 2 - 5 years, and I have to be in a Relevant Job, but I can start this April and the University will pay my tuition for me while I’m working here (until the end of June), and after that I can run off to The South, or something. With the sole exception of that last point, all of those are both Pros and Cons pretty much equally.
If I do it Full Time it will take about 12 months, I don’t need to worry about finding a Relevant Job or else in the meantime, and I have to stay in Aber for at least 9 months (although once I’m down to the actual Writing A Diss stage, I can go and do so from ‘pretty much anywhere.’ These are all relatively positive, and the only major problem is that I will magically Not Have Anything Paid For, although since the University would only be paying the first two or three months of my tuition if I went Part Time, that’s not so huge a thing as it might otherwise sound.
So… we’ll see.
And that’s all you people are getting from me, for now.
O, except I finished the Allied campaign on Red Alert 3, and I really need to write to EA at some point, to find out why they’d preffer me not to buy any of the games they’re releasing.
(Yeah, I know I keep banging on about this. It just bugs me that these people are sufficiently retarded to think that making a game with invasive anti-piracy measures which you don’t get on the inevitable pirate copies will encourage people to pay hard currency for the inferior copy-protected version, rather than pirate it for free. I just can’t help but feel that anyone incapable of spotting the FAIL inherent in that philosophy is probably someone who shouldn’t be allowed metal cutlery, never mind influence over the gaming industry…)
Anyway, I don’t mean to keep you from your surfing with an argument you all know and agree with; I just figured all of the EA executives might swing by on a Googlewhim***, realise they’re all cretins and commit seppuku in pennance…
Enjoy…
* Money doesn’t count. Or, at least, not this ammount of money.
** Actual title may vary.
*** You can use this word. I don’t mind.
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07.11.08
Posted in Fun, Reflective, Travel at 11:36 am by Mister JTA
Every day this past fortnight that I have woken up I have done so with my left knee killing me and my back playing hob so as not to feel left out. After a remarkably mild year for that kind of thing, I’m out of practice at the whole “constant background pain” thing, which is a right bugger.
I had toothache the other week, and that hurt like crazy, as well. (Although, to be fair, I find that re-assuring, since it means I now have a dentist such that I’ve not got toothache all the time and cease to notice it.)
Next month I have a dentist’s appointment, in (of course) Shrewsbury. Very kindly they’ve given me the time off work gratis (rather than my having to book it from annual leave). Only for this one occasion, of course, but all being well I won’t need another check for at least six months, so I hope I can dodge that bullet and hang onto my leave for when I need it.
Wedding venue scouting was good. It actually did me a Hell of a lot of good to sit and re-read all the brochures everyone sent me, just so I could remember how angry they made me. I mean, seriously, who in the name of God sends out brochures that say (when you boil off the insincere congratulations) “You will give us large sums of money in used Treasury notes, and in return you will get to do exactly as we tell you, eat what we tell you to, throw yourselves out building you’ve paid to use when we tell you to, and then you can give us more money.”
…I think what baffles me more than anything about that is that it must work, or it wouldn’t be profitable to keep doing it. I just find it annoying. One of the things I like about Prospective Venue A is that it gives a firm impression of being flexible. It gives a fairly strong impression of Turquoise as well, of course, but mainly it’s an impression of flexible. And I think the turquoise will be quieter with the shutters open and the lights on.
And, finally: if you’ve not seen it already, zoom your browser* now to this beauty of a story over at El Reg, which has got me literally laughing ’till my eyes watered, and everyone looked at me funny.
*’chug’ in IE
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02.10.08
Posted in Fun, Memes, Reflective at 1:57 pm by Mister JTA
Haircut:
Well, first up I’ve just had a haircut. Was surprisingly quick, and fairly painless. I don’t get on with haircuts, as a rule. Unless I know the barber I never have anything to say, and I just sit there gawping at my own reflection and wondering if I’m moving my head too much.
The barber in Hadley was a decent guy, once I got to know him, and Gino in Newport is the only chap I’ve met who knows what I mean when I say “Er, well, a general trim, I guess. Sort of a short-back-and-sides, but short on top as well, and I don’t want a fringe*”.
Also, of course, the hanging about while the queue depletes before your very eyes can be pretty lame, especially if you’ve not got a book. This haircut only took twenty minutes, though, thus getting me to the “really uncomfy feeling of hairs stuck down the back of my collar” even faster than I expected. Whee.
My face has mysteriously become oval**, and my eyes seem to have got bigger. Like I say, I don’t get hair.
On the plus side, I shouldn’t need it cutting again before the Spring, which means it should be able to grow to a nice warmish sort of length before the frosts come, thus providing me with further insulation. Win.
Supreme Court meme:
Sarah Palin has famously (in America, that is, over here we didn’t notice; I got this from zoethe) been asked to list some Supreme Court rulings, and came up with a grand total of One (Roe V. Wade, natch) before descending into silence. This pleases me, because that means I know more about American law than a prospective Vice President of the United States of America***. I can name two Supreme Court rulings, only one of which is Roe V. Wade.
Anyway, there’s now a meme. It goes like this:
Post info about ONE Supreme Court decision, modern or historical to your blog. Any decision, as long as it’s not Roe v. Wade.
…then there’s some stuff about spreading the fun, but you all know I’m just showing off my dubiously-aquired knowledge.
Anyway, I pick the Only Other Supreme Court Ruling I’ve ever heard of (not bad going, really; I didn’t even hear about the Supreme Court until I was 19 or so).
I pick Hustler Magazine, Inc. V. Falwell.
Background to the ruling is as follows:
- Jerry Falwell is one of those famous TV Fundies.
- Campari is an alcoholic beverage, which in the 1980s ran an ad campaign where famous people “talked about their first time” (drinking Campari. See what they did there?)
- Hustler Magazine is a porno mag, the kind men read “strictly for the photos of the naked women.”
…y’can all see where this is going already, right?
Back in the early 1980s Hustler printed a mock Campari Ad wherein Falwell “talked about his first time.” The clever twist was that it was his first time having sex. With his mother, while they were both drunk on Campari. In an outhouse.****
Falwell wasn’t too pleased about this, and sued for libel, and hurt feelings, and what have you. Very long story short: it went to the Supreme Court in 1988. The Supreme Court had a think and then, by 8 votes to 0, came up with the following ruling:
The creators of parodies of public figures are protected against civil liability by the First Amendment, unless the parody includes false statements of fact made in knowing or reckless disregard of the truth.
Since the Ad in Hustler was listed in that edition’s contents as “Fiction; Ad and Personality Parody,” and since the fake Campari ad said it was a parody, and they didn’t actually think Falwell lost it to his mother whilst drunk on Campari [I'm paraphrasing], the ad wasn’t made in knowing or reckless disregard of the truth, but more in a spirit of fun.
Basically, “It’s OK to say such things about famous people, just as long as you don’t try and pass them off as being actually true.”
Given that Sarah Palin is a prospective Vice President of the United States of America, I’m growing really fond of that ruling… I mean, dinosaurs. Ffs.
Well lunch is nearly over, and I’ve got hairs all down the back of my neck. Guess I’ll leave the post about the N95, and the Answers to the bits of the meme nobody got yet for another time, huh?
Enjoy…
Footnotes:
*I’ve never worked out what a fringe is for. It spends three months growing into my eyes, gets chopped off, and then starts all over again. Why?
** Still, pudgy, but oval. Less moon-like, anyway, which is a start.
***For a given, and mainly wrong, value of “know,” anyway.
**** I honestly don’t know which bit of that paragraph I find more disturbing.
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12.09.08
Posted in Fun, Reflective, Travel, Work at 10:34 am by Mister JTA
Well it’s been a busy couple of weeks. (I offer this mainly as a reason for why I’ve not managed to update anything, rather than as a warning that a massive post is on its way; you’re safe to continue reading!)
I’ve contrived to buy a car, and to drive it through some truly appalling weather, which was interesting, especially the bit in the middle of Stafford where I had a choice of drowning the exhaust or aquaplaning, whilst driving through a good foot and a half of water.
Still, the machine is still running, which is good. The sunroof has developed a leak, which is less good, although I can see how huddling in the carpark of Morrisons, Stone, with the rain so loud on the roof you can’t hear yourself speak might be a factor in that.
It feels very odd to get into the car and just go somewhere. Admittedly, so far I’ve only gone out to Morrisons, but even that felt peculiar, what with there only being me in the car.
On the plus side, there only being me in the car helps, because I’m still getting the hang of the difference in ‘feel between this new one and Mike’s, uhm. Corsa?
Anyway, I’m being incredibly boring, so I’ll shut up about that.
The reason I was out in the dreadful storm was because I went up and dug Annie out of Cheadle (which appeared to have some sort of a bookshop), and we (viz, Annie + my mother and sister) went to Gladstone. Any AGS people have a recollection of visiting it? I’m sure I went once before, back in the mists of time.
It was really fun. There were tasty savoury oatcakes (as opposed to the breakfast-with-syrup variety I’m used to in South Shropshire), and a light up model, and some toilets. And a gorgeous Sunburst-style deco washbasin. With the same taps as we have at home. And a set of bath taps, the same as we have at home. And a recipie for pobs [hard to find a good link for that].
This happens every time we go to a museum. Just once it would be nice to walk round all the exhibits without having to think “That’s not an antique, that’s our cake tin / jam pan / thing in the back shed. That’s what it does, is it?” But, then, I’d probably miss it, if it didn’t happen.
I made a pot. (Kinda. The Woman Who Pottered did quite a lot the work, with helpful explanations of why I had to do something different, to make sure I didn’t foul it up utterly.) I am quite pleased with it. They can’t afford to run the kilns, even with their pile of Free Coal which is sitting in the courtyard getting damp, but I have got hold of a really nice guy who works in the Arts Centre, and was completely unfazed by my phoning him up to ask if I can borrow his oven. He reckons I should go back after term starts, and put a glaze on it. Annie seems to think it will not explode in the kiln, so I shall try and take it up to the man on Monday, and I shall have a nice pot. Hooray!
Then, at some point many years from now, it will get dropped, or toppled or otherwise accidentally broke, and I can feel miserable about losing it. Sigh.*
Survived, as I said, the storm. Came back to Aber, by dint of giving Dan a lift, and seem to have had a very long week, mainly comprised of resolving to go to bed Early, and then doing nothing of the sort. Badminton was fun, however, and Statto and I got some topical news satire done, which is good.
I know there’s a whole other pile of things which have been going on, but I’m not sure I can remember what else I intended to blog about. I am not now going to York, so I am spared a completely stupidly long journey, and can do a mere stupidly long journey, instead.
EQ is now on a new server, but this should work anyway.
That seems like a broadly opportune point to hit the “publish”-y button. Although I notice, in saying that, that I have stopped using phrases like “marginally sensible” in favour of “broadly.” I am not sure if that is an improvement.
I am hungry. Poxy Llanbadarn and it’s poxy total lack of shops. I shall sulk at it.
* I include this observation because I think it provides a valuable insight into my psychological makeup, and the nature of the bulk of my fretting about everything. (Yes, I do normally trim these things out.)
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22.08.08
Posted in Fun at 2:00 pm by Mister JTA
Quick post before I get back to whatever desk I work at on Friday afternoons!
I read a lot of webcomics, partly because it helps me to work out what day of the week it is while I drink my morning coffee (For example; if it’s a day without a new Candi, but with a new menage a 3, and not a new Darths & Droids, then it’s Saturday, and I can go back to bedn without bothering to finish filling myself with caffeine).
But this is the first time I’ve discovered a webcomic told through the medium of a Round Robin game.
Lots of different artists each get one panel to advance the story, and that panel can contain as many frames as they can fit in that one panel. The effect (so far as I’ve managed to read it!) is fabulously anarchic, and very funny. Or, at least, it’s got me sniggering over the keyboard, which is typically a good sign, even if it is confusing everyone else in the room.
O - and did I mention that it’s a round-robin style comic where the only fixed element of the plot is that there’s been a murder? Win!
It appears to live over at http://whokilledroundrobin.blogspot.com, and you can read full pages as they happen from this link here.
Unless, y’know, you were all going to spend your Friday afternoon being super productive, or something…
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16.08.08
Posted in Fun, General, Work at 2:24 pm by Mister JTA
…and other good ways for an optician to describe the glasses you’re wearing.
Buzzed over to D&A this morning (I say “buzzed;” I was there until the bank shut, which is going to slow everything down a bit). It seems there’s been some very minor shift in my left eye, but the difference is “less than half a lens” so it’s not actually worth changing my prescription. Win.
On the other hand, since they had a sale on, I’ve got some new glasses, because the frames on my normal ones are now three years old and getting a bit fatigued-looking. That and it’ll give me two pairs of glasses that have the anti-glare protection, which I anticipate being useful in the event that I get any insurance, ever. Which, to be fair, I will, it’ll just cost me lots.
It’s not the “costing lots” that I object to, per se, it’s more that the reason it costs lots is because they think I’ll use the car to get drunk and try and impress girls by doing dangerous things. I find that insulting; it’s like they think I’ve got to be 23 without realising that there are better ways to waste petrol than trying to make women fancy me. Pouring it down the drain, for instance, or into the water supply. Bah. I shall cough up nonetheless, and then fling the damn machine off the road when I fail, yet again, to tell my left from my right, I expect.
Anyway, I’m getting new glasses. More encouragingly, the optician woman seemed to think I was likely to stay on more or less the same prescription I have now for the forseeable future, which is a big step up from the last time I went and had lights shone at me.
I’m still finding work fun, and I’m still finding work tiring; come Thursday mornings I’m really having to struggle to get out of bed which, when I’ve got a reason to get up and start doing things, is unusual for me. I think, however, that I’ll get back into the swing of things relatively well; I’m still getting more sleep than I was when I was commuting from Wallingford, so I think it’s just a matter of adjusting to having a routine that revolves around more than “when the CoD4 servers are least busy.”
In other news, I was listening to, er, something, on the Radio yesterday, and caught a fabulous quote, viz:
“The Potteries, in the North of the West Midlands, are an unlikely setting for a revolution…”
Yes, that’s right, there’s never been a Revolution in the Midlands. All those integrated kilns and transport networks are just an example of a cottage industry that was allowed to get out of hand.
Well, it made me laugh. But then I had to slog though an entire Geography project on How The Industrial Revolution Changed The Area*. It seemed to involve a retail-cum-business park, but I could be remembering a different trip.
Ah well. On with the Weekend Tasks of Everything I Didn’t Do This Week…
*I didn’t actually do the project, I think I just handed in a few scrappy sheets of A4. But I was meant to do it, which is good enough for me.
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07.08.08
Posted in Fun, Tech at 1:58 pm by Mister JTA
For those of you who don’t pick up my semi-comedic status updates on Facebook (and I can think of potentially four of you, and that’s it), I’ve been taking a look at the new version, which they’ve done up nice, and tried to hide all the useless applications away, and things.
By and large I’m really quite fond of this New Facecoke, it really does seem to be neater and cleaner, and if it’s taken away all my beloved Applications That Tell You What I Want You To Think My Personality Is, it’s also shifted all those bloody Zombies off people’s pages (Is there ever a time when a Zombie-related thing is an application you encourage to go near a computer? I can’t think of any).
It has, however, a downside. And that downside seems to be that it was Designed After The Millenium.
At some point in the very late 90s, and unbeknownst to be, who was using Win 3.1 on a Pentium (before they started numbering the sods) right up until January 2002, there was some Council Of Evil that decreed that, henceforth, any new, mainstream, computer software had to come with ugly rounded corners. I’m running Win XP back home, and, thank God, it has a “Windows Classic” setting, which is precisely the first thing I turn on whenever I re-install Windows (as opposed to an Internet Connection, which is precisely the last thing I turn on whenever I re-install Windows).
The UWA AU terminal I’m using at the moment is running Vista, and it’s bubbly as Sin. Blecccch.
What is *with* this, people?
I do not believe that anyone who knew me could honestly accuse me of “not liking curves.” On the contrary, I am a huge fan of curves. Many of my most attractive friends have curves. Indeed, if you asked me to list several things that I find attractive in women, “curves” would be right in at number four-ish, after “being a nice person,” “big eyes,” and “not objecting to overweight librarians with beards.”
But whilst I am an only occasionally slavering fan of curves in their proper place, I do not carry this fandom to excess. Cars, if they do not overdo it, can look very well with curves, and so can smaller things like rubber balls, and larger things like the Cotswolds, and I have no objection to their remaining just as shapely as they are.
Where I get fed up with curves is when they feature in place of sharp angular corners in operating systems or application windows. I do not see the need to take a perfectly good, sharp, crisp line, and spoil it by filing off the edges.
I can accept that we don’t all want the glory days of DOS back (and, actually, since I’ve only just discovered Tab-complete, I was probably never a very efficient DOS user, since I’d type things like “Copy a:\work\eng\chau1.rtf c:\jta\work\eng\xwrk\chau1.rtf” out in longhand every time, which, in retrospect, may not have been the fastest way to do it, and which is certainly slower than “click, Ctrl+c, alt+tab, Ctrl+v”. But do we really have to have curves?
Has there been some study done that “found 63% of people found curvy edges instead of corners made them less afraid of computers,” or something? Or are you developers just doing this to annoy everyone? I’m curious as to where and why this came to be inflicted on us all. (Well, me, specifically, but everyone else seems to have it, too.)
Bloody Wordpress is doing it, an’ all!
*Cite me! I was the only quote JTA could think of that involved corners, and I feel lonely and innapropriate!
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31.07.08
Posted in Fun, Work at 11:55 pm by Mister JTA
But it’s OK, because I’m going to be paid to do so (eventually; in the meantime I’m living on rice* so I can keep feeding the electricity meter).
Yes, tomorrow I return to the exalted ranks of the employed taxpayers (as opposed to the unemployed taxpayer, which is what I’ve been since October. It’s been a while.)
I’m not looking forward to continually walking up the Hill, mind; I reckon that’ll either be uncomfortably hot or wet and miserable, depending which season we’re in, and I’m not too great at moderating my speed; I tend to hack up the thing at pretty much ‘As fast as I can go,’ which means my calves start acheing like mad by Bronglais, but never mind.
I’m guessing I’ll get me a UWA email address again, which will be nice (although technically, I guess it will be my first ever UA email address, but that just sounds odd to me. I really ought to go to bed about now, and, indeed I’m just starting to feel tired (because I was up until 03:00 while a download finished this morning, so I’ve had something of a long day.)
I was going to get an early night, and be in bed by 22-00 this evening; that doesn’t seem to have worked out properly, I think because I’m just not used to that anymore. On the plus side, my sleeping patterns tend to iron out fairly neatly once I’ve got an actual routine to work with (the lack of a proper solid routine really got me down in the first few months after I left the Bod.) so I’m sure it’ll all be good.
Meanwhile, I think I’m just rambling, so I direct you to look at my shiny little favicon (LiveJournal users click here) which ought to be displaying in the title bar (if it isn’t, please do comment to that effect, and I shall swear at it). I downloaded it all by myself from those amazing people over at KTAB.co.uk, y’know, the ones that make the amazingly funny semi-regular news satire and parody site, although since Statto is in Japan just at the minute, we’re not writing anything until he brings me back some Ghibli DVDs :-)
Anyway, I’m going to post this, finish up going “Ohhh!” [emph. on the h's] to Nathan Fillion’s awesome entrance as Captain Hammer in Dr. Horrible, and shove off to bed.
Have fun!
*Not just rice, obviously, because then I’d die. The reason I’m living mainly on rice is because it’s cheap, so I can still buy meat, and thus get some actual Newtrition(TM) into my diet.
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29.07.08
Posted in Fun, Work at 2:31 pm by Mister JTA
Fabulous!
Well, I mean I know that the week before last was teh awesomeness anyway, but guys. Man, I love selling things. Rock!
I have just recieved my cheque from the fab guys over at Campus Clothing, who, you’ll recall from my endless banging on about it, were paying me money to sell toptastic Graduation memorabilia to anyone and everyone who came past the stall.
I was getting paid, as I’ve said, a really decent rate of £55/day, which was nice, although, as I mentioned in this huge post it was pretty exhausting stuff, since I was up at the Arts Centre by 07-50 and not heading back down the Hill until somewhere between 18-30 and 19-00.
Still, it wasn’t a bad way to make just shy of three week’s rent, plus bonuses for having fun selling people things.
Anyway, I cavort merrily into Tangentia. My apologies.
I have just recieved my cheque. With the cheque is a letter, which runs after this fashion:
“John,
Cheque enclosed - thanks for all your help & we have paid you £67.00, not £55.00 day rate, to compensate for long days. Regards,
[name]
P.S. Bonus payments yet to be calculated.”
I’m up the better part of a further fifty quid. I am walking on air people; I can not only pay the rent, I can actually afford food, too! I love those guys.
My apologies to Charlie in the office downstairs for playing loud and celebratory Rammstein with a subwoofer right about his head. I am cheerful.
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26.12.07
Posted in Fun at 3:04 pm by Mister JTA
Well, Christmas is going well so far. I like Aber.
I’d just like to get onto Abnib the link to the latest-looking Flash thingy from JibJab (They did, if you recall, the ‘This Land‘ animation about the last US presidential elections).
Anyhoo, this one is based on Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire,’ & is fairly good. Slightly more America-centric than the original, to be fair, so there were a few things I didn’t get at all, but hey, ’s fairly amusing.
O, and, being American, it misses the “and” from the phrase “two thousand and seven” (2007), which is a bit weird, but it’d spoil the rhythm to say it ‘properly’ anyway.
Here it is, anyway.
Merry Christmastide!
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29.10.07
Posted in Fun, Reflective at 2:12 am by Mister JTA
Edited Sunday August 23rd 2009: Please see Comment 4 for clarification on inquest findings & accidental death. (I can’t readily adjust the post this far on, but please be aware of Comment 4, from Charlie Stroud, before reading the post, & bear in mind my memory has played me false. Thanks.)
I woke up this morning.
I appreciate that’s not really the sort of incisive opening line that normally draws you in*, but I start with it regardless because I think, all things considered, it’s something of an achievement in itself, since, in spite of everything, up to & including me, I’m still here, ten years further down the line.
(and, yes, slightly coming to bits. Never used to be this weak, dunno what’s going on with that.)
But, hey, I’m still here.
Naomi, a Quaker from Telford Meeting once changed her surname to Stillhere as an affirmation; “I am still here, in spite of everything the world throws at me.” I quote that as it appeared on the order of service from her funeral; in the latter week of May 2000 she was finally overwhelmed and threw herself from a bridge in London.
I wished at the time that had the guts to do the same. As it was, however, I repeatedly chickened out of anything of the sort, and thus, by and by, I came to waking up this morning, which I do think is something of an acheivement since, if I’d had just a wee bit more backbone, I’d never have come close.
Congratulations, past JTA; you are indeed a useless gutless spinless shit, and I owe you one for it. I know it isn’t much help but cheers! nevertheless, and remember that if you’re stubborn enough life seems to get bored of shoveling shit in your face.
Time I got to bed; I’ve got a whole another lot of waking up to do tomorrow. G’night.
* The best opening line I ever read ran ‘If you were a pigeon, you could fuck forty times a day.’ I can’t for the life of me remember the rest of the book, but it started fantastically.
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24.07.07
Posted in Fun at 12:17 pm by Mister JTA
Well as you’ve no doubt noticed, it’s been just a bit wet lately.
And I wondered if I’m the only person to have seen the link between that and the rather amusing Simpsons movie advert from last week?
Note the humourless pagan lady in the sixth and seventh paragraphs:
“We were hoping for some dry weather but I think I have changed my mind. “We’ll be doing some rain magic to bring the rain and wash it away.”
…
Worked, then…
So who wants to grab the faggots, matches and kindling and round up some Pagans and wander back up Broad Street? (We don’t actually have to set light to ‘em, but we could see if they could do some sort of “We admit we’re silly cretins” dance, which would, at least, cheer people up.
*Usual vague offer of pint for citing source applies.
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21.05.07
Posted in Fun at 1:41 pm by Mister JTA
Seriously, shove off out of it, you swines.
No, I’m not talking about Israel having another pop at the Lebanese. I’m not even supporting the dismissal of the Long Parliament - I’m sat here twiddling my thumbs and waiting for the Act of Union to be over and done with, so we can have an English parliament without a bunch of Scottish MPs cluttering it up and making a bloody nuisance of themselves.
It would appear that the bulk of Scotland is in favour of going off and being “Scotland” again, and I think Wales would rather like to do the same, given an Assembly with slightly more teeth and some members who might be capable of actually forming a coalition, rather than just talking about it (Although I think if they go, they’d better go good and hard, because it’ll be a logistical nightmare to just give them the old Principality back and try to re-militarise Ludlow - can you imagine trying to corner a tank at the traffic lights above the Feathers?)
I personally would like to see the whole thing come to bits because I’m not a fan of, eg, Top-up fees, the legislation for which only came through because the Scottish MPs - who knew damn well it wouldn’t affect them - voted in favour of it. If they’d not been there then the whole thing would’ve got defeated by the English MPs - who it would affect - and who knew damn well it was a daft idea. I’d like a break-up that left a Welsh and Scottish representation in Westiminster on a purely national level (which is to say something that leads to Trevor McDonald saying “Mr. Ben Jones, MP for Wales today joined forces with his Scottish counterpart Mr. Jock McTavish to protest against the under-representation of their two vast constituencies in British politics.”) I think that would balance things out a bit. And England can put an representative for England into the Scottish Parliament and another into the Welsh Assembly.
After all, in the whole run-up to the local elections we’re told that there’s going to be huge moves for devolution, and now it seems to have gone a bit quiet. I’m probably missing something, but I can’t find much in the news to say, eg, “Her Majesty has today called for the re-appointment of the Prince Bishops to the seats of Durham and Chester in what has been seen as the first move towards defending England from the secessionist Celtic republics of Scotland and Wales…”
Which is a shame. Because, apart from anything else, (including the fact that nobody much wants to be in the Union anymore) I don’t think it would do much harm. I can’t imagine we’re going to revert to border raids if we say “actually the UK was a nice idea at one point, but it’s now looking a bit feeble, let’s put an end to it,” and I’m fairly sick of living in the only bit of the Union that’s left without representation at what we might call the National level. Sure, I can vote for a MP who can go off and be with lots of other MPs, but where’s my AM, hmm?
And, quite apart from anything else, ‘God Save the Queen,’ as the national anthem of the UK is frankly pants when you compare it to ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ (or, even, to be fair, ‘I vow to thee, my country’).
I’m assuming, mind you, that a break-up would be nice and amicable, and without closed borders and checkpoints and things. I’m imagining, here, more of a “separate beds” thing than an “acrimonious divorce with obscenities scratched into the bonnets of the ex’s car at midnight,” but I’m fairly confident we can manage that. I admit Wales might be a bit shakey (If we see Scotland as the wife in the break-up I’m fairly sure Wales is the child that always suffers, if only because after 700-odd years it’d be a damn big shock to suddenly get put outside with a suitcase full of toys and told to get on with it) but I reckon it’s worth a go. Anyone who really hates the idea can move to one of the other places and we can see if we can all still be friends. It’s got to be worth a go.
It’s just a thought, but I’m all for it. I’m not, really, in favour of the Regicide, but I will grant that he was good at stirring up trouble. (So, of course, was Leo Amery, so I can probably claim to be quoting him). Speaking as a pro-devolutionist, therefore, and working on the assumption that we can still meet up for coffee and things without sniping about who used to steal all the metaphorical duvet each time we bump into one another at a party, let’s have some of that dissolving, shall we?
You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing lately…. Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God,—go!
Well, that’s enough making a nuisance of myself; I should go do an afternoon’s work…
*Or “Don’t stuff your head up with things you don’t understand“
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08.05.07
Posted in Fun, Reflective, Travel at 2:47 pm by Mister JTA
The Avon Ring Narroboat Holiday Page:
The full write-up of the holiday now exits. It’s huge. At 18, 695 words, it is, I think, the longest thing I’ve ever written, and it’s probably taken me close on 24 hours of actual writing time. I blame this entirely on my starting to write it and then thinking “Heh, I wonder if I can try and do a Jerome K. Jerome style of writing?” That, and my thinking “I really want to try to get down everything that happened so I don’t forget it.”
You don’t have to read it all, I realise that’s pretty damn vast. But it’s there if you want it; go click the link.
Have fun!
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20.02.07
Posted in Fun at 2:19 pm by Mister JTA
I had the weirdest experience, this morning. At 06:00 I laughed myself awake. I’ve never done that before. It was… odd.
See, what happened was, I was having this dream, which featured a land-rover and some really muddy hills, and me, Norman, Nick Frost and a third guy whose fact I don’t even slightly remember, were slogging over them.
At which point, the whole scene faded to the dining room at Manse Road, where I lived until about 2001, with the old leather sofa that used to be in there, and the little brown sofa from Hafan and the little table we got and then gave to Dan and Claire.
And on the table were shots, I think of Vodka, or something equally foul, and… Nick Frost was knocking back these shots and trying to sing the song that Lister, Petersen, Selby & Chen sing in a Red Dwarf flashback scene in something like series one (”I’ve been to Titan / I’ve been to Polanski / I can name ninety men / Who’ve slept with Kochanski”) …except he was really drunk, and kept getting it wrong, and had to keep drinking shots as forfeits, and then he’d get it wrong again…
At this point, in my dream, I was in a laugh-out-loud giggle loop, and I kept thinking “I need to stop laughing, or I’ll wake up!” After what seemed to be half an hour of this, I did wake up, sniggering madly away with, as Jeff says, my shoulders going like I’m drilling the road…
…except, it turned out, I wasn’t actually laughing. I know this, because I was finding this dream so funny, and shaking with laughter so much, that Ruth woke up, under the impression I’d finally cracked and was sobbing hysterically and trying to keep quiet about it so I didn’t wake her. Presently, therefore, she asked me what was wrong, and I said something like “It’s… so… funnnnny!!” and then I thought “Er, no it isn’t. Why in the name of God am I giggling so much?!”
I still can’t work out what was funny about it now. Or why Norman was there, or anything else about it.
But laughing yourself awake at 6am is kinda new to me, so I thought I’d foist the concept on the Internet and save myself the trouble of thinking about it anymore. Anyone who’s had that happen to them, mind, is more’n welcome to tell me about it…
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25.01.07
Posted in Fun at 3:02 pm by Mister JTA
I’ve just got called down to the front desk to collect some flowers that had randomly turned up there. Cue some very puzzled porters. And an even more puzzled JTA, actually.
[If you're no' a fan o' sappy weediness, ye shud look awa' noo...]*
Just for the record, Ruth is far too good for me, and I don’t deserve her at all, and I love her enormously, and she has a wonderful talent for making life seem better, even when everything is tiring and stressful and bleak. So a huge thank-you, and I love you to her, and hooray, because you are so very wonderful and kind! And also I appear to be full of cheer and smiles. Hooray!
[Yez can all carry on wi' yer readin' from heer. It's safe noo]
*I’ve been typing in vaguely Scots since December. I’ve no idea why.
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02.01.07
Posted in Fun, Reflective at 12:22 am by Mister JTA
…2006 ended interestingly, as well. Got a lift North to Maulds Meaburn, yonder Cumbrian village what Dan mentions, and where, at weekends, Ruth’s father hangs out, away from nuisances like telephones bearing people who want to speak to him.
We arrived - Ruth’s mother (the Rev.), her brother Robin and I - in horrible weather, and bang between the starter and the main course of a dinner Tom & Judith were giving for a couple of friends they had staying for New Year. The timing, all things considered, could have been better, but, dutifully sticking to the Plan (I like sticking to a plan, it means the only trouble you really face is bringing the Plan about and hoping it all goes like you thought it would) I carted Tom away from the table and into the living room, where, full of nerves, I asked him if he’d give me permission to marry Ruth.
…This would appear to be a good point to insert a clarifying parentheses…
(Firstly, I was asking, rather than making a bald matter-of-fact announcement, because we were rather keen that he understood we weren’t - and, indeed, still aren’t - planning on doing anything just yet; we’re waiting until 2010, so we can save up some cash, Ruth can finish her degree, we can say we’re at least a reasonably respectable age [mid twenties], and we can have a nice round number from which to remember anniversaries. By asking a question, rather than making a statement, I was not only inviting further questions [because I didn't force a simple 'O, right, that's a surprise' issue] and I was, in theory, signaling that we’d rather like him to be OK with it, without giving away too much of the fact we’ve rather been waiting for a chance to do the Ask Tom bit and this was the first chance we’d got…)
In accordance with the plan, he didn’t raise objections once he’d been re-assured on points such as “No, I don’t mean this Summer, I mean at some sensible time” and “Aye, we’ve thought about it and it’s something we’d both like to do,” and “No, we’re not planning on including unhelpful members of the clergy or mendacious white dresses,” and thus we reach a stage at which the whole thing gets rather more public, since we’re not concerned about breaking it gently-ish to sundry family members.
So, aye. That made for a good end to 2006, that did. And, indeed, a good start to 2007, and, when Waitrose opens tomorrow, a good excuse to nab a bottle of their 1999 Moet, the only drink that’s ever given me a hangover, but which is fantastically nice.
In anticipation of some potentially asked questions:
- We’re no doing a “traditional” church wedding because they’re a bit, uh, naff, especially since Ruth only really likes Churches for their musical potential, and I remain deeply mistrustful of the vast capacity for abuse the system of organised religion seems to build into itself in the same way the human body contrives toenails. We’re rather more likely to be doing a Quaker wedding instead, but that’s still some stages of planning away, since I’ll need to speak to my Meeting first, and tell ‘em.
- Yes, probably is a bit of a shock. And, quite possibly, to one or two of you more than others. Still, we like it, and are really very happy with the way it’s all panning out, so we anticipate reactions of “I’m not that bothered, please don’t keep telling me about it, shut up” and “Hey, that’s cool, I hope it all goes well and you’re happy.” You’re welcome to have variations on them, and, of course, completely different reactions, but, by and large, we’d preffer the latter…
- We are indeed a wee bit young. But since we’ll be not nearly so young in three and some months year’s time, that’s probably no huge problem. And we have gone through considerable periods of mass stress and penury, some fairly crap times, and some wrist-slashingly abysmal times, so I don’t reckon you could say we’re too young to understand how tough the world can be, or that we’ll go to bits in the event of our first “real” problem, because you’d not get past the first comma before I shoved your fists up yer bum. [I still get tetchy when people say I dunno what shit life can be...]
- I know, I know, I know… telling people via the Internet: lazy, cheezy, and just a wee bit insulting. But the alternative would be ringing you all up, in which case I’d miss someone, and really upset them, or sending out a load of e-mails, which would either be personal, but two lines long, or an impersonal and even more insulting “hello people, here is news, bye”… Sometimes mass communication is kinda handy…
- And, finally, aye, we’ve done the ring bit. Note “we’ve,” - technically, I think, Ruth’s the only person entitled to one, but that smacks to me of a pre-feminist “women are chattels and should be marked as belonging to people” plot to deprive me of the excuse to buy a nice bit of jewelery, so bugger that for a lark, I’m having one as well. And it’s very nice. Kudos to David Lloyd, who are an excellent family chain of jewelers in good old Shropshire, [Newport, Wellington, Ludlow, probably Shrewsbury and some other places] and who’ve done us good on what’s now three occasions, and four bits of sundry gold and silverware. Though, to be fair, House of Williams actually made the things, David Lloyd just ordered ‘em and handed them over, with excellent timing, the morning after I returned to Newport.
So there’s a bit of news for you. I’m hoping that I’ve successfully conveyed what’s been going on with a reasonable explanation and sufficient notes to explain that we’re all hugely cheerful about it at this end (and Tom didn’t vanish and return with an axe, or anything), but I imagine Ruth will contrive a post herself, so you can grab a bit of the other side of the story.
And, aye,
Happy New Year
2007!
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18.10.06
Posted in Fun, Work at 5:51 pm by Mister JTA
…Realises hasn’t much to Say!
Life here carries on as hectic as ever, I’m afraid. Well, not at the moment; I’m on Evening Duty in a Reading Room, which is quite fun, and rather Big School Library-ish, when there aren’t people wanting to come over and get their grubby fingers onto books they’ve pulled up from the Stack.
Fantastic weekend, for which belated cheers go out to Alec & Suz and Matt-in-the-Hatt and Sian - all enormously last minute and surprising, but I managed to catch some sleep up on the Sunday, so I’m glad I contrived to lever myself out of bed!
I’m still getting my head round the way this place works, but I think I’ve mostly got it sorted out, now; or, at least, I’m probably in a position to be able to work out a vague map, or something, which, as we all know, is Rule One (#5) of Exploration (Rule One #’s 1-4 covering things like ‘have someone who can detect traps,’ ‘if you’re stuck go back and look for hidden buttons,’ and ‘don’t step on the pressure plate without looking about a bit first’ [now I wanna play Eye of the Beholder again... Never did manage to get onto level 6, actually, had to keep bypassing it...])
A little alarmed at the fact I don’t seem to be getting very good at the commuting, yet, and I’m still knackered almost all the time. That’s a bit annoying.
More annoying is the way winter seems to be coming on, brining with it the usual aches and pains and trouble with my knees. As soon as I’ve got a minute I’m going to have to go and register with a doctor and demand they do something better than saying “have these Ibruprofen tablets” by way of fixing the problem - we’re talking little pink pills worth 400 Mgs a go, and I’m up to the point where if I only take one, it does pretty much nothing. If they were giving me morphine, I’d've been put into rehab by now…
Still, beyond that, all’s pretty much well, and I’ve not been completely swamped by anything yet. Give it time and I expect I will, but I’ll worry about that when it happens.
Have confirmed my time off for the Real Ale Ramble, at least (Thursday-Wednesday, to give time to get up to Aber beforehand, and to collapse in a heap afterwards), so that’s all fantastic, and means we can start things like “Booking the train tickets in advance,” in a bid to save a wee bit of cash, which is good, especially since I’m going to be getting a new monitor, presently (read: when I get paid), in order to use the computer which we’re planning to manhandle down here in the near future.
And that’s more-or-less that, I reckon. Another update in another week, like as not.
Have fun!
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08.09.06
Posted in Fun at 10:44 am by Mister JTA
Well, sort of. See, Home on The Strange isn’t actually a year old, so it’s not it’s birthday. It’s more one of those ‘fake’ anniversaries bestowed upon small babies and new relationships; worse even than “six months old,” is today’s HoTS celebration; it’s, er, 100 episodes old.
Still, everyone has to start somewhere; even Dudley’s Dungeon had to start somewhere, and if ever a webcomic was running along on minimal material, you’d think that’d be it. [Assuming you don't count 'LOL TEH NEWT!!' as material, anyway...]
So, yeah. I’m doing links to the funniest HoTS ever. For me that’s a bit hard, but I’m going to plump for The Slap Dance Is Always Better When The GM’s Crying and send you off there.
I’m also going to put in a link to the HoTS that isn’t the funniest - it’s not even that amusing, to be fair - but which doesn’t try to be funny, and doesn’t need to be funny; that’s this one, which is brilliant.
I’d do links to others, as well, but that would annoy you all, so I won’t.
Have fun!
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02.09.06
Posted in Fun at 12:17 pm by Mister JTA
Yesterday was, uh, really good.
OK, it started with the destruction of a 21-year record; I woke up with a hangover, which was a new and broadly foul experience - turns out I’m fine drinking borderline silly quantities of beer, wine, Black Mountain, Mead, Cider, etc…. Give me a quater of a bottle of 1999 Moet & Chandon, on the other hand, and I wake up with a headache. What a cruel world…
On the other hand, some tea and Anadin fixed me up after a couple of hours, and in the evening I headed over to Oxford to meet up with Ruth and see what could be done in terms of celebrating.
“What could be done” transpired to be LaserQuest (I blame this entirely on LaserQuest getting features in Sunday’s episode of How I Met Your Mother, causing Ruth to say “LaserQuest! That’s what we need to do!” and then spend the rest of the week finding somewhere.
But, yeah, it was good fun. Much better than the thoroughly naff place in Stafford (which, keeen to fit in with everthing else in Staffordshire, was a bit rubbish) - if you look at this map, and turn it upside down, (ie, rotate it 90 degrees twice, not just flip it) then that was the map…
…And, yeah. We had two, er, interesting games. As we queued up we espied a group of smallish children ahead of us, accompanied by a parentish dude. And boy did the little buggers whip us.
We didn’t, y’see, prepare for any species of tactics from the kids, merely anticipating them running about like scattered easy prey. Fat chance. Firstly, they’d been there before, and knew the course, which we didn’t. Secondly they worked as a group, giving each other cover all the time and yelling things like “Help me over here!” and “I’ve found one!” Clever little sods…
…Out of nine, Ruth came fifth, and I was seventh. That was fairly humiliating.
The second game, however, we did much better, since we knew what we were doing by then. We teamed up with the parental dude against the kiddies, (no strict teams, they were both FFA matches) and we knew both the way round and that the kids weren’t too bad. At one lovely point, Ruth & I were basically pinned down in the red base by about four of ‘em, and we held them off for a good few minutes, mincing them all the time - strangely they didn’t send someone round the side to knock us offline… not so clever with the tactics now, huh? …
…I almost wish we weren’t so proud of that…
…Also, by then, three other guys had turned up, and they just had no tactics whatsoever. So the second game we did really well and out of twelve, Ruth came third and I came second. And the kid calling himself “TTTUUPPPP” won both of the games, so that was really quite cool.
Then we all headed our seperate ways (with the parent-ish guy saying “See you next week,” which was cool) and Ruth & I went for tapas, which I’ve no had before, but which is amazingly nice, and we had a really friendly waiter dude, which was cool. So, aye, that was yesterday. All much rockingness.
And now it’s the weekend, hooray!
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