dont touch anything

August 25, 2005

something will break soon. please don’t fiddle. I’m sat in my office in the UK, hooked up to skype listening to the folks in california on the audio stream while they’re demoing stuff on local servers that I’m watching on a VNC session via my Firefox which is on the Sun network via VPN and I’m watching the VNC session on the video stream in a Real window on the desktop next to the actual VNC session while a webcam is transmitting a video stream of my typing this nonsense into the other desktop while I’m uploading to flickr and downloading the presentations from the collabspace and I’m backing up everything on the network hard drive while I’m batch filtering some lomo in photoshop.

I’ve not been to the bathroom for 6 hours in case one of those things stops working, so I’ll just have to hang on another couple of hours until Jonathan drops by and then I’ll probably try and say something english and witty, but skype will do the annoying thing it does and drop the call after I’ve been on mute for a while and then start talking, and the VNC session will die and the video stream will stutter to a dribble and the webcam will give me that error with some hex number that means I’ve probably done something like pull the wrong face and the encoder threw up and then I guess to cap it all, I’ll get a 1 second outage on the DSL which won’t effect anything except the VPN session which will die like a dog and refuse to start until I reboot the w2100z which means making that industrial hairdrier noise on startup which wakes the kids up and I’ll probably have photoshop hang on me just as I’m applying some filter or other to a lomo shot that happens to have a woman in I don’t know but my wife will walk in at that precise moment and I will be frantically trying to turn off the monitor which won’t be suspicious at all and my night will be over.

I’ll go in a minute. really…

not bowling but drowning

August 24, 2005

yes I’m still on. all those other AT&T bips are other people dropping off. they must have something else really important to do, like get coffee and stuff. as I work from home and I’m an 8 hour timezone shift from you, its 22:30 here, here I’m just popping out for a kebab and a pint of stella before I come back after the break for the development roadmap discussion, where I shall get lippy and interrupt from across the atlantic, slightly delayed by skype, so that I never quite get my point across, which I’ve forgotten now anyway.

I’ve set up my webcam so that you can see if I’m still awake at around 1:00 am when Anil is talking, so if you can see the top of my tired old bald head instead of my quizzical corporate face, then please shout through the polycom and spark me back to life. even better, call me on the other office phone, which should be right next to my head, and watch me go apoplectic and wake up the children in the next room with some insane outburst. my wife is in bed already, and so noone will be poking me with a stick for a while, so please remain vigilant. I’m sure something important will come up at 7 hours and 59 minutes into the conference, so I’d hate to miss it. even if it’s just the directions to the bowling I can’t go to. dammit, chilli sauce on my keyboard. I hate it when that happens.

pump it up

August 22, 2005

evangelization. monetization. head. wall. one inch short of a broken nose, I’m peering into staroffice 7 while catherine wheels blaze in the hayloft. that’s my spanner and this is a bag of nails. I’ve told you all this before but it was in a different template and the screenshots were from 2003 and so give me 2 weeks and a rusty pair of pliers and then all my friends will be gone but we’ll have a universal quote and online pricing for dual core opterons in Uzbekisthan. hey you, you at the back, that’s really hurting my chisel, please put the nailgun down and step away from the suite before somebody gets commited.

two thirty. is that the time? I’m off to the dentist. It’s free, so I have to go and get my false head examined, even though I can get it all paid privately to get the same thing done by beautiful people, but that’s not fair, is it? the kids will have to go down the mines, that’s all there is to it. and they can fix my pallister wall while they’re at it.

spontaneous contagiousnessness

August 16, 2005

excuse me. aaaaaaaaaaaah. that’s better.

I’ve spent 9 hours looking out of this window listening to collaborative nutmegs and ganttisms and I’ve become an uncontrollable twitching avatar of a onceperson. people pass about 20 feet from my upstairs window and they’re only on view for about 10 seconds (which is normally enough round here, I can tell you), but I’ve developed a curious bodily contagion that is a kind of overexaggerated group activity with me as the only knowing participant. 3 times in a row someone has strolled past barking into their clamshell and then taken a moment for a 5:30 yawn, at which point I’m uncontrollably flapping my head open in a contorted drawl, my eyes streaming with overegging and I’m collapsing on the beech veneer like I’ve not slept for a decade.

but that’s quite normal really. group yawns are pretty common. nothing to worry about. so why am I watching this group of UEA students stutter past in their half jeans and elvis shades, laughing like hyenas about someone they don’t like in waveney terrace, and suddenly breaking into an insane cackle during the conference call on platform globalization, much to everyone’s consternation? I don’t know. why am I flapping my arms about like a deranged water mill as an overgesticulating midlife crisis from the middle management at norwich union dribbles past, conversing unappropriately about Mike in accounts with his hands juggling an imaginary flock of seagulls in the phonebox of entrapment. search me. I just seem to be randomly picking up character traits from passing strangers as they flit across my periphery, like a bad tv interlude in my subconscious dribbling.

there’s another. she’s picking at creases in her skirt as she wafts through, and suddenly my office chair is decidedly uncomfortable. look at him, he’s poking a finger in his ear and scraping away the detrius of an unfulfilled working day. ditto. oh, there’s a dude swinging his limbs in time to the foo fighters on his iRiver. stop it, dammit. Im trying to type up a manifesto.

this day will end soon.

panel beating for beginners

August 11, 2005

so if its gonna be 800 quid to repaint the offside door and fit the wing mirror back into its rightful place then I’m not going to even think about what it’ll be after chav mcnasty from the west earlham posse and his 3-quarter length trouser friends have hoofed their reebok classics over the bonnet, roof and hatchback after they’ve been turfed out of weatherspoons at 1:30 in the morning. our neighbour’s brother’s dad’s mate’s cousin has done some work on her car but of course they’ll probably be back next week after a night out in KFC and they’ll sick on the sunroof or something. that’s why I’m going to beat out the panels myself. I’ll be taking a club hammer to the underside of the bodywork, with my head in the engine, battering out a pissup from last saturday while I curse yob culture and hit myself on the thumb, crushing my knuckles.

you can get stabbed 6 times on the top deck of the number 43 these days and nobody looks up from txting their girlfriend. I’m not starting a provincial vigilante group to roam the golden triangle with wet celery and brickbats, but if I had a big gun or something, I’d probably hang out the upstairs window for a couple of nights, just in case I got line of sight. I’ve been playing a computer game where I shoot people like that so I’ll probably complete the loop of virtual and actual bodily harm and provide a test case for the daily mail and get imprisoned for like, forever, just to deter other people like me who got pushed over the edge by nobrains who choose to indiscriminately wreck stuff while gurning like halfwits and ending up with a fine because they’re only 14. I mean, our car’s a bit rubbish, but that’s not the point. I’ll choose when to kick the wing mirrors off and jump on the roof, thanks.

lie down

August 10, 2005

so I had this thing right, where, like, you know, it was there but I just had to lie down cos I thought if I moved an’ that I’d be, you know, like, sort of falling? you know, internation all over, the, shop, like it was, well, I’ve still got it now but I’ll drag meself up to me desk and round it all off so that its ready for them upstairs, like what you have to, well you know, just to get you in so its like that really, innit? and then with your Panda 4×4 you can ‘ave it large and wheedle those spangles over ere after that pint of tap. christ on a bike, you’ve only gawn an done it now, anitcha? she’ll be dahn ere with her pointy sticks an stuff and I’ll be hoofing the servers until its autoblanced an’ I can get a decent cuppa tea. blimey! it aint much to ask, right?

I suppose you’re gonna be looking for a meeting about this as well. I got a list of names as long as yer arm mate, so let’s be avin’ yoooo.

yakuza. bless you.

August 4, 2005

Takeshi Kitano for 5:99. well, you would, wouldn’t you? I just went in there and got 3 of them and so I’m lining up my ‘beat’ weekend where I shall be hooking all my dvd peripherals up again and then staying up all night slunk in the leather armchair glued to the screen. even the boxes are out the other side of über. I might just slip in a copy of don’t look now while I’m there for a bit of a roeg moment. gotta love that wispy beard freaking out in the venetian winter.

did you see that?

August 3, 2005

that’s horrible. I didn’t mean to do it, but I just kind of forgot that I’d set up a webcam. I mean, I’ve done worse things but not captured quite like that before. I really am working, by the way. these phat headphones are for conference calls, I’m not doing a dave doubledecks down here while paul talks about globalization design docs and we check on status. I’m not really hoofing around the gulf of oman in an APC in battlefield2 while you’re talking about user-friendliness and reordering things in the authoring temaplates. look, I even sent out some kind of document or other to make it look like I was prepared. admittedly, I put it in the collaboration space so that it will time out before you can load it, but it’s there, really. it’s got knobs on

I watched 2 guys in space do some repointing on their mobile home on the internet today, which I was quite blasé about really. I mean, they’re 224 miles above the coast of france, hovering about on a giant white fork-lift truck contraption, picking out little bits of plastic from between slices of fiber cheesecake with their huge white fingers and I’m seeing this live, as it happens, because they’re got helmet-mounted (careful) cameras that are transmitting wirelessly to tracy island or something which is hooked up to some webserver or other that’s streaming stuff under the atlantic to the BT infrastructure that’s doing better for me today than chris and I’m sat here looking at a 4 inch square streaming video on my monitor in the upstairs office in norwich watching their every move. so that’s amazing, right? but am I bovvered? not really. it’s sunny outside and I’m leering out the window at 20 year olds on their way to top shop to get a new crop top for saturday cos gary’s takin her dahn Lava, innit?

so what I do on the webcam is really not very significant. unless my mum’s watching. she’d be horrified.

but you don’t print them

August 2, 2005

I’ve got a lot of them but you’ve never seen them even though they’re yours and you asked me to do it but you know if I have to log in as me then I can do that but you’re not connected so its too hard from here and anyway I haven’t got my cartridges refilled at cartridge world where they have that monstrous yellow shop front next to the cafe that used to be a shop that now has those middle class dropouts snuffling and snorting around redbush teabags in the half-light of a norfolk anticlimax, so I guess I should take up the viking offer before mr tim caynes! is no longer able to get the branded ones before it expires but, I mean, its better if I upload them to photobox, and we just need to work out which ones to add via that applet which takes 17 hours to complete and I know that you know we haven’t put any in for over 5 years but at least we’ve sorted some out from when she was 6 months and had sick in her hair, a bit like the other night after that implant rejected and we gave birth to a small intestine on the canal.

I mean, they only look posh, but they ain’t really so they’re only as posh as what you are like and me so don’t bother with them and I tell you, she’s just a nasty piece of work so I’m not going out of my way to do that out of hours stuff when I’ve got three dealers and a monkey with three donkeys to pay cos the hack’s gone down to newmarket with the dongle and my apparatus has crashed off the A47 into that ditch where bernard matthews pride of the east is cavorting with a lemon and squeezing the plums through the catflap. I mean, its good, but its not right.

predictive blogs

August 1, 2005

f u cn rd ths then I’ve just installed lazyBlog® because I have so much to say but I can’t be bothered to say it and anyway I’m waiting for the chelsea one to hoof up here so we can spark off over globalization and decide we probably won’t meet in the middle but I’ll try and get products out and I’ll do press releases in Korea anyway before that vendor goes mad with slash press. I came across lazyBlog® while I was cross referencing the page I made with the online viking office supplies catalogue to see if there was any hidden meanings to my life that could possibly link a thousand nude californians and ink jet cartridges, but there wasn’t, unless I looked at them the wrong way round.

it’s apparently the first piece of blogging software from the folks responsible for the iBull, which I can see already has you shaking your leg under the desk. it works like predictive txt on cellphones, where you use you enter a 2 letter word with no meaning and you get back a 4 letter word with no meaning which is out of context when you didn’t even have one and you can’t erase because your head is under a bucket somewhere near the shropshire union canal. except lazyBlog® is much more gooder. it do all ur blog after you’ve only written one paragraph or so. it apparently uses a patented algorithm that analyses your online behaviour and tracks histories, bookmarks, previous blog entries, email, shopping lists, tampered photoshop files etc., building a unique picture of the person what you are and what you’re likely to be thinking at 12 oclock on monday morning after you’ve just driven from Norwich to Camberley and decided to go home again after you picked up a ream of paper and a couple of bics. so by the time I’ve got to about this point, everything you see from now on is probably machine generated. It might already be. In fact the fantastic futureheads album has 4 stars and can be found here. The super BBC news site has a interesting feature on baboons in Guatemala that features in Michael Palin’s new book ‘Baboons in Guatemela’ which is a vailable in all good bookshops. I saw a great special offer on ink cartidges today – 2 for 1 at PC World Business Direct. Hurry while stocks last. anyway, I see that there’s a lot of conversation about Open Source Software on some people’s blogs on some sites somewhere probably. I have something to say about that even though I don’t normally link to any software sites or buy it or talk about it, but I did once follow a link of th 19th June what did go to an OpenSolaris page for blogging thing someprobably. Have you seen my cat? I was reconstructing my garden after cycling through Surrey and Doctor Who who came on the TV and I like good wine and here is a picture of me at some event of other taken on my treo. I want to die. Why oh why doesn’t she like me? That President Bush…

hmm. it’s still beta. perhaps you can actually pay for it to remove the adverts. unless I actually just wrote all that. on my excellent Talin. Oi! stop it!

Things what I writ