I’m responding, but I’m not listening

April 20, 2005

I mean, it’s pretty neat right? I mean we can do this stuff without the, you know, forgotting the this, and the that, but it’s like, well, we should I could you know like it we might wanna try it we can take it offline if we have to. and hey – thanks, right? no, I mean, this is great. no, really…

blimey. it’s not like I’m ‘aving it large ‘ere while all this is kicking off, but it’s a bit bleedin’ rich when old Bravo gets the gab on and e’s blartin’ on abaht the branches an’ the bleedin’ French, like. I CARN’T ‘EAR YER MATE! SORRY! and ‘ere I am scribing like a nutter just gettin’ this hoperations review done so I can leg it dahn the Black Horse and get a swift one in with Mad Andy and the wife, before it’s back to the gaff to see that thing on the telly with that bird out of Blue Peter getting ‘er legs slapped by some undead geezah. lahvly.

anyways, it’s off to the lockup now to sort out a little business with some old gateways I’ve got piling up round the back. thing is, right, I promised them to the world and now I’m getting a right ear bashing abaht which bits fall off when you ‘ang ’em up on yer own site. I mean, it’s not the end of the world, right? if you’ve got any problems, give us a bell an’ I’ll sort you out with some new home pages I’ve got coming in from me supplier on thursday. they’re right tasty, real quality gear. cost you, mind. I reckon a monkey, mate…

can you tell what it is yet?

April 18, 2005

I dunno, you wait all day for a D and then all of a sudden you get an E. I promised them I’d get it delivered tomorrow you see, and I was looking out for final final final. what is he playing at? I mean, if he’s up at 4am doing this stuff, then he should be delivering something, right? I can see him there with those massive cans on and he looks like he’s been treated with PowerGoo in Photoshop 3 (pre-layers, natch). I saw him in the flesh once. his eyes were in the right place then and he looked about 27. funny how designer’s faces end up looking like their designs – you know, a bit like dogs. he’s got loads of round edges now, but he just kind of fades out from the top to the bottom until you can see through him. I’m looking at him on IE and he doesn’t even fit on my screen anymore.

so I reckon I’ve got an extra hour to fly a crate to the amarrket and then I’ll get me port numbers up and stitch together a downloadable blart. nothing like a bit of raw stuff to keep the punters happy, right? I mean, it’s not as if we get paid to do this stuff, i’m just doing it as a favour for Big Dave, cos he’s got some badgers down the lockup and they’re chewing the gaff up good and proper. if I don’t get this stuff on the barrer by 5 I’ll be down a pony and Pete Doherty will be scrawling on the walls. strewth.

hola you

April 15, 2005

somebody rang the cheese alarm so here i am waiting with bait on my breath. just got back from the Costa del Sol and i’m overjoyed that i’ve stumbled back into a pressure silo full of spring flowers and songs. sharks and hitler, that’s what Andy says. mind you, it’s sharks, hitler, ghosts and balls these days. know what I mean?

£545 for a family of five on our favorite creaky budget older-than-average cabin crew airline, EasyJet to get us to the south of Spain where we’re met off the plane by 17 handlebar-sporting, Ducados sucking Mercedes drivers holding up white cardboard with other people’s name on. “snr. Armstrong? snr. Armstrong?”, “excuse me”, “snr. Garibaldi? snr Garibaldi?”, “excuse me. mind the cases, kids”, “snr. Dermatitis? snr. Dermatitis?”, “excuse me. mind the cases, kids. I think that’s it, no hang on. excuse me. WHERE’S THE BLOODY INFO DESK IN THIS BLOODY AIRPORT?”

and relax. pick up key for Seat Cordoba SDi (S for sloooow). drive like tourist down wrong side of autovaía. throw cases into house. up to roof terrace and find it’s 75° and sunny at 6pm and laugh like imbecile to self. 2 and a half weeks without phone, email or office.

lucky me. free town house in Nerja, 40 minutes from Malaga. day trips to Frigiliana, Competa, Malaga, days on the beach at Burriana, quick stroll into town to the Balcón de Europa to watch hugely unentertaining street theatre. Apparently, standing still for a very long time dressed as a pirate is very lucrative these days. you only move when some hapless fool drops 1 Euro in your tin and then you move v e e e r r y s l o o o w w w l y like you’re really made out of wood or something. I tried it myself. I sat on the beach with una cerveca and didn’t move for a week. only very slowly, when I had to slap a wooden bat around like an idiot trying a swat a plastic ball my son had launched about 15 metres to my left directly towards the enormous paella fire in Ayo’s bar.

still, it’s good to be back. ha. hahahaha. hahahahahahahahaha. “you could work out here couldn’t you? it doesn’t matter where you work does it? you’re remote working. could be England, could be Spain. what do you think?” er, I guess. actually…

it’ll all fall apart

March 25, 2005

right, quick shifty at me dual timezone clocks tells me it’s about, well, 2 hours til this stupid SonicStage software imports my mp3s so I can update my shiny fingerprint magnet Sony network walkman with some Bloc Party and some one-man mad mentalism from a underneath a bucket somewhere outside Cambridgecestershire. More importantly though, its about, well, 12 hours til I get on a patched up 737 courtesy of bargain airline EasyJet and flop over to Spain to spend two and a half weeks laughing like a madman on the beach as I think about the woeful assortment of project managers I’ve left behind to do all my rubbish stuff while I’m away.

they won’t do it though. I say it’s because I’m so frighteningly efficient that my projects look after themselves while I’m away. They even make small origami models of Menlo Park for people as they pass, and compliment them on their free Sun Education laptop bags. All that effort I put in the last 4 weeks. The selfless dedication I have to the success of the project. My children think I start work at 4pm, because they never see me after that. I’m always on the dog and bone, waiting for 50 minutes quietly in the corner and then suddenly getting IM’d and blurting out some incomprehensible gibberish that I just quickly nerfed from my iBull. Sam gave me a hug today while I was washing up the tea things and I said “aaaaaaah. what’s that for Sam?” and he said “because I won’t see you. you’re going to work now” and it wasn’t even a work day. He just thinks I disappear at that time and “do my calls”.

the truth is, things will go on without me and I’ll come back in 2 and a half weeks and I’ll login and I’ll IM someone and say “heyyyyy. I’m back!” and try and intimate a knowing kind of sideways nod and a wink in an instant message and expect them to somehow pick up on the fact that I want then to ask me about my vacation. Except they’ll just say “did you finish that roadmap for the countries?” and I’ll sink into my office chair and my tan will just instantly fade and the camera will suddenly zoom out above me while I’m looking up from my desk in the middle of a million identical desks and my mouth will be forming the words “heeeellllp meeeeee” but noone will hear me scream.

because I’ve left myself on mute. arse.

genius

March 5, 2005

You have to get yourself one of these. Just $399 will get you an indefinite ‘get out of corporate jail free’ card. If you’ve ever been stuck for what to say, when know the right kind of thing to say, this is for you. No more stuttering around the corridor saying ‘I wish I’d said yzx’. No more reaching that final slide on global venue management and feeling that cold bead of sweat trickling down your forehead, as you remember you went out with “Bob” last night and got mashed up at “Bob’s Place”, instead of adding those recommendations that the CXO, who’s sat in front of you, looking at his Sony Ericsson, wanted by last Friday.

You need this in your life. There’s even a free demo, if you can find it on the page, so get cracking, and you’ll never have to worry about being stupid again.

lasering my face

January 6, 2005

so I’ve got one of these, for doing proper stuff, and I’ve got a stacked one of these, for doing other stuff, but I’ve also got one of these, which is rubbish. I mean, if I’m trying to draw a layer mask round a dolphin in Photoshop, I want some control, right? I don’t want some rollerball full of dead skin stuttering across my diamondtron and lopping off fins with a single jerk. I want something that looks like it’s just been deployed covertly and that I can leer over in a grown-up middle class boy kind of way. I need something I can pretend they would use in Starship Troopers or something. In fact, what I need is one of these.

So I got one. A quick shifty over to ebuyer, where it’s 10% cheaper than anywhere else and I place an order. Except I want it so badly, I go for the ‘light speed’ delivery option at 8 quid, so that I can start using it yesterday. Still, it’s worth it. The dolphin looks great now. You can track any surface and it still works. Scratch it up and down and across my manky old face and it still glides across the screen, tracing out some strange ugly pointer trail. If you blink your eyes quickly enough, it looks a bit like Jesus. A bald Jesus with fat chins, but still pretty close.

Of course, when I have to admit to spending 60 quid on a mouse – which I do in the end – it all gets a bit messy. We haven’t eaten for a week and here I am dropping a few score on a rodent with eye lasers. I mean, it doesn’t go down too well, but hey, I’ve just tracked round a banana, and saved it as an Illustrator file. What more justification do you need?

upside down in the duke of norfolk

December 22, 2004

Its cold. I mean its not Lake Tahoe with no shirt, drunk on a bike cold, just kind of a bit sort of cold. So I’m standing outside the city hall with about 200 other people who have just stumbled out of Argos with seasonal chavware (its a bit like middleware, but gold), and we’re all looking up at the roof waiting for French people to fall off.

This is abseil ballet. Scarabeus are a bunch of loons who hang off buildings dressed up like patients in insane asylums and kind of swing about to a background of Daft Punk-like ambience (which, in Daft Punk’s case is actually enveloped very swankily, but in this case just sounds like the audio is coming through a huge cushion). Occasionally, everything swings at just the right time, but mostly you’re just wondering what the hell is going on for about 30 minutes of your life. I think about taking a picture, but actually, I just can’t be bothered. You know when you’re about to take a snap that you’ll look at later and say “well, I didn’t think that was going to work”. I think about other stuff, but my brain freezes over and I’m just gawping at office workers standing there in shirt sleeves and smoking tabs, ready to go out for the night and get off their face, like I used to 20 years ago before I chose the ten o’clock news and a pair of slippers instead.

And then I remember how cold it is. Sam is just kind of rocking like a Weeble and Madeleine’s transfixed of course (it’s theatrical), but her breath is freezing, Mr Freeze style, as it comes of her wide-open mouth. I’m ready to head for the Forum to stand under a heater for a while, so Sam and I head off past the ice rink, avoiding the goths peering through their own hair, to find a hot-air hand-drier. Of course, as we round the corner past the police cars parked across the road, they go and let the fireworks off as a grand finale. There is mild excitement as the 2 sky ballet artists hanging from the city hall clock collide in a mock embrace from a Gaultier ad 100 feet off the ground and then a few limp flashes later it’s all over.

We head home to groom our colds and sure enough, by the next day, everybody’s coughing over each other’s fish fingers and leaving damp tissues in the sink. So that’s nice.

you get that? from that?

October 25, 2004

ok, so I dropped into Stanford Shopping Center before leaving for the airport. I had a gap I’d previously left in my suitcase and I had to fill it. It didn’t matter what with. Just stuff. I had an hour, so I figured Macys, Nordstrom, Crate & Barrel, ooh, Apple Store, Hair International (maybe not that one), and just see what appeals. Macys – nope. Nordstrom – how miserable are you? Crate & Barrel – nice bag, got one already though. Apple…

It’s not a big Apple store. There’s not really much to poke. At best, you get to finger some accessories and try and figure out where the base units are (they’re under the base units), but that’s about it. Half an hour later, I’m escorted out of the building by Dwight and Chan in their black polo necks, just for drooling onto a30″ Cinema Display. They shouldn’t make them so rampantly desirable. It’s their fault.

Anyway, 10 minutes left and I’ve looked at all the blow-up pillows in Brookstone, so I’m just heading back to the Chevy Preferred Customer, when I pass the Bose shop. I’ll never be able to afford anything in there. Move along. But hang on, what’s that thing? That looks nice, must be a new one of those Wave Radio things. I’ll take a look. Now, I don’t own an iPod, much to my chagrin, but then I work from home and never go out in daylight, and then it’s only down to the paper shop down the road, where I’m still allowed to go unattended, so, when I see this thing is a SoundDock Digital Music System for an iPod, I’m walking out. That is, until the lovely Mike, with his bluetooth headset and braces (teeth and trousers) starts showing it to a couple who actually look like they might have some money. “You just take your iPod”, he oozes, “or iPod Mini, it works for that too, and you slip it in the dock (ooer) and then…”, and then he left the most dramatic pause ever witnessed. I was looking at my watch when the sound started coming out. I thought someone had put the home cinema system on in the next room. The sound that came out of this 6.5″x12″ waffle was just unbelievable. I can’t begin to explain it here, but I’d just suggest you take your iPod along to your nearest Bose outlet and demand they give you a damn good docking, to hear for yourself. You’ll not spend a quicker $299. Well, apart from that time in Union Square…

freaking out on the golden gate

October 22, 2004

So, at the end of the week, it’s always nice to get out of town and take a ride. This was last friday, mind, but I mean, it takes a while to do this. Winding down from the terrible excitement of an ops review and an ecstatic all-afternoon discussion about layout frameworks and content layout assembler template managed things, and not forgetting the Jager incident, it was time to take a trip over Woodside and hit the coastal highway in the tasty Chevy Corporate. First stop, Bucks in Woodside. Now, that’s some place. Chris tells me that all the deals go down there, so while I wait for him to make me a deal, we get something called a 2x2x2, which is pretty much the best breakfast you can get, except there’s twice as much as you can eat. As usual. I could live in these hills. But I don’t, so I wave Chris off on his bike and head over the 84 to the Pacific.

A bit twisty. The Jager’s coming back. And those pancakes. And the sausages. Hurgh. Ah, there’s the sea…

Here’s the thing though. You come over here in mid October and it’s 90 degrees and you sit in the office all day. You head over the hills to the beach and it’s suddenly fricken freezing and total cloud cover. Hmph. I am going to Half Moon Bay and I am going to sit on the beach. Whatever. So, I do that for a while and there is nobody to see for miles, which is a bonus, but I’m getting all morose on the beach on my own, so back in the lovely Chevy Marketeer and up the coast a bit.

All the way up the coast in fact. I was only looking for somewhere to pull over to take my jacket off, but I ended up in Golden Gate Park with that “I’m a tourist” sign stuck on the roof. I swapped it out for the “I’m in a rental car” sign and burned down the middle lane, swerving violently about for the sake of it. After a near miss with a Dodge Enormous I settle down, and succumb to the fact that I’m going over the bridge whether I like it or not (Chris tells me later he’s never done the bridge, so me being resigned to it is a bit lame. it’s such a drag).

The bridge is looking bad. Mean and bad. I’ve done the vista point on the north side before, and it’s been glorious, day and night. Lucky I guess. Right now, the clouds are at about 50 feet and the mist is just clinging on to the structure. Oh well, no majestic sweeping panoramas on the W1 today. I know. I’ll walk across. I’ve never done that. Ooh, bad idea as it turns out…

So, I set out on foot to see how far I get. Quite ok. Dodging the day bikes and the mental Tour de Bridge carbon fibre brigade. Not many pedestrians. Carry on. The one thing I notice is it’s so bloody loud. I mean, that traffic at 4pm on Friday is like a hurricance – six lanes steaming by at ear height. Carry on. The first moments of weirdness happen when you’re ‘off concrete’ and ‘on-bridge’. Take a few steps, look over the edge. Take a few more, look over the edge. Stop, look up, and then…look at the size of that thing. The first suspension tower is right in front of you, and that thing is huge, man. I mean, it’s huge. When you take the route round the outside of the thing, which hangs out over the water, the sense of scale is overwhelming. So that’s where I start freaking. Right then, I’ve taken a couple of classic wide shots with the SF skyline just about visible. Let’s just take a quick one to get some idea of the size of this thing. Ok, there noone around, good. Hang on. There’s really noone around. Anywhere. Look both ways and there’s no bikes, no pedestrians, no CHP to check whether I’m hanging over the edge. Nobody. K. That’s alright. Just a bit odd. Right, let take that shot. Point the camera w a y u p t h e r e to the top. Lean back. Back a bit. Looking straight up now, straight at the camera display…

All I can say really, is that being totally alone, on the most massive man-made structure around (megalophobic), high over the huge, sea-like SF bay (thalassophobic) and losing the horizon and any reference to my spatial positioning I was suddenly in cold panic. I pretended I wasn’t though. I mean, somebody might have been looking. I took that shot and then pretty much ran all the way back to the vista point car park, where I set off the car alarm instead of unlocking the doors and hid in the toilet. Or I would have done, if the toilet wasn’t being cleaned. I actually hid in the ladies toilet. There.

Anyway, I made myself better by doing a ‘Taxi’ down Van Ness and onto Market, whereupon I drove the car straight onto the pavement and left it there, like something out of The Deadpool and dashed into Macys, where a very nice man sold me some Puma underwear. They had Lycra and everything.

edge of darkness

October 19, 2004

You know, there’s nothing I like better after a hard days graft than to settle down in a nice cosy corner of a Cali cafe and just quietly discuss organizational structures with people who know as little as I do. But of course, this being the final date of the tour, mentalism was predetermined and hopelessly unavoidable.

I mean, you start the evening with a nice chat at the Blue Chalk and maybe even grab a sausage or two, but at the point where you’re shouting at the dessert menu then really, it’s time to pack up and leave by the back door, shedding a few solo artists on the way. Not this time though. There’s this place, see. This place I was warned about. The place where the law enforcement gather at the bar to bear witness to the social outkasts as they linger around the ‘DJ booth’ and just kind of half-dance around on the sticky carpet. They’re possessed, see? I mean, it’s not right. How can people behave like that?

Well now I know. It’s the 8th layer of hell. It’s Jagermeister. It only took 12 of them and and I was just grunting around the edge of darkness like a 12 year old stuck on Avril Lavigne. I should know better, but they made me do it. Project managers. Can’t live with them, can’t make a fool of yourself and have really bad pictures end up on your own camera without them

Things what I writ