cracked h4x0rs

January 5, 2009

in 1984 I was asleep on the hard cold shoulder of the M25 while a man from the AA was jacking up the 2CV that had finished the ether it was running on and I never even woke up so its a good thing I wasn’t actually the driver but needless to say many things have passed in a blur since. hows things. back to normal. haha, whatever back to normal is. oh, yes, haha. nice break? JUST ASK WHAT YOU WANT TO ASK. sorry? no, I’m sorry.

sometimes little gems turn up form inside your own planet and one such did save me many hours during the last days of december but really it wasn’t very productive anyway its just that it was less productive quicker so I as able to be much more inefficient without even trying just waiting for the paid version to show up whereupon I’ll unleash my fiendish help requests upon the support forum to a deafening silence much like the one I hear right now on the other end of this phone.

if you ever get the urge to download a human league album then don’t resist I did and now my tumble dryer’s lost its grommet just as we’re all at level 5 still at least we’re all still here I forgot that its january already locked in the box like what I am. I can’t decide whether to re-invent everything. it’s tuesday tomorrow. ruby!

you really should finish that

January 2, 2009

with a free day to yourself and adobe indesign twitching away in the corner you know you should really get to the UI specifications that have been bouncing around like the donkey in shrek trying to get your attention but then you’ve got that whole wiki organization thing to do and you did spend a while on that lovely flow diagram you made for it so how about just getting to grips with those atlassian confluence templates or wait there’s that whole documentation thing you’ve got planned out there in the pile of paper you’re trying to push towards the edge of your desk I mean you said you’d do that in september and that was like a whole different year now right?

better get a cup of tea and one of the christmas biscuits and sit down for a while. look at your desk. there must be a good hour’s worth of tidying to do there. and you haven’t hoovered in here for over a month. you know, actually, that cupboard could do with a bit of arranging I’m sure I could make better use of that space and <SLAP>.

ah. alright. can I just read my email first? I don’t think there’s an thing really important but <SLAP>.

ooh. right. the UI spec thing? now?

lost last loss leaders

December 31, 2008

ooh. I was just thinking yesterday as I downloaded about 4 mp3 albums from amazon in the uk for 3 quid a piece that it probably wouldn’t last. I didn’t buy everything I wanted and frankly I bought a few things I wouldn’t have bought at 7.99 or 8.99 but when they are so ridiculously cheap and are 320 kbps and are DRM-free then there really isn’t any reason not to. so I thought I’d get some more. I’d had second thoughts about the glasvegas album even though I’d been listening to it on napster but I thought I really couldn’t pass up the 3 quid loss-leader and so I headed back to amazon this morning to shovel a few more bargain-bucketfuls of coinageable purchases only to find that they had as was inevitable raised the prices on everything that wasn’t glen campbell or pendulum both of which I got anyway. I mean, they might have only increased some things by a pound or maybe 2 but in some cases they’d really exposed their primary loss-leaders such as the rihanna album which jumped from 3 quid to 7.30 overnight. I guess they’re pretty confident they can recoup large wads of cash on that one. maybe not so much on the simply red greatest hits which was rightfully stuck at 3 pounds which is in fact 3 pounds too much and does not really qualify for loss-leader status as they should be paying you to take it away and throw it in a virtual skip.

some things never really got the loss-leader treatment, of course. if you didn’t already have the duffy album, you weren’t about to get that cheap. or the coldplay album. or, um, the ocean colour scene album. not sure about that one. I did manage to pick a couple of things of my christmas wishlist at the 3 pound price tag, but, curiously, the 4:13 dream album by the cure remained steadfastly at a think twice price. and amazon don’t even have the late of the pier album so I snuck over to 7 digital for that one and the fabulous m83 saturdays = youth album at a knock-down price.

all-in-all if you were stuck for something to do between christmas and new year and happened to be sat at your computer, there were some fine savings to be had but they’re mostly gone now and mp3 downloads will undoubtedly match or approach regular cd prices on amazon from now on so there’ll be less chance of that girls aloud album finding its way into my library. well, the next one, anyway.

just put that over there

December 18, 2008

moved analytics from one account to another meaning I just reset the counters but that’s not all bad is it I mean when they’re all flatlined where’s the harm I see that urchin come up in the world got all fancy and lardy I might just take you up on that offer looks I even got the ads right so it’s about time dave wheeled out the biscuits and we had a little chat about aggregation.

it sticks in your throat though no I mean it does stick in your throat. literally. never mind the bullets and graphs its all about my retirement so lets start now with the clickstreams and targets what’s that I don’t know but you’re in marketing I was I thought it would be as simple as just giving myself access but it seems I’m rather more clueless than I thought still hey what’s a midsized trench pedant cavorting with a beany stick anyway there’s more at stake than a cold snap.

formula wan

December 16, 2008

what’s all this bernie ecclescake and max moselyshoals nonsense about I thought planks of wood and sports day debacles were the pinnacle of duh but we’re facing the prospect of all drivers having to buy their engines from argos for less than 17 quid and are not allowed to go to the toilet before a race or something. I’m sure I used to watch ayrton senna blasting round estoril with james hunt and murray walker falling over their own hyperbolics while I got through 20 marlboro and 12 packets of monster munch and I actually quite enjoyed it but now it seems that I have as much fun tuning into (or, god forbid, turning up to) a formula bun fight as I do getting the longest queue in tescos and getting out first. really. is there anything less exciting to do with a sunday afternoon than watch 23 year old billionaires practice their drive to the golf club yes I know its still actually dangerous and its actually still highly skilled and its actually a feat of human endurance and its actually a technological miracle but then so is trying to keep up with blog posting. and I can’t really tell which is less interesting.

the problem is they are equally compelling for a reason I can’t quite fathom and more or less constitute a waste of a couple hours of your life when you really should have been doing something more effective instead like a user interaction specification or clearing leaves from the garden but in the end you just quietly slip back to them like some horrible dark secret in the cupboard from a stephen king novel. which is why I’m writing this. about that. you see?

do I understand DNS?

December 12, 2008

no. I don’t get it. I went on the network administration course and everything but I still can’t map one domain to another with all that A and CNAME stuff. I can’t even understand the help I read when I’m looking for help that I can’t even find because I don’t even know how to ask for it. well, that’s not strictly true. I can at least type “DNS CNAME map domain not redirect or forward my head hurts” into google and trawl through a million self-proclaimed experts with hello world paint shop pro banners who will proceed to enlighten me in such a way that they obviously understand what they’re talking about themselves but I still have no idea even after reading it a few time and mentally underlining the bits that look relevant so I can come back to them when I understand a bit more which I never do so it’s pointless. I do know now that if you’ve been in a marketing organization longer than you’ve been in a service organization you are officially too stupid to work things out for yourself anymore and the preferred method is to ask somebody who does know what they’re doing how much it will cost if they do it for you at which point they see from the way you’ve written and signed your email that you’re in marketing and so it’ll immediately cost double the number they first thought of. which, in this case, means I should have just got the domain through the service that can configure the DNS for me for free instead of buying it from my regular domain broker and then trying to use a control panel from 1994 to tweak IPs and stuff. and then waiting for a day to see that you’re in no better state than you were yesterday and you don’t have any idea why not. its a bit like playing mastermind with someone but walking between each other’s houses 15 miles apart between each move to see if you’ve learned anything.

don’t offer to help. I like the pain.

poke that in your eye

December 11, 2008

let me just talk over you for a moment you’re not understanding what I’m saying there’s a time and a place for that placation but blow down a melon if that’s not right here now today we need to blart quite clearly lest we’re tripping over the outstretched tongues of tousled falcons with mouse trap retorts. it’s good that you’ve dropped to your knees and prostrate your miserable little pencil at the bison farm but what I need right here right now today is actionable clap magnets for genies. there’s no other way.

yesterday you thought it was a good idea to slip an organic pastureful of careening witch cattle unto the storage boxes. you’ll regret that later.

you must restart your computer

December 10, 2008

look at that. its a minor miracle that I’m not bothered by rampaging elephant bots trampling my fingers into the keyboard of phish where the dropped mangle of pirate bay galapagos mouse traps wait for silver surfing junglists to bomb out on the mysterious marketplace. it is confusing that you looked for that there but it came from there at twice the price where its all in the same place and look its even got the same name on it but its not the same is it know that so do you but she doesn’t I admit that’s confusing oh yes but you learn from that don’t you? man, those boots are 1981.

building a little wall with the effervescent support of the redmond auto plug whence I’ve loaded every application know to man and logged in via vpn to be told that if you really want to update the last 47 bits in the remote pinball wizard manager then everything must change and now its your fault you asked us to do this it doesn’t matter that its not related to anything I can’t change a light bulb without going out the front door and coming back in again that’s just the way it is look at my big pointy stick I’ll poke you with it every minute. in the eye.

is there anything more annoying that getting a crackle in your socket the day after warranty? I don’t think so.

it’ll never last

December 6, 2008

crashing ungainly into the enemy were it but a slip of the brittle then we’d never have another country. sat brooding when you didn’t ask the question you mention but recount a day when there was too much to say between the fingers of concensus to crash on the beach like a soon to be exploded whale you can’t walk around it you can’t get inside it you can’t grok it so here’s what we’ll do I’ve changed the label nobody will notice. oh.

just past twitchy you succumb to a numb vacant stare into which a folded envelope creeps, winking vegetables. there’s just not enough time in the day is there? apparently not see you later if you want to yes I will. I did html. it had macros in it. I took it back and the man said because I’d got it from a book I was ineligible. it took me so long to spell it that he slipped out the back and slapped a fish with the evening news.

hammers

bored of internetshire

September 3, 2008

bored

Things what I writ