when I hear the word democracy, I reach for my headphones

July 12, 2005

so I have to get back to rating. is that hot or not? is it a bit hot? is my leg moving? now that we’ve supplanted ourselves with the prosthetics and given up the healy its back to the 40 days and 40 minutes of back catalogue which god knows needs filtering through the doppler. you should have known it would happen like this really. one minute I was ripping it up on a four track fandango, after a chance meeting in the city ended up with a ride to the place we knew we would end up as soon as we stepped out of the door, the next you’d left and made that really quite rubbish effort where you were wearing that new york stylee wooly hat thinking that was the 90s beatnik look but in actual fact it was just the 90s wooly hat look and since you made it permanent I have to berate you now.

not since coventry was flattened has it been mobilized so frantically. I mean, its not like I’ve needed any excuse to sit here looking at the wall and reminiscing about long coats and spikes in my boots, but jesus, journeyman? where the hell did that come from? time to go pick a carpet and get back to earth. I think its somwhere between the orange and the fawn, but I wouldn’t want it to end up as taupe. even with flecks. that would be dreadful.

I don’t care, now go away.

July 11, 2005

I can see one on the road and one on the other side, striding into Victoria like a deranged 14th-century pleb. ooh, that insidious tweak of the heels as they dribble up the path and the ratcheting bones of the spike jones lookalike competition winners who are dragged by their feet through the dogs mess in what used to be my adventure playground. there were nice logs. a rope slide and all sorts. but now I voyeuristically survey the half-life mentalisims that drip into view, sloping their club feet into the nearside and dribbling some kind of ridiculous bile at each other, like some mad old apes in the baboon house at banham. and those dogs.

you see, I’ve cultivated a particularly offensive highbrow backlash against you all. I see you crashing the handset against the new email client that nobody uses and staggering across my road like some neaderthal. you’re headed into the pickwick for one last argument with dave about picking up stuff for the morning job and then you’ll be off to costessey for a slap, you idiot. by the way, that shirt is rubbish. they went out in the 90s with those horrible loafers you’re wearing

apropos of which, I’m still alive. I did take a couple of days off to just stare at the tv, so I’m late again with the globalization program. but you know, there’s some things I really have to get done, and some things that I’ll just about get done, so excuse me for a minute, and stop spoiling my view, you cretin

I’m not bothered about the noise though

July 5, 2005

do you mind if I just shut the door on you? is it my singing? no, its your whistling, ha ha. actually its the sound of the circular saw buzzing through the floor of the kids bedroom that’s vibrating me across the office floor like davros or whatever his name was from doctor who. I’ve got a bit of a bad stomach today as well, so I’m probably green too. all I need now is to get my medusa headset on and I’ll probably get a free pass to some kind of convention where I can spend my time sifting through back copies of radio times and betamax videos, occasionally looking up and nodding to a cyberman with a sea dragon mask in one hand and a cheque book in the other.

so we agree on a ‘100 mil’ panel and some beading that is apparently called ‘ocra’ or ‘ocar’ or something and then gary gets to work on the wardrobe doors. he’s going to fill in all the little gaps as well. ah. after that, he’s going to start on the shelves in the living room that I haven’t designed yet, but all I know is that they have to have one shelf about ‘800 mil’ off the ground that’s deep enough to fit a shiny new turntable on so that I can finally, after about 15 years, stack the vinyl underneath and then pull out and dust off my mono copy of piper at the gates of dawn and cue it up and sit back in the leather sofa and relax. its probably at that point I’ll realise that piper at the gates of dawn is really a horrible screechy wailing noise, especially in mono, and so I’ll whip it off, delve back into the warped back catalogue again and pull out hex education hour or 1997 wtf’s going on or something instead and then do some air posturing in front of the telly while I’m reading the sleeve notes on unknown pleasures. I might even dig out who’s next and do a spot of windmilling, if nobody’s looking

but right now, the sawing has started again. I can’t really hear it that much through the victorian walls inside this house and over the fan battle of the w2100z and the 8400 and the bionaire (which the w2100z wins quite easily, naturally) and the passing traffic through the open window because its sunny again and my south-facing office is approaching the volcano zone. but its there. just niggling away like a rat chewing your skull. so I expect to lose it completely by the end of the day and go rampaging down to M&Ms with a sawn-off bike pump or something, demanding they had over the soft rolls before anyone gets hurt. dammit. there it goes again. scuse me gary, can I just borrow that saw for a minute?

that’s art, that is

July 1, 2005

don’t make me change that. it took me ages. just because you don’t follow that particular product life cycle process doesn’t mean you can’t understand what I’m saying. I mean, of course its cock full of subsections that I didn’t even understand myself, but I filled them in and made them all look like they were valid and important, so you should at least read them. you know you want to. I crafted them lovingly in my usual prose-heavy way so that its less of a program management document, more of a novel, with compelling characters, engaging storyline and a startling and unexpected twist. alright, its only describing FY06 globalization activities and the business process changes and platform enhancements, which doesn’t sound very exciting, but don’t let that put you off. I mean, Enigma. that was about a typewriter, right? the Da Vinci Code. that’s all about puzzles or something. so, it doesn’t sound very interesting, but get into it and by page 17, you’ll be spilling your coffee into your lap with your jaw hanging open like you’ve just witnessed the second coming. you’ll have some kind of revelation on the path the monetization.

except I haven’t finished it yet. naturally. its friday.

oh yeah, well, that. you know.

June 30, 2005

I’ve made a list. I once asked my old manager how she managed to keep on top of everything what with the supersized number of projects she had on the go and all the people in the team. she said it was a juggling act. but not the kind of juggling act where you keep five balls in the air on a sunny day on millennium plain while over-enthusiastic southern european exchange students laugh and point in their dayglo rucksacks. no, its a corporate juggling act. you throw everything up in the air and mostly things come back down and you catch them, add value and throw them back in the air again. sometimes you catch them as they come down and throw them hard at the person sitting closest to you at the time and they have to pick it up off the floor and figure out why the hell you just threw it at them, ribbing their bruise. sometimes you throw them really high so they spiral into the ionosphere of the lifecycle process before crashing down through the rarefied atmosphere of significant milestones. sometimes you just kind of flick them up with your wrist because you know they’re just too heavy to launch without hurting yourself somehow. mostly they just kind of circle around in a big arc over your head and its reasonably predictable when they’ll fall out of the sky again. sometimes, when you’re not looking because you’ve spend the morning fixing you email account, three of four of them land of the floor at the same time and then you start flapping your arms around uncontrollably like a deranged seagull

but best of all, and for reasons not really clearly understood, sometimes they don’t come back down at all. they just keep on going, up into space, until they collide with a passing beagle or something and all contact is lost, despite the efforts of scientists in beards with optimistic faces. these are the things you’ve thrown really hard. you did an enormous windmill with your arm like a adrenalin-fuelled pete townsend and fired that project at a million billion miles an hour into the cloudbase. ha. someone else’s problem now, I believe.

so that’s why I’ve written a list. I’ve reached critical mass with all the things I should have already done and the email trails that I no longer understand and its time to get everything into a bag, so I can pull them out one by one, evaluate how heavy they are and initiate the launch sequences. I had a good breakfast and 17 coffees and I’m twitching like a madman, so I’m thinking at least a couple of things will be defying gravity really soon.

sports day debacle

June 25, 2005

it was supposed to be the highlight of the events calendar. for years, the school had been trying to break the developing and lucrative market of ‘dads who are at home on a tuesday afternoon, but find a reason not to attend’. over the past couple of years, the supremo of the sports days, bernadette ecclescake had struck many deals with the organisers and sponsors so that now the tuesday afternoon meet in north norwich had become a premier occasion. in reality, bernadette had become the controlling power of the event, making policy decisions on details such as venue, day, time, cake stall management, and even choice of footwear distributors. for years, participants had free choice over footwear and could change them as often as they liked, even up to the last minute, when mum suddenly turned up with a brand new pair of black and white adidas kicks. together with baxter moselyshoals, who was the chairman of the inter-norfolk schools association, bernadette had everything sewn up.

so, the stage was set for the blue riband event – the three-legged egg and spoon dressed up as a policeman through a hoop beanbag on your head relay. the crowds had gathered excitedly in the record breaking heat, their cool boxes and digital video cameras at the ready, beeping like some insane techno orchestra because mums and dads don’t know how to turn that beep off. there had been rumblings about the safety of the course this year, as they were doing some building work on the new sports hall at the end of the field, so the last corner needed to divert around a couple of old traffic cones over a bit of bumpy grass. in fact, yesterday, little ralph from class 3b had got a nasty chaff when he careened of the track at the last minute when he had spotted his mum with a mini milk out of the corner of his eye. some parents had slightly raised one eyebrow and muttered some stuff about ‘health and safety’ and ‘what bernie’s doing about it’, but all team members appeared to be present and correct. the excitement was building, the tension palpable, and nobody in the crowd was really noticing a number of heated exchanges in the sand pits. we’re english, we don’t notice heated exchanges.

10 teams had made it to the final. 10 teams of 2 runners, tied at the ankle, truncheons poised and footwear carefully selected. it’s customary for the finalists to be introduced on the crappy loudspeaker system that’s dug out of the store cupboard every year, so they all do a quick hobble around in front of the massed ranks of beaming parents prior to the real business of racing. I couldn’t help noticing that some of the finalists looked a bit, well, grumpy. they darted a look across to their mums, who were doing a kind of hand across the neck gesture, like they do on the tv when they want to stop somebody talking rubbish. in fact, more than half of the ankle-strapped youngsters looked like they really didn’t want to be there at all, which was odd, but maybe they were just nervous. anyway, the PA crackled the names as they passed and everybody in the crowd settled down to watch the big race.

then it happened. just as the finalists were making their way to the start line, suddenly, 14 mums appeared from nowhere and whisked 7 pairs into 7 waiting vauxhall zafiras and they shot out of the car park and off to Tescos. this bizarre scene took everyone by complete surprise and bewildered, we turned back to the start line to see 3 rather embarrassed pairs of finalists smiling apologetically on the start line. one of the bigger boys, michael surelyknackered had something approaching an evil grin on his face, which made us all do a collective gasp of horror. out of the corner of my eye, I could see bernadette ecclescake and baxter moselyshoals striding into the maths room, waving their arms in the air and saying something about shoe shops, but I couldn’t really catch it. and then the flag went down and the 3 pairs hobbled down the track, to some rather ugly scenes on the terraces. disgruntled child minders and dads who had actually turned up this time started throwing hobnobs and cheese sandwiches onto the track, nearly hitting michael on the flaps. the result was really neither here nor there, and most parents had gone home to tidy the garden by that point, but smarmy michael surelyknackered and his partner ruby barnacle hit the tape first. so there.

it turns out that this year, the rules had been changed and last minute footwear changes had been disallowed. a large number of mums with bulging shoulder bags had taken the matter into their own hands and boycotted the event as a result. they claimed that ‘sports hall corner’ was unsafe and they hadn’t brought any extra grippy trainers with them. there were attempts to reach some kind of compromise. they even said they would drive all the way back to sprowston to get the grippy trainers, but baxter said that wasn’t fair on the mums who had walked from earlham road with the correct backup footwear and that was that.

in the end, it’s sports days that are the loser here and it’s difficult to see how they will ever win back the stay-at-home dad audience in north norwich again. they’ve lost a crucial market segment through the inflexibilty and greed of their own little empires. stupid buggers.

coefficient of alrightness

June 24, 2005

you can either accept the fact that if you’re going to keep the window open, then you are a slave to shuffle and you must suffer the consequences of your actions. if you really do like all the things in your 4 and 5 star rated playlist, then what does it matter that anyone walking past the window can immediately associate you with the 5 second snippet of music wafting out across the 30 degree, slightly smoggy street-level air? I mean, you’ll never meet these people or ever talk to them, so what does it matter what they think of you at that moment? nothing. unless you’re a half-baked insecure 30-something desperate wannabe who’s constantly justifying your validity in a retro culture society that you remember the first time around when you thought you were the centre of it but you probably weren’t even then.

so, it matters to you desperately that if ryan adams is trailing off, as a bunch of 20-something ex-university students in 70’s elvis shades, just faded enough element t-shirts and fat face flip flops pass by, that it might suddenly cross-fade into wuthering heights and they’ll all be swivelling their necks around to see where that stupid wailing noise is coming from. it would be something of a social disaster if LCD soundsystem come to an abrupt end and all too quickly, natalie imbruglia pipes up, just as the heigham park massive are drifting past with their nice white airmax 95s and their evisus hanging the requisite 3 inches below the waistband of their calvins. I mean, you’d be lambasted. you’re just so culturally irrelevant. you’re just like someone’s dad. which you are, of course, but you’ve just given it all away, you idiot.

you have to develop a contingency. it’s slightly extra work, but it’ll be worth it in the long run. these are you favourite tracks. you know when they start and finish, but you can’t give up the shuffle, no matter how hard you try, so you’re caught between the freedom and gay abandon of randomness and the self-conscious straightjacket of predictability. you need broadcast control, but with the flexibility of choice. you like half man half biscuit, godammit.

the answer is the cultural self-preservation equation. it roughly states that the level of saving face is equal to the product of the coefficient of alrightness times the specific relevance capacity over the am I bovvered factor. as the level of saving face approaches 1, the requirement to mute approaches 0 and vice versa. so, for something like lilywhite lilith by genesis, on a nice sunny friday, this would probably look something like:

4 (coefficient of alrightness) * 0.2 (specific relevance capacity) / 2 (am I bovvered factor) = 0.4 (level of saving face)

so, I’d have my finger pretty close to the mute key for that one. however, if it were to be something like black and white town by doves, on a grey wednesday, it would probably look more like this:

15 (coefficient of alrightness) * 0.6 (specific relevance capacity) / 10 (am I bovvered factor) = 0.9 (level of saving face)

which is pretty darn high, so I’d be looking to the whack the volume up key for that one. it takes some practice, but you end up being able to perform this equation on the fly in no time and so within a second or so, you’re able to direct your twitchy little fingers to the correct key that will enable you to remain comfortably smug in the knowledge that the most credibility-risky tunes are screened from the passing cultural commentators. at least, it’s a bit less embarrassing when sheryl crow suddenly starts blaring out the window and you’re able to catch it just before that nice girl with the purple hair walks past. mind you, if she knew about the jo dee messina track I’d have no chance.

what I’m trying to say

June 22, 2005

I’ve gained traction today. that doesn’t mean I’ve got an enormous steam-driven flywheel in my garden and I’m sporting a flat cap and coal dust and talking like some bloke from bolton. it means I’ve spoken to somebody in the engineering team and that we’ve agreed on something we can actually do. apparently. actually, I’ve been on the 5:1 surround sound skype phone a lot today and have apparently amassed a sizeable heritage museum with the amount of traction I’ve gained

I’ve also been driving accountability. that doesn’t mean I’ve been taking middle-aged men in bad suits around the ring road in a mondeo. it means I’ve put somebody else’s name at the top of the project plan and now its their fault if it all goes pear-shaped. even if the technology stack diagram does actually look a bit like a pear.

the trouble is, amidst all this metaphorical meandering, I completely forgot to push the envelope. which doesn’t mean I extended the boundaries of the business processes to enable a full-featured globalization capability. it means I forgot to push the envelope. into the post box. the envelope with my expense receipts in. arse.

sniffing the whiteboard marker

June 17, 2005

aaaaah. thanks geoff

3 discoveries today – skype for 3 hour conference calls, a medusa 5:1 surround sound headset, and idiots who cycle on the pavement are on the increase. I registered for skype a couple of days ago because I wanted to wear a headset to do conference calls. sick of that plastic crab in my ear and a rubber noose flapping around my neck, I wanted alternatives to the land line phones and headsets that I seem to have tried every combination of. The best I managed to do was a dect cordless wired to the BT office line with a mobile phone earpiece. everything else was rubbish. I tried a netcom headset phone but you couldn’t get it close enough to your ear without taking the headset apart and wiring the tiny speaker up to your brain. the end of the mic had a light on though. ooh. I tried a jacob jensen über slick handset phone with an amplified input, but the handset rubbed the skin off one side of my face and the blood trickling into the holes in the plastic triggered some kind of continental moodiness and everything went ingmar bergman. I even tried just using the mobile phone but if I said that out loud the telecoms team in EMEA would probably have me sell my body to medical research to pay for the charges. so, I figured I’d be able to use skype, get myself headset/phone/handset combination #17 and crank up the soundcard to 11, so that I can hear how we’re deploying the latest fix from SDL for once. no problem. just bought 10 euros of skypeout credit so I just need the headset.

so, it looks like those ‘skype ready’ headsets are a good bet. hang on. this guy on the ‘don’t buy skype ready headsets’ forum says don’t buy a skype ready headset because of course all headsets are skype ready. ok, that narrows it down then. I just want one that looks cool. that one’s nice. it’s a bit thin though. how about that one? it folds up and everything. no, rubbish. hang on though. wait a good goddam surround sound minute. a 5:1 surround sound headset? that works with skype, and DVDs, and games, and my audigy 2? and looks like you could wear it in a ridley scott film? and its only 40 quid? and is on play.com so postage is free? I think thats’ sold, mate!

moment of truth. I’ve unpacked everything, plugged it all in – nearly lost it in the excitement of plugging new kit into my soundcard – and now I’m ready to go. I got black hawk down from play for 6.99 for the hell of it, just to test these things out, and so its green light, green light to proceed to the crash site and put this thing into action. I get myself into a cinematic shellshock state, just to cleanse myself of mortal insignificances, slide the DVD tray into the dell, place headgear on head, sit back, and get ready to rawk.

bzzzbzzzzckcbzzzz. arse. interference. hang on, I’m going in. interference at 11 o’clock. typical. it’s the panasonic dect phone firing a last dying volley of electrostatic at the medusa hub. diiiiieeeeee! panasonic lies shattered in the dust, smoke from a virtual RPG billowing out in a vortex. right. go, go, go, go, go!

I have to say, the sound on this headset has just consigned my existing sony audophile headphones to the ‘also ran’ pile in the cellar. the eeriness of having off-camera dialogue and whizzing bullets coming at you from the back, front and side of your head is mental. I sit and watch the whole film, laughing like an idiot to myself and sporadically darting a look over my shoulder where I’m expecting to be shot by a somali sniper from the opposing rooftop, which is just the pub over the road, of course, but hell, it sounds like I’m in africa in a hellstorm. ok, so this thing works like it says on the box, so lets get plugged into the world of rebranding post-mortems and kick some project management ass. speed dial through the freephone sun switchboard to the internal routing to AT&T and then its ‘who just joined?’ and I’m in. and I sound magnificent. and I can hear everyone. and I can turn the sound on this conf call up at least 15 times louder if I want. and listen to robyn hitchcock at the same time without anyone knowing. upmixed to 5:1. genius.

as for the idiots, I’ve read a couple of others who have commented on the red light cyclist right of way contradiction, but as I rarely leave the house unattended and only then to walk the children to school, I have a different, more blood boiling problem. everywhere I go in Norwich right now, cyclists seem to prefer the path (sidewalk) to the perfectly good roadway 6 inches to the side of them. our house is on a good sized arterial road to and from the city centre. its wide. its nice. you could cycle on it. but no. there is no common denominator or demographic that defines the offenders. sure, they are often hoodies on joke mini bmx bikes that look like circus chimps, but its also middle aged lecturers, 20-something women with afros, anyone, but they all ride straight past our gate, which has shubbery (bring me..another shrubbery!) on either side, obscuring our view until we go through. but then its too late. the kids are young, and still run out of the gate just to be the first. the bikes come down that path at 20 miles and hour. one of my children will get killed one day. and that’s why I want to stab these mindless, irresponsible and ignorant people in the eyes with a pencil. I mean, I wouldn’t of course, but that’s the kind of thing you think when your children are put at risk by others. this happens on many paths, next to many perfectly good roads in Norwich and I’m sure many other towns and cities. there’s only so many times times I can spread myself across the width of the pavement as one of these bastards approaches at speed, until I forget my middle class sensibilities and push them into the road, into the oncoming traffic, as they do to me.

face down in the sand dunes

June 17, 2005

five minutes ago that sky was blue.

planned an excursion to the sea for the weekend so that means I get to do things right this time and behave all grown up. last time I went to waxham was on a 52-seater that somebody had organized from college and being as I had no will of my own at that time I simply booked myself on because there were a couple of people I kind of liked going and I got drawn in by my own shortcomings again. its a very vague recollection, because for most of the night, while those very people were dancing around a campfire to duran duran, I was face down in a sand dune inspecting my internal organs. you have to try these things once, but that was the single moment of clarity I had that night and from then on I’ve never touched it again. I mean, I’ve been face down and immobile in plenty of places since, but they were just kind of acceptable because I was a bit older and made my own choices about exactly how much John Bull was too much and then taking it that unacceptable couple of pints further.

so this time I expect I’ll be driving the scenic and we’ll have a barbeque with andy and helen and the kids will run into the sea with all their clothes on and I’ll have forgotten to pack the towel. or the spare clothes. or the kids. my brain is about as useful 25 years later as it was when I was trying to pick out a sandy lung from a sandy kidney in a pitiful mashed up state, except now its just a bit tired. I have a globalization project plan to finish by the end of today so we can tap up the exec sponsors and get commitment to our über plan for the next round of nirvana and I have to make sure that parcel is sent to ockley, I pack the swimming bag and sort out the tea and get the dark washing done and hung out.

but now the sky is black. its june. england’s whether is all cocked up. I need a shower, but the kind where I add gel, not the kind where the kids get drippy at breaktime because I didn’t take coats to school this morning, dammit. I think I’ll just get hard-fi on and sit here gawping at victoria for the rest of the morning. I swear she moved a minute ago. zzzzzz…..

Things what I writ

when I hear the word democracy, I reach for my headphones

I don’t care, now go away.

I’m not bothered about the noise though

that’s art, that is

oh yeah, well, that. you know.

sports day debacle

coefficient of alrightness

what I’m trying to say

sniffing the whiteboard marker

face down in the sand dunes

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