twitching in the flatiron crossing

May 26, 2005

Nordstrom, Foleys, Nordstom, Foleys, erm, left. No, straight on. will they have socks? of course they will. they’ll have those thin old man socks that cost $15 dollars and have diamonds up the side. right then, Foleys. Left. No, hang on, I can get presents in Nordstrum too. right, Nordstrum it is. ok, left. I think, hang on, ALRIGHT MATE! I’M THINKING!

stick the ceramic aztec trophy in the boot and swish through the doors, straight into Chan in menswear. “is there anything I can help you with today sir?” erm, no thankyou, I’m just being british and stalking around your footwear in a deliberate fashion while hunting for socks I refuse to ask you to locate for me. these shops are always empty when I go in them. I mean, Nordstrom. it’s huge, but there’s absolutely noone in here. is that just me? anyway, I don’t find socks, but upon realizing that flatiron crossing isn’t just 2 huge department stores stuck together in the middle, I head off into the wilderness of thursday evening mall shopping in Colorado. I need a tshirt. I have to fly back tomorrow in a tshirt that was fine when I flew out a week ago but following numerous bar meals in the tap room, with fat tire, slabs of hotel chocolate, lunchtime sushi, nachos, burgers, subways, beer, enchiladas, tubs of lard etc., my uber gut stretches the etnies logo out of shape and I look like I should be sat in a golf cart in florida with a havana in one hand and a colostomy bag in the other. so I just need to scale up slightly for the plane. it’s the altitude you see, it adds 20 pounds because of the air pressure or something, honest. right, banana republic. nope. helly hansen. yeah, right, I really need microfibres that stretch to fit and expose every contour. gap. nope. dick’s sporting goods. ooh, maybe, lets have a look. eh? there’s people wall climbing in here. that’s just stupid, get me out of here. hang on, they’re playing the carpet crawlers by genesis in a sports store in a broomfield mall in 2005. that’s just weird. mind you, I hang on for a couple more minutes to listen and pretend to look at basketballs I’ve no intention of buying. “you gotta get in in to get ou-ou-ou-ooou-out”. nope. abercrombie and fitch. it’s too dark in there. and a man just came out with a sideways head, I don’t like the look of that. pacific sunwear. sorry, Pac Sun. sounds a bit like Pac Man that martin has in his basement. ok, there’s 21 year olds in there I aspire to be like and I desperately want to wear their tshirts and be in their gang, so I’ll take a look, even though I’ve come straight from BRM01 and I’m wearing my meeting clothes so obviously I just look like their dad. or creepy trying-to-be-trendy uncle or something. ah so what. right, over to the shirt rack. ooh, fox, etnies, hurley, mad monkey, wet dog, quiksilver, billabong, rolf harris, and they’re 3 for 2. I have to try one on, because I still don’t know whether a US medium is a UK large or whether that’s just random. “Hi I’m Sara! I’ll be unlocking your changing room door for you today and closing it behind you! If you have any questions in Pacific Sunwear today, please give me a shout!”. er, ok. in the end, medium is medium, and I really need a fat git size today, so large it is. $42 dollars and a withering smile from me that says please let me be in your gang later and I’m out of there.

still no socks though. but now I have a shopping bag with stuff I’ve bought in it. that makes me a shopper. that means I can browse around other shops and for some reason staff completely ignore me, like I’ve been seduced by the dark side and they don’t need to pursuade me to part with my money. I’ve crossed the line. I will spend more, it’s the law. so with me bulging comfort blanket in me right hand and me left hand in my trouser pocket, I head back to victorias secret which I passed by earlier but pretended not to be interested in, even saying something like “ah yes, brookstone” out loud to myself so people thought I was intent on going somewhere else. I can now cross the threshold of this place as a shopper, which means I’m not just gawping at plunge bras like a 15 year old, I might actually buy one as well. for my wife. but actually, victorias secret is just so rampant it all gets too much for me and after doing one circuit, humming to myself apparently nonchalently, I try to stumble out gracefully, but I trip over the electronic tag detector in the doorway and set off the alarm with the magnetic strip on my library card. I think I just about hold it together while I crawl around the floor, picking up the contents of my wallet as it slithers away from me across the polished floor and me glasses fall out of my shirt pocket, where I’ve been keeping them like some professor or something. stand up. shoulders back. walk on. smile. try not to notice the entire staff in there are peering at you around the counter and the stock cupboard door like you’re some kind of pantomime freak on holiday who left his costume on. never mind that they’re all 19 and called Kirsty and they would have been happy to help you if you had any questions in victorias secret today, it’s too late. you’re an idiot. a fat idiot who hasn’t bought any presents and looks like a stupid dad person on vacation, looking for socks and loitering around lingerie shops.

anyway, I did get some socks. calvin klein, $10 each. then I went back to the hotel and sat in the bar on my own watching tv. I’m going to drive to Aspen tomorrow.

oi

May 26, 2005

shut it you blart. look, if I say you ave to change your business processes then you aint got a leg to stand on right? I mean, it stands to reason dunnit? you got a lahvly set of content there – oi, dave, ain’t that a lahvly set of content? look ere, look. its got tabs and everything, real class, not like that muck you get over at those cowboys down the east end. anyway, here’s the thing. I’ve got a proposition for you which I reckon you might take a fancy to. I just had an associate of mine drop round for a little chat, and we got talking in the back of the jag, see? it only turns out he’s got a bleedin globalization strategy for our web venues that massively reduces complexity in our publishing processes, enables content reuse and promotes a consistent, coherent voice to our customers, while providing a feature-rich user experience supporting local business priorities and an extensible content model that integrates localization workflow and plug-in web services on a centralized, internationalized, common web platform, dunnit?

so here’s the deal, my son. as I’m feeling generous and I’ve ad enough trouble with little narks like you today, I’m gonna let you in on a little bit of business. call it a mark of my gratitude for the loyalty you’ve shown to me over the years. I mean, you’re like a brother to me. except of course you ain’t, but you know, you’re like family, right? and what do families do? that’s right, my son, they share things. you share your takings and I share you a slap from ron here, but today it’s different, cos today, I’m sharing with you a chance to put all that behind you. what I’ve got for you today my son is only a bleedin global content model, innit? eh? geddit? a global content model. you know what that means, right? ere, ron, I don’t think he’s understanding me right. I ain’t seeing any gratitude. do I ave to spell it out for you? look, its a bleedin centralized content authoring and production environment with subscription, global tree merge, and all that nice stuff, based on a write centrally, view locally publishing model that supports the research and buy cycle in local language for a local market where we do 60% of that kind of stuff, whatever that is. it even lets you carry on authoring all those things you do youself and then sticks everything together in some kind sepository or something so it all looks like it’s supposed to be and not like its just fallen of the back of a virtual lorry and you’ve got some slave labour at 10 quid an hour to patch it up like a kipper. tell im dave,

look, this offer don’t last right? as soon as we’re out that door we’re off down whitehall to see a man about a bit of trouble with opening sauces or something, and then the offer’s closed. all I want you to do, my son, is just make a small change to your business process. that’s all. just a small change. all you have to do is stop making stuff that only works in one place and start making stuff that works in any place. then we’ll throw in the globalization bits and we’ll be laughin. that’s gotta be the best deal you’ve ad all day, right? tell him ron. make him understand the value of localization-readiness in content creation, but don’t make a mess, mind. I’ve already got blood on me Armani from that trip down camberley.

wake up dammit

May 24, 2005

19 hours of travelling and I’m sat in front a tv that’s 5 feet off the ground trying to focus on re-runs of CSI or something that’s got loads of earnest looking americans picking up suspicious objects from the floor of smoky warehouses in slowmotion and then cross fading to a train that goes over your head like what it does in the French Connection until some words or other slide into the frame and then just as I get it the adverts cut in and there’s a massive Nissan Globalwarmer driving across a desert with a boat in the back of it and a caption comes up at the bottom saying ‘professional driver in a simulated desert thats not real so dont do this at home in wisconsin because itll be all your fault when the chassis falls to bits and a flying camshaft takes out Mrs. Pantiles at number 47’. I must be dead in Colorado.

7 years ago all this was fields, well, probably a golf course, but now it’s full of hotels that you can see from 17 miles away but apparently I can’t find the entrance to without driving the wrong way up highway 36 and then taking a turning onto Interlocken and then realizing every turning here is called Interlocken so I’m no closer to my bed than I was 18 hours ago when I got out of it at 7 in the morning and said goodbye to my family like it was a trip across antartica but they actually were still asleep and just kind of said ‘yeah, er, bye’. in between then and now, which seems like about 5 fat tires and 2 bar meals in the tap room talking to Brad about cutting your thumb and listening to Tom going on about wine which is just a bit warm, but definitely not corked, I managed to squeeze in a bus a plane and a chevy cheapskate. oh, and a taxi to the bus station, where Ron dropped me off as we saw a couple kissing each other goodbye and he said ‘youre not getting one of those mate!’ and he was right, even if I offered him double the fare. I usually stay in a rubbish hotel in the heathrow flight path the night before flying out, well its practically on the runway, just at the point where they dump 10 hours worth waste over berkshire, but the flight to denver leaves at 15:50, so rather than taking 2 weekends out I decided to take the bus in the morning to the airport, because the bus isn’t that bad really. unless it’s sunday morning at 7 oclock and the driver has obviously just had a row about eggs with his wife and will happily call the IT specialist an ‘arsehole’ who just put his bag in the luggage compartment marked in his head as ‘gatwick’ instead of the secret one called ‘heathrow’. that was the longest 4 hour bus journey ever. so I get to heathrow about 4 hours before I need to and because I’ve checked in online, I can’t check in yet and so I have to sit in the pre-departures ‘seating area’ which is like finding a dry piece of newspaper to sit on at glastonbury – funny for 2 seconds. 2 hours later I can check in, but that’s alright, because my online check-in means I ‘beat the queues’. apart from the queue that is everybody who has checked in online for British Airways, which is the longest queue of all queues in this collection of queues that is a check in area at heathrow airport.

anyway, as Patricia says, BA’s service onboard is impeccable, even thought the 777 I’m sat in is pants compared to a 747-400 and I’m damned if I can work out when Hotel Rwanda is going to start, so I end up watching Hide and Seek instead which has that 6th sense twist that you kick yourself for not seeing an hour before and then de niro goes all cape fear/tribble, which just isn’t so good at 60, especially when you can see him in Meet the Fockers on channel 16 on the screen on the seat next door. kind of takes the tension out of it when he’s simultaneously wielding a blood-spattered spade and rescuing a toy dog from a toilet . still, dakota fanning was a great dark-haired miseryguts. I managed to squeeze in another film I’ve already completely forgotten about before we landed and no sooner had I stepped off the Avis shuttle bus than I realized I probably couldn’t find my way out of airport in the chevy preferredaccount without at least breathing some real air. I stopped for a while in the car lot and remembered that last time I came here with Chris, Air Force 1 was just landing and we watched it taxi up to the gate where will smith and tommy lee jones appeared from a range rover and we got whisked away to the marriot in Boulder.

having eventually negotiated InterlockenEverywhere I was checked into the Omni and there I sat on the end of the the bed, after a couple of swift ones in the tap room talking with a nice woman from StorageTek about Malcolm Glazer and bikes, flicking through the interactive services menu to see if the bar bill was already on my online statement which it wasn’t which I though was interesting but actually soon realized that just meant I should go to bed and stop being so sad. for some reason I woke up on the hour, every hour, until it was time to get up again. I can’t explain that, but I’ll probably not try and program the radio alarm clock and the p800 and the tv and wake up service all at the same time tonight.

words they mean nothing

May 20, 2005

so I’m flagging down a peasant with last night’s evening news but he’s straight past and ducking into the Black Horse for a swift Adnams while Angelique nimbles her way onto the pavement and clatters her joss sticks all over the counter at Dave’s place. he’s got the arseache cos Andy’s meandering over the 3:50 at Ripon with a catflap full of bilge and an uncontrollable mare. while everyone’s having a butchers, he pokes the lip of charlotte rampling with a pencil and blarts out some diatribe or other about lost shoe factories collecting dust in the undercroft of the Honiton embassy club.

oi, oi, oi, get off the path. its people like you that make poeple like me that are like you wish you would run over my tractor so I can chase you with a pitchfork down the alley, wailing like edward woodward in the wickerman and stabbing your indulgent rear with all the pent up rage that can be squeezed through my wormhole of injustice. you can see how intolerable you are, right? look, there’s another, 26 years old and acting like a parrot on Right Charlie, except those parrots don’t hurt when they hit your head, they just squawk a bit and flop into the nissan micra. you, on the other hand, will strike the fish stall of inconvenience and will trip over the sponge of idiocy and knock the wing mirrors off the shoe shop of petulance and will by your actions be made to sing along to eurovision for eternity, snipping pictures of kerry catona out of Now magazine and selling clacton pier to the japanese.

by way of which, I went over to the bottle bank and slipped in a vole, which caused a bit of an overflow into the garden, so I coughed up a monkey and headed back to the office, where I woke up the next morning with ainsley harriot boiling my eggs in a tiny brown bucket.

javaone one. I mean the first one. you know what I mean.

May 20, 2005

1996. It was the beginning of a short period when I was a really quite bad java programmer. still, I got the JavaOne backpack and realized that its possible to have a garden on top of a bunker in the center of town. well, I say the center, but it’s not really, but that means I could park in that garage down the road next to the freeway where I discovered that the rental car had lights that come on by themselves. which is nice, but couldn’t turn them off.

I’ve still got the backpack, but I can no longer overload an operator, unless it’s the statusline for BT broadband. I recall that nobody really knew what the hell was going on at the event and just kind of wondered around clutching handouts and pieces of cheese and trying to work out which was the most popular breakout session. which was probably beans. or servlets. in fact, they were probably the only breakout sessions. oh, and Scott held up the 7 inch future of computing and we all rocked.

it was great. I ate Casey Jones for 2 weeks straight, ages before that bloke on the telly.

no, it’s really just rubbish

May 19, 2005

too bad. 22 years forcing myself to like Barrett, but today I give it a 2, which means I’ll never hear it again. stupid tea-brained outcast, whining uncontrallably in front of a fireplace in his bare-floorboards front room while dave and nick bring him soup from the co-op and prop him up on a stool, where he just dribbles into his chest, the spark gone right out. I used to live in the flat upstairs to that room when I was sticking £35 price tags on mono copies of piper at the gates of dawn in the upstairs of the cambridge beat goes on and I thought that was just very cool, but actually neither of those things were and now I’m deleting him from my playlist to make way for The Longcut, so there.

in between sticking pins in my arm to remind myself I’m still here and that I really should be revising the standard templates and indexes for global venues in line with Sun’s rebranding and the things I forgot to do in the first place, I’m fiddling with a P800 and pointing a gun at my foot as I think about what to put on the Tadpole to see me through the next week in the land of high-altitude Jagermeister and a big bed at the Omni that I’ll probably fall out of at 4 in the morning as I stumble for the hotel ethernet cable that will connect me up to the Sun network to coordinate Japan. I have to use photoshop, so I have to use XP. I need to install JDS, but I really don’t have the wit to dual boot and I only have 1 day to sort it out anyway and by the way, if you’re thinking of suggesting the gimp, then don’t. I’ll do the right thing when I get back and then reinstall the entire home network with solaris 10 and get VPN working because chris managed it so I should be able to, even though he’s got a Ferrari now like what all them engineers do. you just need to get NAT to point to the right port and apparently a tunnel opens up, like fricken Narnia or something. I dunno.

so i’m going to rip the heart out of an About Sun gateway and stick it back together again with ‘I know what I’m talking about, really’ glue, ready to hoof over to the development team to do that stuff they do with XML and god knows what and then I’ll stick a new stylesheet on the press pages and wrap up the indexes like dynamic fajitas and then I’ll ask the lovely people in Australia if they would like to opt in to changing the world and everything in it just by configuring their NSAPI. or I’ll have another pie. pie it is. hang on, Spiritualized. blimey, that’s a bit rubbish too.

Things what I writ

twitching in the flatiron crossing

oi

wake up dammit

words they mean nothing

javaone one. I mean the first one. you know what I mean.

no, it’s really just rubbish

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twitching in the flatiron crossing

oi

wake up dammit

words they mean nothing

javaone one. I mean the first one. you know what I mean.

no, it’s really just rubbish

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