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.

Things what I writ

can you tell what it is yet?

hola you

it’ll all fall apart

genius

lasering my face

upside down in the duke of norfolk

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Things what I writ

can you tell what it is yet?

hola you

it’ll all fall apart

genius

lasering my face

upside down in the duke of norfolk

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