i say editors, you say netbeans

February 28, 2006

I’ll just do a quick story although that will probably be a whole chapter as they’re quite short and we need to see whether there’s anything useful in justice strauss’ extensive library which might tell us something about inheritance law and then I really have to go as there’s probably at least 1 other bunch of geordies or something to squeeze in before we get to what seems to be the unofficial official time of around 9:50 when they’ll flash that torch from the front so that the serious looking pair on the mixing desk know when to dim the lights and crank it up to 11 by which time there’s already a few pairs of feet in the air which will get hauled out by the efficient security staff behind the barrier and get chucked out into to night where the ice cream van that’s been modded to flog burgers and ecoli will gather them up and they’ll never be seen again at least not by me

everyone’s feeling a bit sunday night as its sunday night but we’re kind of kind to the guys on stage from newcastle who I have no idea about although they shout nicely and we all cheer when the bass player jumps down from the stage to confront an annoying troglodite from swaffham who’s been heckling throughout but we don’t get a fight although we do get a pointy finger in the face and a look of thunder and then he gets back on stage and starts playing again and the whole band crack up and he grins for the rest of the set which is funny but no sooner have they gone than the snake trail to the dance pit begins as we’re making early territorial claims on bits of floor that will be covered in plastic and beer in an hour anyway but if you don’t make a move now the only way to do it later is to get ubersweaty and take your shirt off so you slime past people and they clear a path to the front which is particularly effective if you smell real bad and look like you’re stoned past the point of coherence and probably uncontrollably violent but I haven’t done that for years and before you know it there’s a band called brakes on who look like they met in a youth hostel in the brecons via quebec and do 30 seconds songs about picking up the phone blair blair blair and cheney stop being such a dick and a few slightly longer ones about having a life and love and after a good 40 minutes we all think they’re marvellous and when the lights come on we take a quick look at the posters on the pillars about their album which we ignored before

and then said flashlight occurs and suddenly its the 1980s and I’m watching echo and the bunnymen at the ipswich gaumont and u2 at the uea and a whole bunch of 4ad artists who like to play guitars using only 1 string but really loud except that actually its editors and fancy that, someone’s come to the uea and put on a proper show like what they used to with projectors and backlit hanging sheets and those white lights that look like stars and shine in your face and a healthy collection of strobe lights that nearly go for a full unbroken 10 seconds at one point while we’re all catatonic down the front shouting “as the FIN-GERS-BLEED in the FAC-TO-RIES” and “youdon’tneedthisdiseaseyoudon’tyoudon’tyouDON’T” and “I still love the LIGHT on BABY” in a really horrible high-pitched squeal but we’re loving it and even though tom’s guitar is mixed so far down you can bearly hear it and a significant amount of the stage lights point toward the crowd meaning we’re lit up for a lot of the time which means we can actually see each other which is quite off-putting and really kills the atmosphere we have a rather nice time. aah, there’s nothing like a healthy nostalgia trip and if you’re old enough to have been there the first time but can still do it 25 years later without looking like you just there to do some kind of sociology study or something then its bonus time. did someone say big country? ooh, that’s a bit harsh…

daddy, my daddy

February 23, 2006

what day is it today? saturday. what are we doing today? we’re going for the rest of that walk we did the other day. what walk? the one we didn’t finish because it started to rain and you were banging on about some stuffed chicken in that shop up the hill for one pound fifty so we had to go up there in just as everything was closing and bother that woman again and pull everything off the shelves and pushing them back on again in a space about 10 feet square with 6 of us in it when she really just wanted to go home and show her mates the one that goes boing when you slap it on the counter and you really wanted another one of those stuffed things but you’ve got a hundred already but we said we would go back if you were still interested which obviously you were because you moaned for about 2 hours and growled at everyone so that’s it. oh.

just as the sun arcs over the moors and the mist is still cloaked on the tracks we scuttle down to the start of part two, just crossing over to brow hill as the 9:15 blows through and we’re lucky enough to be crossing the bridge as it goes underneath which is terribly exciting and so we all stick our heads over the tunnel exit and wait for it to emerge forgetting that its not an electric one or even a diesel one which would have been alright but its a chunking great steam one straining to get up the first hill and so as we all look over the edge and it passes underneath we are totally whited out in an explosion of combustion and half of us are shrieking and running around in circles of panic while the rest are just are laughing maniacally and also shrieking a bit but in a strange idiotic way that we haven’t done since we were about six years old and after a couple of seconds the steam begins to clear and we’re saying things like ‘wasn’t that exciting?’ to small children who are clinging onto our legs like petrified koalas and we watch as the thing lumbers up the hill to the next station which is probably about 30 seconds away as the whole line is only about 2 miles long or something and coicidentally that’s where we’re headed so we can get the train back, isn’t that exciting? it’s the one from the railway children, you know the one at the end where their dad who isn’t a spy arrives and we all burst into wails of tears.

what day is it today? what?

yes, this one

February 22, 2006

I’m thinking that we’d thought about that one but you know, I just can’t remember so we should probably think about it as open unless you find what you were looking for but wait, that’s it, it was there all the time I’m sorry it must have just slipped through the net somehow like a lot of things do. anyway its the same problem as the other problem and I do know what we’re doing about that one so if you don’t mind waiting until 2008 then I think we’ll be about ready to deploy the first phase of many phases which might not happen after the first phase becomes the last phase and we change the business model and decide we actually don’t need to build it ourselves but hmm we can’t work out who else might build it for us and look its 2007 so I think I might just slip out this door and change my job title so actually if you look closely I’m not actually remotely accountable for that anymore because now I do this instead, see? but I do understand the problem, of course I do. its just that, er, I have to go now

we’ve set the implementation date already so even if you don’t know what I’m talking about it’ll happen anyway and I know you’re all interested to know exactly how we came up with that decision but I can assure you that it was based on a very long list of important things in my head which were relevant and critical at some point and we also happen to have someone there who happens to be doing something else with a similar sounding name so we should expect to be able to leverage some of that groundwork and at least excuse ourselves in the knowledge when it comes to it we really couldn’t forsee the confusion that would have been caused by overlapping programs with the same name happening at the same time in the same place being resourced and managed by completely different business units in the same company who are actually in the office next door but I don’t talk to them because, well, I don’t really like the way they look at me.

I’ll put some kind of agenda together. and then go on holiday.

at least we know we don’t know

February 21, 2006

you’re not supposed to know anything anyway regardless of whether you actually know everything I mean, it don’t cost nuthin to be polite about it, right? you could pull it all over yer face and never a no-nobody should know about it like it’s that’s always the way innit. I can’t help it if they put that stuff out there and I mean, they say they know what they want but do they actually ever bovver to find out whether that’s really true, I mean you done all that stuff right? that’s not your job right? hang on, pass that little plastic knife, I can’t get this milk open and she’s coming back for the little plastic cup in a minute and she’ll let me keep it but what do I want with a plastic cup right? I mean, its not like up here its any different to down there, and across there even though its a bit mental and they carry bags full of cash around when they’re down the arches checking out prices on plumage and stuff so what’s it all that abaht then? listen. I’ll tell you what, gis a bit of that there cheesecake and we’ll call it quits.

aah. see? I knew that would happen. I just dint know she was there thas all so it ain’t my fault if it gets all mashed up when it escalates. I mean, you gotta be reasonable about it but when they come here with their bits and pieces and expect us to just pick em up, box em and ship em out to japan well it’s no wonder that the graph is like that is it? hang on. now. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s a place down there that has sandwiches. yeah, I know

you liking support sir?

February 16, 2006

you stay loyal to a company and you like a little in return, I mean, any company wants a dependable repeatable revenue stream even if it’s just the kind that comes in once a year because the product just failed outside the warranty or I’d broken it myself by being a clumsy arse. so then ideally you’d expect a technology company to provide support services to individuals who buy their products via integrated and intelligent web venues because we all know that people who buy technology products can’t speak to real people on the phone. especially if the people on the other end of the phone are girls.

having added a couple of bits to my ever-expanding brushed aluminium sony garage sale recently I figured I might register these things online like the registration docs tell you to in order to get the extra benefits of indirect marketing campaigns you didn’t realize you’d agreed to by clicking the submit button. this will be easy because I’m already registered with the MySony and SonyStyle web sites so they know all about me.

if I have to explain how painful the next 3 hours of my life were, you probably use the phone instead. if I didn’t even need to tell you that the next 3 hours were painful then you’re probably working in a techology company wondering why its taken 10 years to do single signon and it still isn’t there yet.

1 + 1 = 870

February 14, 2006

a week away and a small panic. we’ll be wisping across the west yorkshire moors searching for pieces of cathy and heathcliff in bits of dead sheep that were knocked over by porsche cayennes on the way to leeds and naturally we’ll be without the tadpole which is alright because who needs it I never really use it until I need to create an entire collabspace of presentation materials in about 3 hours in a hotel in colorado and so the unconnected electricals will just have to fend for themselves on a kind of week’s worth of self-discovery away from the mothership. I think they can make it. but hang on, what’s up here? that was working perfectly until I stuck the usb hub into it and now I’m only getting gemma hayes in my right ear and I don’t have the guarantee of course and anyway I dropped this thing straight after I got it and broke the battery compartment and now it’s held together with one of madeleine’s pink hairbands so if I stride into the sony centre in the mall they’ll just think I’m having a laugh which I try anyway only to find the sony centre is now closed down and the nearest one is in cambridge or something anyway so that’s that.

so, that’s 1 sony network walkman I’ll be without next week then because I can’t possibly justify buying another one when I really need to buy some food this month and so I face the prospect of a couple of weeks or even a couple of months without the waxy foam plugs clamped in my ears wherever I go which isn’t far but its always with the walkman so dammit I’m just going to have to buy another and not tell anyone and hope the new one looks like the one enough to get away with it which it won’t but I’ll justify it buy never buying any more shoes as long as I live or something. that was easy. after skulking around the mediocre electrical outlet selection in norwich for a couple of hours, having to listen to real people’s conversations in the street for the first time in about 20 years I head back to john lewis for the 4th time because actually they’ve got all the network walkmans and so why didn’t I just buy one there in the first place and end up thinking that the link might be an option. I mean, honestly.

so 120 quid lighter, I’m out of there with a shiny new NM407 which even has screensavers for a screen it doesn’t have an a flashable prom which must be good but most importantly has 1gb of flash memory and 50 hours battery life which is perfect for the northern jaunt and will afford me the luxury of around 450 tracks using atrac3 which is fine with me even if you do have to use sonicstage to get them on there but hell, it’s a sony and I’ll put up with anything for a sony.

but now I’m thinking that I have another problem with the absence of the tadpole for regular docking. the w1 only has a 256mb memory stick and if there’s any half-decent weather at all I’ll use 256mb up in about a day with around 101 shots of decomposing brontëesque sheep, closeups of bits of grass and dilapidated sheds and stuff which I think will make art but will just make placemats and so I’m thinking more along the lines of a 1gb memory stick and a couple of cloudy days. except that I remember that last time Iooked at those on amazon they were about 200 quid and so that’s probably less likely than getting a new walkman. which I’ve just done. sooo, let’s take a quick look then. a m a z o n . c o . u . k. right, let’s see. ooh. recommendations for you, mr tim. not now. search shops for “sony memory stick 1gb” including the double quotes, natch, and I see that although it doesn’t come direct from amazon but via one of their dodgy storefronts for some bloke who usually has a carpet laid out on oxford street (a model we might actually consider for our new ecommerce global storefronts incidentally) I see that a 1gb card is now only 40 quid. genius. there you are mr unknown quantity maybe reputable but I doubt it I’ve probably just lost 40 quid etrader, a sum of money. please let me have one of your lovely sony 5 year guaranteed 1 gb memory sticks and I shall be on my way good man.

it arrives on time and it’s even a nice shade of black – a ‘pro’ stick no less – complete with a handy explanation of their odd postage charge set by amazon and offset by the trader but who cares about that its a 1gb memory stick dammit. and look here, I can now take 420 ultrafine 5.1mp shots without having to delete anything. except I won’t have enough battery to look at them all, but it’ll be just like having my 35mm film camera again and not knowing how bad all my shots are until I get home. excellent.

blimey, its the small faces

February 10, 2006

just had time to wolf down the roast dinner before I bolted out the door leaving family chaos behind me like a fleeing teenager going to meet his girlfriend outside the doors of the lower common room at the university which is coincidentally where I was going but not to meet my girlfriend because she’s now my wife and I’ve just left her with some rather unpleasant washing up and 3 school packed lunches to make but that’s ok because I’ll get a list of things I won’t remember that I have to do tomorrow unless I get left a list

tonight I’m banking on the fact that 4 bands can’t all cancel at the same time seeing as tonight they’re all on at the same time and so unlike that class A fatboy shambles who got himself arrested and our finnish friends who declined to turn up at all, oh, and the wierdos who were sick or summat, I’m expecting mystery jets, we are scientists, arctic monkeys and maximo park to give us a performance that people who weren’t there will be remembering for at least, ooh, a year or so or as young alex said in 20 years when its all over will say they were there when they actually might have been down the front asking for girls aloud like what he said innit. as it happens, I’m not early enough to see the young boy with his dad in the band do their thing and they’re just sticking with agnes by the time I get to the bar for a customary stella in a ‘plastic glass’ that will be recycled before our eyes under 100s of tiny feet later on. oh well.

hang on. its busy in here. I saw the rakes a couple of weeks ago and you could stroll onto the floor and put out a deckchair pretty much, but this time its absolutely mashed full of youngsters with their hair and tshirts. not since 1981 has this place been so full of 14 year olds and I was one of them so I know and by the way I do remember 20+ years later when it’s all over because it isn’t because the band I saw then just picked up 5 grammys which is nice and so it was me down the front then except I wasn’t shouting for girls aloud, but maybe for girls, aloud but by a strange coincidence I now also have girls aloud. I’m not entirely sure that all these people are here to see we are scientists, good as they are but that dance floor bit is already moving around like a strange mass with it’s own brain and there must be about 800 people in a space where 600 is probably enough to be rather too personal. I mean, they’re good and they do american jokes and things like they’re out of a spike jonze video and everyone gives them a courteous amount of mobile phone picture taking time and then they’re gone and everybody’s looking at their watch because actually they know from previous reports that arctic monkeys will take the stage at 9 pm and so we’re all eyeing up the preferred route to the mosh pit and where we might end up when we take our feet from the floor and just let our bodies get hoofed around in a sweaty crush.

I give up caring about anything by about 8:55 and so take it upon myself to just barge through about 20 poor young girls in black mohair and squeeze past assorted 18 year old soft southerners, spilling their plastic pints on the way because they don’t deserve to have drinks on the dance floor and after about 10 minutes I’m right in the middle of the floor getting my head in everyone’s way but they should care because in approximately 30 seconds the whole place is going to go mental ape sh*t as the reason at least 50% of the people are here are about to strop onto the stage and give us 40 minutes of south yorkshire monkeyness. as they come on about 20 girls faint on the spot and about 20 boys do as well and when they launch into whatever song it was they launched into I get a flashback to the clash at the brixton academy although not because the arctic monkeys remind me of the clash at all its just that I had a strange feeling I was going to lose my shoes in the brixton academy violent mosh madness and for some reason felt it again here in the uea common room about 25 years later which maybe is what the arctic monkeys are all about except it occurs to me now that they are actually the reincarnation of the small faces which isn’t a bad thing at all and so I keep that thought in my head and jump up and down and get crushed and mashed up and frankly have more fun than a fat balding 38 year old should have when he’s surrounded by students and fake tales of san francisco is a great tune anyway and worth the entrance fee which was doubled by the time I paid it to some bloke on ebay who’s girlfriend couldn’t go.

so then they’re off and so are a sizeable section of the audience who must have to catch a really early bus or summat and so things thin out about and I’m just wringing out my ‘I swam the Pacifico’ tshirt when those lovely northern neo-punks maximo park dart on and pull a few art school poses before giving us all a 50 minute reminder why they are top of the bill after all. because they’re loads better than all the others really. and they’re really nice. so there. I sing out loud. embarassing, but worth it. lose some pressure, apply some pressure, lose some pressure, apply some pressure…

travelogue 11

February 9, 2006

that’s it, its time I was going, so back in the suzuki geriatric and we’ll head down the toll road to the airport where I might even get my trainers shined up by those guys by the stairwell before getting a double scoop of artichoke and onion and syrup of figs ice cream from errol who plainly doesn’t want to be there serving me so my lame english jokes about tubs and cones and traffic go down like a lead balloon but I’m past caring by this stage because I’m never going to see these people again and in 2 hours I’ll be dribbling into an all day breakfast that comes in a cardboard box at dinnertime while the lights are going out all around me and the seat in front is tilted so far back that I’m licking the lcd screen in the seatback everytime I try and take a bite of this nondescript food thing which is just dropping stuff all over my trousers which I can’t see anyway so who cares but it’s the principle even though its cheap BA class I want to be able to move a leg from time to time.

in the end I strike lucky on the journey back like I did back in november and there’s 2 spare seats in the whole plane and they’re both next to me in the row of 3 so as soon as the seat belt sign goes off I’m shifting to the middle, putting all the armrests up, making myself 5 feet wide and sprinkling unsavory looking items from my hand luggage around the place so it looks a bit of a slum. mind you, having a row of 3 seats to myself in world traveller plus is about as exciting and comfortable as having a row of 3 upturned crates in a row in a dark cupboard if you’re over 6 feet tall/long and so try as I might to lie down during the 9 hours flight I just end up sitting upright in the middle falling in and out of consciousness but just aware enough to know that I’m regularly snorting myself awake with a horrible ad hoc snore and my head is nodding like a deranged donkey on speed and so by the time we’re taxiing up to the terminal I have stretch armstrong neck and my head is wobbling all over the place.

only security to go now though. oh, and I have to walk through the labyrith of the heathrow airport connectiong tunnels for about 30 minutes. and then take a 4 hour bus ride back home. nice. at least we’re going to the pub tonight when I get home by which time I’ll probably have been up for about 3 days and so I’ll have a gin and tonic and go mental and lose all my friends. looking forward to the next time already

travelogue 10

February 8, 2006

I think we can do this tomorrow right I have the morning and probably some or most of the afternoon before I leg it back to the airport where that same woman as last time does the fast track BA check in except this time she’s not a new clerk and so hopefully I won’t have to tell her how to do it and where the homeland security stand is where I’ll have to leave behind some stem cells or something before I can buy an ice cream except this time it’s moved next to the BA gates and there’s another scary looking DIA staff member placing my body parts on the scanner before I can go to the bit in the middle of the departure lounge where you just walk round in circles for ages wondering where the rest of the departure lounge is until it slowly dawns on you that this is all the departure lounge and what’s wrong with it just being a stairwell anyway?

perhaps we can do 10 til 12 and then maybe add a 12 til 1 and add it to the end until 3 but you know I’ll really have to get going then and I agree it’s valuable use of my time here to sit next to a whiteboard and scribble the meaning of user experience life because we don’t often have all these brians in one room, especially a room where have a big enough whiteboard to solve the services into ecommerce problem but then maybe we’ll do that later because right now we should probably start to think about actually what the scenarios are that are applicable to folks in the yemen who really want to interact with us via the web to control their account information and download service plans but they actually want to do it in spanish with yen prices because that’s an acceptable local business model apparently and anyway who’s to say the yemen isn’t a growth market for us, oh, you do. so let’s just do a french person in france buying stuff in euros shall we? can we do that? oh.

right, I do really have to go now and pack up before tomorrow because I’m checking out in the morning and I’m due to go out to some place where the pope’s head spins around and spits chianti at you while cheerleaders bark around the sistine chapel and so I’m not anticipating being particularly clear headed in the morning when I have to navigate web tv to avoid breathing over the concierge when I want to check out without checking out so I’ll see you in the morning. I feel tired all of a sudden.

travelogue 9

February 7, 2006

nice jacket. hmph. after a successful day in a conference room where we all decided we all had the same problems but we hadn’t published a list of solutions since 1996 and that we should probably really think about getting on the same project management dashboard for at least the things that we know we can collaborate on which is apparently most of them it was time to round up some of the outcomes and assign some actions and depart for the next set of meetings feeling like you’ve at least justified the travel expenses and the rest of the week will probably be spent cruising into meeting rooms on the second floor called something like Shirttail Hammer Creek Ironing Disaster where we’ll solve all our globalization problems with a sudden collective brain schism and we can all go home and have sausage with the pope.

except it doesn’t happen like that. the first thing that doesn’t happen is that the adaptor adaptor I need for the electric shaver that yes I packed myself and no nobody has had the chance to tamper with has not been found and so as the day progresses I’m looking more like I chose to look like something out of miami vice which of course would be a social disaster but maybe I can just carry it off but looking really tired and pretending that actually jetlag affects me coming this way and not going that way and so I might even turn it into a sympathy vote thing except its obvious that I always look this tired anyway and so that’s not going to be any good as an excuse for bristling in an engineering meeting about acceptabe exceptions to the globalization rule where everybody else will have chins like beech worktops rubbed with baby oil but hey, I’ll just use the intellectual juxtaposition card and make sure I wear the nice brown jacket and my glasses that make me look like a cross between something out of 1960s britain, 1970s france and 1990s netherlands but mainly the british bit like damien hurst except his cost like £500 and mine were 35 quid from dolland and aitchison which says it all really.

dammit. it must be in here somewhere. idiot

Things what I writ