objectionful

October 14, 2005

there’s nothing like a bit of quiet middle class uproar to get you acquainted with your neighbours. we’re friendly with them next door and she keep bringing us plums, but there’s five houses in acuba terrace and I never speak to the occupants of three of them even though we pass each other on the pavement as we dodge the pavement cyclists and dog presents and we smile weakly like we know we should invite each other round for a gin and tonic and a wedge of brie but really, life is so impossible with the children at their clubs and us seeming to always be down at waitrose, flicking through the salads and maris piper, trying to fill out our weekly meal planner for less than a tun, but oh, those tarts looks lovely and blimey, I’ve got to get that ganache. so, I watch them pile into their multiplas and their golfs and they probably see us tumbling out of the scenic after swimming on friday or trampolining on saturday or skipping on thursday or yarmouth on sunday or dorset at half term or burnham market at easter or the video shop when its raining and they probably think they should probably invite us round or something but best wait until we’ve finished the kitchen because it looks a bit of a mess at the moment and anyway, we’ve not done with the utility room yet so really, its just bad timing and maybe when we’ve got the living room straightened out we could invite the whole terrace round. for christmas. in 2007.

so, when the friendly neighbourhood pubs thought they should really apply for extended hours under the new legislation so that the local vehicle remoulding squads and extreme wall repointers could get a few more swift pints of stella in before pissing into our gardens and barking at the moon, we all naturally got terribly upset at the prospect and miraculously we all found ourselves suddenly gathered around the kitchen table at number blah blah blah for a hastily convened residents meeting with our local councillor and the area police community catchment coordinator with water on the table and a chairperson and everything. being the kind of residents we are, we naturally had in our terrace a solicitor, a writer, a project officer, a pensioner, an expert committee leader, a teacher and about 17 IT consultants. well, 2. to say the meeting was organised was something of an understatement. I thought about doing it remotely at first so I didn’t have to walk 2 doors down, but in the end, that would have probably made it into the meeting minutes which would have ended up being published on a residents committee website somewhere and I would never live it down. we had a chair, we took our turns to cover our agenda items. we had a lively and informative discourse with the police and local council representative and we ran to time and captured all our action items and of course, agreed on some next steps and a broad outline of our plan of action going forward into the next millennium. it was like being at work. but with my neighbours. who I didn’t even really know, at least, nowhere near as well as I know the people I work with who are all the other side of the atlantic and live in mountains and stuff.

but at least I got to meet everyone I normally just catch a glimpse of out of my office window as they unload the farm goods and swimming bags, and actually they’re quite, well, nice. when we’ve got the kitchen and bathroom sorted out and got the pictures up and decided what we’re going to do about the hall and the back garden and then spent endless days and about ten thousand pounds putting everything in its right place, we might just invite them round for tapas and a vegetarian cocktail with bits in.

verily plucking out mine eyes

September 19, 2005

hardware is throttling my membranes and the jagged sawtooth blade of the cutter in my skull is jarring my eyeballs at 2000 rpm. that shouldn’t do that when I quit. reboot, quick. ooh. dammit. that didn’t work. I thought I might get away with just swapping out the ATI X800 for something new, and be done with it, but it’s something else. its my precious precious diamond pro 2070SB. its buzzing like a demented asbo on a saturday night in norwich, outstaring me in a frenzied, worrying kind of way, which suggests its about to fall in the river, mashed up on diamond white and draw. all over the screen is a fusion of distorted scan lines and broken wires and I can barely read the hotline number in the feverish haze.

trouble is, that number is useless. the warranty is about as current as Tony Bennett, so I’m going to have to make the horrible choice I’ve been trying not to make for years. CRT or LCD. I’m feeling flat, but granular.

the uncanny parallel of funky monkeys

September 15, 2005

while I’m banging my head against some bright red foam cladding on an upright scaffold pole and throwing up the fishy stars and ice cream I had 2 minutes ago, I’m noticing that the parallel worlds of soft play areas and program management are inextricably linked. I’m in both of them at some point in most days. no, I mean, I’m actually in either a warehouse by the airport converted to a roller skating/rope netting and dayglo platform hell, or in the office trying to work out whether a PPD comes before a PRD or whether I’ve used the wrong paradigm or something, while I’m looking out the window at a 17 year old on the way to Top Shop to meet her mates with similarly inconsequential vests. In either case, I usually end up sat in the corner dribbling while children run around me in insane circles, flailing me with Tamagotchis hung with Scoobie string and doing that horrible squawking noise with means I’ve told them its either time to go home or time to go to the bathroom, depending on which reality I’m in at the time.

I mean, soft play is something of a misnomer. 1cm of bin-end foam wrapped round a girder and covered with stretched latex doesn’t cushion the blow of the equal and opposite reaction of my head crashing into it as I plunge through a pair of giant sponge rollers at the end of some labyrinthine world of rope tunnels, things covered in rubber bats and plastic vortexes at 70 degree angles, after I’ve heard the unmistakable cry of a poleaxed child who I think is mine at the very top of the evil construction although I can’t really hear because in these places, well, you just can’t really hear. its like some kind of infant cacophony torture aimed at displacing you through sensory overload until every child in the place sounds like yours and they’re all crying like hyenas in a high pitched screeching kind of way that makes your ears bleed. I just have no idea idea where I am at that point, as I pick the shreds of moulded plastic from my receding head and the blood trickles onto the padded floor. which I have to pay to get cleaned probably.

similarly, I follow some equally mindnumbing paths through the chaos that is my flimsy grip on the world of something approaching adequate program management, which will almost certainly see me teetering on the edge of a 100 foot platform, covered with grease and nails, labelled ‘life cycle’ or something just as terrifying and just as I think I’ve selected the path that bears the unbearable lightness of delivery, an enormous foam hammer crashes onto my cranium and somebody in the darkness flicks on the devil’s PA and cackles something about business requirements so loud that my ears bleed and so I’m flapping about wildly in the hope of catching hold of at least 1 document that has something on it I wrote in 2002 but is still relevant and its at that point that I crash into the cliffside of scope creep and am dumped unceremoniously onto the rocks of dependency, which are made of sharp, pointy dayglo plastic by the way, and I end up on the padded floor, picking the shreds of moulded plastic from my receding head and wiping off the spittle before anyone notices.

there’s some kind of magical doorway that links these two anti-Narnias somehow, but I’ve not come across it yet. its probably only visible from the outside and it has ‘staff only’ on it. and it probably revolves. forever.

birth and death

September 12, 2005

we have some good friends that we first got together with at our pre-natal classes in Guildford, when a small group of slightly anxious 20-something couples met up in the living room of a slightly insipid 40-something facilitator, all of us wondering what on earth was going to happen to our lives. most of us fell neatly into the middle class and comfortable category, who are looking to do the right thing in a responsible and earnest way for our soon-to-be children. typical NCT cases. throughout those classes and following the births and for the 8 or so years after, we’ve all remained close and shared those life changing experiences. our family and our friends family follow pretty similar paths – we both now have 3 children 8 and under, we’re finally getting our home and schooling just how we like it, we’ve worked hard to get our houses in order and we struggle with those logistics of childcare, full-time employment and long school holidays. the dads work in IT. the mums work in the public sector. our 30-something lives are happy and warm.

at least, they were

on saturday, I had the kids while my wife was working on a special opening of one of the museums she works for. I took them into town and we met up with mum in the castle gardens, had our lunch in the sunshine and we wondered around doing saturday things until it was time to head home and think about tea.

on saturday, my friend got up, got ready, waved goodbye to his wife and 3 lovely children, went off to his beloved football, where he had a heart attack and died

its a simply tragic tale of the shortness of life. it should compel me to question my own mortality and change everything, so that I actually live every day. I probably will. but right now I’m just comprehending the awfulness of a mother who can barely speak, but will have to explain to the children why daddy is not coming home again. ever.

back to the city with a spanner

September 8, 2005

that’s broken. I’ll fix that. that’s broken too. ah, that really is broken. I’ll need a big spanner for that. I’ll tell you what, pick me up on the corner by that old hangar and we’ll head out to the clear zone. I’ll jump out at the last minute and crawl through some 2D bushes until I hit the edge of town. then I’ll get my big spanner and start spannering. it’s better than the big horse I brought last time. that was useless.

look at things the other way

September 6, 2005

is that keef? keef is on the left, no, right, with that shaker thing. ooh, hang on, there’s another on the right, no, left. that must be mick. shaking like deranged weasels in a nefarious state of collapse in between the generous ranks and so on. that’s up to 5, even though I don’t have 1, for some reason. I mean, it works alright when that woman talks and the noise comes out, but when I’m upmixing I’m just surrounded, not punched in the face like on prince of wales road on a friday night after a session down lava and lagered into the wensum by a horny but hornless pleb.

yes, it is puzzling me, like life expectancy with a PSA score in the hundreds. what will that be like? without knowing how far the charts go and how far the thing goes we don’t know the treatment, but I’m erring on the side of 5 or less. and that’s positive. after I’ve rang the man about a £3,000 repair job on my victorian balustrade wall which a drunken halfwit hooded evil mumbling drudging fist-waving oik tried to use as a blunt instrument on a drunken halfwit hooded evil mumbling drudging fist-waving oik outside the kids bedroom window I’ll check up on my facts and then we’ll be waiting until the end of september when we can wave goodbye to the summer, get seasonally affectively disordered and curl up under the desk for 6 months.

if you don’t get hit by a bus or something first, that is. anything could happen couldn’t it? I mean, I could get decapitated by a sheet of glass that falls off the back of a lorry with a failing handbrake, or spontaneously combust or something. so we don’t really know when it’s coming do we? but knowing it is coming, that’s different.

dont touch anything

August 25, 2005

something will break soon. please don’t fiddle. I’m sat in my office in the UK, hooked up to skype listening to the folks in california on the audio stream while they’re demoing stuff on local servers that I’m watching on a VNC session via my Firefox which is on the Sun network via VPN and I’m watching the VNC session on the video stream in a Real window on the desktop next to the actual VNC session while a webcam is transmitting a video stream of my typing this nonsense into the other desktop while I’m uploading to flickr and downloading the presentations from the collabspace and I’m backing up everything on the network hard drive while I’m batch filtering some lomo in photoshop.

I’ve not been to the bathroom for 6 hours in case one of those things stops working, so I’ll just have to hang on another couple of hours until Jonathan drops by and then I’ll probably try and say something english and witty, but skype will do the annoying thing it does and drop the call after I’ve been on mute for a while and then start talking, and the VNC session will die and the video stream will stutter to a dribble and the webcam will give me that error with some hex number that means I’ve probably done something like pull the wrong face and the encoder threw up and then I guess to cap it all, I’ll get a 1 second outage on the DSL which won’t effect anything except the VPN session which will die like a dog and refuse to start until I reboot the w2100z which means making that industrial hairdrier noise on startup which wakes the kids up and I’ll probably have photoshop hang on me just as I’m applying some filter or other to a lomo shot that happens to have a woman in I don’t know but my wife will walk in at that precise moment and I will be frantically trying to turn off the monitor which won’t be suspicious at all and my night will be over.

I’ll go in a minute. really…

not bowling but drowning

August 24, 2005

yes I’m still on. all those other AT&T bips are other people dropping off. they must have something else really important to do, like get coffee and stuff. as I work from home and I’m an 8 hour timezone shift from you, its 22:30 here, here I’m just popping out for a kebab and a pint of stella before I come back after the break for the development roadmap discussion, where I shall get lippy and interrupt from across the atlantic, slightly delayed by skype, so that I never quite get my point across, which I’ve forgotten now anyway.

I’ve set up my webcam so that you can see if I’m still awake at around 1:00 am when Anil is talking, so if you can see the top of my tired old bald head instead of my quizzical corporate face, then please shout through the polycom and spark me back to life. even better, call me on the other office phone, which should be right next to my head, and watch me go apoplectic and wake up the children in the next room with some insane outburst. my wife is in bed already, and so noone will be poking me with a stick for a while, so please remain vigilant. I’m sure something important will come up at 7 hours and 59 minutes into the conference, so I’d hate to miss it. even if it’s just the directions to the bowling I can’t go to. dammit, chilli sauce on my keyboard. I hate it when that happens.

pump it up

August 22, 2005

evangelization. monetization. head. wall. one inch short of a broken nose, I’m peering into staroffice 7 while catherine wheels blaze in the hayloft. that’s my spanner and this is a bag of nails. I’ve told you all this before but it was in a different template and the screenshots were from 2003 and so give me 2 weeks and a rusty pair of pliers and then all my friends will be gone but we’ll have a universal quote and online pricing for dual core opterons in Uzbekisthan. hey you, you at the back, that’s really hurting my chisel, please put the nailgun down and step away from the suite before somebody gets commited.

two thirty. is that the time? I’m off to the dentist. It’s free, so I have to go and get my false head examined, even though I can get it all paid privately to get the same thing done by beautiful people, but that’s not fair, is it? the kids will have to go down the mines, that’s all there is to it. and they can fix my pallister wall while they’re at it.

spontaneous contagiousnessness

August 16, 2005

excuse me. aaaaaaaaaaaah. that’s better.

I’ve spent 9 hours looking out of this window listening to collaborative nutmegs and ganttisms and I’ve become an uncontrollable twitching avatar of a onceperson. people pass about 20 feet from my upstairs window and they’re only on view for about 10 seconds (which is normally enough round here, I can tell you), but I’ve developed a curious bodily contagion that is a kind of overexaggerated group activity with me as the only knowing participant. 3 times in a row someone has strolled past barking into their clamshell and then taken a moment for a 5:30 yawn, at which point I’m uncontrollably flapping my head open in a contorted drawl, my eyes streaming with overegging and I’m collapsing on the beech veneer like I’ve not slept for a decade.

but that’s quite normal really. group yawns are pretty common. nothing to worry about. so why am I watching this group of UEA students stutter past in their half jeans and elvis shades, laughing like hyenas about someone they don’t like in waveney terrace, and suddenly breaking into an insane cackle during the conference call on platform globalization, much to everyone’s consternation? I don’t know. why am I flapping my arms about like a deranged water mill as an overgesticulating midlife crisis from the middle management at norwich union dribbles past, conversing unappropriately about Mike in accounts with his hands juggling an imaginary flock of seagulls in the phonebox of entrapment. search me. I just seem to be randomly picking up character traits from passing strangers as they flit across my periphery, like a bad tv interlude in my subconscious dribbling.

there’s another. she’s picking at creases in her skirt as she wafts through, and suddenly my office chair is decidedly uncomfortable. look at him, he’s poking a finger in his ear and scraping away the detrius of an unfulfilled working day. ditto. oh, there’s a dude swinging his limbs in time to the foo fighters on his iRiver. stop it, dammit. Im trying to type up a manifesto.

this day will end soon.

Things what I writ