panel beating for beginners

August 11, 2005

so if its gonna be 800 quid to repaint the offside door and fit the wing mirror back into its rightful place then I’m not going to even think about what it’ll be after chav mcnasty from the west earlham posse and his 3-quarter length trouser friends have hoofed their reebok classics over the bonnet, roof and hatchback after they’ve been turfed out of weatherspoons at 1:30 in the morning. our neighbour’s brother’s dad’s mate’s cousin has done some work on her car but of course they’ll probably be back next week after a night out in KFC and they’ll sick on the sunroof or something. that’s why I’m going to beat out the panels myself. I’ll be taking a club hammer to the underside of the bodywork, with my head in the engine, battering out a pissup from last saturday while I curse yob culture and hit myself on the thumb, crushing my knuckles.

you can get stabbed 6 times on the top deck of the number 43 these days and nobody looks up from txting their girlfriend. I’m not starting a provincial vigilante group to roam the golden triangle with wet celery and brickbats, but if I had a big gun or something, I’d probably hang out the upstairs window for a couple of nights, just in case I got line of sight. I’ve been playing a computer game where I shoot people like that so I’ll probably complete the loop of virtual and actual bodily harm and provide a test case for the daily mail and get imprisoned for like, forever, just to deter other people like me who got pushed over the edge by nobrains who choose to indiscriminately wreck stuff while gurning like halfwits and ending up with a fine because they’re only 14. I mean, our car’s a bit rubbish, but that’s not the point. I’ll choose when to kick the wing mirrors off and jump on the roof, thanks.

lie down

August 10, 2005

so I had this thing right, where, like, you know, it was there but I just had to lie down cos I thought if I moved an’ that I’d be, you know, like, sort of falling? you know, internation all over, the, shop, like it was, well, I’ve still got it now but I’ll drag meself up to me desk and round it all off so that its ready for them upstairs, like what you have to, well you know, just to get you in so its like that really, innit? and then with your Panda 4×4 you can ‘ave it large and wheedle those spangles over ere after that pint of tap. christ on a bike, you’ve only gawn an done it now, anitcha? she’ll be dahn ere with her pointy sticks an stuff and I’ll be hoofing the servers until its autoblanced an’ I can get a decent cuppa tea. blimey! it aint much to ask, right?

I suppose you’re gonna be looking for a meeting about this as well. I got a list of names as long as yer arm mate, so let’s be avin’ yoooo.

yakuza. bless you.

August 4, 2005

Takeshi Kitano for 5:99. well, you would, wouldn’t you? I just went in there and got 3 of them and so I’m lining up my ‘beat’ weekend where I shall be hooking all my dvd peripherals up again and then staying up all night slunk in the leather armchair glued to the screen. even the boxes are out the other side of über. I might just slip in a copy of don’t look now while I’m there for a bit of a roeg moment. gotta love that wispy beard freaking out in the venetian winter.

did you see that?

August 3, 2005

that’s horrible. I didn’t mean to do it, but I just kind of forgot that I’d set up a webcam. I mean, I’ve done worse things but not captured quite like that before. I really am working, by the way. these phat headphones are for conference calls, I’m not doing a dave doubledecks down here while paul talks about globalization design docs and we check on status. I’m not really hoofing around the gulf of oman in an APC in battlefield2 while you’re talking about user-friendliness and reordering things in the authoring temaplates. look, I even sent out some kind of document or other to make it look like I was prepared. admittedly, I put it in the collaboration space so that it will time out before you can load it, but it’s there, really. it’s got knobs on

I watched 2 guys in space do some repointing on their mobile home on the internet today, which I was quite blasé about really. I mean, they’re 224 miles above the coast of france, hovering about on a giant white fork-lift truck contraption, picking out little bits of plastic from between slices of fiber cheesecake with their huge white fingers and I’m seeing this live, as it happens, because they’re got helmet-mounted (careful) cameras that are transmitting wirelessly to tracy island or something which is hooked up to some webserver or other that’s streaming stuff under the atlantic to the BT infrastructure that’s doing better for me today than chris and I’m sat here looking at a 4 inch square streaming video on my monitor in the upstairs office in norwich watching their every move. so that’s amazing, right? but am I bovvered? not really. it’s sunny outside and I’m leering out the window at 20 year olds on their way to top shop to get a new crop top for saturday cos gary’s takin her dahn Lava, innit?

so what I do on the webcam is really not very significant. unless my mum’s watching. she’d be horrified.

but you don’t print them

August 2, 2005

I’ve got a lot of them but you’ve never seen them even though they’re yours and you asked me to do it but you know if I have to log in as me then I can do that but you’re not connected so its too hard from here and anyway I haven’t got my cartridges refilled at cartridge world where they have that monstrous yellow shop front next to the cafe that used to be a shop that now has those middle class dropouts snuffling and snorting around redbush teabags in the half-light of a norfolk anticlimax, so I guess I should take up the viking offer before mr tim caynes! is no longer able to get the branded ones before it expires but, I mean, its better if I upload them to photobox, and we just need to work out which ones to add via that applet which takes 17 hours to complete and I know that you know we haven’t put any in for over 5 years but at least we’ve sorted some out from when she was 6 months and had sick in her hair, a bit like the other night after that implant rejected and we gave birth to a small intestine on the canal.

I mean, they only look posh, but they ain’t really so they’re only as posh as what you are like and me so don’t bother with them and I tell you, she’s just a nasty piece of work so I’m not going out of my way to do that out of hours stuff when I’ve got three dealers and a monkey with three donkeys to pay cos the hack’s gone down to newmarket with the dongle and my apparatus has crashed off the A47 into that ditch where bernard matthews pride of the east is cavorting with a lemon and squeezing the plums through the catflap. I mean, its good, but its not right.

predictive blogs

August 1, 2005

f u cn rd ths then I’ve just installed lazyBlog® because I have so much to say but I can’t be bothered to say it and anyway I’m waiting for the chelsea one to hoof up here so we can spark off over globalization and decide we probably won’t meet in the middle but I’ll try and get products out and I’ll do press releases in Korea anyway before that vendor goes mad with slash press. I came across lazyBlog® while I was cross referencing the page I made with the online viking office supplies catalogue to see if there was any hidden meanings to my life that could possibly link a thousand nude californians and ink jet cartridges, but there wasn’t, unless I looked at them the wrong way round.

it’s apparently the first piece of blogging software from the folks responsible for the iBull, which I can see already has you shaking your leg under the desk. it works like predictive txt on cellphones, where you use you enter a 2 letter word with no meaning and you get back a 4 letter word with no meaning which is out of context when you didn’t even have one and you can’t erase because your head is under a bucket somewhere near the shropshire union canal. except lazyBlog® is much more gooder. it do all ur blog after you’ve only written one paragraph or so. it apparently uses a patented algorithm that analyses your online behaviour and tracks histories, bookmarks, previous blog entries, email, shopping lists, tampered photoshop files etc., building a unique picture of the person what you are and what you’re likely to be thinking at 12 oclock on monday morning after you’ve just driven from Norwich to Camberley and decided to go home again after you picked up a ream of paper and a couple of bics. so by the time I’ve got to about this point, everything you see from now on is probably machine generated. It might already be. In fact the fantastic futureheads album has 4 stars and can be found here. The super BBC news site has a interesting feature on baboons in Guatemala that features in Michael Palin’s new book ‘Baboons in Guatemela’ which is a vailable in all good bookshops. I saw a great special offer on ink cartidges today – 2 for 1 at PC World Business Direct. Hurry while stocks last. anyway, I see that there’s a lot of conversation about Open Source Software on some people’s blogs on some sites somewhere probably. I have something to say about that even though I don’t normally link to any software sites or buy it or talk about it, but I did once follow a link of th 19th June what did go to an OpenSolaris page for blogging thing someprobably. Have you seen my cat? I was reconstructing my garden after cycling through Surrey and Doctor Who who came on the TV and I like good wine and here is a picture of me at some event of other taken on my treo. I want to die. Why oh why doesn’t she like me? That President Bush…

hmm. it’s still beta. perhaps you can actually pay for it to remove the adverts. unless I actually just wrote all that. on my excellent Talin. Oi! stop it!

leaving today

July 20, 2005

time to go. not all of your friends will go with you I’m afraid, but then you’ve got some friends that are a bit annoying so actually that’s probably a good thing that I know you don’t really understand but one day when you’re reflecting on the last 20 years and those significant milestones you’ll think of the time you moved to middle school and actually it won’t be that bad because that’s where you got all those new friends that you’re now going off to India with to do something ultra worthy like working for oxfam or something or the cultural ambassador to lithuania that means it was all worthwhile

but right now, it’s the assembly so you get to sing all those songs you’ve been practicing all month and doing some kind of maypole extravaganza in front of the massed ranks of tissue wielding 30 somethings who work from home or don’t work at all and 70 somethings who have 30 somethings who remember the long hot summer of 1976 and who’s that boy on the right, oh, it’s a girl, you are just, and you know, so, well, oh, it’s not sad but you know they grow up and, booohooohoooo, hoohoo, sniff, bwaaaaaaaahhh. sorry.

harry potter and the thermos of white van

July 18, 2005

so gaz is back and this time its a multi-function base container with false floor and over pelment with deep battenberg and upside down brackets behind the french-english dictionary and the photo book like what you see in those mockups of casual designs for life in those magazines we buy and cut out little lifestyle pictures that I draw to scale and give back to gaz. we then discuss the merits of 70mil versus 90mil and liberating the picture rail like its been interred in some kind decorative style prison where the hatchet job that now lives in the cellar made out of old shoeboxes and twiddly snippings of ex-shelving units was on day release

by friday we’ll be turning all the lights down and sitting smoking fat old cigars in front of the antiqued features like we’re something out of gosford park, except we’ll be more like the scrags that shag in the pantry which I guess means we’re not quite so crushed by our sensibilities but by our stomachs which is probably a better place to be but it does mean I won’t be pontificating about beading and the cables for the aerial, sky and ntl, which is probably a good thing as I have no idea what I’m talking about and for goodness sake, why did I ever think that the vinyl collection would fit into that 1500mil space. you’ll have to leave the 12″s out and just keep the road album and mono stuff and by the way I’m just popping into sevenoaks to look at a pro-ject

so he then goes and sits in the van with cuppa tea and a couple of aspirins cos of this weather, like, and then it’ll be a start on the framework, which reminds me I should be finishing the resource list and capital expenditure for FY06 as I have to make a bunch of stuff up tomorrow in order to get the world to turn the other way in product marketing before the globalization schooner reaches the end of the earth and tips over the edge into the pit of sheol that is stuff I was planning to do but never finished the plan so I never did so it must be tuesday and there goes the circular saw and bf2 really makes your small finger hurt. I should stop ducking and start running. straight into an APV probably and get squished by some 12 year old 733t d00d called 5punkYm0nk3y or something that takes me 3 goes to work out by which time they’ve fixed the artillery and I’m respawning under a hail of shells and ragdolling through the gulf of oman like a deranged motion sickness crash test experiment.

what I’m trying to do is what I’m trying to do

July 14, 2005

so there’s five minutes left and no questions so I’m gonna just fill in to the end of the hour if that’s alright with you. I’m hoping that you’ll get embarrassed enough to fill in the gaps and you’ll start talking rubbish so that I can respond in a way which makes it sound like I really know what I’m talking about, but actually all I’m doing is having a conversation with you while 20 other people on the call are waiting for me to shut up already because they’re going to the gym and they want to avoid the rush when all the fat people go an hour early so that people don’t see them on the treadmill getting all sweaty especially at the moment when its 30 degrees and actually I have a condition which makes me smell like this

great, so, thanks everyone. I guess I’ll send you though the business requirements so that you can all review them and then we’ll make it kind of ad hoc when we get together because I don’t want another meeting and I have to go to the shops on friday and get some antibiotics so if we could engage via email that would be the solution I’m working towards if we’re all sweet. Yep, I’ll probably be ready with the plan right after the thing I’m doing next week which is really important as I’m going away for a long time after that to chatter with seagulls at a staithe and share one-legged experiences over video with a man from knebworth

any questions?

well, don’t look at me like that

July 13, 2005

dammit. had a repeating calendar entry that I didn’t repeat often enough and now I’m stuck here skypeing when I should be down there with the ham and cheese and guinea pig circus. its my turn as well, so I should be sat there with a cavey on my lap, cooing like a pigeon, but instead I’m getting my face gently blown by the hot air turbine that is my w2100z in my south facing room that happens to have a 28 degree early evening outside and a small generator in the corner pumping out co2 for christmas. I mean, I know I have to understand about resource bundles and locales and 2 column database queries and all that stuff, but really, I only had dave tellin me that he’s got the monkey down from aintree on the other line, so now I’m up a pony, but stuck with a PM doing a clap for the gaff. that’s not right, is it? still, when its tomorrow afternoon and I’m sticking one in the ear for demographics, then I be having a right laugh about it, cos he doesn’t really get it, and I’m giving it globalization and program boards and global simplification goals but its like “yis, but” so whatever.

so I’ve set it for the next 18 weeks and arranged for clive to drop the spanners an hour later so we can bang on about the nosh all relaxed without me sticking me hair down like a coal miner and reaching for the lynx. nice

Things what I writ