things what I writ

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.

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