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Friday, January 02, 2004

Just about recovering my eyesight, voice and reason after new year's eve. Moose and Nelly had dinner with us at our house, and then we went to Adrian's party where Jo coaxed me into attempting karaoke for the first time. So we did some Sinatra songs and that was nice. After which I got drunk and I think I (and possibly Moose at some points; he had a go too) hogged the karaoke rather selfishly in order to do our bad Bowie impersonations. So apologies for that and the poor standard of singing to anyone who was there. It was good fun though.

Yesterday we fell asleep on the sofa a lot while watching things like Dark Passage and Delicatessen. Trying to resume reality today.

 

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Wednesday, December 31, 2003

Just took a couple of pics on a healthy walk... swans are fairly scary, aren't they? Clicky thumbnail and look at the pics right at the end of the gallery called Chesterton in Winter.


[Listening to: Love X Plus Y - Subterraneans - (Soul Mass Transit (Dec 03))]

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Oh yes, and by the way I did finish all the remixes and send them off in time to enter the competition. And Return of the King was all booked up forever, so maybe at the weekend. We're having Moose and Nelly over for new year's eve (tonight, in other words). More later.

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Awoke today to the strange sight of steam rolling off the garden fence as the bright winter sun melted the morning frost. I'd take a photo of it, except that between the tone of that first sentence and the fact that vapour doesn't come out on digital pictures, you'd just think I was having emotional problems.

We successfully left the house yesterday and went to Caroline and Al's for mulled wine and exceptionally bracing schnapps. Drain cleaner for humans. Or in the case of the stuff Will brought, possibly it was actually drain cleaner. Lovely. Nice to interact with some other people for a bit, anyway, just to keep in practise. Adam's been over a couple of times in the last week, but he's more or less as strange as we are.

I have been working from home this week and have sent more e-mails than I received. Apart from spam, obviously. Normally I'd guess I get 50-100 work mails a day, and now I'm down to about 5. I sense that if I were in the office, I wouldn't have anyone to talk to. Certainly none of the people I've needed things from have replied.

Because of this, on Monday I tried to check something for myself in the finance system, SAP, and inadvertently logged into into Kafka's novel, Der Prozess instead. So I click "Display requisition". It says "You are not authorised to use transaction ZE53N". I blink at the 8-digit number I have written down, which bears no resemblance to ZE53N. I didn't ask about ZE53N. I don't know what it means. I just want to type in my number and see if there's a tick or a cross next to it. I click "Help". It says "This function is not linked to Sales Administration". I'm fairly sure that's a non-sequitur. Nothing else I try works either. Given that I had to get a new password because I hadn't used SAP for a bit, and in the mean time they have changed everything so that my cheat-sheet doesn't apply, I give up.

Somewhere in a German software development company in Walldorf, Morbo the green alien from Futurama rubs his hands together and says "tremble, earthlings! By designing this software based on a flowchart of every conceivable corporate financial activity instead of based on tasks someone might need to perform, I will destroy your puny human minds!" [manic laughter].


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Sunday, December 28, 2003

Back in Cambridge since xmas day and have been living as lazily as possible. I think apart from xmas dinner leftovers we've largely eaten chocolate and crisps. Adam popped over for an evening, but apart from that it's been us, the dvd player and the junk food. And all the lovely shelves for our films that Jo put up while I was away as a nice surprise. It were proper bo, I tell thee.

I've uploaded some xmas pics to a new gallery on fotopic - recurrent themes of the last week have been:



My father editing three hours of DV tape from our visit to Ireland this summer in Windows Movie Maker using a lot of the more advanced stuff you can do (not finished yet, but I'm sure there will be a web highlights version at some point). I just updated dad's family homepage with this year's xmas pic in which, as is customary, we all look like we've just overeaten and need more sleep.



My chums from when we all lived in Bromsgrove spending the evening at the Golden Cross, which is too bright, has no music or atmosphere, and is generally devoid of seats - but where a pint of John Smiths is £1.30 - and then returning to my parents' house just as they were calling it a night and sitting downstairs shouting at each other until 3am. It was really nice to see everyone, though, as we're still prepared to have involved abstract debates about daft philosophical things, and while that's silly, it's a nice change of pace from discussing houses, decorating and other stuff with Fairly Adult Themes.



Jimmy being slightly (but understandably) overstimulated on the topic of presents. He was good about it all, though - he might have been a bit impatient but he was nice about all the presents and didn't get grouchy as it got later. And he did entertainingly demonstrate everything - though interestingly the most popular stuff out of what me and my parents gave him seemed to be a small wooden dog puppet-type-thing held in shape by elastic that collapses when you push the base on which it stands. And a pop-up book about monsters, which is conspicuously easier to explain.

Anyway, hopefully we'll actually leave the house today in order to see Return of the King. And hopefully this site will still work next week - after charging me a fiver to transfer my domain away from them, Easyspace are still sending me final warnings that it's going to expire... so I dunno if they just can't be bothered to update my account details, or if they're going to bugger it up in some way and just repoint the DNS instead of taking over my domain. So if I sort it out, more later.

[Listening to: Mad World (Alternate Version) - Micheal Andrews - (Mad World)]

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