Andy's Blog

I’ve never been much of a Lothario, I know that’s hard to believe, or excited much intense reaction from women I am acquainted with, however the gasped “OH GOD!” that I elicited from my female colleague, in the middle of a crowded Costa Coffee, was deeply satisfying.

The fact that there was another female colleague to join in the fun was a bonus, as the “Oh my God!” ‘s were repeated and the scrutiny of naked forms took an intense turn.  A disturbingly intense form.  Realising that she was trying to explore the experience more was both surprising and… well… futile.

There was no more to give.

The ‘post experience’ detailing of underwear, various coloured rabbits and admittance of palpations I will gloss as minor detail.

I, of course, will be battered into a bloody mess for posting this little blogette, even though the guilty have remained nameless, and the fact that this entirely true account of what transpired has enough detail left out to make it sound *SO* much more than what it was… although what it was would, and I jest ye not, leave you with the desire to brillo-pad your eyeballs from the experience!

…and with that, frankly detail light but teasing post, I bid you goodnight ;¬)

I’ve just found that one of the almost unconscious problems of having your musical choices aired in realtime, for all who can be bothered to look, is that you start to not choose the music you like but almost choose the music you think others would approve of!

As mentioned in a previous post I am now subscribed to Last.fm, and it seems I am keeping a bit of a sly eye open as to what others would think of the bands and tracks I choose to listen to, and not those I actually enjoy… which is somewhat daft to say the very least.

I joined last.fm to help me find bands I may not have heard of before but are similar in style to what I listen to now, not what I think others would like – I make a feck awful DJ at the best of times.

Ah well, as I sat back at my appointment and received the unpleasant medicine due to me I tuned my headphones into all those classics that got me bouncing around like an eejit in my oh-so-long ago youth… and stuck a mental two fingers up to anyone who might disapprove of my eclectic choices;  Long may I continue to listen to Genesis, The Jam, Bob Marley, The Specials, ZZ Top, etc…

*Sigh*

Why is it that an exceptionally good weekend can be so easily spoilt by one person’s stream of abuse over MSN?  I am still unclear as to what started this off originally, I am even more unclear as to why it’s continuing…

…and I am totally unsure as to how I should deal with this in the future!

I think I’ve just been ‘ownd‘ by Amazon?!  Just received this in my inbox and am now feeling just a little older today thanks to it!

I am sat in front of the PC and desperately thinking of what I want to do.

I want to draw, but can only doodle a couple of silly cartoons and I can do so much more than that.. if only I could figure out what it was I wanted to draw or what medium to use; pen, pencil, pastels or photoshop with the wacom tablet?

I want to do some more PHP web development, but have so far only developed the equivalent of a “hello world” application and I have certainly done much more that that.. I can’t even figure out what Object Classes or Libraries I would want to use.

So I am sitting looking out of the metaphorical window, as I don’t have a real one in my roof space office, and thinking; “dammit since when did life start impeding on my playtime?”

So it would seem that there’s no hiding up here either…  Which is damn rude of the real world!

I am in the middle of moving some of the web sites I am running, such as this one, onto a (hopefully) more stable hosting provider.  Quite how well this will work out is anyone’s guess, however we are now committed… eek!

I shall leave it a wee while before I deliver any more stunning prose upon you and work out any bugs that this move will inevitably unearth.  Fingers crossed readers!

As has been previously mentioned on this blog I am an Internet Junkie, my ‘Geek’ credentials having been admitted to on many an occassion, and proudly too dammit!

Therefore, when my Internet connection is rudely yanked from underneath my feet, which seems to be the case again with O2 and it’s increasingly flakey 3G service, I start getting the DT’s.  So many things to see out there, what with my rejoining the facebook and MSN world again (thanks to what could only be called a viciously blunt pep talk from an unforgiving Glaswegian friend of mine), and me unable to participate!

The iPhone is good, with some limitations, but the O2 service seems not to quite live up to the device.  Time to shout at some Customer Services personnel methinks, and continue the ancient art of SMS’ing some friends whilst I wait for normal service to resume.

For those of you not geek enough to know what the above actually means, it translates from computer speak to; “Life does not equal Facebook”

You would think, from the barrage of emails I have received, that my decision to remove myself from the facebook world was akin to jumping off a cliff with a pitiful wail of “Goodbye cruel world….”

I think in retrospect if I was to ever jump of a cliff I would try my absolute hardest to make that funny “waaahoohohoooo” noise that cartoon characters make – what a way to go… and be remembered

Actually, the reason I decided to remove myself from facebook was pretty much the opposite of trying to remove myself from life, more to try and re-engage in it.  I don’t think it was only me, but I started to find that;

• I was spending an inordinate amount of time just flicking back to facebook, almost unconciously, checking what people were upto, moving my cars in parking wars and numerous other little games that I would be invited to.
• It ‘seemed’ that I had started living my life in one line status updates at a time.  A case of life imitating facebook, instead of the other way round.  This also led to an absolute glut of maudlin status updates!
• More importantly, and the main reason why I decided to remove facebook, I was starting to use facebook as my main source of information about friends and family, rather than actually just speaking or visiting them.

This last point was the more important to me.  It was proving too easy to just see how a friend was, post a witty or consoling one line comment under their status update and feel that somehow you had done your bit as a friend, etc.

I think it’s time I picked up the phone a little more, or even better visit those friends I haven’t actually seen for a long while – to tear myself away from the computer and to engage with life a little more than I am at the moment…

Radical eh?

I think it is probably time I gave people a rest and stop disturbing people relentlessly so I am in the process of removing my facebook account (how hard is that!), as well as removing one of my MSN accounts.

The MSN is ridiculously easy to do, however the facebook account is proving a REAL pain!  Deactivating it really doesn’t do anything, everything stays on there but you can no longer sign onto it… how is that deactivated?

Ah well, the work continues!

The problem with leading an Internet life is that sometimes the things you wish to offload in a very public way, i.e. via a blog, have to be communicated in a sort of code, using vague but hopefully meaningful phrases that convey their impact without actually letting on entirely what is going on, apart from to those people who are in the know.

This, unfortunately, doesn’t always work quite to plan!  Messages are lost in translation, or even missed completely.  The vague too vague, and the intended audience unsure as to what the hell has just been said, even to those people who *are* in the know!

Blogs by their very nature are NOT the whole truth of a person, they can’t be – no one would ever divulge that amount of information about themselves or their feelings for fear of ridicule, hurt, or in worst cases social stigmatism (depending on how exotic your truth is!).

Until I feel braver about divulging more about myself… viva la code breaking whilst I do some discreet anonymous blogging elsewhere!