Andy's Blog

Is there a difference between Insomnia and just not wanting to go to bed until the wee small hours of the morning?

It’s not that I *can’t* go to sleep, if I was to put head to pillow I would more than probably drop off pretty quickly.  It’s that I don’t feel like putting the head on the pillow in the first place!

I’ve been a ‘Night Owl’ my whole life, ever since the first time I was able to stay up late.  Of course the flip side to this is the morning after… As has been admitted to in previous posts, dragging my carcass from the horizontal to the vertical is nigh on impossible REGARDLESS of the actual numbers of hours slept.

Not sure if this is just a latent psychotic streak on my part or just some sad loner lifestyle.  There is something to be said for seeing the ‘virtual ship in the night’ when you notice others are also up; the sudden appearance of a facebook update and then silence afterwards, the ping of an email, the flickering of someone coming onto MSN (and then off again just as quickly).

More than anything tis just a time to reflect, chill out to some music, update a website, do some coding… and watch others wander darkly through the internet landscape.. See you all tonight?

Safer with a computerless keyboard?

There is a certain laziness that creeps in when riffing off a quick comment. Unfortunately this laziness when armed with a keyboard is where trouble lurks, awaiting its chance to bite you on the unmentionables.

It seems that my writing skills, and its slovenly attributes, change dependant on where I visit when armed with the aforementioned keyboard;

• Blogging: For some reason I can never seem to post a small snippet of what I am upto quite like the talented Mr Fitchett is able to.  A veritable torrent of letters, words, sentences, bullet points and paragraphs gets splurged onto the computer and then gets edited, re-edited, moved around, edited some more, updated, deleted, polished and buffed to within an inch of its life.

The end result is no more eloquent than when it began, but it does probably reflect more what I was trying to get over in my own unique way… most of the time. There being some notable exceptions apparently.

• Twitter: …and in what can only be considered the extreme opposite end of the scale; being forced to voice an experience or thought in 140 characters or less gets you to consider VERY carefully what you want to say and the best way in which to say it.  Of course, as with all things, this can go somewhat awry.

It seems to be in the ‘little’ area between those two extremes that I come unstuck.  The quick reply often done without thought is where unmentionables get the nibble I spoke about at the beginning of this post (way, way back – I did say I tended to splurge on a bit).

Unfortunately, to a greater extent than I should really be doing, you rely on the person reading these unthought out replies to understand what it is you were trying to get across.  Hence, what you thought was a critique of yourself becomes criticism of another which is on the perverse spectrum of where you wanted to be.

Sometimes when a sentence begins with the word “I”, that is where the heart of the sentence lies.

Time to be less flippant online methinks and begin watching, not so much my P’s and Q’s, but my Q’s and M’s and all the combination of letters between the two (look down at your keyboard to understand).

Awww buggar, t’would seem that the powers-that-be have finally swung their Sauron like gaze towards me and wondered; “WTF does he do?”

So I now find myself, just before Christmas, in the position of having my role officially classed as “at risk”.  As my manager helpfully put it at my 1:1 interview; “It’s not you, but your role that’s at risk”.  I think I feel better.

However, I am taking this rather positively and am not *too* down.  It doth give me the opportunity to see what new adventures are available out there and I have about 6 months in which to do it in (or possibly 12 if you read the rather vague HR document in another way; head slanted at a jaunty 30 degree angle kind of way).

That's me that is..

So I am currently calling upon the mighty powers of Web 2.0, and sacrificing my first born upon its altar (sorry Alex but the Internet is a cruel, yet just, deity) to see what can be found for a jobbing IT Guru without actually getting up from my seat… well actually this blog post comes more from a Pod than a seat, but I’m painting a picture here…

…fin!

*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!

Am on the countdown, in hours, to the official start of my hols for this year!  Not sure I am going to be able to dial in at all during this little break, as we will be in the back of beyond in Spain – in splendid isolation in the hills around Madrid.

Plenty of grounds to go cycling in, our own private pool to splash around in….. and probably no wifi that I can hack into to be able to check in on my facebook progress or update my blog whilst bored… EEEeeeekk!!  For the more mentally balanced amongst you this may not present any kind of problem, but for this technofreak – it is.  I’ll be like a junky without his fix.

Looks like I should be coming back a wee bit fitter than I left, and finally get the boys and myself fully trained up in Saifa and Bassai-Dai.

I have a daily schedule of news catching up, this usually involves the following;

• Listen to BBC Radio 4 whilst driving to work. I usually find that the ‘Today‘ programme is a few days ahead of the mainstream news.
• Read the BBC News website, to catch up on current events.
• Catch up on some blogs, such as Slices Of A Digital Life and Random Acts Of Reality, to see how blogs should actually be written!
• Read my monthly ‘Time‘ magazone to see how our American cousins view the world.
• Skim through my Digg Feed so that my nerdiness is kept in its peak physical condition (the comments in there are also a joy to read, sometimes more than the article they link to)

However, every so often you read something that makes you wince and wish you hadn’t taken the time to click on a link that made you think “what the heck is that?!”. THIS is definitely an Eeeek! moment and one that has made me walk funny in sympathy.

Happy reading…

When’s the time you would usually use a service like the BBC’s iPlayer? A service that lets you view TV shows shown over the past 7 days? Answer: When you are away and not able to view your usual favourite progs.

…and what has the BBC gone and done? They’ve gone and stopped me ‘cos I am in a country with some ‘Johnny Foreigners’! Don’t get me wrong, Spanish TV is not that bad, but the adverts between can be longer than the program in total.

Time to have words methinks and remind them who pays their wages! I already have had to do this once when they launched the iPlayer and insisted I use Micro$oft Windows instead of my beloved Linux.

Just before I flew out to Madrid for Christmas with the in-laws I got myself a little early Christmas present. As some of you will know I am an avid gadget freak and my latest toy is the Nokia N810, which is the latest version of Nokia’s Internet Tablets (which I now have a full suite of).

Well colour me impressed! I haven’t put the damn thing down all Christmas, much to the annoyance of the wife, and am now fully mobile after installing some of my must have apps;

• Pidgin
• Skype
• XChat
• GPE Calendar with Google Calendar Sync
• Canola

Throw into the mix the pre-installed RSS Reader, which is currently downloading all my BBC podcasts, plus the Internet Radio streaming – you find yourself with one happy Troozers

In fact this article was written using the N810! Which brings me to the new habit… actually updating this ste on a more regular basis. Now I have the ability to do this from anywhere, let’s see if I can keep this particular New Years resolution (and try and update it at least as often as Mr Fitchett!)

Happy New Year Y’awl!

Well, true to form I managed to muck up the configuration on my shiny new domain name and didn’t hit the right buttons in the GoDaddy domain management interface. The result? The blog was here but no-one could see it!

I am still working on my paranoia; that in fact it was a conspiracy by ICANN to silence me and not let my voice out into the series of tubes that is the Internet.

It is here now for your general amusement, bewilderment and apathy. This does of course mean that I also need to update it too :-/

…now how does these ‘category’ things work?

Well, after a looooong absence the Andy Stewart blog is finally back. Let’s face it the original one was hardly updated on a frequent basis, due to no small part to my laziness. This lackluster also seems to have permeated to my management of the domain ‘andy-stewart.com’, which while I was looking the other way was half-inched from underneath my nose (it is a very big nose, so this task isn’t as hard as it sounds).

Despite some wailing, beating of chests and snivelling on my part – the powers that be, who control the whole series of tubes that is the Internet, decided I really didn’t deserve it and passed my old domain onto some global conglomerate with evil desires on the world (..or possibly some other bloke called ‘andy stewart’). I secretly think that what actually happened is that ICANN actually *READ* my old blog and thought; “ooooh crumbs! we can’t let that kinda rubbish out”

But as they say, you can’t keep a bad blog down; and here it is re-launched on the world, with a new domain name, new engine underneath it and a sparkly new look. Some things may change as I get more used to wordpress and I find new ‘themes’ that I think may suit better – but one thing will remain constant… my inability to update this on anything that looks like a regular basis or the standard of written english when I finally do put pen to paper!

Word up to Mr Fitchett who for some bizarre reason still keeps occasionally referring to me in his blog (yep mate, I actually *do* still read your blog on a worryingly regular basis), so in an effort to actually deserve his faith that anything changes in my life I will attempt to bore you all to tears with the details.

So, till the next post….. (don’t hold your breath!)