Thursday, June 16, 2005

Royyyyyyyyy! This is the blog title and is in bold to denote this.
I may have a sandwich for lunch. The sandwich will consist of some sort of bread. Probably white bread, yet there are many more varieties of bread. Maybe it will be brown bread or some sort of wholemeal affair. The bread will probably have margarine on it. I'd prefer a lighter spread but it will probably be a bulk-buy cheapo variety from a wholesaler. Then on top of that there will be a filling, probably of cheese. There are many more fillings of sandwiches but I am not allowed them all as I am a vegetarian. One variety of sandwich is pork and apple. Another is beef. Egg mayonnaise is another example. I am allowed to eat that one, but I will probably have cheese. I will buy the sandwich in a shop. I will walk to the shop, by taking the emergency stairs down to the bottom floor. I will then walk through the door into W354A, taking a left and then a right. I will walk past a room where people will be cooking lunch in a microwave. The smell is usually quite nice. I will then leave through a door, and make my way round the air-vent works outside. I'll then leave the main gate, cross the road to spar and purchase the aforementioned sandwich. I will then leave spar, cross the road and enter through the main gate. Then, I will make my way around the air-vent works and enter a door into W354A. I'll walk past a room where people are cooking their dinner (smell still nice), take a left and then a right. I'll re-enter my building and then climb the stairs to our office. The sandwich will probably be eaten at my desk. I can't say for sure now, but I will probably use some sort of mastication technique to consume the sandwich. Has anyone ever moved an arm? That's mad isn't it!?!1 If you want to pick up a sandwich or a potato then your brain sends electrical impulses to the muscles in your arm. The muscles in your arm enable it to move and pick up the potato. Then you can do many things, like making chips, boiled potatoes, potato wedges, baked potato, fried potato or mashed potato. Or you could make a home-made version of the Smiley Face potato shapes that you buy in the shop. I went into Sainsbury's last night. Sainsbury's is a shop. It sells food. We bought some gnocchi, some mushrooms, a CD, some vodka, sweetcorn, tomato sauces, washing powder and a pineapple. We didn't buy any smiley faces. There are many other things that we didn't buy though, such as Ski yoghurts, sheaths, semolina and sausages. That is just things we didn't buy beginning with 'S'. Things we didn't buy that begin with 'B' include baguettes, bananas, burgundy towels, brassieres and Brasso. That isn't an exhaustive list, just an example. There are many more things beginning with 'B' that we didn't buy, such as blueberries, Blue Ribbon biscuits and bleach. We've still not listed them all, but I must press on or we'll be here all day. I don't know about you but I'm still thinking about the miracle of moving your arm. I have other parts of my body that I can move. I'm moving my fingers by typing this. You can move your fingers without moving your arm at the same time, though I suppose you can see the muscles in the arm moving as you do it. My head also moves. It can move to the right, allowing me to see a wall and a notice-board. It can move to the left, where I can see Terry, Graham, some CDs, some teabags, a McDonalds grill order disc, a telephone, three 8-balls, a mobile telephone, a pen, a non-mobile telephone, a CD player and some sticky notes. My head can move down where it can see my stomach and pant-stick, though they are covered by clothes. I am wearing a black top and black work trousers today. That's not the head movement complete. I can look up, where I can see ceiling tiles and some lights. Our office has 1534 ceiling tiles. Actually it doesn't as there are 144 ceiling lights. They've craftily made the lights the same size as the tiles, so we can use maths to determine that there are 1390 ceiling tiles. I can also move my legs. I use my legs for walking. Walking I've done lately includes walking into work from my car, walking from work to my car, plus walking from the car into Sainsbury's and vice-versa. I've also done minor walking tasks such as going up and down the stairs. Again, I'd like to stress that this is not an exhaustive list. There are also body-movements which I don't control by direct thoughts, such as my heart-beat, breathing and occasional movements of my winky. The mouth, eyes and nose are some of the head subset, yet they all move as well. I'll use mouth movement to consume my sandwich at lunch, and use leg and arm movement to propel my body to the shop and exchange money for the sandwich. Money is based on the decimal system, unlike how it was years ago. If money was in OCT, we would have 8 pennies in the pound. Except they probably wouldn't call it the pound. 8 pennies would probably equal an octopound. 8 octopounds would equal a pound. 8 pounds would equal an 'eighter'. You may think that if money was in HEX that there would be 6 pennies in a pound (or hexopound). But HEX is slightly misleading, and there would actually be sixteen pennies in a hexopound. They shouldn't have used the name HEX as that will cause problems when we convert to that currency. Damn scientists! In the UK we didn't used to have decimal money. We had other things just to be awkward. There used to be 240 pennies in a pound. A pound is also a measure of weight. That isn't based on the decimal system either. Greengrocers complain about adapting to the metric system, they still like to use the old pound, octopound and hexopound system. I'm listening to The White Stripes album. It has 13 tracks on it. The photo assistant was Nick Pavey. The Tears album also has 13 tracks, though there doesn't seem to be an assistant photographer listed. Richard Bull was the art director. Joy Zipper have 13 tracks on their new album as well. Maybe it's the in-thing for this year. Fashions change after all and a lot of records lately have had 10 tracks on them, maybe bands are giving us more in 2005. The National album has 13 tracks, but Okkervil River only have 11. The last Embrace album only had 10 but Eels manage to include 33 tracks on their latest. But the albums cost around the same price, about 125 octopounds. Maybe Eels had a cheaper art director and could pass the savings onto the customer.

Monday, June 13, 2005

A job that slowly kills you

This isn't good.
I've finally moved desk and I can't say I'm enjoying my new surroundings. Here are some of the problems I'm having.

1. I'd sat at my last desk for over 6 years and had become used to pretty much everything about it. I'd developed the ability to sense when people were approaching me from behind. I've only been sat at my new desk for a couple of hours and I've already been surprised twice. Luckily, I've only been rumbled as I've been staring into space, but I'm bound to be discovered wasting time.
2. Mutes. I'm surrounded by people who don't seem to be able to speak. Wherever I look, all I see is faces concentrating on their work. This disturbs me. The guy opposite (Terry) has glanced over a few times this morning, probably wondering why I'm staring into the middle-distance and why my screen saver keeps activating. The reason Terry is that I find this job horrendously fucking dull and unchallenging. I can quite easily keep myself ahead of schedule by putting in brief spurts of effort every now and then, but I'm sorry that I can't keep my mind sedated long enough to happily sit here for eight hours a day fucking around with config utilities, answering queries from fucktwats, or writing laborious test harnesses that make me want to drink shit flavoured caustic soda. That is the fucking reason Terry why I am staring into space. What do you want from me Terry? I tried to write some tests this morning Terry, but my mind wandered after about twenty seconds. Look at me again Terry. Can you see the faint hint of tears in my eyes? That's fucking boredom. That's knowing that I have to spend 37 hours of my life this week sat here, wondering how everyone else seems to find what they do so stimulating. And one day Terry we'll all be on our death-beds and as our bowels collapse and hearts falter, we'll think about the time we wasted raising change documents for the NIMROD software. But I can see that now Terry; I have seen that future. And that is why I'm staring into space and not concentrating on some unimportant shitty document.
3. They were supposed to move my old computer with me, but they've left it behind. They say I've got a faster one, but they don't understand that I have important programs (games) and documents (games hi-score tables) on that old computer.
4. I'd become used to sitting on my own in a pen. It's odd having to share a phone again.
5. Even though the boss hasn't made it in today, I'm sat near to the big-boss lady. She's already moaned at me once today when I went to retrieve my old mouse (this one is gunged up). I have to sneak past her (or the big baldy twatty big-boss) to get out of here.

Much to my surprise, I had a nice time in Colchester. The wedding was sweet, and it's cool to meet up with people.
I've always got on well with my 3rd cousin Daniel due to a shared desire for idiocy. On Saturday he learnt about what job I did for a living and mistook it for something exciting. He decided he'd help me "jazz it up a bit" by coming up with some radical new ideas. He's come up with a spacecraft that is made entirely from cheese and in the shape of a tie-fighter. Originally he wanted to cover the cheese ship with crustaceans to protect it when re-entering earth's atmosphere, but abandoned this idea when he thought that forcing the cheese to go mouldy with the use of copper wire would have the same sort of effect. That he broadcast this idea to a group of about a dozen relatives, and that he ended the night inhaling balloon after balloon filled with helium for the entertainment of others says a lot about him. I like Daniel, he's exuberant and energetic so we don't have to be. His wife Clare is the same; both of them are a good laugh.
Anyway, even grumpy old curmudgeons can enjoy things sometimes.

Like Civ. Oooh, Civ.
Civ is currently giving me the stimulus that my job fails to deliver. My current game is a great one, it's only just turned 1600 and I have developed the railway and electricity. My army is very small so I'm getting the usual threats from the Germans, but I excitedly await the arrival of tanks and my chance for revenge.
I started the game slowly, not developing any city improvements at first, but filling the world with new cities and workers to ensure that they developed properly. Then, when I'd filled more than my fair-share of space, I started to develop. It's my usual policy, but sometimes other factors limit how successful this can be (size and shape of map, restrictions of environment).
So I've ended up huge and advanced, my wealth increasing through time as I limit the effects of corruption from the outposts of my empire, as well as filling in the gaps where another city can fit.
The Russians look ripe for a crushing; they're backward yet rich in resources. Then I'm after the Germans, though the French seem to be in the way so I might have to go over the top of them. There are always casualties in war. The French are also close to encircling the city of Fleetwood, the remotest part of my empire. They already keep walking through it, as if it's their own. The cheeky fucks.
It's such a beautifully involving and rewarding game.