Si a todo

I know it's Friday but did you have a nice weekend? I saw you in town actually and thought you were looking good. Have you had your hair done? It suits you. I like those trainers as well. Very flash. What's that? How much? Blimey, a bargain! Let me know next time you go there.
I had quite a nice weekend, thanks for asking.
I attended a wedding party for my cousin (she got married abroad) in Fleetwood on Saturday night. A lot of unrecoverable, quite bad things have happened on that side of the family in the past and it's a shame to see how things have turned out, when you can remember a time before it all started.
On Sunday I went with my dad to play pitch-and-putt. Jesus, I played the 18 holes of Fleetwood's pitch-and-putt so many times as a kid (often twice a day in summer) and it brought so many memories back of the times I'd spent on there. I had a really nice time, and enjoyed chatting with my dad about the times we'd spent on the Seaside links course. My dad almost got a hole in one and I managed to chip onto the green on the dangerous twin-bunkered hole 11, something I rarely managed as a nipper. Heh, I just felt completely content playing a gentle game on a sunny day in my hometown.

I still haven't bought a game for the PSP. I thought it would be great to play a game during my "lunch break" on night-shift, but I couldn't decide what to buy. Still, it's rather exciting what this thing can do. Films, music, the new GTA game. Whee! I also believe I can hook it up the wireless network at home. I'll look into that when the laptop is fixed.

Speaking of which…
We've spent some time on the phone to Dell technical help over the week and it's been a pleasant surprise. There have been a lot of complaints about call-centres being moved abroad, but the lovely Indian ladies of the Dell technical help line were knowledgeable, pleasant, patient and not patronising in any way. They quickly realised they weren't talking to people who had never used a computer before so they tailored their approach accordingly.
I guess it is sad that jobs may have been lost over here, but I've spent so many frustrating minutes and hours of my life talking to sulky and unreasonable "local help-desks that I just thought 'fuck-em'. The Indian ladies gave me a warm glow inside. And it wasn't a sinister glow. It was a Ready Brek glow.

This has been so hard to write. It's 5:40am and my brain has locked up. Gnn…
Still, work piss up this afternoon/evening. I'm looking forward to an afternoon of watching the cricket in various pubs around Preston.
Si a todo!

heh

i am an indie snob!




How indie are you? test by ridethefader

You're just too cool for school, aren't you? You're pretty narrow minded
and opinionated with regards to music (and probably most other things
as well). But you're allowed to be, because you really are better
than everyone else. You take pride in obscurity.
You probably prefer vinyl too, you elitist bitch.

Jacks And Fives

I seem to have some desire to prove myself wrong all the time.
I wrote the blog last night about the lack of sleep on night shifts and appeared to have irritated the part of my subconscious that wants to make me look an idiot and show that I don't know anything.
Usually I have about three of four hours sleep during the morning; this isn't enough, yet I am used to not getting enough sleep and seem to cruise through it in a blur.
Today though I managed a grand total of about eight hours sleep. That's spectacularly unusual, and you'd think I'd be fresh as a daisy tonight. Ah, but that’s the beauty of it, my brain has decided to fuck with itself by making me feel tired and lethargic tonight. The fucker. Contrarily, I missed a whole nights sleep on Monday night and it was easiest night I've ever done.
Where is the logic? How I am supposed to make the correct decision on how long to sleep for if there is no definite pattern forming?
Well, I'm glad to see that night shift hasn't made me mentally ill or anything.

The home computer is kaput. It's been turning itself off for a few days and now won't even bother starting up at all. I'm starting to suspect that the problem may lie with the motherboard. Hmm, I'm guessing it won't be cheap to fix.
Anyway, I have no computer at home currently, so if anyone wants to e-mail me (hoho!) then they'll have to use my work e-mail address.
Maybe the laptop has sacrificed itself to save me. It's probably noticed that I've been playing a lot of online poker recently and has decided that due to my past lust for gambling that something needed to be done.
I've been doing quite well at the poker. I've been playing it on the lower stakes tables where you are kind of guaranteed to do okay as there are so many people around who don't really have a clue how the game works. I'm getting pretty good at determining when the odds are worth risking and when to ditch my hand. It's also important to make sure that you are hard to read by the other people playing (some opponents are spectacularly obvious in the way they bet or fold cards).
Luck plays a big part in it, and I lost quite a bit on one hand when the odds showed that the pot would almost definitely be mine. On another hand, I knew there was no way I could be beaten with the cards on the table and was delighted when a couple of other players went all-in. Kerching!

When they wean people off heroin, they'll use methadone; to get people to kick the poker habit, do they encourage you to take up dominoes? Then once they think you've kicked the habit, they'll reduce the dose to maybe ludo or hook-a-duck?

Hello, I Am The Moon

The nightshift. Grafting under the stars.
I'm working nights this week. It is now 4:41. I've missed a nights sleep, but am still going along quite strongly, powered on a vegetarian cottage pie and about two litres of orange juice. At about 10am my blood sugar level will crash and I'll wake with a start. I'll want some fizzy goodness to take away the craving. I'll go and retrieve the charcoal elixir living in the fridge and stop to pause at the TV. I'll not return to bed, and a week of sleep deprivation will start.
Nights actually has various positives and negatives. I shall list the major ones…

Positives

1. The money. The shift cash is rather nice, especially if you get in before 8:30. Then you get time and two-thirds. For reading the paper. Haha, not really Mr.BAe spies, I was doing quality graft at 6:30 yesterday evening. I still am now chief. I've made eight planes tonight.
2. There are only two of us here, me and my friend Chris. I don't exactly feel like I'm being pushed into over exertion.
3. Cricket. We time our nightshift on a week when there is a test match on the Thursday. It means that we get to watch the first two days play. Yay! I loves the cricket. It does however mean that on the last night I am even more knackered than I usually would be.

Negatives

1. Lack of sleep. As I mentioned, I've totally missed a nights sleep. Most people sleep before they come to work but I can't fool my body. It doesn't want to sleep on Monday afternoon, it had enough of that dull nonsense on Sunday night thank you very much. I'll sleep anything from between 3 to 6 hours when I get home and that will repeat until Friday. Then I'll either move swiftly back to normality, or I'll spend the whole weekend in a zombie like trance. I quite like the feeling of sleepiness when you have nowhere to rush off to. I don't particularly like the thankfully rare occasions when lack of sleep sends my already high grumpiness level off the scale. I've sat at work before wanting to kill anyone who even talks to me. If bad vibes could kill, I'd have murdered millions on a night shift. For nothing. I've actually frightened myself.
2. The rig. Our testing rig is a strange place. It's a large room filled with various test benches, electrical cabinets and wiring units, and with lots of nooks and crannies where murderers could hide. It's okay on days when it's filled with people, but I just cobbled together a new set of Nimrod software and went down there to load it onto the computers. Now, it didn't help that there was a thick fog on the way there, and all I could hear in the grey murkiness was the occasional sound of a spanner being dropped or metal hitting metal from the nearby hangars. The rig though was pitch black. I turned the lights on, but as you load your software, you can't help but feel that this would be the perfect place to sneak up on somebody. The soonest I'd know that a psycho had crept in would be when a pickaxe was lodged through my head, making its exit through my right eye socket. It'd be too late for me to realise that it wasn't the sound of the hangars at all that I was hearing earlier, no, it was the sound of the psychopathic escapee's pickaxe being dragged along the ground. It's odd though, because a few times something caught the corner of my eye. If you don't hear from me again this week, call the cops and tell them that I've been deaded by Pickaxe Pete.
3. My mind is dying. I'm finding this very hard to write and I can't fathom why some of my tests are failing tonight. I feel my IQ has dropped to the level of a punctured dinghy.