This morning I am working from home… The picture above might give you a sense of why 😉
Category: Uncategorized (Page 7 of 44)
I spent the weekend engaging in Cross Country Pantomime(tm)*, and my good friend Si got a picture of me, in kit, that I not only don’t hate, but actually quite like 🙂 Thanks dude!
* This term is copyright Ian Andrews and is an affectionately laconic term for LARP
…I want the world to know that I really love Lady GaGa.
Even if her music is not for you, you have to love her authenticity:
(Thanks to Kathryn for showing me the link originally)
Oh my God! This is soooooooo cute!
Something happened today that reinforced my love of the Internet, and seeing as it is indeed the perfect example of my “favourite thing” about the Internet, I thought that I would share it with you, dear reader.
I read a web-comic called XKCD, which is in my opinion one of the funniest things on the planet, but it is also something that has broadened my knowledge from time to time… Take today’s strip:
I had no idea who Paul Erdös was when I read this strip, nor did I get the joke, but a little Googling later and I had found the following two links:
Paul Erdös’s Page at Wikipedia
&
An Explanation of the idea / meme “Erdös Number”
So, you are thinking, I love the Internet because it leads me to the almost accidental acquisition of knowledge..? Well I do love that about the internet, but there is an even more quintessential reason to love the internet, and here it is… If you read the Wikipedia page about the “Erdös Number” above very carefully, you will note that the page has been edited to include that the XKCD comic for June 19th 2009 makes a joke about the Apocalypse and a bunch of mathematicians trying to lower their Erdös Number.
Here is the link with a page-anchor to the specific section
That’s why I love the Internet; the entire store of human knowledge expanding and evolving at a speed just slower than the speed of thought – how can anyone not love that?
Have a great weekend 🙂
Greetings Earthlings,
Welcome to The Future, just Now Flavoured!
Ok, enough, I will stop with the ‘amusing’ living in the future references, but seriously people how cool is this; I am in the Standard Class carriage of a train, in the UK, and I am connected to the internet… For Free!
That’s right Virgin, Cross Country and First Group – For Free!
Hooray for National Express (Rail), and their properly forward looking approach to customer satisfaction; if only I had more reasons to use their services…
Now it’s not all wine and roses, because I am a bit peeved with National Express for other reasons, but I have to be honest that allowing me to blog, catch up with email and find instructions for running an OpenSSH server on the Virtual Windows Machine on my Mac without needing a dongle or a connection to my phone is just marvelous! So on to the bad news…
I am on my way to the wedding of perhaps my oldest friend, Nick (The Vet)… No that’s not the bad news! Anyway, I booked my rail tickets about three weeks ago, and arranged a simple journey to Knaresborough for myself, that would leave me time to get to my hotel, check in, and still make the matching on time. This week, National Express announced planned engineering works between York (my connecting station) and Knaresborough, meaning that the last leg of my journey would need to be made by bus and at a considerably slower pace. Now, instead of arriving at my destination with time to spare to organise my life, I will have to barrel off the replacement bus and into a taxi with all of my luggage and arrive at the venue on the very last minute, which I hate, needing to find a kindly member of staff who can provide me with safe luggage stash space. Having discovered all of this I made the extra effort to arrive at Kings Cross early this morning, in the hope that the staff there would be able to offer me an alternative train at a nominal extra cost, considering the circumstances. How much do you think it was going to cost to modify my itinerary..? Over fifty quid! I could not believe it! They’ve already had the better part of £100 from me for travel over this weekend, and then having frustrated my original booking by announcing changes to the service after I’d booked they are unprepared to offer any kind of reasonable solution.
People wonder why I hate trains, why I get pissed off about MPs getting thousands and thousands of pounds worth of travel paid for as an expense when I don’t get any kind of help with my travel requirements, or why I loathe the fact that every train company in Britain is on the receiving end of millions of pounds worth of subsidies annually, but to me it’s obvious why I loathe trains… They are unreliable, over-crowded, and worse still, grotesquely over-priced – I can fly from Heathrow to Ediburgh with a week’s notice for £40-£50 less than I can travel between London and Edinburgh by train from Kings Cross. Now I don’t know about you, but in my world the idea of domestic air travel being cheaper than traveling by train, particularly considering the massive differential in environmental impact, is seriously fucked up. Still it’s okay, I can use the internet while I’m being ripped off and crammed in…
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EOT
Her skin felt good against mine as we lay together in the sunlight, the warm afterglow of the sex we had been having wrapping us both up in a bubble of happiness.
“Did I already wish you a happy birthday, Baby?”
Her cheeky smile made me feel incredibly happy. I pushed her hair out of her eyes, cupped the side of her face and kissed her softly, eyes open looking right at her, and then;
“You did, Sara, and you are the reason that it is so happy, so soon in the day.”
She laughed, her eyes shining in the morning light;
“So that’s all I have to do to make you this happy?”
She was joking and so I went with it;
“Well, yeah, but the truth is that the more you do it the happier I will become.”
She laughed again, and then became a little more serious for a moment, squeezing me just a little, just to tell me that I should answer truthfully.
“It is more than that, isn’t it? I mean we have that, and it’s great, but that’s not all you want from me is it?”
I squeezed her back, fixed her gaze and replied;
“I love you Sara, all of you.”
“This space is amazing. I just know that Andrea is going to love it. Can you show me around the backstage area as well please, Tony?”
Tony smiled to himself, inordinately happy that he had sold the place well enough that Andrea’s assistant was asking to see the facilities; the front of house had made the right impression.
Ever since he had taken the job, Tony had been looking for a big name performer or act to come to the chapel to ‘put it on the map’ as they say. Andrea was more than big enough as a star and a singer to really draw the crowds in over the Autumn run; “if Andrea McCormack played there it must be a serious venue” and that sort of thing. Now here he was a few moments away from signing the deal that was likely to save the Chapel from its owners worst impulses.
The tour around the backstage area went off without a hitch, and twenty minutes later Tony was waving goodbye to a taxi containing a very contented tour manager, and trying to contain his glee at having saved the Chapel as a live music venue.
There is no end to any of it, there are only new beginnings. That is the koan which my master left me with on his deathbed, and even now, three years later, I find no peace in it. Nonetheless as I stand over the grave of perhaps my closest friend this so-called wisdom offers me no comfort. No, instead it sticks in my mind like a cruel taunt; what ‘new beginning’ could possibly be here for Tessa or for me?
Her grave looks like a wound in the Earth. There is nothing even remotely natural about burial, about placing the dead in the ground. People say that we become one with the ground, food for worms and beetles, but embalming and coffins lead to that future being unlikely. Tessa did end; there is no new beginning for her, not even organic recycling.
Some might say that her new beginning is the afterlife, others might say it is re-birth or reincarnation, but standing over the dark trench of her final resting place, looking down at her coffin I am so completely certain that she is gone; there is no comfort here.