Pay dirt...

yes, the pay is dirt, but at least the dirt came through, in its meager trowel sized shovel, today. 

and with it i'm off.  yes, 'tis sal's dirt-h-bay next week and to celebrate we are off to italia.  yay!  first continental excursion is afoot.  will write post the event to tell you just how much fun it all was.  i'm looking forward to good coffee and pesto. fyi the location is cinque terre wherever the feck that is (poor sal had to organise her own travelling birthday this year!).

and that reminds me, a year ago on the 7th of may, we left NZ.  fuck me time flies.  this time last year we were in Bali, heading for Flores, drinking arak, sweet&nasty arak...

quick shout out to the NZ folk who will gather in my absence this weekend at Rumpletron.  stiltskin!

have a bottle of piper-heidsieck (a perk from bar work) to drink in celebration of the upcoming holiday, so i'm off to sozzle.  wishing you all well.

I got paid!

Thank the sweet-sweet capitalistic Lord, I got paid this morning!  I might just have to celebrate by drinking most of it...

Lost Season 2 Episode 12

For want of not revealing MASSIVE spoilers I'll just ask this wee question. 

wtf?

shit

heaps to say, no time to say it, so i'll fob you off on the best pimped snack project to date.  fucking wicked!

Lubricated

Well currently felling as though communication is divine (pigphone - sadly all google searches for the old party site have long since vanished) and am mentally well lubricated because of My Best Friend's chat that has just concluded and in which games of Rock Paper Scissors were played over the distance of half the world (wtf?) and that was also fuelled by a whiskey or two.  It is after 2pm so hey, what the hell.

Anyway I thought I'd get back on the blog and type random shit.  Last day of unemployment.  Shit. 

Am listening to The Fragile by NIN and am reminded by my earlier post of the Neuromancer film preparative work that I carried out in my head many moons ago.  I was hoping to get Trent to do the music, but well, seeing as it was a theoretical exercise anyway decided that he was on board anyway.  So it was great to think about the music for Neuromancer the movie a la NIN, and then it quickly became a compilation album with Neuromancer themed music that I put out on my own record label under some fucked up DJ handle like Lupus Wonderboy or some such something.

Daydreams ARE free!

Anyway I got it down to a two-disc compilation.  First disc appropriately titled 'The Sprawl' would kick off with the excellent NIN instrumental 'A warm place', replete with its wasp hums and atmospheric build up and would then lead straight into 'Eraser'.  The shot for the credits that opened with it (sadly cliched) are already penned in a notebook somewhere and play in my head whenever those two songs play side by side.  Second disc notable tracks on the 'Freeside' (fuck I'm a geek) CD would be The Nomad's version of 'For the Love of It' which has this beautiful build-up that I always equate with Case's departure from Morocco to wake plugged into a terminal in space with hypoderm's in his arm and drum'n'bass piping LOUD through headphones, his heart only just having survived the flat line...
The other notable, is David Holmes 'Don't die just yet' which for many many many reason is SO appropriate for Armitage's death scene.  The sonar ping just fits the scene so well and the atmosphere of the music is totally tragic mirroring the way that Case reacts.

And this is the mental space that I go to when I'm having fun and thinking of HOME.  It is scary that stuff like this, unrealised and creative and so meaningful (to me), only ever exerts itself when I feel connected to the world and my place in it.  That is exactly why I love Neuromancer.  It makes me feel connected to this earth.  I have no idea why.  And I guess that is why I love coming back to it whenever I've done something that reassures my faith that I'm not about to fly off the face of this world, inconsequential and void. 

And of course I'd be thinking NONE of these thoughts at all if it weren't for alcohol.  Don't even get me started about that.  I'm for another dong.  Probably won't even remember any of this.  That is the devil.

--

"Don't die.." is playing in the background and soaring like it was meant to in its stuttered climaxes...

Pattern Recognition

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

NZ Called

Whoopee!

NZ called, sounded fantastic, made me miss them and then told me to buck up my 'oh woe is me' ideas about life the universe and everything.  So now I am charged with enthusiasm for the new job and London and everything.  But then of course she spoiled it by signing off with a "come home before Feb '07" comment.  Conflicting advice there Acting Manager!  Sort that shit out before the worker bees mutiny.

Oh and instead of your gratitude journal, I've decided on a gratitude journ-cal, daily entries along the lines of:

Cal rocks the party, Oh she rocks the party,
Cal rocks the party, Oh she rocks the party,
etc., etc....
--

You know what?

Cal rocks the parteeeeee!

--

And special shout out the Captian Kes whose e-mail (in response to a whine) brightened my day immensely. 

And to Matt (c) who doesn't read this but will be chatting with me tomorrow thanks to google!

And generally being unemployed WITH purpose.  Life is all good.

--

Finally I agree that NZ is the place and I will be there soon enough.  Till then I'm off to make the most of the UK and beyond.

Pooh

...to Lost Season 2 Episode 19. 

Pooh!  And not a cool Pooh like a honey loving fellow neither!

Though confirmation of a Jin/Sun conflict is of interest...

--

I need to sleep but just can't quite be fucked.

--

Have been boozing.  Am quite wasted.  In a very lucid and awake kid of way.

--

Can't wait to hear from NZ.  Come on NZ.  Call!  I'll be sober 10pm NZ time...

Sweet nothing

Just a little note, of no importance that may or may not solicit comment.  

Easter is over.  I may not have walked 500 miles, but I did cover 41 over the break.  I intend to write about it sometime.  Not now for I have to enjoy my FREEDOM - unemployment with end in sigh (I remain that way till Monday 24th).

That is all, and till then I remain your Easter themed pimped snack.

Further...

RTB is finished 'Long live RTB'

~m, notes will follow in a less public forum.

Lost

Season 2 Episode 18 is a shrimp cracker of an episode despite far too much fat-man fun and frivolity.  It is all getting interesting(er) and interesting(er).

Good

Today is good - I have a job.  Interview yesterday, offer today.  'Tis all good.*

Guitar is good, the fingers on my left hand are supple and hitting the right strings today, and my right hand is strumming up a storm.  I just blitzed "Last to know" which was the VERY first proper song I ever learned on the guitar, and an old faithful in determining if the g-tar playing day will be good.

And all you people out there, maybe even reading this, are good too.

Have a good Wednesday.

* This post reminds me of the Scribe song that goes:
"...it's all good, when you come down to my hood!"

Today's favorite chords: 
Am C G D as a simple progression in both open and barr.
Cm G G# D# in barr (the chorus of a Wheezer song I vaguely remember from uni days)
Bm C G in barr, the core tune of Age Pryor's "Leave it all behind"

FIN

Nothing to report

Please go about your business as usual, for there is nothing of note to report here.

The Global Elite

Well, well, well.  I may be an unemployable chemical technologist, but I do still have the power to mingle with the global elite(tge).  This weekend I had a walk on role as a wannabe bartender at a soire hosted by none other than Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who'se tge page is here, at the amazingly old/huge/plush Ditchley Park, which he is director of.

You can read more about the house here, and look at the funny formatted map of the area that has an air of Ditchley authenticity here.

That is about all the news at the moment, 'cept for the fact that I'm half way through RTB, and the fact that both the cousin's in law from Oamaru, and in laws from Sidford, descend upon us in a day or two!  It'll be family all round.

I'd best go prepare for them.

Reading Drafts

As mentioned in earlier posts, I'm reading a draft of a book. Thus
far it is excellent, and I've just read a bit that made me want to
post this. I'm not exactly sure why. Bear with me...

--

I started reading the draft on my computer and I got to around page 60
before realising that I just wasn't enjoying reading it on the screen.
I felt guilty that this was then stopping me from concentrating on
the story, SO I wrangled a print resource, and now am the proud owner
of a book, unusually formatted yes, but a book nonetheless.

And I am totally glad that I did. Cause there is an aesthetic with a
printed page that you just can't get on screen. I'm really enjoying
just turning each page, it gives you a sense of achievement and
anticipation with every turn. And then sometimes the words on the
page play a wicked trick on you. Like just what happened to me now:

I turned the page, immediately registered the salient narrative points
(NP), and then leisurely read through the paragraphs connecting them.
And it was great cause when I got to the end it gave a me a wicked
sense of deja vu as the last salient point clicked into place. They
were:

<page start>

lead in paragraphs...

NP: I DID

linking paragraphs...

NP: THIS

linking paragraphs...

NP: RESPONSE

</page end>

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, for me and I guess all of us
out there that were trained to read pages, the page is something that
we can and we do understand. I batch process written information:
each page is a batch.

This has made me think that computerised written information
inexpertly delivers itself in batch format. As more and more
information ends up on the web or as electronic documents, I expect
our conditioned response to page-like batch information to change. And
I further think that this is interesting because most of the ebook
readers are still trying to emulate the page, when they could probably
be more forward thinking and design for the time when the page is not
the way people are trained to receive information.

If I had to guess what I think this design concept might be I'd guess
the endless scroll, though I'm uncertain if this is a byproduct of
watching the Matrix once-too-often!

--

It is also interesting cause the page layout described above is the
result of two things:
a) the writer's attempts to lay out the story in a digestible way, and
b) the computer's attempts to logically paginate that story into an
arbitrary size
These two things, over the course of a novel sized document, and
especially in terms of a draft, are in conflict. So it is almost a
fluke that the layout that affected me existed in the first place.

Does anyone else find that kinda creepy?

--

These thoughts have been brought to you in elongated non-paginated
scrolling form courtesy of RTB.

Weird

Had a daydream just before falling asleep last night, in which I was a writer for Lost way back at its conception, and I was fighting the other creative folk for using Charlie's character not to display the evils of addiction with heroin, but with cigarettes!  I mean what self respecting heroin junkie wouldn't smoke as well?

I know that I didn't pay enough attention to the first series so I'm unsure if there hasn't been any mention of this, but I sure can't remember if any of the main characters have ever smoked or wanted to smoke.  And it just seems unusual to me that out of the number of survivors how this issue hasn't cropped up to be a major story line.

Anyway, this of course led to me thinking up all sorts of funny "Man I need a smoke!" scenes and how it could be yet another resource that Sawyer could control and finally about all the inter-survivor rivalry that would occur between those that were able to give up easily vs those eking out the last of the duty free supplies performing tricks for Sawyer along the way!  I think it would have been great.

Anyway, as life continues to imitate art, or at least a major TV series, here is a link to Lost related crime.

--

In other news, my dealings with recruitment agents imitates Sara Lee in a crazy "Layer upon layer, upon layer" farce. One of the jobs I'm applying for goes a little something like this: I'm applying for a position within a company that has outsourced the work to a project management consultancy, and this consultancy needs workers so have advertised through their preferred agency, which in turn put the word out through other agencies.  Thus I was alerted to the position through my agency and now I've been interviewed for my agency for the position, and then their agency and yet I still have two more layers to go before I can even work out who the hell it is that I'll actually be working for!  It is SUCH a dumb system.

In the meanwhile I am continually yours, unemployed...

--

C++ headaches are becoming the norm.  It may also have to do with the amount of caffeine in my system, but I've never been one to blame coffee before so why start now.  I managed to spend nearly two hours troubleshooting a programme just because I was too blind and dumb to see that ONE line was missing.  I'll tell you now that I'll never make THAT mistake again, but am a bit freaked out that I can be stumped for that long on something as trivial as it ended up being.

Ah well, at least my d6 is now rolling pseudo-random numbers in a way that I can 70% fully understand.  I guess that is the problem with me, I'll all like "Yeah OK, this guy here did this to get this to work, but how does it actually work?" and proceed to get bogged down writing a whole lot of extra code to interrogate the solution so that I can try and see what is happening.  It is far from efficient, causes headaches, and generally leads to only a 70% understanding before I have to concentrate on something else or go MAD.

--

Finally, I have myself my very own printed copy of RTB.  It is printed Two-Up and double sided but unfortunately in booklet form, so by all accounts it is an unusual publication.  But it is going to make the reading, and typo identification, run like a fleet footed moose (sans cobbled ankle)!

My second fave typo thus far, pg 105 last paragraph, 'You're a good moth.'

~m I'm only pointing theses out so you don't get a FAT head when I tell you later how much I'm(ve) enjoying(ed) it!

--

Have a good weekend

London Day # ? (I've stopped counting even before I started!)

Not a lot to tell you. The rejections are still mounting and the
prospects of employment seem a dim and distant horizon still.

Have been reading a bit, having finished half of Invisibles Vol.02,
the Sherlock Holmes collection and The Scar, though sadly not enough
of ~m's 2nd draft. We are getting there though.

Still feel naughty for reading the Invisibles, as Harkonnen was once
purported to be in the throes of planning an RPG based on it, and
evidently the key to the game's success was for PCs NOT knowing
anything about it. Ah well. I'm in London now, he can only punish me
from afar if this is indeed still and issue.

One of the things that has taken up more than just a little of my time
have been my rampant advances into C++. I now have a shitty wee
programme running in the command prompt environment that acts a little
(just a little) like a six sided dice (a D6 if ya will!). And I'm
happy that it does, cause it didn't and it was a HUGE headache trying
to work out why, and now that it is working, I'm plotting and scheming
to take over the world with it.

Be afraid - be very afraid.

Actually, it is cool, cause there are a few good tweaks that I can
make to it to make it work even better, and then I have the option of
trying to port it through to a windows based .exe and finally add
graphic features, all the while improving my knowledge of the language
and tips&ricks that may make me a useful resource for my friend's
project. You never know, I may get there.

I'm also very interested in reviving some to the VB work I did AGES
ago for mono-alphabet substitution ciphers etc. as a more
computationally interesting project to carry along the tweaks and mods
path. It is all UBER geeky, and quite exciting given my UBER geek
status.

In more socially acceptable forms of entertainment, I did catch up
with the most recent Lost episode last night, so below the cut will be
info about it...

**S02 EP16 Spoiler Alert!

All I really want to say is that Ep 16 is great! Not only do we get
conflict & resolution drama in the episode with Sun and Jin's story
arc, but we get a good is-this-a-cliffhanger ending after creepy Henry
Gale regales us (he he!), over corn flakes, with a great wee
supposition story, after he mocks Jack and John and the general lack
of inquisitiveness the survivors have towards the hatch. Made me
really like him, the clever wee undercover other that he is.

I can't help but think that Ana, Sayid and Charlie are very much
stranded up shit-creek without the proverbial. It will be very
interesting to see how this resolves, cause if it goes as badly as I
think(hope) it will, the repercussions that will come of it should be
spectacular.

(Hix - when and if Sayid comes out of this I reckon we will have one
hell of an episode of lets 'villify' the Iraqi torturer!)

It really was a good episode, especially as there were no slo-mos or montages.

I was a very happy Lost viewer after seeing it. You will all be too I reckon!

the will to live...

...is always improved with a good cup of coffee.  I'm currently stuck on Indo style coffee.  No, not coffee from Indonesia, just their low-tech way of preparing it.  In a nut shell (or should that be a bean casing) you take a generous scoop of coffee, add it to your cup or mug, pour on hot water, stir add sugar/milk to taste and drink.  Yes, you drink a fair amount of grinds with each cup (this can be limited by careful preparation and settling time etc.) but I like the way that it is a completely NO-nonsense way of making a cup of java joe.  It is instant, there is no faffing around with plungers or espresso makers and best of all it gets you wired quick and painlessly.  There is time to sit back after and think - yeah man, life is good!

...is also directly related to your will to learn.  You stop one, the other will stop.  This is my law, and in recent days I've not been the best practitioner.  So new challenge time.  Learn to programme.  Had a rousing chat with a friend and C++ is the 'where for' and 'what to' learn.  Fuck me.  Big challenge.

Wish me luck, cause while I'm willing, I ain't confident...

--

main()
{
work god damn it;
work;
}


--

And in amongst all this I got to get a job, money, read the three books I've got on the go, learn Blackbird on the G-tar (again) and ...

Who said the life of the unemployed wasn't stressful?  But hey, I'm willing to live it!

Harkonnen

Don't you hate it when you have good friends who don't have nicknames or handles that you can easily use to partially hide identity when talking about them in blog posts?  I do.  This excerpt is from one...

The next morning I was hung over.  Very hung over, at one stage I crawled off to the toilet to take a dump and it took me half an hour because there was no moisture in my body.

I'm calling him (yes only a him could come up with that paragraph) Harkonnen today.  Evidently he played them in the latest installment of the world's most complicated Dune game, that I won, despite being half a world away form at the time of playing. 

You may well ask how I did that but I will NOT reveal my secrets.

snakes on a plane

omg

found through this site which i got through a twisted series of links that is FAR to involved to describe here.  According to imdb it's in post production.  God knows when it it'll actually be here, or why.

"God, when will 'Snakes on a Plane' come out in cinemas?"

<I don't know>

OK, so maybe no one knows...

It makes me wonder why, oh why, 'March or Die!' hasn't arrived yet.