Nearly Forgot....

....I don't celebrate Thanksgiving (obviously), but Boing Boing [see links on right] posted this....A Thanksgiving Prayer, by William S. Burroughs...which is pretty damn cool in my book.

I Hate Today

Today has been very annoying.

I have 45 pence in my pocket. I have 8.59 in the bank. You cannot withdraw this amount without going to the bank. The bank is closed. And anyway, the nearest one is about 2 miles away. The local shop does not accept Amex. Luckily Tesco do. Tesco is about 1 mile away. Luckily I have food and it is pay day tomorrow.

Work is aggravating. Having to fill out reams of documents to "track" (read create red tape) for the last version of OGDR (basically, the Orange mobile bible!) I will have to contribute to.

I have watched all my films and downloaded TV. Myth Bustered out...watched The Life Aquatic last night, Sin City the other day....new stuff not downloaded yet. And anyway I can't for the life of me think of a film I want to watch....any ideas?

I have read all my books. At least twice.....I need more! Any ideas? SciFi please!

I got so bored last night I made cardboard robots for Sonny and Esmae.

Lil got sick on me. :)

I only have the crappy camphone right now, so no pics thereof.

However!

It is payday tomorrow and M&D are coming down on Sunday and I do have Lil for 2 hours that day....and I did buy her a new toy today :)

So....I am going to hibernate this evening...and wake up tomorrow when it is Friday, Pay Day, Happy Day and unfortunately Washing Day.

Take the rough with the smoothe.

Stupid man!

I've just implemented and tested some great (free!) upgrades to the blog...then I noticed the maintenance warning from Blogger.....Damn. Damn Damn.

This is why I am looking to go back to self-hosted, self-managed servers.

Still, I have not lost any old posts. Only the last few hours hacking CSS/XHTML.

Bah!

I am the Nodulator!

So. Turns out (after some messing around with the wrong dates) that my lump is just that....an unidentified lump! Bloke stuck an endoscope up my nose to look at my vocal chords and apparently there's a bit of a "bulge", so I will have a sore throat and lack of voice for a while after the surgery on the 14th.

Good News!

And to celebrate, here's a pic of Lil playing with her favourite toy!

AAAAAAaaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!

Apparently the biopsy results are back.

I have an appointment for 7pm this evening.

Scared :/

Will update later when I know the score

Been busy

Been a bit busy doing other things recently...also swapped back to the SE/// K600i which makes it a bit harder to swap files between laptop/PC/phone....however, here's a few pics with taken with the K600i over the weekend.



Lil is still gorgeous.



You can't really see here, but she's wearing some new clothes (Thanks Nicky!!!!).....the 0-3 months babygro's only just fit her, so I got Rosie to exchange them....good ol' Mothercare ;) So she got a lovely romper suit thing and a coat (all for 1 year olds, but they kinda fit).

Still waiting to hear about my "lump".

Hey ho.

Been a while...

Since I posted. But hey It's my blog, I'll post when I want....or when I can.

My lord, I love BitTorrent! I have spent the weekend and most evenings this week watching Lost (Season 1)....and thanks to the torrent I'm now ahead of the UK season (on C4). In fact....I'm 5 episodes into Season 2....so if you want to know what happens.... ;)

Also, got Star Wars III on download at the moment :)

The main reason for the lack of updates in tha past week can only be put down to "sadness". Yes, I have been feeling a bit down: am I a crap dad? and how can I tell when I only see Lil for 4-5 hours a week? Yes, I have the new job to look forward to, but getting out of a job means lots of work for handovers and stuff....plus I am actually nervous about the new job....never thought I would get a job that I'm not sure I can actually do. Plus, the beauty of depression is that you don't actually have to have anything specific to be depressed about.

So, my recovery plan?

A night out with the female Ricola on Saturday night to see Babel featuring the male Ricola (amongst others)....check out that link....they RAWK! In a folky-klezmer style ;)

Oh....that's why started this post...











Also...do not give money to this man! ;)

DJ Koala makes me feel strange...

...mixing chicken clucks with Evangalist preachers!

thumbs up! to teh ricola....

here is Lil snoring in my ear....i did not want to wake her up...thus...

Brief...

Watched "Batman Begins" last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. A classic disposable action movie...though it did take me 2 applications to find one that would play DivX with sound properly.

The PC also picked up a Trojan sometime while I was in Nice - I'd left it downloading some torrents ;)

Somehow it got past the 2 Firewalls but was picked up by the scheduled virus scan...so that was OK...and I've now updated the Firewall software and tightened up some logging. This was the 1st ever succesful (or not, if you see what I mean) attempt to attack one of my PCs. Inevitable I suppose.

Anyway....

It took about 5 seconds to from smiling to p!ssed off :)

Nice is nice....

....but not very sunny. gun metal grey cloudcover and a definite nip in the air.

The GeekFest is going well and I have so far avoided being hassled too much....and i managed to blag an extra 45 euros of "drink card"....probably best not to ask ;)

I have this photo as my phone's wallpaper and I can't stop looking at it!

Revenge of the Sith...er Cyst

Apparently I have a Thyroidal Cyst!

Joe noticed that I appeared to have 2 adams apples at the weekend, so Monday morning I was off to the quack....didn't take long and apparently the "consultants will love you. They'll have all the students in trying to figure out what it is. Prodding and pokng you." Now, this happened to me once before, a long time ago when I was in hospital to remove a similar affair from somewhere a bit more sensitive (boys have 2 of them....girls don't)....and that was seriously embarrasing.

"I have private healthcare", I squeaked!

Hopefully, it will all be sorted soon.

In the meantime:

Visitor...

Joe came down from London this weekend and we had a great night out on Saturday. Fulleride and Mr Knife came out too and a few beers (and 2 rounds of Tequila) were had by all.

Managed to sort out a couple of problems with Joe and Tola's laptops...introduced him to his niece (and then freaked him out a bit by repeating "That's your niece" over and over again. Fulleride did the same to me last month, repeating "Your daughter" over and over....it'sscary.

Took a couple of videos over the weekend too, I'll figure out how to get them here sometime. They're MP4 so should play in Real Player.



Comedy Gold moment, was Joe attempting to hold Lil....I've never seen anyone lose co-ordination so quickly...like he was holding a sack of spuds!

Had to go to the quack's again today...I've been 4 times in the last 8 months....prior to that I hadn't seen a doctor for about 8 years!!!...am I falling apart or something now I'm a dad?

Snigger...

So, the big boss from my team (we'll call him David, cos that's his name) was over in Briz today for some kind of meeting about the new organisation structure and he asked to have a word with me about why I'm leaving his team...my answer?

Because after 8 months you have just had a meeting to define job roles and objectives. I've been asking for over 1 year for this to be done....too slow.

Then he started whining (wineing?)....erm, whingeing about how hard it will be to find someone able to fill my "Java ME" shoes....not my problem. Yours!

*Sniggering to myself all the way home*

On another note, you could do worse to check out this a rather wonderful website from another member of the family...this one is older and better.

Oh, and...given that I don't have a TV (are you reading this Licensing people? Stop sending me the f*cking letters!), the ol' PC has been "torrenting" some of my fave TV programs for the last 48 hours...got me some "American Chopper", "Myth Busters", "StarTrek Enterprise Season 1", "Lost" (which people keep telling me about so I thought I'd have a look)...and the Fantastic Four movie.

Legal? Dunno...don't care.

And finally...


i'm a gonna punch you if you scare me again, dad!



I think the flash on the camera scares Lil :)

Just a quickie...

Had a great night out with the Ricola (female) and loads of other people on Saturday night. However smoking and drinking did no good for my cold/cough.

Woke up Sunday morning sounding like Barry White!

Other than that, I'm working from home today as I just got Broadband sorted on my home PC...so no more slow 3G connection...and thus I am preparing to get my arse kicked by Ferdinand de Buckos on Far Cry online :(

No further babber pics yet...but I'll probably post some later in the week.

I just got on National Radio!!!

Thanks to the fact that I was working from home I had BBC Radio 4 on in the background. On the Money Programme today they were asking for people to phone in with questions about benefits..."F*x it! I'll phone in" I thought (not expecting to get through)...got through, they took my question "What benefits are available to a parent without parental responsibility, who works full time, while the parent with full control is on benefits...?" ("and intends to stay on them forever!", I nearly said...but don't want to antagonise the Rose).

Anyway, bit later....walking back from Rose's having seen Lil for 10 minutes (sleeping, not spotty.....BBBEEEEeeeeeaaaauuuutttttiiiifffffUUUUUULLLL!!!!! lolols!) and they rang me!

Basically, was too flustered to sound coherent, and I rambled a bit - after they'd put me on silent actually so you don't me hear talk about my "pre-emptive strike" :)

I think you can find it here and obviously I do not use the name "guri", but "Ben".

The answer was essentially "None, you're screwed son".

Human Rights? Bah!