Next time I see my GP (which is next week) I need to mention the whole Sunday=dying thing. I frequently feel flu-ish and have a dodgy stomach on Sundays, and by frequent I mean most weekends. I think it might be a food intolerance. My diet is rather rigid during the week as I usually have similar things for lunch at work and have tried and trusted meals in the evening. But from Friday evening onwards I’m more likely to eat out more and be more adventurous with my food. According to my food diary the only likely candidates are red meat or gluten. Personally I blame Thatcher.

I finish work for my holiday at midday on Thursday. For my sins I’m going to Leeds for the weekend to visit the parentals. They did offer to pay for the train but GNER want to charge me £120+ so I’m taking the tramp wagon (National Express). I have Londonish stuff planned for next Sunday evening so I’ll be back mid-afternoon Sunday, but I may not go to Leeds until the Friday. Everyone’s working and I’ll be at a loose end so I don’t want to spend Friday in Leeds just vegging out in front of the TV. But I could always visit the Royal Armouries (yay shiny pointy things!) and/or tear up and down the Penines at 90mph on the poof mobile. While I'm there I’ll have to guilt the parentals into buying me new clothes. This shall easily be arranged by taking the most moth-eaten clothes I own with me. Rar.

One of the things I managed to do today (despite feeling monged out) was create a Wiki for work. It was suggested by the evil Nolan in one of the God-forsaken customer service workshops. Creating a wiki seems easy enough, but the challenge was to find one that doesn’t need to be hosted on a web server, as doing so would bring down the wrath of Mordac preventer of Information Technology (our company has several of these characters). I’ll install it at work tomorrow, but I predict one of two things will happen: One of my minions (most likely Ben) will vandalise it and it’ll be picked up on by management who’ll insist it has to be deleted; or someone from another team who wants to earn brown nose brownie points will say it’s “against the Data Protection Act” (it’s not) and management will insist it has to be deleted. And then we’ll go back to the usual way of expecting product knowledge to filter through the company: osmosis.

Have your say on the route of the new London Cross River Tram. Go on, you know you want to.

Urgh, I seem to be coming down with the evil lurgy of death. *paints a red cross on the door* An earlier night than usual methinks.

Tomorrow we have the ungodly Customer Service workshop of misery at work. And we have to take it seriously because one of the directors is running it. It seems to be one of those “learn from a video” package, with accompanying 32 page work booklet with patronising questions and obvious answers (I’ve seen the work book and the answers). I think someone in the company saw an advert for the training package, spent a ludicrous amount of money on it and is now going to make as many people in the company see it to try and get as much value for it as possible. I’ll just have to settle for mocking it after it’s happened.

And on the topic of work, they’ve suddenly decided since the rest of the company is doing “something”, the Bermondsey site should have a Christmas party too. And which unfortunate soul is being made responsible for organising it? Yeah, I’m upper management’s bitch. A piss-up is out of the question because of the number of Muslim employees (damned minorities) and all the restaurants I’ve tried to book have laughed in my face when I’ve asked to book for thirty-plus people. I think we’ll have to have a New Year’s celebration in January instead, which works out better for me as I’d enjoy celebrating having survived Christmas. And briefly, in other work-related news there’s a “future fuehrers of CompuGlobal” thing I’ve been encouraged to attend in mid-December, and we’re stealing even more of Norwich Union’s files next month so we can sell them back to them at an extortionate price (anyone with healthcare plans with them should switch to another provider before we lose your files).

I’ve been so wrapped up in Other Stuff™ that I totally forgot about Canadian TV airing Atlantis before the US. Of course it’s taking aaaaaaages to torrent now. And I stayed in Wimbledonia last night so I wasn’t able to torrent Veronica Mars this morning, and as I’m still DVD drive-less (die Maplin, die!) I don’t have any fandoms to watch tonight. Woe. I could watch telly but it’s all reality TV shows and reruns *yawn*.

Torchwood. Meh. I’ve given it a chance and I’m just not as swayed over by it as everyone else is. I think it’s trying too hard. Or not hard enough. Either way it just doesn’t push my buttons. On the other hand I’m seriously enjoying “American Dad!”. I didn’t think I’d like it as everyone’s said it’s a cheap knock-off of Family Guy, but unlike Family Guy it doesn’t go off on weird tangents that stopped being funny after season three. I suspect this is because American Dad shares the same producers as Family Guy but isn’t written by manatees.

I think I need to add “a working DVD drive” to the list of things I can’t live without. Maplin said it’d be a week until the one they should have just replaced is repaired. It’s now a week plus a day. I wasn’t particularly thrilled with the way they handled this in the first place and the only way they could have stopped me from bitching about it to their head office was to get it dealt with in the time frame they mentioned. I was pissed off before but now I’m just seething. Vengeance will be mine.

I’ve spent most of this afternoon suffering from a delayed hangover. I blame this on drinking since 3pm yesterday. Or the poisoned cappuccino I had at Canary Wharf this morning (the milk had gone off. Blah). Attempts to nap off the crappiness failed due to the weird law that everyone wants to text or call you when you don’t actually want them to. Damn my inconvenient popularity.

Whilst looking for work related books (“The Geneva Conventions and Your Minions For Dummies”) I’ve found some much coveted word porn in Foyles, the five volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diaries. Amazon haven’t had any copies in stock for as long as I’ve been looking so I was surprised to find them. I’ll have to buy some for myself as an early Christmas present.

That’s it for new stuff. Nothing bad at work, nothing bad with anything else. Life’s kinda dull when there’s no impending disaster.

I seem to be over my phase of blogging every single thing that happens in my day. Mostly because I’ve come to realise that my life isn’t very interesting to read. That and blogging requires effort *apathy*.

Maplin have made it on to my enemies list. I bought a DVD writer off them last weekend to replace the one that died during the recent PC-killing power surge. The new DVD writer doesn’t read most of my DVDs though so I took it back for a replacement yesterday. Except the manager fobbed me off and told me to they’d have to send it off to be repaired, despite one of his minions telling me they could replace it as it was before some 14 day limit. So now I have to wait a week (at least) for a replacement. As soon as I get it back I’m going to rattle off a strongly worded letter to their head office about statutory rights and decent customer service. Fucktards.

Work isn’t very interesting. We have a customer service workshop next Friday with corporate videos and role playing. I’m very much looking forward to it because you just know it’ll be cheesy as hell. Or like something straight out of Dilbert. And at the end of the month I’ve got a very, very long weekend off work (finish Thursday at noon and go back the following Wednesday). I have nothing glamorous planned, just Christmas shopping and mebbe a pre-spring clean of the house. And then I have a week off for Christmas. Yay. And then another week off in February. I’d like to go away somewhere different for a week but if the housemates are planning on moving then I’ll have to save all my money up for a deposit for somewhere else. Which would suck. In that case I could always work in Shoeburyness for a week as a get-away :oÞ

Eh, I had more to write but I feel the need to shower and sleep. May write more at work tomorrow.

Daylight savings time seems to be detrimental to a lot of people's mental health. Loads of people seem more far more depressed than they were before last weekend. And the abrupt change in weather can't have helped. Damned nature *hands out anti-depressants as a Bonfire Night snack*.

South Park continues to rock my world with the latest episode "Go, God! Go! Part 1". Richard Dawkins come to replace Mrs Garrison on account of the latters misleading attempt to teach evolution ("It was thought up by Charles Darwin and it goes something like this: In the beginning we were all fish, OK? Swimming around in the water. Then a couple of fish had a retard baby. And the retard baby was different so it got to live. So retard fish goes on to make more retard babies, and then one day a retard baby fish crawled out of the ocean with it's mutant fish hands and it had butt sex with a squirrel or something and made this: retard frog squirrel. And then that has a mutant baby which ended up being a monkey fish frog. And then this monkey fish frog has butt sex with this monkey and then that monkey has a mutant retard baby that screwed another monkey and that made you. So there you go, you're the retarded offspring of five monkeys having butt sex with a fish squirrel. Congratulations."). The episode ends on a cliffhanger 500 years in the future with sea otters preparing for war with other atheists (part 2 next week! Yay!).

I'm being weird with my money. There are things I need, like a new DVD drive, underwear without holes in etc that I just won't buy. Then there a shiny useless things that I'd never get to use, like a bluetooth headset for Skype that I really want. I think I need to keep away from the shops for a while (apart from those that sell pants). Not sure I can do without a DVD drive though. 'puter fairs at the weekend I think (also avoiding anywhere that sells kittens).

I have failed to get tickets to China Power Station, as all the tickets have now sold out. I suck. I finally got a copy of Time Out through the post yesterday, seven issues into my subscription (fuck knows where the other six went, but they've refunded me for them) so I have lots of other ideas for stuff to do this weekend. I'm also the proud owner of a Zone 1-3 travelcard, one more zone than before. I want to start exploring London more than I've been doing so far (plus I can stop paying for train journeys to Wimbledonia to meet Mrs. LordOfMisrule).

We're being audited at work, both internally and by Norwich Union. They're analysing the processes involved and they want to "TQM" my department, so one of the company's project managers is coming in this morning with a stop watch and he's going to work out how long it takes to do requests, and ultimately how many staff we need so we can cut back on staff or charge the customers more. I don't like being scrutinised. It means less time surfing the net.

Now that I'm not poor I think I'm going to do some shopping for shiny things tonight. It'd be quite nice to have clothes that aren't ancient and/or have holes in.

My PC gimped out on me on Saturday. It suffered catastrophic hard drive failure, which has resulted in me using my 160GB hard drive as a paperweight and having to format my 200GB hard drive so I could install a working operating system. I won't buy a new hard drive to destroy until I've filled up the 200GB one. I think I need a new DVD drive though. Meh.

I'm not poor next month. Huzzah! I told the parentals I was a bit hard up and they've transferred quite a bit into my account. And my predicted cash flow deficit won't appear anyway as I got my wage slip today and I'm being paid for my sick days last month. So not only do I have money to eat but I have money to live comfortably and buy shiny things. Except I'm still going to be frugal and save up, for soon it is December, the official month of Shiny Things™.

My weekend was rather unadventurous in the end. I got the bus to Shadwell, walked to Whitechapel, then Wapping, then to Crossharbour and did some food shopping before coming home. Then I broke the PC. Well no, I think the power surge in the kitchen in the morning did something but had a delayed effect. Anyway, Saturday night was spent unglamourously trying to fix it, and Sunday I used the new London City Airport DLR branch!... Eleven months after it opened. I went to meet the missus as he was flying back from Scotland. And er, that was it. It would have been nice to have had a bit less stress though. Stupid PC.

Tomorrow I want to go to that dealie in Southwark, since John "Crow" Constable is an absolutely brilliant speaker and the whole thing looks quite fun (assuming I can sit out on any spiral dances). Will have to see who I can persuade to come along.
Anyway, Happy Samhain to you crazy, freaky beatniks.

Yeah, so I’ve been away. No explanation shall be given.

I’m gearing up to a month of total, abject poverty. Sort of. I’ve got bugger all left for food/expendable income owing to time off work sick and being too ambitious in wanting to pay debts off. I’ve lived off a budget of £60 a week before, but it’s not nice. So this weekend is going to be a cheap weekend (the shape of things to come </bsg>). Of course I can’t consult my copy of Time Out for things to do BECAUSE THEY HAVEN’T SENT ME THE PAST SEVEN ISSUES THEY OWE ME!! It makes a mockery of their “pay for one, get nine issues” subscriber introduction offer when they can’t even send me one of the bastard things. They’re on their last chance.
Last week I hopped on a few buses and toured North East London. This week I’d like to do something a little more cultured and some what cheaper. On Sunday I may go to Battersea Power Station to see the Chinese art exhibition. And who knows, maybe I’ll go to the Dogs Home and go “aawwwww!” lots at the kittens. Sadly I can’t afford one this month, and Gaucho would eat it or hump it to death or something. Which would make me sad. And a little grossed out.

Christmas is coming. Despite the poverty I’m quite looking forward to it. I won’t make the mistake I made last year which was puh-chasing loads of things for people and getting next to nothing in return. I’ll get people token gifts from their wish lists and that’ll be it. But my end of November wage should actually be rather healthy again so I’ll buy myself lots of neat seasonal stuff. Like that morbidly cool black Christmas tree I saw last week, and fairy lights. And maybe an iPod. iPods are festive, right?

Work persists in being poo. Sixteen grand. That’s how much they’re going to pay me. Sixteen grand. OK, with the overtime I do it ends up being somewhere in the vicinity of twenty-one grand but I. Am. So. Pissed. Off. Their excuse was that the site hasn’t made a profit since it took on the contract two years ago, and that I should ask again in three months when they’ve cut costs and increase revenue but I’m planning my escape now. Plus the amount of stress and scrutiny they’re giving my department and my minions so isn’t worth it.

Best episode of South Park. EVER.

Wicked was awful. Truly awful. I’ve never come so close to walking out of a theatre. It made anything by Lloyd-Webber look positively appealing in comparison. The story had a lot of potential but it was let down by the piss poor script, forgettable songs and random, painful key changes. One thing in it’s favour were the excellent cast, but the only thing that made me go back in to watch the second act was a morbid curiosity to see whether it would become so bad it would be laughably bad (it was). If I’d paid full price for those tickets I’d have been fuming (or maybe I’d devlop an overly enthusiastic sense of denial about it like everyone else there).
I’m rather weak. I’ve broken my self-enforced work porn embargo (I have four unread books I need to read).

While puh-chasing food and drink from the Tesco at Canary Wharf I saw a copy of Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories for £3.90 in paperback and I couldn’t resist, particularly since it was only yesterday that I was pondering when the paperback would be out. Definitely no more word porn until I’ve read what I’ve got *nods resolutely*.

I woke up feeling like crap today and decided to take the day off work. The place has seriously been getting me down and usually I feel guilty about calling in sick but not today. So long work ethic!

I’m really disappointed with London’s newspapers. The new TheLondonPaper is as right wing as The Sun, and in response to the release of the aforementioned free shit rag The Evil Standard has shifted so far right it’s now effectively a late edition of the Daily Mail. London’s such a diverse city and you’d think that one of the more liberal news agencies would take advantage of that. Still, good to see that Ken’s got one up on the Evil Standard. *adds some more candles to my Ken Livingston shrine*

I'm seriously stressed and wound up about work. Today I was:

I'm not sure what's up with the weather but hopefully this is the tail end of Hurricane Buffster, which is currently wiping Stevenage off the map at this very minute.

Very little is worth mentioning, hence the lack of update. Good telly is back (in the US anyway), which is a good thing. And damn Grey's Anatomy for manipulating my emotions for another season! I'm still sad that Stargate SG-1 got cancelled though.

Work persists in being "blah" (courtesy of Stevenage), but it looks like I may get my pay rise soon (in theory). I'm getting fed up of being poor and I want to buy shiny things for people for Christmas.

I have practically free tickets to see Wicked on Wednesday. I got a spare ticket for Jon but he's being crap and hasn't replied to my text so I'll probably fall back to one of the many people on my reserve list (with Casp at the top and the Sock Puppet of Love somewhere near the bottom).

Erm, that's about it. Once again I'm waiting for the rain to stop so I can go out and do Stuff™.

Or so the old song goes. But what about an iPod and WMP?

Yeah, so despite importing my old iTunes library it's lost all my purchased music, and Apple won't let you download it again for free (or even at a discount). So now that I'm DRM free I'm switching to Windows Media Player, as my next MP3 player won't be an iPod. Plus I'm starting to see many of the bugs in iTunes 7.0. And everyone's flagrant Apple wanking is starting to get tedious. But will my iPod work with WMP?

Boringly the answer is "yes". It works fine, despite both being designed to like each other about as much as neighbouring Middle Eastern states. Even on the experimental and temperamental Vista/WMP11 it works fine. And in future if I can't torrent it I'll just buy the CD.

Children of Men was a great film. If you’re childfreelike me then it’s a vision of an ideal future. Sure, the coffee shops you have frequent may get blown up but there wouldn’t be any kids to annoy you! Obviously the rounding up of anyone a bit foreign isn’t nice though. I also watched Me, You And Everyone We Know this evening. Despite some enjoyable moments it was a bit crap.

I’m quite worried that the tag cloud on my blog has gerbilling in big letters. I’d better start tagging non-scary things.

How annoying. It’s the last day of my long weekend and it’s pissing it down.

My plan is/was to go to Oxford St, buy a new book and then go to the Imperial War Museum. Annoyingly this doesn't look like it's going to happen so I'll go to Canary Wharf for coffee and cake (mmmm, cake) and then see what Books And Stuff (Etc) has to offer. After reading heavy sci-fi I want something that doesn't take itself too seriously, but I'm still in a fiction mood. I'll probably get something by Will Self or Neil Gaiman. I'm still off to see Children of Men with Tom this evening. I was invited to see it yesterday with other friends but I was disinvited by omission (you know, that thing where they still go but neglect to tell you where and when).

It's good to see that Di's back on the front cover of the Express. I was getting withdrawl syptoms after their mammoth coverage of anniversary. Truly the "World's Greatest Newspaper"!

Right, back to fiddling with Movable Type until the apocalyptic rain stops.

I’m just killing time on t’interweb before the lunch time rush has died down at Canary Wharf. I need buy word porn (books), anti-histamines (god damned fleas) and, of course, coffee. I also need to buy some pens as I stole my own weight in post-it notes from work yesterday (many pretty colours) but I don’t actually have any writing implements at home. D’oh.

I have a weekend of complete and blissful inactivity planned. This isn’t to say I won’t do anything, it just means I can be as spontaneous as I damn well please. Ditto for Monday *chants “Day off! Day off!”*. And I seem to have figured out why I’m so damned lazy recently. There are lots of things I want to see and do, like films at the cinema, but I avoid them as I worry that if I go it’ll be crap and I’ll have wasted what little free time I’ve got. It’s a cycle I need to break out of. But not today. Maybe tomorrow :oÞ Coffee now.

Judas Unchained

by Peter F. Hamilton

Short books can be fun, but sometimes you need something that goes well beyond 300 pages. The first book in the Commonwealth saga Pandora's Star was 1200 pages long and the concluding part is even longer. I've never read anything by Peter Hamilton and I defied the adage by buying Pandora's Star solely based on it's cover, as I wanted a big, honking space opera. The saga would have benefitted from being a little darker and some of the characters needed a bit more dimension but it was fun. Judas Unchained was a much easier read than Pandora's Star as all the characters' individual threads had woven together by the end of Pandora's Star. And Judas Unchained was 3-for-2 in Books Etc, so it was effectively free! (please don't spoil the logic) I'd definitely recommend it if you like sci-fi, but only if you don't mind the fact that the saga is 2500+ pages long.

I have no idea what to read next. Something Londonish. (sounds like a perfect excuse to go bookshopping tomorrow)

Today one of my minions at work asked me to write a letter for the Home Office so she can extend her visa. In exchange I got a free latte and a bar of chocolate. I’m not entirely sure it was worth the pay off as it’d mean she’d be in the country a few more years but I just can’t say no to coffee.

Speaking of work, I have Friday and Monday off. I’m feeling a bit stressed and burnt out, and I’m still being paid peanuts so I’m going to re-evaluate my escape plan. As I’ve whined about for a while they’re using the ploy that I’m “interim” admin organ grinder (the dancing monkeys being my minions) so they won’t pay me fully until they’ve advertised the role externally and done interviews etc. When they finally get their arses in gear and start advertising I’m going to look for something else. If I get a better offer for more money with another company (hardly an impossibility) I’ll take it. And if they decide they want someone else for my job then I’ll already be looking for something else. In the meantime I have lots of time off to take so I can relax, catch up on reading and do the whole “exploring London” thing.

Bugger all else is new. I have lots I want to write in here but I get home from work and my brain leaks out of my ear.

With everyone indisposed I think I've done a good job of spending time by myself this weekend.

Yesterday I tried that coffee shop on Mile End I found last week. It's nice, but it does get rather busy. I took advantage of the nice weather and walked to Canary Wharf where I de-camped for more coffee, more reading and lots of arsing about with my PDA (worst. purchase. ever). The evening was very sedate. I was planning on attending the PN moot but in terms of my credibility spending the evening on my own, watching Futurama was the least damaging option available.