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Subject:	Meanwhile...
Date:	2005-03-16 21:31
Security:	Public

In other news: not a lot of luck on the employment front. Called the agencies, but no joy. Shall have to sign up with some more, I think. I jotted a bit more down for a horror story I'm working on: a rather nasty tale of family strife and sacrificing one's humanity in the pursuit of the ultimate high that currently has the title All or Nothing.

shadowstone found my missing waistcoat. Wish it'd turned up a couple of days ago, could have done with that during the interview, but I'm glad to have it anyway.

I seem to be playing the guitar a bit more than usual. Trying to brush up on my fingerstyle -- which was never up to much in the first place. Continuous attempts at Stairway to Heaven and Brain Damage have left me with a blister on my third finger. And lo, the molehill began its inevitable transition into the likeness of a mountain...

On top of that I've decided to go back on a tough decision I took a few months ago. After chatting with Patric, who edited my work during the DPG days, it looks like we might start working together again on RPG products. Not expecting to make any money from finishing off these adventures, obviously. I've seen plenty of horror stories from freelancers, and the DPG fiasco is still pretty fresh in my mind. It's just a hobby this time. Something to do. Ultimately I'll just be happy once I've got some of these enormous manuscripts finished off. If I can finish off The Tyrant's Festival it might give me a bit more of an impetus to get more of Goldric's Luck finished -- basically, a way of keeping the creative juices flowing. More news on that as and when it happens. I have one or two ideas, but they're still a bit vague and I shan't discuss them here until I've thought them through in more detail.

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Subject:	Nicked from cavalorn
Date:	2005-03-16 20:58
Security:	Public

So, 'internationally known' psychic Linda 'My middle name isn't really Moonbeam but it ought to be' Polley claims that John Lennon is writing songs in support of Michael Jackson. Of course he is. It couldn't possibly be that Linda is flakier than an outbreak of scabies.

Still, if anyone can channel John Lennon, I figured I, being bespectacled, surly and generally cynical could give it a go as well -- and so it came to pass that the spirit of John Lennon entered into me and told me the medium had missed out a couple of verses. He prompted me to pick up a guitar and play the following.
( John Lennon collaborates with a lot of us spiritual types, you know. )

Having finished his song, he then proceeded to rifle the place for booze and yelled at me when he failed to find any. He stomped off in a spectral huff. And yet, despite the insults, the incessant swearing, his insistence that I find Mark Chapman and give him a kicking and the further volley of abuse when I pointed out that I was broke and unable to be in America anytime soon, it was a strangely beautiful experience...

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Subject:	Grr.
Date:	2005-03-15 20:20
Security:	Public
Mood:	frustrated

Mood for the day: Frustration. Feel free to try it out. Imagine a simple problem with a fairly simple solution, then imagine events conspiring against making that solution possible. Frustration may then ensue. If after a few attempts to experience frustration you find it still eludes you, frustration will probably occur as a consequence. Try it. Share it with your friends. See how much frustration you can generate within, say, two hundred square feet. Record the noise and post it to your blog if you feel so inclined.

Today's been a fairly good day for frustration. As I've not had any work from one of the agencies for a while, I figured I'd ask them for a letter confirming my lack of income -- something I can enclose with the student loan deferment form. All of a sudden it turns out I'm classed as not working for them. This of course struck me as being somewhat odd as they arranged that interview for me last week. You'd think they wouldn't really feel the need to do that if I was off their books. Mind you I didn't speak to my usual consultant and I suspect it's just a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand's doing. I've got some mail coming my way anyway, so hopefully that'll do.

Another day, another Java manual. This time I'm giving Introduction to Java Programming by Y. Daniel Liang a go. By the time I got to the second chapter the book was showing me how to write apps that read in data from the keyboard. This is promising -- the other books I've looked at seemed to skip past that, or substituted functions from libraries on their CD-Roms. Nice, but not what I was after, really: while I know there's not much point in re-inventing the wheel, I would prefer to know how to do the basic stuff without having to rely too much on other peoples' code. Still, this book appears to be prepared to teach me that, so we'll see how the next few days go.

Finally, just so I don't bore you rigid with news about Slack 'n' Hash, I've added a syndicated news feed: slacknhash.

Fading somewhat. Time for bed.

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Subject:	Well, I'm back.
Date:	2005-03-15 05:06
Security:	Public
Mood:	blah

I seem to have got through the worst of my illness now. Still not quite 100%, but at least I have my voice back.

I had an interview yesterday: the one I had to postpone for a week. It went fairly well -- as usual, I gave a pretty good interview. But, and ain't this always the case, chums and pals, I didn't get the job. Apparently my details have been passed on to the company's IT department, but I suspect not much will come of that. It sounds too much like 'a copy of your CV is in our files' to me. Ah, well. Back to the drawing board. I dropped a copy of my birth certificate off with another of the agencies yesterday, since they'd been after that for a while. Would have dropped it off earlier, only I was like death warmed up last week. Not a pretty sight.

Still, I'll have to phone the agencies again this morning, and see if they have anything else. I also really need to get back into Java. Let's see if I can grasp object-oriented programming this time around. A quick request to the various programmers on my friends list: I know you mean well, but please don't try to describe various related concepts in your replies to this post. I'm still at a beginner and I won't grasp a single thing you say until I've got the basics. I already feel hopelessly out of my depth.

1 nasty | Ooh! Nasty!

Subject:	Thanks, Hanks: Thanks.
Date:	2005-03-08 06:51
Security:	Public

Well, the latest series of Look Around You has come to a close at last. I shall miss it. The finale was suitably shambolic: the magnificent Invention of the Year trophy, presented by His Royal Highness Sir Prince Charles went to Sam Macnamara and Pat Taylor for their sex-change machine, while Leonard Hatred (inventor of the Psilence spray, played by Mark Heap) was disqualified for going apeshit. The usual technical difficulties ensued, and somehow the Slimby Slimming Picture got spliced into the images. The shock nearly killed me, readers...

Incidentally, I've noticed that Mark Heap does seem to play a lot of psychos. Well, okay, Stressed Eric and Brian Topp were merely damaged goods rather than psychos... but one does have to wonder if the poor bugger's typecast.

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Subject:	...
Date:	2005-03-07 09:11
Security:	Public
Mood:	monged

Rescheduled the interview for this time next week.

The amusing bit, really, was phoning the agency to see if that could be done. My voice has degenerated quite badly since my last post. Previously I was capable of a croaky monotone, ideal if the company in question wanted someone to take the job of the office Davros, now it's almost completely gone. Not much more than a raspy whisper. Not particularly great for a job that requires an excellent telephone manner, hmm?

A brief whispery conversation with my co-sufferer, shadowstone turned up an interesting idea. What do martial artists do when they lose their voices? They can hardly utter an effective and satisfying kiai when they need one. I mean, can you imagine Bruce Lee in that kind of situation?

"...hai...!"
"Pardon?"
"...hai...!...hai...! ... oh, forget it..."

Perhaps that's where ninjas came from. Unable to engage in jujitsu shoutiness (Brian Blessed, by the way, is supposed to be quite handy at Judo -- forget that malarkey about his deformed foot -- his shoutiness puts him at a natural advantage) the poor ninja had to make do with killing people silently. Poor Ninjas. They have to contend with that as well as their lack of cultural identity.

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Subject:	Ex-ter-min-hack cough wheeze heCccckh (ate)
Date:	2005-03-07 01:55
Security:	Public
Mood:	sore
Music:	Dalek Empire II: Dalek Wars 2

Well, I have to be up in six hours in order to get out to my interview later today. I've been awake since six pm, I'll probably be alert enough if I stay up. I'm certainly not tired enough to get some shut-eye. As you might have gathered, over the past couple of days I've been listening to a lot of Dalek stuff. Getting myself in a mood for the Dr. Who relaunch. The irony that there are Daleks that don't sound half as croaky as me right now has not been lost on me, dear Readers.

Well, here I am for the long haul. What can I do with my time now? I've already had a go at Brian Keene's latest competition. Prizes to the top four entries, but truth be told I don't really care if I win or not. Coming up with my horrible entry for the compo was fun enough, and reading the others' contributions was a bundle of laughs too. A competition in which people outdo each other in their attempts to write like Nickolaus Pacione? Hilarity ensues, readers...

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Subject:	Flu groove.
Date:	2005-03-06 07:04
Security:	Public
Mood:	sick
Music:	The Daleks' Master Plan - 12 - Destruction Of Time

Well, 50% of my attempt to sort my sleeping hours out failed miserably. Despite medicating myself up to the eyeballs, the degree to which my symptoms were alleviated was... well, to use the term 'negligible' leaves such terms as 'non-existent' unused. Attempts to lie down were met by bouts of lung-wrecking coughing that left me feeling pretty damn wretched, so I fear apologies are in order to shadowstone, wizlow and particularly sauron19, whose room is adjacent to mine. Sadly the combination of medicines has yet to rob me of much of my remaining lucidity. Don't get me wrong, I'm still rambling and wandering aimlessly: indeed, as shadowstone noticed, I have developed a tendency to stare unblinking at objects as if they were ancient Egyptian artifacts. I doubt I was capable of quite that level of fascination, dear readers, but who knows? Perhaps subconsciously I thought the hidden lore of Sutekh could be divined from an empty packet of Tesco's microwaveable toad-in-the-hole.

Stranger things have happened. Quite what these stranger things are, I don't know, so that rather scuppers any attempt on my part to contrast this rather monged train of thought with some other frame of reference. Such is life. It's not a perfect world.

Okay, my knuckles have started to ache. My freaking knuckles ache. I've already got a scalp that feels as if each of my hairs was hammered into place, and now my fingers have decided to rebel as well! Let this be a lesson to you, readers: if you catch a cold or the flu, don't be me. The most piffling symptoms appear amplified a thousandfold. What state I'll be in at the interview I really don't know. Still... when you're feeling low, the best thing to do is anything. To that end, I started catching up with various bits of bureaucracy -- applying for more jobs, filling in deferment forms for my student loans, that sort of thing. I figure I don't stand a snowball's chance in Hell of getting the job I applied for today: a ridiculously junior admin position with an NHS trust -- they want GCSE-level qualifications, I have a degree -- but, still, if I'm not going to get it, I may as well not get it with style and fill in the app form while delirious and incoherent. What less could I do?

I should be awake and ready to go this time tomorrow. Outlook not so good. Ah, well. Maybe I'll pull some sleep out of my arse at a semi-sensible hour. Stranger things have happened. My irrational belief that the secrets of the Pharaohs lay encoded on the back of a microwave meal box, for one...

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Subject:	Blargh.
Date:	2005-03-05 19:40
Security:	Public
Mood:	sick
Music:	7 Seconds of Love - Your Mum's Your Dad

Emgh.

Not sure if I have a cold or influenza: having had my fair share of either I can't say I notice the difference. One might be bacterial and the other viral (as far as I know, which admittedly isn't very far) but it tends to amount to the same symptoms each time -- mucus rattling about in my chest like the world's grossest lottery machine, joints throbbing harder than Jimmy Swaggart in a room full of fourteen-year-old girls, a scalp that appears to be trying to escape from the top of my head and a nose that isn't so much a proboscis as a sophisticated device for accumulating and then redistributing snot all over my front. On top of that I appear to be somewhat delirious, to put it mildly. In danger of losing the plot completely would be a better way of putting it. No changes there, then. Well, I'm falling back on the usual array of remedies (vitamin C, plenty of fluids, steam inhalation, honey and lemons, etc, etc), and hopefully I'll come out of it in a couple of days. I'd better. Like I said earlier, I have an interview on Monday at 9.30am.

Oh, shit. Sleeping hours need to be sorted out again, don't they? Arses.

On top of it all, I'm in serious need of cheering up. To that end, I'm listening to 7 Seconds of Love, an old-fashioned ska band fronted by Joel Veitch of Rather Good fame. Well worth a listen. Also reading b3ta. Cheap laughs to be had, hopefully.

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Subject:	Column A / B
Date:	2005-03-04 17:35
Security:	Public

Okay, so IE in any of its incarnations doesn't recognise fixed positioning. Shite and onions.

On the plus side, I've got an interview on Monday. Just when I'd given up on one of my agencies.

1 nasty | Ooh! Nasty!