stoogoff

Twits

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 23:10:42 GMT

If you're a twit or a tweeterer or whatever it's called, you can now follow my life, in bite-sized chunks, on twitter.

Creative Catharsis

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 10:18:05 GMT

Some people said it wouldn't happen, others said it shouldn't happen but we've only gone and started a new web comic: Creative Catharsis

Enjoy responsibly.

A Night Out in Brighton

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 12:12:32 GMT

OK people, on the 9th of Feb I will be entering my very late 20's and will be celebrating the event in a mature and adult fashion with a few beers on Saturday the 7th.

As ever, I have no real plans and currently very limited space for people to stay, however if anyone fancies a day out in Brighton with a meal and beer later in the afternoon / evening / night, feel free to join me.

Leadership

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:28:05 GMT

There's been a recent power shift at work and I'm now in charge of a team of two developers. When I took over we had a meeting, just the three of us, and I stretched my leadership capabilities by giving them a bit of a pep talk on what the future held, for us as developers, within the company.

In a stunning vindication of my faultless leadership abilities the person I thought least likely to listen to me handed in his notice yesterday! I know that's not generally considered to be a win in the management world but he did exactly as I told him.

I know people are going to ask, so this is roughly how the pep talk went: 'As developers we don't really have a future in the company and we're not going to get anything even remotely interesting to do in the foreseeable future. I would suggest we all start looking for new jobs and if there's anything you feel you're weak at let me know and I'll create an internal project to help you develop those missing skills.'

Heh. Now I just need to take my own advice...

Winter

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 13:38:37 GMT

Land glistens with frost,
The bitter wind bites the skin,
Dark clouds promise snow

Man, I love this time of year!

The Week That Had Everything

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 12:45:03 GMT

So much happened last week, which is often the case when you get away from work and remember you have a life.

I had one fantastic date and one bad date, with the same woman, before you ask. Which just reaffirms my belief that women are crazy and there's no helping them. How do you go from "I don't want the night to end" to "I don't want a relationship right now" in the space of one (mediocre but quite funny) movie?

I saw Rome Burns play with hardly any significant interruptions and bought a copy of the fabled album. Not bad. I caught up with old friends over the next day or so, wrote a fair bit, generally dossed around doing little at the Dreaming. It may be still under construction but the shower is amazing and I'm incredibly jealous of the cinema room. Especially now ulfilias seems to have bought an Xbox...

Friday I headed to London, bought comics, talked to random skinheads in the ~~Dev~~ Hobgoblin which was er... good. Later on I met simonsatori and morbidfrog in the fairy kingdom before heading over to the Victoria and Albert Museum to listen to Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie talk about their latest book, Lost Girls, pornography, bad movies, and to see them sign a duck. Ask Simon for the why's and wherefore's of the duck signing. Later we met up with Nick for some goth club I can't remember the name of. There was an amazing (?!) film involving a werewolf and a flower though...

Saturday was a crazy mix of things. I lost a friend to an illness and I lost a dream I was never going to make true. And I'm not even going to begin to tell you what Nick got up to.

Thanks to Lee and Nick for putting me up on my brief tour. Thanks to everyone else for just being themselves.

Amongst the Things I don't Understand

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:01:56 GMT

TV licencing.

When I moved into the new place there was already a letter from the TV licencing people waiting for me. There always is. In my rather extensive experience of moving the TV Licencing people are almost always the first to send a bill through your door. I had a TV licence. When I was in Norwich I had a TV and I dutifully paid my licence. Even though the only thing I watched was the Simpsons if I got home from work in time. That's ½ an hour of TV a day, at most five days a week. And that's on Channel 4 and as I understand it the TV licence is only applicable to the Beeb.

Anyway.

I phoned them up and explained the situation: I had a TV licence, I'd recently moved citing my previous address and my current address, I no longer had a TV and wanted to cancel. The guy I spoke to was very helpful and updated everything, even sending me a refund on what I'd apparently overpaid. All fantastic and I thought nothing more of it.

Until I got woken up by the door bell one saturday morning.

The woman at the door explained that my flat wasn't registered as having a TV licence. I told her I'd phoned up about that weeks previously and everything was sorted. She said that was fine (she didn't ask to check for a TV) and said she'd list my flat as being empty for six months. Slightly confused I asked why. She told me there was nothing on her form for people with no TV so it was either list the flat as empty or have someone banging on the door every weekend.

As I write this, going over the event again, I feel like I've suffered a blow to the head. This can't be right. It makes no sense! But this is what happened.

I'm right aren't I? This is crazy?

General Update

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:34:36 GMT

I keep meaning to write something because so much has happened since I last wrote anything. Because of that you get the short version.

After nine weeks in hotels and six of those weeks being completely homeless I've finally found somewhere to live. I've got a flat in Brighton and a very large thanks go out to Adelle for helping sort out just about everything. The flat is reasonably OK, in that it's convenient for everything. The drunks out the front, the nightclub out the back, the lack of furniture and the current lack of heating are kind of annoying, though. I might not mind about the boiler dying again but it's the second time it's happened in the couple of months I've lived here and I currently have an absolute stonker of a cold which isn't helped by four days of cold showers.

The job I moved here for is steadily going down hill. My boss was fired a couple of weeks ago and his replacement is hell-bent on outsourcing all of the development work. I'm pretty sure my job will be either redundant or as good as redundant in six months time. I'm not sure whether to start looking for a job now or to hang out for possible redundancy. I haven't even really made any friends in the company either. I think it's the large corporation style office, there's limited socialising and the people I directly work with are either eeyores or tiggers and I'm not interested in hanging around with either.

The weird thing is, despite a long list of woes, I'm actually OK.

Photography

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:59:35 GMT

lightmark

The world sounds slightly shrill...

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:49:38 GMT

You probably haven't heard of him, but you'd recognise his voice anywhere. Don LaFontaine, the guy who does the voice over for every movie trailer ever, has died.

http://www.toplessrobot.com/2008/09/the_world_is_now_higher_pitched.php

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 13:28:06 GMT

According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on their list.

1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Bible -
Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman Loved the first one
Great Expectations
Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare - I've read a few but nowhere near all
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger didn't think this was all that good TBH
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown I intend to read this because I'm expecting to hate it
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte's Web - EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I don't know what happen to book 100... Or 3, depending on who you ask.

Turisas

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:00:36 GMT

Anyone going to see Turisas play at the barfly in Chalk Farm tonight? Gig details can be found on the barfly website.

I got my ticket, thanks to a heads-up from morbidfrog

Mermaids

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:04:58 GMT

There's something about this comic strip I find deeply disturbing.

Homelessness

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:58:39 GMT

Well, I've been homeless now for about a week due to the moving out part working but the moving in part falling through. With this being my fourth week in B&B's / hotels I've not really noticed it too much. It's slowly starting to get to me, I think, it's hard to tell. It's not pissing me off at all, I just feel very numb. Robotic, almost. Most of my responses during the day are automatic, I don't really feel myself "coming through" very often.

The new job is going well. I'm gettng to grips with everything and it doesn't seem nearly as overwhelming as it did a couple of weeks ago. The company is quite odd though. The real brain-trust of the team, developer-wise, are three contractors who are being "phased-out". Two are leaving at the end of the month, the other at some unspecified time after that. The two who are leaving have both been with the company for two or more years, while the rest of the team are all new: a year of service or less. It's very odd.

The funny / annoying thing is I find more common ground with the people who are going than with those remaining. The two remaining I think of as Eyore and Tigger. That probably conjures up enough of a picture!

The really handy thing about the job at the moment is they're sending me on training courses in London for the next fortnight. Having just payed for a "cheap" hotel in Kew Gardens I can no longer afford to move, and as I'm going to be in hotels for a fortnight anyway, I don't really feel the same pressure to move as I did before.

Right, I'm off to the pub.

Oh yeah, Crawley sucks!

Last Day

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 10:59:58 GMT

Today is my last day at Soup, and I seem to be dressed in pink...

In other news myself and my good rocking buddies Robbie and Brad have set up a blog to post any snippets of writing or ideas we might have. I'm aiming to write and post *something* everyday so I can't promise quality but I can promise quantity.

Overthink: stories

Command Line for the Web

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:58:27 GMT

For those who haven't seen it:

Command line for the web

It's basically a command line style wrapper for the more complicated functions available from Google. I've been playing around with it this morning and I'm finding it very useful. Check it out!

Yesterday's Dreams

Wed, 28 May 2008 10:37:05 GMT

This kind of sums up yesterday: http://xkcd.com/429/

On the plus side I managed to get a ticket to see Tom Waits! It was a swine using the ticket master website (seriously, the developers (or more likely, the managers) should be hung drawn and quartered). But I got it! Getting the the ticket is pretty much the high point of the year, so far.

For anyone who's interested...

Tue, 27 May 2008 08:33:13 GMT

... a link to my first piece of coursework for the Creative Writing Course I'm doing at the UEA.

The Black Knight (PDF)

One of the surprising things about the part time, ten week course is that they've given me a student card! I'm now officially licensed to stude and I can get in cheap at the cinema. Woohoo!

Two days, two very different gigs

Tue, 20 May 2008 14:01:14 GMT

Tinariwen

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=23667&l=f4214&id=544024471

Ladytron

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=23670&l=cbb06&id=544024471

Is anyone going to see Pythia support Ministry next week in Kentish Town? I could see Ministry in Norwich but I kind of want to see Pythia play.

News

Thu, 08 May 2008 11:58:02 GMT

Well, that's it, I'm leaving Soup and I'm leaving Norwich. I've been offered a job as Senior Developer in Crawley for embarrassingly large amounts of money and I have most graciously accepted.

Anyone know anything about the area? I know it's close to Brighton so that will be a possibility for moving.

Wii Multi-touch Interface

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:23:46 GMT

This is a fairly OK, but not great video of some of the stuff I've been doing in my limited free time at work and copious long hours after work:

It's using a Wii remote controller and two hand-built infrared pens to control the interface. The Wiimote can track up to four IR points simultaneously so this could allow for collaborative working on a single PC or a four point control system for one person. I'm not entirely sure where to take a four point system at the moment. Using the finger and thumb as a cursor with grabbing / pinching motions could be possible but would require a glove instead of a pen.

More information can be found here:

When I've ironed out the bugs / got bored of this I want to move on to doing something with the software behind the reactable.

Weekend

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 23:04:10 GMT

Is anyone doing anything this weekend? I know ulfilias has plans to go to London which I may tag along to. I feel the need to get out of Norwich for a day or two. Actually I feel the need for adventures.

Round and round, again and again

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:35:35 GMT

There's a feeling I get sometimes: a deep dissatisfaction with everything, a yearning for something more, but I'm never sure what. Something better? Something other? It leaves me restless, pacing, unfocused. It invokes a wanderlust in me which led me to move to a city I'd never been to before and is why I've moved house every year for the past eight.

I've written about it before, at various times. I drink, sometimes, in an effort to quench it, but it rarely helps. I listen to sad songs and I rage at the moon for no good reason other than it's there. It can last for days, or weeks, this feeling, occasionally months; and the trip to Morocco last year has made it worse, more pronounced, more destructive, when it comes along. It leaves me hollow, missing something; but it always passes in time. Eventually it's forgotten.

This time it was brought about by a woman in a red dress, and I'm still there talking to her; whenever I close my eyes, whenever my attention wanders. I found out a bit more about her last night (she has a myspace page) and could only see things we have in common. So, I dream and I concoct fantasies where I happen to bump into her whenever I'm next in London and I wish for something other, that somehow she'll change everything.

What infuriates me the most, I think, is that I feel this way at all. Aren't I too old to be thinking like this after a five minute conversation with a woman I don't know?

Daydreaming

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:01:26 GMT

Normally when I day dream, when I drift away and become utterly dislocated from my surroundings – even when you think I'm listening to you – it's because I'm doing this:

http://xkcd.com/337/

But for the past 50 hours I've been thinking of a brunette in a red dress with sparkling blue eyes. I've been there talking to her, rather than here, wherever here may be.

Ghosts I-IV

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 11:59:45 GMT

The new NIN album is available from here: http://ghosts.nin.com/

To be honest, I didn't particulary like the last couple of albums and haven't really been that much of a NIN fan for years. Probably this century. I still think Pretty Hate Machine is one of the besst albums ever made and I still love Broken, but the recent stuff? Nah.

However, this method of buying the album - free download with additional options for those who want to spend the cash - is going to be the way of the future. We'll be seeing more and more of this and, personally, I think it's a bloody good thing.