Severe Jam Damage

Good Lord. My head is banging like a steel drum. Awful, awful headache.

New place, still not sure what I can access and what I can’t, I’ve lost all my bookmarks so going through everything manually again. This place doesn’t seem to like mozilla, and is a bit temperamental with IE. So far I’ve figured out I have no access to flickr.com for reasons of ‘Nudity’. Ehm, ok, so pics on this blog are going to be severely limited unless I post from home. Gofugyourself.com is also blocked for nudity. Priscilla, Lucy, Brian and Chris’ blogs are blocked for ‘WebHosting’. David Moore is blocked for ‘pornography’, while Miz Wurzel Tod is blocked for the lighter ‘adult\mature content’. (OI! IT lads, I’m over 18!)
I can still access TVGasm, gmail, hotmail and yahoomail. I have IM but I’m sure it’s monitored. Boingboing is gone due to ‘proxy avoidance’ but I can get to WarrenEllis.com
My RSS feeder is blocked, so I have to stick every (accessible) blog link into my favourites folder.
I leave my desk for five minutes and my machine goes into sleep mode and takes about 5 minutes to reconnect to the network.

Bleh, not in the humour to post anymore…

Just call me the crazy dog lady. Here I am, for the last five days no one to speak to but two stubborn-see-how-far-they-can-push-me huskie pups. Yes, despite the size of them they are still pups. The sis and her husband have left me in charge of the house and the dogs. I’m slowly going stir crazy, although the break has been nice and I’m back to work tomorrow. SSDD.
The dogs meanwhile are a joy. If you are the type of person who enjoys scooping up dogshit or sticking your fingers down their throat to retrieve a piece of foam they’ve been chewing on. Eli, the Lion Tamer. For my next trick I’ll stick my head in Bobby’s mouth – but only after I’ve brushed his teeth.
This morning I let them out after breakfast and went back to bed. At about 8 o’clock there was a ruckus and I stuck my head out the window to see Bobby with both his front paws in one of K’s plant pots digging out the flowers and Cassie egging him on. These two make Pinky and the Brain look like amateurs. By the time I got outside Bobby was pretending nothing had happened that no, there wasn’t a pile of potting soil and 5 plants dragged all around the garden and Cassie was sunning herself by the shed.
‘Who, me?’
I replanted the flowers, scooping the soil back into the pot and cursing at the dogs who licked at my face and barked for me to play with them. When I ignored them Bobby nudged me with his shoulders so that I lost my balance. I swear they were laughing at me.
Bobby with his deep-from-the-guts bark and Cassie who doesn’t bark but makes a noise somewhere between a growl, a yelp and Muttley’s laugh. Either way if I was a thief and jumped the fence to find those two on the other side of it I’d think twice. They’d lick you to death before they’d hurt you but they are strong and as pups don’t quite realise their strength. My two and a half year old nephew plays with them so that will give you an idea of how friendly they are.
My arms are scraped to shit where they’ve jumped and clawed at me. I’m going to go back into work tomorrow and people are going to think I spent the time up to some dodgy S&M tricks.
My clothes are covered in dog hair, I’ve got crumbs of dog food under my nails, there are bits of chewed dog toys on the kitchen floor and I’ve just spend 20 minutes picking up dogshit so the thought of lunch is turning my stomach.
The dogs are sitting under my feet here in the back garden. Occasionally one of them will stretch and push against my legs, gaining more contact with me and pushing the other one away. The garden is huge, but they’ve chosen to sit on my feet.
I guess they don’t hate me that much.

This made me laugh today:

Star Trek does Monty Python

Well hello all. I’ve been busy with worky stuff (more on that later, at the moment everything is a little bit stalled) so haven’t had time to sort through my holiday snaps. I just got 7 rolls back yesterday and still have four or five rolls to be developed. Hopefully by the end of the week I will have managed to throw most of them up onto flickr. For now, here is a (sorta) cool double exposure shot taken with the Holga. I’m really liking that little camera.

Louis Riel, among the clouds. (Click to embiggen.)

FFS. Edited to remove possible ’spoilers.’

Well, of course he isn’t, but just like Perry White I always wanted to use it as a headline.
Priscilla and I went to see Superman Returns last night though. We were one seat in from the aisle up until the credits starting rolling.
‘Great’ I muttered glaring at the empty seat ‘I’m going to be sat beside some horrendous sweaty mong beast of a fan boy whatcha wanna bet?’
‘Maybe you could get lucky and a pretty boy will sit beside you’ said Priscilla.
‘Nah, pretty boys don’t go to the movies by themselves.’
In the end it was a pretty girl who sat beside me. I briefly considered swapping seats with Priscilla to give him a chance to wow her with his geektacular knowledge.
Because it’s a 12 rated film all the trailers were for the upcoming kids movies (and one particularly awful looking thing with Ben Stiller) but thrown in among them were trailers for Ghost Rider, Spidey and Transformers.
‘Yes!’ squealed Priscilla, clapping his hands and bouncing in his seat like a little girl. ‘Be still my beating heart.’
The girl beside me snorted with laughter. Good thing I hadn’t changed seats, he’d already ruined any cred he might have had with her.
But to the movie…
I liked it. Quite simply, I wasn’t sure what I was going to think of it, but it was an enjoyable enough way to spend a couple of hours. Brandon Routh was a pretty good Superman (nice thighs boyo! hubbahubba) and proved he could do the slapstick schtick as Clark Kent. Spacey ripped through the movie spitting scenery and Parker Posey was enjoyable to watch as the ‘moll with the heart of gold.’ Kate Bosworth (OI! Hollywood, enough with the Kate’s already, how many do ye need?) was more of a Penelope Pitstop type of Lois, than a ballsy She-Ra version. However she put to rest Terry Hatcher’s whiny portrayal of La Lane so we can be thankful for that, although the amount of scrapes the girl got herself into, she really shouldn’t be let out of the Daily Planet offices. The set piece at the opening is brilliant and even though I knew it was going to turn out alright - cos we’re only 20 minutes into the movie for godsake - I still found my fingernails digging into the armrests. Beside me, Priscilla had pressed himself back into the seat as far as he could go.
Overall a thumbs up, some nice touches - they gave Lois a boyfriend who wasn’t a sleaze but proved he could be a hero when it counted. Some cool FX, a bit of the old ultra-violence involving Lex and a pair of steel capped boots and Eva Marie Saint as Martha Kent. Sure it’s well worth your tenner.

Well obviously I was busy with other things but here is a quick list of the books, music and other stuff that absorbed me on holiday.

Books:
War Reporting for Cowards - Chris Ayres: I picked this one up at the airport and pretty much finished it by the time I landed in Toronto. It’s pretty standard travel writing stuff. Chris Ayres was an embed in Afghanistan in 2003 and writes about his ‘Nine Day War.’ Witty in parts he doesn’t dwell on the reasons for the war, but rather how he got there and how soon he can get out.

Sideways - Rex Pickett: One muggy evening when we were too exhausted to even speak to each other we sat on the porch drinking cold beer. Mrs H was reading ‘The Quiet American’ and I picked up Sideways. I haven’t seen the movie but I knew the general gist, the basic American Road Trip story. To me the book seemed oddly uneven. The first part seemed manic, almost ‘Fear and Loathing’ with Cab Sauv. Driving, swigging wine and lots of shouting. I didn’t like either of the characters, Miles was an alcoholic and in denial about it and Jack was - not to put to fine a point on it - a prick. I couldn’t understand why either of these men were friends and it was not explained in the book. All they did was fight about wine, women and everything in between. There didn’t seem to be any reason for either of these men to hang out together and that quite frankly grated on me.

Someone comes to town, someone Leaves Town - Cory Doctorow: Yep, that bloke from Boingboing. Okay I also bought it cos the cover art is by Dave McKean. (Holy crapola I’ve definitely become a geek. I’m buying books for the cover artist now!) I read this one on the way home and it read like a Nano novel. The plots were thrown around like dirty clothes on the spin cycle. All it was missing was a few Ninja Pirates (Nanowrimo joke.) But it did have monsters, angels and murders. The one driving (and pointless) plotline was about getting Wifi into Toronto’s Kensington Market, and pretty much the whole book hung around that. Considering that Doctorow is an uber-geek and the King of Boingboing the technical shit was pretty poor, and rather outdated. (Think Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon - okay you can stop now before your head explodes.) It really should have been tighter. The ending tied up absolutely nothing, or at least there were still a few strands left hanging.

Music:
The Sadies: Saw these guys in the afternoon at the Winnipeg Folk Festival and they were really cool. On stage one brother looks like Nick Cave and the other has a sort of scruffy Bob Dylan thing going on. You can listen to some of their stuff here

Food:
A&W: Okay, forget McPuke’s and Bluergher King. If you are gonna go fast food A&W is the only way to go. I had a couple of TeenBurgers (or three) while I was there. SO MUCH BETTER than the rest. Question: They have a Teen, Momma, Poppa and Grandpa burger but what happened to Grandma eh?

Mrs H’s Grilled Salmon: She bought a half a wild salmon for under a tenner. (We’re on an island famous for salmon and it’s not that cheap!) Stuffed with dill, lemon and garlic butter then grilled on the barbecue for an hour. Absolutely delicious. Also, her homemade guacomole kicks ass.

Bison Burgers: Tastes like beef. Apparently they are now farming Bison for meat. The burgers were DAMN good.

Dammit what is the point of coming home all brown and leathery from your summer holidays when the general populace is enjoying a heatwave.

Not one comment on my scaly red arms and bright red nose this morning. Not ONE!

So i was in early this morning, the only one. Basically all work has stopped here, everyone is surfing the recruitment sites or taking phone calls and arranging interviews. I’m actually kind of excited, in a weird way.

My CV is updated (thanks K!) and mailed out. Have had a call already from one of my best contacts. Mind you the whole staying in IT \ QA \ Test thing is doing my nut in. How wonderful it would be if I could wake up tomorrow morning and just know exactly what direction I want my life to take. This last move was supposed to be the last one for a while. At the beginning of this year I actually had a PLAN. Yes me, the Queen of Indecision actually had an idea of what the next couple of years would be like.

Now I’ve got to start all over again, probably in a contract role somewhere and try and figure out in my spare time what it is that I really want to do. The PLAN is going to have to go on hold (meanwhile house prices continue to soar) while I figure out just what the hell I’m good at.

So for those of you who haven’t heard the company I work for has been sold and I may or may not have a job when I land back on T’Eire Firma.

It sucks hearing about it on holiday but at least I have a heads up this time so can arrive in prepared on Monday morning, as opposed to the last time this happened and I turned on my phone in the Dublin arrivals hall to a flurry of increasingly panicked messages.

According to my source everything is going to be done and dusted in 2 weeks time. Our office will shut down and those who are the ‘chosen’ ones will be moving out to the new owners premises.

I feel surprisingly calm. Although I am utterly fed up with this industry. At the age of thirty mumble I would expect to have a career that didn’t involve bouncing from company to company and wondering how long it’s going to last. Saying that I know a girl who was made redundant from SEVEN jobs in a row. Miranda, where are you now?

IT is a pipe dream, in Dublin anyway. They told us we’d be millionaires, that stock options would actually be WORTH something. Do you know how many companies I’ve worked for where my options have lapsed into negative numbers? Don’t answer, it’s rhetorical. But apparently this decade’s big thing is the Pharmaceutical industry. All the kids are studying in that field and coming out making a fortune in the companies that have invested in Dublin. They’ll get about 7 or 8 years out of it before the companies pull out and move to India or somewhere similar.

Sorry this entry is a bit muddled. I meant to write something a bit more legible but my head isn’t really in it. Must go, gotta fly!

What is the point of this? I’ve just spent an hour on the phone waiting for a ‘customer service representative to become free’ so that she can take all of 30 seconds to say ‘yes, you are confirmed on the flight’

Does ANYONE know the point of ringing up two days in advance to say ‘Yes, I’m going home’ ?