Second Consecutive Landmark

So I reach a non-event of a landmark for a second consecutive day. Today marks the 74th blog of the year and overtakes my 2006 tally, making this the second most successful blogging year. The only point of this is now that I churn out more posts with less content much more easily, and don't worry about making them relevant!

This evening I went to the pub with people after work. This was very enjoyable. Tomorrow marks the beginning of May and the start of a three-day weekend! Both things to be happy about.

Cooler ... Perhaps!

So far on the way in to work it's been refreshingly cooler. However now the sun has reappeared and we're going to clearly be roasted in the office again today.

This marks my 73rd blog of the year. An uninteresting number, relevant only because it means with less than a third of the year gone, I have already equalled my blogging tally from 2007.

Finally, in all this kerfuffle about Brown's comment, did noone notice the question he was asked? 'All these people coming from Eastern Europe, where are they coming from?' Um ... clue's in the question!

Odd Combination

The bizarre combination of listening to Radio 4 through iPlayer is a curious juxtoposition. Very traditional listening, yet modern delivery! Confusing!

I'm currently listening to The Unbelieveable Truth, which has the immense benefit of being presented by David Mitchell.

On The Move

It's a lovely evening as I write this. I'm currently on the way home and, lacking a paper to read, writing on here instead!

Today has been another tedious and slow day. Nothing much seems to be happening at work at the moment, which is incredibly unfulfilling. The warm weather isn't helping here either! The office is incredibly hot, and it just seems to make the day drag even more!

However, I'm currently forgetting about it with relaxing music (Sigur Ros' Takk) and reminding myself that there are only 12 working days to go before I'm on holiday!

Check Your Settings

Mildly disappointed that apparently everyone at works knows about my disillusion with an upcoming change despite me never saying as such to anyone - the only place I made such a comment was here.

Time to cross-check my Facebook security settings.

Three Day Weekend

So a three day weekend has meant that I have been completely lazy and not updated here at all over this time!

In case you were wondering why it became a three day weekend, I had a day of time off in lieu to use up from releases at work the previous Friday, and the Thursday before that. Two half-days combine nicely into making a three day weekend!

It has to be said, Friday and Saturday were both glorious. Lovely weather, sunshine - I was on both days sitting outside enjoying the weather. Sadly a little more miserable today, but still pleasant enough. As you can predict quite easily, by the way, I have achieved absolutely nothing this weekend. I mark this as a success.

However, I did book flights to go see Chrissi in May, finally. I also booked in a stopover in Canada on the way back to call in and see family. This involves convoluted travel plans, but should be good!

Controversial Position

So, having watched some of the Leader's debate tonight (although not all, as they helpfully scheduled it for a different time), it was a little more predictable than last time. Everyone had picked up the tricks and gimmicks to look and sound sincere. At least this shows our politicians can learn!

The one thing I wanted to have a bit of a rant on was immigration. For the second week in a row, this came up, and every politician leaped to the strong, we will defend the borders, we will fight them on the beaches, we will never let them claim benefits stance. It sounds a little laughable to me.

Firstly, it's ironic that this is a favourite right-wing comment; yet tied with right-wing free-trade economics, this is the classic realisation of it. Someone who brings in a skill from elsewhere, either that is needed or at better value, and gains market share. It is applauded for businesses. For individuals, we must keep the buggers out, though.

Obviously I have a slightly biased perspective here, but having seen the umpteen hoops that Chrissi has to jump through to even think about moving here, the debate seems slightly farcical.

Immigration, overall, is a good thing. It's never said, but it's good. It means we have a viable service industry, and help to support an increasingly aging British population. It causes some problems when times are less good, but ingeniously, that is why immigration is so wonderful - economic migrants will migrate somewhere else where they can be better off in that scenario. Noone is going to emigrate to a country where they're going to be worse off, unable to get jobs. It's illogical.

The lack of reality and populism to what is essentially a thinly disguised BNP policy is rather tragic in my view. I know this is a somewhat controversial position, but it's all too rare to hear it articulated that immigration is a good thing, that we're not talking about great numbers of people, that realistically, there is far more scaremongering than there should be because it sounds plausible and strong.

Feel free to disagree, however, I'm interested in any comments on this - if only to try and have a discussion where it's not about a challenge as to how tough you can be!

Regular ... For Given Definitions

So if you recall a week or so ago, I'd pledged to regularly go running in the morning, generally get more exercise and put in more effort.

So far that's not going so well, as after a good run of Saturday, Sunday and Wednesday, it somewhat fell into disarray ever since. However, I have every intention of starting again! Using football as an excuse on Monday and Tuesday (although a good one on Tuesday morning, I feel) was a mistake too, as it just helped me get out of the tiny hint of a routine I'd gotten into.

Today at work I got to retell my Oman joke.

Slightly Marginalised

There's nothing to inspire dread at any workplace than the fact that management have come up with a new process or review system. This sort of system typically multiples bureaucracy and crushes any efficiencies.

In the less abstract, I'm slightly more dreading and concerned about a specific plan at work to have a system for reviewing and ensuring that specifications pass a quality assurance and design standard. The writing of specifications, overseeing their approval and catering to design criteria is what I do.

It's tough enough to get a specification signed off nowadays anyway - it took me three weeks to get a simple five page specification signed off back in February/March. I'm concerned that if each specification has to undergo a review, either it will (a) be so brief as to be irrelevant and a waste of everyone's time, or (b) be so in-depth that the entire process slows to a crawl to accommodate it.

Oh, and I'm a little peeved that this is mostly at the moment my job, and steps I've taken to take a common-sense approach in this field have apparantly been disregarded.

Fun times!

Return to Football

So after many weeks of meetings at the end of Mondays in odd locations, bank holidays, anticipating being off, and actually being off - I managed to play football for the first time since March 5th.

This meant some pleasant changes. For a start, it's now light when we play! Today, in fact, it was rather hot considering the time of day. I was naturally unprepared and didn't have a drink, which is a mistake I regretted.

The game today was also more 'correct' - perhaps in recognition of the heat, we weren't tearing forward and leaving huge gaps behind. People were being more sensible, covering space, defending, and it worked quite well. It was a good game overall.

Hopefully I can play again next week and get back in the swing of things!

What Are You?

Today I woke up exceptionally late, courtesy of a busy few days. Yesterday was a release night, so I was at work until just before 11pm, and then made it home around 1am. I then sensibly decided to stay up for about an hour and a half, eventually ending up in bed about 2:30am.

Strangely enough, as a result of this, I wasn't too sprightly on my feet this morning. I did get up, but then promptly went back to bed again only to resurface around 2pm. An overdue sleep, but not too conducive to a successful day!

The blog title today refers to my little anecdote I referred to in yesterday's blog. In a discussion at work regarding the dramatic ash, my colleague Ani asked if she was going to have any problems because of the ash. My response was to ask her if she was a jumbo jet engine. The retelling isn't great, but the question is still just as absurd.

Failed Efforts

I was going to write a vaguely amusing story from something I read today. But instead I'm going to post this satirical image plucked from Facebook, which is utterly brilliant.



I particularly love the helicopters comment.

Election Debates

So the concept of the election debates is new, here at least. Mainly because we don't live in a presidential system, where the leader of the country is actually the one who commands a majority of constituencies, nothing else.

It was horribly vaccuous. Everyone was competing for space, and noone sounded authorative. Lack of straight answers, predictably. The fun game was to spot the cliche, to me it was as follows:

Clegg: "Straight" "honest" "open"
Cameron: "13 years"
Brown: "ringfencing spending on education, police and health"

The only one big blow seemed to go unnoticed by anyone. Brown challenged Cameron to say that he would protect spending on health, education and the police, which was constantly met by responses starting anew and ignoring the point (quite sensibly, but also quite blatantly). However, at a later point Cameron said they were making an exception for health spending and securing that. Surely that means they're going to fail to protect the spending on police and education?

Interesting that more wasn't made of that.

Odd Hybrid Verb

This story is relayed about thirteen hours after it actually happened, so it's impressive that I've remembered it this long!

This morning I was once again running, in my continual pursuit of physical perfection / ample material for self-deprecation (delete as applicable).

One of the less noted things about running when you're tired is that mid-run you start yawning. It seems absurd - you're wide awake clearly as you're running, yet you're tired so you start yawning? Clearly I'm only halfway awake at this point. It must look ridiculous too!

On the plus side, this discovery means I was out running this morning. Fully approving of this!

Another One Of Those

Today seems to have been another one of those days, where many little things manifest themselves in repeated frustration and annoyances. I've been having too many of these recently, both work and outside work. Honestly not quite sure what to do about it.

A philosophical yet negative note; apologies for that, I try to be more upbeat on here but sometimes I'm just not in the mood for it!

Quadruple Century Unnoticed

So today I was banished to Banbury for work for a meeting in this afternoon. With the meeting overrunning by about an hour, my train being delayed by 25 minutes, I ended up not getting home until just before nine.

However, this wasn't a bad day. I wore my smart suit again, always something that's good! Having bought it last summer and used it for two weddings, I'm now starting to wear it for meetings and other occasions at work too, as opposed to getting value for money just hanging it in my wardrobe.

As the title denotes, apparantly yesterday was my four hundredth blog, and I didn't even notice! I'm actually quite shocked at this level of persistence, ability to talk about nothing at length. This year in particular I've been particularly consistent with my blogging achievements.

Next milestone is the half-millenium.

Electoral Anger

It may not to be anyone's surprise who has followed my blog that I'm angry about the Conservative plans to 'recognise marriage in the tax system'.

By some complicated system, you can transfer £750 of your tax allowance to your spouse, essentially saving them £150 in tax at the base 20% rate.

This is going to reaffirm the rightful place of marriage in society.

I find it hard to contain my irritation at such utter nonsense. Firstly, the thought that marriage is the magic solution to all wrongs. Putting aside my past comments on this, the fact that the thought that more marriage will suddenly overcome all problems in society is nonsense. That, and it's promoted some traditional vision of a married family, where the husband earns the money and the woman stays at home ironing his clothes and cooking his food and looking after the 2.2 children. What utter rubbish that this is the sort of thing that our 'progressive' opposition party is proposing to legislate, a throwback to Victorian morals of the woman with her place beside the stove and in the nursery? It's absolute utter nonsense.

At this point anyone listening to me typing this out would be clearly able to tell how much this angers me by the ferocity with which I am typing this out.

Anyway, back to the rant. We are talking about £150 for some families (not all, obviously) to somehow be enough of an incentive to mend society. Now, if we somehow accept the utterly ludicrous premise that marriage is how to right all of society's ills, and that the idea of government-sponsered bribery of couples to marry, then even accepting this the concept is ludicrous.

£150 on an annual basis works out to £2.89 a week.

TWO POUNDS EIGHTY NINE PENCE? You think that a tax recognition for marriage will encourage couples to stay together through difficulties for the prospect of nearly three pounds a week? "Well, we were fighting and there was domestic violence, and he cheated on me, but the £2.89 from the government meant it was worthwhile to stay together."

Is this someone's idea of REALITY? That a patronising, economically irrelevant, archaic Victorian-era throwback recognition of marriage will somehow be sufficient to 'mend society' of all its alleged ills? Who came up with this? Why do they think it makes sense? What sort of thinking is it that concludes that well, there are a lot of problems in the country, and this will solve at least some of them as a top priority of action?

It's just total, utter bollocks.

Early Morning

This morning I was bizarrely up at 8am, and then intentionally up at 8:30am. Since then I've managed to go for a run, which was overdue as counting my weekly exercise as occasionally running for a train wasn't too good for me.

I'm now feeling relaxed and ready to procrastinate for the rest of what looks to be a lovely day.

Normal Timing

I'm not being deliberately lax with the blogging, but yesterday's absence was due to not getting home until 1:30am. This was slightly annoying.

I was playing poker after work, but I was also helping with a release. This meant that while poker finished just after 10 (with delays due to myself and others working on the release inbetween times), I was still at work at 11:40pm. Not the place you want to be, really, at that time.

The release took a long, long time to deploy due to one slow-running script. I'll avoid more detail for those less technically inclined (although mainly because I don't understand much more myself!). However, it meant that instead of finishing by 8 or 9, it wasn't done until much much later.

Train from Raynes Park at 23:49, to Surbiton just before midnight. Train from Surbiton got me to Woking at 00:30 - and from there I walked home. I was a little sluggish getting up this morning, needless to say!

Improvement In Two Years

So this marks the 55th post I've made this year. In all of 2008 I made only 54. Clearly, either I'm blogging more often, have more to say or don't care as much about saying less.

This evening I made an immense pie - salmon and mushroom - to eat for my evening meal. It was fabulously good, I was most impressed. The evening was capped with a comical European exit for Manchester United, always a good thing.

Also, if this election persists with me being bombarded at the station every day with vaccuous slogans (this morning: "Good Morning Sir! Time for Change?" No. Time for coffee, work or sleep. Leave me alone.), I'm going to be forced to enact some measure of violence upon a Conservative volunteer.

What Change?

So this evening on my way back from work I was accosted at the train station by two people desparately handing out leaflets.

One was waiting as I walked towards Raynes Park station, on one side. "Try voting Conservative this time?" he said hopefully, the pleading in his voice in vain. "Probably not," I replied. I like to let them down gently - in hindsight, a line about the temperature of hell and how it's not below freezing would be more applicable to my voting intentions. Seemed like a pleasant enough fellow though.

On the other side I got the traditional face of the Tory party. A grumpy, gruff, balding man, probably in his 60s. Looked a little like an anaemic version of Prince Philip. He mumbled something about "vote for change" in an utterly uninspiring fashion to me, and ignored the two people in front of me (well, they were a little scruffily dressed, and we wouldn't want that sort of oiks in our Conservative party, would we? Probably on the way to mug someone, youth today).

It was a depressing picture of exactly how much this party has changed ... barely at all.

Another Post-Midnighter

Yes, this is another post-midnight blog, but this time mainly because I intended to and then forgot. Not really a great justification, I must admit.

This evening I ended the day with a late and unexpected trip to the pub. Mark and Sophie are down for the Easter weekend, so was nice to see them again! Was also nice to see others too - bizarrely I actually have seen Mark and Sophie more recently than Paul and Rachel, despite them being 20 minutes walk away as opposed to 200 miles away!

On the walk back it was raining. This seems to be a consistent theme! Fortunately it was dry when I walked out earlier, as I did a little shopping of basic essentials (like, um, food) for the week ahead.

The best thing about the four-day bank holiday weekend is that having had two days of it, I can think that hey, I'm only halfway through! Most excellent.

April Showers? Looks Like It!

So today - after a week of rain, as I've earlier been complaining about - the day started with glorious sunshine. It was warm, and clear, with barely a cloud in the sky. Lovely weather, a far cry from the always-imminent April showers.

However, then it turned murkier and greyer as the day progressed. Around 5pm, it started hailing it down - a storm directly overhead, with some impressive thunder and lightening to go with it. A little more dramatic than expected, but at least more along the expected lines. After that it cleared again to a lovely clear sky within the hour!

However, this weekend being Bank Holiday weekend, it will of course rain, and plenty of it - it seems to be very much the par for the course!