Monthly Archive: March 2011

01:50 on a Tuesday Night*

So it has reached that time of night when I have had a day filled with events and random come downs where my body has taken what rest it could while a fevered mind ponders the multitude of contrasting elements that is must engage with when I realise that sleep isn’t so much taken from me but confined to a wilderness that my resting soul cannot share…

In other words, it is 01:42, sleep hasn’t arrived as I have been engaged with a computer all evening and now I wish I had closed my eyes two hours ago…

On the other hand, I am lying in bed next to my young and beautiful wife, there is some classic British comedy in the background, I am catching up with writing, picture editing, and some promotion/conversation in online life and so it isn’t like I am lying here staring at the ceiling…

But I still wished I had closed my eyes…

You see these days I don’t drink caffeine, well not much, just on the special occasions when I want a really good coffee, or when I really need to perk my brain into semi-semblance of activity and it is refusing. I had to give it up, I was getting old, it was affecting my mood and my sanity, and mostly it was preventing me from sleep.

There are some people who claim that caffeine doesn’t affect them that way, biologically that is wrong, though biology can adapt as can perception and environmental adaptation (mostly biology again but this time intentional), but it is still wrong, but right with the correct mitigating factors.

For me, that has never been true. caffeine has always had the correct knock-on affect.

So I gave up drinking it and switched to decaf (please stop shuddering and claiming that you would prefer it if an elderly syphilitic goat had just urinated in your cup), and that gets me through the day. Insatnt decaf, good blends and good beans only, are an acceptable alternative to caf., eventhough they are a travesty and a rape of all things nice and bean like. Though I always did like strong blends, rich roasts, and they always contained less caffeine anyway (the richer the roast the more caf. is burned away).

I still wished I had closed my eyes…

Because then I would be dreaming (in song lyrics I would be “made winding through her hair”, or wanting you “in my arms” or even making her “the cutest that I’ve ever seen”, wait she already is that…) and I like to dream “perchance to sleep”, I have always thought of it as “what is man, what is he not, man is but the shadow of a dream” (Pinder [apologies as it should be ‘person’ not ‘man’ but it is a quote]).

I have always been a lucid dreamer, and I have noticed patterns to how my dreams form and when I can remember or engage with them, and one of those patterns is not being up this late as then the over-tiredness will kill either the conceptual space in which I am lucid or the recollection of any lucidity.

So I wished I had closed my eyes…

Thanks for reading.

——-
* Apologies to the Cure. Also it should be a Wednesday morning, but the song has night in the title not morning so I took liberties, “drip, drip drip…”

Scheduling Life

So it has come to this, we finally have such a busy life now that Leigh and I regularly sit down and have to write down the proceeding weeks times and events to see where we can negotiate who is doing what, when, where and how we can fit a social life into a now hectic family and work regime, and most important how we make the time for each other.

We were always busy, we are people who fill our lives, when we are not working, with interesting hobbies and pursuits and if we can a fair number of social events, games, and holidays.

But in the past year this has taken an extra dimension or two.

The first of these was the birth of our first son, Ben, who we both want to spend as much time with as humanly possible. The next was Leigh returning to full time work after Maternity Leave, add in her return to university (part time) and my undertaking of projects and responsibilities as part of a growing responsibility in the Perl community as an organiser and helper, and you have administatioclasm.

There is also the diverse group of people who are our friends who unfortunately bear the brunt of our disappearing time as we juggle their exposure to us on a weird rotation basis with no rules, but plenty of traps, pitfalls and the occasional Gremlin.

Then of course you have to consider family, who we are almost pathologically meran to as we shuttle engagements and apportion them meagre moments of our now precious time.

It has become a juggling act. If we sit down to watch a programme (television) or film it is a rare event, almost to be treasured, and if it is one that doesn’t fully sap our attention we also read, discuss or use a computer at the same time.

This now sounds sad. I am missing all the fun times we take Ben out for walks, or to the park and generally when we sit on the floor playing with toys and reading books.

I have not mentioned the holidays we get with Grandmas in the motorhome and visiting far flung relatives and friends and loving how they put all their attention on our son and let us rest while they entertain him.

Or the fact that we feel so much like a family, that we do all that we can to further ourselves both morally and intellectually, that the efforts we make are to strengthen and support the varying groups we belong to (not to blow our own trumpet too much but we are super).

And, we still find time to write in Nanowrimo, scriptfrenzy, run and play roleplaying games, read books and fight the occasional horde of pixelated monsters.

We just don’t watch a lot of contemporary television, and we miss a lot of theatre, concerts and films, those are the elements of our lives we had to remove to do all of the other things we want.

These days we catch up on contemporary film/theatre/music life months later, and sometimes I catch up on films when traveling. I miss seeing them first, or at the cinema, but I wouldn’t swap what I have even if you offered me a lifetime free pass to see all the music, films and theatre first.

He Bangs the Drum

“Ye Gods No!” I cried when first i heard.

“How could they be so cruel?” I followed with as the realisation sank in.

Then…

“Well it isn’t all that bad, really, at least it is electronic,” as more information was forthcoming.

The reason for all this, well Linda and Steph have bought Ben a drum. I know, I wanted him to be a musician and they buy him a drum to thwart my dreams of a son who is a Rock-Star-Movie-Scientist-Author-Poet-Model-Samaritan-Hero, if he turns out a drummer it’ll totally Ringo him is my big worry “Peace and Love,” Ringo, “Peace and Love.”

Anyway, he seems to really like it, well it makes a noise and it lights up when he hits it, what’s not to like. And at least it isn’t a tin drum, I believe my brother once got one of those for Christmas and it had disappeared by Boxing Day, something about “loud noise” and “attic” is what my mum said.

Anyway, here is an obligatory video to amuse you.


(if the video doesn’t run in your browser then please use this link: He-Bangs-The-Drum download link)

More Twittering

How fickle and pointless I have become, I found myself recently responding to various celebrities, not because I wanted to comment on something interesting they had said, but to see if I could be re-tweeted by them. All this because a few people I know had been retweet by a celeb. How sad is my behaviour.

Please, don’t answer that, it is sad. I normally just reply to whomever I follow when spurred by what they write, but I found myself watching the one or two celebs I follow more keenly and responding to them more, perhaps not as much as some of my other Tweeples, but definitely more than I had done previously.

Well, now I have caught myself I will stop. I promise, cross my heart and…ooooh a chance to respond to Ben Goldacre, gotta go…

I am teh famus, lol, wtf

I do apologise in advance for the title of this blog post and the entire sillyness of anything it points out. But, apparently I am a little bit famous in a manner I never imagined.

In 2007 I created a Trading Card game for my company Shadowcat Systems as a bit of fun to give away as a Christmas Advent calendar item. The rules of the game and the associated files are linked to here (http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/resources/).

Spin forward a few years to the entirely inappropriately named site Fuck Yeah Nouns (http://fuckyeahnouns.com) has used these cards when you type in dbix-class (http://fuckyeahnouns.com/dbix-class), not really that surprising as there are very few images for that, but if you type in Mark Keating you get another card (http://fuckyeahnouns.com/mark%20keating), also works for Lego Robot Wars (http://fuckyeahnouns.com/lego%20robot%20wars) Leigh Keating (http://fuckyeahnouns.com/Leigh%20Keating) gets a picture I took of my wife Leigh.

The idea of the site, btw, is you put in some words and it finds an image associated with them. I have no idea how it works things out, I guess it is looking for descriptive tags in the alt text or something, but it does make me happy that something I did for fun, for free and for joy is still being used now.

And I am a little bit famous for a few brief fleeting moments, a transient star still to find my full fire in the firmament…I am sure at some point other images will replace these but for now, they are mine and I shall retire to my hovel with the clarion calls of fame still ringing in my noggin.

Thanks to Ribasushi for pointing me at this 🙂

Trending Nonsense

<rant>

Does anyone who is even remotely sane follow the trending topics by looking at the actual responses anymore. My basic issue is this:

  1. You see a trending topic;
  2. You open the link to view;
  3. You read the first few replies and realise at least two of them are retweets;
  4. You look up and notice at least 20 new tweets have been added in the time it took you to read three;
  5. You try to make a tweet, but your words are lost in the miasma of retweets, inane comments, WTFs etc.;
  6. You give up on looking…

So I do not understand why anyone bothers with them at all. What do people get by making something trend. Okay I know that things will trend just by being mentioned, but a lot of people make them trend by insisting on using the # (which is fine to use), or by using the appropriate keyword that is trending. We all have at least some mastery of English, it is easy not to use the word and avoid trending the inane.

Basically trending topics give analysts an idea of the public consciousness, apparently, and I say ‘apparently’  as I have noticed that they in fact are not the zeitgeist of the modern persona but an inflation of a small section. Take, for example, that during the coverage of the Earthquake near Japan one of the trending topics was PearlHarbour. The tweets were split between the offensive “this is revenge/karma for Pearl Harbour”, to the angry “how can people compare this to Pearl Harbour” and the various millions who retweeted. It made it look as if this was a hot topic of division.

It wasn’t really, it was mostly over-reaction from both sides leading to a spurious heated exchange lost in the wealth of pointless retweets and insults. The trending topic is the new internet flame war, Twitter allows us to vent our spleen in much tidier packages that can distill the essence of our bile and render ineffective any viewpoint we have.

How can we analyse and debate anything in a mere 140 characters. Twitter is a great tool for an instant thought, or linking something of importance, but it is nano-blogging, there is no scope for reflection.

The trending topic has become a parody, it no longer shows the pattern of public feeling, more the shoaling of minnows with little voice. Yes, from a distance a lot of shouting may appear to be a great tide of opinion, but when all they are doing is chanting to a tune you realise it is just an audience at a spectator sport.

“You’re shit and you know you are” (endless repeat)
“Who’s the b*stard in the black” (and many other varieties)
“We’re all bald impotent w*nkers with girlfriends who remain sexually unfulfilled” (truthful option)

</rant>