It's fake Sunday. I've had a four day weekend.
Today is the last day off I have in this holiday year. The new one starts in about 5 days but I never take days early on, so effectively this marks the end of the more carefree summer holiday season and the start of the more work oriented winter.
The next few weeks promise to be busy, so being done with days off is a good thing, but I also know it's going to be hard yet uninspiring work, trying to make huge slabs of data meaningful.
Once again I feel i'm wasting too much time. I had no intention of allowing this four day break to pass without a single trip somewhere. I meant to go to London but frankly it's far too expensive on a train unless there's an actual reason to go, and i'd really be going to wander around.
This long weekend consisted of me consuming podcasts, movies and TV. I figured out a little more aobut Ableton Live which was good, but it doesn't feel like enough.
I did find my first ever version of what this is. A Word document in which I remember writing some 20,000 words. Unfortunately this was 7 years ago and I can't remember the password for the document. I must have used a long one too, because I can't seem to crack it. I'd really like to read it, despite it probably being fairly cringe worthy.
That's all. Random brain spray.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
Vuze - Look What Happened/Former Friend/Fall From Grace... you get the picture. Good becomes Evil.
Vuze may not be the best Torrent ápp, but i've always liked it in both it's current and previous incarnations.
That ends today. I'm not talking about the fact that the version updater has been hanging on my machine for weeks and i've just been cancelling it. That's a bug and acceptable. My stupidity told me that reinstalling would be the way around this bug, and it was. How ridiculous is it that it turns out i'd have been better off leaving things as they were rather than fixing the problem. Read on.
As of right now, 11:25am GMT on 16/10/2009, if you install Vuze on your machine like a normal person and pay no real attention to how you might be being tricked, poor excuse for a search engine Ask.com will invade your Firefox settings without any prompting.
It's not that Vuze hasn't been shipped with a shitty Ask.com customised toolbar for some time now. No sir. It's the fact that they have gone completely off installation Wizard convention and implemented an unticked "Customize" checkbox at the very start of the configuration process. If you don't tick this you are simply thrust through the entire setup process without any choices to make. How fucking handy for getting a few hundred thousand unwanted toolbar installs. Needless to say from my anger, the shitty toolbar and all it's unwanted configuration changes are part of the default.
I genuinely can't figure out how to undo the mess this has made. I will find out, but that's time I have to spend.
I also have to find time to find a different client.
That ends today. I'm not talking about the fact that the version updater has been hanging on my machine for weeks and i've just been cancelling it. That's a bug and acceptable. My stupidity told me that reinstalling would be the way around this bug, and it was. How ridiculous is it that it turns out i'd have been better off leaving things as they were rather than fixing the problem. Read on.
As of right now, 11:25am GMT on 16/10/2009, if you install Vuze on your machine like a normal person and pay no real attention to how you might be being tricked, poor excuse for a search engine Ask.com will invade your Firefox settings without any prompting.
It's not that Vuze hasn't been shipped with a shitty Ask.com customised toolbar for some time now. No sir. It's the fact that they have gone completely off installation Wizard convention and implemented an unticked "Customize" checkbox at the very start of the configuration process. If you don't tick this you are simply thrust through the entire setup process without any choices to make. How fucking handy for getting a few hundred thousand unwanted toolbar installs. Needless to say from my anger, the shitty toolbar and all it's unwanted configuration changes are part of the default.
I genuinely can't figure out how to undo the mess this has made. I will find out, but that's time I have to spend.
I also have to find time to find a different client.
Saturday, October 03, 2009
Competitive Nature
Okay last one was too long. Faster.
Am I competitive? I thought not overly but I lost bad at Laser Tag last night and I have a burning desire to understand why I finished deep into the negative scoring.
Why should I care? I shouldn't. I bowled a good game an hour earlier.
I think I just suck at things with guns.
But yes, I am competitive. People at work that started after me and even worked for me briefly are now starting to rise to the levels above me and as much as I can be genuinely happy for them and feel it's deserved, I find myself burnt up about it despite telling myself I didn't want to go where they're going.
I probably still don't, and that's the point. Should I follow the competitive nature and hope it indeed leads to advancement? I'm almost certain that if I set myself a goal and worked at it I could get myself a few levels higher at work in not too long a time frame, but apart from wanting a bit more money, and at this stage a bit is all it really amounts to, what's the point?
I'll leave it there for fear of this becoming the last post. One more to do.
Am I competitive? I thought not overly but I lost bad at Laser Tag last night and I have a burning desire to understand why I finished deep into the negative scoring.
Why should I care? I shouldn't. I bowled a good game an hour earlier.
I think I just suck at things with guns.
But yes, I am competitive. People at work that started after me and even worked for me briefly are now starting to rise to the levels above me and as much as I can be genuinely happy for them and feel it's deserved, I find myself burnt up about it despite telling myself I didn't want to go where they're going.
I probably still don't, and that's the point. Should I follow the competitive nature and hope it indeed leads to advancement? I'm almost certain that if I set myself a goal and worked at it I could get myself a few levels higher at work in not too long a time frame, but apart from wanting a bit more money, and at this stage a bit is all it really amounts to, what's the point?
I'll leave it there for fear of this becoming the last post. One more to do.
Content Overload Worsening
Podcasts. I now subscribe to 24. That's more than when I last mentioned it and wanted to drop a few.
One of my favourite (though recently less so) comedy shows is now going 5 days a week. I should be pleased but i'm not. My not quite OCD nature means I need to treat these shows as all or nothing. I can't bring myself to just listen to episodes when I feel I have the time, but I also can't imagine finding yet another 2 hours in a week to listen to the two extra shows. Maybe they'll do me a favour and put the new shows behind a pay wall.
Current favourite show - Red Bar Radio. This has been in fantastic form recently. Much better than the show that's about to go 5 days a week which has developed a weird obsession with describing YouTube videos that I can't see. They also seem to see themselves as implicitly superior to Red Bar, which may have been true at one time, but at this point it's misguided arrogance. I'm not sure these show wars really exist in the hosts minds most of the time but this was brought up briefly in the last few weeks and for some reason it annoyed me.
Don't bother with these types of show if you've ever been offended by anything though. Incidentally who are these idiots that get offended?
So yes, content overload. Too much audio and too many unread stories in Google Reader.
Today I posted three times and all three posts largely fell apart towards the middle. I haven't been doing this enough recently to be good it it I guess.
One of my favourite (though recently less so) comedy shows is now going 5 days a week. I should be pleased but i'm not. My not quite OCD nature means I need to treat these shows as all or nothing. I can't bring myself to just listen to episodes when I feel I have the time, but I also can't imagine finding yet another 2 hours in a week to listen to the two extra shows. Maybe they'll do me a favour and put the new shows behind a pay wall.
Current favourite show - Red Bar Radio. This has been in fantastic form recently. Much better than the show that's about to go 5 days a week which has developed a weird obsession with describing YouTube videos that I can't see. They also seem to see themselves as implicitly superior to Red Bar, which may have been true at one time, but at this point it's misguided arrogance. I'm not sure these show wars really exist in the hosts minds most of the time but this was brought up briefly in the last few weeks and for some reason it annoyed me.
Don't bother with these types of show if you've ever been offended by anything though. Incidentally who are these idiots that get offended?
So yes, content overload. Too much audio and too many unread stories in Google Reader.
Today I posted three times and all three posts largely fell apart towards the middle. I haven't been doing this enough recently to be good it it I guess.
From the "A morning Radio DJ shouldn't be able to make me contemplate my life this much damn it!" department.
I've been back in the Chris Moyles camp in the last month or so. That podcast eventually sucked me into listening in the mornings after abandoning the afternoon show a few years before he got the big job - the morning show I never listened to for 5 years. Mission accomplished, I would imagine. I could try to figure out why i'm suddenly into this again after what I suppose must be about 8 years but that's not really the point here..
The dude gets a lot of stick from far and wide. Strangely enough most of the things that people used to say about him largely don't seem true any more. His show is far more positive now. Clearly that may relate to having reached the top. Hard to be negative when everything's going well.
This isn't really specifically about him, anyway. Like most of this blog, it's more about me. I followed @chrisdjmoyles on twitter for a while and it struck me how interspersed with the celeb trappings there was a lot of fairly normal life thrown in. Being content with sitting watching TV for entertainment, going for a drink, and so on. Looking forward to these things!
It got me to wondering why I feel like i'm wasting my time when I do them and it always seems to come back to being content with your job. I'm not saying I want to be a DJ. I don't have the quick wit, and although I love radio as a medium, in about 5 minutes of searching you can see the huge gap between people that love the medium like me and people who eat, sleep and breathe it, and these are the people that should be doing it. Stands to reason.
It's more that i'd like to get to a point where my day of accomplishment (work or otherwise) feels meaningful enough that a relaxing evening doesn't feel like a waste. I have a friend who manages to feel this way, although he works around 60 hours a week, around 1/3 longer than me, and that's going to lead to valuing the relaxation time more. Working an extra 20 hours isn't something I want to do, or at least not in my line of work.
It's all been said a million times before - do something you're passionate about. I can get passiontate about creating MI for a large company to an extent, but it feels increasingly like that's going to become more restrictive, plus it's not something I intended to do forever.
This line from Baz Luhrmann's Sunscreen has been stuck in my head now for ten years:
It's a great line which i'd like to apply to me, but I don't find myself all that interesting any more, or at least not to other people. I increasingly come back to realise that most of the things that I like the most aren't things that other people like, and those that they do like, I like too much to be able to relate with them on the topic. I am still the geek I always was but I decided to try to forget it for a few years. Doesn't work.
I never felt guilty about not knowing either. I don't have parents that pressure me to progress as many people do, and I still think this is a good thing. Having said that, without being pushed it's easy to stand still. Standing still is what i've been doing for a few years now. I have progressed in my career a little but where that was an easy stroll up a hill, the next bit is much steeper. I can't move on where I am without compromising and narrowing my focus, and like many others I like to have choices, doors, avenues.. Escapes routes.
Yeah so that's about it. Sorry if you assumed i'd find a way to tie that all together but I think this one's beyond that. If I had the punchline I wouldn't need to write the rest to begin with.
Still feeling pretty good in general!
The dude gets a lot of stick from far and wide. Strangely enough most of the things that people used to say about him largely don't seem true any more. His show is far more positive now. Clearly that may relate to having reached the top. Hard to be negative when everything's going well.
This isn't really specifically about him, anyway. Like most of this blog, it's more about me. I followed @chrisdjmoyles on twitter for a while and it struck me how interspersed with the celeb trappings there was a lot of fairly normal life thrown in. Being content with sitting watching TV for entertainment, going for a drink, and so on. Looking forward to these things!
It got me to wondering why I feel like i'm wasting my time when I do them and it always seems to come back to being content with your job. I'm not saying I want to be a DJ. I don't have the quick wit, and although I love radio as a medium, in about 5 minutes of searching you can see the huge gap between people that love the medium like me and people who eat, sleep and breathe it, and these are the people that should be doing it. Stands to reason.
It's more that i'd like to get to a point where my day of accomplishment (work or otherwise) feels meaningful enough that a relaxing evening doesn't feel like a waste. I have a friend who manages to feel this way, although he works around 60 hours a week, around 1/3 longer than me, and that's going to lead to valuing the relaxation time more. Working an extra 20 hours isn't something I want to do, or at least not in my line of work.
It's all been said a million times before - do something you're passionate about. I can get passiontate about creating MI for a large company to an extent, but it feels increasingly like that's going to become more restrictive, plus it's not something I intended to do forever.
This line from Baz Luhrmann's Sunscreen has been stuck in my head now for ten years:
Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. the most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives, some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don't.
It's a great line which i'd like to apply to me, but I don't find myself all that interesting any more, or at least not to other people. I increasingly come back to realise that most of the things that I like the most aren't things that other people like, and those that they do like, I like too much to be able to relate with them on the topic. I am still the geek I always was but I decided to try to forget it for a few years. Doesn't work.
I never felt guilty about not knowing either. I don't have parents that pressure me to progress as many people do, and I still think this is a good thing. Having said that, without being pushed it's easy to stand still. Standing still is what i've been doing for a few years now. I have progressed in my career a little but where that was an easy stroll up a hill, the next bit is much steeper. I can't move on where I am without compromising and narrowing my focus, and like many others I like to have choices, doors, avenues.. Escapes routes.
Yeah so that's about it. Sorry if you assumed i'd find a way to tie that all together but I think this one's beyond that. If I had the punchline I wouldn't need to write the rest to begin with.
Still feeling pretty good in general!
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