Failure

Unfortunately but somewhat unsurprisingly I have done no writing. It's not going very well really, everytime I tried to think about what to write next I started thinking about other books - not good. I think I'm going to have to be strict with myself. Set aside a slot of time everyday in which I have to do some writing and have a goal X number of words in said time slot. It's the only way. Well, probably not the only way, but the most efficient way that I can see.

I started making my brother's stocking today so it's ready to be lined too. I was thinking about giving it a little turnover at the top but I have to make sure that the lining doesn't clash too much with the gold on the fabric. Also I need to learn how to read patterns better. I just had to do a demonstration to myself so I could understand the instructions perfectly, I couldn't understand why I needed a slipstich opening for the lining. But now I do, although I don't need it 'cos the lining is the same on both sides so I needn't bother with all that complicated stuff - yay!

I finished my book this morning so yet again I'm down to having nothing to read, *dies* Oooh but I've just found out that the good bookstore in Rotterdam is open till nine from Wednesday - yippee! I can buy that PHP book and some interesting fiction ones too with any luck. I was considering leaving work early but now I can just go straight after huzzah.

I love book shops. I could spend ages in them, I have in fact, and not just in the Starbucks. That's why I like the Borders in Cambridge: it has a starbucks *and* they obviously don't pay their staff enough so they don't come round and bother you 'cos they just don't care. Or maybe Borders knows that people don't like to be bothered in bookshops. This might hold true for other shops but I don't generally go in to other shops. I actually don't... how worrying is that? But then, I don't really buy anything except books. Though I do hate it when, on the few times I go into clothes stores, the staff are always so pushy, if you've been there longer than five minutes they come and ask if they can help. It's like No if I needed help I would a) look lost/confused and/or b) have come looking for you. Since I am still in the trouser section, you have twenty racks of trousers and I'm not looking lost it's probably a safe bet that I do *not* need help.

But maybe that's just me.

I probably have more to say but I can't think what it is except: we had snow today! And: 25 days till Christmas! And: good night.

The Covenant or Why I'm annoyed at Blogger

I wrote a nice long post yesterday and I'm so sure it was posted - apparently not. I'm more than a little miffed, if only because now I have a black mark on my record for posting everyday - at least the other times: no internet, were valid reasons and now! *sigh*

So I did just watch the Covenant, it wasn't at all scary but it wasn't supposed to be. It was an interesting story but not as well explained as it could have been. They mentioned 'Darklings' a couple of times but there's no real explanation of what one is except that people who use magic can make them out of dead people. And that's all deduced. They seemed like a really cool idea for giving the good guys the idea that something odd was going on but there wasn't enough depth which kinda wasted it. There's some internal battles between the four members of the good gang, just your average jealous/over emotional/sparring type stuff but again it could have been explained better or just not been there. On the whole though it was interesting. Although I'm biased, any movie about paganism that isn't slanderous or crap I'm sure to like. And not only was it about paganism, it was also about Salem paganism. I love Salem, the witchcraft stuff always intrigued me, even before I became a pagan and it was there that I bought the book that put me on this path. I have a soft spot for Salem. So yeah, Salem and Massachusetts witchcraft is right up my street, as it were.

I want to go back there, I haven't been for, oh, only four years which given that I live in England isn't really that long a time. But I want to go back with money and possibly by myself or rather not with my mum's friend and her kids, lovely as they are. But then if I go with money I'd be tempted to buy far too many things! Bumper stickers for my non-existent car, cool throws for my non-existent sofa etc. etc. Money slips through my fingers like you wouldn't believe.

Speaking of money and ways to get it... I emailed one of my lecturers at uni a month or so ago, maybe longer, to ask if they had any jobs going - for my internship. They said no at the time but apparently he mentioned it to a company manager who was at their annual 'let's give the kids proper interview practice' outward bound weekend. The guy got back to them wanting to know if I still wanted a job so my supervisor called me up at work yesterday to see how I was doing. It sounds great but at first I wasn't sure, no reason why I wasn't sure but anyway. Now the more I think about it the more I want to go, I realised the only thing that I really care about in this country is my project and now that I've got it to a finish as it were - there's expansion and improvements that can happen but it's reached its first goal - I don't mind leaving it behind. We've got the lovely new intern who could theoretically pick up the ropes. I just feel bad 'cos Peter (my job supervisor) is my dad's friend and that by leaving I'll be failing him, and my dad to a certain extent. The other thing is that I'm not as unhappy as I was then, I've, I dunno, become used to the situation. I still don't much like it here and when you realise that aside from your project the things you're going to miss are the stationery shop, the fabric shop and the movie store perhaps you should start worrying. But does being able to tolerate the hole in which you live enough justification not to leave? I don't think so, and even if my flat is worse, even if my job is worse I'll still be closer to home, closer to my friends and closer to my boyfriend. I doubt the place I'd live would be worse - this place is a hole. And it's not so much my job that I hate, it's some of the people, so I guess the people could be as bad/worse but I have to believe they won't be. I used to be in two minds about leaving; I knew I couldn't leave to go back to uni, that'd be quitting but I wasn't sure what moving to another job might mean, on that side of things. I think I've said this before but I'm a quitter by nature and so I wanted to stick this out to prove to myself that I could. That's one of the reasons I didn't want to go back to uni - that and I had *no* idea what to do for my dissertation (I definitely need another eight months to figure that out) but moving on to another job? Is that quitting? I'm not sure. I'm sticking out the industrial year but I haven't put up with the job. But then when the job starts to make you feel like shit, is it worth sticking to? are you still a coward and a wimp if you run away? Tough questions.

Well in the light of those decisions plus the fact that I spent two hours distracting my brother trying to persuade him not to leave home on of which I also spent on the phone to my mother talking to her about my brother's issues. I didn't tell all of them, I'm not a taddle-tale, but when it comes to desperate situations I told them enough of what he was feeling. To be honest he's brought most of this upon himself and my parents couldn't *be* more supportive. More than that he knows he's brought it on himself. Which is why he wants to leave of course: it's not getting better and he's only hurting them by staying. It's only a couple of steps away from "maybe if I left completely, forever, they'd be happier" and other morbid thoughts, but luckily he's too lazy to jump off a bridge and I don't think he's nearly that depressed so we should be good. But I'm a fairly empathetic person I like to think, and I've been told, and Josh and I get on well, he always listens to me. Most of what I say goes in one ear and out the other, but he does listen. And I can get away with saying things simply because I'm not a parent - some things are just harder to take from parents, including piano lessons. But because I'm on the same level as him, family tree wise, we've a different bond and I get frustrated in a different way which means I can have some distance from the situation which improves perspective. So I can talk to my mum and be completely sympathetic all the while gaining clues as to what to tell my brother how he can improve the situation. He's completely unmotivated - about everything. And I think that's what's currently getting to my parents most. He's not working hard enough at school which is always irritating but he can't get off his arse to look for a saturday job either, it's almost like he's zombified from what I can tell. It's gotten to the point that if he even offered to do the washing up or feed the cats my mum would be overjoyed. I only learnt this last night and duly passed on the message in such a way that he wouldn't know I'd talked to her about him! I then talked to my dad on skype today, about unimportant things mostly and then I said I had to go and he said OK and then said "I'm sorry about the stress from Josh last night" and I said it was OK, he's my brother bla bla bla. But then he has a despairing moment, they're really at a loss with him. And I don't mind in the slightest, anything I can say or do to help, I will, but it just seemed amusing that this despair and need to talk about it came straight after he apologised about the stress I just endured from Josh! Parents eh? Who'd have 'em? I can't wait till I'm back for Christmas, I'm going to drag Josh round town and get him to apply to some jobs (I'll feed him Starbucks hot chocolate to make up for the dragging) and I'll talk to him and hope that some of it stays in his brain! And maybe things will get a tiny bit better.

I just realised I meant to start that paragraph with "In the light of those decisions and all the family stress, I gave up my chocolate veto and had ice cream at dinner" but instead I did my rambling thing. So yes, ice cream for tea, that doesn't mean the chocolate veto is off, oh no, back on again from, well, now. But as long as lapses are lapses and don't become the norm, then you know you're in control.

I got a card from my grandma today, she said she'd love to have a stocking, that it'd be good fun. Which is great only now I've realised that the colours of my current stocking are perfect for her but the pattern on the material for Josh's is also perfect for her. So I'm thinking that I will go to the fabric shop, buy that combined colour/pattern fabric (which they had when I was there) and probably buy myself so different fabric - 'cos I can't possibly have the same colour as my grandma. Josh and she will have different style stockings so it doesn't matter that the pattern is the same (hopefully).

So I'm going to make up Josh's stocking tomorrow and DO SOME WRITING! Oh and buy a book on PHP so that I'm vaguely knowledge 'ere I have an interview with that guy from the company.

Good night.

Noooooooooooo

It didn't publish my post - I thought it did, it said it had, I'm sure it said it had *cries* I'll just have to make up a longer one tonight. I'm so annoyed.

My Sassy Girl

So it would appear that all I'm really doing these days is watching movies and reviewing them - which is cool. I do need to get writing again though, I'm kind of in a rut. There's not a day goes by really that I don't think about my story but plenty of days go by without me writing it - which is not cool. I shall endeavour to write some this weekend, be it scenelets, storyboards, character padding-out or full blown chapters - this weekend I will write. And finish my brother's stocking ;)

Back to the movie then. 'My Sassy Girl' is a remake of a Japanese movie with probably the same name but in Japanese. I read a lot of reviews about it and most people bitched that it wasn't as good as the original and the Americans are always re-making stuff and doing it badly. Well whatever, I haven't seen the Japanese version and I probably won't. You know why? Because this movie was great. I loved it and I don't need to see a better version 'cos I'm quite happy with this one. It's about a boy who saves a girl from (possibly) getting killed on the subway - she was leaning over the railings - she turns out to be drunk and so he carries her and puts her on a bench. He decides he can't leave her there and carries her back to his place - still passed out. She turns out to be a drunken, semi-crazy, slightly violent, impulsive(in good & bad ways), demanding, funny, charming, laughing woman and he falls head over heels for her and in her own special way she shows us that she might feel the same about him, but we're not 100% sure. Difficulties ensue and are overcome. A very sweet funny movie but if you've seen the original don't tell me off for settling with the American remake - I don't care :P I thought it was excellent. Do rent it or buy, it's lovely.

I'm working up my courage to watch the Covenant, it sounds pretty awesome but then I properly looked at the back of the box and there's a scary-faced guy. I don't normally get scared by movies, it takes a lot to scare me. But I do get freaked out/grossed out and shocked quite easily. The scariest film I've ever seen was the Blair Witch Project. I hasten to add that I was 11 or so, it was freaky because you never knew what was happening and because it was so real, so 'potentially' real I guess you'd say. Saw I (that's as far as I got) horrified me but didn't scare me. I haven't seen the Scream movies. Oh! 13 Ghosts, that scared me a bit and Long Time Dead - but in a shivers up your spine kinda way and not much more. The Bone Collector - when I first watched that I did get scared actually, we were at a friend's house and we slept with skewers next to our sleeping bags. OK so that's the other movie that really got to me but I've seen it more recently and it's not as bad as I remembered. But this movie could scare me, or I'll just worry about it and be totally let down - that's a likely possibility too. Watch this space, I may watch it this weekend when I can stay up and have nightmares and not be late for work ;)

I did the testing of my program today - yay! There weren't any actual bugs which was nice. Stuff that needed to be changed, although only 'cos I'd forgotten to change the test lol. I also found a brand new status for UPS orders which had me stumped for a while before I realised I wasn't read the error output right lol! Fixed that. So yay - production tomorrow or next week perhaps. Fun fun fun.

It's cake day tomorrow and I have *no* idea what I'm going to make. I'm not sure if we're still on the break from chocolate or not so I'm not going to make a chocolate one just in case. Hopefully my student loan will come through soon and I can buy more recipe books :D There's a Classic 1000 Cakes and Bakes book (part of the series) which looks amazing and is first on my list.

*Sigh* I think my housemate has people round, there goes my early night.

Love, actually

It's such a good movie, I know it's kind of a Christmas movie but it's great! Less than a month till Christmas anyway :D I better start buying presents! And finish making those stockings hehehe. I think I will take some photos when I'm done and link to them on here, proof that I finished a project! A project that involved sewing no less.

Love Actually has a great soundtrack as well, I think. Great fun! Heh, my thinking's all disjointed today.

Work was not particularly interesting but I haven't anything else to talk about at the moment. We deployed my project, it was piss-easy. I thought it was going to be complex and special but no, just a command line version of "go". Major let-down there, let me tell you. Still, it's done and we can do testing on the morrow - hooray! Talked to Evout more, I remain firm in my thoughts that he's a sweetie. Matthias is starting to irritate me though but again it goes back to the standards thing in some ways. Some people work and teach differently. He seems to be very much a "I won't give you much of a hint, work it out" kind of person and I just can't learn like that. But then he'll do simple things like move one of my files around, not tell me he's done it then spout command line commands at me so that *I* have to update the ruddy thing then tells me he was suprised I didn't know the command he told me. I am a Windows person, always have been and probably always will be. I never used SVN till I freakin' got here, never deployed anything, never updated anything on the command line why the hell should I know the commands for doing things to svn on the command line!?

And that's just not how I'd teach someone. *Or* How I'd get them to update something. I'd tell them what I'd done, why I'd done it and tell them what they needed to do to make it work. Argh! He's so frustrating.

I won't have these problems when I set up my cafe hehehe. It started out as such a foolish idea, the "what I'd do if I won a million (or more) pounds" way to while away Databases lectures. It's going to be excellent. I'm going to make lots of cakes - making cakes at work is just practice ;) and do drinks like in Starbucks, all interesting kinds of tea and coffee. But also the regular stuff, I know a fair few people who've complained 'cos you can't get "tea" in Starbucks. I will fix that! Ooooh I don't think I mentioned last time the extension that this cafe might undergo. The ultimate plan, sort of, is to have a cafe which is attached to a jazz bar - ideally a subterranean jazz bar, 'cos it sounds cool. But yes, then I'd own the cafe and the jazz bar. I have a cousin who's a pianist and singer so I could probably rope her in a couple of times, a guy at uni is also a pianist and has almost exactly the same dream, he was talking about it over our end of year dinner and I told him it was exactly what I wanted to do too! Fun stuff. I have another cousin who loves the idea of having a cafe/restaurant but also wants to travel to actually find the people to buy food from or the people that the food comes from, he wants to do that and have a place to send stuff back to. So I selflessly suggested that I could run the cafe in his absence ;) I have *another* friend who's not sure anymore he's in the right business (a guy on my course) and is falling more and more in love with photography so maybe we'll send him off with my cousin and we can put their pictures up all over the cafe. I'd love to do it, I really would.

Oh! I had an idea earlier: IMDB should set up an IBDB - Internet Book DataBase. Unless there's one already? Maybe, I cba to check right now. But it'd be a great idea. It could work almost exactly the same as the IMDB but with authors and books etc. and then any books that were turned into movies they could link to the IMDB and vice versa. I think it's a great idea, but then people who have ideas often think that. Who knows? Maybe I'll email them... lol.

Back to book for in the Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn. Not the best it's true, there's a fanfic that had a much more interesting ending tbh. But it's her series she *has* to finish it the way that feels right to her. Nothing can or should change that. I do remember that someone got the book early and posted "spoilers" and we thought they were completely ridiculous, 'she'd never do that' we thought to ourselves. I was at work, reading the book online. I would normally object to doing this - reading a typed up version of the book, next to stealing - but my copy was paid for and in the post so it wasn't really like she lost out! And I swear I went into shock when I read the first bit of possible spoilers because that meant all the others were true too. It was an awful moment! But hey, the book's finished the way she felt it should be finished and that's all there is to it really.

Night.

Pirates and their standards

Ahhh and the marathon is over. Does it actually count as a marathon if it's done in three stages? Probably not but seeing as it's the best I can do on week days it'll have to do. I do so love Jack. And the bit with his father! Inspired.

It has come to my attention recently that people treat me differently than I would like to think I treat them (I noticed a while ago but more so recently) it's the little things... like the fact that I bought a frying pan 2 1/2 months ago and it was pilfered by the people in the other house (because they thought it belonged to the owner of these two houses) and there's a girl in this house who know the girl who "borrowed" it. And I've asked this girl a couple of times if she could get her friend to give it backk but they still haven't. So I'm despairing slightly, I don't like to ask again because she might feel I'm nagging and then I'd feel bad but it's been two months now and I'm fucking annoyed. And I just wouldn't do that, if it were my friend I'd nag them till they gave it back and if I had borrowed it, well I wouldn't have without asking first, but if I had and I then hadn't given it back immediately as soon as my friend asked me I'd like to think that I'd give it back. I'm an incredibly forgetful person but two months - when it's for someone else - is a very long time.

And it makes you wonder; is it fair to judge other people by our own standards? I mean, there aren't a set bunch of standards - apart from the ten commandments and variations thereof and of course laws. But the standards which you base all of your own actions on and which others base *their* actions on, they're very fluid so is it fair? But if you don't base them on any standards then anyone can get away with anything in theory. So what do you do? This wouldn't be a problem if you were a wanker and had low standards because anyone who did what you would do or better would be a "great" person but if, like me apparently, you had fairly high standards, how is it fair to judge someone? Should there be a cut off point? Take this frying pan thing - is 4 weeks long enough to give them the benefit of the doubt or should it be more? or less? To be honest I think that two months is probably long enough and seeing as I'm hoping to move out (though I haven't organised haggling with my colleague) I don't think I can feel too bad about having a minor go at my housemate to give me the bloody thing back, am I right? Give it back or give me the ten euros it cost, I don't bloody care. If I'd thought it was a lost hope I would have given up by now and bought a new one but because I have misplaced hope in people I really do think they'll give it back - so I haven't gotten round to it *sigh*

Maybe I'm more tolerant of things than I should be so people just take advantage. Or maybe the girl who borrowed it is also forgetful. Or maybe she's selfish. Or maybe a combination of all three


I got some work done today - yippee! Though not as much as I'd hoped because disaster struck! Well not really. We have an internal online phone/address book type thing and it was my job when I started to make it better. And it was working on the database/server it was on but it seems that an unfinished (perhaps) version was deployed onto the main server and now it's all broken and stuff. Next to everything that I added in - functionality wise - doesn't work but all of the technical bits that ought to be used are still there. A 'tag' form for example. You're supposed to check a bunch of boxes for the people you want to tag and the boxes are there and the form is there but trying to use them doesn't work. It's very bizarre. And worse than that, I can't get at the relevant files for some unknown reason! Very frustrating. But I got to chat to my supervisor about various future-and-stuff things and also - though he might resent me for it - got Evout the intern some work to do. He's an intern like and probably older than me so I don't feel I can tell him what to do because we're equals but also I don't really know what I'm supposed to do and there's not much in that for him to share with me so I thought I'd tell our joint supervisor to help him out. I hope it worked and that he doesn't hate me, he seems to be doing OK. I like him, he seems like a sweetie :)

Oh! I don't think I mentioned this yesterday - I found out I have to do a voiceover for a screencast demo of some product functionality. I'm going to giggle so much, or put on an over dramatised voice, it's going to be silly. Oh dear.

With any luck this will actually post - it's telling me the autosave failed and there's an error so I'm going to copy this before I post and see what happens!

Whoops, forgot the title... oh well.

Today was the second installment of my Pirates marathon. You know how sometimes you feel in the mood to watch something but you can't put your finger on it but none of your other movies fit? I kinda had that, I love the Pirates movies, but I just wasn't in the right mood but then I watched them - and it's great :D I think this one was the silliest somehow, what with giant cages, rolling mill wheel fights, Norrington covered in mud, stupidly dramatic lines - "Sorry, Mr. Turner... but he's RIGHT! Arrrr!" (Again from Norrington). Yes, silliness abounds in this one but it's still pretty good, the movie can carry it but it's *soooooo* obvious that this is a two parter. And I mean that's OK but you know that all of the climaxes in this one are not equal to whatever the biggy is in the next one! But that's OK 'cos I get to watch it tomorrow - woop woop!

My flatmate is being wretched again. Apparently it's too noisy, I have turned down my music for him already but for whatever reason the movie/speaker sound doesn't sync up very well so I have to have it quite loud to hear most of the speaking and then fifteen minutes before the end he comes and tells me if I could turn it down (I didn't realise it was only fifteen minutes otherwise I would have told him to sod off) and he does it in this just urgh patient patronising way you know the "I'm sorry, I'm sorry to be asking this again" while in his heart he's going "But if you bloody kept it down I wouldn't have to ask you over and over again, I'm not sorry you wench" *sigh* There's a great episode in FRIENDS where Ross movies in with Joey and Chandler and he does a similar thing. I have all the discs but I'm not going to check and it's not on youtube either...

I was looking for the episode on surfthechannel when "Antivirus 2009" started trying to download itself! It minimised my browser and gave me a pop-up to which I said "cancel" then tried to go back to the right page and it did it again! So I closed the tab mwahahahaha. Um so yeah, can't find the episode there either - sorry! But that was odd.

Um um um, it's a monday and I posted yesterday so there's not much that happened today of interest. I managed to get bugger all done at work today (not entirely true) because some of the things that my supervisor told me to do I didn't know how to do and he managed to never respond when I asked him if I should do (relevant) things that I knew how to do. *sigh* plus the fact that I have a, no doubt bored and confused, intern that's supposed to be working with me and he's got fuck all to do either. Well he has school stuff he can do but project-wise? Nada. It's like I told him: slacking while you're supposed to be working is... not OK per se but y'know, slacking because actually you have nothing to do is surprisingly frustrating. I think I said that last week... wow, I don't think I've done any real work at *all* over the last couple of weeks... I hope they don't notice, I feel bad now. Meh, I'm sure I'll survive, I'm actually keen to be working right now, I love my project, I'm so proud of it - if it were anthropomorphised it'd be a well trained puppy - because I do often want to pat it on the head when it does things right. I know it's because I programmed them properly but still, well done program :)

Sleep time...