www.wyer.org

Just got back from watching Avengers again. In imax 3d this time. And without subtitles. Yay!

Loved Tony Stark's entrance to the bridge, and Hulk's two moments of physical comedy genius.

And i think i may have finally got my second router configured properly. I know, exciting eh?

I finally managed to extract and upload a bunch of my old blog entries (see entries from 2007 - 2008) for your viewing pleasure.

Some of them still make me laugh. And others are a bit cringey. But it's all me, and a good document of what I was like pre-Alex, pre-Plague, pre-Barclays.

One more thing on the big old to-do list DONE. Now I need to find my form again. No doubt there will be a good deal of ranting to be done in the coming days and weeks.

I'm also hoping to post some "view from the other side" responses to http://52weeksofdatingadvice.blogspot.co.uk/

Well, this is one way to learn python: force yourself to extract ancient blog entries from old html dumps, then work out how to upload them to drupal.

The extraction part we already know about (woot!) and the uploading is a work in progress.

I've manually added one of the 2007 entries, just to prove to the world that the effort will be worth it. Oh yes.

Over the past few days (with the few minutes I managed to scrape together), I have been able to add a REST server to the drupal installation and connect to the login method to generate a valid session key. I know, exciting right?!

Pretty productive day today...

Uploaded a bunch of snorkelling videos to youtube:

Selected 134 of the 600+ photos I took in the Maldives and uploaded to Facebook. Will add them to picasaweb later. Probably.

Wrote a little script to extract the blog entries from the archives of my old blog (from the internet wayback machine).

One of those cheap tavernas. Oh Christ.

Harvey Act 1 p16-23
Harvey Act 1 p29-39

Just done tweaking and saving the sound recordings from last night.

My trusty old mixing desk has finally given up the ghost, leading to some nasty static on some of the recordings. Sorry about that. I'll try to do better for wednesday.

Sound files (right-click, download / save as):
Act 2 Scene1 p56-64
Act 2 Scene1 p64-69
Act 2 Scene1 p71-74

This is me. Back on teh intarwebs. ish.

The site has been down for about a year, while I worked out what to do with it. Inspiration has not been forthcoming, so it's back up, with the default drupal theme and virtually no content. Yay!

The credit crunch is now official. “It’s a recession when your neighbour loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours”

But I’m not depressed. Oh no. Quite the opposite. All loved up and bursting with happiness despite imminent redundancy. Not much to report or rant about right now, but I’m sure that will change.

I’m doing the sound for a play down in Merton / Colliers Wood for the next week or so (the first night was on Wednesday, which I missed due to the funeral). It’s two stops from the southern end of the Northern line, about 25 minutes away as the carriage rumbles.

I hadn’t even thought to check what time the last train left, so I was cheerfully plodding towards the station at about 11:15 this evening when one of the other crew members screeched to a halt beside me in his car and told me I’d already missed the last train. Eek. What kind of half-arsed transport system stops running at 11pm? Usually (ie during the week and on saturday), the last tube is after midnight, usually closer to half midnight. But not tonight, oh no. And not in Merton.

Luckily, David (the aforementioned crew member) was happy to make a diversion and drop me home. But it could have been very nasty, stuck that far South on a sunday night.

Now, this is a very timely incident for me to consider, as the mayoral elections are this week. Time for me to peruse the candidate list, ponder the policies, and make an informed and enlightened choice for the benefit of London and (directly or indirectly) myself. Are the English Democrats just the BNP with more hair? Why do UKIP want to run London? Would a vote for Brian Paddick mean taking one step closer to a police state?

Hang on a second.

Sian Berry is hot. That’ll do me. Sian 1, Ken 2. Sorted.

Out til 3am last night, enjoying lots of wine, Vietnamese seafood, and live jazz with Eilidh and her sparkly new colleague Emily.

Went for brunch with Steve in a Jaguar. Brunch was in Waitrose, we travelled in a Jaguar. Pedants. Anyway, soon after finishing our steaks, the familiar old blind spot kicked in, followed by little flashing triangles. Zoomed home with my head jammed as close to the air conditioner as possible.

As per the latest medical advice, I was waiting for the headache to kick in before stabbing myself. By the time that happened, I was too lethargic to do much about it, plus it didn’t seem too severe. It rated about a 3 out of 10 on the pain scale (which makes it slightly worse than a normal headache), and once I’d comprehensively and thoroughly ejected the contents of my stomach, I just slept for about 4 hours.

That pretty much scuppered my plans for the evening, which was probably for the best. I needed the sleep. But just in case my subconscious is getting ideas, I didn’t need the sleep that much. A migraine is never good, but some are less devastating than others.

My third and final grandfather died today, Grandad Shep. Named for his dog. The man who taught me how to fish, introduced me to Soda Stream, and gave me an irrational fondness for the Austin Maestro, having claimed to have designed
these wheels, despite him originally saying the wheels had 4 “fingers” and belonged to the Austin Metro. Whatever the truth of the origin of that design, they will forever be “grandad’s wheels”.

He collected puzzle rings, tales of medical woe, and chins. His considerable girth owed a great deal to his insistence that Granny Shep be less “skinny” with her portions, and a certain amount to his lifelong belief that bacon sandwiches were not fattening (a theme on which he discoursed for several hours during my 18th Birthday meal at the Old Station House).

He was, for the most part, a kindly old man with a stubbly chin, but with a tendency to inflict his organ on anyone within range. This is both a reference to his questionable musical talents (what he lacked in ability he made up for in enthusiasm and perseverance), and his questionable antics around vulnerable females (what he lacked in charisma he made up for in inappropriateness and persistence).

You see, the other person that died was a child abuser. I suspect he was also responsible for a large part of my mother’s psychoses. It’s lucky for him that I stopped believing in Hell some months back, otherwise he would be burning in it for all eternity.

Time for the Daylight Savings rant, only it’s 1:25 in the morning, I’m still awake, my body clock has gone completely cuckoo, and some bastard from the past thinks it’s funny to get me out of bed an hour earlier every day for the next six months.

If it’s so bloody great to be up an hour earlier during the summer, why doesn’t everyone just get up an hour earlier?

Oh, oh, oh, think of the school children going to school in the dark. Fine. Open the schools an hour earlier. It’s much easier to have “summer time” and “winter time” just for schools rather than the entire nation. Don’t make the rest of us suffer as well.

Oh, but think of the parents who have to get up earlier too. What about them? They’re parents. Not only have they chosen to inflict their spawn on this overburdened planet, they’ve been getting up at odd times of the night for the past five years—this is nothing to them. Besides, why not use the extra hour after the kids have gone to school to have the sex they’ve been complaining about missing out on ever since parenthood took away their pocket money.

If they made it National Bonking Hour instead of poxy Daylight Savings, I probably wouldn’t mind so much. Besides, no-one’s actually saving any daylight. We still get exactly the same amount, only the insufferable minority of early risers get to be even smugger for several months, just to make sure no-one really enjoys the Great British Summer.

For no particularly good reason, I didn’t get to my desk until noon today. I was a bit tired from all the cycling I’ve been doing, my back hurt, and I wanted to finish “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt (so I didn’t have to read it any more), all of which slowed down my morning routine.

My boss / colleague wasn’t thrilled. Muttered something about me having to work until 9pm to make up the lost time. I pointed out that 8 would actually be a normal working day, then he came back with some bollocks about everyone in the team working more hours than that.

Wow. The firefox spellchecker had flagged “bollocks” as a misspelling, but when I changed the dictionary to English/United Kingdom it accepted it. Pretty nifty. Though it did just flag both “firefox” and “spellchecker” as spelling mistakes, so I’m not completely bowled over.

Anyway, his boss had been complaining to him about me walking round under a cloud for the past few weeks, and suggesting that I might like to keep my private life out of the office. That’s cuddly Uncle Morgan for you.

I’m only being tetchy about it now because its 1:40am and I didn’t leave my desk until well after 11. Anyone thinking “That’ll show ‘em!” can calm down and stop being so adversarial. The whole thing was resolved amicably and positively just after lunch, so I wasn’t doing it to prove or disprove any particular point. I was just making rapid progress in my project and didn’t want to stop until at least some of the new stuff was working.

Oh, and “The Secret History” is a terrible book. It’s like an American cross between Withnail & I and Lord of the Flies (possibly the worst book I have ever had the misfortune of being unable to avoid reading), with a bunch of poncy students studying Ancient Greek in a poncy New England college, poncing around, getting drunk, doing drugs, killing each other, and generally wittering away from arsehole to breakfast, as the saying goes.

It starts off in a very grandiloquent style, conveying the ponciness of the narrator (one of said bunch of poncy students), then slowly degenerates into conventional, ambling (and tediously prolonged and drawn-out) prose which rather devalues the whole thing (though we are now talking fractions of iotas of worth). The overblown theatrics in the last few dozen pages are utterly risible. The epilogue actually made me snort in derision. Avoid avoid avoid.

My bicycle has decided that it doesn’t like its innertubes much, and has started shredding the valves (three tubes destroyed so far). I reckon the valve holes in the wheel are just a bit too small for the valves, and the edges of the holes are just a bit too sharp, so I’ve switched to a different type of valve which is much skinnier. With new innertubes costing around £4.50, the bike is almost costing more than the Tube.

Had a phone call from the manager of the club this evening. Yes, that club. He seems like a very pleasant chap, but clearly not quite pleasant enough to stop me spending too much money in his club. He says he has an itemised bill of everything I spent that night, which I’m very much looking forward to seeing. Not in a “Yay! We’re going to the Zoo!” way, obviously. But it will be interesting to see where that time and money went.

He already knew about the police investigation, and I gave him the thrilling news of the lab report. Might help.

The police are taking me seriously, and the matter is currently residing with Tower Hamlets CID. I don’t know how high this is on their list of priorities, so I’d appreciate it if the paedophiles, serial killers, and drug dealers in the area could curtail their activities for a while. Thanks.

Support from family and friends has been nothing short of amazing, and I’m especially grateful to Steve for being utterly dependable and pointing me at Scotland Yard.

Of course, it would be nice if the banks could make the distinction between me choosing to spend my money and someone else coercing me into giving my money away, but I’m not sure I’m ever going to win that argument. But I can take my business elsewhere.

What a week. Scraped off the pavement at 2am on Sunday by an ambulance, with no idea how I got there, and vague memories of spending over 600 pounds in a club. Spent the rest of the day (once I’d passed out and come round twice more) throwing up. Then I found the credit and debit card receipts totalling over £5,600. This did not help the nausea.

In fact, nothing helped the nausea and I was still feeling sick on Monday. The doctors at work gave me something for the sickness and sent off a urine sample for analysis. It came back positive for amphetamine! They’re still checking for Rohypnol.

So it looks like my drinks were spiked and I was conned into maxing out my credit card and overdraft. Either that or I got very drunk and very very stupid. Either way, that club screwed me over and I’m now in a precarious position. Since the transactions were authorised by PIN, the banks’ default position is that I’m liable.

It will take four months to claw my way back into the black, possibly longer. I am not seeing the funny side yet. So if I seem a bit less sparkly than usual, it’s because I’m still mentally kicking myself while trying to live as frugally as possible.

There are those not unrelated to me who may consider it a good thing that I’m having to face some stark financial hardship for a change. They may be right, and that does seem to be one arguably positive thing to come out of the whole mess. I just wish it wasn’t quite so stark.

What is it about cleaners that makes them want to destroy expensive glassware?

We fired the last one after she spilt the contents of my lava lamp over the phone, then overfilled the iron from the tap (having been told not to) and plugged it in, blowing up the iron and tripping the circuit breaker. Not to mention the smashing of the uplighter in the living room, and the mysterious disappearance of my giant beer glass.

Today, my pyrex teapot was prematurely forced into doing its duty by the 2nd law of thermodynamics, increasing its entropy until it became a pile of broken shards. Still, at least it’s easily replaceable.

Going to see Derren Brown in May. Yay!

This one hospitalized me.

2 litres of intravenous fluid and 48 hours later, I am just starting to get better.

nuff said. going back to bed now