Burger Bust
Mmmhmmmm This IS a tasty burger - Jules Winnfield

Feeling peckish at lunch time (as sometimes happens) I weighed up my options of what I could have to eat.
It's friday so Fish & Chips tends to be what most people go for but I can't be botherd getting in the car to drive to a good one as the local one is rubbish, the fish are dried up shriveled little things that you get the feeling have been left under the heater all month. The kebabs are good from there though. It's one of those places that combines a little of everything. I decide that having a Kebab covered with hot chilli source on a day as warm as this is just far too unpleasant a prospect for the afternoon. I instead settle on having a burger from the place that's finally deigned to open up it's custom to the lunch time crowd after being closed at lunch for over five years.

It's another of these bit of everything places and I've been told the food from there is good. Except for the Pizza, which seems odd as Pizza features promanatly in the business name.
I look up and down the boards list of burgers with names like: Mexican, Hawaiian, Chicken, Triple, Donner, American.
Now I don't have a problem with people calling their burgers strange names, I even do it myself, however the menus contained no description of what was in the burgers and when I asked the chap behind the counter he just gave me a blank look gestured at the board and said "All there." Well I wasn't about to be out foxed and made to look a fool even by someone so obviously cunning! So I choose myself The Deluxe burger, that would show him I'd get the best god damn burger he had. It was the most expensive bar the Triple Special Meat burger, but I had no intention of eating 'special meat', so I knew I was in for a treat.
I got back to my desk and opened the burger box. I closed it again. Then opened it, lifted the top of the bun and prodded the burger. I then consulted a dictionary. It said:

Deluxe [duh-luhks, -looks]
–adjective
1. of special elegance, sumptuousness, or fineness; high or highest in quality, luxury, etc.: a deluxe hotel; a deluxe edition of Shakespeare bound in leather.
–adverb
2. in a luxurious or sumptuous manner: We always travel deluxe.

I looked at my burger. My burger in a bun. I lifted the burger to see if I'd missed something, because well you never quiet know do you. Nope nothing there, no cheese, no onions, nothing.
I picked up the burger box and headed back towards the shop but his roller shutters where down presumably to keep out the baying masses who demanded proper descriptions of the food they were purchasing.
Well with nothing left to do I went back to my desk ate my burger.

It was a tasty burger. But all I could taste was defeat, you win this round shop owner.

Labels: food, funny, personal, work

Does It Speak Bocce?


The large wooden crates are lined up outside the building filled with various old I.T. equipment waiting for removal and disposal. I'm having a poke around them with Paul.
"Well he's already been out complaining about what a waste this is" Paul informs me about our coworker. "He's removed all the ink from the deskjets" There is a vast amount of deskjets scattered around that will never be used again for anything by anyone.
"They'll never be used by anybody and they'll dry up and be even more useless then him" I comment.
"yup"
"So you looking for anything in particular here?" I ask.
"Well ideally I'd like a flat screen monitor" Paul replies without much hope. Indeed the only monitors here are well worn and busted CRTs.
"What about yourself?" He asks me as I squeeze between two crates to get to another.
"What I really need is a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators." I mutter this quietly as people are passing and I don't want them to think that I.T. are as geeky as we are. I think I did it too quietly as he doesn't seem to hear this witticism so I turn round to say it louder and feel a sharp jab in my arse.
"Arrrrrrgh! I've got a splinter in my arse!" I scream. People turn and look.

I have just pulled and inch long splinter from my arse.

Labels: funny, personal, work

Sleeping Beauty


I've just walked in from a four hour writing session, the time flew by like it always does when you're enjoying yourself. This does mean however that I've snuck in at half past midnight (and on a school night too!).
The ladies of the house have returned from their broken car exile while I've been out. I woke Cujo by coming in and have said a big belly rubbing hello to her. I've also been up and seen Katie, she's fast asleep on the bed. She looks really peaceful; doesn't sound peaceful what with the snoring.
Sadly I get the feeling I'm going to end up waking her as I try and edge slowly into the bed and roll her over to her side from the sprawl that she's got going across the whole bed. At which point she'll awake to a stinky tired boyfriend which not what I'd want her first see after a few days away from me.
Oh well here we go.

Labels: dog, personal

I, Thespian?

When I was knee high to a grass hopper I always quiet fancied being an actor. When out in the fields by my house playing with John, Ian, Peter and myself I would create such vivid images in my mind and threw myself completely into the role of whatever we were doing, weather the Germans where assaulting our trench (we actually also dug ourselves a rather large bunker in a field as a prop, I don't think the farmer was too impressed though), plotting our escape from a Dalek work camp or hiding from the Predator. It wasn't just a game to me, it was real.
This continued with me through out Primary and Secondary school where I would perform little sketches and skits, usually comedy.
When I reached Upper school Drama was finally a lesson to be taught; albeit only for half an hour every fortnight. Drama lessons managed to take my little ember of hope of one day becoming an actor and pour an ocean worth of water on it killing it completely.
Without a dedicated Drama teacher at the school we were taught by a different teacher pretty much each time, one lesson it would be a maths teacher the next a physics teacher after that a geography teacher. Just about any teacher from any subject that could be as far away from acting as possible.
Our lessons were spent being rivers, lakes or trees blowing in the wind and on one memorable occasion when a teacher came in with a hang over; logs, the entire half hour was spent lying on the floor not moving or making a sound.
After passing up the opportunity to be in the one play we ever did (I think I was offered Tree #3). I'd had had my fill of "acting" and instead devoted my time to script writing; but that's a story for another time.

I never would have thought after all these years I would be but a few scant hours away from getting to actually act. Admittedly it's a bit of a stretch to call it acting given that I’m only doing a couple of cabaret acts but we'll see how we go maybe like Jason Voorhees you can't really kill a childhood dream.

Labels: personal

Stop The Inner Voices Please; They Just Make Me Worry


Look just stop worrying.
but...
Everything will be fine.
What if...
The doctor said it's probably nothing.
He also said "ah" when you said you were still coughing
It's nothing.
but it might be something...
You're going to feel silly looking back on this in a few weeks when it's nothing.
Unless it's something...
Yup mighty silly, especially that crying thing you did in the toilet.
But it might be...
Even if it is 'something' it won't be 'that'
It certainly sounds like it could be 'that'...
Well it's not.
It sounded like the X-Ray thought different...
Look we need to wait for the results of another X-Ray first, before a problem can be confirmed or more likely ruled out. So chill out.
Ok...
Good.
But what will you do if it is...
Look just stop worrying.
but...

Labels: personal, sickness

Now there's a new name for terror...


Well there has been a new addition to the house hold, she maybe a little late on the rent but she never minds sharing the gas bill.


I'd like you all to say a big howdy hi to Cujo

Labels: dog, personal

Raging Against The Machine


Got a bit of a problem with my PC at home, any help & suggestions would be appriciated:

Problem:
Booted up the PC one day, logged in. Monitor blinked off and on like it would if you'd just resized your resolution. It now keeps doing that whenever it does anything, it also causes corruption of the display after a while. A reboot doesn't help.
Uninstalling the Graphics card from Windows stops the problem happening, however this leaves me with out proper graphics.
I've tried doing a system restore from going back to about a month ago (to give it ample room incase something screwy happened recently).
I have tried downloading and installing the latest drivers, no change same thing happens.
I also tried a differant monitor, but the same thing happened.

My Hypothesis:
Something wrong with the graphics card. Either
A. Screwy drivers
B. Actual graphics card death (then why would it still display ok without the drivers installed?)

Recommendation:
A. Try and find original disks that came with computer for original drivers (where the chuff are they?).
B. Try uninstalling the drivers then running a driver cleaing program to get rid of any guff that may be left interfearing with the drivers I'm installing.
C. Borrow a graphics card, see if it works ok with that.
D. Get a Mac.

Here's the tech specs:

Operating System:Windows XP Home Edition UK with SP2
Power Supply: 700 Watt Multi-GPU Power Supply
Motherboard: NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI Motherboard
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ Processor w/ HyperTransport and Dual Core Technology
Memory: 2GB DDR2 PC-6400 SDRAM at 800MHz - 2 x 1024MB
Video Card: 256MB PCI-Express x16 NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT
System Drive: 250 GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 7,200 rpm w/ 8MB Cache
Storage Drive: 250 GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 7,200 rpm w/ 8MB Cache
Monitor: Iiyama 19" CRT.

Labels: computer, personal

Welcome to 2007 people.

I'm sorry but I don't have a right lot to tell you, I'm redesigning the site at the moment so I'll be busy doing that for a while.
As you may know I don't bother to give up anything for the New Year like smoking drinking ect I set my self goals¹ that I want to get done through the year. So first off lets see how I did from last year.
I think I said I wanted to get in shape. This was going very well I was exercising daily and getting quiet fit, until around the end of August when it finally died out, now I seem to be more unfit then ever!
Also I was ment to be getting a house. Haven't quiet done that but I'm near. I've got my pennies together and am currently shopping round for one. It just takes time.

Anyway this year what shall we do I've got several possibilitys I'm considering at the moment:

1. Learn Guitar - I've been meaning to do this for about 10 years now I really should get roundo doing it.
2. Form a Cheese Rock band - You know in the style of the 80s classic bands.
3. Work on my guns? - Yes I've turned in to a vapid narcissistic arse, but generally keep getting in shape. Thinking buy some Dumbbells then I can use them when I'm watching TV, drinking beer or such like?
4. Get back into webdesign and Flash stuff. - I've really go to do this anyway I've been letting my technical knowledge slide and if I'm going to be looking for a new job soon then it would be useful to have my brain firing on all cylinders.

I'm sure I had more written down on that paper I wrote when I was drunk. Oh well I'm sure they'll come back to me at some point.

^{1. Yes I realise this make me sound like a cunty middle manager type person, I'm sorry}

Labels: new year, personal

Depressing Sights At Work

In my job I frequently come into contact with Drug users, prostitutes, the homeless, the insane and other dregs of society. This is always depressing to see these sort of people who are down on their luck, sometimes it's scary like when you get threatened with a knife by a mentally ill person or if a angry pimp comes into a surgery looking for one of his girls pulls out a gun and starts firing. Not very nice things to happen to you I'm sure you'll agree. However the worst thing at the moment I think is actually seeing one of your friends checking into a drug rehabilitation clinic (or whatever they call it - I just sort out the 'puters).

Admittedly he isn't a good friend, more of a acquaintance but I can't help but feel that if I'd just said the right thing to him when I was trying to console him a while back over his wife leaving him and walking out with his kid, and one of his family members dying (I forget which, see how bad is that! I can't even remember who died). Maybe if I'd been listening to him properly rather then exchanging furtive looks with lovely lady who was sat at the next table over, I could of thought of the right thing to say or do and he wouldn't be in the trouble he is now.

This was about a year ago now. So I suppose the good news is that he's attempting to get his life back on track. I just wish I could of prevented it from going off the rails in the first place.

Labels: drugs, personal, work