Brennig Jones (and friends)

Sophie has just gone back to bed with a cup of tea. She’s now reading.

Bren is downstairs. He has just backed up many websites and internet databases. He’s now sipping his tea and wondering if he should call BT Vision’s helldesk.

Actually, it’s surprisingly difficult to keep everything in the third person.

Hello people! How are you all this fine and sunny grey and overcast Sunday morning?

I’ve updated the theme; what do you think? A little too fiery? A touch too dark? A bit too much ‘apocalypse nowish’?

Oh well.

Suck it and see. As the actress said to the Bishop.

I have just finished checking that the many websites and databases that I host for a variety of nice people have been correctly backed up and stored.

They have.

I am sipping a fantastic cup of tea made by the lovely Soph (who, even now at 9.35am, is Back In Bed Reading A Good Book), whilst I wonder whether I should trouble BT Vision’s helldesk to tell them about their product not working much.

It’s a busy day for a Sunday.

We have to produce a concept demo of a new show for a radio station. That’s all I can tell you about that for now.

I have a 2pm meeting in Oxford with an independent record label.

And this evening we are going to an Over 18s showing of Toy Story 3 – again, in Oxford.

There won’t be any porn or live sex, it’s not that kind of over 18s thing. It just means there won’t be any little darlings being intrusive all over the place.

And Twitter is currently down for maintenance.

Breakfast is definitely going to happen next. And maybe another cup of tea.

Ear, there’s a thing. Why do I say ‘cup of tea’ when I mean ‘mug of tea’?

Am I subconsciously displaying some kind of posh pretension,  by substituting the word ‘mug’ for the more middle-class ‘cup’?

I hope not!

I am to pretensions of posh what Ghengis Khan was to Emily Post’s notion of etiquette.

Here’s an interesting fact:

In the same year that General Custer was getting his barnet refashioned, in a very rudimentary style, at Little Big Horn, Tivadar Puskás was designing the first telephone exchange for Thomas Edison.

Amazing, isn’t it?

I mean, if George and the Native Americans could have held on to their differences for a little bit longer, they could have sorted things out over a conference call.

Right, my tummy is talking to me. Food is required.

Time passes…

Breakfast has been consumed, tea is being drunked, washing is ‘on’ and Soph is Back In Bed.

And I am on the phone to BT Vision.

Well, when I say I am ‘on the phone to BT Vision’, I mean I am in a queue – in to which a recorded announcement breaks, every not and then, to say thank you for holding and to say how busy they are and how wonderful I am but never the two shall meet.

Or something like that.

More time passes…

I am still in the queue. The same lady keeps breaking in to tell me my call will be answered as soon as possible.

I have been in this queue for ten minutes, so far.

There’s some Israeli apologist on the television who is trying to make the point that The World Is Too Critical Of Israel.

Disappointingly, no-one on the panel has thought to bring up the peculiarly-overlooked murder of civilians – in international waters – on ships bearing aid. What short memories some people have.

Meanwhile, I am still in the BT Vision queue. The lady tells me that my call Will Be Answered As Soon As Possible.

It has been seventeen minutes so far.

Time passes some more…

I am speaking to someone!

I have given him the long list of problems that have affected our BT Vision box over the last week.

And he appears not to understand.

He has gone off-line to perform some line diagnostics.

Why? The problem clearly is hardware related and nothing to do with the line. The shopping-list of problems should have told him this.

I shall wait some more, but at least this time I have Eine Kliene Nacht Musik coming down the line at me.

Time passes just a little more…

The guy came back to tell me that we have a broadband speed issue which is affecting our BT Vision service.

While he’s telling me this, I run a quick broadband speed-check which gives my current download speed as:

Broadband speed check results

Frankly, I find it very confusing to be told that 7.01/Mbs is an insufficient broadband speed to support BT Vision.

And yes, we are actually having one of the common issues with our BT Vision box, as I’m on the phone to the guy, so this is real-time reporting on a real-time problem.

Anyway, after 34 minutes, the call ends in an ‘inconclusive but promising’ fashion. The guy at the BT Vision helldesk has said he will forward our problem on to their 2nd line support/technical team; they will contact me within 24 hours.

Now then, what shall I do next?

• 17th March, 2004
• My first blog post
• Over here
• I’m re-reading it all
• Sad git

Yesterday Soph and I drove in to London, parked the car at Queensway and caught the tube to Mile End where we met Ash for lunch.

Ash is a unique guy. Genuinely talented and blessed with an abundance of creativity, Ash chooses to spend most of his time working in the public sector; providing valuable services to some of our fellow humans most in need of assistance.

With his free time, Ash indulges his creative talents as a composer/musician of serious worth – we have shared just a fraction of his musical talent with our podcast listeners, under the names of artists ‘Warning! Heat Ray!’ and ‘Unsound’.

And he writes; as a music analyst/reviewer, Ash is one of the few muso-writers whose opinions – and writing – I hold in genuinely high regard.

Lunch, with Ash, was brilliant; that’s a measure of what a genuinely nice guy he is.

Later in the afternoon we went back to the West End, had a meal in an Italian restaurant in Berner Street, then walked to the place where we were to meet up with author Alex Marsh and renowned blogger Jonny B.

Alex Marsh and Jonny B are the same person, obv.

The occasion was an informal launch of Alex’s new book ‘Sex and Bowls and Rock & Roll’, or as Alex put it ‘Not a book launch, just a drink in a pub with a few friends’.

Sitting next to Alex was the deliciously gorgeous Catherine Sanderson (aka internationally renowned author and erstwhile blogger, Petite Anglaise).

So that wasn’t very intimidating at all, was it? Jonny B and Petite Anglaise sitting next to me.

Erm, yes. I may have slipped in to idiot mode.

More people arrived.

Mike Atkinson (aka influential blogger/journalist Troubled Diva) was followed by a pair of very high-profile internet characters: bloggers, writers and podcasters, Cliff Jones and Mr Angry.

Then the gorgeous Girl With A One-Track Mind rocked up.

The very lovely (he once did me a favour by personalising a copy of his book for Soph) Andrew Viner followed on behind.

And there were others!

People whose names I can’t remember; intelligent, articulate people who said bright, witty (if not outrageously funny) things.

It was a fun, funny evening.

We bailed out, leaving the survivors to carry on, around 8pm.

By the time we got home, watched Big Brother drank tea and fell in to bed it was midnight.

This morning Soph and I are teetering around the house like a pair of newly-dead zombies.

Why teetering around the house? Because we are not the grown-up people we pretended to be on two occasions, in front of all those folk, yesterday.

We are a pair of kids  who went out and successfully hoodwinked them all into believing that we were grown-up.

Ha-ha, fooled you!

But not only was it really nice to meet everyone – from lunch with Ash to to the afternoon/evening’s meeting with Jonny B and all of his friends – it was very pleasant to meet such a thoroughly nice group of people.

Earlier today I got a tweet from a reader of this blog to say she had been trying to submit a comment here, but the comment was vanishing every time.

Half an hour later I experienced exactly the same problem over at Soupy’s place and moments later, the same problem again over with the Mooster.

Ten minutes ago I had the same problem with The Magnificent Frog. Less than five minutes ago I experienced the same issue with LizSara.

Is anyone else experiencing self-hosted or WordPress-hosted, WordPress issues – specifically – comments not being accepted?

So we’ve been doing really random things today and laughing a lot and giggling like kids and singing and Sophie’s cleaned the house and is it only me that feels as if it’s been a weekend day?

I know Soph’s been home because it’s her Thursday off and that makes it seem like the weekend but the sun’s been shining and I had my hair cut this morning and rode Tom this afternoon and gave him a bubble bath and came home and wrote two PowerPoint presentations that I have to give tomorrow morning in Wiltshire and…

Oh dear.

I seem to have run out of punctuation.

Bugger.

I’ll just nip upstairs and see if there’s any spare punctuation in the filing cabinet.

Back soon.

… because these days we’re all using Web2.0 technology to read websites, right?

I have dumped Bloglines as my Web v2.0 Reader Of Choice.

See that blue shivering pile in the corner of the garden?

That’s Bloglines that is.

The replacement is Google Reader.

Now some folk might tut and shake their head at my tardiness in adopting Google Reader as my Web v2.0 Reader Of Choice, but the reason I didn’t adopt it earlier comes flooding back to me, now that I’m using the product.

Feed extracts.

A couple of websites I read show up as full-length articles in Bloglines, but they are only reproduced in extract format in Google Reader.

And yet they’re both reading *the same* RSS feeds.

I don’t get it.

So I have just typed the URI (not the feed address) for one of those websites in to the Google Reader subscription bar and guess what?

Yep, I’m now getting the full articles in Google Reader.

So what I have here, in my Google Reader account, are two subscriptions to the same RSS feed in the same Google Reader product, yet one subscription shows an extract of the original, while the other subscription shows the full Monty.

WTF?

Anyway, it’s an easy fix; I just follow the same process for the half-dozen other RSS feeds that were being truncated by Google Reader, delete the extract feeds and Robert’s your mother’s brother – job done.

I know this RSS reader stuff is so much easier than having to click through to every single website one wants to read on a daily basis, just to check if anything has updated, I just don’t understand where the gremlin in Google Reader’s functionality is.

Anyway, bye-bye Bloglines and welcome to my bosom Google Reader.

And to celebrate, here’s my word of the day:

Tit.

As promised, the winners of the T-Shirt giveaway (in order of close proximity to the target of blog visitors up until 22.00 last night) are:

1st place: Allister who was uncannily close with the number of the beast (666), a mere 16 adrift

2nd place: Masher who was also spookily close with 600, a mere gnats testicle of 82 away

3rd place: Sarah who was just 100 adrift with 782

The score on the visitors door for yesterday up until 22.00 was 682 as evidenced by the screenshot below. I’ll drop Allister, Masher and Sarah a line tomorrow to get addresses to send them off to.

Pssst. Wanna read something almost amusing?

Hop over here to Miss Smidge’s place.

I am a blog whore but this post really is amusing. Almost.

So there is this website I dip into from time to time.

I’m not signed up to it or anything, although the summer holidays and all they bring with them into my place of work has made me consider it.

It’s called ‘The Society for Librarians* Who Say “Motherfucker”‘

Here is a snippet of what one might find on said site.  This one comes from pcdoc:

Dear Patron:
yes, we do have a lot of internet computers and yes, many of them are in use right now. Some people may be looking for jobs, some doing research, some working on their resume and yes, we do extend time.
However
It’s 82 degrees outside, nice and sunny, not too humid, pleasant breeze blowing.
Your 8 year old is bored to tears and you are still on the computer, after 3 hours.
Are you working on a resume?
Doing research?
Job hunting?
No.
You’re watching cartoons.
For 3 fucking hours

It’s a relief to see that some library customer habits are the same the world over.

Even if it is fucking annoying.

I’m struggling to remember what I did before the internet.

Because I have lived in a pre-internet world, as difficult as that is to believe now.

Indeed, I’m struggling to remember what I did before computers.

In the dark, mostly dank, recesses of my patchy mind, I can stretch back to the Spectrum ZX.

What was before in my life?

Dolls.

I had a doll called Holly. Because I got her for Christmas.

She was bald.

Well, she had a moulded head, so it looked like she had hair, but she was hair-less.

Anyway, this wasn’t going to be a ramble about me playing with dolls.  Although, it’s funny, because I loved my various dolls (Sindy dolls, Cabbage Patch Kid, Tiny Tears, Holly…etc), but at some point I decided, actually, dolls are all very well, but if you think I am going to have an *actual* living, breathing, pooing, screaming baby, you can bugger off.

But, I was going to blather about t’internets and stuffs.

Because I have been home from work since 6pm.

That’s 3.5 hours.

Yes, we’ve eaten.

No, it did not take 3.5 hours to prepare/eat/wash up.

What have I been doing?

From the moment I set foot through the front door I switched my laptop on.

It’s like an instinct.

I switch it on straight away, before I’ve even taken off shoes or dropped bags or shut my car door or shut my front door, I switch it on to give it time to load up.

It’s forward-thinking.  Or just plain sad.

I have various things to do when I go online.

Like a routine, if you will.

Gmail account.  TweetDeck. Facebook (usually to lose a game of Scrabble to my cousin). Bloglines.

After this there is the ritual plugging in of the iPod and updating podcasts and stuff.

And finally I look up stuff that I’ve had in my head all day.  Random stuff, usually lyrics or a book title or a tidbit of a fact I overheard and want to find more out about.

Since I work in a library, you’d think I’d have all the resources at my disposal to do the fact-finding while at work.

But it’s just easier to hop online and do it, isn’t it?

I’ve become so lazy.

Anyway, this really was going to be a short ramble about the fact that I seem to spend all evening plonked in front of my laptop doing, mostly, fuck all.

If I were writing this Great British Novel I intermittently decide will one day spill forth from my chewed fingertips, then I’d perhaps feel a sense of accomplishment.

Or even if I were trawling the various online news sites, like Bren does, I would feel as though I were learning something.

But no. I read stuff about what other people are doing.

Which is basically like an online version of watching Big Brother.  Almost. Only without the birds tweeting in the background when someone swears.

Oh, I forgot another part of my online checklist. Checking my Aberystwyth e-mail and networking site.

It’s not a daily thing, but I do check it.  God knows why, since I’ve done no study for months, apart from one mad instance in Costa first thing in the morning a couple of months ago when I decided that a business plan can surely not be as scary as I seem to think it is, so started to make some notes.

And haven’t looked at whatever it is I wrote since.

Perhaps I check it in the hope that someone from Aber has e-mailed me to say ‘Hey – no need to bother doing this silly Managment Module that you seem to not be doing, we know it’s total rubbish, so just skip ahead to the extra geeky stuff like Cataloguing…we’ll just give you an A anyway!’.

Anyway. Again.

I need to not be so obsessed with what everyone else is doing.  Hanging on their every tweets. And blog posts.

Because spending 3.5 hours in front of a laptop and coming away from it with not a great deal, except perhaps the memory of a funny YouTube video or well-worded Tweet, is just not a good way to be spending life, is it?