Yes, I think this is the last of tonight’s 3 updates of the sad and lonely. Well, bugger it’s Christmas in about 22 hours. I hate Christmas. I hate all of the commercialism and the whiny carols shitting out of tinny car park speakers from the middle of October. I hate the way theres a Christmas related stall on every spare patch of city centre land, their attendants try to stop you in the streets, won’t take no for an answer and look genuinely offended when you tell them you’re not intersted and brush past. Everybody seems to want to sell you a bit of Christmas and I fucking hate them all. Fuck. Off.
All that said, I do like Christmas really. I like the time off work. The sitting around in the uneasy peace of your family Christmas dinner, where the year-round niggles of day to day existence together are put aside and you can actually talk to one another for a change. Anyway, this wasn’t supposed to be a rant about Christmas or anything, just an update about life in general. One has been overdue for some time, I know because people start to complain when I don’t update my blog. It’s strange, but they become compulsive reading, even when they’re just another load of drivel, which I have been known to produce from time to time and this one is no exception. So, on with the show…
Well yeah, I’ve not been up to too much recently, apart from working, eating and sleeping. I have my plan to take over the world, but I’ve already written about that. I’m really looking forward to that. I bought The C Programming Language, though I’m not sure how much I’m going to do. It’s strange, I did an entire degree and never learned to program properly in anything, but of all languages I’ve dipped my toe in, C++ made the most sense. Although I understood the principles of object orientation, I never learned how to apply them programmatically and so C, along with being the Unix language of choice aside from Python for GUI apps, made sense. I’d like to learn to program in C properly. It is highly likely however that the book will just sit on my bookshelf or next to my desk along with the other 20 or so books I never get to read apart from in an emergency.
I also bought The Boo Radleys Anthology on a whim. I’m not sure what led me to that, but I used to love some of the Boo Radleys EPs when I was at school and for the most part, the early ones aren’t available any longer and I don’t have a vinyl deck any more. Sadly, the Boo Radleys were best known in the mainstream for the absurdly chirpy summer hit Wake Up Boo! from around 95 or 96, but that wasn’t their musical bag especially, more a proof of concept that they could write great pop songs if thet wanted to – and they didn’t want to. Better tracks to listen to if you can are the blistering 12″ version of Lazarus, Does This Hurt? from the Boo! Forever EP and The Finest Kiss from the now unavailable Every Heaven EP, released on the ill-fated Rough Trade label. The band originated within the psychedelic trance pop genre known as shoegazer but developed beyond it. Fucking great band.
Other than all that, things are going ok. Work has settled down and I’m now feeling reasonably confident with my role, it’s been a heavily pressured few months up until this point though. I’m enjoying playing with Vexim, a virtual mail hosting layer for Exim, with a web interface, virus scanning and spam filtering. Great news. I still hope to get a working Xen system going, but thats been on the back burner for the last few months while I do real day to day work.
If I don’t post again before, I wish you all a fantastic Christmas and a prosperous New Year. I’m off for another JD and coke.