October 2005 Archives
For the first time in a week and a half, I can stand up without my back aching. I spend very very little of my life actually on my feet, I'm either lying in bed asleep, sitting in the car, sitting at my desk at work, or sitting in front of the television or computer at home. I probably spent about 5% of my time (if that) on my feet. So that probably explains why my back has taken so long to get better, it's at the wrong angle most of the time. I guess that doesn't really make a lot of sense, but it did to me when I was thinking about it earlier!
Anyway, the point is, I should be able to get back to the gym later in the week. I'm working tomorrow, then I've got a week and a bit off. I'm planning to spend a lot of that time at the gym, not exactly making up for lost time, just making good use of my membership. I might knock the weight training on the head for a while, and concentrate on cardio and fat burning exercises. Because at the end of the day I really do want to see the numbers on the scales go down.
So... a weekend without internet access at home, what the hell did I do to fill my time? I didn't see my son last weekend, so I had 48 hours to try and fill! I spent some time fiddling about with computers, I have an old PC lying around I'm trying to set up to use as a server, of course it took me the best part of Saturday morning to get it to boot up in the first place....
I found that I spent longer browsing shops. I went into town on Sunday to do some shopping and ended up just browsing book shops, browsing computer game shops (I did have this idea that I'd get a playstation 2 to help me pass the time, after all I can't be having a social life every waking moment I'm not in work), and browsing aisles in the supermarket I never even knew existed.
I decided against getting a PS2 in the end. Not because I couldn't afford it (I can't) but because I didn't actually fancy playing any of the games. They all look so alike, they're either car driving games, or fighting games. And I can't be bothered with games that are so similar. I remember when my nephew got a PS2 for his birthday last year or the year before, he went out with his birthday money and bought four car racing games. It took us a long time to persuade him to take at least one of them back and get a different type of game in its place.
I watched a lot of television. There's actually quite a bit on, if you only bother to look for it. I can't stand soap operas, but comedies, quizzes and documentaries are all worth seeking out. Although ask me now what I watched and I'll be hard-pressed to tell you! Oh yes, the new snooker season started this weekend, and there was the Japanese grand prix. I taped a very silly movie on Friday night called 51st State and watched it on Sunday evening (god this must be sooo interesting to read!)
And I spent a fair amount of time wth my cousin, and while at her house I took a gander at the web site for the social club I was a member of before I met my wife (I'm sure that sentence isn't grammatically correct but I can't be bothered to try and fix it now). The site is at www.spicemcr.com and it has the current diary on it. There are lots and lots of events to choose from, and I'd love to do more than I can actually afford to do! I'm going to join up anyway and get out and about doing something, though. I quite fancy the "taking more confident steps" and "what to say after hello" seminars - sounds like they're just what I'm looking for.
I've had a bit of a life-changing experience this week. I'm not going to go into detail about what it is, but I'm going to use it as a kick up the backside to try and change my lifestyle. And the first thing I'm going to change is the amount of time I'm spending on the internet. I'm treating my internet usage like an addiction, and I'm going to treat that addiction by hoing cold turkey. I have cancelled my internet account at home, and am going to be blogging from work (outside of office hours, of course) from now on. I'll probably be writing entries at home and then posting them from work, or from a friend's PC. So you may not see as many entries from me in the future, and I may not be reading and commenting on other people's blogs as much as I have been.
I have realised that I am spending far too much time on the internet, and far too much time staring at a computer screen. I stare at a screen all day at work, and then I've been coming home in the evenings and staring at another screen, often until the early hours of the morning. Enough is enough. I'm going to try and turn my life around, get out and about, develop some sort of social life, so that when I do make a post, I'll have something to talk about!
I still have internet access at work, and I use it as part of my work, but it should remain basically a work tool. My social life has suffered a lot over the last few years, because I have felt that I don't earn enough money to be able to pay the bills and live a life at the same time. That's no way to live, I'm merely existing and not getting anywhere or doing anything. Stuff the bank balance, I'd rather be a little bit in debt and happier as a person than debt free and miserable.
I've made various posts in the past about how I should be turning my life around, I keep saying I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that, and in the end I don't end up doing any of it because I spend all my time in front of the damn computer. Enough is enough. The money I save on internet access can go towards a social life! There was a time when I didn't have a computer at home, there was a time when I didn't have internet access, so what did I do back then to fill my time? That's right, I had friends and did things with them.
I spend an inordinate amount of time in chat rooms, because I enjoy the level of social interaction it gave me. But it's not proper social interaction. It's kind of like eating microwave food instead of hunting, killing and cooking a rabbit. I'm sure you'd enjoy the taste of that rabbit a lot more when you know it's real, rather than some pre-processed artificial rubbish. Chatting with people online is no substitute for talking to someone face to face, just like microwave food is no substitute for the real thing. So to avoid filling my life with artificial microwave food and just pretending it's the real thing, I'm going to throw away the microwave oven and buy myself a hunting knife.
Bye bye internet, hello social life.
There won't be a weight update this week, as I've twinged my back, probably carrying my son on my shoulders for half an hour last weekend. So I've not been to the gym at all this week, so I've probably not lost any weight. Normal service will be resumed as soon as I can walk again.
Last Friday was stock take day at work. We do a stock take every three months (which isn't so bad, it used to be every two months). The company I work for is in the business of manufacturing pairs of glasses, so there are three basic types of stock item - frames, lenses, and accessories (cleaning cloths and cords etc).
Four or five years ago we used to have one big computer system that handled everything, order entry, manufacturing, stock, the lot. Then we decided to split out all the separate functions and use systems from different companies which specialised in those particular areas. As a result we now have three separate stock take procedures for the three different types of stock. It's all a bit of a mess and I was much more confident handling the stock take procedure when it was all part of one big system that I understood. Now I have to print out a set of instructions every time, follow them like a monkey, and if it goes wrong I haven't really got a clue where to look.
The lens stock take went wrong on Friday. For some unknown reason the previous stock figures were not cleared down properly, so after three people had spent all afternoon entering the new figures, we looked at the totals and saw that they were all over the place. No-one was in the mood to look at it at ten to five on a Friday afternoon, and we didn't really know what to do to fix it anyway, so we did the lens stock take all over again this morning.
However we were able to get all hands on deck (well, nine pairs of hands) so it only took an hour to re-enter all the data. Why it went wrong on Friday I'll never know. What I do know is that this isn't the first time this has happened, and I'm dreading the next stock take, which will be on the first day back at work after the Christmas break. Oh joy.
At least I'm not the guy in the firing line any more!
Well it seems I've had my head up my arse for the last week or so. Sometime I don't feel like I want to post about every last detail of what I get up to or what I think about, because if I did it would be so boring even I wouldn't read it back. Here's an example of what's been going through my mind this week.
Last Monday my brother's friends, Bess and Lemmy, were featured in an episode of Wife Swap on television. If you don't know, the premise behind Wife Swap is that they get two completely different families and, well, swap the wives over for two weeks. During the first week the wives have to live the lifestyle of their new family, and during the second week they turn the tables and try to impose some of their own rules and regulations. This is where the sparks usually fly. At the end of the fortnight, the families meet up to discuss what, if anything, they have learned. To make it more interesting, the programme-makers tend to choose families with vastly different attitudes and lifestyles, and usually choose a family who's got it basically right to swap with a family that has got it drastically wrong.
Fortunately for Bess and Lemmy, they were the family that had got it basically right. They do what they want, they have lots of friends, the children are happy, sociable, and have enough freedom to express themselves. The other family, Cheryl and Sam, were.... different. Sam worked 80 hours a week, and was never there. The kids (twins aged 15) didn't go to school, and hadn't been for about two years, apparently. Cheryl took them out of school because they were being bullied, and had intended to home-school them. But (and there's a big but here) Cheryl was addicted to cleaning the house. Fifteen hours a day she spent vacuuming, polishing, wiping, dusting, and insisting people took their shoes off before going into the living room. The kids were basically housebound, they didn't have any friends or any sort of social life, and joined in the cleaning to give themselves something to do.
Now, it's not easy to film two families for a fortnight each, come back with a month's worth of footage, and then edit it down to one hour. A hell of a lot has to be left out, and some of what was left in was out of sequence, so they cut from a shot of people hanging around in the living room at 1am to a shot of the son in his room playing an electric guitar. This obviously gave the impression that he was playing at 1am, which would annoy the neighbours and only add fuel to the "bikers are scum" debate. Of course, he wasn't playing at 1am, it was just the programme-makes trying to stir things up a bit. They also tried to entertain some debate by asking that Bess wore a "Just Fuck Right Off" tee-shirt when she first visited the other family.
But by the end of the programme Lemmy and the bikers had won Cheryl over. She spent a day doing Bess's job teaching aqua-aerobics. She had to sit in the lounge watching the kids play video games while Lemmy prepared dinner. She felt bored and useless. At the end of the first week the Lemmy and the Black Knights took her out on a rally, got her to wear a leather jacket, ride on the back of Lemmy's trike, have a few drinks, sleep in a tent and loosen up a little. She started to realise the error of her ways, and that the lifestyle she'd made for herself wasn't what she wanted at all.
Bess was just as much out of place in Cheryl's house. She wasn't used to being housebound all the time, and after a few days was going stir crazy. When it came time to impose some of her own rules, she hid all the cleaning stuff and got the family out racing each other on mini-motorbikes. By the end of the fortnight both families had learned something. Cheryl had learned that there was more to life than cleaning, and Bess and Lemmy learned that they were perfectly happy all along. Although they did take one aspect of Cheryl's lifestyle and incorporated it in their own - they bought a dining table and started to sit down together as a family to eat dinner. Although, as Lemmy said, they didn't really need to sit round a table in order to communicate with their children.
According to my sister-in-law, who was present for the entire shoot, Channel 4 said that the programme had got 4m viewers, a record for the series. You can catch up on some of the debate by looking here, here , here (although Lemmy would like to point out that Cheryl is not, has bot been and never will be a member of the Black Knights!) and on the BikersWeb message board here.
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Ok, enough of that. What else has been happening? It's all very geeky and technical I'm afraid, so if you want to switch off now you can. I found out on Wednesday about these people who are offering 24Mb broadand for £24 a month. That's 12 times faster than my current conenction for a pound less. Definately definately worth looking in to. I've put my phone number into the enquiry screen and it says it should be switched on in my exchange in December. For an extra £4 a month you can have a static IP address, and they don't even mind you running your own web server and email server from home. Now that appeals to the geek in me - I quite fancy the idea of building my own web server and hosting my site in my bedroom. Of course, if something goes wrong it's down to me to fix it!
I think I'll have another look at the Linux from Scratch (LFS) project - this project takes advantage that Linux is all open-source, you actually have the original program instructions for the software you're running. LFS takes this to the ultimate level, that of building an entire operating system using only the original source code. But in order to build a piece of software, you need the software required to do the building, and in order to build that..... it's a circular reference. To get round this, you either have to start with a running Linux system, which seems a bit daft since all you're going to do is throw it away once you've used it to build your own, or you could use the LFS LiveCD, which is a bootable CD containing all the tools you'll need. Simply get a blank PC, put the CD in, boot it up and away you go. I don't have a blank PC here, so I'm using a virtual PC to play around with it.
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I went back to the gym on Friday night and spent an hour and a quarter there. Now my back is aching, which is good. I spent yesterday with my son, niece and nephew at my parents house, and gave my son his birthday present. It's not his birthday until Monday, but I won't be seeing him again until Tuesday evening. Anyway, his present was a Micro Scalextric Batman car racing set, which he loved to bits. He tried his best to get me to tell him what the present was before I actually gave it to him though - but this year I didn't cave in! I took him into town in the afternoon to get him some new shoes (which came with a toy spaceship embedded in the heel of the shoe - what will they think of next?) and while we were out my mum and niece baked him a birthday cake. My son, being not at all typical, blew out the candles, ate the crust off his slice and then said he'd had enough..... what sort of child leaves a plateful of birthday cake? Ah well, I suppose he'll be getting plenty more over the next few days.
My ex called me on Thursday and said that she was planning a small party for some friends, and could I contribute a little towards the cost of food and party-type-stuff. I didn't mind this at all, even though it was over and above my normal weekly child maintenance payment. For all his birthdays up to now he's had a big party at a Wacky Warehouse-type place, and it's cost a small fortune. My half of the expenses last year was £150, which I gave to my ex in an envelope in cash together with that week's regular payment. Guess what? She lost the envelope with all the money in it, and begged me to give her some extra to cover the loss. She was genuinely upset about the whole thing, and she said she'd cover half the loss if I covered the other half. So that party cost us both £225.... no wonder she's keeping it more low-key this year!
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I've also been getting tempted to replace my PC monitor at home. I have a standard 17inch monitor, and it's taking up quite a bit of space on my desk, so I've been looking into getting a flat screen unit. I've no idea if I will or not, but while doing some research into flat screens, I came across the acronym DLP. This stands for Digital Light Processing, and is used in some large-screen tv sets. It's an incredible piece of technology, and you can find out how it works by clicking here.
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Ok, that's enough drivel for now. I'll come back when I have something more interesting to say. Or maybe not.
