As it my custom it is time again to look back at the year just gone. I say custom, I did it last year, the year before that and the year before that too.
1. What did you do in 2009 that you’d never done before?
Moved in with someone that I haven’t planned to move out with afterwards.
Oh, and Go-karting… that was epic fun.
2. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I didn’t make any, so yes, very easy to keep. By far the best kind when it comes to keeping them. Given that plan has worked out thus far, I plan to keep not making them and ably achieving the.
3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Nope. This said, we are all getting older and a lot more people seem a lot closer too it (not in the fat sense)
4. Did anyone close to you die?
Again, thankfully not.
5. What countries did you visit?
Just France I believe on Family holiday.
6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?
Time.. lots more spare time. Money would be good, sleep would be too, but time more than anything else.
7. What dates from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Moving in, the many epic trips to Ikea that were required, Holiday, Thanksgiving is always quite an event and actually, Christmas was really nice too.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Finding somewhere nice to live and actually starting to live there. OK, so I know it is a simple thing, but it is always the simple things that mean the most.
9. What was your biggest failure?
Uni work and alike continue to be a constant source of failure, one I have yet to fully work out how to deal with. Im trying not to put it into that “one day” bracket, but it is going that way.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Im sure my pride has taken a beating from time to time and colds and alike have hit me, but in general, no.
11. What was the best thing you bought?
A whole pile of furniture, turning a few rooms into a home.
12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
The countless charities I know of or help from time to time who despite everyone tightening their belts still managed to do good in every way they could.
13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
The music industry, the film industry (US and UK) and the government and some large companies for their onslaught against privacy. Their belief that everyone is a criminal and that making a copy of something for free is the same as taking a physical item.
14. Where did most of your money go?
Rent, followed by the car, followed by food, followed by furniture, followed by plights and tech maybe…
15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Again, like a true stuck record, moving in with Demelza, starting a new job, get out and making my own way a little bit more…
16. What song will always remind you of 2009?
17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a. Happier or sadder?
Happier
b. Thinner or fatter?
A bit thinner.
c. Richer or poorer?
Richer
18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Sleep, my own projects, spending time with Demelza.
19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Work, driving, spending money.
20. How did you spend Christmas?
Driving mainly. This was a lot better that is first sounds. We did both the parents in the one day doing the morning and lunch with Demelzas family and then drove all the way over to my family for tea. We actually really enjoyed it, despite it being quite a day.
21. Did you fall in love in 2009?
Over and over, same girl though…
22. How many one-night stands?
None. I should really remove this question, but it will mess up the numbering.
23. What was your favourite TV program?
Still the legend that is Top Gear. Also very much been enjoying SG1 again.
24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
Nah, hating has so been done.
25. What was the best book you read?
I still don’t really read. In fact, I have little choice what I’m going to put here, I only read one book. It was The Last Lecture and I highly recommend it.
26. What did you want and get?
Somewhere nice to live and a job.
27. What did you want and not get?
A degree would have been nice…
28. What was your favourite film of this year?
The new Star Trek film. A nice mix of the new and the old into something enjoyable.
29. What was your favourite game of this year?
As I said before, Burnout 2 on the GameCube, still. I still play it more than anything else. That said, Boom Blox is really cool. As is the free PC version of TrackMania.
30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I was 23 years old and Demelza came up from Cornwall and at best guess, we went to the cinema, but I honestly don’t remember.
31. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
All the filling being done sooner and automatically… Sad isn’t it.
32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2009?
Same as the year before with more t-shirts.
33. What kept you sane?
Demelza, despite the bloody Ryanair music trying to push me over the edge.
34. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy/respect the most?
None. I am growing tiered of celebrity in general and few warrant respect.
35. What political issue stirred you the most?
As stated earlier, piracy and privacy annoyed me the most. They still do mainly because I see little intelligent thought going into them. Every study has come out against the government and the industry, but instead of realising how wrong they are and innovating they are pushing back… but they are pushing back against a public that will win.
36. Who did you miss?
Hello stuck record. Demelza for the first half of the year, and then for the second half of the year, a good number of friends I’m now a bit further from.
37. Who was the best new person you met?
Since moving down to this part of the country I have met a lot of good nice people. I won’t name names, but there are many who I am happy to have met.
38. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2009:
Just because the car says it has oid doesn’t mean it knows what it is talking about…
So, same time next year… No, you’re right, a month earlier…
I can’t help but feel a sense of achivment and a sense of sadness this evening for something that seems to be a dying frame of mind these days.
Since I have been home this evening I have repaired 3 pairs of trousers and am working on my fourth. Nothing major, a couple of seems coming appart, a button come off and a hem that has come out in the middle.
All of these trousers are perfectly fine except from a few stitches coming undone in some fairly important places. One of them I will admit is quite worn, but I like it that way. The total amount of money it would have cost to replace these particular trousers would be somewhere around the £100 mark (one pair is a fairly long standing and hard living North Face pair I have had for a long while which don’t come cheap).
I will admit to using a cheap small sewing machine Demelza got a year ago or so to do all this, and while I could have done this even more cheaply by hand, my hand stitching is not quite up to par in some places (what is it about a straight line that is so complex!). The point is, even using a sewing machine, in this one instance we have in effect saved £80 (£20 sewing machine for thoese who can’t keep up).
A few years ago with rationing still ringing in their ears the general public at large would have considered this not only easy to do, but also the only sane choice. These days people seem more than willing to part with yet more money to replace something which was far from gone.
I will admit that several years ago I was probably the wrong side of the line, but a couple of years living with Dan (who is one of the ultimate “Keep Calm And Carry On” people I know) and I was soon on the right path.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting spending all waking hours tending to the vegtable patch or clothes with more patches than sleeves, but just a little more bias towards mending and making do.
This of course does not just apply to clothes. Never would anyone in their right mind in computing let an old dead machine go to waste. Of course it will be thrown out, but first it will be stripped for parts, anything that might come in handy and save a trip to PCWord and the land of silly prices.
So on Saturday we had our house warming party. I say party, I use that term as loosely as it can be used. It was not so much a party, but a small collection of people that met up in a single location for some time and food.
Let me begin with some background.
Demelza has grown up in Cornwall, she went to Roehampton for university and then she moved back home. A year later we moved in together in Plymouth. I on the other hand have grown up in Horsham, Brighton and the south east of the country in general.
The majority of our friends are in and around the London area which as I can tell you from doing a long distance relationship from Cornwall to Brighton is no small distance from Plymouth. This is a journey that requires the better part of the day whichever method of transport you take. Trains can take upwards of 5 hours door to door and the car is not much better. Plymouth to Horsham on a fairly clear day takes about 4 and a half hours.
With this in mind we began to organise our house warming party. We knew not everyone would come and to that end we probably invited a fair few more than we felt we could cope with on the basis that a reasonable number would not be able to make it. We spoke at great length to some on how to get down here and we encouraged people to book their tickets early.
We seemed to have a fair number coming or saying they would come. Some people let us know early on that it would not be possible to go for various perfectly good reasons. This was fair and to be expected.
As we approached the day in question more and more people seemed to be dropping out. Some for, again, perfectly good reasons. Others it seemed had looked at the travel and decided it was quite far to go and they had not noticed quite how far or how long it was going to take. I think some cited costs which of course could have been reduced by booking early.
By the time we got to the day in question and phoned more people to check they were still coming we heard a few more reasons why people were not coming. Again, some of them good.
At this point we had whittled our numbers down to the glorious total of 4. Had some people not already been on their way we would have cancelled there and then, but it was too late.
While no one person had anything but fairly honourable intentions, the net result of so many people pulling out was we both felt rather upset and let down. Admittedly my upset surfaced mainly as anger to start with, but that soon turned to a fairly sombre thought of does anyone actually care.
It seems that most people took the view with regards to their travel that it was just something that could just be sorted out nearer the time. However as stated earlier, this is not a small journey and requires planning and thought. The longer you leaving booking the more expensive it becomes and if you fail to plan it it can easily drag on a lot longer than you first thought (as Thomas found out). As people realised their travel was going to be more complex that first believed, they dropped out, relying on others to take their place. Unfortunately when everyone relies on everyone else and no one does it you end up with the workforce of mangers, a well structured façade with no support behind it. Or in our case a table full of food and no-one to eat it.
Thankfully we don’t choose our friends as people we don’t get on with or don’t like so while this whole episode has been fairly upsetting, I do not for a second believe it to be an act of malice or spite, more an act of carelessness, thoughtlessness, a bit of bad luck and a reliance on others.
This all being said, for the few that did turn up I think a nice time was had. It was not quite the atmosphere we had aimed at but it was a nice gathering nonetheless.
One final question I feel myself compelled to answer (like a child of the national curriculum), given the chance would we do it again? There is a part of me that feels never again. The part of me that put a fair bit of work in for not that much gain. But there is another side of me that must accept that these things happen and to stop because of one bad experience is an even greater tragedy than the event itself. With that in mind, we probably will do this again, but not right now.
I admit that as per usual my plans for keeping my blog up to date have not quite worked. Let’s face it, everyone is used to this by now, moving on…
Life has been too busy. It is always too busy and I wish it would stop. I know a lot of it I bring on myself and that is fair enough, but I also could do with a break. Just a chance to catch my breath.
Last weekend I went back home to Horsham (not sure if Horsham counts as home anymore… maybe I have two homes…). It was the first time I had been back since the summer. I went back for two reasons, first to tidy up and clear my room so my little brother could take it over as his own and secondly because the weekend before was Nik’s Birthday and in the time honoured tradition we were planning on going out for a meal.
Meal was good, drinks were good and still the purple rain cocktail shines on as the house favourite.
Sunday I did the epic drive back home to Devon. 5 hours 30mins non-stop. Boring and annoying, but it had to be done. Unfortunately given the length of the journey I had to leave Brighton far earlier than I wanted to. Then again, I spent nearly two years living with those guys, so it is always going to feel like I’m leaving too early.
The week that followed my trip back was not quite as I planned it. I can only assume I had been holding off illness for that trip. Almost as soon as I got back I wasn’t feeling so great. It is no great surprise, everyone around me has been on and off ill a lot of the time. It finally caught up with me and that took me out of work for 3 days. I did try and go in on the 3rd day, made it in, one meeting 2 e-mails and then back on the way home again. On a plus side that seems to have gone now.
That brought us round to the weekend. Cunning plan was to have a nice day off on the Saturday and relax a little. Unfortunately a recent discovery in our bedroom put a stop to that. Turns out when we moved into the flat there was mould in our room on the walls. At the time we didn’t realise it was this. My best guess is someone brushed the walls down to make it look more presentable. Had we known when we moved in we would have dealt with it there and then.
It had been growing behind the wardrobes and down by the side of the bed against the wall as well as around the window. Hence Saturday was spent trying to find a decent cleaner which wouldn’t stain the paintwork and Sunday morning was spent moving EVERYTHING out of our room and cleaning the walls.
Suffice to say it smells like a swimming pool in there but the stuff is dead and gone.
We haven’t yet moved our stuff back in as we are letting the room air for a while, but that was one headache we could have done without.
Maybe next weekend there will be that time to relax… I live in hope.
My clarinet teacher once told me that the key to practice was little and often. My retort at the time was “I’ve done the little, but not the often”.
I think it would be safe to say this rule works for many things, blogging for one.
I have been meaning to get back into keeping my online persona and blog alive for some time now, but for one reason or another other things have taken precedent.
A lot has happened to me of late and as is always the case, it is hard to know where to start.
Last time I wrote anything here I had recently moved out of the house in Brighton. I was back home living with my parents with a bit more summer still ahead of me, hunting for and applying for jobs and looking forward to a nice Holiday in France.
That holiday has since been and gone (and if the temperature in the mornings is anything to go by, fairly long gone). The job hunting has also come to an end as I am now gainfully employed by a small company called RPM.
Living arrangements have changed too. No-longer am I filling a small room at my parents house, nor do I take up far too much room in a house in Brighton. I am now living in deepest darkest west country Devon with Demelza in a nice little first floor flat.
Suffice the say in my online downtime things have been very busy. To begin with I was busy house hunting (although, as luck would have it that didn’t last long). Then I was busy with planning and taking all I could down to Cornwall to Demelza’s parents house. After that came a nice holiday and a short time to relax (although even this was filled with writing lists of things we needed to do/get). Then finally a quick trip to London and then down to Cornwall to begin my job.
During the first week of my new job we got the keys to our flat, I spent my days working and my evenings moving stuff in. Then on my first full weekend down here we moved in for good. Well, I say moved in, we did, everything else was just a big pile of stuff on the floor.
What followed was a series of trips to Ikea, Sainsbury’s, Tesco’s, Argos and anywhere else you might find all the things you need when you move into a new place. The big things were, well, big, but at least we knew what we wanted. The small things took the real time, the wooden spoons, the cheese graters, the hand towels. You only ever realise you don’t have them when you need them.
All the while with this backdrop of sorting the flat came work (for both of us), sorting out of bills, more calls to the rental agency than I care to even think about. I could have written 100 blog entries on the trials and tribulations of moving in, but as is always the trouble with the interesting things in life, you are always too busy to talk about them.
Suffice to say, it isn’t all done, we have already had two visitors and still the weekends have long lists of things that need doing. We are however slowly getting through them. More importantly I feel like we are getting through them.
In other news, my computer is on its last legs, I have a new phone and the world still spins…
There is a certain irony to how I feel about computers at the moment.
Today started with the sync partnership between my phone and Outlook on my computer getting lost broken or stolen from me one way or another. The net effect of this was all my contacts, tasks, notes and calendar entries vanished from the phone. While this was not a catastrophic loss as all the data is in Outlook too, a phone with no contacts is like a car with no wheels.
So I set about restoring the flaky connection between the two devices and forced them to kiss and make-up. All in all this lost me about 3 hours of this morning with other distractions and tasks occurring in-between. You would have thought that now I would be generally annoyed at technology, but in actual fact the exact opposite is true. This successful patching of the morning spurred me on to sort out a couple of other things on my phone and general organizational system in the in-between times of the day.
Specifically I re-discovered MS OneNote.
In a way there is nothing that special about OneNote, it is a note taking application for the computer which is part of the Microsoft Office suite. All you do is keep notes in it, that is all. Yet it is how elegantly that this all works that makes me feel I can appreciate computers for that they are again, tools to get the job done.
I dragged bits from websites including text and images and they just appeared in the note along with date time and where they came from as a block ready to be moved about. I can just pick up any element and move it round like publisher. I can also just start writing wherever I want and use all the nice powerful formatting tools from Word. I have workbooks, tabs, pages, folders. I can tag items, draw things in, highlight text, search for anything (including text inside images). In short, it is an application that makes collating and storing little notes and bits of information for projects and alike really really simple.
The best part of all of this… I knew I could set this up to work with my phone. I found the option to install to my phone. Up on my phones screen popped the installation, I clicked through and 30 seconds later I had all my notes on my phone so I have them with me.
I like it when things just work!
So I’m moving out of the house in Brighton this weekend. I have lived down here for the last two years and in that time, although my living has been fairly spartan there is still a fair bit of stuff in my room.
Turning into a neat freak has certainly had a hand in helping me stay fairly organised, but it doesn’t seem able to stop the clutter… well, maybe it has, I don’t think I’m really sure what I regard as clutter.
For example, I am always fixing computers and picking up spare parts. Every time I am about to throw some random bit of hardware that doesn’t work I take all the screws off it and add them to the (sorted) box I have. I hate having a screw that just fits when I could have one that really fits. The same applies to bigger bits of hardware such as MODEM’s and graphics cards. To that end I currently have 5 spare graphics cards and 3 spare MODEM’s in my room. OK, now it doesn’t take a genius to know that is too many, but exactly how many is the right number? Fine, one lets me help one person with that problem, but I don’t get new graphics cards every day. It would be really annoying for everyone involved if I ended up needing two.
This sort of problem, however small, seems to apply to a lot of my stuff. I like to keep things around that would be handy to have in the future, but at the same time I don’t want to be surrounded by stuff that never gets used.
I do something similar with clothes. When something is old and worn out it just moves into another pile so it’s kept for events (mainly Scouting based it has to be said) when I want something I don’t care much about.
How about magazines. I pick up PCPro fairly religiously each month if only for the DVD of software it comes with. I regularly find myself going back a year or so in magazines to find some article or bit of software they talked about. OK, so I could throw out everything older than a year but I guarantee the day after I do that I will want something from 13 months ago….
I want less stuff in my room, I want less clutter, but what will it cost me in convenience to do that?
Today has just been one of those days.
I have been broken the last week with what feels like one of the more vile forms of the flu and Demelza left for Italy today to go for a holiday with some friends. Both of these things suck, but not nearly as much as I have today.
This morning I have barely been able to construct a coherent discussion or argument with Nik. I have struggled all day to build sentences that, for lack of a better word, make sense.
This is liveable with if it wasn’t for the strangle mistakes and bad luck that seem to have followed me round all day.
I think this is summed up today by the trip I made to Sainsbury. Our Sainsbury’s has a set of escalators that deal with the single story people need to go up to get to it. To allow trolleys to be taken on them, instead of the usual steps, ours is more of a set of long ramps.
As I arrived at the shops the "up ramp" was stationary so I had to walk up it. The "down ramp" was working just fine. OK, a little annoying. 10mins later and I am coming out of the shop only to be greeted by a closed "down ramp" and yup, you guessed it, a fully functional "up ramp".
I don’t know why I bother.
Ever get the feeling your girlfriend is just keeping you around in the hope she can later kill you and steal your money?
Either that or she was a serial killer in another life. Love you too dear :P
I have for many years had trouble free computing.
OK, maybe that isn’t quite true. Let’s try again. For many years I have never had a computer break down in any way whatsoever. I have never lost a file, I have never broken a piece of hardware. Actually, not quite true, I broke a single external harddisk which I took everywhere and to be quite honest, expected to fail. Disks were never meant to be moved around like that, they are too fragile.
I have spent a long time fixing other peoples computers and something strikes me. It is always the cheap bit of kit that fails. It is the cheap power supply which dies and takes the motherboard with it, the cheap disk which last a year and dies, the cheap case where the fans clog and die etc etc.
Let’s give a couple of examples.
My case cost about £70. It is fairly expensive as cases go for the size. It is of high build quality, it is big, heavy and solid. I have never had any issues with it. On every air intake for fans there is a filter. I am always having to remove dust off the front of these. Every time I remove the side off the case there is almost no dust in there. As such my fans still run just fine, they can still run quiet and the rest of the machine is in good order.
My power supply is made by Antec. These people have been the gold standard for any IT enthusiast since as long as I remember. There is good reason for this. I have a large high powered computer, it has 5 disks, a 4 core CPU and 2 graphics card. I am still running it on my 5 or something year old 550Watt power supply. It has to be fairly fully loaded and yet it still runs just fine. I have seen much larger power supplies give up and die at the mere sight of this hardware. Also, everyone I know who has ever killed an Antec power supply notes it never took anything else with it. This is a common problems with cheaper kit. As with before, Antec is not cheap.
Hard disks have moved on a bit in recent years. When you start seeing 5 year warranties on disks you know it is going well. Although, bear in mind that the disk my OS is on is again 5 or so years old and still going. I would say this is at least in part due to not picking the cheapest disks out there.
I will admit some of the bits in my machine have changed, but all the computer hardware I have ever bought is still in active use. My old motherboard, RAM, CPU and graphics card are in my brothers machine and running just fine everyday.
I will be the first to admit that my computing life has been far from trouble free, however, hardware wise I don’t really have any issues to my name. Compare this to the countless machines I have fixed, clearly there is more than just luck going on here. Perhaps the next time your thinking of buying a new machine that extra £50 might save you something.