Hurry

Is it September yet?

In fact, forget that (much more exciting) - is it October yet?

Music…

This is the music in my head this morning.

A great song, is a great song no matter where it’s played, how it’s played or who plays it (mostly).

Ukuleles are fun

This version still sends shivers down my spine

All famous bands should be able to do what you see in the next video, in case there ever is a nuclear winter and we all need cheering up without the aid of electricity and microphones. I still think The Magic Numbers are just one of the best bands on the planet; the minute I hear them sing it makes me think of sunshine, burritos and open-topped cars.

..and finally Esther, it doesn’t matter if someone can play it a bit better than you or more accurately - you just have to sing it with some feeling..

The mega blogging

Hello y’all.  I’ve been a *tad* busy and as a consequence not got around to blogging stuff.  Those of you similarly intravenously attached to the Internet as myself may well be a bit more up-to-date due to my henious addiction to my Twitter account and gross abuse of Twitpic.  Serves you right.  I bet you really did need to see my worrying obsession with taking pictures of my food didn’t you?

Ok.  Back in the real world - and I use that term with its loosest definition - things have been going on.  BIG things.  Well, big things for me anyway.  Here’s a brief(ish) round-up of the last few weeks.

Firstly I spent a couple of days busy being a proud step-father to my eldest step-daughter at her 21st birthday.  The DJ which she booked turned out, entirely by co-incidence, to be one of my best friends - the DJ with whom I spent the infamous weekend in Grantham.  It was a surreal night where I met half of the people I used to know when I was married to my step-daughter’s mother and have not seen for several years.  Much hugging and “you must come over” times.  I find it difficult as this is no longer my life, it belongs to someone else now.  My step-daughter seemed to enjoy it despite doing her best to drunkenly fall off the stage and nearly break her ankle which meant she spent the following day in hospital.

Last week saw the arrival of my decree nisi for the penultimate stage of my divorce from my second wife.  Several people said to me “ohhhh, it must be upsetting, I’m so sorry for you“.  Actually I didn’t find it at all upsetting.  I don’t consider my second marriage to have been a failure - far from it.  I think we were very happy for many years, brought up three good kids who make me proud in several different ways and the marriage only ended because my wife and I had changed as people which meant we no longer made sense as a couple.  It came to a natural end and I’m fine with that.  I wasn’t at the time - it sent me a little around the twist for a while - but, really, we got to the point that everything we both wanted and believed was quite different (and in some ways still is).  This is why I do not consider it a failure.

We were sensible enough to split up before it got to the “I hate you” “good I hate you too” stage and we’re mostly friends and have made our own lives in our own ways.  She is with someone else and they both seem very happy with each other - more on me later.

Today is the 18th birthday of my other step-daughter.  All three kids are very different from one another and, like anyone, each have their own characteristics that make them who they are.  Despite being the one for which it could be argued I have had the most parental influence she is the one with whom I seem to have the least successful personal relationship.  In short, I don’t think she really likes me all that much.  I don’t take it too personally; she’s not that keen on her own father and can sometimes have extremely strained interactions with her elder sister and mother too but I do feel a twinge of pain that somehow she should be the one who hugs me and smiles so we can say “I love you” instead of giving every indication that I irritate her.  For the small part I played in her life I’m glad of the young woman she has become - strong, very independent and resolutely self-believing.

Let’s see, anything else?  Oh yes.  I handed my notice in at work.

I can’t really blog about my current employer too much.  I have worked there on and off for 12 years.  I write all of the software for every single computer-linked product that we sell.  The owners of the company are personal friends of mine and I’ve seen the company turn-over grow from approximately 300k per year to just shy of 1.2 million.  In short, we’ve been successful.  However, I have always written software for a number of other software houses and one of the ones I also write all of the software products for made me an offer I couldn’t refuse - so I didn’t refuse it.  I start there on 1st September.  Curiously enough I used to live above their offices so it’s a bit bizarre to be turning up every day for work at your old home!  I could easily have stayed at my current employer indefinitely - no-one is indispensable but to be honest my position within the company was unassailable and about as “safe” as you can get.  But “safe” is not enough is it?  I’ll be in charge of all the development at the new place and working on a number of existing and new products and “we” (as I am learning to think of them) also have two new fledgling companies in some fairly exciting vertical markets.  Cool stuff for a programming whore like myself.

God, I sound like some kind of San Francisco Silicon Valley market-speak geek.  It must be the influence of the woman in my life. 

Oh, did I not mention that?  WordPress’ worst-kept secret.  Surely you don’t *really* want to hear about three hour Skype conversations, smelly birthday presents, and being hopelessly in love and all that jazz?  In case you do I would have to write a whole new missive blog entry about her.  An extraordinarily special person with many unique qualities, way beyond anything you could ever want and totally over-reaching your expectations.  Everybody should have their own; you can’t have her though, she’s mine.

Funnily enough, I had actually written some of these thoughts down previously as a draft and when I came to write the post today I found it once more, mouldering in the dashboard.  Here’s some of what I wrote, I think it makes sense:

It’s nice to be in demand; even nicer to have a vocational occupation that people value at a sufficiently high financial level that leaves you to think “hmmm, the dress code is ’smart casual’ there and they have a proper filter coffee machine” rather than “will I be able to pay my rent if I take this job“.  I know, I’m an ungrateful jammy bastard - sorry.  You know the defining moment at school?  The one where the teacher said “Jenkins, if you don’t concentrate in class and get good grades you’ll end your days penniless and unhappy” - they were right; no other way of dressing it up.  I left school at 16 due to a truly shitty childhood but I did manage to latch on to a skill that the rest of the planet doles out the cash for by the bucket-load.

Sadly it’s not poetry.  It would be cool if I was able to say it was but computer-programming is my stock-in-trade (it actually says “computer programmer” on my passport and even on my divorce papers).

I’d so much rather it was ‘poet’ or ‘humanist’ or , less plausibly, ‘decent geezer’.  ‘Poet’ would be first choice but on closer examination it would appear, based on the examples of Dylan Thomas and the like - poetical life expectancy is not great and life-satisfaction levels are also bordering on “sub-optimal”.

I’ve cheered up a bit since then!

I also spent last week looking after my sister’s dog, lots of time playing with Shozu and part of today saying a very loud rude word after I managed to electrocute myself with 240 volts delivered into my fingers at 6 amps.

Any questions?

The Big Moo

I’m back!  I have very sore feet and legs from lots of bending down and loads of walking from venue to venue (Milton Keynes shopping centre is one mile end-to-end and the Theatre District is another 500 metres from that).

I got asked to write some of my poems out in big chalk letters “all over The Theatre District”…so I did.

Literally hundreds of people watched me do it and by the end of tonight several thousand will have seen my work.  This is a very good thing.

I also did two performance sets, one hour each, on the two stages.  One stage was by the “Big Tree” in Midsummer Place and the other stage was slap, bang in the middle of Middleton Hall surrounded by all the cafes and restaurants.  I got a very enthusiastic reception and was asked back in the evening for some yummy food (from which I have returned).  I’ve been approached by a few people to do some more in other venues in the next few weeks so I may well take up the offer.

All in all, a very good day…although I am absolutely wiped out now (and a little sunburnt).

To see some of my pics go here:

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/ian.barker/TheBigMooFringeFestivalOfArtsJuly11132008

There are lots more pictures on the way as I was photographed by the press and several friends who will send me the pictures soon.

Yes, I did read “Sleeper“, twice, and yes my dad did cry, twice. 

While you’re waiting…

Catch me in the Theatre District Milton Keynes all day tomorrow plus the Main Stage in Middleton Hall and on the Fringe Stage at Midsummer Place from about 1pm.  I will also be by “the statues” outside the Theatre and Milton Keynes Art Gallery and you’ll also see my poems and work written all over the pavements around The MK Theatre District.

Specially for my fellow bloggers here’s one of my poems currently not on the website (note to Americans - me being an Englishman obviously means that “pants” here refers to underpants/knickers/undercrackers).

Sock monster

(with apologies to Dr. Seuss)
Give back my pants you evil swine,
give the pants back, the pants are mine.
I’ve got none left but the woolly pants
and they are the itchy ones that itch like ants.
I’ve got eight socks and they are all odd
except for the two with the holes, you sod pig,
and the pair with flowers that make me look gay ghey,
give my pants back, give them back today.

What do you do with my underwear,
when you snaffle my pants to your secret lair?
Do they sit on your head like a panty hat
or do you cuddle them in bed like a panty cat?
do they fly on a pole like a panty flag?
GIVE MY PANTS BACK, YOU MAKE ME MAD!

Do you think it’s funny to take just one of each?
Do you stretch them out as towels on monster beach?
Or do you go to visit sock monster camp
and sleep in my sock
and stay out of the damp?
I’ve been searching high and low,
I’m ten minutes late and I’ve got to go.
Give my socks back, don’t you care?
I can’t go out with one foot bare!

Grantham

I am off being a proper poet right now - more blogging on this later.  Meanwhile; the overdue post about Grantham….

So, Grantham.  A little background: my friend Gary is a DJ.  Quite a good one actually having DJ’d at various places including Pascha, Ibiza and venues locally as well as….Grantham.

He’s been trying to get me to Dj again almost as long as he’s known me.  I used to Dj professionally for about 10 or 12 years.  Lots of places, lots of different gigs from village hall to huge and swanky venue, even the Cafe Royal and The Hilton International Park Lane (where I was a DJ in a DJ if you see what I mean).

I stopped when the urge to kill all the punters got to the point where I almost couldn’t resist it. 

So anyway, superstar DJ managed to persuade me to nip off to Grantham for the weekend to pull a couple of gigs at his regular haunt (The Playhouse) which is owned by a mate of his - an ex-Milton Keynes lad.

Saturday was a regular evening gig.  Lots of funky house, lots of club mix versions of chart stuff and some classics.

Weird things went on, like people in odd clothing…

and the evening wore on and on in the same vein.  In general it was fine.  Gary was amazing.  I am hypercritical of other DJs - always hate discos because I’m so arrogant I rarely think the poor DJ is doing a good job.

Saturday brought out the odd people.  Several hen parties and a group of lads in zoot suits.  We asked but never received an explanation of why they were dressed like 1920s New Orleans pimps.  Freaky.

Every so often drunken Grantham lads would try their luck on the punchbag machine.  The more drunk they get the more they try to wack this thing through the wall of the pub.  It was about 3 feet from the left-hand side of the decks.  Loud.  Loud.  Loud.

Gary punched the highest score despite being the size of a large elf.  He claims it’s down to technique and practice…but he only tells me that, he just says “and I’m only a little guy” to the lads trying to beat him. 

We crashed the night above the pub with Gary having a bed and me crunching myself up on a very small setee.

Morning came and after bacon sarnies and lots of me talking to the landlord’s 4 month-old daughter Gary and I skipped off downstairs and played pool.  What do DJs do on a Sunday morning?  They play pool and beat the computer programmer…very comprehensively. 

Like the Murphy’s, I’m not bitter.

We took a stroll around and went to the 3 Mobile shop and Gary bought a Skype phone from 3.  This was mainly because I’d bought one a week earlier and was extolling the virtues of being about to call “people in other countries for free”.  I can definitely recommend it if you have friends in far-flung places, America, for example, because you can literally speak to them for as long as you want without charge..saving loads of cash, which is always nice.

It was a fun weekend and next week I am *actually* going to be doing some DJing at my step-daughter’s 21st birthday - mainly a “party set”.

Meanwhile…back to being a poet…in the rain…

Hmm, 12 hours and still sleepy

The fact that I just spent about a minute staring into the inside of my cooker wondering where my freshly washed shirts have gone seems to indicate that I might just still be a little tired.

p.s. It’s ok, I’ve found them inside the washing machine now.

Le Weekend

Bonjour mes enfants.

I have returned from a bumper weekend of DJing, sleep deprivation and Skype phone battery testing.

Since I have to naff off to Derby and stand in the middle of a quarry and look all clever with some hand-scanners and GSM modems I’ll have to go but I’ll return later for a bumper blog full of photos of weirdos lovely people in strange costumes of varying brightness.

See ya, wouldn’t want to be ya…

x

The 8 questions about blogging meme

Well, it would be rude of me not to…

[Meme by Tan and Pete]

1.Can you remember without looking what your first post was about?

Well, this is a little trickier than it sounds because I have been in “the IT industry” for far too long - about 25 years at the time of writing - and I have had to keep various versions of what you’d call a blog professionally on and off for almost as long as that.  Stuff like this was not called a “blog” in those days - I don’t remember when they did start getting called that.  I started calling what I did “blogging” when I joined up with Blogger (with my original account, I now have a few) in 1999 before Google eventually bought them and it became all weird.  I have always had “online” access throughout my working career - what changed was what you could get “online” and how you did it.  In the 1980s it was BBS (bulletin boards) and Unix or Vax boxes with lots of arcane nerdy stuff.  Later on it moved more into things like CIX and Compuserve and then someone clever (with lots of friends!) “invented” the World Wide Web and dial-up became useful and less torturous with the advent of lossless compression and 56k modems.

I know for certain, because I’ve asked them to remove it several times, that there is a “blog” of mine on a local ISP from 1997 - the first post was describing some software I had released.  It’s still there, it can be Googled, as can many of my very early posts about things like Visual Basic, Delphi and Windows. Google never forgets - it’s worth remembering that when you say something daft.

It was not the first one I ever did so - no I don’t remember.  I’d lay money on it saying something like “Hey cool, this is my diary and news page.  I’m clever, please like me”. 

2. Where did you write it?

My first “blogs” were written at work when I worked as a programmer and IT Manager in the 1980s and were on the Janet/Usenet and Compuserve/CIX systems.

3. Which was the first blog you read?

Can’t remember - it would most likely be some kind of thing to do with Unix development and almost certainly from MIT.  I *always* used to religiously read Byte magazine only for Jerry Pournelle’s column: Computing at Chaos Manor.  I wanted to be Jerry and mess with computers and get cool stuff sent to me for free.  I started reading his blog the second I heard about it.  Jerry’s column was very much like a paper version of what blogs like Boing Boing later on became.

4. Who did/do you tell about your blog if anyone?

Generally I don’t actually tell people about my blog.  Typically it gets found from time to time, usually when I really don’t want it to and always when it can cause maximum embarrassment.  When I find out someone else I know has a blog I tell them about mine.  I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve written and I swapped to using WordPress because it supported password-protected entries so I could be more explicit or say things I did not want to be accidentally broadcast far and wide.  I always assume that, even with a password, the stuff I write will eventually get read by someone I would prefer not to read it.  I’ve learnt that this is a good thing and I don’t censor myself (although I do blush sometimes when someone reads back or quotes to me a dodgy passage).  I do rewrite history to avoid implicating or causing unintentional harm to people - it’s my choice to open myself to ridicule, criticism or abuse but I don’t think I have the right to do that to someone else.  If I have an issue with someone I’ll talk to them face to face or email them privately - a blog is not the forum for that IMHO.

5. Has your blog ever caused a scandal?

Lol.  Frequently.  I have been challenged on several occasions in the past about descriptions of work colleagues which, although carefully written, still provoked much unwanted discussion.  Ex-20sixers may remember “Russian smelly fag computer programmer” - I had to wriggle around a bit over that entry when colleagues stumbled across it.  I have also (password protected) blogged about naughtiness, forgotten I had done this and then gave someone the password.  It was an uncomfortable moment when they said “I read all your password-protected entries - you are a filthy boy”. 

6. Tell us something random which happened as a result of blogging?

I was offered a job - the one I am in now.  I have worked at my current employer for 12 or more years.  I left for just under 4 years and worked for myself and then at another company before coming back in March last year.  However, I originally got in contact as a result of one of my blogs.  I was sent a message saying, in effect, “We have a job opening, would you be interested in applying”.  I did and got the job.

7. Snog, Marry or Avoid - pick another blogger for each.

Snog.  Hmmm.  This is going to be one of those blog entries that I will get in trouble over.  I’d snog most girls for fun and without any further intention because I’m a naughty boy but the clear choice, with an agenda, would have to be Lisa.

Marry.  Lisa.  She is a remarkable woman, probably unique and deserves me.  ;-)  If someone could just move the American continent so that it’s a few miles off the Dorset coast that would be ideal.

Avoid.  Heh heh. SOOOO many bloggers to avoid!  I think my most obvious choice is going to have to be described in a slightly obscure way to avoid backlinks.  Ex-20sixers/Platform27 will remember one blogger on there who suddenly announced one day that he was gay and then proceeded to detail, in their entirety, his predatory and unpleasant and angst-ridden relationships on his blog.  I should point out it was not the being gay bit that is a problem, the gender was irrelevant - it was the way he wrote about EVERY single detail and sounded really like a nasty, dodgy potential sex-pest.  He had previously spent the majority of his time blogging very long and winding rants about the government, local government, Tescos and so on.  He then started posting sound files of his rants and then YouTube videos.  It was absolutely compulsive reading.  I stopped when he started putting links to his adult webcam stuff on his site and posting his telephone number.  I had a feeling it was going to end with a live stream showing him eating his next-door neighbour and frankly I didn’t want to spare the time to make statements to the police at the inevitable prosecution that would follow.  He had the worst blog design known to mankind with HUGE fonts in garish colours that made your eyes bleed.  Surely I can’t be the only one to remember him?  So, yes, avoid - avoid at all costs. 

8. What’s your most amusing blog memory?

Hmm.  I frequently laugh out loud at all sorts of blogs.  If I was to pick one of my own blog things that gave me the most personal belly laughs it was when, on 20six, I posted an April Fool’s entry that pretended I had been accidentally hypnotised into believing I was a soldier from the Vietcong Army and could see snipers and so on in the bushes around the garden.  Several people fell hook, line and sinker for it and for several days afterwards I had people saying things like “oh my God, that’s why I’d never let myself be hypnotised”.  I even got put on WikiPedia’s “April Fool’s Pranks” page (although its dropped off by now).

Blogging is a good thing.  I find it to be cathartic, an intellectual outlet and a good pass-time.

Er… ALT F4?

Not sure what to do - I *actually* don’t want to restart the mail server on which I have just treid to uninstall this crappy driver software for the utterly utterly useless NAS boxes we bought from (and sent back to) Dabs.

We bought three of them, two failed constantly with the RAID mirrors either failing totally or partially and being made further pointless by the completely ineffective backup software that came with them.

The uninstall program for the drivers pretty much summed up our entire experience with them.

Note the lack of a “No, I don’t want to restart my heavily-used mail server” option or a cancel button or any other option except “Ha, we WILL restart your server because our software sucks big ones”: