It's going to happen

They're preparing the cake now. Nothing gets by me. Where'd I put those cyanide capsules?

21

Today is my birthday. 21 years ago today at 20:03 I was pushed into this world (literally) kicking and screaming (literally). Personally I consider it significant that babies don't enter the world with a big smile on their face, they scream and cry about it.

The first 4 years of my life I can barely remember. I have vague memories, such as falling down the stairs backwards at Lillian's, and having Lillian fall on top of me from a roundabout in Scotland.

I can remember my 4th Birthday. This is the first birthday I remember, and I can only remember bits of it. The most important thing about it was the feeling of complete and utter bewilderment I felt at the time; I had absolutely no idea what the hell was going on. In the front room we played Pass the Parcel. There must have been something before that but I don't remember what it was, but I do remember some girl who I didn't know whining "I'm booooooored" and wondering what "bored" meant. I also remember my Mum let her start the game of pass the parcel, and I also distinctly remember not winning a single thing on that game.

More importantly I remember being in the dining room where the kitchen table had disappeared under a big table-cloth with masses of food spread across it and some presents in the middle which I couldn't take my eyes off. Especially the big one in the middle which moved every so often. I don't remember opening that present but I know in my mind that it contained a lovely little rescue kitten named Danny, white all over but with black spots, who we spent the next week or so trying to name. Obsessed with He-man I wanted to name him Cringer after the cat in the cartoon. Everyone else liked this name too, as Danny was afraid of his own shadow on the wall and used to cringe whenever he saw it.

Not long after we moved to Nottingham and began a new life away from inner-city Sheffield. All my birthdays in Nottingham seem to have become one big jumble in my mind, but I do remember that the song "It's My Party and I'll Cry if I Want To" used to get sung at me rather a lot due to the way I generally used to get pissed off on my birthday and often cried. I dread the day I turn 50 and my parents sing that again.

My 18th birthday was the usual embarrassing party with the parents. I was bought a stereo with a TV in the middle of it, which died within seconds of switching it on. We had to go back to the shop and swap it for another one which worked. I also got a Suede jacket which I wore to go out that night with my mates in Nottingham and with Sophie my friend from South Wales.

The night before my 19th I went out in Aberystwyth and got completely hammered. In the morning I was woken up at the ridiculous hour of 12:00 by my flatmates going on a road-trip. Shortly after Sophie turned up to give me my presents which included a 4 pack of Guinness. It was hard to look enthusiastic about being bought a 4 pack of Guinness when my stomach was doing the Tango and my brain slowly seaped from my ears.

Sick of birthdays I decided not to do anything for my 20th. Liz, a friend I had met that year was having none of it and so I suggested that a few of us have a video evening in my front room. I got a phonecall from Burt who was in Safeways with Liz that afternoon saying he'd bought a few items for the video evening and asking where to leave them. When I got home I found the "few" items filling the hallway of the house and struggled to find anywhere to put all of it in the kitchen.

12 days later Liz and I nearly got together. 2 days after that, on Liz's birthday, we did.

Since then Liz's job has meant she has had to move to Newbury and most of my mates are on their Industrial Years away from Aberystwyth. Sophie has spent the last year in France as part of her course. Today at work I will almost certainly have to do the whole birthday cake and candles thing, and will have to keep grinning pretending that I don't have a care in the world for 24 hours.

Full Stereo

My other ear was syringed today giving me proper full stereo hearing. To celebrate this I have decided to start faffing with some music again and have the starts of something. You can listen to it if you want, my other songs can be downloaded here if you're interested.

In other news tomorrow is my birthday. I shall be 21. I'm not expecting there to be a crowd of people rushing to wish me happy birthday and buy me a drink. In fact I emailed all my mates who I think are in or around Aber or who might be able to make it to Aber last week and I've had a whopping 1 reply and 1 "yeah, I'll be around". I'm told there may be as many as 5 of us. Wow.

So, how else better to celebrate finally reaching an age where nothing is restricted any more (I refer to 21+ clubs and mortgages) than to fill your gut with beer and generally risk the well-being of one's kidneys and liver. Personally I look forward to being comatose on the pavement.

Those strange hits on my website at 3am are still happening. I think they're coming from the users.aber.ac.uk server, but I don't see why it would be hitting my website. Unless they have some sort of indexer on the UWA servers and it's getting confused by the fact that my website is built entirely of interwoven links...?

Is everything online these days?!

The Barrington Arms where Liz and I stopped for lunch on Saturday afternoon. I would happily recommend it to anyone who is in the general vicinity and is looking for a nice place to go for a drink.

*Yawn*

What a thoroughly knackering weekend. Friday was spent watching Grease and Liz gave me my Birthday present, a 5-in-1 Namco games box :D On Saturday we drove out to Uffington Castle which is an ancient site containing just about everything except a castle. Sadly the weather was not on our side and so we get completely drenched and covered in chalky mud walking to the "Wayland Smithy": An ancient burial chamber. Then, after we reached the verge of hypothermia looking at the Uffington White Horse, we made our way back to the car to warm up.

We decided to go to a pub for lunch, but the first one we encountered was closed. After a while of driving around without finding any pubs we decided to head back to Newbury with the intention of screeching to a halt if we found a suitable looking pub. I nearly missed a turning we needed to take as I didn't hear Liz say "Right" and as I realised we were nearly past the corner. I'm not sure what happened to me, I just threw the steering wheel to the right and we skidded around the corner. I worry about myself sometimes, but I think I scared Liz more than I scared myself. She was very quiet for some time after that little trick.

We reached a little village that I can't remember the name of and found about 4 pubs in a row, so stopped at the one that had a sign outside that said "Serving food NOW!" We were extremely lucky. It was a nice quiet pub with an open fire, a good vegetarian selection (despite listing Tuna Pasta Bake as vegetarian) and even the Coke tasted nicer than the watered down crap you'd get at the average pub. We were both very pleased with our dinners.

Later Woodsta and Eppa turned up for a night of drunken debauchery. This entaled going to Sainsbury's to buy vast quantities of alcohol and watching Zoolander and Mystery Men. There may have been another DVD in there somewhere, but I honestly can't rememebr.

This morning (Sunday) we all went to Avebury so that Eppa and Woodsta could take pictures of the standing stones. Liz and I tagged along for the ride. The weather was much better than when we went to Uffington. We had lunch at the extortionate cafe which serves almost nothing but Vegan/Vegetarian foods where Liz and I both had a Hummus with Roasted Peppers sandwich and a slice of Vegan chocolate cake. I want to know how they make that cake. It's absolutely delicious, although very heavy.

After returning from Avebury I packed all my stuff up and left for home. Typical uneventful journey. Now I'm home and starving and knackered.

Dinner then bed, me-thinks.

Oh

I just asked Matt, my colleague, if he'd seen that clip before. He said he had. I asked if he found it funny and he said he did. I explained I had only seen it because I was looking at my access statistics and someone had requested it, and it turned out it was him. Oh. He'd put it on his own userspace and had been trying to request it but had somehow inadvertantly entered my username in the URL instead of his own.

The day's only just begun...

...and already it feels like it has been going on too long. I need a holiday. A real one. One where the brain is disengaged for a while and worries are forgotten about. I've really not stopped over the last few years and it's starting to get to me. I shall be on holiday a week tomorrow so that's something to look forward to.

Last night I was checking the statistics for my website (this website) and was shocked to see 1120 hits over the last week: way above average. Stranger still was the break-down of when these requests occurred. 3am seem to be when it all happened. I'm not sure what exactly has been going on, the UWA stats are utterly crap so I can't find out where those requests came from or what they were for.

Another weird thing was the fact that somebody requested /atlantagrape.mpg, /atlantagrape.mov, /atlantagrape.mpeg, and /atlantagrape.mpa none of which exist. They never have existed on my userspace and they never will so I have no idea why anyone would request them - they'd have had to have typed the address manually to make those requests.

Out of interest I tried searching Google for "atlantagrape" which revealed another Blog which contained a link to the rather odd video clip. Personally I thought it was an awful clip. A woman falls of a platform onto her arms, which would of course force her arms into her chest and knocking the wind out of her. It's a painful and scary experience to be fully winded, it can take some time to regain the ability to breathe and there's nothing funny about it.

Out of boredom I then searched for some more "funny" clips. It amazes me what some people find funny. According to one site the funniest clip as voted for by their viewers was the classic clip of a kitten sitting on its hind legs waving its front paws in front of a much bigger cat. Which then pounces on it.

That clip was vaguely humerous when I first saw it about 5 years ago. It never classed as hilarious at any point in my mind. In fact none of the videos on that website were particularly funny.

All well.

This morning when I was making my lunch I accidently nudged the kettle which made a loud spitting noise. I was a little surprised by this and so nudged it again. It spat again. Odd. Why would it make that noise? I looked and saw that it was switched on. As I was the first up that had to mean the kettle had been switched on with no water in it all night. It's a wonder the thing didn't melt. I switched it off and put some water in to cool it down. I live with some very odd people.

I just remembered a dream I had the other night where I was covered in those little yellow and black ladybirds. It was horrible. Then a little Robin landed on my hand and started pecking at them, but it had a sharp beak. I woke up with quite a start after that and it took me about an hour to get back to sleep. Damn anxiety dreams.

Suppose I should do some work, I have plenty to be getting on with.

Shattered and Hungry

I've finished cleaning the flat. It was a bit of a pain as I had to borrow the hoover from my new place as the old hoover was so loud it hurt my one functioning ear.

Now I'm starving hungry again.

I've just initiated a mass culling of people on my MSN "Buddy" list. If you're on my MSN list please read this information The general idea is anyone who doesn't speak to me between now and July 1st will be deleted from my "buddy" list. You have been warned

Ugh

It's been a long hard day and I feel utterly ground down. Everyone went for lunch without me and I had a meeting at 2:00 which I had completely forgotten about. So I had to sort all that out, and then the meeting dragged on for hours. All the way through it felt like every idea I put forward was automatically rejected by the group without stopping to think about it and in order to make them think about it I had to keep hammering my point home.

Take for example my idea that we should stress-test the website before going live. First of all it's good practise to stress test any website before letting it go live. Then, I argued I need to be sure that the database-driven backend isn't going to lock up as soon as more than one person tries to access the site. They kept telling me things like "oh don't worry, the site isn't going to get that many visitors". That's simply not true. Especially now it has been decided that there will be a grand launching ceremony and everything. The last thing I want is for the site to go live and then instantly break.

I had to keep insisting that I wasn't sure the database code could handle more than one user just to get them to agree to having three or four people playing with the website at once - as if that's so much to ask. And then there was my point about the word "Support" in the navigation menu being meaningless to me. If it is meaningless to me then what will the users of the site make of it? Yet after 10 minutes of telling them this they still didn't seem to understand that I thought it was a useless word.

All in all I feel utterly down-trodden and have had more than enough. Just to make things better I now have to go and move the remaining stuff out of my old flat and at some point I will need to go to the launderette and at some point I need to try and make my room inhabitable.

fs.

Interviews

It's madness here in the Open learning Unit today, the interviewees are all being shown around and I am having to give my spiel etc. On top of that various urgent changes have been required on the current OLU website which I have had to attend to.

I've been asked to try and predict which of the students will receive the job as part of LoweyPredicts. Erk!