why the fuck do i still work here?

See, this is part of why I gave up blogging: it just becomes the same thing over and over again.

I hate working here.

It's so fucking frustrating.

I even stayed very late last night and came in early to get some of the stuff done, yet one of the bosses seems determined to a) fuck it up & b) piss me off.

Deep breaths are the order of the day... and we're supposed to go to the pub this lunchtime to celebrate two people at work's birthdays.  I think I'd rather stick a needle in my leg.

What makes it worse is this whole thing is an utter waste of time.  We cannot possibly make money on it, yet we're throwing effort at it like it's the answer to all our problems.

Fucking idiocy.

Anyway, the A31 was flooded this morning, which was quite a shocking experience.  The time I was driving through it it was quiet in terms of traffic, but it also meant it was proper dark.  That meant it came up on me completely unawares as I couldn't see it, but also, because there weren't many other cars, I didn't get clued in that it was bad.  On the upside it also meant when I swerved into the middle of the two lanes to avoid it (it's a dual carriageway) there was no-one else in the way.

de-munch

As part of the preparations for the trip, I've decided to get back on it properly with the diet and weight loss.

I mean I never really properly stopped, and I won't say I was doing the whole yo-yo dieting thing where you quickly put all the weight back on, but certainly I've gained back quite a few pounds.

At best I got down to about 19 stone 6 pounds, but my weigh in after Christmas was 21 stone 2 pounds, so that's a gain of 1 stone 8 pounds.  It also took me back into the morbidly obese range, so I needed to pull my finger out.

To be fair, Christmas has always been a period when I've loosened off with dieting and put on anything around half a stone, but basically just recently my weight was staying a bit too constant.  I've been walking, so that's helped keep it in check and means I'm still as fit, but I feel I need to get back on it.

It will also help longer term as I will be able to buy some nicer clothes - particularly for work and, more pertinently, interviews.

My weigh in this weekend was 20 stone 10 pounds.  This means I lost 4 pounds, though to some extent that's a pinch of salt number - as mentioned I tend to put a lot on over Christmas and when I stop the excess a few pounds usually go automatically.  However, I definitely did step things up in terms of consistent walking and the diet got a bit better - I unfortunately had a few things to finish off from Christmas, but these are almost all gone and I even had salad all weekend (I'd forgotten how I enjoy it Saturday lunch, but then it gets repetitive the next two Saturday dinner & Sunday lunch).

I'm going to get some new walking shoes though.  I was going to need them for Canada anyway, but I think I'll have to get them sooner as my current pair are worn almost flat in places.

I'll try to keep the blog updated with the progress.

canadian gp 2014

So the big reveal of the thing I kept alluding to last week is that I'm going (with my family) to the Canadian Grand Prix this year!

I'm really looking forward to it, though as I was mentioning it's caused me some issues in terms of plans.

I mentioned in the blog before that I'm back looking for a job.  I'm also not sure that I mentioned I want to move - the two are linked, obviously in that I would like have to move for the job, but I wanted to move more immediately as I really don't like where I like anymore and want to move on.

This has been particularly brought to a head due to the break-in and the fact my rent has gone up by 5%, making it less economical.  This is made worse by the fact the electricity pre-pay meter rate recently went up (I blogged about how they decided to charge me for a non-existent debt - that got sorted, but it doesn't change the fact the cost of it went up) and the laundrette up the road recently put up their prices (again). So I'd be much better off financially living in the town where I work and also from a piece of mind point of view.

However, both of these become particularly difficult with the Canada trip, which is in early June.

For one thing I need a good ten days of leave, so I can't really use random days to go on interviews or to move.  Also, Canada will not be cheap - I will need around £1,000 to spend.  Canada is quite expensive anyway, but also I obviously want to have a good time.

Add in that clothes is one of the biggest areas of my life where I have "economised" so will need to buy stuff for the holiday and need some new bits if I'm to look smart for interviews and you can see I'm going to have some big drains on my purse over the next few months.  This makes it difficult to see how I can afford to pay for petrol to travel to interviews, but also how I could afford 2 months (or whatever) deposit to move - plus I'd need to overlap the rents so I'd have time to transfer all my stuff.

So as you can see I'm left in two minds quite what to do - do I keep going with the job hunting and start looking for somewhere to live?  If I do I don't know quite how it would work.  If I don't I am adding in a huge delay - more than 6 months before I even re-start.

time dilation

Why do weekends go so quickly when weekdays go so slowly?

It's more than a bit of a cliché to make such an observation, but as I sit here typing this I can't honestly say that the past two days really felt like two days.  It felt more like about 6 hours.

Which isn't to say I did anything particularly different or interesting, it's just that time seemed to basically evaporate.

Not that it was all rosy.  For some reason all Saturday I had a bit of a "pulled muscle" feeling in my stomach area - like if you've been doing some lifting and tweaked a muscle, but not so bad as to put you out of action.

However, I think I must have compensated weirdly, as Sunday I had muscle pains in my back instead.  These didn't really ease today; however, I think that might be more due to the fact I had a terrible night last night so my body's not really had a proper time to recover.

For some reason I just couldn't get comfortable in bed (I don't know if this was related to the back - it didn't feel so bad when I was lying down), but also I just didn't seem to be able to switch my brain off properly.

So I kept napping and then waking up again.  Today I don't feel like I had proper insomnia, but I am tired.  I think to some extent it might be an after effect of the fact I slept really well and for a really long time on both Friday and Saturday nights.

I'm wondering if perhaps I "overslept" then and so didn't really need as much sleep on Sunday.  However, the reason I'd slept so much was that I'd had proper insomnia on Thursday night and only got about two hours sleep.  This was an insomnia that was actually prompted by the temperature.

for some reason this year I really seem to be struggling with sleeping when it's cold.  I mean, obviously there always been the odd occasions when it's been really cold and it's woken me up, but this year it seems to be happening a lot.  In particular this year it feels like there are cold breezes blowing across my face, though I can't identify where the heck these might be coming from.

Part of the problem is also that the bedsit is like a leaky sieve when it comes to heat, so even if you get it really hot before bed it cools right down after just a couple of hours.  And of course I can't sleep if it's too warm, so I have to turn the heating off.  I thought I'd cracked it on Saturday when I used my oil-filled radiator and put it next to the bed.  This is much more adjustable, but it has a bright light when it's on.  As mentioned, on Saturday I slept really well, even though it was really cold outside (thick frost on the cars), but as I also mentioned, this might have been more to do with being tired.

lull

So, first week of the year is over.

It's really been a week of "plus sa change?", which is to say, I went back to exactly the same shitty issues that have been getting me down over the past couple of years.

It's weird - staying was clearly a mistake, but then going to the company who made me the job offer I had would have been a mistake (I can't really say in the blog, but take my word for it).  The real answer would have been to take the pay rise and just keep looking, but instead I thought stuff would change.

I was wrong, and, indeed, stuff got worse.  It felt quite a lot like getting shat upon, so not I just want to go.  Problem is I'm a bit trapped.

Anyway, weekend ahoy and next week I will definitely explain all about the big event next year and how it's left me not sure what to do about stuff like moving and finding a new job.

rest of christmas

So what did I do over the rest of christmas, then?

Not much.

I had quite a short to do list:

• Couple of friends to see.
• Do my file back-ups.
• Sort my gaming machine - it had developed some problem where it crashed constantly.
• Try to make a dent in all the recorded stuff on my PVR.
• Watch some anime - preferably downloaded fansubs in order to clear the hard-drive I use, which is full.
• My traditional New Year's "full clean" of the bedsit.
• Do plenty of walking.
• Work out plans for next year.

I did most of these, though not fully in most cases.

I saw most of the friends, but unfortunately the weather poxed up some of my plans, with cancelled trains and blocked roads.  The weather also poxed up the walking plans, obviously.  I've put on 4 pounds across Christmas - obviously this was mainly due to the over-eating, rather than not being able to walk, but this won't have helped things.

I did an "update" file back-up, rather than a full one.  this was mainly because I decided that the gaming machine problem was software based and the cleanest solution was to wipe and re-install.  This was fine and appears to have worked perfectly, but of course it took well over a day with all the updates and putting the games back.

I did make a significant dent in the PVR, though it still groaning with stuff.  I now have about 35% of the drive clear, with about 65 programmes to watch.  I know this is a lot still on there, but you have to remember that over Christmas there was a lot of stuff to watch and none of this was left.  Also, I focused on things that didn't have ad breaks, so although the programmes are mostly 1 hour, there are a lot of adverts that will reduce the actual watching time.

I also watched a chunk of anime fansubs.  If I'm honest this was one of the least successful areas, though, as it wasn't a big proportion of all that I've got.  However, I also had a sort out and there's stuff I could take off for other reasons (OAVs of series I didn't like, have been licensed so I only need a 2 episode sample, rather than the full series, sequels so might as well burn them to disk for later, etc, etc).  I still need to attack them, but I've certainly created a bit of breathing space.

I also did the full clean, though this seemed more hard work than I remember from last year.  It took me 2 full days (one for the Kitchen & Bathroom and one for the living room / bedroom) to do the actual cleaning, but the impact was more extensive - they weren't consecutive days, as I was shattered after doing the kitchen.  After the bedroom I was basically crippled - I'd put my hamstrings through so much that I could hardly walk the next day.  This was due to the hoovering, mainly - I go at it with a special attachment and it's really effective, but also inconvenient to use and so I end up bent over in a bad way.

The "plans for next year" was the really big failure.  I've not really got a plan, and will have to give it some thought - there's a big event that I'm not really sure how I'm going to work around.

So the holiday was pretty mundane - nice to not be at work for an extended period, but not exactly exciting, and mostly poxed up by the awful weather where it might have been.

There was also some unpleasant stuff.  My landlord has decided to put up my rent by 5%.  This is particularly annoying as it now means the bedsit is uneconomical, but I'm left in a quandary as to moving, owing to the aforementioned unclear plans for the year.  I also scratched one of my alloy wheels on my car - some penis pulled up in the station in front of me at the petrol station rather than wait the 10 seconds it took for me to pull away and in going around him I caught the curb.  There was also a break-in where I live: they only got into the garden, rather than the house or shed and didn't take anything, but another reason for me not to stay.

christmas

I thought I'd give a bit of a wrap-up of the Christmas holiday.

We had the company christmas lunch quite late this year, but then the positioning of Christmas Day is a little unusual, so it wasn't as late as it seemed in terms fo the acual date.  If I hadn't had quite so much leave left over I'd have had to work some odd random days or bring them forward from next year.  I guess the flip-side was that I got over two weeks leave and have only used up 3 days of my 2014 leave.

I had so much leave left over for several reasons - one was that I carried a couple of days over from the previous year, but the other was that I kinda saved it up with the anticipation that I might be attending interviews, but in the end it was quite late before I properly went back on the job market and then had to effectively stop looking a long way before Christmas.  Anyway, I'm goign to need that leave this year, but more on that another day.

We used to spend Christmas at my Dads, down in Deveon, but he seems to have decided that he doesn't like doing this anymore, and my sister hosts.  I find this really quite unsatisfactory, particularly as she lives ina tiny flat, which she shares with her flatmate, so it also becomes a double-Christmas thing with the flat-mates family too.

I don't really like Christmas, and spending it with someone else's family makes it quite uninteresting.  The biggest problem is that they all know each other - the flatmate is a long term friend fo my sister, and my dad knows her and her family quite well as well.  This leads to long periods of them rabbitting on about people I don't know "Did you hear Fred has moved in with Brenda?" "I have no idea who Fred and Brenda are, and care even less."

It would be far easier if they just put the telly on and then I could watch that and they could natter.

It doesn't help - and I'll be upfront that this is not a nice thing - that they're not my sort of people.  I mean, I'm a nerd.  They're not.  I wouldn't have anything to talk to them about, even if they weren't twittering on about people I've never even heard of.

My hope is that by next year my life will be sorted out and I'll have moved somewhere where I can play host to my family.

Having said that, there is another less-outspoken reason why my sister hosts, which is that she's tight.  By hosting she doesn't have spend the petrol money to drive down.  Instead my Dad pays for a hotel for me and him (her place is too small for us all to stay and he knows I would refuse to pay for a hotel) and we both drive to her.  There's even a bizarre situation each year where he then takes her to one of her friends "on the way back" (it's nothign fo the sort as it's at least 100 miles out of his way).. and then a few days later drives her home again.

She kinda has him wrapped around her finger, as she's always been his favourite.  Note that I don't care as such, but ti woudl be nice if he at least realised she was doing it because she's tight - Indeed, I think he'd be pleased, as he's of the "careful with money" persuassion himself.

Well this wasn't so much a round-up of Christmas as a moan about the day itself!

I'll try to cover the rest in another post (if I can be arsed), although one thing just to note - the joruney down to my sister has been horrendous both years.  Last year it was because it was on Christmas morning and kinda poxed up the day, but this time it was because of the horrible weather.

The A31 was closed on one part as a river had burst its banks, so they sent us down a diversion to rejoin it about 2 miles further down.  This distance took me 3 hours.  The whole journey took me 5 and a half hours.  Not fun.

happy new year... i guess

I'm finally back to work.

Big inhale... huge sigh.

I think I lulled myself into a bit of a false perception over the holiday period, which is to say the crappy bits seemed to dull and become less "urgent".  Of course as soon as I got back it all swam back into focus, which is to say that there's basically nothing but crappy bits.

This is partly why I stopped blogging towards the end of last year - I'm a bit stuck for anything to really say apart from how I'm really not enjoying work, and that's such a big part of any given day/week/month, it doesn't leave me with a lot else to talk about.  I was also getting a bit fatigued, so the idea of writing anything became a bit of a chore.

Actually, there was one specific thing with the work blog posts that gave me a bit of a scare (shock might be a better word) and was probably the main catalyst for stopping.  I posted a blog entry that let a few of the "cat's" out of the "bags" - in other words I gave a few specific details about things that previously I had only really skirted around or touched on.

You could possibly have worked some stuff out and certainly got the general feel from what I said, but this post was quite specific.  Now usually my posts get around 5-10 hits.  I take this to be one or two people who read the odd post or click on it via a google search and the rest to be bots crawling the blog for indexing.

I've had a couple of posts that got significant numbers of hits (there's one I've actually blogged about to do with BMI that's obviously ranked highly in a particular search as it has hundreds of hits), but this one posts had well over 100 hits in the space of two days.  This worried and puzzled me so much that I moved it into drafts - particularly as I can't see what about it might have caused it to get so many hits, but the content is a bit sensitive.  If/when I move on from here I'll take it back into normal circulation, but it was also a big part of why I cooled off with blogging.

Note, I'm not sure I'm going to start properly again, but I figured I should at least post a "happy new year" type post.

electric-trickery

I'm guessing regular posting won't resume for quite a while as I am struggling to cope with everything at the moment.

However, I got a spare chunk of time so I thought I'd rant about what the electricity company has been up to.

I first noticed something odd was going on when I got back from holiday.  I have a pre-pay key meter and when I left for holiday I was sure I had about £35 on it and when I got back it was more like £20.  Given there was nobody there for that week this seemed odd, but I put it down to miss-remembering the amount on it when I left.

However, over the next few weeks I seemed to have to feed a hell of a lot more into it than usual (£110 over the course of about 5 weeks).  I therefore started to pay closer attention and specifically noting down the amount left when I when to work and when I got back.

This showed me that, during the 10 hours I was out it was still getting through 70-odd pence of electricity.  Even when I turned everything off bar the fridge-freezer, it still said I was apparently using 60-odd p of Elecy when I was at work.  Now when you consider that 1 kilowatt hour was about 16.5p, that's a hell of a power-hungry freezer!

Except it wasn't - to cut a long story short, what was actually eating up my money turned out to be a mysterious debt that they'd assigned to the meter.  Without telling us.

The meter is actually in the landlord's name and they hadn't received any letters about this supposed debt, yet they'd still assigned it and decided to take it out at a rate of £10.00 per week.  We're still not clear on how much debt they assigned, but given it was done via the key at the paypoint, that means it was put on some way before my holiday, so I reckon it was over £200.  Certainly when I worked it out there was £140 left and it had been 4 weeks since I'd topped the meter up after my holiday, so it was at least £180.

At this point my landlord basically stepped in and had to go through a tortuous process phoning them, but the end result is that they sent an electrician around and installed a new meter.  Interestingly according to this the rate of usage seems much lower.

I therefore suspect the meter was faulty - certainly it didn't seem to be doing things in line with what they said it should (they supposedly assigned a credit to it, but nothing happened when they put it in the paypoint machine).

However, I also suspect I know what might have caused them to think there might be a debt.  They obviously put the prices up at ever chance they can (electricity company profits have increased 5-fold in recent years) but a few years ago I decided I was going to put a load of money on the meter and therefore delay the need to get more.  this meant that my key didn't go into the paypoint machine for months, so it couldn't update the per-unit information.

That meant I had several months at the old rate after it changed.  Now my understanding is that they can't retrospectively apply the new charge, because it is a pre-pay meter.  I effectively pre-bought lots of electricity at the old rate.  Think of it like buying a load of toilet rolls when they're on offer: Andrex can't turn up at your door once the offer is over, demanding you have to pay 2p extra every time you wipe your arse.

However, the maths also doesn't work.  They put the price up by about 10%, which equated to about 3p per unit.  IF you do the maths it therefore only works out to be a debt of about £40, which is why I think the amount of debt is due to a faulty meter, but the period they think it occurred was during that period where I pre-bought.

Why ever did people fall for this bullshit about privatisation being a good thing?

I really wish the labour party would grow some balls and promise to re-nationalise them.

The basic services should be in state hands - that's the point of them.  Power generation and distribution has a basic cost and must be done at a national level for the benefit of the entire nation, not a handful of shareholders.

formula one

So Sebastian Vettel has wrapped up the driver's title and Red Bull has the constructor's title.

It seems like after the mid-season break they have become unbeatable.  From what I understand this is partly because the change of tyres back to last year's compound following the tyre-failure issues played into the design of the Red Bull, but I also think they focused on the development of this year's car where others moved on to next year's car.

There are quite a lot of big changes coming next year - the engine changes to a 1.6 litre turbo, there's a much bigger energy recovery aspect (not just the KERS), but also the front wing is much smaller, the rear wing changes, the exhaust exit point changes and the fuel capacity changes.  I'm sure there are other things, but those are pretty big already.

I think that means that the teams had to make a decision much earlier to switch all effort to next year's car, otherwise they'd end up impacting their competitiveness, and I think Red Bull left that decision until much later.  Certainly McLaren were saying they'd switched before the season was half way in, Force India haven't done anything since the mid-season and I think Mercedes switched some time ago, just to name a few.

The other aspect of course is Vettel himself.  His big advantage, I think, over the others is his flexibility and willingness to listen to what the team tell him.  If they say "do this" he tends to do it (I mean specifically in terms of how to drive the car - we all know he'll ignore team orders and his engineer is always telling him off for going for the fastest lap), where I think other drivers try to get the car tweaked to better suit them, rather than adapting to it.

The last grand prix I actually blogged about was Singapore so I thought I'd give a very quick run-through of the races:

• Korea - I've always felt Korea was an okay track and the races were okay, it's just it suffers because it's in the middle of nowhere.  This year's race was pretty good, I thought.
• Japan - Japan is usually pretty good, but this year I thought it was okay.  This might have been a bit affected by my holiday issues, so I was watching it some way out of sink.
• India - a fairly dull, pedestrian race.  This isn't one of the better newer circuits, though obviously Vettel was crowned champion, so it wasn't totally uninteresting.
• Abu Dhabi.  The beeb's highlights suggest it was better than it actually was: it was a pretty dull race, with a few interesting moments.  I mean, it's better than when it was first held as they've tweaked the circuit a bit, but it's still pretty dull.

That leaves only two races, which are another double header: Austin next weekend and then the traditional closer of Brazil.

job hunting

So my job hunting has continued, obviously without success.

It's been odd, actually.  I've had a reasonable number of interviews with a mixture of face-to-face and telephone-based, but I've been struck that most of these haven't felt "fully formed".

When I was looking before and going to interviews, it felt much clearer that the organisations I was talking to had a clear idea what they wanted.  Obviously I'm not saying that they pre-decided who they wanted, but I mean they had a clear idea that they wanted a bid manager and were either keen to explore if someone from a different sector could fit or already appreciated that they could.

This is one of the key things that's causing my search to be longer - I am very keen to move into a different sector.  The problem this time is that I seem to be encountering lots of people/organisations that don't really have a clear feeling about quite what they want, but then having been through some interviews, they then decided "no, we want someone with experience in our sector."

Now I've no problem with them wanting that experience, it's just that it's quite a big waste of my time, money and holiday (all of which are in short supply) if they're bimbling around not really knowing what they want.

And it's quite clear that they don't have any real clue.  Two of the interviews I went to in person (one in Essex, and one in Knutsford, so pretty excessive travel) I've seen the jobs being re-advertised several times since.

Or at least, they seem to have come to the decision that they want someone with experience in their sector.  But the problem there is we're talking sometimes talking about such a specific sector that there basically isn't anyone in the country.

It boils down to a combination of a lack of bravery ("as in let's take a chance" - these organisations are all coming across as quite risk averse) but also, mainly, I think, a lack of understanding of the generalist nature of a Bid Manager's skill set.  It's like Project Management - it's a fully-transferrable skill-set: if you can manage one thing, you can manage anything.  But they don't appreciate that, and I think a big part of that is because they don't really understand bid management themselves, and certainly don't appear to have properly defined and established processes.

Which is the flip-side: in all honesty, I'm kind of glad none of these have gone any further, as I've had red flags being hoisted at each interview.  One of the big advantages of where I currently work is we do a lot of things badly, and I find a lot of frustrating, so I know what I'm looking for in terms of things I don't want.

Of course the other aspect of going back to job hunting is that I'm having to deal with employment agencies again.  Quite why companies don't just place the job adverts themselves, I don't know, but the thing nowadays seems to be to use job agents.  They're basically on a par with estate agents and used car salesmen, in my opinion.  I mean, you get the odd one that's okay, but generally you're talking about a bunch of people who are only interested in getting their commission, and they don't really give a shit about things like never telling you you've been unsuccessful following a job interview.

a month ago

So it's been a month since I last posted on the log.

Exactly a month, in fact - my pre-holiday post was on the 4th of October and today is the 4th of November.

The reasons for the long delay in posting are somewhat complicated.  The main issue was that I had planned to spend some time over my holiday writing some blog posts and that didn't happen.  I'd also particularly planned to write a bunch of the back-log of films reviews I've build up and was going to fill the weeks after the holiday with many of these.  Obviously this didn't happen either.

The reason this didn't happen was because the holiday was a lot messier than I'd intended.

Firstly, my plan wasn't a good one. My landlord needed the time I was away to install a new shower (not the actual shower, but the unit around it), so I couldn't be home at all.  However, I also couldn't stay with my dad for that entire period.

I therefore decided (badly, it turned out) to spend the Saturday night at a Travelodge, then go to my Dad's on Sunday, then stay at another Travelodge from Wednesday to the following Saturday, when I'd return home.  The following Monday was a recovery day.

However, this didn't work at all well - the Saturday at the Travelodge was okay, but it wasn't a "productive" thing to do - I spent a lot of time farting about and couldn't see the time productively.  The time at my dad's was okay, but then I had to change plan.

Basically, rather late before the holiday I was asked to attend an interview (I'm still job hunting).  I said I could do the Thursday, so it was booked in, but the place was in Essex.  Now that would be far away even if I was at home, but obviously I wasn't - I was in Devon, so it was a huge drive.

Having already booked the Travelodge for Wednesday to Saturday and gone with the "non-cancel" option to save money, I then had to also book a Travelodge near the interview.  That meant I ended up spending one night and a morning at one place, then driving all day, getting lost (the town had two exits off the main road, and I took the first where I should have taken the second), going to bed very late, not sleeping well, getting up very early (I wanted the interview in the afternoon, but they then had to change it last minute), going to the interview, then spending all day driving back to Devon again!

In other words, I spend half my holiday driving places, killing time while I waited for things or recovering.  So all my grand plans basically gone knackered.  Here's the things I was going to do and the progress I made:

•    Write some blog posts - didn't do any.
•    Write some film review blog posts - didn't do any.
•    Watch some stuff on crunchyroll - didn't watch any.
•    Watch some fansubs - watched some, but my plan was to clear out the past years shows, and I only watched about a quarter of them.
•    Lots of walking - there were only two days where I went for a walk.
•    Clear backlog of e-mails - didn't read any.

Of course I also spent a fortune in petrol and a room booking which was relatively late so was more expensive, as well as having to buy food at services, which is always more expensive.  None of which I could claim back, as I was told (I'm not 100% sure I believe the agent - more on that later) the company wouldn't refund travel expenses.

And of course I didn't get the job - more on that later as well.

The other factor in my not blogging is that I returned to a shit-load of work: I actually worked a bit of one of the weekends.

As "holidays" go, it's been pretty non-fun.

holidays

I'm away on holiday for the next week and a bit.

I'm going to see my dad for a bit of it, but the rest is basically just relaxing.  I'm going away, which has cost me more money, but unfortunately I was kinda forced into it because my landlord needs to replace the shower in the bedsit.  It's the enclosure, rather than the shower unit, but it's a pretty hefty job.  It also means he'll have to turn the water off to the bathroom.

I don't; mind too much as I could do with a bit of a change of scenery, even if it is going to be about as cheap a holiday as I can possibly achieve (so no days out anywhere).

I've taken the Monday off as well, even though I'll be back on Saturday.  This just gives me a bit of a chance to sort things out and get back into the groove before I'm back to work.  I generally don't like to come back to a full week anyway, as I find it a bit much after a holiday.

cockneys versus zombies

I seemed to go through a terrible stretch of movies during this period.

Having not enjoyed Fanboys and The Raid, I then received Cockneys versus Zombies.  I'd heard this wasn't very good, but was hoping it would be a bit of humorous relief.

Unfortunately, it wasn't all that funny.

One of the problems with it is that it doesn't actually seem to have much of a grasp on what it wants to do with "cockneys" side of things.  Yes, it's set in the East End of London and the older characters are definitely getting into "proper" cockneys territory, but the younger element of the cast could almost have been anywhere.  And it's the younger element of the cast that's really carrying the story.

Well, I mean, obviously the story is a bit thin, but it takes up most of the time, so they're obviously on screen more of the time.

It almost feels like the whole "Snakes on a Plane" grand-concept thing.  They've come up with a title and then tried to work a plot up so that they can call it Cockney's versus Zombies, but in reality haven't really achieved that as it could have been set anywhere - there's nothing all that cockney about it

It also fails to really hit the mark in terms of scares and laughs.  I'm guessing one of the inspirations for the film was Shawn of the Dead, but the problem of course is it's not as well written and not as funny.  Also, one of the things that's probably not obvious with Shawn of the Dead is that it's actually a RomCom in structure with Zombies added as a twist.

CvZ lacks this as its core, which is okay, there are other types of films, but it's replaced it with something along the lines of a heist movie, and it doesn't do a very good job at being a reasonable heist movie.

The effects were okay, if a little thin - I'm guessing that they couldn't quite scrape up enough budget to do everything they wanted and the horror side of it ended up without enough cash to do lots of good, gorey kills.  It doesn't make up for that by being scary - there are some good jumps, but it's not really a horror movie-proper.

And as I say, it doesn't achieve the trick of being a comedy either, so it was very disappointing.

the raid

I'd heard good things about the raid.

Specifically I'd heard it was an entertaining, somewhat old-skool martial arts film, that had loads of great action.

Well it had loads of action, I will give it that, but I have to confess I found a lot of it a bit dull.  No, that's not quite right - it's more that I got rather bored of it.

One of the things I say in quite a lot of my reviews is that they've taken a perfectly good 1hr 30min film and made it 2hr long.  Well, the raid is only 1hr 30min (ish) long, but it felt like it should probably have been 1hr long.

A lot of the fights just drag on, and I know they're brutal and harsh and well filmed and all that, but I just found myself fast-forwarding through them.

A big part of the problem was that I found the whole film ludicrous.  The plot makes no sense whatsoever.  There are also some twists in it, and these just make things confusing and undermine whatever little sense it had.

Now, don't get me wrong, I wasn't expecting it to be sensible, it's just that some of the stuff that happens doesn't actually hang together, even within the logic of the film.

I dunno - I guess I'm being harsh again, but I just found it boring.  Maybe if I'd watched it back when I went through that traditional phase most young guys go through of loving all things martial arts (Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, et al) then I'd have liked it more?

simcity

So...  simcity.

They released the game back at the beginning of August and the 7th (I think - I've lost track a bit) patch came out in August/September.  That's 6 months.  And I think it's only now that they've finally addressed all of the stuff that was either broken or (more depressingly) badly designed/implemented.

In some ways this isn't uncommon nowadays.  Modern games are super complicated things that have to excel both in terms of visuals as well as content.  During the early days it was all about the content - the game itself - but nowadays there's an expectation that games will look great too.

That obviously makes them expensive to develop, so there's always going to be a temptation to rush them out before they're really ready.

This is particularly the case for testing.  It must be very tempting to just do some basic testing, rather than big-scale betas.  It must be quite expensive to do proper testing and fix the game before it some out.  The temptation to release it quickly and effectively treat the first few months an extended test (one where they're paying you to test the game!) and then fix stuff later in patches.

Which is pretty much what's happened with SimCity.  Some of the stuff they've finally fixed with the last few patches makes the game operate like it probably should have done at the beginning.  Don't get me wrong - I think plenty of the stuff they've put out was probably always intended to come out as extra content and some of it has occurred to them after release (like the road height thing), it's more that some of the stuff is effectively the final version of the code that simply wasn't ready at release, or they've had to come up with because their original design was broken.

I find it all a bit disheartening and the time this has all taken and my desire not to waste time on a game that wasn't ready has meant I've not played it a great deal recently.

However, they've just announced the first proper expansion for the game, and it looks rather interesting.  It's basically a raft of things to make your cities "future cities", and includes some nice stuff

The problem is that I also think he fundamental "model" is broken.  It was clearly the intention to make a multiplayer SimCity, which is fine as it goes, but the problem is that SimCity isn't a multi-player game.  The mechanic they've chosen to achieve multiplayer seems okay - smaller cities that are interconnected, but the problem is that when you play single player, the method they've used for "simulating" other cities is just a mess.  You have to keep exiting the game (this is the only way you can force it to save) simply in order for the other cities to look even vaguely like they did when you last played them, and even then they still don't work like they should.

I mean, this whole notion they had of one city "doing garbage" another "doing industry" another "doing education/research" only looks like it might work in proper multiplayer, with all the players playing at the same time.  I say this, because I've never played multiplayer and have no interest in doing so.  I've therefore only played single player, and I can assure you this mechanic doesn't work like it should when played that way.

The thing I find bizarre is that it seems like such a simple thing to achieve.  We're simply talking about storing some basic numbers for each city - they don't need complex simulation, you just store the fact a city has x litres water spare somewhere.  Why do I have to exit the game for it to even save that number in a place that my other cities can see it updating?

eBay fun

I mentioned eBay the other week, but I thought I'd do a separate blood about their latest scam - the racket that is e-bay appears to have come up with yet another way to rip everyone off.

They've now started charging for postage.  Yes, that's right, if you enter the correct amount of postage on your item, you're now going to be 10% worse off.  Well done you cunts.

They've stated some bullshit about this being to "encourage people to offer free postage" and to "provide better value for buyers".

Now don't get me wrong - there is a giant loophole in the system as was.  If you selected "other courier" then it allows you to enter whatever value you want.  And of course, auctions up to 99p are free, so by putting 99p and then, say, £30 for postage, you could sell quite expensive items and not pay e-bay a penny.

Of course, this is playing the system, and it was something I never engaged in.  Indeed, until Royal Mails more recent price hikes, I was relatively happy to charge less for postage than it actually cost me.

For cheaper items (genuine 99p, not worth much, just want to get rid of it but don't want to throw it away type ones) I would try to get roughly the right postage, but didn't factor in cost of envelope and all that.  I didn't mind too much as 99p auctions are free to list (well, you can do 100 a month free) and then they charge 10% (10p) at the end and PayPal take 4%+20p (25p-ish), so the postage was made up by what was left.

But now let's look at the economics.  The 35p it costs on the item is still the same, but you now pay 10% of postage.  Well, for one of the White Dwarf magazines I've been selling recently, for example, the postage is a staggering £1.40.  So if you put £1.40, you're now effectively being charged 50p total, and suddenly the economics don't make a lot of sense.

But if you increase the cost of the item about 99p you're suddenly going to start being charged the insertion fee, which for a magazine is 10p.

So if you raise the initial price to £1.15 cover the additional fee, now you're being charged 10p to post the auction, and of course the end fees rise a bit too! It's the classic vicious circle that means you end up having to post the thing at £2 to make your money back, but then of course nobody wants to bid!

So why not add the extra on to the postage? Well technically it says that you're not allowed to raise your postage cost to cover this fee!

And what about offering free postage? Have they looked at the cost of postage nowadays? It costs 60 p just to send a letter.  Well if you add 60p to the 35p of charges, that's 95p of a 99p auction!

Oh, and another thing that amused me (if you didn't laugh you'd have to kill somebody) - e-bay now trumpets that they offer a money back guarantee if you're not happy with the item.  Yes, that's right; e-bay offers a money back guarantee on your item.  You've got no say in the matter...

landlord returns

My landlord came back the other day.

I'd obviously set myself a list of things I wanted to get done, which included:

• Sort stuff in the shed
• Put some of the shed stuff on e-bay, including some of my figurines, old art books and DVDs
• Clean my car

I sort of did all of these.

I cleaned the car, but it was only a "normal" clean, rather than being a full-on polish.  This wasn't so bad, as I'd polished the car a few weeks back.  However, I did also top up things like the oil, washer fluid and tyre pressure, and it was while doing the last of these that my old foot pump finally gave up the ghost.

I've had it ages, and it's been a bit temperamental for a while, but it's just typical of the recent months that it's another thing that's broken that I have to replace.  I've blogged about this recently, but I've had some more things go as well.  For example, I broke the Ethernet switch I use to connect my computers to the BT hub, so I had to replace that, and some of the buttons on my printer are dodgy (you have to press really hard and they don't always work) so I'll need to replace that.

Anyway, I'm waiting until I get paid this month before replacing the pump, which means I've actually been running on slightly low pressure tyres, as it was the connector to the tyre that broke.  This meant it was bleeding out air and whenever I tried to pump it would pop off, so it's deflated the tyres a little - nothing disastrous, but it needs sorting.

I attempted to sort the stuff in the shed, but there were a couple of problems with this.

The first was that my landlord didn't actually go until Saturday lunch.  I also missed him leaving, so it was quite late in the afternoon before I ventured out to the shed.

The second was that I had also decided to try to stay up all night.  I've mentioned before that I have been having trouble staying asleep and waking in the middle of the night.  While I still think stress is a part of this, I think the whole "habit formation" I also talked about is a big part of it.  One of the ways I've found to sort this is to basically stay up all night, which totally disrupts my body clock and allows me to reset it.

However, when you're doing that after having spent all day shifting big heavy boxes around, it doesn't quite work.  You're not only tired from being up; you're physically shattered from the exercise.  And of course, it's not a 1 day job, so going into the night sorting boxes became quite a chore and I wasn't really alert and thinking straight.

In the end I did go to sleep for a couple of hours that night.  The night time waking is still not sorted - I am waking up early, but it's early morning (5AM-ish), rather than middle of the night (1AM-ish) so I'm just a bit tired, rather than the walking dead.

However, I did generate a lot of stuff to go on e-bay.  And I mean a lot of stuff.  So much that I was too tired to put it on that first weekend and instead left it for this weekend, which also turned out to be a free-listing weekend.

This wasn't such a great idea.  I'd used the Saturday to clean the car and do other bits in order to leave the Sunday for it, but partly because of the Interview earlier in the week I was so tired I had to have a lie in on the Sunday and it was late before I started.

I then just launched into it without really thinking I would "do x, but not y" so I ended up doing it all day, and even then I had only put on about two thirds of it all.  I've also apparently been missing a trick with my auctions - I knew Sunday was the best day for them to end, but apparently he evening is the best and I was ending mine mid-afternoon.

By the time I'd finished I had 85 active auctions.  Now to be fair, some of these were re-lists I was doing to take advantage of the free listing, but still, that's an awful lot of stuff!

fanboys

What a terrible film.

I thought it best to just come out and say it.  The problem I had with fanboys is that it was just a sort of weak, thinned-down version of a Kevin smith film.  Indeed if you take the dialogue of Clerks and mush it into Jay & silent Bob Strike back then you've basically got fanboys.

The idea behind it is of a bunch of nerds going to Skywalker Ranch to steal/view Star wars Episode 1 ahead of its release.  So you're talking about a bunch of nerds and you're talking about a road movie.  And that's basically it.

Unfortunately, the movie is just not as well written as a Kevin Smith film.  The dialogue lacks real punch.  It also seems to try to be "inclusive" of non-nerds - it felt a bit toned down and 'lite', instead of being full-on nerdy.  It was like they felt they couldn't be too extreme with the jokes because they might alienate some of the non-nerd audience.

The characters also felt a bit thin - fairly loose stereotypes, without a great deal of interest or individuality to them.

And of course the plot is very minimal - more like a series of sketches than a plot.  Given it's a road movie it could perhaps have had some saving graces in terms of how it was filmed, or the places they went to, for example, but it fell down thee too.

I'm being very harsh.  It wasn't painful to watch, the acting is okay and it's watchable, it's just that it was supposed to be funny and I didn't laugh once.

dad's dog & fraud

I mentioned that it wasn't just work that had been making my time just recently a bit rubbish.

One of the other things was unfortunately that my Dad's dog has died.  He was a Labrador and apparently average life expectancy is around 10 years old.  My dad's dog was about 13 or 14 I think, so it has been on the cards and therefore wasn't totally unexpected.

However, that's not to say it wasn't a shock.

Being a typical Labrador he was motivated by his stomach and when he went ill the first few symptoms were "loose stools" and he wouldn't eat his food.  As such, my Dad took him to the vet promptly and they worked out that he was suffering from kidney failure.

Obviously you'll be aware kidney failure is pretty serious.  When people get it they have to do dialysis (filtering the blood, which is the kidney's main function) and need a transplant fairly promptly as they don't tend to last too long.

For a dog that would be an extreme length to go to.  They tried a few drugs in the hopes it might restart his kidneys but they eventually decided to put him down.

It's a shame - he was a nice dog (although to be totally fair he could have done with a few obedience classes).  My Dad has obviously therefore been a bit down and of course I'm so far away I can't be there in person.  I am going down to visit him for my holiday in a couple of weeks, though.

The other thing of note was that I suffered some internet fraud.

Well, I say that, I have a very strong suspicion they fucked up.

I have a PayPal account (you unfortunately can't get away from having one if you use e-bay) and what happened was that I received an e-mail saying that I'd made a payment to one of these online money things.

I hadn't, obviously, but the money had come out of my bank account (PayPal links to your bank & a credit card, in case you're not familiar).  It was £42, so not a giant sum, but significant, particularly given my current financial situation.

I immediately flagged it and they solved the case in my favour.

However, what makes me think it was a cock-up is that it was a single sizeable payment (they often do lots of little payments with fraud), but also it was how it was how my account was described on the e-mail.

Initially I'd thought it was just a phishing thing, but as I say, I checked my accounts and it had come out of my account.  But here's the thing - the account name given on the e-mail was not mine, but it was a sub-string of my account.  So if my account was "RandomName123@gmail.com" then the account it said was "Name123@gmail.com".

So as I say, this leads me to think they fucked up and a genuine transaction for somebody accidentally came out of my account.

The most annoying thing, though, was how long it took them to process the actual refund.  So I spotted about 6 hours after it happened (it was a weekend) and flagged it to all concerned.  Within 24 hours it had been decided in my favour and I was informed it would be refunded.  Within 48 hours I had received an e-mail telling me it had been refunded.  However it was 2 weeks before the money actually made it back into my account.

I've said it before, but PayPal is a fucking racket.