missfrost

Oct. 2nd, 2001 09:20 am

Isn't the internet brilliant? I was sitting outside this morning having woken up at 6am, and thought that you don't see many cirrus clouds (having watched a documentary about clouds last week) so I decided to look them up on Wiki. And there it was, all the information about cirrus clouds you want. Years ago I would have had to have owned a pretty comprehensive set of encyclopedias* to find out this stuff. These days I don't own any sort of dictionaries, atlases or reference books because it's all just there. Or here, rather. Take last Saturday, I was going up to my friend Steve's in a part of England I've never been to before, and in the eighties and most of the nineties I would have needed a detailed map or instructions on how to get there, and I would have probably have visited or phoned the station for train times. On Saturday I simply Googled his post code, panned out a bit on the map to see where the station was, then looked up the train times and prices on thetrainline.com. And if it hadn't been way out in the countryside I could probably have even checked what his house looked like on Street View.
Yesterday I spent at least three hours reading Giles Coren's restaurant reviews (and finding out a new series of Supersizers Go... is just about to air, hurray!) and getting recipe ideas for my pork. Today I will probably find out what most of my friends did over the weekend even though I haven't seen them, and have sparked off a debate about Keith TOTP.
The bad side of the internet is that I am working tonight and have sleeping to do at some point. Also the floor needs a good going over. And I will most likely sit here hitting F5 instead of doing anything. The internet is good though innit?

*And I have looked up the correct plural.

Apparently I do have an iron, it's in what I call the cupboard under the stairs although there are no actual stairs involved, it's just a cupboard under the stairs type cupboard. There's even an ironing board in there too and I presume they're mine, in that they aren't on the inventory so were most likely left by the previous tenants (Australians who were returning back to Oz) and aren't the landlady's. The returning Australians were useful in that they (with my permission) left behind an extremely well stocked kitchen so I now have ridiculous things like pizza cutters and apple corers, and a giant meat cleaver, but bizarrely, no corkscrew.

I have spent ALL morning, having got up at 7.15 and just decided to quit, messing about with mp3s in anticipation of my new mp3 player arriving soon. This is not as easy as it sounds. My old laptop broke, in that the USB port physically snapped, and the USB port was the only way to get stuff onto my old mp3 player, and at at the time was my only way to get on the internet, with a dongle. So I bought a new laptop, a netbook in fact, which has no CD player.
Therefore the only way to get the stored music off the old laptop onto the new netbook is to plug the old laptop into the broadband, upload the mp3s five at a time to my BT vault, then download them on the netbook. And then I took the fox across and went back for the chickens, etc... Unfortunately lots of the stuff I had appeared to be unlabelled, or even if a whole album was labelled as a folder, the individual tracks inside would have nothing written on them, so I have been playing Name That Tune for quite some time. Or Googling for track listings, particularly when you realise you don't even know what the song title was in the first place. Anyway IT'S JUST ARRIVED. MY NEW BABY HAS BEEN POSTED THROUGH THE LETTERBOX AS I TYPE. So I shall go and get playing with it. I've just thrown the three other letters on the floor - I wonder if they were anything important?

Oh, I have just found a 'what to do if you lose your bank card' card nearly a week too late. That was fun - 'oh let's just get a cab, I'll pay...' so I asked the cab driver to stop at a cash machine on the way, and he took us via one of those £1.75 charge jobs inside a garage, which promptly ate my card. I'm fairly sure there must be a legitimate bank ATM on the way from central London to my house, but clearly not in this driver's 'knowledge,' therefore we were turfed out of the cab and left with a half hour walk.You'd think the least he could do was admit partial fault and finish the journey anyway, but no. Props to NatWest though - card reported stolen at roughly 5am on a Wednesday, new one delivered 12pm Friday.
To add insult to injury, when I was leaving for work the next night I realised my mp3 player was 'missing.' I bet it's in his sodding cab. And I couldn't even treat myself to a new one with no bank card (I have ordered one now, so please feel free to irritatingly tell me I could have had your old one/s.) As steam was coming out of my ears over the prospect of walking to work without all the new music I had only recently filled my mp3 player with, my belt broke. Last week was not a good week, as it started with a migraine that meant me taking Monday off, which led to my manager suspiciously questioning my being off sick on a Monday having already booked the Tuesday off. (I later got all the 'valued employee' spiel but still, I was smarting from feeling like a naughty child.)
Also last week I received two quite outrageous demands for money (in the thousands) which I have spent all morning getting legal advice on. I couldn't phone up last week because, piling on the misery, I found my phone had been unceremoniously cut off despite my having sent off a direct debit form at least a month ago. And I couldn't immediately pay the bill because... my card had been stolen.
O, THE DRAMA OF LAST WEEK.
I suppose I need some balancing 'life's not so bad' stuff before I end it all. Well the night out on Tuesday was great fun for a start. And I have so far successfully taken over one of work's 'most prestigious clients' with no major headaches, other than a guarantee that I'll never get out early again. I am going out tonight for lovely Bec's birthday (happy birthday Bec, Laura, my dad, and Karl Marx) and I have been reading about my nearest big park* which looks lovely, so I am going to sit in it tomorrow in the promised 20C, having gone via the library and the Tesco for some supplies. I have lots of good things to do for the rest of May too. And I am now going to reheat the leftovers of Sunday's delicious curry for my lunch which should have that even better matured taste by now. Of course because I made the curry in the evil Last Week, while making it I picked up my jar of cardamoms by the lid, which wasn't attached, giving me a kitchen carpeted with cardamom pods. I'm told this is a hip look in Brighton.

Oh while I had the news on the other day, BBC Click recommended a thing called digsby.com which nicely ties up all your stuff like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and IM apps, meaning you don't have to bother clicking between them all. I can recommend it too. I really ought to update more often, sorry.

*If it's as nice as it looks, I may insist on a birthday picnic there.

I am watching David Lean's Oliver Twist, which was clearly filmed in a bloody great Pinewood Studios set, but I still keep watching it as though I'll recognise somewhere, with some of it being set round our way. Apparently it was banned in America for three years, and in Israel, on the basis of Alec Guinness's prosthetic hooter. There aren't many films that have been banned due to people having a big beak are there? What about Cyrano de Bergerac? Anyway, I no longer have a copy of the book of Oliver Twist, so I can't check where it was supposed to all be set (oh Hattie Jacques has just made her appearance as Pub Singer) but what I definitely recall from the book is that any film adaptation of it seems to comprise chapters 1, 2, 3, 51 and 52. It's a hefty tome, but worth the effort. Incidentally the only time I have ever been to the cinema on my own was to see the 2005 version.
My door blew open earlier, the main door. Which was a little disturbing considering it could have happened when I was out, or asleep. It's not overlooked from the street, but still, having a door that closes is pretty much a basic safety precaution and I'll have to watch that it does a proper click in future.

Marathon question: Do any of you regularly go and watch it? Only I'm working on Saturday night and have to get home on Sunday morning, right through the main route. Are people likely to be lining the route hours in advance? I'll be coming home three hours before it sets off, but if I can't even cross the street outside work I'll be a bit buggered. And furious. 

'Twitter collects personally identifiable information about its users and shares it with third parties. Twitter considers that information an asset, and reserves the right to sell it if the company changes hands.'

Did you all know that? I'd like to know what it thinks it knows about me. As you may or may not have noticed I only use Twitter to post complete, fantastical, bollocks. This is because I still haven't figured out Twitter's USP, in fact further than that I would say it is less unique than practically anything else on the web. Like everyone else, probably, I have a few places I like to check when I get online, to catch up with news of my friends. Not all of my friends overlap in the internet applications they choose to post on, so I flick round them all, but with the advent of Twitter it seems to have totally homogenised and I read the same thing again and again. Here's a typical scan round the internet for me these days.
Bob has a new hat.*
Bert is going out to lunch*
Bob: I have a new hat.
Bert: I am going out to lunch
Topic New Hat started by Bob
Topic What shall I have for lunch? started by Bert
Bob wrote 'I have been out to buy a new hat...'
Bert wrote 'I am trying to decide where to go to lunch...'
Bob: Tweets for the day
Bert: Tweets for the day

I also racked my brains to think of anyone 'famous' it would be interesting to follow and honestly couldn't come up with anyone whose day-to-day witterings I'd be vaguely interested in, and am coming to the conclusion I just don't like people. Of course the point of posting all this blather is that what I really want to know here is, what does the # thing on Twitter mean?

*Names have been changed

Pour le cappuccino_kid, I would definitely recommend going on Le Petit Train up to Notre Dame de la Garde. Be warned, that website has music, and it's exactly the same music that they play while you're trundling up a hill in a little toy train, with a narration filled with corny little jokes. Extremely surreal. But there's an amazing 360 view from the Notre Dame. I would also say take the boat out to the Iles du Frioul, where there is nothing to do except see how long you can wander around an island without seeing anyone else (hours) but that's why I liked it. Most boats to Frioul go to Chateau d'If as well, (home of the Count of Monte Cristo) but on the day I went the whole island of If was closed due to the French having one of their traditional national strikes.
If you're going to go to lots of museums and galleries, it's probably best to go to the Tourist Information in Vieux Port where you can get a City Pass which gets you in free to places and gives you free travel. (Clearly I am just finding out now that I could have done this...)
You must also have a kebab, because it will come with chips. Inside it. Kebab with chips inside it. That still kills me.

What exactly is the point of putting the clocks forward an hour? I know the official answer is to give us an extra hour of daylight, but it doesn't does it? It doesn't stop the planet moving and travelling round the sun. It doesn't add to the number of hours in a day. We merely get the same amount of daylight, but with a new name. And again the official reason was to give farmers an extra hour of daylight, but they managed without it in winter, and if they really need more daylight now, why don't they just get up earlier?
I am surrounded by boxes and cables, as my BT Vision has just arrived. Unfortunately the cable provided doesn't quite reach the best socket for it, so it is spread across my walking space to one it does reach, so I have to play French skipping every time I want to leave the room. This situation will have to see out the week as I can't really go shopping for an extension cable while I'm working nights. And after half an hour of hunting I realised the really useful 4-gang extension I do have is already under the bed with one item, a bedside lamp, plugged into it.
So if you don't hear from me for a week I am either amusing myself recording and playing back live television, or I have tripped over a badly placed cable and have electrocuted myself. 
My Tesco delivery is now officially 10 minutes late. I am hungry. I do hope they don't give me a 'complimentary' Daily Mail again, it's getting embarrassing having it on show in the recycling. Edit: Yes, yes they did.