unexpected use for a shopping centre...

this evening's mission was to go out into the world and find some peace in a chaotic plavce, which is why this is a delayed telecast. lacking the desire to pay for two sets of broadband, i'm not exactly mobile-data enabled. still, the local shopping centre is warm and has a surfeit of available beverage.

it's also a great test of how versatile the Eee is out in the world. i've been carrying it around while i wander the shops for the last hour and i can't say i noticed it overly much.

unfortunately, even with repetitive noise in my ears i'm finding it hard to turn off the situational awareness. if i can type without looking then why not look around at the people wandering back and forth on the other side of my little table? oh well. if i can't focus on that then i guess i'll talk about other things.

this has been a busy week in many ways. not in as much as running around and doing stuff, more in the things that just Happened. i've spent most of my evenings at home, but somehow they didn't seem slow and dull. maybe it's how busy i've been at work - filling in my less frenetic moments with extra-curricular activities until i got to the point today where i just had to get out of there to get some peace. it used to be that i went to work and put my home life away for a while. now, through the joys of task atomisation and multi-threading i'm finding the holes in my activities and filling them with little parts of other activities. an email gets written sentence by sentence over the course of 15 minutes while i wait for scripts to run. i speak with someone on the phone while my coffee cools, or while i wait for my other line to ring, and most of my brain's spare runtime has been taken up by a girl.

another girl - the banes of my existence, the faces of my insanity, the one species that can completely and utterly throw me off my spin. with a mind that i've toiled long and hard to make bulletproof they're my achilles heel. i hate them, and i love them all the same.

another girl - right before i leave the motherfucking country. right when i had everything worked out and sorted. i love my life so much that one day i'm going to have to engrave the phrase down the barrel of a gun and fucking felate it. no, scratch that. it sounds too bitter, and i'm in too good a mood to be bitter about anything much at the moment.

once upon a time, Shaalwyd told me in a moment of depression that "you have a history of meeting beautiful, brilliant women who light up your life for as long as they stay in it," which was exactly what i needed to hear at the time. years later it's always stuck with me and i try to remember that when i'm feeling down and time and again it's come true.

you gotta love Shaalwyd. which reminds me that i really need to call her and say hello.

and with that, i think i'm going to have to pack up my toy and stop attracting stares. things to be, places to do... wait... no, i was right the first time. i'm sure i'll get a chance to upload this at some point. until then you can rest assured that between writing this and posting it i'll have been having fun, even if that fun is enjoyed at license-losing speeds. joy, in whatever form it takes, is something i'm still learning to accept but as with all things it's one step at a time that will lead me to understanding.

when what you were going to say has slipped your mind...

i had something planned and i knew from the start that i should have written it down there and then - in the bath or not - but now it's lost and i'll have to wait for the appropriate moment when my brain clicks back into the right gear.

i'm exhausted - four hours of sleep (thereabouts) preceded and followed by busy, active days has left me on the verge of extinction. still, it has been a GREAT couple of days, filled with adversity and achievement, productivity and pleasure, relaxation and relief. it's left me in not just a good, but a fantastic mood and i'm going to sleep soundly tonight for the knowledge that i couldn't have asked for it to have gone any better.

alpha...

... so it's been a productive day, all told. i woke up early... for some gods-unknown reason and was confronted by a broken laptop. diagnosis and coffee later, i headed off to get my first professional haircut in over 6 years. this failed, alas, because the local hairdresser was massively hungover. no matter - on my bike to head off to pick up a replacement BIOS battery for the Dell only to remember that the oil light had turned itself on yesterday afternoon and would need checking. oil checked (low) and topped up and an hour of hammering the streets between here and Fyshwick and i had a repaired Dell. my hair was fixed up thanks to Hair by Lou and i was sitting pretty.

it's been another big week of fixing things - i can now use my mobile phone to control the media player on my Eee and things at work are ticking over quite nicely, all told. it's nice to know that having a laptop refuse to start, or a bike with a blinking oil light, isn't anything to knock me out of my rhythm. it's good to feel like The Shits every once in a while - to do a bog-lap of the office waving the Three Fingers of Rock in the air screaming "i'm the motherfuckin' KING, biatches!"

tonight i head out for the watching of movies. it's almost a let-down: the one night in forever that Paul and Lou are going to be out of the house and i won't be able to run around the flat in my underwear with heavy metal cranked out of the Media Server. oh well, i guess i'll just have to survive. no idea what we're watching, how i think about it. i'm taking a bundle of DVD's and an external hard driver over a friend's place and i think we're just going to go to town until the wee-hours. should be good, i think. i managed to get through The Day The Earth Stood Still last night which was really quite good. i'm enjoying catching up on my seminal source-material... especially when it's been so brutally ripped off time and again in the (nearly) sixty years since.

otherwise, i just need to focus on not crashing my bike so that i can sell it in another month, and wait for those pedantic Brits to tell me whether i can go and work in their bloody country or not. oh, and Make Noise Be Loud Now! i have another half an hour of In Flames cranked loud that i intend on enjoying before i hammer off into the sunset.

learning to live with it...

after whinging for some time about the lack of available retail therapy, the IT world has once again provided and so it is that i'm now sitting here with a ASUS EeePC 1000h on my lap while i sit in front of the TV. it's not that i have any care for the olympics, mind - it's just more sociable.

this little thing has sapped most of my spare time for the last week since i decided to take the plunge to use linux for this thing. different? check. technical challenge? check. frustrating... yeah, a little. still, i've got it working with the help of google and various forums and wikis and it's generally working pretty well for me.

other than that i've managed to find a lovely level of apathy for travel. things have been going... nicely, really. not that i'm wishing for it all to go to hell in a handbasket again, but if i didn't already have the tickets booked i don't know that i'd be going. that's silly talk, i know. perhaps i left it too late in the year and 6 months of prep was just too much. perhaps i should have stayed miserable. either way, i have something bordering on high-hopes for the coming months and one way or another i think i'll leave secure in the knowledge that when i get back there will be a life here to walk back into which is something i was never quite certian of in Perth.

it really has become a case of desperately trying to not think about how soon i'm leaving so that i can enjoy my days. when things were going poorly i couldn't wait to get out. now things are going well i don't want it to end.

oh well.

in the short term i have amusements planned for the rest of the week, and some rather pleasant company organised for the weekend. realistically that's all i think i can really hope for for the time being, and i'm quite sanguine for all that.