bed stereo

well, I meant to go to sleep, but I was getting really pissed off about listening to music to sleep to through the laptop speakers.

I really longed for a dedicated bed-stereo, then realised I had a spare 2.1 (satellites + boombox) in the spare room. fucking result!

grabbed it, wired it in, 15 mins later I'm back in bed with a proper sound system.

while the loneliness does beat me around the head quite a bit, I do like being able to do random shit like this at midnight without upsetting anyone.

except possibly patrick if I turn up the sub bass unit...

ahhhh. this sounds far better. though I did have to take over the blue LED to prevent it illuminating the room. doh.

book: found

Thanks to pw201 and twisted_one, I located the book I was hunting down :)

It's a free ebook called the Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, by Roger Williams, which I shall now be reading ;)

Thanks to everyone who commented, I've got a huge reading list out of this :)

(no subject)

things to jangle my nerves after a long and tiring day:

THE FUCKING FRIDGE DOOR FALLS OFF AND ALL THE FOOD JARS CRASH ONTO THE TILES

damn, man. I just wanted a snack.

long day is long

home again, home again, jiggety jig...

went into London proper to meet up with the lovely ephemera to get my passport application countersigned... Corben was a bit of a monkey, but only because he'd had to endure a few hours strapped into his push-chair, then had a too-short nap and woke up in a pizza restaurant, somewhat grumpy and confused.

he's also developed too much of a liking for my iPod Touch. it's fantastic how much he's interacting with it, now (apps, menus, games, using the accelerometers, etc) but because it's become a killer toy for him, he's now throwing a tantrum when I have to have it back off him. He neeeeeever tantrums for me, so this has to be scotched before he thinks it's OK, so I guess I have to be strict about how long he can play with it for, then given a warning that I need it back, then firmly letting him know time's up.

Along those lines, his advent calendar has been good. He went quite apeshit the first two days when he was only allowed ONE chocolate and then had to wait until the next day, but now he's kinda chilled with it and understands he has to wait.

Of course, I did fall asleep the other day and woke up to find he'd taken half the doors off.

Hadn't eaten the chocolate. Noop. Just took the doors off. He is the Michael Cain of the advent calendar world.

Man, but I am SO knackered from carrying the pram up and down stairs on the underground.

Today's prize for MASSIVE FUCKING PRICK goes to the grumpy old fucking shitbag who was walking down a (mercifully short) flight of stairs (on the right, too, so fuck off, grandpa, you stay on the left on the underground).

I'm staggering up on the left hand side, carrying a fucking PRAM DUDE. he looks me square in the eyes and just keeps walking down the stairs toward me. So I have to fucking move over to the other side, thus stopping ALL traffic in both directions while cunty-chops there dodders his way down.

Thankyou for flying Air DeathBoy, that complimentary elbow you got in the ribs as I went past is all just part of the fucking service we provide for our 1st class shit-heel customers.

On the positive side, lest anyone think that London is as unfeeling as I'm repeatedly told, there were three other people who offered to help me with the pram when they saw me getting to the bottom of some stairs, in one case, a petite lassy who probably would have put her back out if I'd taken her up on it.

I did let the city gent in the suit help me, as I was shattered by then, and have to say it was a treat to find a polite member of his apparent social class on the underground. If there's one group of people i've been repeatedly shoved, shouted-at and pushed-in-front-of by, it's been businessmen in expensive suits, to whom the idea of common courtesy seemingly is alien. This chap, however, restored my faith a little.

Oh, aye, and we had a really helpful and accomodating waiter at the restaurant, who went the extra mile to make things easy for us with the nipper in tow.

A 4:1 nice-to-dickheads ratio is quite acceptable, go Londoners!

fuck. I've got to start work now.

no rest for the wicked.

XP fun

Windows XP tip:

if you have your taskbar set to auto-hide (like any sensible human) and it won't, try clicking to maximise, then clicking again to minimise every app on the bar.

one of them impolitely wants your attention and won't let the bar hide until you've brought the app up then dismissed it.

yes, this is shit.

yes, I still love XP.