Posting on the blogspot dashboard about the 'storm' virus which managed to hijack peoples blogs, leaving links which, if the clinically thick clicked on them, would infect their computer. I've had a load of the same 'storm' emails sent to my account at work, notable for their, according to the bbc, cleverly crafted emails. I wonder if, in the future, as we give more and more personal information away on our social networking sites and wotnot, that we will get more personally crafted emails...for example, 'Dude, what were you thinking of' will certainly not get my attention but something along the lines of 'John, you left the gas on...click here for film of your house burning to the ground' would pipe straight into my anxieties and get me clicking on that infected link faster than you can say 'Trojan Horse, yes please'.

Off to see the Borne Ultimatum this evening, with my chum W. Should be good, first night no less, so expect lots of Borne enthusiasts. Which will either be lots of muscle bound young men or very, very geeky pale people.

For those of you who care, Reynolds new book 'The Prefect' is set in the Glitter Band before the melding plague. Excellent. It also has a great scene which totally captures the feeling that you get when someone says to you 'that last page update you did? I think you actually managed to delete our website'.

aacch, as we Scots like to say. That was a nasty few hours of packing up the remaining crap from the outer storage room (more like the outer fucking limits) into the nice boxes supplied to us by the moving firm. Now its the inner space's turn, as our attention turns to the jungle of wires, obsolete electronics, state of the art consoles, two years worth of new scientists, shares, bank statements, simpsons memorabilia, eldritch war boots and panties that is the storage room. Inner sanctum, my arse - exactly.

Sanctum, was incidently, a comic yarn which I read a few weeks ago. Not bad, but a little disjointed, mind you though, the art work was good.

tired now, must sleep and read some more A. Reynolds latest (The Prefect) before I catch some zzzzz's.

When a day you know is Monday starts off sounding like a Thursday afternoon then you know, somewhere, something has gone horribly wrong. Apologies to Mr Wyndham (or was it Doctor, probably, and in the medical sense I expect).
My good friend J wondered what had happened to the blog (I'm guessing the general lack of activity and, perhaps, the rather distressingly bland template)so I felt moved to add something...
An update - I'm currently working my arse off in the run up to working half time or so. Which, in effect, will probably mean I end of working some very very long days. The good news is that the website launch is going pretty well, it will be vanilla rather than chunky monkey, but tasty nonetheless.

Reading: Just actually finished 'Black Man' by the god of the sci fi action thriller that is Richard Morgan. Brilliant. Just decided to bin reading Romanitas (which, thinking about it, sounds like a medical condition) by Sophia Mcdougall which is pants, though a good idea (roman empire never collapsed and now, in the present day, occupies most of the planet). Finished Transcendent by Stephen Baxter, okay I suppose -whats next I wonder, Effervescent?

Playing: Oblivion, which is so fucking huge its just ridiculous and FEAR, which is actually way to scary. What a sad sack I am.

Moving: Well, I started packing carefully. Selecting items which should be sent to the dump, or stuff which it would be handy to have on the first few days of the move, and then carefully labelling boxes. After about five minutes of that I had resorted to tipping the same draw fulls of crap I've been moving around now for the last 10 years into boxes, once again, without sorting them. I'm sure I'm still carrying around front door keys for the first student house I lived in.

Annoyed: The pain in my shoulder which has come back to say hello, just as my pull up regime was hitting its stride. This was caused by a cheeky undercling on a gnarly 5b (english) problem.

WELL...managed to fuck that up nicely. SUCK! as we say in Swedish, I'll get back to this....Big Sweaty Bollock.

Watched: Hot Fuzz, lovely.
Listening: Ane Brun, sublime.

Messing around with the Google maps API to see how easy it is to use in the university website. Answer: Very. If a monkey like me can get into their blog in about, oooohh, all of twenty minutes then I imagine my resident java experts and wotnot will have no trouble at all.

Sick joke of the day: This popped into my head earlier. Actually, no, it's just too nasty.

Sensations: It's very hot in my office. Southfacing, no air conditioning. 5 metre high windows. Very sticky.

36 years wiser and writing some words, though not many mind, just to stop the blog from completely drying up...it's that time of year when a young man's thoughts turn to the holiday season, his sap begins to rise and he thinks of things other than the impending launch of a new website which he is pretty much single handedly responsible for. How an earth did that happen? Hornblower! Man the pumps!

Just watched Metallica on Live Earth, fucking excellent!

The dashboard (still in Swedish) tells me that its been weeks since I blogged. If you're actually reading this then it means that you cared enough to come and see if anything had changed, for which I thank you....I also worry that maybe you need to fill your life with some, perhaps rather more interesting things to do. Perhaps the sock draw needs to be organised, or that ant hill at the bottom of the garden needs attending to (you know, the one which glows that sickly yellow colour at night and which makes strange booming noises).

Loads happened at work today but because my colleagues are very switched web people I don't dare talk about lest I be discovered and summarily executed.

Its midsummer tomorrow which means dancing around the ringed tree and singing about frogs, I kid you not.

Ultravox New Europeans lyrics funny how wrong you can be, for bloody years (well, in fact since 1980) I thought old Midge sung "put up your chilling tendrils, his senses slip away" - which clearly makes little sense when in fact he sang "Full of future thoughts and thrills, his senses slip away", which makes a lot more sense. In a similar vein, I always thought titch sung, in Vienna "a man, and a duck, in a picture frame, so mystical and soulful", which as a bad poetry writing teenager I thought was, like, wow, really deep maaaan. I probably would have figured this one out a lot earlier had it not been for a picture in a student house which had, curiously, a man, a duck, and rather obviously, a picture frame. This was, for me, certain confirmation of my belief. Sadly, I was wrong. He actually sings "a man, in the dark, in a picture frame". Oh, and while we're on the subject he also did not sing "Please remember to mention me, in case you leave me behind" (on the track 'All stood still') but "in tapes you leave behind"...I think my version is rather better, actually.

Where would we be without t'internet, eh?

What can I say, probably too much. A stonking 10 day followed by a few glasses of wine and most of the first season, and some of the second, of Spaced makes me far too maudlin. So I'm going to go to bed, first removing my contact lens, prosthetic arms and trouser press.

lovely chubs.

The instrument panel for my blog has turned, annoyingly, over to using Swedish rather than Her Majesties English, which is fucking useful, isn't it. It was the same with my iPod, simply because the pc is running in Swedish it assumes that it should run in Swedish too...anyway, back to work tommorrow after two days of holiday grafted onto a weekend. Thursday was whitsun, you see, which made friday a 'clämdag'(i.e. a day falling between a public holiday and a weekend)and thus it became a holiday too.

I would blog more but a nice cup of tea calls.


Todays amusing link: Rate your students

Incident of the day: Upending a load of porridge powder on the floor. E immediately grabbed handfulls of it and proceeding to stuff them in his mouth, where the powder became a strange dough like substance which stuck to his face and mouth like glue. Lovely.

Two days of giving seminars, all well and good but it distracts me from my job which is a little annoying as the clock is ticking (i.e. whole new content for the website to deliver, and only 10 months left to it.). Maybe I shouldn't complain, 'Rome was built in a day', as they say.

And now I remember the useless bollocks which I want to share. Ipod conversations. Not talking to your ipod but rather the wierd conversations it has when you scroll down through song titles. All you have to do is create two personas, give each alternate song titles and then enjoy a strange, cryptic and, at times, affecting conversation. No cheating, you can't move, or omit songs. For example:

on the street corner...

Dude 1: Ain't my bitch
Dude 2: Ain't no right
Dude 1: Ain't that unusual?

the brief encounter...

Dude 1: Do anything you want to
Dude 2: Do I know you?

the truth hurts...

Dude 1: Has my fire really gone out?
Dude 2: Hate to say I told you so

the uncharitable...

Dude 1: Help the aged
Dude 2: Help yourself

the wierd...

Dude 1: I'm a chump
Dude 2: I'm a man
Dude 1: I'm amazed
Dude 2: I'm leaving now

the come on..

Dude 1: I'm partial to your abracadabra
Dude 2: I'm the only gay eskimo

the point scoring...

Dude 1: I don't like drugs
Dude 2: I don't play piano

and the saddest breakup...

Dude 1: I just called to say I love you
Dude 2: I just don't know what to do with myself
Dude 1: I just want to have something to do
Dude 2: I know it's over
Dude 1: I like you

and the odd...

Dude 1: I wanna be adored
Dude 2: I wanna be sedated

and the sex scene...

Dude 1: It's right in front of you
Dude 2: It's true that we love one another
Dude 1: It's up to you
Dude 2: It ain't gonna work
Dude 1: It can't come quickly enough
Dude 2: It feels good
Dude 1: It must be love

and the forgetful...

Dude 1: Where's Captain Kirk
Dude 2: Where's me jumper
Dude 1: Where is my mind?

and the put down...

Dude 1: You look so fine
Dude 2: You need hands

And to think I could have used the last five minutes to meaningfully improve my life. Suck. ('sigh', in Swedish)

A capital place for panic attacks | Review | The Observer

A capital place for panic attacks Review The Observer: "Red-eyed, rage-fuelled monsters; flesh-ripping special effects; murderous military interventions; helicopter-powered mass decapitations "...can't wait!!

YouTube - Danger 50,000 Volts: Zombies-Staring Nick Frost(Hot Fuzz)

YouTube - Danger 50,000 Volts: Zombies-Staring Nick Frost(Hot Fuzz)...must check this out when I have time, just about to settle down and watch 'Black Dahlia', against my better judgement.

Word of the day: bicekorv (Swedish), the English translation being, literally, 'poo sausage'. As in, "who left this poo sausage on the bathroom floor?"

UN scientists warn time is running out to tackle global warming | Climate change | Guardian Unlimited Environment

UN scientists warn time is running out to tackle global warming Climate change Guardian Unlimited Environment: "unrestrained greenhouse gas emissions could drive global temperatures up as much as 6C by 2100, triggering a surge in ocean levels, destruction of vast numbers of species, economic devastation in tropical zones and mass human migrations."

lovely.

Howtopedia - simple technologies, simply shared

sweet and simple: Howtopedia - simple technologies, simply shared

World Without Oil :: Document Your Life In The New Reality

Kinda interesting, an alternate reality game trying to create real world action (read as, knit your own yoghurt version of second life)...World Without Oil :: Document Your Life In The New Reality

Argh, what to say...it was Valborg over the weekend (the end of winter celebrations) which meant a good pagan burn up on the beach with lashings of sausages, lovely. As it's Sweden, a sing song was essential..stuff about good riddance to winter, a welcome to the summer and where's the sausages, or something. Speaking of sausages, it's sausage club tomorrow morning at work. Which is always nice.

Reading: Charles Stross, Jennifer Morgue.
Trying to avoid: Spending much money this month as I want to be able to buy a '360 at the end of the month with clear consience. 'Daddy, I'm hungry'. 'Quiet son, I'm playing Oblivion'.
Pleased with: Coming 6th in the 10K I did over the weekend (47 minutes and change), the starting line was about 50 people so that was a reasonably respectable position and time - particularly as my training began two weeks ago and consisted of precisely two runs outside...and I wonder why I had a blister the size of Britain on my foot. And I can never remember that Second Skin, the spray on bandage, used to hurt as much as it did when I treated my aforementioned injury with Spray on Acid, which is probably what it actually said on the can. Next race in about a months time, another 10K, the aim is to get 45 minutes. We'll see.