Lone star sick boy

Just a quick update. Moved my life into storage on Friday. Spent the weekend at friends, cleaning the house and got our deposit back (miracles do happen!). Was supposed to fly out of Cardiff at 6am to Houston, but got delayed due to fog or some such. Pretty sure pilots just need some lights on the runway and instruments, but what do I know?
Set off 2 hours late, landed in Amsterdam having missed the flight, then re-routed to Toronto, but that plane was late too, and arrived in toronto too late to get the connecting to Houston. Ended up staying in the Sheraton over the road, courtesy of Continental. Not too shabby. got some meal vouchers which covered maybe the breadrolls for dinner.
pleasant Canadian waiter suggested Rickards Red which was indeed tasty. The steak was more well done than medium rare, but I was tired having being trekking the globe for 18 hours. Tried in vain to tweet a friend in toronto. I was passing through, it seemed a rare opportunity…
Sadly my phone was out of juice and my charger was in my luggage which I assumed was in Houston by then. Little did I know.
So I failed to meet up, but slept like the dead, and up for another early flight at 7.55 which actually left at about 9.30.
made it to Houston 24 hours later than I should have done.

then found out luggage was nowhere to be found. not even in the system. Oh well.

After two days of incompetence two of them turned up, no sign of the other one, and then out of the blue, a courier woke us up at 2am with the bag. Whilst I admire the above and beyond’ level of service, it might have been nice to wait until the morning.

Whatever. I got some free clothes thanks to continental. finally have my luggage (the 2am wake up was last night), getting over the jet lag, and have eaten large quantities of food. Great Texan barbecue at a place called Joes… Awesome.

Texans are very friendly, and somewhat creepily happy all the time. I suspect it’s all a front and they are secretly planning to lynch me. the refrain from Deliverance pops into my mind unbidden a lot, but I;m sure it’s nothing.

I think I may have gained 20 pounds since I got here. not that I couldnt do with gaining 20 pounds.

so, if my updates are somewhat sporadic over the next 2 weeks its because I am eating my way through Texas, and on my return at the beginning of the year I will be moving into a new house. Oh, and then a new job.

I had too many margaritas last night at the mexican and spent the morning and afternoon alternately feeling ill, throwing up or having a headache.
Just starting to feel human again, but might skip the monstro-food escapades tonight, and the drinking.

I’d like to repeat my tweet from earlier this week.
Never fly KLM. Their service is awful, and their staff incompetent. Although the in-flight meals are good. This is no way makes up for the confused hell I went through.

Ode to C

I can never thank you enough,
For introducing me,
To the CelebFash hilarity,
That is GoFugYourself…

Unusually for a man,
I do like a good chortle,
At whatever Posh Spice is,
Wearing this weekend…

FIN

Change is Good Part 2

I am playing with the new QuickPress feature on the dashboard. It is, well, quick.
(Aside: Where the hell did Dame Wiggy go? Wiggy! Why do you keep disappearing when my back is turned…
What was all that malarkey with Marco and why did that happen? I never understand anything that goes on at your blog…are you constantly drunk? Did the crazed woman stop stalking you, for whatever reason that was happening, which you didn’t explain properly either…unless you did it in some kind of youtube pictionary way. Thinking about it, I think possibly Dame Wiggy may have been one of those feral children who turn up and speak their own strange language, only instead of strange grunts and runes, Wiggy used youtubes as some kind of interpretive symbolism)
Ok so that was less of an aside and more of a whole paragraph. Sorry.

No. Crap. I lost the thread again. I’ll come back.

Change is good, although the menus suck

I have a little rant about WordPress 2.7

So, WordPress 2.7. Turned out ok, all ajaxy goodness. Drag and drop, turning off of things I don’t need….categories and tags back in the right hand column where they belong. 

Still some bugs in Google Chrome, but you know, I’ll forgive that for now. 

The menu though? Sheesh what a pile of cack. Granted the existing WordPress.com menu system was awful involving 72 clicks to get anywhere, but as anyone who has used self-hosted wordpress with the ozh dropdown menu plugin, we were kind of hoping WordPress would have the good sense to implement something similar. The ozh menus are so easy to use, they take up no screen real estate – one click and you are where you want to be.

2.7 has a side menu that has neither the elegance of ozh drop down menus, nor the simplicity of the old menu system. 

in order to have access to the stuff you need, you need to have all the menus open at once, which then involves you scrolling up and down like a demented er, scrolly thing. Why not implement a system whereby the menu drops down when you hover over the arrow? Why not have the menu you previously had open automatically close up when you open another menu? Why not give us some more options to have the menu work the way we prefer? Everything else is customisable, but the menu is stuck in this useless testament to usability failure. 

I did have a brief moment of joy when I discovered that I could turn off the open and close menu crap and get a pop out menu instead, but you only have icons with that method, and I don;t need to be trying to remember which icon means what. 

The dashboard is riddled with ajax drag and drop usefulness. Why not allow us to move menu sections up and down as we please? It is counter-intuitive. I have no notion what they were thinking of when they designed the menu. The top menu WordPress uses is great. Fast, dropdowns – get where you want to in seconds – only I rarely need any of those things very much, so getting to them fast is not much of a bonus for me. I want fast access to the stuff I use constantly, and 2.7 fails very very badly in this regard.

Saying that, the menu is the ONLY thing I don’t like about 2.7.

The ability to customise the dashboard widget placement is great, the ability to switch stuff off with the sceen options tool is great, the general UI is nice, and clean, if a little grey and wishy washy. It would be nice if there were a few colour schemes for the admin side.  (edit: I just discovered the admin colour schemes in the profile. Wish washy grey or wishy washy blue. Nice. Thanks…)

Good to see categories back on the right of the post. 

Overall, good, but with a decent menu system it would have been awesome. Oh well. Maybe 2.8 will improve things there.

 

I was going to do one of my patented two part posts, but the 2nd part is being slow, so I’ll do it seperately.

Twitter addendum

I neglected to mention. My twitter username is darkentries, strangely enough. Please do follow me. I never tire of peoples inane chirpings whilst bored at work. 

Stephen Fry is following me. I would feel honoured, only he is following 20,000 other people too.

End times

I. Wherein I ponder the fact that the world has gone ‘effin crazy

Possibly it’s just me (not for the first time) but there’s a whole bunch of stuff happening recently that to my, albeit neurotic mind, could maybe herald the apocalypse. We’ve all become so media-saturated with our 24 hour news blogging, twittering commentary live from some bloke on a mobile at the scene, that perhaps we are inured to the crazy shit that goes on, and have missed the salient details like, the end of the world is nigh.

 (yes that sentence could have done with some more punctuation, or rather other punctuation besides the blessed comma, but I don’t care.)

 

Possibly the gray camouflage would have been better

 

Ok, so maybe not armageddon, but really… a militia squad armed to the teeth wanders through Mumbai, spraying chaos wildly and taking over a couple of hotels. It’s not something you expect to happen outside of a William Gibson novel, at least, not until recently. 

Add to that the fact that you can’t turn round without some natural disaster blowing up in your face, wars going on in every little corner of the globe and invading other countries becoming de rigour rather than generally frowned upon. It used to be that when you invaded another country it triggered a world war. Now we barely bat an eyelid. 

Although impressed by Obama’s oratory style (and what fan of the West Wing hasn’t been waiting for the day when a President could actually deliver a speech that both made sense and made people excited?) I can’t help but harbour some vague doubts that he could very well turn out to be the antichrist. I mean, come on. Nobody is that smooth. He just popped up out of nowhere, and was miraculously nominated as the Democratic candidate over The Clinton? Then as fortune would have it, the Republicans decided to pick a walrus shooting, retard as their best choice for vice-president, backing up someone who in all probability would be unlikely to make it through the excitment of inauguration day. No. Sorry. It smacks of mind control to me.

Or collusion.

Or something.

…

Antichrist. 

…

Anyhoo. Just warning you. Best stock up on bottled water and peanut butter cups…

 

II. Wherein I twitter and speak of pipes

Speaking of twitter, which I was earlier, go and check if you don’t believe me, I have joined the ranks of twitterers. I had an account I used for work, but have set up a personal account so I can update the world of my mindtootlings even when I can’t be arsed to open up wordpress and write something sensible. Which is most of the time. 

I used twitterfeed (dot com) to feed my blog updates to twitter, then got the twitter rss feed  so I could plonk an rss widget in my sidebar. WordPress (dot com) arse-achingly failing to have produced a twitter widget despite there being one squillion users now. However I was unhappy with the rss feed displaying only the date and no time, and also rather redundantly displaying my blog updates to the twitter updates on my erm, blog. 

Not to be defeated, I played around with Yahoo Pipes for the first time, which are one of those scary things that I avoid because they involve complex programming jiggery pokery, whereas I am happy only doing pleasant things with html and css and images. Anyway, as is customary I found someone elses work to steal, and then proceeded to adapt it to my uses, i.e. removing the blog updates and hiding any @replies, and keeping the time in there. 

If anyone wants to use the marvellous darkentries twitter pipe you can find it here: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=a91386bd4a85cc29d0a484359d19f185

My twitterfeed prefix is blog update, so you’ll need to change that in the pipe to whatever you use as a prefix for your twitterfeed blog updates. Other than that, you just enter your twitter username, run the pipe, and get the resulting rss url. Slap that into an rss widget and the jobs a good’un. 

None of that made any sense to most of you did it? Never mind, I am sure many confused wanderers will happen by searching for ‘twitter yahoo pipe for wordpress’ and then leave all happy and with a shiny new widget. How benevolent I am. 

Anyway, soldiering on, for those of you who fiddle with such things, understand what a mashup is, and have basically not wandered off to read something else yet, Yahoo Pipes is really really cool. Which is a shame because they’ll be bankrupt within a year or so I’m sure. 

Twitter Updates will live in the top right, unless I figure out a way to get them to post themselves as real posts.

The cat is dead

Long live the cat…

 

I forgot to mention. A few weeks ago my beloved fluffcat died. Luckily we had a replacement cat waiting in the wings. Behold, Zola, the shelfcat!

 

cake or death reprise – Cake, then death please.

I forgot the point of the previous post in my tangential ramblings. (tangential – word or not?) 

I was talking about not going on about the inner whinings I have endured regarding the existence of my blog. I guess I succeeded by then forgetting what I was not going to talk about. But, to summarise. As with any recovery blogger, I feel a certain pressure to keep talking about the stuff that my readers originally came here for, i.e the depressing stuff. 

Alas, most of the time, these days I am just not very depressed. Whilst depression might suck, it does tend to give one a certain fire in the belly to whine about how crap life is. Thats good, it gets it out into the open, where it can’t fester inside like a tumour of misery. 

however, without that fire I find it kind of difficult to motivate myself to write in this blog, because, as I mentioned,  I feel a certain obligation to write only from the pen of doom, and not the quill of contentment. 

I don’t know why. Hardly anyone reads this thing, so it’s main object is just to be a place to let me write stuff. But there’s always a part of me that fears boring the crap out of people. I think it’s that way for many bloggers. We want to write interesting stuff. Dramatic stuff. Well-researched stuff. We don’t want to write myspace-like drivel about what we did at the weekend. Which is weird considering most depresso-bloggers ™ want nothing more than a nice quiet boring non-depressive life. 

So, those are the things I have being considering. On the one hand, I feel this blog would be difficult to turn into a normal blog about whatever the hell comes into my mind. On the other hand, I don’t particularly want to start a whole new blog. This is me. The bad and the good. I don’t want to keep two blogs. That would just be doubly stressful and leave me with two things to worry that I’m neglecting.

In other news, this month has been a bit of an action-packed whirlwind, so much so that I haven’t really had a chance to take stock yet. Here’s a quick summary:

• Made friends with my stepmother who I haven’t spoken to for about three years due to a massive argument we had. 
• Hugged my father for the first time ever, well, since I was too young to remember anyway. This is a big one. My father is emotionally distant. I am therefore emotionally distant with my family. I bit the bullet and did it anyway, as it became clear that expecting him to do it first was just childish. Yes, I am the child, but I am not a child. 
• Hugged my father a couple more times. Seemed churlish to stop after one. 
• Got a job. After a couple of months of interviews, fear and loathing. Rejection. More interviews. Fear. Loathing. 
• Getting aforementioned job means I can now make the move to a new and more interesting city (well, to a city) that I have been wanting to do for some time. Scary. Exciting. 
• Put on some weight and exercised a bunch. I should post a bit more about this, but long story short, eating well and exercise helps mood disorders. Who knew! 
• Some other stuff that made me happy and was exciting and life-changing that I am not going into in this blog.

 

So basically, before my psych has even completed his interminable assessment of my maladaptive schema I am solving most of my long-standing issues. What the hell am I paying him for? 

I’m moving anyway, so I am going to be seeing a new psych in the new city. hopefully this one will move a little faster. I may as well just charge myself £75 an hour.

cake or death

Another nearly two months slides by, like a slightly greased piglet sneaking through the undergrowth. 

This isn’t much of a recovery blog is it? Haha, I am feeling much better, and I will take my secrets to my grave with me. See you in hell suckers! 

To be honest, I don’t see much benefit in sharing the secrets of my success with those who come after. I am me, and you – I fear – are you. What is good for the goose… and such. 

I won’t recapitulate the ’shall I shan’t I?’ conversations that have gone in my head (sorry, but having one of those things where a word looks all weird and I can’t figure out if it is actually a real word or just something my mind made up on the spur. Shan’t. Can’t be real can it? What is it contracted from? Oh, I just gave in and looked it up. It is real, and is contracted from Shall not. So thats alright then. got to kill these parentheses….’Shut it down!’ – Dark City, 1998) about stopping blogging althogether, or starting a new blog in which I no longer feel the pressure to blog about the inner workings of my mind for fear everyone (i.e the two people who probably still have me in their feedoramas) gets bored and wanders off. If nobody reads your blog do you cease to exist? Like Gods? On a tangent, wouldn’t it be great if God/Goddess/Gods/Whoever had a blog. ParticuIarly God. Gods and Goddesses have it alright. They’re pretty hip right now. I think it would endear such an outdated figure like God to a whole new audience if God himself gave regular updates on his thoughts about his creation. Perhaps weighed in on the big political debates of the day. Maybe I should suggest it to the pope?
Does the pope have a blog? I must investigate.  

Apparently not. But he should have. My point exactly. They’re not even trying to engage with the youth of today are they? Is it any surprise that teenagers are all flopping around with funny coloured hair being all angst filled.

I ran out of steam on this blog post. I just had a two day break, which mostly consisted of me having a migraine. Had to spend the day in bed yesterday. Still had a headache when I woke up this morning, but dragged myself into work anyway. I necked a handful of paracetemol driving into work, trying to enjoy the new chumbawumba album that my dad sent me (but failing because it’s folky…folky!) washed down with freshly ground coffee (because thats how you fix migraines goddamit!) 
I envy the people who arise early in the morning, wash, shave, perform the daily ablutions, sit down to a civilised breakfast, drink coffee whilst watching a little CNN or some such. They drive into work humming a little song or something pondering their days tasks. 

My mornings consists of re-setting the alarm 15 minutes further on, sleeping some more, re-setting the alarm again. Once I’m good and late, I fall out of bed, stumble around the house pretending I don’t’ really need to shave, pour hot water into a cafetiere which I haul out to the car with me and pour into my thermos cup which has the rancid remains of several days of old coffee in it. I drive to work, trying to clear dreams from my mind, and confusing reality with my demented hallucinations. 

Every day I swear I will get up earlier, have a sensible morning and be on time and prepared. Every morning I fail. 

Still, at least I have a job and make it to work. Thats a fairly major feat I think. 

 

I would write more, but I fear I will wander off for another two days. I’ll just start another post.

even thinking of a blog title seems too much effort

It appears to have been nearly two months since I last posted. Time flies doesn’t it? 

I have been:

• Looking for a job as my current job expires at the end of December
• Having therapy for the first time in my life, which so far has been less than impressive
• Spending time with my soon to be sister-in-law
• Dealing with the repurcussions of looking for a job – i.e insecurities, self-confidence or lack thereof, panic, fear, denial, fear of change, etc, rinse repeat
• Waiting for summer to happen, getting upset when it doesn’t, getting down, beating myself up about it, calming down again
• Coming off prozac, thinking I was going to be drug free and wonderful for two days, and then losing it completely, and going back on prozac very quickly. 
• Prancing around various gay bars in Soho and being very disappointed with the action, although the Cobb Salad at Balans was great, and there was a girl with a belt-like skirt at BKB that my sister in law was quite taken with. The G.A.Y bar was a dive, and in need of more comfy chairs, but the O Bar had nice wine. 
• Failing to get a job I wanted, but managing to prepare for, make it to, and not freak out in and run out of the interview shrieking was a victory. 
• Dealing with old family feuds, fears and bitterness. 

All in all. An eventful two months. I feel pretty good, I have hope for the future, and if patterns are anything to go by, not blogging would seem to coincide with my happier times. I’ve always been a miserable writer. Anguish fuels my creativity. 

Anguish sucks. I long to be bored and fat.