All the years I’ve been using vi as my main editor and I’ve only just discoverd the joy of macros. Doh! All these years I could have been building up a personal armoury of useful vi tools and instead I’ve been typing out the hard way. Honestly, what a wanker.

Talking of arms, the filth have announced a new gun amnesty in march. During this period you may give up any guns you own without risking legal action for posession. This normally results in many, many people handing Grandad’s Luger, or Uncle Nick’s MP5, over to the police. So I have to wonder why there is an end date to the amnesty ? If people want to give up their weapons, and they obviously do, why end the amnesty ? What happens if you try to submit your AK on the day after the amnesty ?
“Sorry sir, I’m afraid the amnesty’s over now – whilst we appreciate your public spiritedness we are legally obliged to bang you up. Tell you what, if I pretend I never saw you, perhaps you could dispose of it yourself. Dump it in the river maybe, or sell it to some children on the estate – and I’ll say no more about it”.

Saturday night – PARTY NIGHT!
Michele is out up the pub with Shiney and I’m sat here writing this. At home. On the computer (teapot). In the dark. On my own. On a saturday night.
How sad am I ?
Well….not very in fact. I actually enjoy it.
One of the best things about being grown-up is the honesty we can afford ourselves. Many years ago the pressure to “go out and enjoy yorself” would have forced me to go out on a saturday night to somewhere I didn’t really want to be and drink too much.
Nowdays I’m happy enough to stay at home and ignore those lying bastard voices in my head that tell me life is better up the pub on a saturday night. It isn’t, it never will be and never was…well probably. Saturday is the crappest night to go out – it’s amateurs night. All these twats come out who only go out one night a week. They don’t drink too much on normal week nights – only the weekend. For the professional drinker such as me, this is a pain in the arse. They get pissed, get stroppy and get depserate. Don’t get me wrong, I love going out up the pub. I do it a lot – but saturday nights can fuck right off. So many times I’ve gone up the pub, not because I wanted to, but because I thought I should. Each time it was ok…sometimes it was good…but then sometimes it was crap. Either way it would have been better, easier, and cheaper not to have bothered. That feeling like I was “missing out” used to tear me apart. Knowing that not going out I was missing out on vital social events felt harsh – until I realised that it makes not one sodsworth of difference. OK, I admit that when you are single it can make a difference – but then that is the point isn’t it ? Isn’t that why we go to the clubs and pubs ?
For men it’s the opportunity to get your feathers seen and (in an ideal world) spread your seed. For women it is the chance to choose the perfect sperm to breed with. Don’t you fucking dare call me sexist… we’re all animals. You may interpret flirting as “a bit of fun” or “making me feel attractive” but it all comes down to animal passions. We like to think we’re more sophisticated than that – but we’re not. People can intellectulise it all they like, but in reality it all reduces down to nature and reproduction. We’re no more in control of our actions than birds, dogs and monkeys.
Hey look – I’ve had a couple of bottles of wine and am rambling. I’m sorry. Why not download some blakes 7, some funky tunes,light a scented candle, drink some wine, and drift off to sleep being stimulated by 4 out of 5 of your senses.

How many mondays have you felt saddened when people ask you “how was your weekend ?”. Well this weekend I can reply totally positively.
To be honest I wasn’t relishing the though of going out with Michele’s friends, the Callaghans, on saturday – I like them and all but wasn’t feeling too sociable – but I’m so glad I went.
In the theatre bar I bumped into an old Goldsmiths student, Phillipa, and remembered her name! 10 cool points to me. She didn’t remember mine (-10) but she remembered me (+2). I then went on to explain to Michele that despite her sounding dreary she was cool and really nice….without realising she was sitting directly behind me at the time (-100).
Oh well. Anyway it was lovely to see the Callaghans, especially Mary. The play was superb – “Iron” by Rona Munro. The only other things she’d written that I’d seen was “Butterfly Butterfly” which was grim as fuck. This was just as good, but not quite so grim.
Afterwards Loch, Mary and Chris took us out for a really good meal in a restaurant called “Oriels”. We ate nice food, talked and laughed, and after all that’s what life should be all about. Ok it wasn’t quite as good as gastro Gastro but as someone who enjoys eating anything, I loved it. A great night.
Today was great as well. Michele and I went down to the ironically named “Good View” noodle bar in Lewisham and ate way too much yummy food. Later in the day we went to my mum and dad’s and ate way too much yummy food. And we laughed a lot. That’s what a good weekend should be about. Work tomorrow doesn’t seem like a drag at all. ENVY ME!

Dreaming is when your mind goes off from reality, usually because not much is going on there apart from snoring, and creates a fantasy world where anything can happen. Our bland, drab, routine lives are left behind as we are free to explore the limitless possibilities the world has to offer without tedious real-life considerations such as wealth, work and phone bills. So, why then are my dreams so utterly crap ?

Rather than dream about going into space to relax in an intergalactic pleasure dome with its own vinyard I dream about forgetting appointements, arguing with people I like and being slightly late for something important.
The worse thing about such crap dreams is when you don’t properly remember them, but the experiences lurk in the dull recesses of your mind and eventually become memories. That’s such a cruel trick. I once had a really paranoid dream about a group of friends telling me to fuck off. I forgot all about the dream, but the next time I met one of them, there was a slight feeling of discomfort in the back of my head.
Then there are the ones where you dream something really cool and wake up to find it’s not true. I used to get those a lot as a kid, like the one where I had a Merlin. Upon waking I excitedly opened my bedisde cabinet to play with it only to find that it wasn’t there – instead there was a marketing pamphlet for Merlin explaining how much fun it is when you’ve got one.
Michele’s dad had a smiliar dream as a child. He came down the next day, obviously very unhappy and asked his mum “where are all the puppies ?”.

So here are a list of some of the crappest dream scanarios I’ve had recently:

• Aries (a UNIX box at work) going down and needed to bee rebooted from CD. This was in real-time.
• Being wrongly imprisoned for tax evasion and being told by another con about the state of the place inside, and how the floor was covered in KY jelly, blood and shit
• Being late for work
• Writing a program in C to do something really unexciting
• Describing, in extreme detail, something to do with cryptography that in reality makes no sense at all
• Getting caught skiving by the boss
• Michele leaving me for a right wanker

Not that I’ve got anything to write or anything interesting to say…
Today was another pub experience. Geoff, Paul the pick, Brodie, Benners and I ate and laughed about stuff. Michele came up after work and we had a quick drink with Claire, Liz, Alan, Zap (whose voice now sounds much less like a 10-year-old dalek), Geoff and Lynn.
Michele and Claire, both being girls, spent ages discussing small glass bottles of coloured liquid. Bless their little female hearts.
Then Michele and I went to Gastro Gastro – a really nice (although fucking expensive) restaurant, in deptford. The chef came out to accept compliments, although I have to say they were deserved. The food is great. I’ve no idea what sort of style you could say it was, but it’s good. At a guess I’d say it was a sort of anglo-italian-carribean-spanish sort of thing. The chef is a really nice bloke anyway.
To round the evening off we caught a cab and had a typicallly unimaginative argument on the way home. Pity, it was going really well until then.
Ah but a brief soujourn in the local Spar got us both Laughing. If anyone is interested in nominating someone for an MBE, I suggest Jay from the Tyrwhitt Rd Spar. How he keeps up his level of humour and sarcasm is anyone’s guess. Such a good shop that.

A nice few days really. On saturday we went on the biggest anti-war demo in british history. Possibly the biggest demo about anything in british history. “We” was me, Alex, Mod, Ben and Michele. Yes Michele came! Her first demo and what a demo it was. Everything you could ask for drummers, banners, whistles and 2 million people! Fantastic. We got to Hyde Park and spent long enough there to take a picture and then fucked off to find an empty pub. Obviously we failed and ended up sitting outside in the freezing fucking cold. However we did meet up with Toby, Petra, and Mod’s friend Justine. After following some shit advice from Ben (sorry Ben 🙂 we walked about 200 miles to find a pub that had closed down and ended up in a very poncy wine/cocktail bar in Kensington. It wasn’t all bad tho because apart from being reasonably priced they gave away plates of Nachos and we got a seat. Cool.

Since then we’ve had Tony “The right cunt” Blair changing tack and trying to convince us that the war is going to be after a humanitarian cause, and the U.S. chucking their toys out of the pram and organising sactions against Germany because of their recluctance to kill thousands of brown people in order to build a new world fascists order… Funny old world….

On tuesday I went to an Apple seminar with Dave Riddle. An interesting day, but a bit Mosley: they all wear black with small white logos on the breast and start by telling you how cool and empowering their software is. They smile and talk about how mellow macos X is..until you ask them a question….then their faces turn stony as they announce “we can’t tell you about that”. Yeah.
Here is my list of question that are guarenteed to reveal the corproate fascist lurking behind the facade of a friendly Apple salesman

• How much is the upgrade from MacOS X server 10.1 to 10.2
• Will MacOS X ever support smb (Windows Networking) for home folders ?
• I bought 10.1 and it doesn’t work, where can I download the upgrade to 10.2 where the bugs have been fixed
• I’ve been a hardcore mac supporter for 15 years but for some reason you won’t let me upgrade to your latest system…why not ?
• Your open source policy is great and I’ve spent many hours developing chunks of your lucrative system for you for free, but I can’t seem to find the source to aqua/quartz/etc – where can I download it ?
• Are there any seminars planned that don’t involve making us, your already loyal supporters, sit through your latest diabolical advertising propaganda ?

Well yes, it is a bit crap that I haven’t written since Jan 23rd. The problem is that the longer I leave writing something the more difficult it becomes to write because I know it’s going to have be quite long. This why I’m so crap at keeping on touch with people. For example, Marla. Marla is someone who I really miss, but only write to once a year. By the power of e-mail we could talk daily but we don’t. After a week of no contact with someone you realise that the next time you write it’s going to be a long, long letter and take ages to write. So you better wait until you have time to write it properly, and of course that time never comes. The longer you wait for a “suitable time” the more difficult it becomes to write. Then people think you just don’t write back because you’re an arrogant wanker. Oh dear… Sorry to Marla, Alex, Tony, Dave, Andy, Tina, Nicola (not necessarily in that order of course) and all of the other people I love but never write to. I’m just crap.
Anyway, since Jan 23rd my life has consisted of

• Being really bloody ill for a week
• Completing my Tax Return Yay!. Even though it turns out I owe the cunts a grand because of the incompetence of an account at a previous job it’s a weight off my mind
• Being depressed by the state of the world
• Being brought out of depression by crap thinks like AC/DC
• Working
• Sleeping
• Drinking and Laughing
• Being angry with Connex

Saturday will be very interesting. Never, in my entire life, have I heard the Police estimate the number of people at a forthcoming demo to be 500,000. Coupled with the fact that just about everyone I know is going makes me think that there will be millions of people there! Even Michele is coming!

And how amusing to watch the yanks and the government struggle to scare the population into agreeing with the War on Iraq (previously the war on terror). They even put a Tank at Heathrow…you sad wankers. Some poor bastard had to go on “Today” this morning and explain to Jim Naughtie what it was for. Eventually he had to admit it was totally pointless and was just there because “if Al-Quaeda were planning to drive a van full of explosives into the airport, they’d think again if they saw a tank”. Laugh I nearly shat….which would have been very bad, because I was in the bath.

20 minutes ago this blog would have been positive and mellow.
Now it’s full of venom and anger.
What changed ?
3 minutes of “question time”.
How Robin Cook, Tony Fucking Blair and Jack Cocksucker Straw sleep at night is beyond me. A few years ago I used to get pissed off with people slagging off Labour, because I knew that they were socialists and socialists are nice. My dad was a communist and I love him, and I love his politics. His friends are sound and I agree with them. Then I realised that you can’t trust anyone. Despite this I still trust him. He feels betrayed by the Russian communist party. Hardly surprising when you consider what a shitbag Joe Stalin was. The worst thing is that while Joe Stalin was masscring his people and lying through his teeth, the western communists defended him – and I’m convinced it’s because they believed. They believed that communism was the way, and that other communists were therefore righteous. Joe would never do that.
But he did. The socialists surrounding me as I grew up weren’t like Stalin – they were genuinely sound, and genuinely believed that people should be equal [ yes that is what socialism is about – equality. If you think that socialism is about dictatoriship then you are wrong. The problem is that so far all socialist societies have been far from socialist.]
The reason for the problems is power:
“Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
This is why I’m now totally convinced of my political outlook: I am an anarchist. To me, “anarchist” means nothing more than “being against rulers”. That’s it. If you are against rulers, you are an anarchist. If you disagree with my definition then let me know. I can help you 🙂

When Jack Straw was a student, he was your typical public-school lefty. PC to a bizarre degree and all surface. As soon as het got a taste of the power he turned into the worst sort of fascist. Fuck you Jack. Fuck you Tony I hate Margaret Thatcher more than I can tell you – but I would prefer her in power now that these cunts. At least when she tells you she’s going to close the hospitals, cut the working-class’ income and piss over the miners, you can believe her. Tony and the rest of the Labour cabinet are a bunch of weak-kneed lying bastards. The only reasons I would ever vote labour again (even though I probably will never vote for them) are:

• There are still rightous people in the party, stuck there because they think it will, one day, change
• er…that’s it

Tony – you’re supposedly a Christian. In that case, according to your own doctrine, you will burn in hell for killing so many people unjustly. You won’t tho’ because God is just as much of a cunt as you. I know – I’ve read the Bible.

Saturday night – shit telly night!

Both Michele and I quite enjoy shit telly and it doesn’t get much shitter than “ant and dec” followed by “who wants to be a millionaire”. The viewing audience of the latter can be equally divided into two groups: those that want the contestants to win and those that want then to walk away with 100 quid and feel totally humiliated. I’m with the first lot – every time someone wins a large sum of money I feel really uplifted – how sad is that ? Just knowing that they’re going to have a really fucking good night celebrating and then giving family and friends a way out of their shitty debts…ahhh!
But it’s on ITV which means ads. I hate every add more than the one before. This means that by the end of the night I am swearing out loud and breaking things and my wife had her finger poised over the ‘9’ button on the phone. It’s a family trait you know. My dad even told his (NHS) psychiatrist about how worried he was about the anger they generated within him. If an advertising executive were to turn up at the door at the right time (like during a Vodaphone picture message ad, or a “get out more” bloody car ad) I would have no qualms about sliding a knitting needle through their heart and laughing as they crumple in agony.

Come to mention it, that vodaophone add is extra irritating as it uses a piece of late 20th century pap indy music called “can u dig it”. Any tune called “can u dig it” better be funkier than the love child of James Brown and Aretha Franklin or so rock-and-roll that cocaine shoots out your speakers. But this is that unspeakable shit that looks like rock and roll (floppy hair, guitars, lights and drums) but sounds like Barbie and Ken humming to the test-card. WANKERS! Get some self respect! Listen to some proper music…Jimmy Hendrix, Led Zep, Public Enemy, Prodigy.. or something.. before you even look at a fucking guitar. Grrrrrr.

After a hard days work rewriting perfectly good bits of PIC assembler, a yummy dinner (chicken and date spicy stew sort of thing) we’re going to watch “Moulin Rouge” in bed.

Good night.

I forgot to mention what a good selection of films BA had on the flight back. Thankfully they’re sorting out 747-400s with personal TVs as opposed to those bloody projector film things that you can only see if you are right at the front of the cabin. Christ I hate those. Economy air travel is bad enough to get you irritated by your fellow passengers at the best of times…what you really don’t need is an extra reason to hate the tall bastard in the seat in front of you with elongated head for 8 fucking hours…
Anyway…
Outwards I got a chance to see S1m0ne – not bad at all. I was hoping that Kate Winslett was watching it two seats away, what with it being an entire film about replacing primadonna actors with computer simulations. But I don’t think she was; she certainly wasn’t laughing whan I was…but that could be because I was drinking quite a lot and laughing at most things.

On the way back I watched “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and “Barbershop”. Both made me laugh shockingly loud. Although again I was pretty pissed. The young air steward who had given us the 5 seats obviously took a liking to me because he kept giving me more red wine. Every time I asked for a bottle he handed me two. I wonder why ?

Since returning we’ve been grooving to Marvin Gaye “Got to give it up” because it reminds us of that scene in Barbershop.

A reasonable day at work, despite having a sysnet meeting. Managed a lunch at the pub drinking only grapefruit and soda. What a pain in the arse/gut.