grim this morning

am on earlies this week which means i have to leave my house at 7.30am. its dark at that time, but even darker this morning with thick dark clouds and heavy rain and strong winds. goodness me it was grim in the 7 or 8 minutes it took to walk to the train station this morning. only 4 more days of early starts in shitty weather left for me this year. next time i am on this shift it will be 2010 and god knows how much longer i will be here after that.

have a lovely week and thank your lucky stars you are not in london when its weather like this.

today i have mostly been timbaland feat one republic - apologize.

hypocrisy

so i met up with my 3 school friends last night and we went out for a chinese meal just behind leicester square. i hate leicester square. its for tourists. do new yorkers go out for a meal in times square?. no. its the kind of place tourists go to because they don't know the city and where the good places are.

anyways, the whole evening was not as bad as i thought it would be. everyone seems fine although one of them has now found god in a big way and was telling me about how his life has changed for it and how great it is. good for you dude, if it makes you feel better then go for it. at one stage i thought he was going to go on and on and on about it but he wasn't too bad.

i do think it says more about the person he was when he says his life and perspectives have changed. you shouldn't have been such a money obsessed and spiteful little shit before. the rest of us weren't. this is a guy that told me he doesn't declare all his income to his accountant and so avoids paying tax. everyone pays tax and whilst i don't want to pay more than i absolutely have to, i don't resort to hiding a portion of my income, which is against the law. there are people that earn 5 times less than he does who pay a higher proportion of their wage in tax. god or no god, that just not fair.

this is the same guy that told me he interviewed people that were talented and bright but then told his manager that they were inept technically because he didn't want anyone that might jeapordise his own position at his firm. thats a shitty thing to do just on a human level and its deceitful. what did your god say about that?. i bet any money that he is still doing the same after his enlightenment.

my friend who i went on my road trip across america started getting all moralistic on me as well, i recall. when the waitress gave us our bill and it was a few bucks short because she didn't include everything he insisted we tell her, while i was saying we should pay, tip her and leave it. he told me that would be the morally wrong thing to do. this from the person who dropped $2000 on a hooker in las vegas in one night!. this from a person who spent £600 on hookers on a stag weekend in poland. we can't get a $4 orange juice for free but its ok for you to take advantage of these young women for whom the only opportunity to earn above minimum wage is to sell their bodies for sex with strangers. go figure that one out.

this isn't me slamming religion. its just me slamming the hypocrisy of some people. also not all of my friends are in prison or tax cheats and kerb crawlers. most of them are hard working decent people who just get on with their lives and who never attempt to give people lessons on morals or decency whilst forgetting or concealing their own shortcomings. maybe its because they are decent people that they kind of assume, possibly naively, that everyone else is as well. i sense the ones that make a big deal about it and tell people about it, assume everyone else is morally deficient, maybe because they are or were themselves.

today i have mostly been listening to u2 - bad. this is from when they were a good band making interesting music. this is before the hypocrisy set in. this is another from when i used to go to my friends house when i was a kid and we used to listen to his parents and older brothers record collection.

old friends

a guy that used to live on the same block as me and who i used to play football on the street with, when i was kid, died suddenly last friday. not too sure of the reasons but it looks like he just died in his sleep from a heart related issue. i hadn't seen him for about 10 years but i bump into his brother occasionally, who also played football with us, because he works for london trandsport and is sometimes at the station i take in the morning. sad news.

also on the subject of childhood friends, tonight i am meeting up with 3 guys that i used to go to school with. 1 of them is a really nice guy and i have got a lot of time for him, but the other 2 are just assholes. all they talk about is money, and yet they are tighter than fish's arse. they are also just chancers who have landed fat contracts and have sat on them for years, hoping not to be discovered. dull, boring people with nothing to say whose only status is the money they earn and not the substance of their character.

i have met plenty of their type in my travels around banks. bitter, institutionalised IT workers threatened by anything new and whose sole purpose is self promotion to anyone that will listen whilst also patronising and putting down anyone perceived as a threat, in the hope of gaining a reputation as someone who is not expendable if a reorganisation came to pass.

am a little surprised they haven't been completely found out yet and been let go. one of them has been a bit. he was a contractor earning £120,000 a year and his bank told him they would end his contract and take him on a permie earning £45,000 a year. that still good money, but a 75k pay cut is tough to take. he took their offer in a tacit acknowledgement that he is actually a chancer and was overpaid beyond his ability and he would be unable to compete with anyone even remotely good in the open market.

i hadn't heard from one of them for about 3 years and in his first email to me yesterday the first thing he wrote me was "hey, how are you doing?, are you out of work?". what a lovely way to start an email. i replied i was well and employed. i should have replied, "i am doing good, how are you?, still cheating on your wife?", "its a shame she found out 6 months after the wedding, hope the divorce hasn't cleaned you out". prick.

anyways i have an evening of bullshit to look forward to tonight, and will invariably be asked if i can get hold of the latest version of visual studio or sql server or oracle or whatever. download it off the web yourself you idiots. trial versions are free.

today i have mostly been listening to editors - papillon. this is a live performance from the tv show, later with jools holland. its wicked. the new album is good as well. it grows on you slowly. also you can't see it in this clip but the audience on the jools holland show always consists of desperately un-cool people nodding their heads out of time to whichever band is playing. all friends of friends of bbc lovies i suspect. shoot me if i ever go to a taping of that show. its a great show, but the audience always consists of wankers. i bet the journalists from the NME are there as well as people who work on Radio 1. zane lowe, jo whiley, chris moyles, etc. wankers, like i said.

have a splendid day. its not raining today in london town, so thats always good.

it is a fact

exuses, excuses. do i say i was waiting for a delivery, or do i say that i needed to pick someone up from the airport, or there is always the classic, i had a dentists appointment.

i told my boss i was going to be in an hour late this morning, and not wanting to lie when i don't have to, i gave no explanation as to why. he was fine with it and didn't ask why, but its an easy thing to do to feel compelled to give more information. i didn't.

i was going to be late because i had my exam this morning. my confidence that had been building up all week and that made me bring my exam forward by a week, suddenly ebbed away last night as i was studying. christ, i don't know this shit nearly as well as i thought i did.

anyways, i go to the exam center this morning and started the exam and having done dozens of exams before i know if its going well or not. this one was not going that well. i got through it and at the end of the exam i waited expectantly for a message mocking my false confidence and saying that i should have studied another week.

to my surprise it appears my exam score was counted by the same people that counted the ballots in florida in 2000 and the same people that did the recent afghan election, because i miraculously passed, and quite comfortably as well. i had a voucher for a free re-take in case i flunked it, but its nice to know i won't need it and i will have a free weekend ahead of me, although the forecast is for rain all weekend so i may as well have been stuck indoors studying.

anyways thats me done. there are no exams that i feel i have to take for the time being. i will still read but with out exams to do. i doubt that will work well but we shall see.

in other news, i applied for another contract yesterday. we shall see what happens but the market is definitely waking up. come the new year i think its going to be interesting. am hoping i will be measuring my time at this contract in days and weeks and not months when 2010 rolls round.

today i have mostly been listening to the cure - disintegration. the title track of one of the greatest albums ever recorded. that is not my opinion. its a fact.

have a lovely weekend my friend

they didn't want me

they didn't get back to me about that job after i was in contact last friday. maybe they thought i was not good enough or they didn't believe me that i could extricate myself from my contract and be able to start next monday. oh well, no bother. am a little surprised they would pay soo much money to fill a roll and only give themselves 5 days to find a candidate. you might not be getting the best you can get, but hey, thats up to them.

the good thing is that the whole process woke me up and i am studying like a beast now. am absolutely killing it, so much so, that i had my exam booked for next friday but i have brought it forward to this friday. i also have a voucher that entitles me to a free second shot at the exam (it costs £125 to take it), so that means even if i crash and burn i still can go back and try again with out being stung for more money. i can't lose, .........unless i fail it twice.

they didn't laugh

you know you are a nerd when just on the basis of a job spec on a recruiters site, which doesn't state the company they are recruiting for, you can work it out.

"aah, thats interesting that they want an windows guy who knows exchange,....that counts out deutsche bank, rbs because they use lotus notes, and also jp morgan, goldmans, merryll and morgan stanley, bank of america and nomura because they have separate messaging teams. right, of who is left.........". through a process of elimination based on the technologies in the job spec i figured it was one of 2 banks, and this morning the agent emailed me and it was one of the 2 i guessed it would be. what a fucking nerd!.

so the people that are recruiting for that really good job got back to me this morning. the guy was honest in his email and said he had 12 people that they were considering for it and that i was one of them. he asked me to give him some more information and said he would get back to me. he also asked me to confirm if i could start in just over a week. i said i was pretty sure i could work it out if things went that far and i got an offer. its also quite nice that the recruiter for back to me at all and didn't laugh when he saw my CV and then burned it on a fire.

in all honesty the chances of me getting it are very slim, but we shall see how it goes. i won't be too disappointed if i don't get it (because i never do), though it would be nice. there will also be some problems to iron out with my current place with regards to me getting released in time and those problems are made worse by the fact that the other 2 people in the department have both booked holidays at the same time at the beginning of january. but that is not my problem. i am not going to feel guilty and turn down a chance of a good contract because it may clash with my work colleagues holidays. that makes no sense at all.

i have been a martyr for work before. i have done it lots of times. i gave up holidays i was entitled to, to finish projects that were given deadlines that were too tight. i have worked countless weekends and long hours and in the end it all counted for shit. i promised myself that i wouldn't let that happen to me again and it hasn't and i feel so much better for it.

have a good weekend

today i have mostly been listening to muse - undisclosed desires

luck

saw a peach of a job today. it looked absolutely perfect but they wanted someone to start in 10 days. arrgghh!!!!. who can start in 10 days time?. people that are sitting around the house watching day time tv and wearing sportswear on a weekday but not playing sport, thats who.

for a while i thought of going for the job and dealing with the consequences if it came through. the consequences being if i get the job, i just tell my current job that i won't be coming back in to work and leaving after a few days and breaking my contract mid way. its a shitty thing to do and i won't lie and say that money has nothing to do with it, because it does. they would definitely react badly and my name would be mud in this place. it would be a bridge permanently burnt and these people have treated my well, even when i have done the occasional fuck up.

i hope this doesn't prevent me from getting other similar roles, but actually its just struck me that i have been available quickly each time i have moved between contracts and this is the first time i will be in the midst of a contract and not able to leave with in a week or two. shit shit shit!.

am still debating going for it.

in the meantime i have sent my agent an email asking him what my notice period is. after all, they didn't give me a raise when i asked for one a couple of months ago, and i want that little fucker to know that i am serious and could walk, maybe not now but soon. that will put the cat amongst the pigeons and i don't want them to get too comfortable. i don't want me to get too comfortable either hence the need to move on soon.

sometimes it all comes down to luck.....

UPDATE: i just went ahead and applied for that job. if they don't get back to me thats fine, and if they get back to me but reject me that fine as well. i am not going to reject myself without even trying.

mute admin

being the mute admin sitting alone at his desk, i have been blissfully unaware of politics and personalities. i suspect my colleagues might think i am a bit weird and very quiet but as they say, thats how i roll.

anyways its only in the last few months that my blissful ignorance has been tempered and i have started seeing some politics and personalities come through.

my boss is in a bad mood today. he has these occasionally. i don't think it was helped by me doing some work last week that he wasn't aware of and that didn't follow all the procedures. jeez, i had some senior manager at my desk who looked under pressure and he asked me to do so something as it was holding up his team and other teams around europe. i could have said "have you raised a call and done all the paperwork for it", but i didn't and just started to work on it. when my boss came back to his desk i could see he was not happy.

i also had one of the networks guys get a bit pissed off because i didn't do some hardware upgrade for him. he asked me what the delay was. i looked into it and it turns out that the delay was him holding up the decommissioning of another server which i had told him i was going to get the parts out of, for his server. why bitch about something not being done, but at the same time hold up work that is reliant on that work being done.

be in no doubt that i can be slack about stuff. employee of the month is something i will never get, but people who shout about stuff should also get their facts straight. network guy has gone strangely quiet now that i have refreshed his memory and traced the cause of his delay.

ah well... such is life. most of the time things are fine here but occasionally you get some shit.

thats all jobs i guess, and hopefully i will find a new contract in the new year and once again be blissfully unaware of any politics or prickly personalities. i can recall 2 years ago to the day that i was sitting next to the biggest chump in the world at the japanese bank i was working for at the time. that was painful every minute of every hour of the day having to listen to his nuggets of wisdom, which were in fact nuggets of horse shit. this is a stroll in the summer sunshine by comparison.

speaking of sunshine, there has been a little but there has also been some showers and its getting cold as well. to be expected in november. am glad i still have the memory of californian sun in my mind and my soul.

today i have watched a clip of the office. it brings back memories of where i used to work and reviews and appraisals with my bosses.

there is none of that for me now, although like this clip, i was looked down upon by a lot of the guys at that bank with the chump, because i had gone to university. who would have thought studying would be something other people would discourage, but they do. i think i would have fitted in more had i spent my evenings getting drunk, watching big brother, lost or 24 on sky plus (tivo), and playing golf on weekends and reading tabloid newspapers everyday. er, no thanks.

anyways i have booked my exam and its in 2 weeks time. revision has been coming along ok and i figure that in a couple of weeks i will be ready......or i might not be ready and i will get 7% and be laughed out of the exam center whilst people though rotten eggs at me and call me names.

mute

a quiet weekend. had to force myself to go to the gym on saturday and sunday and am glad i did. its just too easy to let things slide and be lazy especially at this time of year when its cold and dark and you would rather just sit at home in front of the tv. actually the only times i studied this weekend was when i got back from the gym. its gets your blood pumping and motivated and full of energy and it has a positive effect on the mind as well.

speaking of being lazy at this time of year, a measure of how bad i had got was that i didn't send off my timesheets last week. it wasn't because i was particularly busy or they hadn't been signed off. it was just because i was lazy and just let it slide. you would think the fact that it held up payment of my wages for the whole of last month would be a motivation to get it done promptly, but no. anyways, i sent them off this morning as i still have some energy left from working out.

my boss said something that amused me last week. i asked about the guy that almost started crying when his PC wallpaper got changed and who requested that he put his own picture on his desktop. i asked my boss what happened with that and if he would get an exemption. my boss, in a very dead pan and serious way, replied, " no, and people like that should be killed". ha ha ha!!!. we can laugh about it, but making a silly request like that means that the guy's stock has fallen. should be killed. ha ha ha!!. harsh but fair i suppose.

i have seen so many contractors commit proffessional suicide by saying stupid things at work. i think here where i work they must think i am a bit of a quiet loner. its not that, but i am just very aware of not being too vocal and being a loudmouth or even just saying something really stupid. i guess it comes from working in investment banks recently. i have seen people not have contracts renewed just on the fact that they have been a bit mouthy and difficult and not gotten on well with one person in the team.

am on earlies this week and i was leaving the home this morning it was really cold. its the first real cold we have had this winter season. it will get worse, but there are only another 6 weeks of work left before this year is effectively over. just need to count it down and get through it and i know i will feel better once we have broken the back of this winter.

anyways, today, like most days, i have been sat at my desk like a mute.

today i have mostly been listening to stellastarr - sweet troubled soul.

i was right, it was a rubbish bar

this week has gone by so fast its scarcely believable. it just seems like yesterday that i was waking up in monday morning thinking i had a whole 5 days ahead of me. have been quite busy at work but not so busy that it gets stressful. not that i ever get stressed anyway.

i went out to a bar in clerkenwell last night and as i suspected it was a bit of an old mans pub. i don't think some of the other guys were very impressed with it either. even the guy that suggested it looked a bit sheepish as we all turned up one by one and suspected he may have not quite caught the mood we were looking for in a place. i doubt we will be going there again. strongrooms in shoreditch will be re-installed as venue of choice for us. still it was a good night out and we had much amusement slating each other and where we work and people we used to work with. long winter evenings fly by when you are bitching and taking the piss.

i applied for another job today. at the very least it will get my resume out there in the hands of recruiters so that they will have me on file, if and when something else comes up over the next few weeks and months.

and thats it really. will study a bit this weekend. my gym sessions have been disrupted because my gym has closed for 2 weeks for refurbishment. it will be nice to go there when its all been done up and is nice and new again. it was starting to look a bit tired and some of the equipment had begun to breakdown quite often.

today i have mostly been watching the trailer for the the new film, where the wild things are. it looks wicked.

have a good weekend my friend.

the only shit bar in clerkenwell

going out for a drink with some friends this evening, and we usually go to shoreditch, but for tonight the venue has changed and we are going to some old dingy pub in clerkenwell. there are lots of nice bars in clerkenwell but we are going to what looks like a dated old fashioned bar for old men.

arrghh!!!, why can't we just go to our usual. you can get a seat, they serve decent food and there are usually some nice looking girls which is always pleasant to see. if not there then why not to the dozens of other nice bars in clerkenwell.

there is a thing in london where people are just desperately trying to be fashionable and cool by going to places that are not fashionable and cool but that they think are going to be fashionable and cool in 6 months time, at which point they stop going there, and can then moan about how its lost its edge and had its day now that everyone is going there. they then move on and try and find bars that are shit in the desperate hope that in 6 months time, they can do the whole "this place has had its day" speech all over again. what a futile exercise.

i suspect the venue tonight is going to be shit. i could be wrong, but i doubt it.

my boss told me that in the first week of january i will be on my own as him and the other person i work with will be away on holidays. there is something to look forward to in the new year. not.

i think i am slightly abnormal in the amount of time i take off, in that its not much at all compared to most other people. anyways, i should be in the midst of job hunting then, so hopefully we won't have a scheduling conflict. we shall see how it goes. i applied for a job today and in the worst case scenario they will be screwed if i get it, but lets be realistic, its unlikely i will get something so quickly, though it would be a nice problem. actually it won't be a problem...for me at least.

today i have mostly been listening to screaming lights - GMN, ...whatever it is gmn stands for???.

take care V

edge of seventeen

weather has gotten a few degrees cooler today after the unseasonably mild temperatures we had last week. its actually a lovely crisp sunny day outside.

weekend was quiet for me. gym and a little bit of study. i was a little unwell and with out wanting to go into too much detail i had issues keeping food down since thursday. i decided that i would stop eating and let my system reset its self and so i didn't eat for 3 days till yesterday, sunday. it seemed to do the trick as i seem to be fine now. this happened to me once before and i ended up not eating for 3 weeks. i lost 30lbs in the process. in comparison i think i got off easy this time.

there was no football last week as we ended up being a man down because he went to see the death metal band cannibal corpse, on that night. oh dear.

anyways its the start of a new week. am on lates which is ok and the best shift for me to be on. will carry on studying for my exam and thats it. am going out in shoreditch with the usual group of poeple that all worked at the internet company i used to work for. it should be a good night out as usual.

oh, and can i just make a point about software and microsoft. can i just say that having used windows media player to sync my new sony mp3 player, it is an experience as pleasant as being punched in the face. my playlists are messed up for no reason and music has started disappearing from my player when i know its on my computer. the syncing has a mind of its own. you might think that this might be me just being a dumb ass and not knowing how to use a computer, and although supporting servers doesn't make me qualified to use media player and an mp3 player, you would think i would have the aptitude to fix any issue, but no.

windows media player is a horse shit piece of software and yet we are on version 11. they have improved it 11 times, and its still this bad. christ on a bike!. don't assume that i am a unix/open source advocate who hates microsoft. i have made my career supporting microsoft server software. 22 certifications in microsoft software mean i am not someone who uses their products on the side and there are some great things they do, but my recent experience with media player has been terrible. no wonder google, apple and vmware are giving you a beating. maybe you should just stick to office and windows server and leave everything else to people with better ideas and understanding.

anyways enough ranting, today i have mostly been listening to stevie nicks - edge of seventeen. i was watching a documentary about fleetwood mac last night, and they had this on it and it reminded me how great a song it is. the first time i became aware of stevie nicks and fleetwood mac was when i was about 15 and i used to go round to my friends house and we would sometimes listen to some of his parents old record collection., that how i first heard stevie nicks and her unique, gravelly voice.

if you don't like this song, call an ambulance because there is something seriously wrong with you and you need to get yourself checked out by a doctor. :-)

take care my friend.