foals

went out last night in shoreditch to our usual place to meet up with some friends and a good night out as always. the usual run for the last train and this time as i just set foot on the platform i heard the beeping sound when the doors close on the train. a quick sprint and a leap and i just squeezed through the small gap about half a second before they closed shut, otherwise it would have turned into a painful journey home.

its a bank holiday weekend and the forecast is for rain on saturday and sunday. i knew it was too good to last.

some more new music for y'all over this long weekend. foals - this orient. a very good song.

exit

people huh!. there are some characters around. yesterday at the gym there was a guy that there that was quite annoying and then quite funny. first off he does that thing where he just hogs one piece of equipment and does 6 sets of the same exercise. dude, thats not how its supposed to be done. if you can do 60 reps of the same exercise its too light and its doing nothing for you. that was the annoying part.

the funny part was that in a packed gym he was talking to himself and psyching himself up before each set. "come on, you can do this. come on!!". "just 3 more, 2 more, come on, 1 more, push,... push!". its a packed gym mate. you are not in your bedroom at home standing in front a mirror practicing your travis bickle, "you talkin to me" speech.

he looked so ridiculous whilst he was doing it and in front of everyone, i nearly laughed out loud. at first i thought it was a joke but he was properly serious, despite the fact he was lifting not very mich weight. i nearly asked him to keep it down a bit, not because he was making too much noise, but because it was making me laugh and i don't want to drop 40kg dumb bell on my head because of his 'taxi driver in a gym', comedy routine.

some people huh?.

today i have mostly been listening to u2 - exit. don't worry, its not any of their recent material which is horse shit. this is from when they were good.

performance

oh my gosh, the weather is fabulous. its better than southern california over the next couple of days. everything in the world seems fine. i have nothing to whine about or if i did, i have forgotten because its so lovely outside.

in other good news. i got a letter from the tax office saying i had paid too much tax. its only £95 ($150), but its always good to get money back from the tax man.

this week will be quiet. i am going out in shoreditch and meeting up with some friends on thursday night. i really didn't want to skip out on football but its got to be done. why does everything good have to happen on a thursday evening. no bother.

i still haven't told my work i am planning to leave. my boss goes on holiday on thursday. i will leave it till he gets back. just this second i got a mail from my agent confirming my new contract offer and what i thought about it. i told him i would sign it.....i just didn't tell him i was planning to jump ship not soon after signing it. no need to give everyone all the information just yet and its a bit like that scene in the godfather, where marlon brando tells james caan, never let anyone know what you are thinking. i love that film. part 2 was good as well. part 3 was horse shit.

take care. have a lovely day.

today i have mostly been listening to performance - the living. enjoy.

american slang

not posted all week which is a bit odd. had started drafting a couple of posts but never got round to publishing them. anyways, the weather has been nice all week. quite cool but clear blue skies for most of the day and its so nice to see the sun. forecast is for this weekend to be pretty warm. t-shirt weather.

had football last night. 3rd week for us playing and can feel my fitness coming back and compared to the first week, i feel miles stronger and am playing miles better than i was a couple of weeks ago.

one of the guys that plays with us works at goldman sachs, the investment bank that is caught up in a fraud case. whn i saw him i told him we weren't interested in buying any of his dodgy synthetic collateralised debt obligations or other derivatives that he is shorting and he should keep that stuff away from our football circle thank you very much. oh how we all laughed. don't you wish you were at football with a bunch of jokers like us with our amusing quips about financial derivatives. normal service was resumed later with jokes inferring sexual deviancy and slating each others favourite football teams. anyway.......

thats it really. all is well. nothing solid happening on the contract front. a couple of things here and there that might come up but we shall see how it goes. no bother.

today i have mostly been listening to the gaslight anthem - american slang. no video yet which means you can colour it in youself in your head. i was going to post nighttrain by guns n'roses, as thats what i was on last night on my way back from football, but i will post it another time, when there is no new music that i particularly like.

have a lovely weekend. i think i might.

no thanks

had my interview this morning. 1 hour of technical grilling followed by one hour of chat. the technical grilling seemed to be all ok. all questions lifted straight out microsoft and vmware exams and i had heard most of them before. it did drag on for a while but these things usually do. their building was also across the road from the last bank i worked at (which was an intellectual vacuum), and it did remind again me of how awful that place had been and how dull the work had been.

anyways, i had a suspicion that the role was very boring and constrained and it turns out it is. they were really trying to talk it up but there was no getting away from the fact it was like watching paint dry. the pay was quite good. actually its very good considering how little skill is needed to do the job, but i think i might turn it down if offered. i just know that i would get bored in 3 weeks and be looking to move again and thats not what i want to do. i would actually quite like to get settled somewhere, a bit like where i am now. i would stay here if they offered me an extra 20 grand a year, but that ain't gonna happen.

hey, who knows, maybe they thought i sucked and they don't offer me the role, and i won't have to turn it down and it all sorts itself out nicely. here's hoping they think i was rubbish. :-)

anyways, i have football tonight. i was supposed to be meeting up with friends for drink tonight but people are dropping out like 8 year olds invited to a party and funfair at the neverland ranch. am not sure that joke works since michael croked. actually it doesn't work and its very poor taste. oh well.

on to the next one

excuse me. did i just get told. did the girl who works in our department just have a bit of a dig at me. she asked me if i was going to be around on june 24-25th because she was going to glastonbury and our boss was going to be away on a conference (a jolly in a hotel for 2 days with free booze). she said that last year at this conference time, i had booked holiday and it was an inconvience for her to cover those days. oh excuse me. i only took 5 days holiday in the whole of last year. sorry it caused you inconvenience.

......obviously i didn't tell her that i was going to be resigning in a few weeks and i wouldn't be around in june.

i have my interview on thursday. to be honest i am not really feeling that place but will go along and i might be suprised.

today i have mostly been listening to jay-z - on to the next one.

choose life

the weather was quite nice this weekend which was a pleasant change. i ended up doing the usual gym and cycling. went out to a bar on friday night with some friends and my friend from the army who is about to go to afghanistan very soon now. it was a good night evening out and there was much amusement to be had.

i also have moved to being almost 95% certain that i will quit this place at the beginning of june. i thought about it over the weekend and its an opportune moment to do it then and i don't want to end up staying here temporarily and then realising years have passed. if i don't get anything immediately its no bother as there is the world cup on tv, i can do a cisco exam, and possibly become one of the very few people around that is Microsoft, Citrix, VMware and Cisco certified, and i could even go away for a week or two. i have taken only 1 week off work in the last 15 months that i have worked here, so i think i am allowed a short holiday.

the plan is to sign the new 3 month contract at the end of this month when this current contract expires on april 30th, and then inform them that i will be leaving a few days later (contracts are done on a 3 month basis and not monthly). which gives me a leaving date of the end of may and it gives them the whole of may to find a replacement, although as is always the way, my boss is off from april 30th till may 9th on holiday, so it gives them 3 weeks. how many fucking holidays does someone need in a year??!!. it means i will be completely free by the end of may and if i haven't found anything i will agree to stay on a week by week basis till either they or i find something else, whilst it allows me to be almost immediately availble for a new contract elsewhere if one were to come up.

the reason i am doing it this way, is that its not entirely beyond the realms of possibility that i might be out of work for a few weeks and i would rather be out of work in june when the world cup is on than in may, when i will get bored and slowly go out of my mind from being at home all the time.

now if that ain't a good plan, quite frankly i don't know what is. all the bases are covered.

today i have mostly been listening to PF Project - choose life.

coma white

praise the lord and baby jesus, its sunny and warm today. it was quite mild yesterday evening when we were playing football as well. had fooled myself into thinking that my fitness would be ok, because i had been cycling and going to the gym over the last 4 months since we last played, but it turns out it all counts for shit, when it comes to playing football. we were all struggling after 15 minutes and i played a stinker. i might be missing it next week so my next game will be in 2 weeks time. i think i might hit the treadmill a few times at the gym, before then.

the bank that did the telephone interview with me, wants to call me in for a face to face nterview next week. i know someone who works there and mailed them to ask them what it was like. he didn't make it sound too good. i will go to the interview and see what kind of feeling i get from the place. if its lame i will pass. it is quite a bit more money but to use a footballing metaphor, i am not michael owen, or andriy shevchenko. i am not someone who is just gets blinded by a big contract but ends up leaving liverpool or acmilan only to end up on the bench at chelsea or newcastle a season or two later.

i also got a call from a really good company today who were asking my availability for a contract and i told them i could start in 2 weeks. she said that might not be soon enough. this is all becoming strangely familiar scenario. i know there is peach of a contract out there. i just need them to be a little bit reasonable.

i also heard lots more sad stories about stuff that happened to friends and associates recently on top of what happened to the guys at football recently. i shall not recount them as this could become a very depressing blog, which is worse than what it currently is, which is simply mundane.

today i have mostly been listening to marilyn manson - coma white. this if from the mechanical animals album, which a lot of hard core manson fans hated, but i am not a hardcore fan and i thought it was his best album and i prefer it anitchrist superstar which preceded it. credit to him for trying to so something a little different after a very successful album. one could argue that his recent albums have been safe and back to the formula that made him popular and there is also that fine line between being cool and edgy and just being lame, contrived and deliberately shocking to just get publicity. i think he has skirted with both sides of that line, but then again very few people can get it on the money all the time like a david bowie or prince or nine inch nails.

have a lovely weekend flower.

go do

my boss just told me that my contract was going to be renewed at the end of this month. i think they thought that not knowing if it would be renewed, i might start looking around or they can sense i might be looking around already and giving me something to think about.

too late dude. i have started looking around and i even had a telephone interview this morning with a bank and not wanting to count ones chickens before they hatch, but i think they might call me in for a second interview seeing as i answered all their technical questions which weren't very technical at all. thats not me trying to show off as being clever. they genuinely weren't difficult questions. the only reason they might not call me in would be if they didn't like the sound of my voice on the telephone. that would be weird and quite frankly i wouldn't want to work for weirdos.

i also had someone else call me up about a contract and they said they wanted to consider only those candidates that could start on monday. i told them i couldn't. bang, there goes another one. idiots.

anyways we shall see how it all goes. a new financial year started on tuesday so hopefully there will be some more activity over the next few weeks. am hoping i don't get put in a tight spot where i end up with a big decision and have to leave very suddenly, but it ain't happened yet so no need to worry about it just now. anyways, its a no brainer.

cloudy today but the weather tomorrow and the next few days is supposed to be good. bring on the spring.

in the football last night lionel messi turned in a world class performance and scored 4 goals against arsenal in the champions league. i should be dissappointed but you can't be when messi does that. the boy is a genius.

anyways today i have mostly been listening to jonsi - go do. he is the lead singer of the band sigur ros, and this is new solo material. i can't embed the video because embedding has been disabled but just click here and listening to some atmospheric joyous music. lovely stuff.

football tomorrow night. i haven't played in 4 months, so i am looking forward to it more than usual.

take care flower.

11 years

it was lovely having 4 days off work over the long easter weekend. not going to work is quite nice. i think after a while it could get boring but 4 days is not long enough for it to get to the boring stage. it would have been even better if we had nice weather but it was raining on friday and saturday and it was cloudy and a bit chilly on sunday and monday, but hey, at least it was dry. typical in that the first day back to work, today, its the warmest day of the year and its sunny outside.

anyways, i didn't do anything particularly exciting or out of the ordinary. we have football this thursday for the first time this year which is something to look forward to. i also heard some sad news related to a couple of guys that usually play with us. one of the guys has been coming occasionally for around a year and i don't know him that well as he is a friend of a friend. anyways, his girlfriend was was ill recently and one of the guys told me that she passed away in the last couple of weeks. thats got to be unbelievably tough to get through.

also, one of the guys that was in trouble with the police, finally had the completion of his court case last week and he got sentenced to 11 years in prison. i think he had been hopeful of getting somewhere around 7 or 8 years, and maybe 10 at the very worst, but it seems even that was optimistic. like i have mentioned before, he was a person with 2 sides and the gangster side was something that none of us at football ever saw and something he deliberately went out of his way to not bring into our circle of friends. we never mixed with any of his other associates and none of the guys got involved with any of his 'work'. he was still the same kid that played football with us from 10 years ago and used to play playstation and was into football like the rest of us.

my boring dull life is a blessing at times like these.

i watched the film papillion on friday night on tv. its a great film with dustin hoffman and steve mcqueen (who is the coolest person in the history of the world), and its about a prisoner trying constantly to break out of prison in french guyana. kind of appropriate given recent events but seeing as i have already posted editors - papillion, on one of my posts already i can't re-post it so instead today i will post a montage clips from a couple of my favourite films directed by terence malick. this is from the films, the thin red line, and the new world, both of which are wonderful films and beautifully shot. enjoy.