First Aid Kit - Emmylou

Rae Morris - Under The Shadows [Official Video]

Man Made - Plastic Key to Living (Exposed In Session)

lux

started a new contract yesterday at an insurance firm in the city, which is due to last 6 months. have had the previous 3 and a half months off and i went to japan and i watched all the world cup. its only the last 6-7 weeks i had been applying to jobs and had not really had any calls back about anything, till last week, when this job came up and i accepted. 

.....and then wouldn't you just fucking know it, but i got a call on friday to arrange an interview for this week, which i declined because i already accepted a contract, and then today, on my second day of work, i got 2 calls from seperate agents recruiting for roles at 2 city investment banks, one of which is supposed to be a really good firm. nothing for weeks and then as soon as you get something, people are calling you up for shit you aint even applied for. typical.

turned them all down. my current place is paying me good money and the work looks relatively stress free and easy. i like easy money. the days of me chasing big prestigious firms for my cv are over. i have been there and done that and have worked at plenty of them. 

i dont want any shit. that is my criteria for any new roles from now on. pay me and dont get me involved in any shit. i dont want to be on-call, i dont want to work 16 hours on a saturday, i dont want to do all the crap that no one else in the department does not want to do, and am left to pick up shit. 

this is a wonderful piece of music, from a disturbing film. 

Paolo Nutini - Iron Sky [Short Film]

JAWS ~ GOLD

internet

have not posted despite lots of big (good) things going on. been living life instead of writing shit about the banal and dull. anyway, this blog is just for the banal and dull and i never write about my personal life anyways and i wont start now. its not necessary for everyone to write every detail about them despite the fashion for narcissism and complete openness when people log on to the web. 

here is an example of how to make yourself look like a dickhead on the web. a guy i used to work with and who i have mentioned before about his constant facebook posts has now started a new series of daily posts. he is posting everyday from the perspective of his pet cat, and has done so, everyday for the last 27 days. i know its been 27 days because the posts have the prefix 1#100, 2#100.....27#100, which means he plans on keeping this quite ridiculous series of updates for 100 days. 

some people try to make themselves look cool on facebook. lots of selfies with friends having drinks and partying or pics of them on beaches or up the eiffel tower. this guy has decided that he thinks all his facebook friends will want to read posts that are written from the perspective of his cat. fuck me!. you are a married man with a wife and your facebook is written from the perspective of your kitten. i dont think you could you make yourself look like a bigger cunt if you tried. 

anyways, that whole kitten posts shit made me not want to login and blog. live your lives people. you dont have to be funny or say something profound on your facebook and you dont have to try and be quirky or play to an audience. fuck it. fuck it all. 

this is the most interesting part of my posts. its the bit where i post some music. 

there are moments in history that you wish you could back to for music. the late 80s in LA to see janes addiction and guns and roses playing at whisky or the troubadour. the cure touring the disintegration album in 89/90. first avenue, minneapolis in 1981 when prince was playing there often doing material from dirty mind, and even songs that would eventually find their way onto purple rain. 

this performance is from one of those moments. this is 1975 in london and its bruce springsteen singing thunder road. so much of the internet is just a platform for cunts and idiots, but sometimes you find a gem like this. 

 

David Gilmour / Kate Bush - Running Up That Hill Widescreen

Lonely The Brave - Backroads

Escapists - Breaking It Up

The Afghan Whigs - Matamoros

the decline of western civilisation - part 3

have not been posting for a little while. the reason has been life. i have been living it and the internet is just a medium that is not as important a part of life that some people would have you believe. 

i finished up my contract, i went to japan, i came back to watch the world cup and i have been enjoying summer and a month off from work. i went to nottingham and saw my friend in the army who got back from the falklands and i went to see nine inch nails there as well. 

it kind of dawned on me whilst i was at the concert. at some point i would usually get my phone out and take a picture and upload it to facebook, because i have a couple of friends that are fans of NIN and might be interested. upon thinking about it a little more, i realised there was no need to take pics and post them because the 2 people that would be most interested in the pictures were with me at the concert, so what is the point?.  

i did post up pics of japan when i was there because i know people that might be interested in seeing them, and had my friends gone to japan, i would definitely want to see pics just because i am interested in what it looks like. there was not a selfie amongst them. 

on the flip side, one of the guys i used to work with posted on facebook 7 times in yesterday during a trip he made to brighton with his wife, to pick up a kitten. 7 mother fucking times in one day. the only people commenting on the pics were his wife, who he was with, and his mum. if you want to talk to your mum, pick up the phone and if you want to talk to your wife, then do it, instead of having a conversation on facebook with someone who is sitting beside you. what the fuck!!?. also, you are posting tones of pictures of kittens. you are grown man and married, not a 8 year old girl. man up. 

from the title, the first part of the decline is about peoples need to write shit on the internet. the second is that i just read that Transformers 4 is the highest grossing film of the year so far. is this why jesus died for on the cross?. is this what the Nazi's were defeated for?. was this what the English civil wars were fought for in the 17th century?. so that in 2014 the highest grossing film of the year is trans-fucking-formers, part 4!!!!. 

this is arcade fire. it will not make everything right again, but its a start. 

cut

i had no idea that Robert Smith, my hero, held these views until i stumbled up on this. 

i used to love the cure. i love them even more now, if that is even possible. 

Morrissey - Istanbul (Audio)

DJ Fresh ft. Rita Ora - Hot Right Now (Official Video)

hideaway

i have one more week of work after this one and then i finish next friday. its been a very good contract and i have met some very nice people and i have learned a lot of things i never had an opportunity to see before. its a small world and maybe one day we will be back working with some of these people again. 

in the meantime i am just looking forward to having some time off. i have been getting splitting headaches over the last few months mainly because of dealing with all the stress to do with my dad passing away and dealing with lawyers and accountants. every evening after work i have had something to deal with and its gotten worse over the last month. hopefully this should be me done now. work finishes and coincidentally all the other crap goes as well. i was going to say its not been good for my health but i actually feel pretty good physically. my brain is tired though and my stress levels have been high. in a couple of weeks i will be in tokyo and hopefully relaxed and peaceful. its going to be great not having to deal with mail, phone calls and letters for a week. 

it would also be great if i had june off work so i could watch the world cup. i have made a point of not applying to any jobs, but as is usually the way, when you dont work, people are offering you shit all over the place, and when you do want work, no cunt calls you for months. consistent with that i have a telephone interview on wednesday. i have not applied to anything and people are just calling me. its good money and i would be crazy to dismiss it. if i end up working when i dont want to be, then i will treat myself to some presents.

i like this song. its got a great video but they disabled embedding so i cant post it. this is a good version though. 

rihanna

one of the guys got married last week and he posted on facebook everyday before the wedding about random shit he was doing, and then he facebook posted on the wedding day and now he has gone on honeymoon and its been 3 days and he has posted everyday from his honeymoon. what the fuck?!!. 

you are having that great a time on your honeymoon with your new wife that you feel the need to tap around on your phone and be constantly posting random posts and pics?. i suspect you might not be having that great a time if you are on your phone on your honeymoon. also, he is away in a foreign country and the data roaming charges must be costing him a fortune, but i guess its a price worth paying to project a certain image of yourself on a social network. 

its like he is almost too self conscious when in reality not many people actually give a shit. here is an interesting interview, part of which deals with bands being too self conscious and the rest of it is about society and politics and lots of other interesting things. 

even though it was a 4 day week, it was a struggle. only 4 more weeks till i am out of there. its strange, but had they given me a 6 month contract and i knew i was going to be there for a while longer i would feel more motivated and happy to be there. the fact i know i am leaving soon has completely shot my motivation to bits. this is always one of the toughest part of contracts, when you just need to keep going when you know you will be gone soon and your mind is on the upcoming holiday or the next contract. 

part of me was thinking i should have just booked  a week in los angeles, instead of tokyo, and i know LA quite well now and i could have gone down to san diego for a couple of days and just spent a week laying on a beach in socal and going to baseball games or MLS, or even seeing a band play. it would be easy and very stress free. instead i am going to one of the most crowded cities in the world staying in a metropolitan area of 30 million people. sometimes i wonder if another big bustling city is what i need right now. i am fed up enough with london as it is. 
......and then  i think, no way, its tokyo and its going to be amazing. i think it will be. my mind just wants to take the easy way out sometimes. its a symptom of fatigue. i am on my knees with tiredness these days. 

this is song that was mentioned in the interview i linked to. i agree it is a great song and she is one of the few people doing interesting things in pop music, as opposed to just going back and recreating exactly what was done before and adding nothing to it. 

bullshitters

work today after the 4 day weekend and as expected it was a struggle, but only 3 more days to get through till we hit the weekend. my dull headache has returned after subsiding for a few days. too much lawyer and accountant shit to deal with outside work with regards to my late fathers taxes and estate. the govt manage to turn personal sadness into stress and anger by through the seemingly calculated use of utter stupidity. 

in other news, CV's have started turning up at work for new infrastructure architects. me and the other contractor were taking a look through them. personally i would pity anyone coming into an interview with him who had written something on their CV that they actually did do, because he would catch you out. anyway, someone had sent a cv and i could hear him groaning whilst reading it, because the guy had written he was an expert in 'cloud computing'. its a generic term that means nothing really and is often used by bullshitters and non-technical people. 

it reminded me of this where i said someone got a job at a massive US internet company which i wont name directly but it could be one from google, yahoo, facebook, twitter or microsoft, and they had written they were an expert in "computers" and the "internet". i showed him the guys profile and he was shocked that someone who spoke in those terms managed to get a job at a serious tech firm. it felt slightly vindicated in my own views about it. fuck me, i am no techie genius but if someone wrote they understood "the internet from the wires up to the app", and i interviewed them, they might be on the receiving end of some specific questions about the make up of TCP packets and maybe a few questions on configuring OSPF on a juniper router. i might even throw in a question about the physical cabling order of pins in an RJ45 connector. if you mention wires, i will give you wires. you cant be writing shit like on your resume and not expect to be quizzed about it. 

i have been looking at my CV and whilst its not the most impressive thing out there, i can back every word of it up. hopefully i will get asked to interview and not embarrass myself over the next few weeks and months. 

this is funny. 

riptide

we are in a 4 day weekend and its needed because i am on my knees. i had not had a day off from work since last july and i feel shattered. as i mentioned  before, i would have been going on holiday in a few days but my request got denied when i asked in february and so i finish my contract in mid may and this weekend i booked a ticket and hotel in tokyo for a week at the end of may. the perpetual headaches and the constant stress and hassle of dealing with shit outside of work as well as in work means i am looking forward to being somewhere completely different for a week and its going to be a life saver. 

i am still having to deal with stuff from when my dad passed away and its been nearly 2 years. Her majesty's revenue and customs are complete cunts. they want to check my dads tax return from april 2012 to may 2012 when he died. its 6 weeks and we already paid the tax, but they want to check it again. fuck me, someone grow a brain there. unless he had income of more than 10 grand in that 6 week period which would take him above the threshold to pay tax, he does not owe anything. seeing as they have all his tax returns going back years, they can see his monthly income from his state and work pension would not be 10 grand in 6 weeks, but they still have sent me another huge form to get filled in. they have sent the letter under the premise that i might be owed a refund for paying too much tax. i dont want a refund, keep the fucking money!. i wonder if dave cameron had to put up with this shit when his old man died. no probably not, eton boys are connected and dont get treated like cunts, thats for the rest of us lower classes. 

anyways, my boss who turned down my holiday has said he is going to be working from home all next week because he has work to get done. sounds like bullshit to me. when projects get down to the wire you need to be in the office and calloborating face to face with the people you are working with, not working from home. the other permie is also working from home on tuesday as well, and the third permie is on holiday. so, out of 5 staff, its going to be the 2 contractors in the office. make of that what you will. no wonder they had to torpedo my holiday request on the premise of a lie that they were going to give me a 6 month contract, when in fact they only offered me a 1 month extension so that they can all take time off themselves. had i known in february that i would only get a month extension i might not have turned down some of the potential job opportunities i got in march and the beginning of april. as a contractor you have to be professional, and i did not say anything, but i think i have been treated a little poorly.

no bother. only 5 weeks or so till i fly to the land of the rising sun. part of me just wanted to fly to southern california for a week and lay on a beach, but i thought i would freshen my mind and try something new. 

farewell

got called into a meeting with the tech director who told me they wanted to extend my contract but that they wanted me to join the support team. he really tried to sell it to me but i know what those guys do, and they basically get dumped on to do all the shit. i know because i have done it in other places. i much prefer working with the developers and building out infrastructure or doing migrations and projects. he tried to tell me that i would get to do project work, but i can do that now without joining that team. i was not buying it, but i told him i would think about it. 

in the afternoon i spoke to my team leader and told him i was not going to do that role and that my contract was going to end on april 22nd and then i would move on. this evening as i was leaving the office he asked me if i would consider staying on for 1 more month to cover one the guys and even though i really did not want, i told him i would. london is small in the world of contracting and i will stay and do them a favour. there is no need to be unco-operative or spiteful. one of the other engineers resigned about 4 weeks ago and he tried to get out before his notice period. it did not go down too well amongst the senior managers and i suspect he will never work at that firm ever again. they have treated me well and i have got a lot out of working there. 

i have done plently of contracts and plenty of shit ones. the one thing i learned is never burn bridges and be professional at all times. 

the plan is to put the word out that i am looking in a week or 2, and then to maybe book a week in japan as holiday. thats the plan, which might change and be overtaken by events as they happen, but we will see how it goes. 

today i have been mostly listening to farewell jr, that i posted yesterday. great song. 

Farewell J.R - Skin Pieces (Audio)

max q

my boss that turned down my 5 days holiday when i gave them 2 months advance notice and had planned it for when this current contract period had expired, told us on friday that from now on he was going to work from home on either mondays or fridays from now on. 

his girlfriend lives in another city a 3 hour drive away and he has been complaining that it is tiring driving up every weekend, so now he can make a 3 day weekend of it and its less tiring. you know what is tiring?. not having a single day off work since july last year, thats fucking tiring. my boss had 3 weeks holiday in december/january and then another week off in february, but still turned down my holiday request. those 5 days i was going to be away they need bodies in the office, and now i can see why when he is going down to 4 days a week in the office. the other senior permie has also reverted back to a 4 day week as well. what the fuck is going on?!!!.

am going to accept a contract offer if they give me one, but i am going to ask for more money. they can give it to me or they can refuse and i will still sign it, but i will then be on the look out and they will suspect it as well. i know we contractors are just a resource for projects and work, but we are human beings as well and there is no need to treat them like shit.  

a comment was made last week that was telling. i was told at the last minute that the local support contract in new york needed to come into the office to shut down some equipment on saturday for maintenance. i was told this on thursday and it meant that the 3rd party contractor supplier had little time to arrange for one of their guys to work on saturday. when they asked if they could arrange it for late friday afternoon i asked my boss if that was ok, and his reply was something like "no, they will come in on saturday and do it when we want. we pay them for the work and if they dont want our business we will get someone else to do it". i thought that was a bit cuntish. they have done lots of good work for us in the past and they were just asking if it was possible to re-arrange it as it was such short notice. also, i dont think we can find another support contract in NY in one day. 

he should have been less bullish and appreciated the fact that it was our fault this was at late notice. he should have appreciated the fact that they did then come in on the saturday and do the work we asked them to. just because you pay someone does not mean you can treat them like shit. on the flip side, if people are just money, then you can give me some more. after all, this job is just a means to earn money. 

i have a meeting with the IT director in a couple of weeks, which is also 2 weeks before my contract expires. either he will tell me its over, or he will offer me a new one. its going to look shit, if they dont offer me a new one and have fucked my holiday for no reason other than spite. 

a guide to recognizing cunts

another lovely spring sunday in london and as last week, there were millions of cunts driving around. actually, not only driving but cycling as well. i was cycling around regents park and you get a lot of lycra wearing racers going round as well. those fellas can shift. anyways a middle aged couple of barclays hire bikes pulled out of a side road with out looking. they looked like tourists. anyways, i was not going that fast and slowed down because i anticipated they were going to be do something stupid like that. behind me was a serious cyclist and there was no way he was going to stop in time, and luckily he managed to swerve round them as he shouted for them to look out. those skinny tyred racers are not very maneuverable at speed and he did well. if he had hit them it would have been entirely their fault and it would have been carnage. that old fella would have been hit side on and it would not have been pretty. 

what the fuck is it with tourists who want to cycle around london. i dont know what fucking city you come from but they look european and that shit might be ok in masstricht or amsterdam or brugge but this is london and you need to keep your wits about you otherwise you are going to get hurt. i would never dream of hiring a bike and riding around manhattan. i have seen the traffic and the broken roads and the speeding cabs and i would rather take the subway than trying to dodge people, cars and vans on streets i have not ridden before. why would i risk my life on holiday doing that. i am i going to cycle in tokyo?, fuck no!!. 

anyways i also had a car overtake me and get really close. he was driving a bmw 5 series gt. a fucking gt version. the regular saloon is a nice but conservatively designed car. this cunt, said to himself, "i want a beemer 5 but i dont want the conservative looking one, i think i would rather drop 40 grand on the shittier looking one. no mate, it does not look like an aston rapide, or a ferrari FF or 456 in that its a swooping sporty 4 seater. it looks shit and you are a cunt. 

yesterday another driver just took a left turn with out indicating. i had anticipated he was going to do it by the fact that he was driving a vauxhall minaro. who the fuck buys a 6 liter vauxhall in london?. a cunt, thats who!. i already had my fingers on the brakes as i came up behind him and actually thought to myself  "6 litre vauxhall, this guy is obviously a cunt, i better get ready to take evasive action in the event he lives up to the crude stereotype i have labelled him with, and he did. 
buy an BMW M3 or M5, or an AMG 55 or 63 if you want large displacement. dont buy a big engine in a fucking vauxhall. 

but the world champion cunt car is the Audi A3 (or s3). they are almost exclusively driven by cunts. usually men who clearly have a little bit of money and want to buy something german. they are young and non-graduate and yet have a few quid so i suspect they might work in IT or a junior position counting paperclips in a bank in the city or they are estate agents. they could have done the sensible thing and bought a golf r32, but no, they wanted a bit more badge and so got the audi even though its less of a car. they think audi is a prestige marque not realising the fact that it is undermined by the fact they actually bought one. they then proceed to drive it with their fucking boyfriends in the passenger seat, both of them wearing superdry polo shirts with the collars turned up and oakley shades resting on their soon to be balding heads. its a catalogue on uncool. superdry is not cool. wearing oakley shades when you are not a proffessional bike rider is not cool and turing up your collars is not cool. guess what?, your car is not cool either. 

the politest drivers on the road. that will be mercedes benz and particularly those that drive the top f the range S class. i had a guy give me so much room the other day as he was overtaking me that he swerved over into the opposite lane and nearly crashed head on into oncoming traffic. he would rather have killed himself and another car driver than risk getting too close to me. i salute you sir. 

this is wicked.

the decline of western civilisation Part 2

it was the warmest sunniest day of the year so far and i went from wearing my jacket and gloves and woolly hat last sunday on my cycle to the gym, to wearing a t-shirt on my cycle today. it was beautiful weather in london town. 

maybe it was the shock of having such good weather so early in march in london that had an affect on peoples brains, but london was also full of people acting like cunts today. an example of just one of many incidents on my 20 minute cycle to the gym is explained and shown below. 

i ride through st johns wood which is one of the nicest and most expensive areas in north london. its near regents park and there are some beautiful houses worth tens of millions of pounds. ambassadors, rock stars, investment bankers, oil company executives all live in st johns wood and it has a small high street with not an iceland or lidl in sight. am surprised they have a tesco round the corner. it does have the now ubiquitous starbucks, of which i wrote about in the first part of my posts about the decline of western civilization. today i saw the next part. 

something has happened to human beings and especially those that can afford a car. one wonders if in a few generations we will have evolved and lost the use of our legs, given how everyone wants to drive everywhere and are loathed to use their legs even to carry themselves the smallest distances. below is an example of the lengths people will go to avoid using their legs. 

the high street is wide enough for one lane of traffic in each direction. a truck (represented in blue) had stopped and blocked one lane as it was making a delivery to one of the shops on that side of the street. cars were filtering around it when there was a break in the traffic in the opposite lane, and there was a queue of about 3 or 4 cars waiting to get around it. one of the cars (represented in yellow) that had been behind the truck, moved out into the opposite lane, but instead of passing the truck, it pulled up along side it and put on its hazard lights and stopped (see graphic below).

it decided that this was the best place to wait for a parking space. both sides of the street were now blocked, one with the truck and one with the car alongside it waiting for a parking space. cars were now queuing up on both sides of the street as it was blocked and the guy in the car just sat there as if nothing was happening. he seemed utterly impervious to the beeping horns and the dirty stares he was getting from the cars blocked behind and the cars in in front of him, that he was facing head on. all for a parking space and your refusal to even entertain the idea of having to walk a few meters you will open yourself to vitriol and abuse, but you will sit and block the high street. 

i do wonder what it is about these people and what goes through their brains. i wonder if they look at troops that have come back from iraq and have had their legs blown off by an IED, and think to themselves, "lucky bastard, now you have an excuse to sit down all day in a motorised chair". i do wonder if they had the chance, many able bodied people would use wheelchairs out of choice because they dont want to walk even the shortest distance. "sorry dude, how did you lose your ability to walk, was it polio, was it an IED, was it a broken back, an industrial accident or something?". 
"no, my legs work fine, i am just a lazy cunt for whom walking 50 meters is the equivalent of doing the london marathon".  

its telling that this occurred in st johns wood. these people are the elites. those with access to money and education and universities and good jobs and good housing and good culture and those that have most control over their lives in terms of having choices open to them that might not be available to others. one wonders if elites are queuing up for a fucking starbucks on a sunday afternoon and now not aware of their actions when blocking a high street because they dont want to use their legs, whether we have passed the high point of western civilisation. should they not be at the opera or ballet or commissioning artisans. should they not be writing and composing and building and inventing. should they not be using their wealth to enrich their own lives with culture and knowledge which in turn would advance culture and knowledge as a whole. it turns out they are not from what i see. instead they are waiting in a queue outside a coffee shop with their car double parked. 

oncall

i have been on call this week and i am on call this weekend. i had not had any calls and i figured i could get away with going to the gym at lunch time as i have not had any out of hours calls all week. as is usually the way, as soon as i got changed and started working out, i got a call from someone who could not get into their system. instead of going home and remote accessing from there, i decided it would be quicker to cycle into the office and fix it from there, which i did. thanks for ruining my afternoon. 

this evening i had to remote in and do a little more work for the north america office, which somehow i got lumbered with. on friday they had a discussion about not wanting to me to work this weekend on it because as a contractor i charge for any extra time i work. damn right i charge for my time.  they asked around amongst themselves and even though they did not want to pay me for today, none of them volunteered to do the work. hey, i am happy to not work on the weekends and you can keep your money, but it turns out none of you (permies), actually wanted to do it, so thats why i said i would because it needs to get done. 

its only an hour of work but the dept head said i should bill it as half a days work. the senior techie who i have to work with and dont much like, said that actually they would pay me a full days money but would also then give me more work to do to fill the whole of saturday, to which i said i was not free for the whole day. i dont think he liked that. hey!, if you one of you volunteered to do it you would not be in this situation but none of you did, so you can not really resent me for being paid a silly amount of money for an hours work, because the dept head agreed to it. pardon me for being helpful and pardon me for being a contractor. if you had the stones you would go contracting yourself but you like giving it large and talking big in a familiar environment.  

were it not for 2 of the guys i work with, i would walk away from this contract at the end of april. one of them got me the job and i dont want to let him down, and the other guy is probably the best contractor in london and i learn tonnes of new shit from him every week. i have been getting lots of calls from agencies despite not applying for anything in months and the market seems to have improved quite a bit. under normal circumstances i would book my ticket for tokyo and end my contract at the end of april. instead i will stay because of those 2 guys who have helped me a lot and to whom i owe a debt of gratitude. 

i watched this recently. watch it if you want to learn something. 

sinner man

work has been a bit of a chore this week. its just been a bit busy and boring and a little annoying. i have to work with one of the guys that i dont really like. he thinks he is the shit and that he runs the place and yet it turns out he does not know nearly as much as he would like to think he does. we have another guy in our team who i by far the best techie i have ever worked with and he is exposing holes in the stuff that has been put in. 

tonight we had a problem with a mail store on a mail server and it was left to me and the other guy who is really good, to sort it out. we are both contractors whilst the annoying guy is the senior member of the dept and permanent. he walked straight passed us when he saw that there was a problem and went home at 5:30 whilst we stayed behind to try and fix it, which the other guy did manage to. 

i thought it summed things up quite appropriately. when the shit hit the fan he split because when things go wrong, its when you find out what people know. he did not fancy getting exposed as he has an image he is cultivating, whereas i dont give a shit if people dont think i am the best techie in the firm, and i just want to learn and try and understand things and if that means google and reading forums, then so be it. i am not too proud to admit that i dont know what every error message is. anyway, the reason the servers went to shit was because the time server on the ESX host they were on was not set right and the virtual servers were getting their time from it. 2 fuck ups and 2 more things that should not occur if you followed best practice. you dont let your virtual windows machine get time from the esx server. you use another NTP server that is not piggy backing and using an esx host as its master. in that case, even if the ntp daemon has stopped on the esx server, it still would not fuck up your guest VM's, which it did tonight. kerberos does not like time differences of more than 5 minutes between servers.  

today i have mostly been listening to nina simone. class. 

UPDATE: tonight i had to remote into one of our north american sites to shut down a server. its a small office with no IT staff and only have one server on site. now, the guy who is a bit of an asshole is a stickler for process and doing things right and getting everything documented and done by the book. well, for all that, it turns out we have a server in a remote site with no iLO remote access configured. another case of giving it large and falling over on the basics. other similar issues this week on top of the NTP issues and this were discovering they had randomly mixed 300GB and 600GB drives in the SAN for someone unknown reason, not using host sets on the SAN, not receiving alerts from the SAN, naming servers as AD domain controllers but they are not actually domain controllers, using group policy to implement Logon as a service right to a bunch of random accounts, which was overwriting the accounts that actually needed to on particular servers,  incorrect IP address stated for a switch and domain controller at a remote site, so i thought they were down when i could not get to them or ping them and incorrect password written in the password list for one of the switches. so much for dotting all the I's and crossing all the t's. 

copy of a

my team leader dropped another hint and said that pretty much all of may was out of bounds for holiday as well. fuck, fuck, fuck!!. i really need a break. the irony is that it will help me work better and i know i will be more productive after a break. i better get a fucking renewal in april because i am going to be pissed if i did not get a good deal on a holiday to tokyo and then it transpires that they change their mind and i dont get renewed at the end of april. 

the irony is that everything else is going well at work. i am picking up some good knowledge and the people are nice. they just will not let me take a break. its been nearly 8 months with out a break and it looks like they want it to be at least 10 months before they even consider letting me take a few days off. 

have missed a few mid week gym sessions over the last few weeks. the weather has been awful and sometimes the trains are screwed and by the time you get home late in the pouring rain, the last thing you want to do is go straight back out to the gym. once the days get longer and milder and we move towards summer i will ramp up my training once again. shit, its not like i am going to be anywhere near a beach any time soon so its not as if anyone is going to see i dont have any good conditioning. 

this is the only thing i have look forward to in a few months. 

tokyo

i had started to look for plane tickets to san francisco or los angeles over the last week or so, in anticipation of taking a trip when my contract finishes on april 22nd. i am gasping for a holiday and i did not go away last year so i really need to get out of london this year.

 

anyways a couple of days ago i got an email from virgin atlantic advertising a sale on fares for 4 days and it had Tokyo, Japan return flights for £599 which was about £150 less than a ticket to san fran. i looked into hotels yesterday and found it was not unreasonable so i made a plan to go Tokyo this year instead of Cali. it would actually be significantly cheaper than cali. the place looks amazing like its the set of bladerunner and i did some research and found some good shops that sell sneakers and old video game arcades. i would also have done some museums and gone to their main areas like shinjuku and shibuya and akihabara. there was only one slight doubt and that was work. my contract runs till april 22nd and so i planned to go on aril 24th. i mentioned it to my team leader and he replied that it would be a busy time to take holiday. i did say that my contract would have finished by then, but he said it was unlikely that i would not be offered a new one and that it would be particularly for the period end of april and may where they have to deliver some projects. arggghhhh!!!!!. tokyo trip cancelled postponed. :-(

its like famine and feast. no one calls me about a job for 6 months and i have lots of time on my hands but no money and then i get a contract and money and i cant take a week off in 10 months because they want me at work all the time. i am not going to forget the Tokyo idea. i am going to try and make that happen at the end of may when everything is delivered. i will be on my knees by then from not having a break. 

today i have mostly been listening to athlete - tokyo

Embrace - Refugees

starfucks

first signs of the demise of western civilisation. 

i cycled passed a starbucks and there were so many people in there that there were people queuing outside. its a coffee shop for fucks sake!. 

i bet the queue to see janes addiction play at whisky on sunset blvd in 1988 was not as long and the venue as packed as a fucking starbucks in st johns wood on a saturday afternoon. jesus wept. 

show me

am still getting calls from agents about other contracts. is this some sort of fucking joke, because i am not laughing. where were you all for 6 months last year when nobody called me about anything and now i get a contract and people are calling me every week, even though i have not applied for a job in over 6 months or sent my cv to anyone. i can guess what happens next. i finish my current contract at the end of april and then i wont be able to get a call back or an interview from anyone. its always the way, but this year there is a world cup on in june, so i will be content if i am not working then. 

no, i have not posted this by mistake. i do actually like this song. its kind of like a modern interpretation of lets get it on by marvin gaye. i do think these fellas are going to the regret the tattoos in a few years time. a friend of mine has some tattoos and they always fade and the edges blur and i can imagine in another 10 years its will just look like a big bruise. 

shattered

i feel shattered. its been a long few months of darkness and cloud and long nights and dark morning and rush hour trains and work and rain. with the exception of 3 days over christmas i have not taken any time off from work, and i feel worn out and a bit fed up. 

i have 3 more months to get through till my contract is up and will see how it goes. i dont think they will need me after april and i really could do with a couple of weeks off. 

work is going ok. i cant complain about it because there is nothing to complain about. some of it is interesting, i am learning some things i did not know before and they pay me. you can not ask for more than that. i just need to get through the next 3 months. its really hit me that last couple of weeks. my energy is leaving me. have missed a few sessions at the gym but i forced myself to go on thursday night and it will set me up for good sessions this weekend. a good hard session always makes me feel better for a day or two. 

this song sounds like how i feel. 

Bruce Springsteen - The Ghost of Tom Joad - Sanremo 1996

Nine Inch Nails - Came Back Haunted