Category: Life: Personal

Yawn! I haven’t long woken up from a really long sleep – just about 18 hours. I haven’t slept for so long for ages, but I guess with only getting 4 hours sleep on Friday night, I needed to catch up. I was working on a new website until around 6am Saturday morning: ok, ok, it was the “Guess That Movie” website – the design is already looking quite nifty (it looks like its a framed based site, but it isn’t), the database design has been finalised and nearly all the main graphics have been designed (ok, there’s only going to be two graphics and I’ve done one of them: but 50% is nearly ‘all’ isn’t it? 🙂 ).

I must admit, however, that I did have a really funny dream. I usually have semi horror-movie, sci-fiish or, at least, “likely to happen” type dreams but last night’s was just “totally out there”.

I dreamt, that for some reason, I had instantly been selected to play in the English football (soccer) team in a very important match. And, like in real life, I wasn’t a footballer. So the match comes around and, being a defender, I managed to stop the “game deciding” goal from getting in my just running behind our goal keeper (who was just outside the box) and header-ing the ball from behind him into his hands. Since I was only playing for the one game, at the end I went back to “real life” and found myself in a pub talking about the game – several people didn’t believe the fact that “yes, I was the one that saved that goal” and so I had to get the pub manager to play the game again on the TV and at the important part I pointed out where I saved the goal and did a little celebration thingy in Richy style… They then started to believe me and buy me drinks.

The only possible thing that I can think of that might have sparked that freaky strange dream is the fact that Leicester City Football Club (“The Foxes”) somehow managed to let Wolverhampton Wanders (“Wolves” aka “The Doritos Cheesy Team”) beat them 4-1 in the fourth of the FA Cup. But considering LCFC is currently in “administration” because of previous financial difficulties, have a large number of injured players (striker Brian Deane has a fractured cheekbone and Trevor Benjamin and James Scowcroft are also unavilable due to injuries) and because of the “no player transfers whilst a club is in administration” rule have been unable to get “fresh” players – I’ll let them off these once.

I think I must have angered the Internet Gods yesterday some how. I got back from work and, as is my habit, instantly came upstairs to check my email. I’ve actually got my various email accounts spread out on 6 servers – 2 are for work-related email (i.e. I was ‘given’ the addresses by my employer), 1 is my Hotmail account, 1 is my Yahoo account and then I’ve got my two “main” accounts. One is hosted on my main ADSL dialup ISP and the other on my dedicated server which runs my website. Anyway, I got home and went to check my email – ping, ping, bang. My ISPs mail server was suffering overloading/technical issues and I was unable to pick up my mail v ia POP3. They eventually acknowledged the problem at 9.30pm, but didn’t get the hardware failure fixed until 2.30pm today. So, I was without my major email practically all day (I had over 600 waiting for me when I collected it today).

Ok, so I can just cope with my own mail server, ok I may be missing out on some emails sent to my ISP hosted domain but I’ve still got two way email access. Or so I thought. Come 1.30am in the morning (don’t ask!), the server is suddenly unreachable. I’m unable to access my email, my main website or my blog. I run a few tests and find out they’ve had a router failure. I send them an email via my Hotmail account and then decide what to do. The router was down for 419 minutes according to my log files – that means my web server was unavailable for nearly 7 hours 🙁

Is it really Wednesday today? I know what I eventually got out of my nice big warm bed this morning (it was one of those times when my body just wanted to lay still), I thought it was Tuesday. I went downstairs and made a cup of tea and picked up the post. There was just my copy of Private Eye magazine – which I thought was odd as it normally came on Wednesdays.

Went to work and it wasn’t until I was leaving and one of my co-workers asked how my first week and a half went did I twig that, yep, it was Wednesday.

Just before I left, my boss told me that they were going to have to change my working hours to fit in with other activities – so that means I get half an hour less sleep than I currently do. Bummer. Of course, I could always go to sleep before 3.30am.

Why did I stay up so late last night? Well, I wasn’t too tired and in that situation I normally just lay on my bed and watch a film or something on my computer – but Christina’s guess on the current “Guess That Movie” was so extremely close that I really thought someone would guess in the next 10 minutes. So I decided to have a bath instead (and my tub takes a while to fill), checked the GTM thread – still no guess, had my bath, came back – still no guess. Finished reading “A Fall Of Moondust” and still no guess. I went to bed thinking “I bet as soon as I fall asleep someone would guess”. I’ve now done a days worth of work and it STILL hasn’t been properly guessed. I’m in shock! Why? Because at the moment all the clues are sitting there and you just need to click on 2 links and you’ll have the choice of two possible movies that match the clues given to the guesses so far. So if you are intelligent, yet don’t recognise the film, you should have a 50/50 chance of guessing correctly.

I may actually have to revise my GTM schedule at this rate – I’ve now got 3 images all ready on stand by (I try and have the next one on standby anyway just in case the live one is guessed in 5 minutes), but the next “scheduled” one is even harder than this one (it contains no humans in the screen shot). I may have to substitute it for the one I did just before bed last night – a reasonably easy one IMHO.

So how did my first week as a professional search engine placement engineer go?

Well, technically the job title on my contract (yep, I have a proper signed contract – first time in years!) is “Search Engine Optimiser” but since we guarantee to place our customers sites in the top 30, 20 or 10 (depending on how much they pay), I like the “SE placement engineer” title better 🙂 No, don’t ask how we do it (as I’m not going to tell), but when I started I thought I already knew every single “trick” in the book, however it seems I only knew around 75% of them. Of course, if you want your site promoting just drop me a line (leaving a comment will do) and I’ll send you the links. I’m not going to change my blog into an advertisement medium and I do want to keep my personal and professional life separate, but I also want the company to do even better than it is so I get a massive bonus so I can make my own hollowed out volcano *mwahhh*. Drat. Did I write the last bit out? Ooops… 🙂

My job’s at a company an “inconvenient” distance away – it’s too close to catch a taxi cab (1.8miles) – but it is practically on a direct bus route from the bottom of my road. However, the buses only seem to come once every 20 minutes and in that time I could have walked it there. So, of course like the fool I am, I’ve been walking to work and back again every single day. Previously I was used to catching a cab to the train station, going into Birmingham, having a mad 5 minute dash across the city centre to discover my next train had just left and then having a 2 minute walk to my old works front door.

So, of course, my legs weren’t/aren’t used to this amount of work. By Thursday my legs were knackered, and on Friday I didn’t think I’d actually be able to get to work – every 40ft of so the pain in my lower legs just got to much and I had to stop. I’m a wuss I know 🙁 It did give me strange dreams about running the London Marathon in record time and then running from Lands End to John O’Groats for the sake of it – I’m not even going to “go there” with the part of the dream where I ran across the Atlantic Ocean in a plastic “hamster ball”…

I’ve just watched most of Armageddon on BBC TV again and it started my mind wandering.

Basically, the film is about an asteroid “the size of Texas” heading for Earth and a bunch of oil drillers being sent up to the asteroid to “nuke” it from the inside. Part way through the film, Nasa Mission Control thinks they’ve lost the Independence shuttle and crew in the asteroid’s debris as it tries to land on the shuttle. The crew includes AJ (Ben Affleck) who is Grace’s (Liv Tyler) boyfriend. Grace is still in mission control and is obviously extremely upset at the loss of her boyfriend. Then the other shuttle – Freedom – lands on the asteroid and lose contact with Mission Control: making them think that both shuttles have gone missing. Grace is devastated because the second shuttle contained her father (Bruce Willis) – and, from what I can work out, her only living relative.

That got me thinking – what would I do if all my immediate family were killed? Would I cope? What would I do? And who would ask to come with me to lend moral support at the funerals? Whilst I’m close to my GESF, we’ve only met each other once (well, over 3 days) and we’re just close friends at the moment – so would it be “wrong” for me to ask? Or how about my ex-fiancee who I was with for around 3 years and who actually knew my family extremely well – or would it be “wrong” to contact an ex for something like that?

Luckily, I’ve “only” had to attend one funeral in my life (my Great-grandmother’s around 2 years ago), but then I had my entire family and my fiancee with me. But what would it be like if I suddenly had nobody?

It’s not really a nice thing to think about, but it is brain provoking.