It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Kit so happy.
I’ve never seen Kit so loved-up.
Aren’t humans interesting?
This blog post was later featured in an On This Day revisit, in a blog post in 2010.
Month: August 2003
Caffienation
A week of no more than 5½ hours sleep a night led me to caffeination as an aid to get any work done, this week. It’s kept me awake to work, but has made me feel weird and unwell, and last night, OD‘d, had me get excessively paranoid and curl up into a crying lump on Claire.
Caffeine is not good for me.
The Most Terrifying Thing A Web Developer Will Ever See
Want to see something quite terrifying: DHTML Lemmings. I kid you not – this is scary shit, particularly when you realise that it’s all being done client-side, using script, over the web: no Flash, no Applets, no ActiveX <spits> – just pure unadulterated CSS and JavaScript. I got scared.
Beach Party Gone Bad
We walked back over the dunes from Ynyslas beach. I lead the way, planning to reach the car, drop off my bags, then go back and help Kit and Paul, who were struggling with most of the remaining barbeque gear. A few minutes behind me was Claire, and a few minutes behind her, Fiona, a friend from Stirling who’s visiting us for this week. Paul and Kit were a few dunes back.
As I climbed the last rise before the car park, an alarming vision appeared before me… water. Lots and lots of water. The tide had come in further than I’d have expected, and the rear half of the car was underwater, sinking into the sand and slowly filling it from the exhaust-pipe upwards with water!
I dropped my bags and ran back to the top of the dunes. “Claire!” I shouted, “Get your keys from your bag, drop your bag, and RUN!” She looked at me quizzically for a moment, but then, noting the severity in my voice and the specificity of my instructions, did exactly that. Meanwhile I ran past her and down into the valley. I raised a hand over my head and shouted to the others: “Fiona! Kit! Paul… FLOOD!”
Fiona and I reached the car together and waded out behind it. Claire revved the engine as we tried to push it from behind, but the partially-buried front wheels (combined with our inability to get a grip against the slippy underwater shore) prevented us from gaining more than a few inches.
Some strangers came by. One commented that “we’d never get it out like that” (helpful!). “Could you three lift the front up?” I asked, gesturing to the larger-looking of the men. They did so, and Fiona and I continued to push, and slowly but surely we extracted the vehicle from it’s watery sinkhole. Not a moment too soon, either – it was an hour from high tide, so there was a lot of water still to come.
Later, at Safeway, we cleaned the saltwater off the car using the jet wash, and went and had A Midsummer Night’s Troma. All in all, a fun day.
Claire also gives an account of the proceedings. It’s disappeared from the Internet, so a copy can now be found archived here.
Go look at virtual Ynyslas dunes
Online Banking
NatWest phoned me today in response to my complaint the other day that their online banking service refused to support Opera, my web browser of choice, seemingly for no good reason. I threatened to take my account elsewhere. Regardless, they’ve promised to look into it and try to make the site Opera-compatible, and I’ve said I’ll give them ’til Christmas.
Let your feet do the talking, people. It’s the only way that big companies (and banks) pay any attention at all.
Sand and seawater
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
This repost was published in hindsight, on 11 March 2019.
Claire wrote:
Got up late, and spent the day on Ynyslas beach (A small town North of Aberystwyth, on the coast) with Paul, Kit, Fiona (Kit’s new girlfriend, as I’m sure he will relate in his next entry) and Dan. The water was warm, if a little shallow. We went for a swim, had a barbecue and watched the beautiful sunset. Pictures will be online soon enough. We climbed lazily back over the sand dunes to return to the car. Dan ran ahead, stopped at the crescent of a dune, and turned. “Drop your bag, take your keys, your car is underwater!” I thought he was joking.
So i wade into the now several inches deep water, just below the level of the exhaust pipe. Uncaring about getting sand in the car from my soaking shoes, I jump in and start the engine. I rev and rev, but my wheels are spinning and I’m digging myself deeper into the sand. Eventually, as the water continues to rise, some strangers come to my aid. (Dan had gone to get the others.) With about five people pushing and me panicking slightly less, the car was rescued and i drove it away from the water.
As I drove, very relieved indeed and driving cautiously in case the brakes had been damaged, a woman shouts at me. “Your lights are off!” she tells me. The least of my worries on an almost deserted beach after escaping a drowned vehicle! I flipped them on and waited for the rest of the crew.
We returned to aber, and laughed at our stupidity. Ok, my stupidity, I guess. This sort of thing only happens to me. We washed the salt water off the car and went back to the flat for beer and “Cannibal the Musical”. Hooray. A good day all round.I’m considering giving my car bouyancy aids and an anchor.
Chilli!
As Kit relates, too, we made a fab chilli con carne (and, using Quorn mince, a ‘chilli non carne’ for Paul). Recipe as below (feel free to steal, adapt etc.):
AUGUST CHILLI
serves 81 225g tin chopped tomato
1 5-portion bottle “sundried tomato” pasta sauce
4 medium tomatoes, thinly sliced
1 tube double concentrate tomato paste
1 tube chilli paste
1 200g tin kidney beans
6 cloves garlic
12 medium closed-cup mushrooms, sliced
1 tblspn herbes de provence
6 mild green chilli peppers, sliced and de-seeded
1 small drop of “Da Bomb” mother-of-all-chilli-sauces (who dares burns)
2 teaspoons monosodium glutamate
pinch of salt
500g lean beef mince
250g quorn mince
olive oilFry the mince, and, in a separate pan, the quorn – in a little olive oil. Toast the garlic (again, olive oil) in a separate pan, add the mushrooms, and fry until cooked. Meanwhile, mix together the remaining ingredients in a large pan over a medium heat, stirring frequently. Add the cooked mushrooms and garlic to the tomato/chilli sauce, and heat for a further 5-10 minutes. Pour 2/3 of the sauce over the beef mince, and the remaining 1/3 over the quorn mince, and stir in. Serve with fajitas, tacos, or whatever else you like. Also tastes great re-heated, or with a little Worcester sauce added (not vegetarian, so don’t add it to the quorn pan!).
Without a doubt, Kit and I’s best chilli to date. Not hot enough to injure anybody… Bryn, who considers a medium curry “hot”, went back for seconds… but well-rounded, fruity (if substituting “Da Bomb”, use a good-quality chilli sauce), and warming. Brought my nose-end out in a sweat, and left us all sitting around in a mild chilli-induced euphoria. Fantastic.
Reb Leaves The Country!
It turns out that Reb (my ex-) was trying to get in touch with me to tell me that she was leaving the country: she’d decided on Saturday night that she wanted to tell me that today (Tuesday) she’d be leaving the UK to go and work for six months in Benidorm, returning for a few weeks in January before (if she can get a visa sorted out) moving to Egypt.
This is good for two reasons:
(a) This is something she’s wanted to do pretty-much since I met her, six years ago. She suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder, which causes her to become depressed during shorter days as a result of a dependency upon sunlight to make ‘happy chemicals’ in the brain. Moving to more equatorial regions – at least for the winter – should make her a happier bunny.
(b) I no longer have to share a country with her. Seriously, it’s a great relief. I’m sure that folks in Preston will be glad to hear this news, too. Apparently she had a party to commemorate her leaving. I wonder if I can organise one, too, to celebrate that she’s gone.
But I suppose that’s excessively harsh. When I spoke to her on the phone on Sunday I didn’t even for a moment get a compulsion to put a spear through her chest and skewer her to a tree, and I even smiled at the fact that we were talking (and not just at the fact that she was leaving).
She said that she misses me. I said that I was glad that I didn’t miss her, because she’d caused me enough self-abuse in my lifetime. She changed the subject.
Eventful
Been excessively busy this last week: lots and lots of work. Pulled a 16-and-a-half hour work day on Wednesday, fixing the entire network where my co-workers were unable to. It’s a lot nicer now. In other news, I won an eBay auction for a copy of the 1974 edition of Parker Games “Careers” board game, which is fab, and Claire, Bryn, Paul, Kit and I have been playing it all week.
Three Rings schedule looks tighter and tighter. Having some doubts about getting it to a stable 1.0 release by next weekend, the deadline.
Tonight, sometime after midnight, my awful ex-, Reb (if you ever hear me complain about my ex-, it’s undoubtedly her) dropped me two text messages out of the blue asking if I’m awake and to call her, in capitals (followed by two “X”s, which I take to be kisses). I can’t be arsed. I’ll drop her a text in the morning and find out what she wants.
Right now, I’m going to coax Claire to bed for rumpy-pumpy. ;-)
A Vasectospectacular Mistake
So this Brazillian man with a ear infection goes in for surgery, and, as a result of his sore ear, mis-hears the name announced in the doctor’s waiting room, and accidentality gets a vasectomy.
What? Didn’t he think anything of it when the doctor applied a local anaesthetic to the area under his balls and produced a scalpel? Apparently, he thought that the doctor knew best and that the infection must have travelled down that far. And didn’t think to ask. It’s a weird world.
Dating Agency Stupidity
I saw this dating site today (don’t ask how I came across that in my daily webtrawl)… the page in question has two major flaws:
1. Why would a dating company offer a “lifetime membership”? If they were truly any good at what they did – i.e. matchmaking – then shouldn’t you not-need to be a member for very long
before you find Mr./Miss. Right and sail away into the sunset? Surely the best dating agencies don’t need to offer memberships that cover more than one date, because they’re that good
at matching people up?
2. I don’t think they meant for their legal agreement (see for yourself) to read “TERMS AGREEMENT GOES HERE”. Whooops!
Anyway, it made me smile. And my headache’s almost better now. Shame I’ve got almost no work done today.
Plague
It’s contagious! I have a dull ache in my head and a mild nausea.
<fights on>
How Am I Supposed To Feel?
After my stressy-rant the other day, Claire, Kit and Paul started tidying up Claire and my flat. My suspicions – that they were doing this to try to make my life a little less stressful – were confirmed by Claire one evening.
They mean well, but I can’t help but feel that instead of having lots of things to do and little motivation, I now have somewhat fewer things to do and little motivation. I’m not sure whether that’s an improvement or not. I guess it is. More prominently, for awhile I felt guilty: like by my blog entry I’d, like, emotionally blackmailed them into doing it. I mean: tidying my flat? I don’t know.
Claire’s not feeling well and has taken an early night, but I can’t sleep again.
I do feel a lot better though. I guess my friends’ efforts really have helped. It makes me happy to have friends who care. It makes the corners of my eyes twitch and my stomach try to swallow my heart, all by themselves. I guess this is what friends are for.
I’m going to check if Claire’s asleep and take her some more painkillers if she’s not. Then I think I’ll take a walk, then try to get some sleep.
To friendship.
Progress!
Working late. I’ve got Club 977 (best 80’s cheese on the ‘net!) playing as loud as this computer goes, slamming out code at a rate more productive than I’ve been all week. Finally got past a bug that’d been troubling me for days. Phew! Just in time for a meeting tomorrow!
I’ve been getting a lot of concerned attention after my post, “Stress!”, earlier (I didn’t think I had so many avid readers). Thanks, all of you; you concern means a lot, but really – I’ll be okay: I land on my feet, remember! Just need to get my head down and get on with some stuff, that’s all, and a little bit of de-stressing onto the web was good, too.
A few more lines of code, methinks, before Claire arrives (she’s kindly giving me lifts to and from work while I’m being a lazy bugger and not sorting out my bike, the star).
Take care, y’all;
I Want The Goat
Seen Andy’s journal entry about goats and game-shows? I’d want the goat. No, really. Goats are cool.
I’m not getting enough work done. However, I did find an interesting web site called My Pole. Make sure you look at the “The History” section. Weird world.
<tugs at chains> <continues rowing>