Surreal – but somehow amusing

I’ve been very good on this, and not mentioned the Who Wants to be a Millionaire cheats court case, but the fact that the case got adjourned for a day because the jury were overcome by a fit of coughing was just too surreal to go without some form of mention.

Shit end to a shit day

Got back to Manchester, and just missed the bus. So I had to wait for the next one – and of course because of Stagecoach Bus‘s fucking shonky timetable after 7pm, they run every half hour. So the 7.30 finally arrives – and coasts straight on past, half empty and obviously driven by a complete arsehole.

I finally got home nearly an hour after arriving in Manchester – and the first thing that got done was a shitty email to Stagecoach. We’ll see how it goes with that one, anyway.

Getting Paid

Today’s definitely qualified as “one of those days”. I’m in the mood to murder some poxy fucking bureaucrat. And it’s all down to my favourite people in the world, the banking industry. (People who know me will somehow not find this a surprise)

For the last two weeks, I’ve been working for a web-design company over in Huddersfiled, on a contract organised by an agency who shall remain nameless. A week ago, I sent off the first invoice of this contract, which should have been paid into my bank account last Friday. It wasn’t. Because I’d worked for this agency before (about 18 months ago, give or take) they’d still got my bank details on file – unfortunately, they were for an account with a bank who shall remain equally nameless which I closed three months ago after a nine month battle. Oh fucking whoops.

Today, I’ve been told that they can’t pay the money into the correct account until they’ve got the money back from the bank they sent it to incorrectly. The general attitude seems to be “well, it’s not our problem – you’ll just have to wait”. The fact that they didn’t even pay me the correct amount is, of course, utterly irrelevant.

And along with that, I’ve been having to write webpages that will work off an Access backend – a total nightmare, to say the least. I’m a database geek, can’t deny it – but Access bears the same resemblance to a decent database as a dog-turd bears to a diamond.

Hopefully tomorrow will improve.

Considering a move

Following on from various comments, not least being today’s one from Peter about the growing shonkyness of Haloscan for commenting etc., I’m considering moving hosting over from EasySpace to 34sp.com (mainly on the recommendation of Pat) over the next couple of weeks. Who knows, I might even go the whole hog and consider cursing Moveable Type.

In all honesty, right now it’s going to depend on a couple of factors. 1) Having some spare time. 2) Getting paid. After that, it’ll all happen, and hopefully it’ll be a smooth process. Ha. Who am I trying to kid?

Children and contraceptives

I’m turning into another Green Fairy. (which won’t surprise anyone who knows me) The Grauniad is reporting today that the Green Party has launched it’s new policy on abortion and sex education. Part of this policy is to give out free contraception (A Good Thing) and improved sex education (also A Good Thing) to children of school age. Considering the Marie Stopes report last week that children are having sex from the age of 11 now, I can’t help but think that the provision of contraception and better education are an improvement on the current situation where they can’t obtain medical contraception (such as the Pill etc.) without their parent’s permission/knowledge until they’re sixteen.

As for better sex education, well, anything that means they don’t have to keep writing to Just 17 or whatever, saying “I gave my boyfriend a blowjob, can I get pregnant?” has to be an improvement.

The phrase that Green Fairy will froth at though (my prediction for the day) is this one : “Improved support should also be given to women on low incomes, so they were not driven to terminate pregnancies for financial reasons, they said.“. It seems to be saying “hey, it’s OK to have loads of kids even if you can’t afford it”, which is just an extrapolation of the current attitude, involving “have more kids and you can claim more benefit”. Maybe that’s just my perspective on it though.

Weekend

Well, there wasn’t much updating getting done over the weekend, due to an invasion by the parents. Nothing too bad – having seen them last back in November, and quarterly visitations are OK in the grand scheme of things. It’s a year now since my father had his heart attack, and he’s doing really well after it, which is always a good thing to see.

Anyway – Saturday involved a trip to Manchester Airport to drop off my brother so he could go off for a week’s ski-ing. Not that he knew exactly where he was headed (“it’s either Grenoble or Lyon, depending on what happens“) or whether he’d meet the people he intended to meet once over there. It’s been that kind of level of organisation – which reassures me that it’s a family trait, not just me. Following a visit to a pub while working out where to go next, a visit to the Whitworth art gallery, and then an intention to visit Werneth Low park – which was doomed from the start due to piss-poor navigation on both my part and then my mother’s. Being fairly well lost (although still knowing we could get back dead easy) resulted in a trip around a fair amount of South Manchester, including Cheadle Hulme, Wilmslow, Handforth Dean and several others.

Finally got back, and then went out for a meal in the city centre on Saturday night – very pleasant.

And now they’ve gone, and the house is back to being mine ’til next weekend, when I’ve got more friends staying…

People are strange

Looking through yesterday’s logfiles (So I’m a geek, and pay attention… *Grin*) it looks like some of the Google searches that found d4d were – how shall I put this? – slightly out of the ordinary. (Hey, nice understatement there, lyle).

I’m not sure which is worse – that I come up #1 on this search, or that someone typed it all in.all i have wanted is simply to get back to the normality of things, if there is such a normality. then i pause to think, is the normality of things really so great? when every day of my life is wasted…

And then I spotted this one : Can you help me find some things on farts? Looks like I’m #6 on that one. Then we find the epic mis-spelling of Kick Poxing, for which yours truly is sat happily at #3.

And finally, the truth is obviously out there. a Yahoo search on I hate ashton-under-lyne brings up d4d at #6. I can live with that.