Posted: Fri 2 April, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Creativity, Depression, Domestic, Health, Own Business, Photography, Thoughts, Work-related, Writing |
It won’t give up, it wants me dead
Goddamn this noise inside my head
© Nine Inch Nails, “The Becoming”, Downward Spiral album
That’s not quite where I am at the moment – but somehow it still seems to be the best lyric for describing things at the moment.
I’ve written before about my regular issues and history with depression, and the way I normally fight my way through it. Recently though, that’s not been the case. If I’m honest, the last three or four years have involved fighting, but only getting to an impasse, a holding action to keep ground, rather than a victory.
I’ve made lots of plans, and had the intention to do things. It’s just that I never seem to find the time or the final motivation to get them done. I keep on trying, and I keep on failing – and at the moment there’s no good reason for Why. I just don’t get to it. That final bit, that final push, is missing, AWOL.
So I’m working on getting through it, but I’m also going to go a different route this time. I’ve a doctor’s appointment in a couple of weeks time, and I’m going to aim to get some anti-depressants. Not something I’m overly happy about, but I think it’s time for me to try them again.
I had a very negative experience with them many moons ago, so I have some really serious reservations about them. But if I can give them a go and they work, so be it. If not, it’s another avenue tried and I need to find other options. But at least I’ll be trying the avenues this time.
Posted: Mon 29 March, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: 2009/10, Creativity, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Script Frenzy, The '10 Writing Project, Writing |
One of my challenges for April is to take part in Script Frenzy – a challenge to churn out 100 pages of screenplay during the month.
I don’t yet know if I’ll manage to do it – there’s a lot of stuff coming up over the next month what with one thing and another – but I’m going to give it a go. I had my reservations back in November about the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) but this time round it’s something I feel a bit better about having a go at it.
I won’t make any promises or guarantees about this right now – I had intended to have some plans and idea in place before the start of April about what’s going to happen and where it’s going to start/run/go, but I haven’t. We’ll see.
Posted: Sat 27 March, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Geeky, Getting Organised, Sociable, Thoughts, Travel, WHC2010, Writing |
This weekend I was supposed to be at Brighton Shock, the 2010 the World Horror Convention.
Next weekend, I was supposed to be at Odyssey 2010, the SciFi Eastercon.
As it happens, plans have changed (now there’s a common theme) and I won’t be at either.
This weekend ended up clashing Brighton Shock with both WebSourceEast and the Peter Gabriel concert at the O2, plus I figured I couldn’t really justify being away for two long weekends on the trot with work and home. So Brighton Shock got the boot.
As for Eastercon, when I signed up for it I hadn’t realised that Easter was the date it was, and it would’ve meant being away for Herself’s birthday. (Less charitable souls might suggest that me not being around would be a good present in and of itself, but that’d be nasty) Additionally I did some maths and figured out that the cost of it all would be feckin’ expensive, as it’s at the Radisson hotel at Heathrow – not a venue known for its low prices, I think it’s fair to say.
So instead I’m at home for the next two weekends and not travelling round the country like a loon. In some ways that’s disappointing, in others it actually makes a lot of sense.
Posted: Thu 18 February, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: D4D™, Domestic, The '10 Writing Project, Writing |
This may be a really really bad idea, but I’ve signed up for this year’s Script Frenzy in April.
The challenge is to write 100 pages of screenplay in the 30 days of April. Should be interesting – assuming I can get my brain and motivation into gear.
Anyway, I’ve signed up, and we’ll see how it goes.
Posted: Thu 4 February, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: D4D™, Domestic, Security, Web Development, Work-related, Writing |
In the run-up to the Festering Season, I had one hell of a lot of work coming in with some documentation that needed doing in order to get us what’s known as PCI-DSS accreditation. PCI-DSS stands for “Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard”, and it’s a total fucking nightmare.
Anyway, one of the big steps in attaining this PCI-DSS standard is to have somewhere around a metric shit-ton of paperwork. No kidding. There’s some 230-odd points in the PCI-DSS standard, and each one of the bloody things needs documenting. It’s a serious bit of work just getting all the paperwork done.
With the other stuff I also had to do in order to get everything in place, the documentation took a back-seat, and we ended up getting it done by me speaking into a dictaphone, and then getting an audio-typist to type it all up. It was supposed to save me a stuff-load of time. And it worked – I’d got all the dictation done in two and a half days, and the typist did everything in time for mid-January.
Or so we thought.
It turned out that the audio-typist was a tossbag, and didn’t actually do all that much in the day they were in – at the end of which they said they’d done it all.
Cunty fucking bugger.
It’s taken me the intervening three fucking weeks to get things back to where I thought I was in mid-January. Three weeks of doing this sodding documentation, three weeks of making sure it’s right, and that it all makes sense. Oh, and still doing all my normal insane workload as well.
This goes some way to explaining why I haven’t been writing much on D4D in that time – I’m utterly damn sick of typing, and didn’t have the time or headspace to do much here.
I’ve just now finished the documentation for PCI-DSS. We’ll review it tomorrow and next week, so I’m sure there’ll be some edits. But that’s just fiddly crap – the most important thing is that I’ve broken the back of it. I’m done.
I’m also utterly fucked. But that’s beside the point. I’m done with the documentation. Happy, happy day.
Posted: Fri 1 January, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Domestic, The '09 Writing Project, The '10 Writing Project, Writing |
Back at the start of 2009, I started a plan to get at least one piece of writing out the way and completed in 2009.
That plan failed spectacularly. In fact pretty much everything around my writing ideas failed spectacularly in 2009.
So I’m going to do the same for 2010.
All I actually want is to get one piece written from start to finish, get it done and ready for whatever comes next. If I can get more stuff done then even better. But just one piece, that’s all that’s being targetted right now.
Posted: Thu 31 December, 2009 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: 2009/10, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Own Business, Photography, Resolutions, Thoughts, Work-related, Writing |
Well it’s New Year’s Eve, so it’s time for me to have a few thoughts and ideas for 2010.
As always, there’s a number of ideas and plans coming together at the moment, but whether they’ll all come into fruition or not is something only time will tell. But for now this is the list of what’s in my head, and we’ll see what happens. I’m trying to keep it down to four or five categories, just to simplify things a bit.
- Photography : I really want to make some progress on the photography side of things, work towards selling some bits if possible. I’ve got some contracted work to do for the charity I worked with a while back, and from there see what progresses.
- Writing : Again, I want to get to the point of having some stuff actually done and finished. I planned to do this in ’09, but that hasn’t worked out. There’s a few bits that have been started, but I need to finish at least a couple of them and work that way.
- Work : I’ve made the commitment to stay in the current job throughout 2010 – allbeit with the “unless everything turns to shit as a result” proviso – which will keep the bills being paid and me in general work. But I still want to get some of the outstanding projects and ideas into some version of reality.
- Social Life : Over the last couple of years (really since moving to Norfolk) I’ve been utterly shit on the social side of things. So I plan to spend some time getting back in touch with friends around the place, and seeing them etc.
- Money : For me, 2009 wasn’t a good year financially, and want to spend 2010 getting back into a place that I’m happy with. Currently I’m not happy with the situation for debt, and I want to get a significant dollop of all that paid off if at all possible.
And that’s it. There’ll be more detail over time, I’m sure – and there’s also stuff on the domestic side – but that’s the rough plan. It’ll do for now.