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June, 2006

  1. I Spy

    June 28, 2006 by Cas

    There was meant to be a Bright Cast tonight, but somewhere along the way my inspiration got swallowed up by work. I don’t think spending the last couple of hours looking dreamily at Keanu Reeve’s long legs helped much either. Hard to write about a ginger dweeb when your brain is kinda taken up with tall dark and… mmmm….. handsome.

    Because I don’t want to leave y’all with nothing to read, the following is something I picked up from Nanette and Cheryl.

    I am: the blondest brunette my supervisor ever met; an eternal pessimist; obsessed with penguins; eternally surprised that people want to be friends with me; confused most of the time.

    I said: I can’t be just friends; more than I probably should; I’m sorry when I didn’t really mean it; I’ll see you soon, knowing it was really goodbye.

    I want: to have a home of my own; to be happy; to be able to afford an external hard drive; to have a career.

    I wish: I could make my mind up; I was good at making plans; that I knew what I wanted to do with my life; that it was easier to loose weight; people would just be nice to each other.

    I strongly dislike: mushrooms; confrontation; practical jokes.

    I miss: my Granddad; Somerset; Kingston; my cat Twigglet; the girl I used to be.

    I fear: slugs; loosing my mind; infertility; dying before I work out what I want to do with my life; that I won’t have the courage to take an opportunity when it is presented to me; that someone will take away my choices.

    I hear: the washing machine; traffic; John Mayer.

    I wonder: if there is life on other planets; what will I be doing in five, ten years time; why I have this compulsion to write my life; if I will ever find my Prince Charming; what the people who bullied me at school are doing now.

    I regret: not sticking up for myself more during my undergrad; not keeping in touch with people; not saying “I’m depressed” sooner.

    I am not: the life and soul; confident; mean; sure I want children; sure I can have children.

    I dance: badly; enthusiastically; not caring what other people think.

    I sing: in my car; around the flat when I’m alone; without realizing when I have headphones in; out of tune.

    I cry: when a movie is sad; when there is a soppy ending; at the drop of a hat.

    I am not always: happy; in control; confident; nice.

    I made: cheesecake; quilts; earrings; notebooks; brilliant friends; some truly awful decisions.

    I write: to sort out what is going on in my head; to keep track of what is going on; to connect with people; because I can’t imagine not.

    I confuse: lots of people; left and right; six and seven when I’m speaking Spanish; names, constantly; myself.

    I need: to cut down on the amount of tea I drink; to get a proper job; to get out of the house more; to get fit.

    I should: return emails; go to the gym more; plan my life better; make more of an effort to keep in touch with people; stop drinking orange juice from the carton.

    I start: so many projects; with good intentions; drafts of emails I don’t send; each day wondering what bizarre happenstance I will get to laugh at that day.

    I finish: most books I read in a couple of days; everything eventually; all the biscuits in the jar if someone doesn’t stop me.

    I tag: whoever is feeling bored enough to do this :)

    Category Daily Waffle | Tags: | 6 Comments

  2. So it’s time to be healthy once more

    June 26, 2006 by Cas

    God was most certainly not a woman.

    I came to this decision about the creator long ago, but lately it has been reinforced in my mind primarily because of the following:

    I can have excruciating PMT, but easy to control weight.
    OR
    I can have medical intervention to eliminate the cramps that feel like Jack the Ripper is having fun with my ovaries, but weight that just seems to creep up no matter what I do.

    Since blissful lack of PMT is, well, blissful for me – and coincidentally also much nicer for people that have to deal with the Uber Bitch from Hell that I can become – it is the weight increase that I am going to have to face.

    Bugger.

    I looked in the mirror day and had an “Ugh! Whale!” moment. The girls out there will probably know what I mean. The guys… Meh. You have your own worries to deal with, I know ;) As an aside, what is it about gym clothes that makes them so unflattering? Isn’t hot, red, and sweaty bad enough?

    So it is back to the push-ups, sit-ups, and depressingly healthy food for me. Not that I have exactly been excessively unhealthy the past few months, but clearly I haven’t been healthy enough. Sigh.

    Because this blog is all about sharing, I thought I would share with you once again my favourite smoothie mix. And my previous ruminations on fruit.

    I’m not looking for huge amounts of weight loss here. Even at my thinest when I was fourteen and hadn’t eaten for three months due to… all kinds of medical issues… I still weighed in at a buxom 10 stone. Right now I’m a bit more than that, but not horrendously so. What I am going for is a general tone and reduction in the “wibbly bits”. At my best (August 2005) I was pretty much a perfect size 14, even a size 12 in some shops (and man did I like those shops ;) ). Right now I’m a generous 14 with occasional forays into 16 territory. I’d like to get back to being comfortably a size 14 again. One day it might even be nice to actually have a flat(ish) stomach, but let’s not get carried away here!

    I tried something like this back at the start of the year, even set up a category for it, but y’all were basically pants at keeping me on the straight and narrow :P Let’s try this again, shall we? Once a week – let’s say Monday evening – I post an update. You cheer me on, and we all have fun. If I don’t post an update, you yell at me, and again we all have fun :D

    Deal?
    (And no, you can’t have my current weight, because I don’t own any scales – at least, I’m pretty certain I wouldn’t fit on the set we have in the kitchen. I’ll have to remember to check next time I go to the gym).

    (And yes I know Colin has a similar thing going on, and good luck to all of them, but I’ve never played too well with others. Gets a bit demoralizing when you slip off the wagon as I am sure I will do many times).

    Category Daily Waffle, The Diet | Tags: | 6 Comments

  3. You know it’s a good day…

    June 26, 2006 by Cas

    You know it’s been a good day when you see a cute guy on a unicycle waiting at the bus stop.

    I do love my life. It is just so supremely surreal. :D

    Category Daily Waffle, Mini Meadow | Tags: | 2 Comments

  4. Unplanned server issues

    June 26, 2006 by Cas

    Well that was a little unpleasant.

    For those of you who tried to access the blog for most of yesterday but were greeted with “cannot find the server” messages, I apologize. My server provider (Fasthosts) decided to take the day off and go to the beach. Anything on a Fasthost server, including their own site, was down for the count all day.

    All is back up now and they claim it was a one-off but… Yes, I am looking into moving servers to something a bit more grown-up and robust. I have a grand master plan but y’all know me and grand master plans. If in the future I have any warning that things are about to go fritz I will give you as much warning as I can. Yesterday kinda took us all by surprise!

    Many thanks to RIB at this point for being a being a supreme internet sleuth and finding me the number of their technical support so I could speak to someone real (they annoyingly only publish their support details on their website, which sucks when it’s their own website that is frelled). My apologies also to him for having the misfortune to be at the end of my email tirade!

    That’s it. Everything (seems) to be back to normal, so go enjoy yourself. The Sunday Roast is there, as are the archives. Have fun :)

    Category Grump, Housekeeping | Tags: | 6 Comments

  5. Sunday Roast: I shaved my beard for you, devil woman!

    June 25, 2006 by Cas

    For some reason I was under the impression that this week had been a light week with regard Roast-able material, then I open up the folder have my usual 20+ tabs. Bugger, just when I was wanting a short one because my wrist and RSI are playing up again. Ah well, since your wish is my command and y’all seem to enjoy the Roast, I will just suck up the pain and get on with it.

    A while back I pondered why I had Antarctica listed in my server stats as a place people could possibly visit my blog from – I mean, Antarctica. Just a lot of penguins, right? A few months later I was proven wrong and had a merry time looking through lots of blogs written by people having fun in the snow with the penguins. One of the blogs I keep reading is that of Phil Jacobsen. He has a wonderful sense of humour and a great writing style that is always interesting, even when he is talking about stock inventory.
    I recommend to you his post on outsourcing jobs in Antarctica as an example that you never know where being a humble dishwasher will take you.

    Well done to Rebecca Holdcroft for speaking up over discrimination about her tattoos. I can see both sides of the story here – a company has a right to institute a dress policy and that level of tattooing can seem intimidating, but on the other hand she isn’t dealing with members of the public and appearances really shouldn’t be that important compared to how well you do your job.

    Part of the problem I was having with comments last week came when I was playing around trying to get trackbacks to display differently. If only Paul had written his how-to on showing text for trackbacks a few days earlier! I’ve yet to institute this, but I will be playing today – be prepared for the entire site to die again!

    Top of the Pops has ended! This is sad, sad news indeed. Not that I watch it any more – if music and TV are combined it’s normally TMF here at Meadow Towers (the videos are just so preeeetty!) – but it’s always been a big thing for a band to appear on TOTP. At least in this country. As I said, a sad day :(

    I don’t care if it is true or not, this story about how knitters are making jumpers for Little Penguins caught in oil-slicks is just too brilliant for words.

    I haven’t tried to boot Windows on my Mac in a good six months – I just don’t have to any more. When I did, I had to use Virtual Desktop which always made my poor PowerBook seem on the verge of falling over and dying. New IntelMac owners though, can experience the joys of Parallels for Mac OSX which lets you run Windows in a window, like any other app. How great is that?!

    Every so often I come across a story I just don’t have a pithy come-back too. This is one of them. A Theatre critic calls for performances attended by disabled people to be flagged so he can avoid them.

    I remember the last time Moose went to London and came back to tell me the front of St. Paul’s had looked a little odd as she crossed the Millennium Bridge. As she got closer she realised this was due to the front being swathed in fabric to cover scaffolding – on the fabric they had drawn the bit of the building that was obscured! I never did get a chance to see what the frell she was talking about, so I’m glad I stumbled on this photo yesterday. Not only is it an amazingly pretty picture, it is pretty much the exact same view that Moose got that fateful day.

    Time breakdown of modern web design. LOL. In fact, maybe even a RAOTFLMAO

    David Cameron wants to scrap the Human Rights Act (and replace it with something else). Bad Conservatives, bad!

    Shoppers want longer Sunday opening hours. Yes, yes I do. I rarely go shopping on a Sunday, but I would like the option to. It always threw me whenever I was in the States or Canada, that shops were open all day on Sunday, and nobody thought anything of it.

    Category Sunday Roast | Tags: | 9 Comments

  6. Too Good To Delete – partie quatre

    June 24, 2006 by Cas

    I have a horrible feeling all the spam Akismet is catching is starting to get to me. There is just so frelling much of it! I’m starting to be intrigued as to what lies at the end of the links they keep throwing at me (though one look at the url and it is fairly obvious). I know if I was to actually click one of the links it would be a case of “My eyes! My eyes!” and a frantic lunge for the little x on the tab, but still, there’s this little bit of curiosity I’m having to beat back with a stick. That, and some spam bots have started using little snippets of story to catch my interest. I find myself wanting to know what happens next to the characters.

    So far I’ve managed to resist (most) temptation, but I have been keeping a note of some of the more bizarre pieces of comment spam that Akismet has caught for me lately. I bring you the next installment in the “too good to delete” series. (My comments in italics).

    • Jonathan, ever wondered who wrote Shakespeare? You can find the answer here
      One, I’m not called Jonathan, and two – didn’t Shakespeare write Shakespeare?
    • I acknowledge that bagels are comparatively rare outside the U.S. and Canada, but if you can get them that will make the experience better.
      Quite why this linked to a blog that sells drugs I am not sure. That, and um… what experience can possibly be enhanced by bagels? ;)
    • Apparently, it’s huge in the States. I’m not sure why, but I don’t think it would do so well here.
      The mind does boggle, and it is impossible NOT to dwell on the dirty connotations of this – I always said the gutter was high for me.
    • An exhaustive knowledge of the life and times of Douglas “Tin Legs” Bader, English WWII fighter ace.
      Poor ol’ Tin Legs, having his memory linked to a sex-splog.
    • The way you make a “station” in Pandora, is to begin by picking a certain song to kick it off. The system starts to guess what other songs you might like, based on the original criteria.
      This was one I just could not decide if it was spam or not for the longest time, till I followed it back to the splog from whence it came. Still, it is remarkably accurate – read my own post about Pandora if you are curious.
    • Permalinks have been enabled on this blog. You know what to do.
      Well this is more than mildly sinister. I am waiting with bated breath to see what happens next…
    • When it rains you can really smell the poo on the Parkland Walk
      Remind me not to go to Parkland :|
    • What the hell is a weblog and why won’t they leave me alone?
      Honey, you stop spamming me, I’ll willingly leave you alone.
    • I can’t be bothered with anything these days, but such is life. I don’t care. So it goes. More or less nothing seems worth thinking about. I’ve just been hanging out waiting for something to happen, but that’s how it is.
      I’ve had a fair few comments from this very depressed spam-bot. I’m starting to feel the need to go round to it’s house and make it a nice cup of tea.
    • Have You Hugged Your Abortion Provider Today?
      …
      …
      …
      And who in their right minds thought that this would make a good piece of spam? Other than it being just a bit too personal, if I did anything with my abortion provider it would between him/her and me. I’m not going to share it with a piece of software!
    • May we exchange links with your site?
      This is always followed by a torrent of links in the same comment. I have no objection to exchanging links with people (if they are, you know, real) but to ask and then link without waiting for the answer just seems rude.
    • I was definitely being seduced by someone channeling the ghost of dean martin.
      This has to be one of my favourites. And if I remember correctly, it linked back to some fake Amazon rip-off site – quite how that relates to either seduction OR dean martin is any ones guess. I also find myself wanting to know what happens next…
    • My final crime is that I was joking a couple of weeks ago about how lax it was of her not to have broken any arms yet (I had done two arms out of four by the time I was her age).
      Like observing any new species, we learn things about Spam Bots in snippets – now it becomes apparent that they have four arms. All the better for typing with *mwhahahahahaa!*
    • You have many friends that post in your guestbook – it is cool!
      Now excuse me! I haven’t had a guestbook since 1999 I’ll have you know!
    • Your confidence allows you to take your general awareness and channel it into creativity
      For a moment I had the happy thought that this was a genuine comment, wrongly pegged as spam, complimenting me on my writing style. Sadly not – I’m no prude and I wanted to gouge out my own eyes at what lay at the end of the link.
    • Let’s stay focused here. The only impression I received from your web log is that it makes you look like an ass.
      That’s as maybe, but I’m an ass who got into 9rules, so there :P

    Category Daily Waffle | Tags: | 7 Comments

  7. I’m a bit simple

    June 24, 2006 by Cas

    Apparently I have a simple honesty in my writing. OK yes, I always tell the truth, though sometimes I probably shouldn’t. It’s the simple I’m having trouble with. Simple has… connotations.

    Brings to mind a quote I heard a while back:
    I got your memo by the way, and I have written you a reply. I wrote it slowly because I know you can’t read very fast.

    Then again, it was meant as a compliment, so I’m going to take it at face value. Though that might be a mark of my abnormally low intelligence ;)

    Category Mini Meadow | Tags: | 1 Comment

  8. God was my maths teacher

    June 24, 2006 by Cas

    No, not really, but the other night in one of my dreams he was. I don’t know why I am so sure he was God, but God he was. Not even the god I worship either, but there in my dream, a big bearded chap, with open-toed sandals and socks, a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, and I knew without a shadow of a doubt this was the chap responsible for Christianity. Teaching me mathematics. Analyze that dream if you will!

    I don’t often remember my dreams, but there are two exceptions to this rule. Dream one that sticks in my mind for reasons that will become clear when I tell you about it, was about Rod Stewart in a sparkly red Speedo. Yes, the aging rocker clad in nothing but a scarlet pair of swimming trunks that were covered in sequins, reclining on a chaise lounge. I have no idea why Rod Stewart. I have no idea why a red Speedo. And I sure don’t have a frelling clue what was up with the furniture! Who knows what he was doing in my subconscious that night, but there he was. There are times my brain is just too scary a place.

    Dream two have come to be called my “Millfield dreams”. These dreams are set at the school I used to go to and are populated by people I knew there.

    I was very, very lucky growing up that we were near to a private school system that was prided on its academic excellence. My brother was in the local State school till he was about seven, but he really didn’t get on there, earning a reputation for stupidity and laziness. My brother is intelligent, fiercely so, but he needs a rocket lit under his arse to get him to do anything. Catch his interest, engage him, and he will astound you. In a class of around 30, he just wasn’t getting the attention he required, so he coasted – hence the stupidity rap. As soon as he was old enough, determined not give up on the son she knew had a brain if he just cared to use it, Mum enrolled him in Edgarley, and he never looked back. By the time it came for me to start attending school, the Millfield system had opened a third school in the area, Abbey, designed for pre-Edgarley aged kids (three to eight). I loved it there. When the time came to move up to Edgarley, I loved it there as well. I was a bright kid who was given access to motivated teachers and pushed to be as good as she could be. I was never in a class with more than 15 pupils so had enough attention to make sure I didn’t start to coast (like my brother, if I don’t have someone standing over me with a pointy stick I find it hard to get going). I was given the opportunity to do music, art, languages, drama, and all sorts of fun extra-curricular stuff most kids don’t get the chance to.

    Once done with Edgarley (aged 12) I won an academic scholarship and was off to Millfield (the senior school) all excited and expecting more of the same. On paper, that’s what I got. I had the same great teachers, same wonderful opportunities, same brilliant environment for a kid who wanted to learn. Alas, teenagers are a lot quicker to pick out on differences than younger kids. And most of the kids at this school were rich teenagers. I couldn’t afford the designer gear. I wasn’t sporty. I was short and plain looking. I was a band geek who liked science… I was different enough to stand out, but not different enough to appreciate individuality as a good thing. I was also very, very ill for the majority of my three years there. Quite frankly, it was hell on earth and I couldn’t get away fast enough – when I was given the option to stay on at Millfield to do my A-Levels, or to enroll at the local community college, I jumped at the chance to go to Strode. It was during my A-Levels that I started to appreciate people might actually like me for my wackiness and individuality.

    So why do I dream with such nostalgia about Millfield?

    I should say now that it was actually just a small number of individuals who made my life such misery during those three years, and that I didn’t exactly help my self. I did make some very good friends at Millfield and I do have some very happy memories of my time there. I also appreciate the chances and opportunities I received – just, I was glad to leave.

    One of the odd things about Millfield for me was the people – most of these people I had been to school with since I was eight, as we’d come up from Edgarley together. Some of them I had even known from the age of three and the Abbey school. I still have vivid memories of hitting John MacQueen over the head with a Tonka truck on the first day of Kindergarten. I reminisce fondly of playing with Tim, James, Neil, and Olly in the playground – I can trace my love of story-telling to those wild adventures we crafted for ourselves aged six. I remember meeting Lizzy for the first time and how we rarely not at each others side for nearly eight years. I get a smile on my face when I think of Ed Wilson. Thoughts of Katherine still make me grin – now there was a girl who embraced her individuality, regardless of what everyone said. And Mary Gould… Hmmmm, now there was mutual hate at first sight now I think on it. These people were the landscape of my childhood and, whilst everyone seemed to undergo a Jekell/Hyde transformation once we hit puberty, I still miss them.

    I want to see them again to see if they remember the same things that I do. I want to see if they have changed as much as I have changed. Perhaps slightly childishly, I want to see them again so I can go “look, I survived. I’m happy now. This is me regardless of what you think”. I want their love. But I want to be wildly successful before I see them again, so I can rub their noses in it. I want to know how they all did. I want to know if they were as happy as they looked, or if they were as unhappy as I was. I want to know why they stopped talking to me.

    I have no idea why I dreamt that night that God was my maths teacher – much though he would have liked us to believe it, my maths teacher was not a deity in any shape or form. I’ve also no idea why, in my dreams, I seem to regard Millfield so fondly. Is it my recollection now that is fuzzy and warped to the dark side, or my nocturnal adventures that are wrong? Nor am I totally sure why my Millfield dreams are the one set of dreams that stick with me into waking, but clearly this is a chapter of my life I am in serious need of closure on.

    Um, anyone know what Ed Wilson is doing now? ;)

    Category Daily Waffle, General Musing | Tags: | 1 Comment

  9. Woot! Still employed

    June 23, 2006 by Cas

    So I start a new job on Monday. Just another temp post – I’m not even moving company. In fact, I’m going to be working for the guy who’s office we seized the other week!

    It’s still no where near approaching what I actually want to do, but it is another few weeks work (at least) and even sounds fairly interesting. It will look good on the CV, if nothing else.

    It was quite sad today knowing it was my last day with the team. I thought I had another week in my current post till the temp agency rang me this morning and offered me the new job. We have had such a blast these last five months – there is no way the new job is going to be half as much fun. Who would have thought that twenty-three thousand old people would bring so much joy and happiness to a team of nine temps?

    Just, where along the line did it get decided that I was actually going to turn out good at the office admin kind of stuff?

    Category Daily Waffle | Tags: | 9 Comments

  10. CoComment Holiday

    June 22, 2006 by Cas

    It’s a sad day for me right now – I’ve had to strip the coComment integration code out of the blog. After chasing down errors for the past couple of days, I finally came back around to my original suspect, and sure enough removing coComment from the equation seems to solve all problems. (I probably would have isolated the problem a bit sooner, but conflicts with extensions and browser-caching issues were muddying the waters. That and I was panicking – my pretty blog was broken and I didn’t know why!)

    Hopefully this is just a temporary measure.

    I love coComment and all it does, and am still an avid supporter of the system, but at the moment full integration is breaking things with a *bit* more frequency than I am really happy with. This is especially taking into consideration the non-coCo users of this blog who are still in the majority, despite my constant harping-on about coCo! Here at Bright Meadow more than half the fun often happens in the comments – if you can’t comment, well, it’s just not cricket.

    coComment first came to my attention around the same time as another comment-tracking system. That other system, MyComment, relied on the blog-owner to have a plugin that enabled a commenter to track any comments he’d/she’d made on that blog. coCo, in a subtle but important distinction, relies on the commenter to have a bookmarklet/extension on their end. Comments are tied (primarily) to the commenter and only secondarily to a particular blog. A blog-owner needs to know nothing about coComment, and perhaps more importantly, to do nothing – if a commenter wants to track their own conversations it is, quite sensibly, up to them.

    That being said, an extra level of functionality was introduced fairly recently, which enabled blog-owners to integrate coComment into their blogs. With the addition of a couple of lines of javascript, all comments made on a blog are automatically submitted to coComment. If they are made by a coCommenter, then the comments get added to the appropriate person’s conversations. If they are made by a non-coCo-peep, then they just get added to the appropriate blog/post page *1*

    This functionality excited me and still does – though I publish an RSS feed for the comments on this blog (found here), and though I get email notifications of all comments made, tracking comments is hard when I am at work as I don’t have access to a feed reader, or to webmail. With the integration however, I just have to periodically check a single webpage to be notified of any new comments made across Bright Meadow.

    This isn’t the only reason I use coComment, or decided to integrate it into the blog, but it is the bit that is going to be affected most by my current decision.

    I don’t anticipate this decision being final – hopefully in a day or so I’ll be able to put the integration code back in and all will once again be well and shiny in my commenting world. This is the price you pay for playing with beta technologies. Sometimes things have to go on a little safari before they work properly. Sometimes new and fantastical beasts are found. Other times you get stuck in the swamps and need to be rescued. It’s this exploration that makes it exciting!

    As I said, here’s hoping Bright Meadow can be fully integrated again soon :)

    Endnotes:
    *1* Blogs have a page of their own that conversations get added to – Bright Meadow’s is here. Each individual post/conversation thread also gets a page, as does each commenter. A veritable smorgasbord of options on how you can track conversations!Back

    cocomment, conversation, comments

    Category Daily Waffle, Housekeeping | Tags: | 11 Comments

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