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? 😉

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?

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

I just noticed that Bright Meadow has over 1,000 comments – 1,042 to be precise (as of 17:39 today).

This is a huge deal! And that count should even be a few more because the older posts I brought over from blogspot lost their comments in the move 🙁

I really couldn’t have done it without you all 😀

Um, help? I think I did something very, very silly on Monday afternoon.

I handed in my notice at work.

I will now be unemployed as of the 30^th of June.

And I have no savings thanks to the past four years of university.

Bugger.

Some back-story:
Back at the start of February I started what is my current (soon to be ex) job. It was a temp post and only meant to last a few months at most. Five months later I am still there and starting to climb the walls with frustration – I love the people I work with, but the job does not require someone with two degrees. We’ve finally got the project to where it should have been back in April, so it seems like as good a time as any to go.

My manager took the news wonderfully well, possibly something to do with giving her two weeks notice as opposed to the one we technically have to give – I’d feel bad just leaving them in the lurch – and I got hold of the temp agency to see what fun they had for me now.

Turns out, they don’t have much fun for me at all.
Zip.
Nada.

So here I am with no job to go to on the 3^rd of July. Not a good feeling, especially when the landlord has this annoying desire to get paid monthly. I’ve applied for a few things, looking into some others, but I have this sinking feeling that I’ll be going back to shop work just so I can pay the bills. Nothing wrong with shop work, just… Thought the whole point of going to University was that they would be throwing great jobs at you once you graduated.

Why does being a grown-up have to be so difficult? *sigh*

You will now all please brainstorm in the comments on how I can start to get the dream job as commissioning editor for a literary publisher with 1) no experience, 2) no qualifications, and 3) staying in Southampton for now. Good luck 😉

Endnotes:
I’ve discovered that whilst I can listen to music and be inspired, and I can be at the gym and be inspired, I can’t be at the gym, listening to music, and be inspired all at the same time. I was on the bike this evening and had a great idea for a post whilst listening to Pink, and just kind of ground to a halt because I didn’t want to loose the idea before I had worked through it in my head. I don’t want to have to start taking a notebook to the gym with me…

And no, this post wasn’t the great idea. The great idea has been added to the list with the ten other great ideas that I am working on at the moment 😉

Is anyone experiencing difficulties with commenting?

I have noticed over the last few days that sometimes the page hangs after submitting the comment, never refreshing and showing the new comment in place. Twice just now I also got directed to brightmeadow.co.uk/wp-comments-post.php instead of the proper page.

Clearly not appropriate behaviour, and I have a sneaking feeling something to do with the coComment integration. Now, is this behaviour just attacking me because my blog has taken an irrational dislike to me, or are other people experiencing it as well?