Wednesday, 11th January, 2006

A School Outing

outed

And there was me thinking that everyone at work knew about my alter-ego and her online activities...

Yesterday, I popped up to see a colleague from another course. He wasn't around, but just as I was leaving his (shared) office, a voice piped up from the back:

"Graham, do you blog?"

"Er, maybe. Why?"

"Nothing, it's just a friend of mine from Lancaster said he reads the blog of someone who lives there, but works here. Apparently it's rather lewd."

Lewd? Me?

I suppose I do say "fuck" a lot.

...

Interestingly though, there are two universities in Leeds. And I don't think I've ever actually mentioned which one of them I teach at. Now, I know it's probably not hard to find out (I gave up the idea of anonymity on the Internet a long time ago), but I'm sure I've never said which one.

Have I?

Ah, remind me to update the staff list on our one then

Downtime

erin outage

Speaking of work, and outage, and suchforth (but in a totally different context), I had today all planned out when I woke up this morning. It was going to be all Great and Lovely™ — furtling around with the new website I've developed for the course.

At eight o'clock, in Harrogate, the sun was streaming through the windows of the flat I stay in, and content and chuffed with the world, I thought I'd just quickly check my email...

...only to find out that Erin was down again

This has been becoming a bit of a frequent occurance of late. It's not Erin's fault — she's happily serving away to a non-existent audience — it's because my DSL keeps going offline, and refusing to automatically reconnect itself.

So, today, instead of chugging my way through several changes and added functionality, I sat there completely useless for about an hour, then jumped in the car and drove the 70 miles back home.

The thing is though, that one of the most exciting and cool things I've done this week (apart from buying that dress of course ) was get myself a Great Big Fat Server™ so I could host this new site properly, quickly, and without it falling over every ten minutes. I mean, it's not a 20 Billion Megabit connection or anything — but it's faster than Erin, and it won't rely on a crappy little consumer DSL line.

I was thinking though, "why don't I try and move some of my weblog over onto it, so that I don't keep disappearing in a cloud of smoke?"

But I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that the reason why this weblog is so important to me — and the reason I write in it the way that I do — is because it's sitting on the floor next to me. If it wasn't part of my home, then I think I'd feel a lot different about it — and consequently not give quite so much of a shit about what goes on it.

If that makes any sense

So, I guess I'll just have to put up with little outages every once in a while — unless someone wants to pay for me to have a leased line running to my house...

You pimped /seconds when it launched.

Ah yes — forgot about that

Do you think you could train the cat to do it?

LOL, nah (cue Izzard) "Cat! Come for training!"

However, that does give me a wonderful excuse to tell a story...

Cabbage Squits

story cat poo

I have, in the past, mentioned my first cat — Cabbage. She wasn't the first cat I ever had — I think that one was called "Fluff", and I had her when I was about 6 — but she was the first cat I ever had in this house.

She was a beautiful creature when she was a kitten — small, cute, and with the most curious meow in the world.

She didn't go "meow", she went "mbrup".

Here (because what self-respecting blog would pass up the opportunity to post a cat picture?), for an example of her cuteness, is a picture of her asleep on the keyboard of my old LCIII...

Ack, I loved that cat She got a bit grumpier in her old age, and a bit fatter too — and it was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do when I had to get her put down after she got hit by a car — but all the time she was with me was wonderful.

...

I've been in my house for ten years now — and in that time, the bedroom's seen, well, rather a lot of 'action' so to speak.

When I first moved in though, I'd just broken up with a long-standing partner — a truly awful piece of timing. We were literally days away from moving in with each other, and she suddenly — out of the blue — announced that it was over.

(No prizes, incidentaly, for pointing out any similarities in my current life OK?)

Anyway, we're good friends now — in fact, she came round for dinner on Monday night — but at the time, I was a bit grumpy and in an all-out, determined mood to move on very quickly and pull.

Fortunately, it was Freshers' Week at the local Uni, and I wasn't exactly "past-it" in those days — a young and spritely twenty-four-year-old in fact

So, I did the unthinkable and went down to the local student nightclub to try and "pull me a rebounder"

And sure enough — what with the place full of impresionable first-year students who went all giddy when they found out you owned a house — I found myself back at mine with a rather cute law student.

All went well (very well, if I recall correctly) until the next morning. What was, for me, a complete rebound-shag — an attempt to blot out the memories of my ex with some intensive sex — seemed to be a little bit more for her.

"What shall we do today?" she asked as we lay there in bed, as if we were now going out.

"Um", I started, desperately wanting to have to avoid using the words "one", "night", and "stand".

Suddenly, Cabbage jumped up onto the bed.

"Mbrup!"

"Aw! You kitten is so gorgeous!"

"Mbrup! Mbrup!"

"Yeah, I know. Um listen..."

"Mbrup! Mbrup! Mbrup! Parp"

A nauseous wave of foul-smelling gas flooded the bedroom, as a nauseous flood of foul-smelling shit flooded the bed. Cabbage didn't flinch. Having deposited her load on my duvet, she now started making her way up towards us to rub herself against our faces — her way of saying "hello"

"Keep her away from me!"

I jumped off the bed, rolled up the duvet and frog-marched Cabbage downstairs, all the while apologising profusely. I dumped the duvet in the wash and, as I came back upstairs, found the woman (who will have to remain nameless I'm afraid — because this was one of those clichéd "don't know her name" episodes) hurridly getting dressed.

"Listen, last night was fun, but I really have to be going"

"So soon?"

"Yeah. Um, I'll see you around. Perhaps."

And with that, she walked out the door, and I never saw her again.

...

That evening, Cabbage got more tuna for tea than she'd ever seen before in her life. I like to think that she totally did it on purpose

Toilet Humour

link bogwall

While we're on the subject, and all that.

Actually, this isn't some piece of random prose involving the words "fart" and "bum" at all. If you cast your minds back to what I wrote at the top of the page, you'll recall that I went to see one of my colleagues yesterday.

The reason being, that while I've been an industrious little princess — basically ripping off Flickr and writing a video/photo/audio sharing site (with Bonusy Podcasty Goodness™), my colleague has been dabbling in the black arts of multi-user Shockwave web-apps.

Behold, the Bogwall.com

I know — it's just a thing that you can scribble on online — but, what's really cool is that if you're scribbling on it at the same time as someone else is, then what they're doing shows up while you're scribbling.

If you get my drift.

So, the immediate thing that jumped into my head was somehow combining these two things that we're working on, to create some form of real-time social software.

...

I'll get back to yous on where this one goes

Mike Vyse

photo

(via flickr.com/people/si08han)

National Bingo Caller of the Year. A true star, if ever I saw one. This man will go far.