Thursday, 8th March, 2007

Embarassing Sainsburys Checkout Moments #94

sainsburys quip ramble

I have had a seriously unproductive day. I had (of course) high hopes — there's a million and one things needing to be done around here: walls needing painting, floors needing tidying, clothes needing washing, and bags needing packed. Plus my Super Duper New Work Role™ means that Ive got a shitload of code and formatting to be getting on with.

I did do one useful thing today mind — car washing — but I'll come back to that.

So yeah, I woke up pretty early with the intent of necking a few brews, chuffing a few fags, then throwing myself into the heady world of converting millions upon millions of MS Word documents into template-friendly Markdown text.

But, of course, I got distracted and spent a good deal of the morning buying clothes for Kisa

Then, true to form, after a spot of lunch I instantly felt sleepy and crawled into bed "for a quick lie down".

Which lasted until late afternoon

To be honest with you though, considering how shattered I've been all week that's not all that surprising. One or two things conspired to leave me with nowhere to stay in Leeds this week, so I've been driving there and back every day.

I mean, I say "nowhere to stay", but that's not entirely true. There are quite a few people I could of asked (and I think they were a bit surprised that I didn't TBH), it's just that I really needed a bit of space to myself the past few days, and kipping over with a colleague usually means that work extends right through until bedtime — if you get my drift.

A lot of people, when they find out (a) where I work, and (b) where I live, jump to the conclusion that I commute that distance every day. "Shit, that must be a hell of a commute", they say. And, having tried it for just three days, I can confidently report that it is a hell of a commute, and that if I did it all the time, I doubt I'd last more than a couple of months before I went insane.

But hey, you live and learn

So anyway, slightly blurry-eyed, I dragged myself out of bed at half-four this afternoon, found some latent energy from somewhere, and forced myself to take Ffr (who, for new people, is my car) to the petrol station to (a) fill her up, and (b) wash her. Because dammit, she needed it.

Earlier on in the week, I'd jumped to the rescue of a student who had a load of stuff to take into town for an exhibition they were setting up, and arrived at her house ready to stuff the boot with her things. I made very sure though that when we were unloading the bags at the church (Trinity Church on Boar Lane BTW — I think their stuff is there until the end of tomorrow) that no-one tried to unpack the large binliner that had my Very Nice Dress™ in it

I think I had a mental notion of being the 'cool lecturer' in his flashy black hatchback, but the reality of it all was that I was the scruffy git in his rubbish-filled, mud-encrusted shit-mobile. So, considering that I'm ferrying people around tomorrow, I figured she could do with a good scrub

...

As an aside, why is it that no matter how hard you concentrate, no matter how often you go round your car with the big sloppy brush thingy that squirts foam all over your hands rather than the car, you always miss a spot? Eh?

...

Sorry — back to plot (?) Car all lovely and washed, hair all lovely and washed too (because it needed it too TBH), the inevitable happened.

It started pissing it down.

Now, I'd been a Bit Sensible™ earlier, and got some stuff to eat, along with some sticks and coal for the fire, so I was quite happily toasty indoors. But I needed catfood and booze (natch), so I had to brave the elements and nip off to Sainsburys.

(Navarra is still £2.99 BTW — I'm in heaven )

I toyed with the idea of retaining my air of sophistication and dashing handsomeness in My Armani Jacket™, but decided I'd have a problem looking 'dapper' if I was soaked through like a drowned rat, and grabbed my chunky (but with a hood!) duffle coat off the chair where I'd flung it a few days ago.

Sainsburys wasn't that busy, surprisingly — for some reason I always find it heaving when it's raining. I managed to grab a load of spicy chicken for a fraction of the price by fluttering my eyelids and looking doe-eyed at the guy behind the counter.

Or rather, that's what I convinced myself happened, but the reality is much less exciting — he only had five left, and decided to give me them all when I only asked for three. But hey, if there's one person in this world able to delude herself into thinking the entire planet fancies her, it's me

Booze, catfood, and humanfood in basket, I trotted off to the checkout — deliberately picking a certain one, for reasons I can't blog about now, but will do in about ten years time. Because it's a good'un, but I'm already in enough trouble about it as it is

It was only whilst standing in line, sandwiched between two rather attractive 30-something women who'd filled the conveyor belt with all manner of Organic Bollocks™ and Tampax that the horrible truth dawned on me...

My coat, the one I'd absent-mindly grabbed off the chair...

...was the one that Biscuit's been using as a bed for the past week. And the reason these two women were staring at me wasn't because they were thinking "What a cute guy" — they were thinking "My God, that man is covered in cat hair".

The Intertubes

internets

Ah, how we all love referring to the Internet as "t'intarweb", or "the internets", in mock n00b-speak to show ourselves off as being the cool, ironic hipsters that we are Thanks to Wil Wheaton, I now have another one

On Newbies

ramble newbie secondlife

'Scuse me a second, while I 'big-up' myself again

Before I write anything about this, I really must mention that I talked to myself wrote a massive post along these lines in the car on the way home on Monday night (because I'd left my stereo front in my office and had no tunes), but was too tired to type it afterwards, and had forgotten it all by the next day.

(When, funnily enough, I was just as tired anyway)

I need to employ someone to sit in the back of my car and type the stuff I blather on about

Anyway. That whole thing went rather well I was shitting myself beforehand, not really having prepared properly — and the fact that one of my scripts (the Flickr set-broswer) decided to Stop Fucking Working™ five minutes before everyone turned up didn't really relax me...

The main throust of my self-talking in the car was something along the lines of how you can't really jump into a new environment and give a talk with any 'authority' — your audience will gloss over very quickly. You need to be familiar with the quirks of the space you're presenting in.

In fact, K linked to a rather useful article on this a while back. I'll pop a link in here after I've finished typing. (Note to self: Put in link)

I wouldn't want to try and pass myself off as being a good speaker, but I do think I managed to keep some sense of 'structure' and 'topic' (I know! Me! ) going on, where other similar events I've been to have degenerated into twenty-way-simultaneous irrelevant conversations, while the Avie who's supposed to be leading the chat has just stood there like a numpty.

And maybe there weren't as many people there as usual, and maybe the subject (scripting) was quite a specific one — but whatever, I'm rather proud of how it went

(Permit me to pat myself on the back for one further moment — because of that, I've been asked to talk at the Euro SLCC '07 convention in August. I'm rather proud )

But before I went off on one about newbies and how only people familiar with the conventions of a space could really give an effective presentation — and extolling my Prezentational Skillz™, I managed to stop myself and realised "Um, Curran, you're being a bit of a n00b here yourself aren't you?"

Newbieness is a weird thing. In my two 'non-RL' guises I see it a lot — trannies that fling themselves out of the closet Rather Too Enthusiatically™, and Second Life Avies (particularly on Flickr) that proclaim themselves to be 'addicted' within five hours of signing up.

I guess I'm actually — despite my best efforts to appear otherwise — rather overly-intolerant to newbs. Don't get me wrong, I'm helpful — or at least, I try to be — but inside, sometimes, I'm screaming phrases that have long since dwindled into the dark recesses of the Jargon File.

(She said, deliberately not linking to it. Google it FFS)

Sometimes it exaccerbates me — I see discussions and posts asking very simple questions, like "How do I {X}?", where just typing "{X}" into the search box would have brought back a bazillion previous discussions where the very same question was answered — and I want to let rip. But I hold myself back — usually.

I mean, I'm as guilty of it as anyone else TBH. For a perfect example, you only have to cast you mind back a couple of weeks, to an ill-advised post which I've gone against My Idiom™ and deleted, in which I got too excited about something that I did, and wanted to proclaim it to the world.

(Yes. That one)

I'd done something new to me, and presumed that it would be new to everyone — when, in fact, it was pretty-much a non-interesting blip on the overall Sexuality Radar™. I do, it has to be said, owe a fair number of people an apology for that little episode. I was really off the mark on that one, and I'm really sorry — both for the post itself, and the subsequent drama-queen-like way in which I tried to deal with some of the comebacks.

And...

...well...

...Nope. Sorry. Lost the flow a bit there. I was going (I think) to launch into a tirade of "STFW" and a lament on the demise of netiquette — but my gob is too stuffed with humble pie.

Wait

secondlife presentation

...I remembered something I was going to write earlier

Sitting in our computer lab (which is such a crappy way of describing a room bristling with iMacs) — fingers frantically beavering away at the keyboard trying to keep a crowd of Avies entertained and informed — was an interesting experience. It was equally interesting to have someone sat at the meeting and next to me on the adjacent iMac.

(Seriously, if you're ever doing a thing like that, that would be my one tip — have someone in the audience sat next to you IRL)

There were, if you like, two conversations going on — the one where I was talking about SMIL and llHTTPRequest(), and the one where I was saying "Is any of this making sense?!"

Having someone there to say "Yep. You're doing fine" was a godsend

...

You know, for some reason I'm getting serious déja vu Have I blogged this before?

...

There were a couple of moments though — even though it was after-hours — that disrupted things a bit for me. Just as I was getting started, one of my colleagues popped in, stuck his head over my shoulder and asked "How's it going?"

Later — mid-Kisa-flow — a student popped in and asked me to come help him with something.

It struck me that it must have appeared like I was doing what I normally do — sitting at a computer, fiddling with a few things. I think (and I rather like this) that my students have got rather used to the way that I work — I sit at my Mac doing Stuff™, but they know they can drag me away to give them a hand with something.

It's very rare (but I've noticed they respect it when it happens) that I'm doing something critical — like a complicated bit of SQL that could (if I don't concentrate) completely fuck-up our entire site.

So when they tried to spark up a conversation, I dont think it occurred to them that I was talking to a large(ish) group of Important People™ — and that a perfect analogy would be something along the lines of them walking into a lecture theatre where I was talking in front of a crowd of people, and asking me to come help them with something.

...

The other thing I forgot to mention, is that there's a transcript of Monday's talk. See if you can spot the point where it all started to go a little bit wrong, and I nearly crashed the Sim

Dear Spambots

spam

Thank you for spelling it "informarmation" and giving me a perfectly easy bit of regex to cull a huge chunk of the recent blog-shitting that you've been doing recently. Cunts. I only wish I'd spotted that one earlier.

Please, Don't Apologise

link paranoid

http://www.siobhancurran.com/

Tent

photo

I'm 'airing' it for an excursion