Drunken Travels

I made a whistle stop tour of Lisbon last week.  I was only there for 3 days and most of it, to be honest, is a drunken blur.

After landing in our hotel (not literally, we had to get a taxi from the airport…) to torrential downpour we found our way into the Bairro Alto – which is the nightlife area.  This was only after getting dropped off, at the wrong bar, in the middle of nowhere.  Brilliant. 

Within 2 minutes, we were greeted by Mr Portuguese man in the street asking if we wanted drugs (nice welcome).  We politely declined and took shelter in a nearby bar. 

A few more bar visits through the long and winding streets followed; including gate crashing some family karaoke party and belting out the hits.  Pissed Englishmen…on Portuguese karaoke…yep it was as good as you can imagine. 

A friendly cab man then found us a bar/cafe which was open all night after we found out the bars by the docks were all closed.  We somehow managed to get back the hotel at 7.30am – most of it was a blur, it seemed like we were only in there for an hour. Total wrongness.  Again I’m sure the proprietor loved us, they did keep serving us Super Bock all night anyway..

Thursday was a total blur again, I literally have no recollection of most of the day/night.  Only two minutes ago did that Portuguese karaoke thing come back to me.  I’m sure I was alive through adrenaline and alcohol alone.  But again we managed to find our way to the open all night bar/cafe and got back the hotel at a similar ungodly hour.  Not good when we have an 11am flight.  I was woken after a 30 minute “snooze”, in good comic book fashion, by my mate showering me with water. Grreeeeaaaatt!

Although having made the airport in good time, and the obvious long gaze into space, wondering why I’d punished myself with alcohol and little sleep did me no good.  I was about to go to the bar again only to hear my name get announced over the tannoy “last call for Mr C Sribble your flight is now closing” or something like that.  When the fuck was the first call?

I’d always wanted airport fame and now I had it, but fuck me it was a bad time to get it. 

“haha there’s them two knobheads who are about to miss their flight”

…is what I always say when I see people running through a airport terminal.  I was now that knobhead. 

Luckily, we made it onto the flight after the air stewardess search party greeting us half way round telling us we had to leg it because we had about 30 seconds to get on the plane. 

I was informed that “you fucking stink” on the plane – luckily only by my mate, but I’m sure I wasn’t in the best of states to others either.  Ho hum (literally), I’ll never see them again. 

Lisbon, it was a pleasure – or at least I think it was.

Repeating Repeating

I’m not the most prolific reader in the world, but I do like to keep a book at hand to read when the fancy takes me. One thing I’ve never done though, is read a book twice (unless looking through lingerie sections in a catalogue as a rampant teenager counts…).

I’ve just started reading The Stand by Stephen King again. I first read it about 10 years ago and even though it took me literally 6 months to wade through the 1400 pages, it still ranks as one of the best books I’ve read. I kept telling myself I’d re-read it again, you know, just to check that it still ranks up there, but I was put off because I’d know what would happen and remember bits of the story.

A bit like re-watching films or TV shows I’ve seen, I hardly ever sit through them again – mainly because the element of the unknown has gone. I’d never be able to recapture the “fucking hell, I didn’t see that coming” moment such as the last few minutes in The Usual Suspects when Kevin Spacey stopped being a gimp (although that is one of the few films I’ve managed to sit through more than once). Similarly, as fantastic as they are/were, I can’t re-watch The Sopranos, The Wire or The West Wing (does all good stuff start with The?). Likewise there are also only so many times that guy in Anchorman can say “I love lamp” until it stops being funny.  I’ve seen it; I know what happens…it’s never as good.

So, anyway, back to the book.  I’m 300 pages in so far and even though I know the outline of the story, I don’t feel like I’m repeating myself yet.  I don’t feel like I’m repeating myself yet.  So I’ll let you know if re-reading something is any good and *does that wanky speech marks thing with fingers that them people do.  You know, THAT thing that makes you want to smash their face in* “gives me a greater understanding of the book”.  Or something.

Given the speed I read and my attention span, I probably won’t finish it until March 2010 anyway, by which point I’ll have forgotten all about this post and why I started re-reading the book in the first place.

I had a better ending to this in my head 10 minutes ago, but I can’t remember what it was now. See what I mean about the attention span?

Don’t worry it wasn’t anything profound or life changing. You’ll live without my wisdom.

Chop chop, move along, nothing to see here…put your chairs on the desks before you leave and NO running inside the building…

Still anonymous

Mate: “I’ve been messing around with blogging sites and software in work, for a site I’m working on.  Do you know anything about it?”

Me: “Err, no.  What do you mean, like that blog Google thing…Blog? Blogger? or something is it called?”

Mate: “Yeh, that’s it”

Me: “Nah, no idea about all that blog stuff”

Mate: “I’ve found something called WordPress.”

Shit.  He’s found it I thought. 

Within a split second I had the next 5 years of piss taking and endless jokes run through my head.  I wanted to find a dark corner and curl up into the foetal position.  I raised my eyebrows and gave my best non-interested “oh right” whilst keeping my eyes on the cricket on the tv.

“It’s brilliant, the templates are dead smart and it’s easy for people to update and do all kinds of nonsense.  They’re building a site around one in work”

Me: (giving my best ‘you’re boring me shitless look’) “Ah right.  Nice one.  So you’re going to start “blogging” or whatever it is now are you?” 

Mate: “No, fuck that…joking aren’t you?  I’m just setting it up for work.  Wankers.

“Pint?”

And with that, he floated off to the bar non the wiser but proud of his technological achievements.  Meanwhile my heart went back to beating it’s normal rhythm and I gulped down the remains of my pint.

Thankfully, he was just chatting shite and not asking probing questions.  It was all over in about a minute, but I’d just played my best mentally challenged role yet.  Awarding myself an Oscar whilst he was at the bar and giving myself a virtual tap on the back in the process.

Internet cold turkey

For the past couple of months my internet activity in work has been limited by the IT monkeys putting in a new swish server – which blocked anything and everything which wasn’t work related.  I wasn’t too fussed at first, i still have access to Gmail, Google Reader and a few forums I go on.

I was more concerned with the fact they had an easier and more robust system for identifying which sites people visited and when etc.  For example, even though this place wasn’t blocked, I’ve since avoided logging in from work through fear of someone finding it.  I doubt they go through the internet logs with a fine tooth comb but I’m not chancing it. 

The paranoid monkeys think they have all the power by disabling all the internet settings in Internet Explorer and restricted any downloading. 

However, this cunning gimp, recently discovered that using Firefox (which I’d downloaded on my work machine donkeys ago),  I have full access to disable the internet proxy setting and thereby give me full, unrestricted internet access. 

Go Team Scribble!

I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before they notice internet traffic (me), not going through their fortknoxedparanoidserverproxymachine. 

I just can’t stop myself though.  Access to the forbidden fruit and all that…

It’s like someone not allowing you in the pub, but giving you a glass of coke outside and allowing you watch them drink alcohol through the window (ok, it’s not that bad but you get the jist/gist (I cant be bothered looking up the correct spelling)).  But I can’t go back to 1998 and spend my time on Solitaire or Minesweeper.  And, god forbid, I can’t spend 8/9 hours a day actually doing ‘work’.  That would just be mental.

I wonder how long it’ll be before I get my hands slapped…

Self Censoring

When I started this blog, the idea of it being anonymous was that it’d be somewhere I’d just type out any old ramblings without a care in the world.  It’d be somewhere I can say things without being too worried what anyone thinks, after all nobody reading this knows me in real life. 

I never factored in that people would keep reading and I’m humbled that people do keep coming back and reading my nonsense.  So some of you will know that I do continue to post nonsense ramblings!  But as time has gone on, as anonymous as I try and keep it, why do I find myself self-censoring myself more than I’d like to?

I read a lot of blogs and it’s easy to build up a picture (or an idea) of what someone is like through the words you read.  My idea may be wide of the mark, or it may be spot on, but I still put personalities to the people behind the words (he/she is funny / sounds like they’d be a good laugh / a bit mental / speaks their mind / is a dickhead / similar personality to me etc etc, you get the idea). 

Therefore I suspect some people have put a personality to me too.  Therein lies my problem.

I’ll probably never ever meet a single person who has read this blog, so I shouldn’t care what I type about (or worry about what people think of me), no one knows me and it’s my blog, so I’ll type as I please.  A ‘you can’t please all of the people all of the time’ type attitude.  But I still have a little voice at the back of my head saying “you can’t type that, people will get the wrong idea” or people’s attitude towards me would change if I mentioned this or that.  So I stop myself and in half my ramblings I only type half the story.  Something that I never intended to do in the first place. 

It’s stupid really because it’s just my words on a screen.  It’s not like anyone reads this, then would come up to me in the street and call me a knobhead for what I’ve written…hopefully not anyway! 

Unfortunately, tabloid newspaper fans, there isn’t going to be some kind of front page headline where I suddenly announce that I’m a Filipino cross dresser (no offence to Filipino cross dressers). 

But I did wonder if other people limited what they write about?  Does it bother you what people, who read your blog, think about you?  Or do you just think ‘fuck it’ and type away anyway? 

Mini Travelling Adventure

I was in that there Londinium over the weekend.  I’ve never really been out and about in London – apart from when I’ve been to football matches – which mostly comprised of being herded like cattle off and on coaches outside a football ground – so even though I’ve been to London loads of times, I’ve never really seen any of it apart from out of a window.  This time we travelled down by train on Friday and had a little drinking adventure around London Bridge.  This may sound stupid, but even though I live in a fairly big city, I was still surprised at just how many people there was milling about.  Even at 2pm on Friday afternoon there was just loads of people everywhere.  Sky News even ran a breaking news headline to commemorate the occasion: "Shocking News: We Can Confirm Loads of People Live In London".

First mistake I made was trying to meet up with mates and not realising there was a London Bridge and a Tower Bridge. Well done me.  I still didn’t get to see much of London apart from the inside of pubs/bars (as per usual) and our planned adventure to Covent Garden didn’t materialise either.  However, I did see Tower Bridge for the first time ever in real life – which omitted a "woooo there’s that bridge" sound from my mouth. 

After copious amounts of alcohol on the way back to our apartment, my sense of direction was lost and we ended up walking in a big massive square.  Deciding that walking around London at 2am in the morning was not the best thing for us to be doing we jumped a taxi (not literally) instead to head back to our apartment for more debauchery.  Even though we were only a few hundred yards away I doubt I would’ve found it anyway.  The cab cost us a massive £3, I think we were in it for about 30 seconds.  I blamed the dark. 

Saturday morning we missed breakfast because of our previous nights over indulging and so I settled for a cheeseburger to set me up for the day.  Now, the cheeseburger I ordered from some place by Borough Market arrived looking nothing like a burger, more kebab-like…and was in a baguette. I’ll give you a second to be as agog as I was (and still am). Yes, a burger in a baguette. Not even a soft one, it was one of them hard baguette you could play cricket or baseball with.  The absolute horrors.  As soon as you get a ‘burger’ in a baguette you know there’s going to be problems. I think I managed half of it out of necessity, but mark my words, I’ll be writing letters of complaint to the food police.

Saturday nights journey home was mostly uneventful.  Although we did bunk into first class on the train.  Never one to miss an opportunity, I borrowed the water in the fridge by our seats.  I’m going to hell I know – but, it was an alcohol free train and half the journey was spent hiding alcohol from the Transport Police – so it was compensation for missed VDT (valuable drinking time). 

Little did I know that water was free anyway (I am redeemed), there was even free salted crisps in the buffet car for people in first class.  Who’da thunk it?  Sigh.  Serves me right for travelling as a pleb for most of my life.  I’d be more impressed if they gave free roast/steak dinners, alcohol, drugs and maybe a cabaret show to go with it.  Oh, there was free internet…but my phone had died by that time so that freebie was rendered useless.  In short, we need more freebies on trains, sort it out train people of the world.

All good intentions

A few weeks ago I decided I needed to exercise more and be a bit more healthy.  So far, eating healthy wise, I don’t eat that much crap anyway but I’m doing marvellously.  Exercise wise…well, the thought is there, the want is there…but it just isn’t happening.  I even set my alarm to go off 45 minutes earlier in the morning so I could go for a run.  Given my current exercise levels are somewhat sloth like, this turn of events was revolutionary for me.  (When I say ‘run’, in all honesty I’d probably lightly jog for 2 minutes before collapsing in a heap). 

The alarm went off at the set time, but before I’d even had time to reach out and press snooze I was already telling myself I was a mentalist.  Running…at 7am…before work.  No chance, I stayed in bed.

So then I spent last week researching joining a gym.  Fuck me some of them are expensive aren’t they?  Jebus.  I burnt off enough calories looking at the membership fees.  So that’s on the back burner for a while. 

This weeks research activity has been on electric toothbrushes.  I know…rock and roll.  I know everything there is to know about oscillating and pulsating heads – don’t deny it, you so wish you were me.

I’ve decided if I’m going to buy a new one it’s going to be a good one.  Good ones are expensive.  However, when I buy stuff, I have to justify it to myself before buying things.  Expensive toothbrushes I cannot justify to myself…unless something mysteriously tragic happens to my current one (which I’ve gone back to using after an hiatus).  So I’m continuing to assault my toothbrush everyday, by dropping it on the floor, until it dies.  It’s served me well and it’s a fighter, but it really just needs to die with a small ounce of dignity now.

I’m living the dream people.  Living the dream.

A post of nothing

I feel like I should be updating this thing more than I am, but I really can’t be bothered lately.  I’m not sure if I’m just losing my inspiratation for all things blog or I’m just being lazy.

I’ve no idea how people find things to write about everyday (sometimes multiple times a day).  Maybe I’m not looking in the right places for blog stuff!

Anywho’s (I never say anywho’s in real life by the way…I’m not that cool) I’m going to see The Enemy tonight…if someone lashes a pint in my direction I shall be on another pint throwing at gigs rant by the morning.

It’s also my birthday coming up at the weekend, for yet another year I’ve had to take charge in organising everyone going out.  I’m always the unspoken of ‘leader’ on nights out anyway, no one else seems to have a brain of their own so I’m used to it.  All questions of where we go, what time we go, where we go next etc, always end up with me making the decisions – not a bad thing of course – but it does get tiresome.  That’s a rant for another time methinks.

That’ll do for now, it’s 12 minutes past 5, I should be well gone from work by now!

My Google Reader

84 feeds in my Google Reader:

• 45 of them are just general blogs and peoples insane witterings
• 16 are ‘New’ which I have found on my blog surfing travels lately.  These stay as ‘new’ until I either bin them or decide them worthy enough to stay in my reader.  (I know this is very geeky, but I need someway to sort the wheat from the chaff!)
• 8 are feeds for sites who update with articles/daily cartoon things (ie The Daily Mash, Dilbert, xkcd.com)
• 6 music site feeds
• 4 geeky internet/computer feeds which I keep an eye on for any decent free software or general computer nerd stuff
• 2 photograph sites (they post good pictures now and again…and it’s not porn!)
• 2 football feeds
• 1 Google Reader Blog

Thankfully not all them blogs post daily – I’d never get through them all.  However, scan reading and Google Reader’s ‘mark all as read’ button do come in handy at times!

Out of all them sites I only comment on a handful of peoples insane witterings…sporadically.  I do apologise, but I am officially shit at commenting on other blogs.

What are other people’s feed readers like?  Do you read a lot or just a few?  Or do you prefer not to use a feed reader at all and just click to the site every so often?

If you’re in my blog list or have commented here in the past then I (probably) read your blog too.  You can sleep peacefully knowing at least one more pair of eyes are staring at you.

Doesn’t that make you feel better now?

Cynical Scribble Signature Factor

As everyday goes on in work, I find myself with even more forms to sign.  It’s a never ending deluge of papers which needs signing.  It’s no great shakes, I’m not authorising the transfer of millions of pounds to my off shore bank account.  I’m signing stuff for the ever boring ‘audit trail’ which we need.  So much for the electronic world, we might as well be back in the 50’s.

I spend so much time signing stuff, that I decided to find out how long.  In order to analysis this I had to use a complicated mathematical equation known as the Cynical Scribble Signature Factor…

On most bits of paper I sign I have to place my autograph and print my name.  Even with a squiggle for an autograph, my 10 letter surname and 1 letter initial take up most of the time to ‘print name’ alongside my signature.  Did I hear you ask me how long?  Yes I did…well, it takes me 8 seconds on average.  Add another 3 seconds to add the date and that makes 11 seconds per signature.  Wowzers.

Each file I sign needs 4 pages signing, so: 4 pages x 11 seconds =44 seconds. Let’s add another 2 seconds for each page turning (2×4)+44=52.  So, 52 seconds per file.

I sign on average 25 files per day, so: 25 files x 52 seconds=1300 seconds.

That gives us a Cynical Scribble Signature Factor of 21 minutes and 6 seconds per day.

Are you still with me?  Good.  Pay attention at the back.

If we put that sum into a working week: 21.6 minutes x 5 days=108.3 minutes  (or 1 hour 48 minutes and 3 seconds).  1 hour 48 minutes signing my name per week.  And then into a working month: 108.3 x 4 weeks = 433.2 minutes.

Which now gives us a new Cynical Scribble Signature Factor of 7 hours 12 minutes per month.

That’s nearly a working day (not including lunch), just signing my name every month.  Amazing.

Let’s say there are 46 working weeks per year (minus Holidays etc). Which leaves us with 230 working days or (as I know you’ve just worked out in your head) 299000 seconds, of which I spend time signing my name every year.  It could also be shown as 4983 minutes and 3 seconds.  Or 83 hours, whatever you prefer.

This now gives us (and I know you’re excited) a new Cynical Scribble Signature Factor…drum roll please…

A Cynical Scribble Signature Factor of 3 days 11 hours per year.

I need a shorter name.