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Thursday, January 31st, 2008
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5:47 pm - Gawn
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| Monday, September 17th, 2007
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3:59 pm - We've moved.
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| Saturday, September 8th, 2007
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9:58 pm - Missing, presumed...?
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Okay, I'm about to switch off this PC, and when I do, you aren't going to hear a peep out of me for a week.
Seriously, no email, no phonecalls, no LJ posts, you won't find me on IRC, MSN or the interwebs.
We're moving stuff into the new flat and it won't even have a phone line until next week, let alone broadband.
If any new memes crop up over the next week, keep a link to their origins, I need to keep up with internet culture upon my return.
Have fun, and I'll see you all again soon.
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( 2 fingers on my glove | Knit me a new one )
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| Saturday, September 1st, 2007
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12:10 pm - Blanket survey
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Practically everyone knows now that I have two blogs, I keep mentioning my 'secret' one in this public one and I use both to reply to peoples comments. Sometimes I use this one to reply to comments in my other blog and vice versa and it's just getting confusing.
I have surmised that the easiest thing to do would be to reduce down to one blog... trouble is, I cant pick which one. This blog is jam packed full of pictures of me in the before times and references to my old name, all in gloriously unlocked posts (about 3-4 years worth of them)....
And the other one... Well lets just say I made the name for it when I still thought spelling Stacy with an 'i' was cool.
So, if I made a third journal to consolidate all my posts, and ditched the other two, how many of my friends would follow me and befriend the new account?
Be honest.
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( 18 fingers on my glove | Knit me a new one )
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| Monday, August 27th, 2007
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12:24 pm - I almost became a teacher once.
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| Friday, August 24th, 2007
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12:02 am - Update newsflash
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I haven't blogged in HOW LONG?
Okay updates...
Went to Edinburgh, saw Mitch Benn, saw friends, got hair dyed, now reddish, photos soon.
Been house hunting, viewed a lot of places, found a nice one, applied, financial jiggerypokery regarding deposits, updates soon.
Personal projects all on hold, too busy and stressed, updates later.
What else... Missed recombination because of Edinburgh. Edinburgh was planned so far in advance I hadn't realised it was the same date.
First day back at work after Edinburgh I saw someone in a recombination Tshirt on my bike ride towards the science park and almost wanted to kill him and steal it.
What else... loving the new job. Feel like I've found a real niche, and as soon as I get trained in the arm assembler I will know things no one else there knows and be pretty much indispensable.
Eeeexcellent.
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( 10 fingers on my glove | Knit me a new one )
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| Thursday, August 2nd, 2007
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11:27 pm - Construction
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So I've had this idea which needs a rather bizarre component: A giant button.
By this I literally mean a GIANT button, like a shirt button, except about 7 inches in diameter, maybe more, and rougly half an inch thick.
( Something like this )
Basically my idea was to get a bit of thick wood or mdf from a craft store, cut file and sand it to the right shape, drill some holes then paint and varnish it for a plastic-like finish.
But it occurred to me that you're a crafty lot and you might have better ideas, so I'm outlining this specification here to see what you all think. How would YOU make a giant button?
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( 13 fingers on my glove | Knit me a new one )
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| Friday, July 27th, 2007
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7:17 pm - How to save a life
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After my escapades with one dead mouse it seems there are more dwelling in here.
Last night Debbie set up more traps and it didn't occur to me till the morning that if another mouse is caught, I'll be the first to find it. This statistic displeases me. Luckily nothing was snapped last night (due in part to a really poor choice of bait -a tiny nugget of peanut butter. I gave my mouse a last meal the size of a grape covered all over in lemon curd :P) and as I ate my Tesco brand Coco Pops substitute, Choco Snaps, I pondered how I could prevent more needless death.
I could just snap the traps myself after Debbie goes to bed although that seems somewhat unsporting and ultimately pointless, because I'm no keener on mice running around here than she is.
So the thought occurred today at about 2pm that the thing to do was to set up a front line. I know more about mice and how to catch them than Debbie does, and as such I've got one big advantage. I've been doodling designs for a humane trap to capture the mouse live, and let me transport it to a nice retirement home in the wild.
Current winner is a finely-balance tipping-up system with bait in the back of a jar. Just need to figure out how to rig up the rest of it with common household junk.
I'm gonna rescue the mice in this house.
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( 1 finger on my glove | Knit me a new one )
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| Monday, July 23rd, 2007
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6:51 am - Ah, l'amour
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At 6:45 my alarm clock went off and after stopping it, I had the following curious conversation. Keep in mind that Rebecca has the uncanny ability to converse lucidly (but often nonsensically) in her sleep, without even realising it.
StaZ0r: What time do you want to wake up?
BeXX0r: Erm...
...
StaZ0r: Well?
BeXX0r: I'm thinking!
StaZ0r: Okay.
...
BeXX0r: Probably.... soup.
StaZ0r: Soup?
BeXX0r: Yeah. Soup. I want soup.
StaZ0r: What time do you want to wake up!?
BeXX0r: Hm? (having now actually woken up) Sorry I'm cracking up... Seven.
StaZ0r: Seven?
BeXX0r: Seven? Don't be crazy. What would I do for an hour? Eight.
StaZ0r: Eight?
BeXX0r: Yeah.
See now that's the way I heard it. The first part was probably an unconscious flashback on Becca's part from last night when she couldn't decide what she wanted for dinner.
I think in her head it went like this:
*happy dream about soup*
Staci: What time do you want to wake up!?
*wakes up, somewhat disoriented*
Becki: Sorry I'm cracking up....
Staci: Seven?
Becki: Seven? Don't be crazy. What would I do for an hour? Eight.
Staci: Eight?
Becki: Yeah.
*Back to soup dream*
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( 1 finger on my glove | Knit me a new one )
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6:07 am - A curious physiology
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I don't think I'll ever understand why this happens, but for some reason on the first day of a new job I always wake up preposterously early.
Today the alarm was set for 6:45, to give myself ample prep time and see how early I arrived, so I could adjust the alarm later.
That didn't stop me from having two false starts and finally waking up at about 3:55 am, stone cols sober and unable to fall asleep again. False starts, in case I've never explained explained the concept before, are dreams in which you wake up, start to get ready for work, something goes terribly wrong, you panic and wake up in a cold sweat. The most common is a dream where you wake up and look at the alarm clock to see it's an hour past the time you're supposed to be working and the alarm never went off.
Horrible feeling.
But after lying awake for an hour I decided i should use the time more productively, and in the last hour I've had breakfast and cooked myself a lunch. Some time later I'll give you my current favourite lunch recipe, honey teriyaki egg fried cous-cous with lettuce.
Nom nom nom.
The trouble with waking up stupid early on the first day of work is that it means by about 4pm I'll be shattered.
At some point today, I also have to ask about getting the 10th of August off, because of the tickets we've booked at the fringe. Is there any kind of specific etiquette used when asking for time off on your first day at a job? If so, tell me before 8pm because that's when I'm heading out.
I suppose I could have my shower early but when I'm showered I need to blow-dry my hair and that'll wake EVERYONE up, so I want to leave that for the latest possible moment.
Still, extra long shower never harmed anyone...
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( 1 finger on my glove | Knit me a new one )
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| Saturday, July 21st, 2007
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8:55 pm - Fame dropping.
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Debbie was listening to some loud choral classical music just now and when they read the credits she noted how some of the people had taught her at some point or had even performed with her, and now they were famous.
With a sort of wistful look in her eye she said it made her think about the things she could have achieved if she'd applied herself differently.
Stuff like that must happen all the time if you grow up somewhere like Cambridge.
I grew up in Sheffield, where things were a lot more certain.
No one you knew was ever going to do anything, full stop. The highlight of most of our lives will be getting our photo in the newspaper because we happened to work at a company they were featuring or went to a public event they were covering.
There were only two big fame stories, and neither of them really inspired me, or anyone else, to think about how we might have applied ourselves.
The first story was a girl in my maths class who became a model. That was really exciting for about a day or two before we realised it was just in a discount clothing catalogue. Maybe she made a career out of it, I honestly don't know. All I know is that it gave her the outlook and realisation that if she could stay pretty she'd never have to work hard again. Not much of an inspiration to the rest of us. you can't study towards an aesthetically pleasant bone structure.
The other story was a more ongoing thing, and one which reflected how the teachers felt about the students, Having realised themselves that we would never make anything impressive of ourselves, kind of an offshoot from the realisation that they themselves were never going to make anything impressive of their lives.
Every day of every year, the teachers concentrated on making kids work hard, telling them to study, telling them off for messing around, punishing (within the bounds of the law) those who were disrupting the study of others. And then at the end of the years we were presented our GCSE certificates by the most famous person who went to our school. When he was a pupil there, he refused to study, got terrible grades, messed around, disrupted lessons, picked on weaker kids and then upon leaving because a professional footballer.
This was the aspirational figure we were presented with. Someone who hadn't worked hard in lessons or followed rules and became famous and admired by the entire staff because he was good at a game.
That kind of ended my faith in humanity there and then.
It's funny how that sense of nothingness pervaded life back in those days.
Debbie went on to say that when she was nine she'd done a solo performance of the song which was on the radio.
When I was nine I did nothing. The only solo childhood performance I could recall was playing a mouse trapped in a glass bottle in a school play about littering.
Did I mention I killed a mouse last night?
The other impressive thing I did as a child was win an art contest to have a painting put in a gallery along with similar works from other schools. Yep, my work's been in an exhibition.
I never even went to see it.
Nothingness.
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( 3 fingers on my glove | Knit me a new one )
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7:15 am - I feel kinda bad about what I did last night.
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Last night I saw a mouse. It was so cute. Unfortunately it was running from the dining room to the music room, which isn't really the right place for a mouse.
So I did the logical thing, Debbie had a couple of mousetraps, and I set one up.
Luckily my knowledge of rodent behaviour meant I knew exactly where to put it and what to bait it with. Sure enough I went downstairs just now and it's head is squashed into my carefully mixed mound of lemon curd and peanut butter... and now I feel really bad.
I mean I knew if the trap got it, it'd kill it, but I didn't expect to get it on the first night. I figured there'd be a sort of outwitting and I'd find the trap snapped with the bait gone, and it'd become a clever game of cat and mouse... well... person and mouse. I expected it to be more like that movie Mousehunt, where my attempts to capture it would end in a mutual understanding, and eventual friendship.
Finding it practically snapped in two face down in my favourite sandwich filling sort of cut that tale of self discovery short.
Now it's lying there dead and I can barely stand to look at it. I cant get within 3 feet of it without feeling kind of ill... which is a problem because I feel like I should be the one to clear it up. When I told her I'd seen a mouse, Debbie looked incredibly frustrated about the fact, so she'll probably be glad it's gone, that doesn't mean she won't be equally annoyed at having to clear it up.
It just reminds me too much of Gwen, my second Gerbil.
This must be what Vietnam flashbacks are like for war veterans, only these are veterinarian flashbacks...
What the hell do I do now?
UPDATE
With the help of a rubber glove, a pair of pliers, and the knowledge that if I didn't shift it the next person to see it would probably be Debbie's youngest daughter, I managed to take the trap out to the bin and open it, to dispose of the body. I then washed the trap and I now feel very very ill.
It is starting to occur to me however that just because I saw one mouse and caught one mouse, doesn't mean it's the same mouse...
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( 2 fingers on my glove | Knit me a new one )
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2:36 am - Ancient neolithic cookie dough.
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I am now convinced Becca would make a far superior archaeologist than I would. In eating Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Chip Cooie Dough Icecream, I will happily take a spoonful, getting a morsel of cookie dough here or there.
She will carefully scrape at the icecream, delicately removing complete chunks of dough, saving them in the lid of the tub for eating at the end...
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( 1 finger on my glove | Knit me a new one )
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1:56 am - Musicology
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Putting out a call to people in general, specifically musicky people.
I'm looking for sheet music.
Nothing specific, but I'm currently writing a program which tutors people to play the tin whistle and I need some tunes for it to teach. I'm basically looking for simple melodies, one note at a time, in the key of D. D is because my tin whistle is in D and I'm using it first to teach myself.
They say those who can do and those who can't teach.
I can't... so theoretically I can teach myself until I can... and then I will.
I'm sort of hoping to release this open source when I'm done so it'd be handy if the tunes were royalty free.
Thanks for helping out. Details again:
Simple melodies, probably not more than a few minutes long.
Varying difficulty, the program can handle note timings down to a 16th, so fast paced things are fine and dandy.
Key of D preferred.
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( 5 fingers on my glove | Knit me a new one )
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1:27 am - Conformism!? PAH!
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I just went to the midnight launch of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
I did not however buy a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
I bought a copy of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.
I've always wanted to do that...
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( 4 fingers on my glove | Knit me a new one )
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| Friday, July 20th, 2007
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3:27 am - Free stuff!
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Today feels like a birthday.
It might be the fact that on a whim I have had both jelly AND ice cream today, but I'm starting to think that they might have been a continuation of a birthday-like feeling regarding my job, which I start on Monday.
The reason it's a birthday like feeling is that today I got a present :D
I got an ACIS messenger bag, with a ring binder inside it containing my induction pack for work. It's awesome.
The induction calendar starts with basic training and goes all the way into September, and includes time staying in a hotel on a training visit to the head office. I am so freaking excited. I've never been given anything like this from a workplace before, much less been on a business trip.
I hope I get to stay in a Travelodge, those places are minimalist quality. I mean yeah, Mariott hotels are nice, but nothing says "Nowhere better to go" than a night alone in a Travelodge.
Is it normal to be this fired up over a new job?
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( 2 fingers on my glove | Knit me a new one )
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| Monday, July 16th, 2007
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8:07 pm - isms and ists
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Sometimes television makes me feel better about myself.
Sometimes it scares me about the state of the world.
It seems more and more that shows are doing both at the same time. in this case the show in question was presented by a chap called Richard Littlejohn. Now by all accounts that I've read, this Littlejohn fellow is racist homophobic and all the rest, and he's written a novel which one reviewer called a 400 page recruiting pamphlet for the BNP.
But in the show he was acting as a beacon of tolerance regarding something I hadn't even realised was an issue - the growth of British anti semetism.
I hadn't realised that it was such a big thing, I have one or two friends who I think are Jewish (to be honest I never spend the time trying to classify my acquaintances) and none of them ever mentioned the kind of issues this show brought up.
The reason this show kind of cheered me up is because I always think of myself as being fairly race/gender/religion blind in my choice of friends. There's an old phrase which makes many people cringe, when folk say "I'm not racist, I've got loads of black friends!"
I don't really take the time out to think about what demographic boxes I'm ticking in my social circle, but whilst I know I have or have had friends who are gay, lesbian, goth, furry, ginger, wheelchair users, little people and in an age range of 16 to 50 years old, I cant recall ever having a close friend who was black. It's just never come up, I haven't been avoiding anyone, it just never came up.
So even though I know I'm not racist, I'd have a hard time proving it, since my circle of friends is entirely caucasian. It's troubling because a lot of the time these prejudices sort of sneak in under the fence, and folk with no particular hatred of a certain group of people just start to have negative sentiments or believe more in poor stereotypes from the media.
Until this show, anti semetism wasn't even on my radar, and finding out that it was becoming a problem, I sort of felt good that it hadn't managed to infect my thinking in that sneaky way. When I did the Jedi thing (my census said I was a Jedi, I might as well observe some of the standard practices) and searched my feelings, I realised that I was, for want of a better word jew-blind.
There's a supposed nirvana of equality where people are gender-blind or colour-blind, where people don't even notice or care what sex or race a person is. I have to admit, I can't honestly say whether racial or gender prejudice has affected me. I know I'm probably more likely to trust other women than men, and the fact that I've only been mugged once and my assailants were all dark-skinned may still affect me subconsciously.
but I can say for certain that I am most definitely not affected by Jewishness because I know for a fact I practically never even notice is someone is jewish or not. There was a time when I didn't even know Mel Brooks was Jewish...
It does worry me however that there might be a lot of people out there who are prejudiced against my friends for reasons I didn't even realise...
current music: Girl Anachronism - Dresden Dolls
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( 5 fingers on my glove | Knit me a new one )
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| Sunday, July 15th, 2007
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8:18 am - Speaking of death, art and tossers...
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Have you heard about Damien Hirst's latest work?
It's a human skull encrusted with 8000 diamonds. It's said to be the most intrinsically expensive artwork ever made. Damien Hirst was interviewed and... Bless him he's just not very good in interviews.
It's kind of been known for some time that he hires other people to do the more laborious parts of his work, but he doesn't talk a lot about how the workload is split. It could just be that while he's preparing the shark he needs an extra pair of hands to lower it in, or someone to hold the ladder while he fingerpaints the picture of Mira Hindley. But then it could also be that he wandered into a workshop with 20 struggling art students with a bag of diamonds and a skull and said "Come on, pip pip, get working. And I'll be counting so no sticky fingers..."
He just does not give good interviews. I saw Damien Hirst interviewed on TV at the opening of one of his exhibitions, a room decked out to look like a rather bland chemists shop. After making up some nonsense about it being a statement that medicine lures people into a false sense of security, he was asked the classic question "But is it art?"
To which he answered, snottily "Of course it's art. I'm an artist and I did it, so it's art."
I can think of lots of things Damien Hirst does which no one would pay to see.
But his latest work is at least pretty to look at and he's guaranteed a high selling price by making it out of the most expensive raw materials he could find. He can't go wrong, right? Wrong.
Hirst, who financed the piece himself, watched for months as the price of international diamonds rose while the Bond Street gem dealer Bentley & Skinner tried to corner the market for the artist’s benefit. Given the ongoing controversy over blood diamonds from Africa, “For the Love of God” now has the potential to be about death in a more literal way.
“That’s when you stop laughing,” Hirst says. “You might have created something that people might die because of. I guess I felt like Oppenheimer or something. What have I done? Because it’s going to need high security all its life."
Yep, it made Hirst feel some strong emotions to have made art which people died in the production of. But he only realised that after spending a fortune and having a good laugh at his own decadence. What a tosser.
But from all this ill will towards an overpaid ("I know, today I'll buy 8000 diamonds"), short-sighted (His shark in the formaldehyde was preserved on the outside but not inside and now it's started to rot and go lumpy. so much for a timeless piece), big headed (basically the point I was making was when he has a poop, is that art too, Mr Bigshot?) tosser, comes my new favourite artist.
No, not Damien himself but the mysterious Laura, who made a replica of the skull with swarovski crystals and dumped it in a glass case in the trash outside the gallery on plain view to passers by. And she made it herself.
Read more and see pictures here.
Now THAT is art.
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( 2 fingers on my glove | Knit me a new one )
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7:50 am - I may not know art, but tossers are graudally becoming my specialist subject.
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Few people think about what's going to happen after they die, but those who do sometimes make preparations for the grand event, be it writing a will or deciding what music to play at the funeral, or the font they want on their tombstone. Andy Kaufmann prepared for his death better than anyone else I've ever heard of, by managing to create the right atmosphere surrounding his whole career to make people honestly believe he was faking it and was going to come back into the limelight 20 years later.
Two days ago I saw someone who had prepared a hell of a lot for his death, and the fruits of his labour were finally on TV. Not a lot of people liked Bernard Manning. It's not just that a large number of folk weren't keen on his act, many people thought that the nature of his comedy reflected badly on him as a person, and I have to say for the most part I sort of agree. So when I heard he'd recorded a TV show to be broadcast after his death, I leapt at the chance to see what someone so despised would have prepared.
The show was pretty trippy to say the least. It seemed to be divided between 4 different things. Firstly there were clips of his old comedy and post-mortem interviews with some of his famous fans. Nothing new there, it was like an "I love 1986" type program for those segments. Also in the mix was footage of his final few months, how he'd prepared his funeral, his last interview, his last gigs and such.
Then it got a lot tripper as he was edited into footage of his own funeral as a spectator in the audience, making comments about how rubbish everyone's eulogies were. I can only imagine that he filmed his bits beforehand on green screen, knowing roughly the kinds of things people would say, and arranged for someone else to edit those into the funeral footage.
The fourth type of action (and these weren't in order, it cut between them like a sketch show almost) was a small drama he acted out, of what would happen to him when he met St Peter and, eventually, God.
Now I half expected it to have him apologising for his bigoted attitudes or the racist antisocial nature of his comedy. But the main focus of the show seemed to be him saying he wasn't sorry, because he was just having a laugh. Now, filming yourself in a conversation with God, telling him you refuse to apologise for being racist bigot because it entertained people, is fairly egotistical by anyone's standards. But initially I sort of saw where he was coming from. I thought that perhaps he was like Alan Carr or Ricky Gervais, who pretend to be big headed and patronising, but are actually really nice people. The whole point being that Bernard Manning as the public knew him was an act, a character. That was before his last interview.
His last interview wasn't anything particularly showy, he wasn't even interviewed by anyone famous. It was just a conversation in a club he;d just performed in, with three people who had, for whatever reason, sat across from him. It might have been set up for the cameras but I don't know why they were picked to talk to him.
One of the questions which came up was basically "No one's denying that the racist jokes make people laugh, but don't you ever worry that perhaps they spread or reinforce the attitudes behind racist behaviour in the wider world?"
And Bernard Manning's answer was that basically, so long as people kept paying him to do that kind of act, he'd keep doing it, and the only reason people said it was causing problems was that they were jealous of his success.
He then lauded up his success, comparing his riches and fame to the three fairly ordinary people interviewing him. He pretty much uses his success as his justification for being a total dick.
I really did think it was kind of sad that he recognised the chance to have a final say after his death and decided to use it to do a big egotistical "fuck you" to his critics and say that he wasn't sorry for any of it because he died happy and successful.
I'm amazed there haven't been more complaints...
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( 1 finger on my glove | Knit me a new one )
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| Saturday, July 14th, 2007
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1:59 pm - The Job Details, or, What I did in Meldreth on Saturday.
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I signed my contract on Thursday and mailed it off to ACIS.
That's the company I'm going to be working for.
On Tuesday they made me an offer...
And on Wednesday I went to Meldreth for another interview.
See, I knew the contract wouldn't come till Thursday, and this interview was going to be a final one... and I've always been one for spreading my bets.
As it happens the Meldreth thing didn't work out and to be honest I'd probably have turned it down anyway, even though the wages were higher.
I just wanted to know that I was good enough to earn 30k a year.
Turns out I'm not, so now I earn 20k a year.
My job is development support. What's that you ask? Well when I was looking for jobs I felt torn between whether I wanted to continue my work in tech support, or try to work my way into development. Even though I'd had a bas experience in my last dev job and another support job wouldn't nearly be as hands on as Snacks Direct.
Well I got the ultimate combo. the "Ribs and wings" in the TGI Fridays menu of life.
Development support deals with tech support in a very very hands on sense. To make a long story short, it's fixing things - which as you know I'm very good at.
I start on the 23rd.
I was going to start on the 16th but shortly after my contract arrived in the mail I got a phone call asking me if I could amend the contract myself to say 23rd, because they hadn't ordered me a desk yet...
It'll be good to finally get to work :D
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( Knit me a new one )
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qfyd's journal