From the Orient

I’ve done something a bit horrible. No, I haven’t eaten a raw cockroach. Nor have I read a Jeffery Archer novel. No, this is far worse. Or better. Well, better than the Jeffrey Archer novel.

I’ve bought my wife a birthday present.

Now wait a moment. Think what I might have bought her. No, not the Jeffrey Archer novels, although it was slightly tempting when I was in the shop. And all the perverts out there can stop thinking what they are thinking.

I bought … ( Hang on to your hats) … The Best of Leo Sayer

Featuring such classics as “Unchained Melody”, “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing” and “Raining in My Heart”. Praise be to Amazon for letting me buy this without having to go into a shop.

Because? Because the first gig (can I call it a gig?), the first concert she ever went to was a Leo Sayer concert. How funny is that? And I’ll never let her forget. Because I’m horrible.
btw, the first “concert” I ever went shall remain a closely guarded secret and if the girls and boys I went with blab, then they’ll be wearing concrete shoes, checking out whether Dirty Den is still at the bottom of that canal or not. That is the seriousness of the situation.

Because I’ll be getting CD’s of their “work” for my birthday and I think that would be too much to bear.

[Currently listening to The Return Of The Real Me by Strangelove from the album Time For The Rest Of Your Life]

Wow! I send my Zaurus back to Sharp UK on Thursday. Basically, it stopped working. Full stop. No lights, no display, nothing. As it less than a year old, it was still under warranty and Sharp took it without question. Yesterday, it was returned to me in full working order (except the battery was run down so I could only use it for a bit).

Compare this to the situation I had with the old Palm I had before the Z. I took it in to Dixons where I had foolishly bought extended cover from Mastercare. Two of the buttons were broken, so it was still usable, but I’d paid to have the pleasure of it being fixed. They took it in.

A month later, no response from Dixons. A month of phoning and going into the shop later, and it was returned to me. On a whim, I opened the box in the shop, to find it hadn’t been fixed at all. Back into the shop to see the salesman. He phoned Mastercare, who didn’t answer him. I ran out of time and had to go back to work. He promised to phone the next day.

As he hadn’t phoned the next day, I phoned in to be told that he’d left. I would have to bring the Palm back into the shop and it would be sent off again. Considering that I would probably never see the thing ever again if I let it go again, I declined. It still has two broken buttons and now decides to turn itself off on occasion.

Never buy a coverplan from Mastercare. I would never shop in Dixon’s (or PC World or any other affiliated shop again). Basically, they deserve to go out of business.

[Currently listening to Pretty Face by Longwave from the album Endsongs]

So, what we got? “Doctor Who”:http://www.dellah.com/orient/2003/07/11/i_am_the_doctor.shtml coming back as an animated Internet broadcast (with added DVD). “Blake 7″:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/3102295.stm in a high tech version run by Avon himself (I guess he wasn’t shot at the end then? Thought not).

Now, ??Sam Buchanan?? reports that a Farscape mini-series is on the cards to finish off the loose ends.

Of the three, Doctor Who is most likely/will happen. Of course, I doubt a new TV series will result from it. Farscape is the one I want to see the most. Being the most recent, and clearly cut off before time, it is most likely to do as well as it used too.

There are a lot of ifs and buts in the Blake 7 story. I’d like to see it, but I’m worried it would be over-hyped. Maybe if it was still had slightly crappier special effects than Enterprise, it will do well.

Everyone in Britain watched Doctor Who in its prime. Even my wife who hates Sci-Fi. That’s because it wasn’t Sci-Fi (not often). Until it started looking too much at its own history, it was just a British TV program, about a British man in time and space, going anywhere and anytime.

Tonight’s episode of Firefly, The Message is a World Premiere. How did Fox screw up so badly, as to cancel this excellent series before they’d even finished showing the first series? Don’t miss it, if you have Sky.

I got home and the children were feeling better.

And this :-

cheered me up no end. Apparently it is Mummy.

I’ve got a light layer of depression resting on my head right now. Nothing is wrong with my life, nothing has changed recently, perhaps I just get the opposite of SAD and summer just gets me down.

The children both have stinking colds which are making the miserable, grumpy and they don’t particularly want to do anything. This rubs off onto the wife, and I guess it has rubbed onto me.

I’m also particularly tired this morning, not having recovered from a wedding I went to on Saturday, but I felt exactly the same last Monday, and also on Friday. Due to my own stupid fault, the wedding clashed with a blog meet for UK people which I would have dearly liked to have gone to.

However.

I doubt I’d have enjoyed myself at the blog meet. I expect it would have been much fun, and had I been my normal, relaxed self would have enjoyed it at lot. But the ennui has me, and perhaps I would have sat there, slightly apart, slightly sour. People may have tried to engage me in conversation, but being slightly depressed, I wouldn’t have responded in equal enthusiasm, and perhaps, then the conversation would have moved on to someone else, somewhere different. The depression (I so hesitate to use such a word, because it can’t really be “real” depression; I can get up, go to work, live normally etc) slows me down a bit. On the way home, I might have thought, “You stupid fool, if you’d just made a bit more effort, joined in more. Now they just thing, that bloke was a bit boring. Polite, but boring. Didn’t join in at all”

But I did go to the wedding, and you can just guess from above how well that went. The guy getting married is in fact my oldest friend. I calculated that we have known each other for 21 years. But since about 1990 we have kind of moved apart somewhat. Anyway, that is a story for another day. The wedding was good, I just was slightly out of sync with the day.

Work is just boring, full stop. Same old shit. I do it. It is easy. The way I am managed is just woeful, and that makes it easy for me to slack. It is easy, but they have no idea what I can do, so I’m not challenged to do better. So I waste my day, reading blogs and crap like that. It doesn’t help that I get a week’s holiday in two weeks time, and half my team seem to get 8 months holiday a year, so my manager is on holiday now, and will still be on holiday when I get back from my holiday. Git.

I think I’ll use this holiday and the time from now until the holiday as a break. See you later.