Less Interesting News

I was staying away from here almost deliberately, as I sorta knew Simon would have absented himself by now. Sad but true.

Anyhow, I was aping him as usual, in deleting my back pages, and it brought us to a page of Holy Swerve, and one of Bob's valedictories - kinda apt...

Moreover, Mr Swerve's last post makes me feel bad as I am currently still in Harbinger of Doom mode, so I am unlikely to post much more for fear of bringing y'all down.

Isn't it a shame how things have to end?

Don't Go Near Angry Man

This excellent post caught my attention. I'm a pretty happy go lucky kind of bloke and have always tried to stay away from negative people. They always seem to bring you down. Even when the shit hits the fan I try to be chipper - it helps me get through the nightmare quicker. So this really struck a chord with me. Here's a quick snippet "Can any of us honestly say we haven't experienced emotional contagion? Even if we ourselves haven't felt our energy drain from being around a perpetually negative person, we've watched it happen to someone we care about. We've noticed a change in ourselves or our loved ones based on who we/they spend time with. We've all known at least one person who really did seem able to "light up the room with their smile," or another who could "kill the mood" without saying a word. We've all found ourselves drawn to some people and not others, based on how we felt around them, in ways we weren't able to articulate."

Great stuff.

Barrett Dies

Syd Barrett of legendary rock group Pink Floyd, has died at the age of 60, the band's spokeswoman has confirmed.

Let this be a lesson to you all. Drugs are good, then bad, then you die - So you may as well try them, at least once.

Owen Hargreaves

I make a brief return to let you know about this important FIFA World Cup news.

Owen Hargreaves Blog.

Thanks to Betty for the link.

hallelujah!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i was going to append this to my excellent world cup report, but felt it deserved a post of its own.

they're back! haribo happy cola bottles are back in the shops in luvverly 350g bags! i know because i've just scored a bag! and scoffed the lot! and now i feel sick!

holyhoses, your official yummy happy cola bottles blog

world cup report

simon's post made me think of pete de freitas, the drummer of echo & the bunnymen, who was killed on the 14th of june, 1989. he was riding his ducatti motorbike along an 'a' road when some half-blind half-dead old biddy pulled out of a side road in her shitty little car and smashed him up. old people shouldn't be allowed to drive. no-one over 40 anyway.

thinking of pete de freitas made me think of the lovely andriy shevchenko, who played and scored for the ukraine yesterday in their 4-0 humiliation of saudi arabia. andriy has got pete de freitas eyes, you see. sort of. we're halfway through the cup of the world now, 32 games played, 32 games to play.

big ron is covering the world cup for uktv, though i don't know what that means.

it looks like owen hargreaves might be starting for engerland this evening. you know, i'm big enough to give the lad one more chance. let's see what he can do.

there's been a lot of talk about who we might meet in the last 16. do we want germany or ecuador? just because people don't know anything about ecuador, they seem to think they will be easier. what a load of wank. i've seen them, and they can play a bit. i'd rather meet germany now than in the final or something, when they're really excited.

little michael owen was almost crying the other night as he claimed, "it's not me that's crap, it's the rest of the team!" i'm big enough to give the lad one more chance, so let's see if he can stick a couple in the onion bag this pm.

gonna have me a time with a poor man's woman

did anyone else see neil diamond in concert on bbc four on friday night? strange bloke. hard to like, as a person, i would have thought. wonder what it's like to be him. to have been neil diamond.

as i was watching, i was put in mind of that complete cunt richard ashcroft. their vocal styles are amazingly similar. i can really do without all that mama stuff.

coupe du monde

cristiano ronaldo of portugal is the gay pin-up boy of the world cup, apparently. how fucking unoriginal. i've always had a soft spot for andrei shevchenko, myself. although i'm not gay. nothing wrong with being gay, of course, but i happen not to be so. if i were gay (which i'm not), andrei could have me anytime he wanted. you could sort of get lost in his beautiful eyes.

my vote for worst commentator goes to peter drury. they're all bloody awful, but the itv ones tend to be worse because they have to keep on selling the game to you when it's obviously a crap game. the bbc already have your money so they can acknowledge the crap, to a degree.

and don't even mention the "expert summarisers."

i miss big ron. i know he said some really stupid and awful things, but surely he shouldn't be punished forever. the man was/is a fucking genius.

Moreaurora

Reading Simon's earlier post about the Aurora reminded me of my own experience, It was something I'd wanted to witness since I'd first seen it on TV as a teenager. It was on my favourite show at the time 'Northern Exposure' (did I really say show? I meant program, sorry).

We (me and my girlfriend) planned a trip around Norway, starting off in the capital, Oslo, in the south and ending in Tromso, in the north via the beautiful Lofoten islands
and a touch of whale watching. The trip was planned over the summer while my girlfriend was recovering from a nasty operation. It was a fun thing to plan while recovering and gave her something to really look forward to once fit and well. We would set out at the end of October, in order to catch the Orcas on their way in to the Fjords while still having enough daylight in the north to be able to, well, see stuff! And also we'd be in a good position to see the Aurora. To cut a long story short, we didn't see a thing. For two weeks Norway had borrowed cloud from all over Europe, or so it seemed. We'd even arrived in a time of high activity, so a single cloudless night would have shown us the lights, even as far south as Oslo. It wasn't to happen. The only faint glimpse we got was on the way home over Oslo from the plane window. Not to worry, we loved Norway so we'd be back.

Snowboarding became my next favourite hobby, beating guitar playing and photography to the top spot. So over the Christmas and New Year break we'd head once again to Norway with the premise of getting some practice in on the slopes and hopefully, hopefully a chance to see the New Year in with the Northern Lights. Once again we'd be let down, low activity and cloud made sure it wouldn't happen, we saw plenty of lights illuminating the sky, but that was more to do with the crazy Norwegians love of fireworks. I've really never seen so many private displays in one go, the whole of Norway was lit up by gun powder. Mad!

Anyway, finally I was lucky enough to get a third chance in March this year as we'd decided to try snowboarding away from the usual crowds of the Alps. This time we'd head for Lapalnd, northern Finland. It was here that I finally got my first chance to see the aurora. The days were bright and cloudless and cold, very cold. It was -24ºC first thing in the morning. That's pretty dam cold, but it didn't seem as bad a you'd imagine. The nights stayed the same, barely a cloud in the sky, perfect Aurora weather.

The setting was amazing, everything was just right, just how I wanted it to be. A snow covered winter wonderland, crisp and clean. Hardly anybody around, this was going to be great. I was lying face up in the middle of a frozen lake with very little in the way of light polution from the village nearby. I had all the clothes on I owned, my eyelashes covered in ice and my bogies frozen, but I was quite warm inside my jacket. The sky filled with a greenish glow, the shapes moved and twisted, like time lapse cloud photography. As the activity wasn't high we only saw the 'green' show, but for a whole week I got to check it out every night. It was close to magic and for me it was a dream come true. Ah!

Something about official and football and at Holy Hoses!

Beginnings, Endings, the Turning of the Wheel

I honestly don't know how this is going to pan out really. In my previous employment, I was - you may have detected - a more or less full-time blogger. I was so "efficient" at my work that I could more or less just browse the innernet and blog full-time. Obviously, it wasn't me doing this. When I say "I", I mean "a friend of a friend".

Sometimes this browsing of the internet was work-related. Quite a lot of it, in fact. I can say this with an honest heart, because I no longer visit around 90% of the web sites I used to frequent. Just don't bother with them. There was a phase of my life, it's clear now, when I was all about Apple computers. This started in 1996 and started to tail off two or three years ago when a little bit of the world-weary "seen it all before" entered my thinking. It's not just that I've lost interest in the world of Apple, I genuinely think they're not as good, or as much fun, as they used to be. It's a bit like a Southern Rock band, after the first couple of brilliant records, and then it's not fun anymore, and all the songs are about the record company and "being on the road."

For example, I found iMovie 2, back in the 18h Century of computing, a joy to use. I've said this before. It was a joy to use, but subsequent versions are not as good, they're more like everyone else's software: things go wrong, it's buggy, and it works more slowly, even though the machine you are running it on is 5x faster (at least) than the one you ran version 2 on. It's a paradox, something to do with what Simon is referring to below. The business model, the marketing cycle: these things don't have anything to do with making things better. They have to do with generating revenue and keeping people employed.

It's a huge difference. Maybe, around the time of iMovie 2, someone at Apple really believed that the software was so good that it would increase the market share of the company. In reality, they've realised that most of their sales growth and revenue comes from existing customers. Which means upgrades. And upgrades, in general, make things worse, not better.

But you don't need me to tell you that.

What I'm trying to say is, life for me has undergone a big change. I've walked away from one career and towards another. My hours are going to be different, and my circumstances are going to be radically different. It was with some joy that I realised today that I will no longer spend hours and hours of sitting in an (airconditioned) office in front of a computer display. When I was doing it, I made the best of the situation, which is why blogging was invented.

But now I'll be in classrooms, writing on whiteboards, strolling up and down between desks, getting 11-16 year olds (and maybe at some point 17 and 18 year olds) to think about things and express themselves. I won't be computering as much. And I certainly won't be doing as much blogging.

Even in my period of unemploy, I've noticed that I don't really have as much to say as I did when I was computering full time. I said to Roy, it's a bit of a public/private split. When I'm sitting home alone, there's less of the public me available for things like blogging. The introvert takes over: the one who doesn't need to talk to people so much, and can happily while away time doing and thinking about other things.

I've been trying to keep it up. But I've realised that I have way too many blogs, and that I no longer have enough public self to spread around.

So if I do blog, it'll be over at the quiet backwater of Maximum Bob, or the Book Reviews blog. I'll probably steer clear of Guitargas, because I'm going to be earning peanuts for at least a year, and don't want to drive myself insane with desire for things I can't have.

I'm not announcing a retirement, just facing facts. I'm going to tidy this garage/studio at the weekend, and get it into a state that encourages me to make music, and chuck out all the paraphernalia of job applications and the accrued mess of months of pottering around. Doubtless the other Holyhoses guys will keep you entertained, but do stop by Maximum Bob now and then if you find yourself missing my dulcet tones. Those of you who email me occasionally, I will of course reply, but maybe not as instantly as one might if one (or a friend of one's friend) was sitting in an office bored out of one's skull.