SketchUp.

I've been mucking about again on this 3d modelling program. I should upload the 3d model sometime soon actually, but as it stands, here's a (2 dimensional) snapshot of... my desk, my computer, my bed (with half it's legs chopped off for now- it's not really that short) my window frame and some of the bricks outside.

(Click it to see it larger)
I'm hoping to have the whole house done, maybe then I'll pop it up in 3d and post it up for the world to see. Sort of like a high tech, low budget cribs.

Thanks for your comment Babor, means a lot.

Targets

This is probably my most well travelled blog post. I started writing it at work, then on the a13 and now in the hospital.

No, I'm not in the hospital because i was blogging while on the a 13, i was in a cab back then. At work, there's a catch 22. A horrible clash of performance and funding. We need to be well staffed to perform well, though the better we perform, the less the higher ups want to give us more staff. Why would they? If we perform well. Unfortunately, we don't. In fact, we fudge the books a little here and there. To make us seem better. Which inadvertently leads us to performing even worse since the impacts the aforementioned staffing issue. As such, we stagnate in a downwards spiralling toilet flush.

Wow, thats bleak imagery for work since im kinda loving it right now. But that's here and there. It doesn't change that changing figures is wrong and leads to people being done wrong. Not very obvious when it's done at my work place. All it makes at worst is people getting annoyed at having to wait to be seen by one of us. Big deal.

This culture of target driven work and such is applied across the board though. So what happens if the government legislate that patients who are diagnosed with cancer must receive treatment within x number of days after diagnosis? Well, then you just get doctors who delay giving patients scans so that the cancer isn't discovered until a later date so that they don't have such stringent workloads and tight deadlines.

So as i sit here, next to my mum who only got her ct scan by a miraculous mistake/novice doctor, I cant help but feel a little jaded. Had we not been told by our doctor to assume this was a minor stroke, we wouldn't have been prompted to send her to the hospital earlier the following day when she was feeling slightly unwell. Otherwise, we would have been waiting till the day after tomorrow for a ct scan. Just thinking that my mum would be sitting worrying at home uncertain about what was wrong with her while she had a lesion and excess fluid in her brain..? We've become quite pessimistic in this family, we're quite sure the doctors assumed cancer before they ran the tests to confirm. Vis a vis aformentioned doctor facts.

My brother and i spoke about things like this while he was down last week, in the run up to my mother's hospitalisation. While we were witnessing her deteriorating health and being pushed around by doctors who were laughably insisting it could be due to high blood sugar.

Imagine you run a pharmaceutical company and make billions on selling a drug. And you come up with a drug that works better and cures diseases amazingly quickly. Do you stop selling your current drug, which isn't as effective but sells bucket loads and makes you rich, start selling the new one which makes you less money?

Or do you withhold your new medicine and make loads of money???

Visiting hours are over now.

Shannanigans

Mcdonalds do a frequent coffee buyer card that comes attached to it's cardboard cups. You buy six coffees you collect the stickers on one of the cards and you get the seventh one free. I've never really collected them, i just hand the stickers over to my colleague who collects them religiously. I've come to realise that I'm not doing myself any favours by turning my nose up at the sticker scheme. You see, to my latest calculation based on my average consumption of coffee, ive missed out on roughly 7.5 billion free cups of coffee. Give or take. It's that hard to stay awake at work after a night out celebrating one of kris' birthdays.

Which are always a blast. Last time i had one, my mate passed out and had to have my assistance in order to, i hate to admit, change his clothes. They were covered in vomit. Of another person.

That's how you can tell you've had one hell of a night.

My iPad auto corrects hell for he'll. Which can be annoying.

Anyway, that year, my friend abdul tried putting his trousers on by pulling them over his head.
This was not conducive to his goal.

As you can imagine, taking his shoes off, what with the delicate task of untying shoe laces, didn't prove to be too easy.

Last nights party was good, no Abdul- sadly last years endeavour was a lesson to him. As for work the following day...

Funnily enough it was the day the people at work decided I could shadow some of the officers while doing some of the more difficult tasks. Something I'd been looking to do from day dot.

And here I am trying hard at 8.45 to stay awake and look all prim and proper, trying hard not to sway back and forth. And the dude i was meant to shadow didn't show.

Sucks.

Major suckage.

Suckage on a colossal scale. Mucho sucko.

Oh and when i get home, after two days of work seperated by 3 hours of sleep and 5 hours of partying, I realize I've left my house keys in my other trousers. So i whip out my phone to call someone since no ones answering the door. Turns out the families left london for the day. And night.

Long story short, i essentially had to break into my house. I've attempted this twice before and only today, in broad daylight for the first time and also, in a more sound state of mind, i actually managed to breK in. Oddly enough, two police officers walked right past me.

They were women though, so what can you expect?

It's slightly disconcerting how easily i managed to do it though.

Im currently reading bram stokers Dracula on my iPad. It's funny that i should read a chapter where they were discussing breaking into a house suspected to be owned by Dracula and van Helsing insists that they should do it during the daylight hours so as to remain as inconspicuous as possible. No one would expect it.



Also, on a note about Dracula. I love it. Such a fantastic method of narrative. And yet fully immersive for the reader. I feel at least.

Having seen a few film renditions of it, not enough is made of the character of dr Seward in my opinion. I understand that he's not got the most romantic and dizzyingly interesting role, but with regards to documenting the whole story, he's practically the spine of the whole story. If I were to write a screenplay based on the book I'd revolve it around the suitors of Mina and mainly on dr Seward. I find the Harkers' diary entries rather.... Drab. Save for Johnothan's first journal based in the castle of Dracula. That's amazing.


Ah, im in desperate need of sleep. My well concealed prejudices are shining through.

Turkish baths.

Firstly, let me say to babz who commented on my last post... Wanker.

Secondly, what awesome weather!! I just got home from the park after a kick about with a mate. I seem to have spazticated my foot. So i sat down in the bath and tried to do a sort of massage on it. Im not as good as the dude who gave me my turkish massage in turkey. More on that later. Im typing on my iPad. Im offended that it auto corrects iPad to get a capital p but doesn't give turkish a capital t. Lame. And racist. Let's try Jew. Oh look at that. Auto corrected. How about Israeli? Oh fan frickin tastic.!

But I love my little ipad baby, wouldn't let anything happen to it for the world. Speaking of which, only a fey hours till England (auto corrected) get their first world cup match! We've not done too well against the USA (auto corrected) the last two times we played them. A draw last time and we got defeated the time before. Now i bring up england as a segway into a rant about the daily mirror. An interview with Wayne rooney(not auto corrected) revealed that he intends to win the world cup for britains REAL heros. Our soldiers. Right. Well, Coupled with the actual likely hood that England get anywhere near winning the world cup, and that a fair few of the soldiers of Britain aren't even English vis a vis possibly not too keen on old rivals england winning... I don't see that promise meaning much.

Also, the darn racist evil, annoying, filth on paper daily mail held a ballot asking if "terrorist" Zakir Naik should be allowed to enter the uk(not auto corrected). WTF?!

I like Zakir Naik. He's special to me. And awesome clever.

I can't move my right foot at all. I think i might have possibly done more harm than good in my bath. I can wriggle my toes. But thats it. Damn. Those turkish baths. Let me start by saying, if you don't know me, I should tell you im hairy. But not where you'd think it ok. No in fact I'm also balding. The two don't go well together. So my body hair is kinda, well, it's all encompassing. Sadly. But I'm cool with it. So i decide, yeah, we're in turkey(not auto corrected), so we should have a turkish bath. Off we go. It's a nice building, the receptionist was actually from new Zealand she had a strong accent and looked oriental. So hot. Perhaps it was just hearing the accent and being able to speak normally rather than screaming at people to make them understand what i was trying to say. Oddly the baths are all underground, you have to walk down this steep set of stairs upon entering the building. We went for the premium service. Unfortunately none of the services, no matter how much you'd pay, would get you massaged by a woman. Unless your a woman.

One thing i didn't get was that women got to go into a private section where no one saw anything but guys got undressed, wrapped themselves into towels and had to walk right past the entrance in the midst of women at reception. Which is embarrassing when there are many fit women along with the fit new zealander(not auto corrected). So inn we go into the men only section, and boy. Boy oh boy. So much heat it's hard to breathe. It was amazing. You begin sweating out from all over in the minute. I think i lost a few pounds. It was a little weird at first going with my brother in law but in retrospect, i think you really need to do that whole thing with someone with you who you can talk to. I imagine it would be a whole lot more embarrassing alone.

Then we were ushered into a different room where we were washed. Scrubed would be a better word. Vigourously. There was much scrubbing. And a little bit of massaging. Then again dragged out into another room where we were sat by a faucet and our heads were washed and shampooed. Finally we were brought to the massage rooms where we were placed on bed and given a full body massage. The guy massaging me did all sorts of weird things that made odd parts of my body move. On a side note me and my brother in law had bee nodding this phone jacker impersonation where half way rough talking to a person we'd start making a strange noise that, in spelling would look something like 'peww'. So here i am, head down getting massaged next to my brother in law and i get the funny idea of doing it. So this dude massaging me hears me make this odd noise and it's clear he's confused because he stops for a second. I begin giggling and know my brother in law is too. I try for a second time but as im doing it, my massues isn't having any of it and digs is hand into my leg hard and my peww comes out as more of a 'pee-argh ah ah ah!!'

And later as he massaging my front he starts tugging at parts of my body hair and saying what's this? So so mean.

And the massage ends. He asks how it was. I say great and thank him, explaining I'm feeling all kinds of limber now. He says, 'wait till tomorrow, you'll feel like...' and pauses trying to think of a super hero.

'...tarzan'.

The dude at work talking about implants at work was at it again. I think if i ever, ever, ever decide to get it done, I'd ask if they can take hair from my body. Kill two birds with one hairy stone...

My dad was taking pictures in turkey and after my constant nagging got me in some of them. He said though, why go to a country like turkey full of historical buildings and take pictures of yourself? I said, hang on, that's what you're MEANT to do. If you just wanted pictures of turkey, you could just google earth it!
Anyway, we took this one and i reckon it's a good compromise on both our parts.

Anyway, I'm done. Comment, I like hearing from you!

Unproductive day at work

Well, here I am. At work. On a dank, cold, winter-like mid summer morning. I think it's raining. Oh shit, I left my muddy football boots in my garden. Poor things.
I haven't touched this thing in a while. I must say, most of you frequent readers visit this site even more than I have recently. I appologise for my lack of updating. I've just been knackered after work all week and either busy in some sheesha session till midnight or just collapsed in bed. I understand this just won't cut it but to make up for my leave I've begun writing this post at work. High risk of getting into trouble when I should be working. But I'm just juggling my prioroties. But is there actually much for me to write about?

All I do is work. And then as mentioned, sleep. I'm sure you appreciate that of late my views on the world will invariably revolve around blankets and matresses.

Just went on one of my tea breaks. There's something weird about how much more lenient this place is than O2. Is it the public/private sector divide? Is it that O2 was sufferring at the hands of the recession at that particular site? Is it just management styles? I doubt the latter since there were systems and processes in place from HR at O2 which implemented how we were governed so that was out of the control of my then manager. Whats more, the general attitude here, the ability to build up flexi time, the amount of annual leave as compared to that at o2, the working conditions, the uniform flexibility, the PAY! It's all vastly improved. When I joined and left o2 it was at a time where they were looking to make job cuts and it was evident that they made working conditions worse to make people voluntarily leave rather than have to pay them their redundancy package. But I walked past a shop the other day and things seem to have made such a big turn around that for the first time, they're actually accepting CVs in store. I don't understand what that's about.

So what else? Oh yeah, I made the move from out-door football to indoor football! Which is... Odd, I have to say.

And I made the move from Hot Choc to coffee.

But back to footie and indoor footie. I don't like indoor as much as I do outdoor but it's what the guys at work play and otherwise, I'm back to unpredictable games on random weekends with mates who drink more beer than actually play football.

Anyway, my guy at work is looking at this complaining about how long this has got. He finds it odd that people would visit a site to read. I explained to him that I was up last night reading Bram Stoker's Dracula. He looked perplexed.

But I take the hint that perhaps this isn't something I should be doing at work, especially given that I'm not writing anything of much interest. A note in general, you can tell a blog post isn't going to have much substance when the first line is regarding the weather.

Ciao.

March for gaza. 5/6/2010

Trains are one of few places where i feel its safe to whip out my iPad. I mean i do use it on buses but I'm generally in a state of.... Eek! Every five minutes. Today, on my way home from work, i would Have used my iPad but there were no seats in a packed out train. So couldn't really. Since i had to hold on to a bar for dear life. Man i hate trains. But while i was on the train i did have some sort of in-journey entertainment. A horde of school children was on the train and for the WHOLE journey without cease they were singing pop songs. In a group. In a crowded train. On like, the hottest day all year. In a CROWDED train... Damn.
All sorts of songs kids shouldn't even understand at their age. Little girls singing, im only gonna break break your break break your heart. WTF? And sometime love knocks you down. They were practically in diapers when that was out!! Uff!

What else? Oh yeah, ive become quite a weird semi-freaky something or other recently. I got lines drawn into my head. Not just a line beard. No. Lines. In my hair. Whats left of it anyway. I dunno, it just goes well with the whole short hair thang.

But now I look like a thug/chav, i think people get kind of thrown when i talk to them politely. Which is funny to see.

Also, for those of you who ever want to gift me anything, since i now have an iPad, Itunes gift cards are now an acceptable gift. For those of you who don't want to give me a present, still get me an itunes gift card. Because without noticing, ive already bought half the application store for ipads.

If any of you are going to the gaza march tomorrow, ill see you there? Well, it would be nice ot rally some support for the people of gaza, but the fact is, you're either the kind of person who'd go to one of these things or you're not. I cant be asked to try and persuade you to go. I mean, it's only a whole country thats under siege by another country acting in a way that is condemned by the international community by and large for its methods and it's brutal killing of thousands of innocent civilians. And Britain also considers this barbaric state an ally of ours. Meaning we condone the killing of innocent people. And their starvation and the systematic degradation of its infrustructure and social wellbeing. Is that cool? I don't think so.

I like though, that so many random people have stumbled across my blog after typing "israel is fucked" into google. C'est tres jolie!

Ah god its late. I think im done for the night, i might go play mirrors edge. ON MY IPAD!!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA yes, im excited. So what?

Night peeps. Comment. Night.