My sources tell me that it’s only about a week and a half until Christmas. I must admit this news came as something of a surprise to me. Okay, I’ll concede that the Christmas lights on Deansgate and the Christmas Markets in St Ann’s Square and the Christmas tree in the office and the company Christmas Party and the Christmas music on the radio and the singing Santa on AlanH’s desk and the Christmas coffee in Starbucks and the church carol service and all the rest should probably have tipped me off, but, in my defence, Christmas seems to start in about July or something these days so when I see Christmas lights and markets and trees and coffee, my brain goes “Oh, it must be about October” and then ignores them.

I’ve done, like, one bit of Christmas shopping so far. Even though I work in the city centre, I’ve not managed to summon up the energy to fight through the crowds and buy something thoughtful, wonderful and exciting for my nearest and dearest. Every day, I wake up and think, “I should buy Christmas presents for people in my lunch hour today”. And then 12:30pm rolls around and I’m in the middle of something so I dash out to Suburb to buy a Burrito Grande and a coffee whilst my code is compiling and return to my desk and keep working. And then I get home in the evening and realise I’ve still not bought anything.

It was okay whilst I was at school or University or whatever – term ended well before Christmas so you usually had a week or so to get in the Christmas spirit before Christmas day itself. In the big ol’ world of work, you work up until Christmas Eve and then, bam, it’s Christmas the next day and you’re kind of dazed and confused and just about get used to it being Christmas and then you’re back at work…

Anyway, I’m rambling now, and my compile has finished, so I’d better get back to work. If anyone’s got any suggestions as to what I can buy my girlfriend for Christmas, please leave a comment. I’m getting kind of desperate for ideas now.

Much to Naomi’s disdain, I have something of an affection for Eastern religion and philosophy: it’s not necessarily the actual beliefs that intruige me; more the patterns of thought involved and, in particular, the emphasis the individual having to work things out for themselves rather than just being told that “[x] is the truth, believe it”. As such, I find this collection of Zen Koans very interesting – a koan is an enigmatic or paradoxical question or statement that cannot be understood rationally or logically, and is designed to develop a student’s intuition.

For geekier people, there are other collections of koans that may be of interest: The Tao of Programming, AI Koans and Functional Programming Koans. These may not be entirely serious 🙂

If you really were Orange, you’d know what my account number was and when it expired and wouldn’t have to have asked me. I am not so easily fooled by your lies. Please take your “special offer upgrades” and stick it up your arse.

Love and hugs,

Chris

Productivity Killing Website Of The Day

Meant to post this earlier but didn’t get round to it. We had our office Christmas party on Thursday – usual alcohol-fuelled hijinks ensued, including a limbo competition (no, of course I didn’t enter – I’ve already got an iPod, anyway) and, more excitingly, the giving of the Secret Santa presents. I got one of these:

It’s a “Horny Devil Bag”. You squeeze it, and it says “I’m a horny little devil” or “I’m a bag – I’m a horn bag” (sadly, it doesn’t say the latter phrase in a hideous female Australian accent, otherwise it would be much, much cooler). It’s really quite annoying.

The person who got me this either knows me very well indeed, or doesn’t know me at all. And I can’t work out which it is.

The people over at Ship of Fools have put together their gift suggestions for this Christmas. I’m particularly taken by the, uh, slightly unusual Christmas lights. The mirror is, frankly, a bit creepy, though.

I know we won the cricket and all that and I was very excited, but if Ellen MacArthur doesn’t win this, then there is no justice in the world.

• I’m still aching after the gig on friday. Definitely not as young as I used to be.
• Scanning photos gets very, very dull after the 5th roll. Even when scanning in batches of 24.
• Baking bread is a hugely satisfying thing to do.
• However, Man cannot live by bread alone, which is why I just ordered a pizza.
• Bought books five and six of The Invisibles yesterday. They make no more sense than any of the previous volumes.
• That link in the item above goes to Rotten.com. I suggest you don’t click around much if you’re not extremely broadminded (and if you don’t have a very, very strong constitution).
• It seems you can run homebrew on a v2.0 PSP. Which is great, because now I can play Day Of The Tentacle on the move. Finally, my PSP gets a new lease of life!
• The Belgian Belly is still awesome. The Belgians make some properly crazy beer.
• Church this morning was, well, kind of annoying. It can’t be great every week, I suppose.
• I’m apparently playing a gig in Altrincham next week. It’s in a pub somewhere, and it’s me on bass and James Adams on guitar and vocals. More than that, I don’t know. But you should come anyway, because we’ll be awesome.

I first saw the Levellers getting on for ten years ago, on the Zeitgeist tour. I was at Sixth Form, I wore Dr Marten boots, jeans, black t-shirts and had round glasses and the worst haircut in the universe. I was angry and youthful and had that rebellious righteous-anarchist streak that middle class people acquire when they hit higher education. I spent the whole evening pogoing like a mad thing and getting all angry about injustice and the corruption of the state and things like that.

And then I came to University, and then got a job, a bit of a beer belly and a tendency to stand at the back of gigs nodding politely rather than cramming down the front in the mosh pit for the entire gig; basically, I got old and boring. Betrayed my youth, as it were.

But all is not lost: last night, I was 16 again.

Okay, so they’ve got a bit older and a bit rounder and the bass player is clearly thinning a bit on top even though he has dreadlocks down to his arse, but, other than that, the Levellers haven’t changed one bit: they’re still churning out turbo-charged sing-a-long punk-folk anthems for the crusty anarchists of the UK, and they can still put on a hell of a show, too. They’re staunchly resistant to any sort of musical fashion (heck, they even did a cover of “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” – that’s goddamned country music, people) and all the better for it: they know what they’re good at and they stick to it.

And they had to be good, too, because the supporting act was none other than Seth Lakeman, nominee for both the Mercury Music Prize and BBC Folk Singer of the Year. Heck, even if the Levellers had sucked, I’d have been happy to pay the £16 ticket price to see his short set alone: he is a truly talented young man (although I’d like him an awful lot more if the gaggle of girls I’d gone with hadn’t all melted into a pool of pure liquid desire the moment he stepped out onto stage; that does nothing for a man’s ego, I tell you – hey, I can play the guitar, too, you know).

Every muscle in my body still aches. I think this is part of the gig-going experience I’ve blocked out from when I was 16. Anyway, I don’t care. It was brilliant, and I’m happy knowing that even though I have a Jamie Cullum CD in my collection now, I can still spend two hours crammed in a moshpit being young and irresponsible and enjoying every goddamned minute of it.

Here’s to you, Dirty Davey.

The machine that hosts www.parm.net (which includes my gallery and a lot of stuff linked from here, all my parm.net email, and also Sharky’s site) is being re-racked this weekend, so probably won’t be available for most of saturday and sunday. Normal service should be resumed by monday morning.