My coat (which I have written about before) has a label on it about the cloth it’s made from. It says:

– Cloth has a luxurious handfeel

Handfeel? As opposed to….? Or is it supposed to only feel luxurious to my hand, and not to any other part of my anatomy? I eagerly await Sainsbury’s to start selling food with a “delicious mouthtaste” and the Discovery channel to start showing programmes that will make you “brainthink”. It’s like 1984, only the other way around.

At the moment at work, I feel like I’m juggling about 9 balls all at once. Periodically one of them hits me on the head, distracts me and I drop all the others, and I have to start all over again. It’s frustrating, especially since I can’t actually juggle.

Juggling is one of those things that I feel I ought to be able to do. I mean, it’s just keeping lots of balls in the air, right? It’s well structured and mathematical, and I don’t see why it should be so hard; also, there’s a good correlation between reading Terry Pratchett novels and being able juggle (no, really) and in my youth I was a devoted follower of the aforementioned beardy fantasy writer. So, why can’t I? I can get about six or seven throws in and then inevitably I’ll miss one and spazz it all up. It’s not fair.

Anyway, this is all by way of saying that there’s a cool Java applet here with a bunch of tutorials on juggling, so maybe I’ll give it another go at some point.

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It’s our work Christmas party tonight. We’ve got a deadline tomorrow. What stupendous piece of scheduling management managed to arrange that one, eh?

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Today was going perfectly, up until 5:30pm when I called a colleague over to look at some code I’d got working. Of course, it naturally promptly and inexplicably stopped working and nothing I did in the next hour could persuade it to work again. I got very angry and said bad words to my computer, and now I’m quite cross, which is why I’m here writing a blog entry and eating leftover curry (with homemade naan, yum) rather than round my girlfriend’s house with a bunch of people from church. Dealing with people would just be one thing too much for me right now, so I’m going to retreat into the safe world inside my computer and hide there until I’ve stopped wanting to break things.

City Life has been shut down by the Guardian Media Group. There are plenty of people out there who’ve written far better eulogies than I, but suffice to say that I’m going to miss it. Head over to MCR for the beginnings of an initiative to make a new magazine out of the ashes; if it gets off the ground, it’s got my support, anyway.

The brief flurry of snow we had has now passed, but whilst we’re waiting for the next one, entertain yourself by familiarising yourself with the many different forms of snowflakes and snow crystals.

Yeah, I tend to be really negative about, well, everything. My beloved tells me I should spend less time criticising and more time pointing out good things. So, in the interest of that sort of balance, I’ll go on record as saying that I thought the sermon on Sunday was really rather good. Frank was dissecting the idea of “heaven” as presented in Revelation – not as the place of fluffy clouds and harps, but rather as the condition of Creation as having been redeemed to its Creator. His eschatology was thoroughly sensible and well thought out – no silly premillenial dispensationalist rapture theology here, and he even went so far as to suggest that, hey, Revelation might be symbolic rather than literal (for example, the persistent use of the sea in the Bible as being a place of danger, and heaven being described in Revelation as a place with “no sea”, meaning that the interpreting this as a literal absence of sea is rather missing the point).

Anyway, it was interesting, well thought out and I’m even willing to admit that I learnt something from it. Hurrah for Frank.

Market research has gone right downhill. The first time I did it, which was a couple of years ago now, I got given a £10 HMV voucher for spending about 5 minutes saying I didn’t much like Coca-Cola Jeans. On friday, I got given a pen for spending half an hour answering very, very tedious questions about car adverts. It’s not even a particularly nice pen; it doesn’t glow in the dark or anything.

The survey was flawed in a number of way: First, it asked me to list “all the car manufacturers I could think of”. Which meant we were going to be there for a while. And then it asked me to list “all the car models I could think of”. Um. How long was this supposed to take me, again? I think it was supposed to be measuring the influence of press and TV advertising on people’s ability to remember car models, which means that my listing of things like “Jaguar E-type”, “Ferrari 355” and “Lambourghini Murcialago” is likely to skew things slightly.

Finally, they asked if I remembered seeing advertising for a selection of different manufacturers recently. One of the manufacturers listed was Rover, and funnily enough, no, I hadn’t seen any advertising from them recently. Can’t imagine why, though.

However, there was a very cute goth/punk chick doing the same survey whilst I was there, so that made it all worthwhile.

You can’t move at the moment for people hyping up Web 2.0 all over the interwebnet – this is the movement that basically says that the next generation of web technologies will all be in pastel colours, use “tags” a lot, be “collaborative” and “aggregative” and “clustered” and will involve “clouds” and “communities”, and for some reason, will all be written in Lisp and will have the letter “e” missing from their name. So far, it’s produced quite a lot of venture capital for very little result, flickr (a glorified, slow and difficult to use photo album) and “podcasting”, which is basically “putting MP3s online for people to download”. Revolutionary stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.

You might detect that I’m not entirely convinced about this whole thing. Neither are the guys at Go Flock Yourself, a blog devoted to pointing out the retardedness of the whole Web 2.0 thang. It amused me for a few minutes, anyway.

I’ve never been able to waltz. To be fair, I’ve never been much cop at dancing of any variety (save for that time when I had about 2 hours of Ceroc tuition and quite enjoyed it but never went back) – I can just about manage the Awkward Indie Shuffle (hold your pint, stare at your feet and shuffle vaguely in time with the music) or the Pop-Punk Pogo (jump) but that’s about it. But out of all of the dances I’ve ever been forced to try, the waltz is the one that causes me most trouble – I just can’t get two feet to go into three beats: if God had meant us to Waltz, he’d have given us a third leg.

However. On Friday night, I had a dream. And in that dream, for reasons best known to my subconcious mind, it was absolutely imperative that I learned to waltz: my very existence depended on me succesfully waltzing. So off I went to a dreamland dance instructor (who was probably the recreation of some terrifying childhood authority figure or something) and they taught me to waltz. And they really did: by the end of the dream, I was moving elegantly across the dancefloor to irritatingly twee Mozart and humanity was saved.

Sadly, it seems that dreams to not bridge to reality quite so easily. On saturday morning I awoke and thought back on the dream and wondered to myself, “Can I remember how to waltz now, in my waking state?”. So, alone in the bathroom I struck up an orchestra in my mind – and waltzed straight into the bath, tripping over my two left feet and feeling quite foolish.

Ah well. Looks like it’s back to the Awkward Indie Shuffle, then.

So, I got whinged at by Ali and Sasha for not writing anything. They were nice enough to feed me and Jez and Naomi last night with very nice food, wine and unreasonable quantities of vodka and Sasha leant me her Kiev medium format so I really feel compelled to write something.

Unfortunately, I can’t think of a damned thing to write about.

It’s a vicious cycle: I can’t think of anything to write, so I don’t write, so I get out of practise and it gets even harder to think of things to write about. So, I guess this is where I make a pledge to write something every day, irrespective of whether I’ve actually got anything to say or not (of course, what inevitably happens with these pledges is that I turn round in a week and realise I still haven’t written anything, and sort of give up. But we’ll see, anyway).

Anyway, I’m playing bass with my band – I told you I was in a band, right? I’m in a band; we play sort of generic-ish indie, at least, when the drummer turns up and when the guitarist isn’t coming up with riffs that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Phil Collins album circa 1985 – at a wedding tomorrow, so maybe I’ll write about that. Or my total lack of inspiration when it comes to buying a present for the company secret santa (my best idea so far being a “DIY Bonsai Kit” – a plant pot, pair of scissors, acorn and a bag of dirt). Or perhaps something deeply interesting and unexpeted will happen to me and I can entertain you all with that.

Anyway. I’m utterly shattered on account of today’s wine, sangria and vodka-induced hangover (and I’m guessing being out until 2am probably didn’t help either) so I’m going to go to sleep now. Maybe inspiration will strike in the night.