Friday 20 November 2009

Boost + McGregor = Aspiration

At first I was going to write about how much I want Ben Fogle’s job. The notion first popped into my head when I saw him on some television programme visiting some random but magnificent places in the world. The boy done good since Castaway, or was it Shipwrecked? Anyway, I concluded that I wanted his job, the kind of occupation where they pay you money to visit unique places on earth and you see what beauty this planet has to offer.

But this did not rest well with me, oh no, whilst choosing between a Boost and a Double Decker at the vending machine, I also decided to delve deeper into my soul. Saying I want Fogle’s presenting job or something of that sort was one thing, but it did not feel right. Apart from the occupation I’d rather have my own life thanks, even my own experiences, ta very muchly. It was only when I decided on a Boost that I remembered about Ewan McGregor. Now, he’s had some experiences. Yes, he is someone I wouldn’t mind swapping places with, well for a couple of days at least. Firstly, Trainspotting is one of my favourite films. The iconic moment for me is when Renton swings that battered holdall across his back and Born Slippy begins playing. Magic.

It is not just starring in a cult film though, I recall his bike trip from London to NYC via some dodgy parts of Russia and Mongolia. I watched those episodes on Sky 1. He travelled properly and experienced some great countries, met some interesting people and also rode a decent bike. He lived it.

By now I was sitting in the cafe munching on my Boost recalling the other trip he took around Africa. He got to see Silver Back Gorillas. One of my dreams is to see these magnificent creatures in the wild and he managed to do it whilst going on yet another adventure. I mean the guy even starred as Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, what more can someone ask of their career, oh yeah, they could have starred in Shallow Grave.

I finish my Boost bar and smile, it is good to aspire to people and I want a bit of what McGregor’s had, particularly going to see Silver Backs before they are extinct. I go back to work aware that Paddington’s Shadow is miles and miles away from reaching this goal but also happy that I’ve at least discovered something I would truly like to do.

Tuesday 10 November 2009

Viral Woes

Last week I was browsing the BBC website whilst listening to Jamie T on YouTube. All was as should be until I tried to click to the next page when suddenly my netbook screen flickered and all of a sudden it went black and restarted. Upon boot-up my background picture had disappeared and I was left with a white one. That’s odd, I thought before right-clicking to change my picture back. The little pop-up appeared and I noticed that my option to change had been greyed out. In fact I could see another icon within the list entitled, ‘critical warning’.

Slightly concerned about what was happening I logged on to interweb only to find that my default home page had changed to some 8888.com advert. Something was up, something malicious and annoying. I quickly loaded up AVG and it briefly appeared before shutting itself down again. What? I thought, and tried again. It happened again. This time I changed tact and went launch it from Run on the taskbar. It had disappeared. I then tried my last line of defence before admitting I’d been well and truly shafted. I pressed the Windows key + R and got a message telling me that function had been disabled by the administrator. I’m the administrator, aren’t I?

Apparently not, this little monkey of a virus had taken over my computer. I even tried to reach the Spybot website only to be redirected to some saucy livecam with some hot chick. Although, briefly a welcome distraction, the fact my netbook had been compromised brought me back to rainy reality. My only option was to try and reformat the hard drive. One issue, I would sacrifice all the scrawls I’d accumulated since January.

Swallowing acceptance like I was drinking egg yolk full of nettles (the ones that hurt and require a doc leaf which never works) I tried to reformat the whole thing but stumbled at the first hurdle. This thing doesn’t have a CD-Rom drive and I don’t have an operating system on a flash pen just hanging about. I sighed, and went to listen to some music, half annoyed about been taunted by a cyber bug and half annoyed I was annoyed at the whole thing.

On Monday I decided to take in the ‘puter to work and ask nicely to IT for advice. They were good and gave me some but nothing worked. I was beaten, that was until someone completely unrelated to IT, in fact hates IT, said, ‘why you so vexed?’, to which I replied, ‘My lil’ ‘puter is ruined by a virus and the only way to fix it is to reformat the hard drive but I ain’t got XP’.

‘Yeah I had that problem, you need to find the recovery key and then I suggest you download Windows 7 it's really good, and it’s only £30 because we get some employee discount or something’.

‘what?’ and then I thought, how does he know this stuff?
‘The recovery key is either f2 or f4, try it out when you have a moment, see ya.’

First thing I did was try and find out whether Windows 7 was available on the cheap. It was. Buoyed by this revelation I turned on the netbook and pressed ‘f4’ as soon as it turned on. There was a whirring noise followed by some blue screen flickering until a page finally loaded up saying ‘Welcome to Samsung recovery’.

So now I’ve got the netbook in working order and have pimped it up with windows 7. I am happy again.

In other news, I have terminated my Twitter account after only having opened it 3 months ago. I just canny not be bothered with it any longer.

Tuesday 3 November 2009

“Lynn, you’re just like a little mouse”

This is exactly how I was feeling upon thinking about my return to work. I find coming back to work after an extended break difficult to handle. It’s not just the fact you have been away enjoying yourself and devoid from all your daily responsibilities and had been left with only two, ‘where are we going to sleep tonight?’, and ‘shall we eat here?’

My temperament can handle this quite well. What it struggles with is the unknown, what mess did I leave behind? Or whether things have moved on so much that I’ll never be able to hop back onto the conveyor belt of daily life duties and that I’ll have to find another one. Thinking about it now, when I was younger, I was the same at school, if I had been away longer than 3 weeks or after the 6 weeks holiday, I’d get all nervous because I was anxious about not knowing what was going to happen in the near future.

So before my legs went all wobbly and I began stammering as much as Professor Quirrell, I thought about why I feel like this and realised that I strive continuity and that change causes this immediate review of, ‘why is it changing?’, to run through my mind. So I decided to play on this uncertainty coupled with anxiety and see what I could find by thinking of the worst case scenario that could unravel in front of my bleary red eyes.

I decided that it would be for everyone to shake their heads whilst closing their eyes in disapproval, nay, pity, before being told that I was to collect my stuff and go. For a moment I thought this terrible, utter disaster. It was only after I started to picture this in my mind that I began to actually realise that should it ever happen, it would not be necessarily the worst thing, it would only mean that that chapter had ended. And the most important thing is not to think about going in on Monday with an aura of trepidation.

So I walked into the office the next day and attempted to take everything in my stride. However, then I heard this, then, hit replay about 8 times until I concluded, “sh*t happens, and if it all goes wrong, go to New York, ok, may just York then.”

In other news, I am really pleased to write about the return of Coldbrain to blogging. Alas, Coldbrain was the person who got me into scrawling my thoughts on Blogger so I am indebted to him for introducing me to this medium. I have missed his enlightening approach to topics and his tone of writing ever since MrColdbrain was closed down, well actually, his Lewis Hamilton joke entry was a significant turning point on the quality of that blog. However, he has now returned here on Tumblr.

Is it me, or is Tumblr and Wordpress light-years ahead of Blogspot in templates, accessibility and just about everything, it seems? I’m hoping Blogger is going to step-up or it could become the new MySpace.

P.S. the title of this blog is from an Alan Partridge qoute, I've been trying to find the exact scene on YouTube but it evades me.