Sleep Interrupted

James and Ruth’s wedding yesterday was superb. The best day in August, beautiful Oxfordshire countryside and a chance to catch up with lots of people I haven’t see in ages. I took enough pictures to flatten the battery on my camera and some of them even looked okay. I’m going to upload the best to Flickr — I’ve used Picasa Web in the past but I feel I shouldn’t put all my eggs in a Google shaped basket, so this is a good reason to try something new.

I was going to upload the said pictures tonight but after staying up until 1.30am — and amazingly avoiding a hangover this morning — I’m just too wiped out; vegging out in front of a repeat of Top Gear is about all I can be bothered with. That 6am run tomorrow morning is looking mightily uninviting right now. And so to bed…

Hopefully you’ll have noticed a decided up-swing in my posts here. To get back in the saddle, I’ve decided to post every day for a week. So far so good but today we’re off to James and Ruth’s wedding, which leaves me with very little time. Consequently you’ll have to make do with this meta-post.

Or perhaps not. As a sweetner, here’s a tip on how to perfectly mitre skirting boards at a corner, no matter the angle.

I’m very  glad to see that Mr Watkins is back. With Mr Moore rationing his output I was beginning to feel very lonely. Come back my wayward blogging buddies, all is forgiven!

On the BitTorrent front, I’m very interested to find out about Mininova from Tim. I’ve been using The Pirate Bay so far but the lack of dodgy adverts at Mininova is appealing. Since iPlayer came out at the top of the year we’ve started using it frequently. Having become accustomed to watching programmes on our laptop, I want to be able to access all TV programmes this way. Downloading them with BitTorrent works very well, especially because we get free overnight bandwidth from the nice folks at PlusNet. But that endorsement can wait for another post.

One tip I’d pass on to Mac and Linux (and *nix) users would be to use Transmission. It takes all the insanity out of BitTorrent downloads and just works.

I was catching up with my blog reading in Google Reader over lunch — today was the first time I’ve had some down time at work for as long as I can remember — when I realised I hadn’t updated my subscription to James’ blog since he moved it. Realising I had a lot of reading to do I did a quick scan only to discover that Vicky gave birth to baby Charlotte over a week ago! Am I really that far removed on the grapevine? So it would seem.

Anyway, this is rather missing the point — Congratulations James, Vicky, Christopher and Charlotte!

Tim’s stag weekend was great fun, although when it came to go home I felt strangely depressed. The poker, which I had been greatly looking forward to, went very badly. I enjoyed being at the poker table with friends but I was knocked out very early. I’d like to say it was of the bad cards I was dealt but I think I was (and am) impatient and the alcohol probably didn’t help. Lessons to be learnt I’m sure. The problem is that while I like the idea of poker I just don’t get much chance to play and without experience I’m just not going to get any better.

I got to play golf for the first time ever and sucked fairly badly, although I managed six on two consecutive par three holes, so perhaps all is not lost. Most of the times things went badly wrong I just wasn’t concentrating and I think that came from expecting to do badly in the first place. On the few occasions I concentrated and relaxed at the same time I got a lot better. The rest of the time I got play the jolly loser, something I’ve had a degree of practice at. Turns out I’m quite competitive, which isn’t much fun for someone lacking in natural aptitude.

Anyway, enough moaning — it was fun but just over too soon. Perhaps the brevity coupled with too high expectations was where the sadness came from. Now looking forward to the wedding a whole lot. Hmm… must adjust expectations!

I had a couple of interesting conversations. Richard has joined the world of death-by-email. One technique I’m experimenting with to deal with the email fire-hose at work is to use the automatic formatting rules in Outlook to colour grey all emails I’m only copied on. This has an amazing effect, as my brain now regularly skips over all the grey emails. It’s as if they’re not there! The second step is to colour green (red is a bit too alarming, blue too close to black) all emails sent only to me. These have a much higher likelihood of requiring action from me. Together these let me monitor for important emails during the day and I can then deal with the chaff in bulk during a quiet moment when I first get in. Seems to be working so far.

I was perusing Facebook the other day, as you do, when I came across a link to James’ blog. Cool! I’m always happy to see friends start blogging, particularly when I don’t get to see them very often. James had a bit of a slow start so I’m hoping if I mention him here it will encourage him to continue.

I’m on the fence about Facebook “friending” of folks I went to junior school with. Of course I’m interested to see what they’re up to now, that’s only natural, but I don’t think I need to keep tabs on them that much. I mean, I’ve wasted more than enough time on that site already and I’ve specifically stayed away from all the Pirates and Zombies and Vampires malarkey. Call me miserable if you like, I’m just trying to use my time wisely; I’m not very good at that as it stands.

And what’s with all this “wall” business? That’s got to be the most ass-backwards form of communication yet invented. Clearly I’m just too old to “get” it. Oh well, I am a dad after all, I suppose I can’t feel too bad about it, it’s my role in life.

Hmmm. To Facebook or not to Facebook? It would be my third social networking presence after LinkedIn and last.fm. Well, if it keeps me in contact with friends and extended family I reckon I can deal with the plurality.

Time passes.

There, done. Will upload a picture and blurb a bit later.

Tim, you’re absolutely right and you don’t need to live in a foreign country to feel “the drift”. Moving out of the area or having children seems sufficient to reduce contact with your friends tenfold. It’s this feeling that made me start blogging and I suspect it’s the same with you.

When we met up at the pub I felt exactly as you described. Half the people there I hadn’t seen in 2007 but the instant rapport left me feeling almost elated. Or perhaps that was all the beer I was drinking. Anyway… whatever… good times!

I can’t believe it’s been four years since your wedding! In a blog-worthy tribute (and to follow up my previous post about photo sharing) I bring you a dozen photos of the day in question. Congratulations!

Thanks to the inestimable Mr Estall I got to see a preview of Danny Boyle’s new film Sunshine last night. Better still, before the screening there was an interview with the man himself. Danny Boyle, that is, not Mr Estall. It was a good interview and he took a wide range of questions from the audience. I thought he was very open, unpretentious — especially around practicalities such as marketing a film — funny and not a little self-deprecating. He hung around after the interview to talk to some of the folks in the audience and he even stayed when the film started to roll.

And the film? Well, in genre terms it’s a sci-fi thriller/actioner. It’s definitely towards the “harder” end of sci-fi, think 2001 or Alien. It’s got the confined feel of those films too and from the interview I picked up that this was a concious choice. In places I was worried that it was going to veer towards the mindless chase-me-chase-me-blood-and-gore of something like Event Horizon but thankfully these elements of the film are kept in proportion. It was only as we discussed the film afterwards that Mr Estall and I began to appreciate how clever and different the writing really is; some of this can easily pass you buy as you are pulled along by the compelling story. The visuals are a treat and there are some striking stylistic choices made that raises this film above the norm. If you decide to see this intelligent action flick I’d recommend finding the biggest screen you can.

On the principle that it’s who you know not what you know, I’ve decided to get all connected up with people on LinkedIn. If you know me, work in IT and are already signed up at the aforementioned site, you can expect a nagging invitation from yours truly. Some of you non-signed-up people might get unlucky too.