tautological casuistry guaranteed

So, I'm angry again... which means there's probably gonna be a serious of grumblings on here.

The first one concerns a book. Nothing new there. And never has such a short sentence been so true.

In what is being described by the media as a radical departure from literary tradition, Caroline Smailes has written a book with a few different endings.
The hype around this fantastic "new" style of novel is such to the extent it even warranted an interview on the today programme.

Now, I freely admit that I may have been blessed with a better memory than most, but I can't be the only one thinking "What The Fuck?" here... As George Santayana said, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and being a child of the 80s I had a grew up with no internet. There was only 4 tv channels & maybe 10 radio stations to entertain me...

...well, that and books of course. So forgive me if I come across like some kind of literary snob, showing off the vast number of tomes I've consumed in my short time on this lump of rock, but I'd be amazed, if like me you're not wondering how it is that the works of Steve Livingstone & Ian Jackson have faded so quickly into the mists of the past.

I cam't be the only person who remembers the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books.
Seriously, there's more than 180 of them!

HOW THE FUCK CAN THIS BE DESCRIBED AS ANYTHING NEW?!

so, there's less than a week to go before we must vacate invincible towers and it's dawning on me that i sure am going to miss living here in this flat...

i mean where else can one see such sites on a monday afternoon as this madness?




at first, just having got back from some exam fun at university, i thought i was imagining this crazy chap outside the shop...
i was convinced that the pressure of eviction, approaching finals & financial worries had finally pushed me too far!
i was worrying that part of my mind had snapped and i'd started hallucinating...
in fact, not having had much sleep over the weekend, i was fairly certain that i'd finally lost the plot.

thankfully, this wasn't the case. it turns out my sanity's not deserted me quite yet ;)

when i left the shop the sink wielding weirdo was but a wee bit further up the road, no doubt explaining to the chap in front of him that he wanted to make sure he'd packed everything and that was why he was carrying his kitchen sink.




for all its faults, hackney really does have a different class of nutter... it'll be a shame to leave the borough, but hopefully wherever it is that i end up will be better, both in terms of entertainment provided by the local mentalists & my own personal living conditions.

Awkward moment in the life of a deer.

My co-worker likes to hunt and has a motion activated wildlife camera he puts out in the woods to see what wildlife are in an area. The results are apparently special needs deer.

we had what i presume was a fire drill at uni yesterday... the first we knew of it was our lecture being interrupted by someone informing us of the evacuation! most of the alarms in the main tower block did not work: i counted two¹ audible bells on the 7 floors we descended!

were it not a drill we'd probably have sat there obliviously continuing with the lecture until we burnt to death!

but wait, it gets better, neither the security barriers nor the revolving doors² [fitted at great expense to the uni] in the main entrance were opened! the resultant bottle neck in the lobby of students and staff took around 15 minutes to clear.

i really aught to have learnt to expect this sort of disorganised incompetence from them by now, but somehow it still came as a shock.

1: there are, iirc, 3 bells per floor

2: fancy ones where the fixed screens can swivel, opening the doors up so that people can exit quickly

america: bigger, brasher and unrepentantly over the top... and things don't get much more ostentatious than our yanky brethren celebrating the baby jesus's birthday.

but dammit, you're just not doing it right! unless, like carson willams, you've gone to the extent of setting up your own radio station so that people can dial in as they drive by and freak out at the horror marvel at the wonder that is your festively synchronised light & sound show.

you don't need sound to gawp at the lunacy that is carson's christmas lights, but the man did set up his own fucking fm radio transmitter so as to avoid barraging his poor neighbours with non-stop music as well as grand mal inducing light pollution!



oh well, it's all fun and games until there's an accident and the emergency services can't respond due to the tailbacks caused by crazed holiday makers taking a road trip to see what $10,000 worth of christmas lights looks like.

i've been angry before, sometimes i could even have been described as being very angry...

tonight, however, i am livid; incandescent with rage! furious is not a strong enough word. pissed off doesn't come close to describing the searing wroth pumping coursing through my veins!

in fact, the effort required not to destroy this keyboard in the process of writing this entry is display of will power i wasn't aware i was capable of.

my piece of shit university have given me two coursework assignments for the cisco element of the degree. one is tantalisingly close to containing sufficient information for me to be able to actually do the fucking work.

i say tantalisingly close, what i actually mean is it contains everything i need except the vital information : network addresses, number of subnets, routing protocols & dce/dte information.

the other one contains this line of text "This is a Cisco based module. The course works are available on-line and set externally."

which is not only the vaguest communication i've received from the university of hip hop, it's also fallacious to the point of the ridiculous: There is nothing on the cisco site, the lecturer's page for the module has a pdf named "Coursework," which i'm guessing actually has the information i need, except it's fucking encrypted. and we've not been told the bastard's password, so it serves only to enrage me more. it might as well not be there if we, the students, can't fucking access it!!


how the fuck am i supposed to submit coursework if i don't know what it is i'm supposed to be doing?!!

jesus fucking christ!