domdavis.com

Why is it everyone thinks I’m going to be bored in a couple of days? At the moment I don’t even have time to be bored. My mornings are taken up with lie ins, gym, tai chi, shopping, cooking, tidying, etc., and my afternoons should be filled with doing loads of little projects I want to do but are usually filled with seeing friends.

Take today for instance: Got up earlier than I would have liked (thanks mainly to the postman ringing my doorbell at 8:30), have been to the gym, been shopping, cooked a lovely lunch (curried, minced Clarrissa. Overdid it in the chillies just a tad but not too much), done some washing and now I’m sitting down for half an hour before doing a bit of tai chi, having a shower, heading to a friends house and having dinner there.

Yesterday and the day before I had to charge into London which I usually combine with hooking up with friends for lunch or coffee which takes up a good few hours of my day. I’ve got Cromer Zoo to go visit and photograph, friends to catch up with, clubs to go to (since Sedition closed my local club is now Rios in Leeds which is a fair trek), about 6 months worth of Java programming stuff to learn, certifications to get, photographs to catalogue, photographs to post, photographs to scan, at least one photo book to produce, a flat to paint, several programs to write, about 8 hours of Lost and Heroes to watch on my Sky+ box and 11 years worth of missed sleep to catch up on. I have less time now that I had when I worked

I can’t see me getting bored for a loooong time

You all seem convinced I should get a job outside of the city too. Na ah. The city pays WAY too much for me to go do anything else. Besides, if I was stuck in some run of the mill programming job earning what I would usually consider to be a tax bill I’d be bored senseless within 2 months. My mum once asked me a few years ago when we were having trouble getting something to work “Why don’t you buy a book on the subject?”. I couldn’t. There were no books on the subject and if anyone was going to write one I’d be the most qualified person to do so. There is something fun about being given a ridiculously vague spec and a hideously short time frame and at the end of it still producing something the business are happy with. I need to be challenged, and I also need to be rewarded for that challenge… but not for a few months

Right, question has been raised: Why don’t I have a flickr account? Well, I do… did… whatever Anyway, it’s been recreated and is basically just the same photos I have over at Somewhere Random.

• Linky to the pictures
• Linky to my profile

Enjoy

OK, so given notice, hot chocolate with old team mates, toddle over to Canary Wharf, hot chocolate with friend there (more about that in a mo), get home, fancy celebrating my lack of a job (but continued employment) so eschewed the gym and went for a pizza hut with a friend instead. Will go tomorrow morning (or afternoon if the postman is late again). In the mean time I’ll probably just snack on a stick of lard sprinkled with pure sugar. After all, we don’t want me getting all stupidly thin again do we?

Anyway, Canary Wharf. Stood there in full cliché*, Jas comes out, laughs at me and says “You didn’t go to see HR dressed like that did you?”. Yes, yes I did Black vans, black combats, t-shirt (’Keep out of direct sunlight’, was going to be ‘404 not found’ but I appear to have spilled half my breakfast down that so I had to change), full length leather coat, shades (think Matrix with long hair and you wont be too far wrong). After all this wasn’t an interview, it was just them formally telling me that in a few weeks time they want me to go away and here’s lots of money to do so quietly. I made an effort too, I put on a non threatening t-shirt and I didn’t turn up with one or more katana slung over my back Anyway, after about 10 seconds it was obvious to her I wasn’t going to be one of the disgruntled ones (why is it that people think that these huge organisations care about them as individuals? You’re a number, get over it) and despite the scary outfit all I really cared about was “how long do I get paid for? When is my last pay date? When do I get the money? How much is the money? Is there anything that will cause my to forfeit the money?”. You’ll spot a general theme there, but at the end of the day it’s why we get out of bed in the first place (don’t give me that crap about money doesn’t motivate you, given the choice of your job, or your job for an extra £20,000 a year I know which one you’d choose ).

* The first time I wore the full length leather coat Jason turned round and said “Did you just walk into a shop and order a cliché?”. The answer is, of course, no - it took several shops to put the whole clichéd ensemble together, but since then I’ve always referred to the coat as my cliché and doing the full black look with coat as full cliché. My last leather jackets was called ‘The Cow’. It finally got rid of it a couple of years ago as it was 10 years old and really didn’t fit me any more. It’s important to name leather jackets (we’re not talking fashion jackets here either).

So I’ve officially had notice served. Due to the length of time I’ve worked there my notice period is longer than I thought it was so I’m effectively getting another 8 weeks paid holiday instead of the 4 or so I was expecting. Given the two weeks I’ve just had we can, all in all, say that we are a most happy bunny. If I need to I can bring the termination date forward but, unless I get a very good offer from somewhere else, I don’t think I’ll be taking them up on that offer

And, no, no amount of jealousy or hatred is going to penetrate my shield of smugness. To the majority of you all I can say is: Ha! You’re at work

God I love my life sometimes

One of the great things about being a layabout is I finally have time to do all those bitty little things that I’d never got round to doing, like setting my scanner up. I’ve been meaning to scan this images for years. It’s from about 12/13 years ago. I was poor. Very poor. My priorities were: Fags, Going Out, Food, Rent - and I didn’t even have enough money to cover the first item. You’ll notice I’m smoking Silk Cut there, in those days I smoked Royals which means that’s a packet my friend Matt gave me. I weighed about 7.5 stone, my hair stopped growing, my fingernails stopped growing and even now I still have a mentality whereby if there is food there I’ll eat it as I never know when the next meal is going to come from… except now I can actually afford food and all the stuffing of my face is causing an ever expanding waistline that the gym only just manages to counter. It’s no surprise that when I got a job in London I put on 6 stone in 6 months (a mixed grill for lunch every day will do that to you ). Despite it being the most impoverished time of my life I had an absolute whale of a time and a couple of the best years of my life. Oh, and in case you were wondering, that jumper got thrown out as it no longer fits me, despite being way to big for me in the picture!

It would appear that Google is having one or two issues with it’s reader (the thing I use to bring the blogging world to me) which is making my morning catchup rather difficult. I’m wondering if today is actually a Monday masquerading as Wednesday. It’s been a while since I’ve had a Monday. Anyway, to the good folks at Google: Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! FIX IT! FIX IT!

Today is going to be bitty and annoying. I’ve got to go all the way into London for a meeting with HR to get through the formal “we’re serving notice” thing which will last all of 15 minutes which, for a 2 and a half hour round trip, just seems a tad pointless. On the plus side I’ll be catching up with some friends for coffee (or in my case hot chocolate) which should push the stay in London into something more worthy of the trip. At some point I should really go to the gym too (especially given I’ll be having at least two hot chocolates today ) and a trip to the supermarket may well be in order as I’m out of milk and I really need to replace the flowers in the living room which are not even on their last legs any more. Hopefully tomorrow will be slightly more productive

So the photo’s I put up earlier today were emailed to me be a friend from the pub. Her email address reminded me of a song by Ash which reminded me of someone I hadn’t seen for an awfully long time and had lost contact with. Two hours later and I had a Facebook message from that person as they’d just managed to track me down. Got to love it when life works like that

Got some more pictures of the Night Of Glowsticks emailed to me, so for your viewing delight:

One of the things that really used to drive me nuts was the people who would go on about how they used to smoke and just decided that one day they wouldn’t any more. For those of you who do/have smoked you’ll know that feeling of intense hatred and jealousy as you think back on the may failed attempts to give up, remember how bad it was and continue with your vow of giving up giving up. Annoyingly enough I am now one of those people.

A little over two years ago my then girlfriends sister gave me Alan Carr’s ‘The Easy Way to Quit Smoking’. In this volume he tells you there are two things you need to do to quit:

1. Stop smoking
2. Be happy about it

Point one seems a little obvious. Point two isn’t explained in any great detail, or it is, but attaining this wonderful state of nirvana isn’t. Still, he’d got my interest so I bought ‘The Only Way to Stop Smoking’. Bigger book, more detail, hideously badly written. So bad in fact that I still maintain I stopped smoking on the understanding that he stop pontificating at me, but stop I did. Two years ago today I walked out from a hospital appointment [unrelated], sparked up took a couple of drags and thought ‘what the hell am I doing?’. I gave away the rest of my cigarettes, my lighters, my zippo (and I think that was key) spent 3 days being a miserable sod, 2 weeks feeling crappy [yes, I know he says it can be done without withdrawal symptoms, but I still think he's talking out of his butt there] and never really looked back. I still have the odd craving, but no worse than ‘ooh, I fancy a curry’ type ones and they quickly go. What I do know is that if I ever try smoking again I’ll probably be back on 20 a day within about… oooh… 0.5ms of the first drag so I’ll never consider myself a non smoker, more a relapsed one Still, I never actually intended to quit and was reading the books more out of interest than anything else (I was extremely skeptical of his claims) so the fact I did proves that something he said stuck. I’d heartily recommend the books to anyone who smokes. Worst case you’re down the cost of 3 packets of fags, you have to read some naff books and you get to whinge here about it. Best case you can annoy the crap out of your smoker friends once you stop too