grahambinns.com

"Aha!" I hear you all cry, "An update at last!"

Well, yes. And yes, I'm going to stick my usual excuse in, which is "Busy, very busy." Also, I've developed a stinker of a head cold, which has left my sinuses filled with something not unakin to that white, fish-smelling glue that they give you to use in Primary school; the stuff that boys have endless fun making fake skin with in order to peel it off in front of some unsuspecting compatriot, usually female, always squeamish, just for fun. I'm in the happy position of having a new, full-time, salaried job. And as my day jobs all seem to go, this one has gone down the route of being hellishly busy. A deadline is looming at the end of the week and I'm having to work quite a lot of overtime to get the thing done, so once again there isn't much time for writing or editing. But that doesn't mean I'm not doing any.

I've edited the embarassingly explicit story and I'm quite happy with it. I'm probably going to give it another pass and maybe put some stuff in that I think is missing. I realised, thinking about it last night whilst trying to sleep, that although I know what's special about the main character, I've made a point of not saying it specifically in the story, wanting to let the story let the reader know in its own time. Unfortunately, I've found myself wondering if it's not a little too vague; there's a chance, I think, that people might come to completely the wrong conclusion and, if they do, that means they're not going to get the point of the story which largely... well, misses the point.

Yesterday, in a mini-splurge in Borders, I bought myself the Writer's Block (along with a couple of Python books, because writer I may be but geek I've always been; Python is my new favourite language), which I've wanted ever since I first saw it. My plan, once I've got some time, is to try and do a little work triggered by it each day, as a way of keeping my hand in the writing game and to keep my mind active. I might even post some of the stuff here for the sake of keeping you all amused when I haven't got anything better to say.

Of course, all this working and not writing (and, by extension, not posting) means that I've missed several key events during the last few days. England lost the ODI series to Sri Lanka, which I'd expected, and on the same day lost one of their greatest ever fast bowlers, Fiery Fred Trueman. Oh, and t'other England dropped out of the World Cup, though I couldn't really give two stuffs about that.

Lessee, what else did I want to comment on at the time? The anniversary of the London bombings is coming up; I'm waiting to see whether the new workplace will be any more affected than the old by it (I didn't write about it at the time because I was working there, but the Mob staff seemed disturbingly uncaring about the whole thing). If not I'll probably go into the town centre to observe the silence; it would mean more that way, somehow.

I spent this evening working with one eye on RealPlayer, which was showing NASA TV. I watched last year's launch of STS-114 and it sent chills up my spine. STS-121 was no different; I had goosebumps in places I didn't know geese could bump as Discovery roared into the sky. I'm going to have to go to the Cape some day, just to see a launch for myself (though they'll probably have retired the shuttles by the time I get there; maybe I'll go when they launch the next moonshot (pause for irony...). Oh, and PayPal cancelled my LibSyn subscription without asking me, so I'll have to set it up again if I decide to carry on podcasting. Thanks for that, PayPal people.

Anyroad. Back to work. As Fred would have said, I'll sithee.

I know this will bother most of you not one wit, but Stanley are back in the league.

And I feel strangely proud of that.

Scotland did beat Les bleus, and I was too busy watching that to do anything less important, okay? You know that that's a valid exuse really, don't you?

Ahem.

But, and I have to say that this wasn't the best highlight of the match for me, though it came damn close, I was delighted to see that the Scottish kicking-tee carrier hasn't been relegated to the scrapheap as had been rumoured. No, the Grouse is still running (radio controlled and on wheels, of course) for his native land. And I want one (if anyone at IWOOT is listening here I'd be happy to discuss design principles). Just for memorabilia purposes, you understand¹.

But to work now. Really to work. Oh, and you can now subscribe to this blog by email. Just put your email address in the form in the sidebar and off you go. Next job: fix all the bloody XHTML errors that are cropping up (though I think that some of those are because the templates are identifying themselves as being XHTML 1.1 compliant, which they aren't).

¹. I've been trying to find a picture of the little guy, but there doesn't seem to be one anywhere. Basically it's a radio-controlled cart with a ceramic white rugby ball on top of it, atop which is a model of The Famous Grouse. It's cool, if you like that sort of thing. You do find some odd porn links if you search for it on Google, though.