boreders

Last night I got caught in the sort of traffic jam that you never want to see at the end of the day. The sort of jam where you’re moving so infrequently you could safely go for a short walk without worrying about interfering with the flow of traffic. So, as I had reached a point yards from a sliproad, I decided to take my chances with a back road tour of north Cheshire. I came off the motorway, headed towards Warrington and aiming for Lymm, knowing that this would get me going in the right direction for home without all the hassle of not actually moving.

Heading into the outskirts of Warrington I reached a junction where a right turn would take me off to Lymm, as I wanted. The raod might have been wide enough for two lanes of traffic if not for the fact that the drivers heading straight and left weren’t especially tight to the kerb and on the right, several people had parked half off the road. So, I made a minor course adjustment towards the right, remaining on my side of the road, and waited for the light to go green.

At this moment, coming from the direction of Lymm, arrives an articulated lorry wanting to head towards the motorway - the way I had just come. He made the turn and got as far as me - and then starts swearing. This guy was easily in his 40s+ - and yet I was suddenly confronted by a blathering psychopath who might as well have been a drunken teenager in overtly combatitive mood. He nudged forward and I tried to pull a little into the left again and he finally got the space to squeeze his cab into the gap. Apparently I was a f*cking idiot or something, what with my being on my own side of the road trying to turn left and he trying to drive an enormous lorry up a minor road in heavy traffic and with parked cars forcing him to come over from his side of the road to mine. Oh yes, that was my fault.

Do haulage companies specifically look to employ people with a hair-trigger temper and attitudes akin to football hooligans? I had no issue with my own conduct, because I wasn’t doing anything wrong - but to have already contended with heavy traffic and a delay that meant I was going to miss an appointment, I didn’t need abuse. I hope that the lorry driver was headed to the motorway and I hope he got stuck in the jam or the one that formed on the opposite carriageway filled with rubbernecking nosy-beggars.

I watched part of the documentary on the Bulgarian care home in Mogilino. I was shocked. I could hardly bring myself to look at the screen, watching children - malnourished and wretched - rocking silently.

The scene of small boys left to sit on potties all day, because it’s easier that way. A boy, blind since birth, who knows it’s safer to stand still when not guided to avoid injury, leaving him to stand like a pathetic and dejected statue in the middle of the room. Like caged animals, these children are without hope. At meal times, the attendants feed them robotically, hardly pausing between spoons to allow the children to swallow. A boy, deaf from birth, has degraded in care to a state of obsessive/compulsive near catatonia, writing out names in coloured pens - the same names, the same colours, day in, day out.

Television rarely moves me to tears, but I simply couldn’t help it here - to see children treated like animals. I feel frustrated that I live in a different world with plenty of food, water and stimulus - and these children are not so far away across the other side of Europe.

I wish the world of entertainment and legality didn’t make teasers and sneak previews so hard to watch most of the time. I’m excited about Battlestar and the prequel movie Razor, so when I noticed a sneak peek at the pre-Razor story about Adama, I clicked on through for a look. I sat through trash advertising to get the message that I couldn’t access the content in the teaser in my country… Damn. So, I trundle over to You-Tube instead and watch it there instead… No less entertaining to watch, completely lacking in stupid adverts and, no doubt, entirely against some legal code somewhere. However, I got to see it in the end - and reasonable well worth it it was too…

Adama, in the midst of the First Cylon War, engages the enemy over an ice planet with no apparent value to the toaster-headed menace. What are they up to and why defend it so hard? I’m sure any fan can take a wild guess… I thoroughly recommend skipping Part 1 and probably Part 2… Part 3 starts the really good material in a pitched battle over the ice planet - and Part 4 definitely offers the best fan material, as Adama gets to battle a classic Cylon Warrior in some fancy hand-to-hand combat!

Bolstered into some kind of extra writing effort, I have now updated the software and theme of my PARANOIA blog, Omega Complex. It looks rather neat, if I must say so myself.

I’m especially impressed by the excellent Dynamic Text Replacement script used to give the site all those fancy titles. The script takes basic header tags and turns them into .PNG graphics at the drop of a hat, based on whatever font you choose. An elegant piece of scripting - much appreciated by this blogger.

I had really good intentions to take part in the National Novel Writing Month this November… but it’s now 6th, and that means I’m already way behind. The goal of the event is for each participant to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days (the length of November, see). You have to start from scratch, write an awful lot, and get it done before the end of the month. The NaNoWriMo event has its own website and support from tons of other wouldbe writers - and started way back in 1999. From a little over a hundred participants 8 years ago, last year about 100,000 people got involved - and most of them didn’t hit the target (only about 1 in 5 manage the full 50K).

I would like to imagine, if I really put my mind to it, that I could come up with something that fits the brief. I’m not claiming by any measure that it would be any good… but, 50,000 words of slogging wouldn’t be out of the question. I recently wrote 10,000 words of gaming material based on the 14th Century Avignon Papacy and associated Schism. I have written close to 50,000 before putting ‘The Underplex‘ together, although that one definitely took longer to a month and left me dead to the world for about 6 months, haunted by the process and the grammar. I suffered terrible writers block during that 6 months and since the beginning of this year have I really tried to get back into the swing of regular writing. I maintain so many blogs precisely for the reason that I hope it will urge me into creativity on a regular basis on whatever subject happens to come to hand.

So, can I find my groove and get into the NaNoWriMo mindset before it’s too late? Given a full month, you need to write 1,666 words a day (with a little change)… Assuming I start right now, I have to clock in 2,000 words a day instead. I feel a sinking feeling already…

This article picks up on an issue I have noted before - the trademarking of colours. It would seem T-Mobile has claimed magenta, within the confines of the tele-communication industry, while my previous bugbear on this relates to the Post Office’s trademark of an admittedly very specific shade of the colour red (presumably within whatever arenas they seek to trade, which would likely to be far more widespread than T-Mobile).

While I appreciate the concepts of brand and identity in establishing a company and its presence in the marketplace, this sort of thing just seems like a minefield. How can you know that you’re not going to get royally screwed by some enormous company and their vicious lawyers without spending weeks in intensive research…

Given T-Mobile already took measures against a German On-Demand book publisher for their use of magenta in an advert (which included other - currently - safe colour variations), how seriously do we need to consider this kind of thing in future? Is it safe to go out of the house anymore without double-checking your wardrobe with your lawyer? (Yes, well, obviously it is… unless you’re into some kind of street advertising and another street advertiser has a trademark on the colour of your favourite sweater).

I’m struck by a dichotomy of purpose in the mornings… and I really have to get it sorted. On the one hand, I like to get up in the morning, have breakfast, drink some coffee, check messages - that sort of thing. Well, I actually don’t like the getting up part much, especially as my first alarm goes off at 5.55am. And the second goes off at 6.10am. I get up eventually, but that depends entirely on the mood of me - my body will either like the idea of an early start or it won’t. Anyway, I like to have the time to wake up basically - which is why I spend time doing things like feeding the cats, checking the hamster and making sure the last bits of the washing.

On the other hand, I need to set out for work at 7.30am to get there for 8.30am in good time. It should take me 45 - 50 minutes to commute on a good day, with fair traffic and a prevailing wind from the north-west. The last first and the last few miles are the worst. I get the pleasure of sitting in car park style traffic for a good ten or fifteen minutes at one end or the other. It makes me want to go back to bed, snuggle up in the blankets and go back to sleep again. Maybe that’s the problem - the prospect of what I have to do makes it harder for me to get up and do it, making me late and complicating the journey further.

What am I to do?

…especially when I read that the body has a bunch of clocks that don’t necessarily all reset themselves at the same time when we jump forward or fall back an hour. Could be down to my adrenal gland releasing my dose of stress hormone cortisol too late in the morning…

Now that I have taken the leap into the 21st Century, I have the chance to flood my page with content from other sites as well as my own. So, not only do you have the chance to read my drivel here, you can read it from my other blogs - like Renegade Time Lord - and see the sort of things that keep me entertained - like Digg and Penny Arcade. I think you should appreciate that sort of generosity, especially considering you didn’t even ask for it.

I visited Waitrose today. What a fascinating store. Of all the stores I can easily visit, Waitrose ranks amongst the higher class supermarket brands. I mean, any place that stocks quote so many Duchy Original products has to be catering towards a different class of customer. My wife positively groaned at the prospect of my spending so much above the odds for some of their lemon curd… Even though it’s just another supermarket, the place just seems to ooze class, from the engaging product packaging to the crisply attired staff with polite and gracious personalities. Marvelous.

I have taken more than four-and-a-half years to make this decision, but in the end I had to… I have a few blogs to juggle here and the old format made it difficult to handle. Now I can see what I’m not posting all over the place - and keep this journal up to date a little more simply. It might take a moment or two to shift some of the old material over here; I can’t possibly leave Metal Mickey and James Bond Jnr alone in the dark to fend for themselves. You’ll just have to hang on a moment…