Notebookscribbles

Boy my irritations levels are pretty high right now.

I travelled a lot when I was younger. Not the two week backpacking kind of travelling but actually going to live and work in a place for months. It was fun and interesting and in the 80's/90's recessions it really needed to be done. This was well before everybody had a mobile phone. Written letters were the norm and if you missed somebody moving and they missed you with change of addresses, well you were pretty much lost forever. It was only towards the end that people started to get Hotmail accounts and mobile phones. But that was pretty rare. Then I didn't log into my Hotmail account for almost a year (I was in Maine and there weren't exactly internet cafes then, and can't remember where I travelled to after but it was almost a year) and they automatically closed my account. No chance to recover. No chance to download data so all the contacts in there were gone. I remember being livid. I couldn't reopen the account either. Painful times.

Anyway friends I made in those early years are scattered to the winds. I found two of them through FB, which is great. I also found one of my old address books in a box the other day, pages and pages of names and addresses. Good memories. Sort of sad that they are lost now though.

What's my point? Well I look at FB now with a fenced off number of friends and family and despair. It's pretty much posting what was had for dinner, baby pictures or stories (see previous post) and what they think are funny GIF's. It's times like this I miss the likes of ICQ and newsgroups. You used to be able to find some great channels to dive into and have interesting or mad conversations. I haven't been able to do that recently. I must get off the ground with my Reddit account as some /r remind me of those times.

Being in Dublin right now is a similar situation. If you weren't born and raised here (or in Ireland, and I wasn't) it can be a difficult place to fit in. The Irish Tourist Board was an awesome force. But truth be told the place has a strong whiff of begruding-ness and cliques. I blame a lot of that on the Celtic Tiger years as well. It's gone from a friendly ambivalence to 'What have you got and how can I get more'.

i'm a bit bored.

Work is also having a similar effect on me. I'm dialling it in lately as there isn't exactly the job satisfaction there. Too much work and not enough gratitude. We have a ridiculous number of teams working on certain significant things. We were getting a lot of questions from people (even though not responsible) so I looked to pull a lot of information together. Took about two weeks (why we haven't got somebody already doing this centrally I have no idea). Pulled the deck together, sent it to a couple of people to add information and then saw it come back to me from another route with other peoples names on the title slide.

Oh that's the one and only thing that really pushes my button. Working from home also means you never get any of that “Water Cooler” goodness to let off steam either.

So I'm generally irritated, bored and a little bit frustrated. When that happens I tend to start living in my head. What I mean by that is just thinking through ideas, thoughts etc. Not huge ones. But ones I'd love to be able to have a conversation about – but there's nobody to have a conversation with right now. So I think it through myself. It's probably very frustrating for the likes of MBH, and very anti-social, but I know I would just become incredibly grumpy otherwise. I've had practice – a lot of travelling like I said and arriving in new places alone and knowing nobody – you have to be comfortable with yourself and your thoughts.

Anyway, some of those things in no particular order:

• I've started learning web applications again. I have an idea for something. It's something I've looked for and I can't find. I had a quick conversation with MBH about it at the weekend and it's actually something she would use as well (a good sign). So I'm going to build it. Two things I'm thinking about – open source it or host it and see if I can sell accounts. Why not?
• Swimming – it's not something I totally enjoy. I come from a time when Swimming lessons at School were not exactly Health and Safety consciouss. You got screamed at to jump in and don't drown. The actual sink or swim methodology! So that sort of turned me away from it. But it is something I'd like to get into. I went to buy a new wetsuit the other week and the guy told me to hop into their pool. One of those things that keep you in the centre with a flow of water. Entirely not expecting to do that but the twenty minutes in there with him telling me how I'm doing it wrong – entirely – made me wonder about getting lessons on technique. MBH knows somebody that has just qualified as an instructor and is trying to get clients. May really have to look into that.
• Writing. Still comes in spurts. And it's generally not great. Nanowrimo was a disaster for me last time. But I bought a book the other day '642 Things to Write About'. It actually looks a really good way to just keep writing. I also bought a book 'Coffee Break Screenwriter', it doesn't mean I want to get into movies but it leads onto the next thing.
• Making movies. Photography I've toyed with. But being honest with myself I'm more than happy with just shooting away with the iPhone and uploading to Instagram. They're interesting enough for me. But I really would like to get into making interesting films and putting on Vimeo. Nothing epic, just interesting. I'm going to try and start with the iPhone and if the bug bites then get rid of the D40 and upgrade to a 550D
• Bike – I need to get out of the house more. Long days working from home can be a killer. We were running a lot but I took an injury and then MBH did so there's been a pause on that. I want to get a new bike though and am researching whether I need a road bike or a touring bike. I remember when I used to know a shit tonne about Bikes … damn memory and losing touch

And that's it – for now.