To do list

Unlike 90% of the rest of the world I return to work on 7 January. My beloved does not and today has nose firmly pressed to grindstone. This has precipitated the dreaded To Do List.

I am not the most reliable person on earth so a to do list outside of work is more of a vague indication of possible activity rather than a strict list of tasks to be accomplished. My other half is not so lackadaisical and the stern looks and telling off I will most likely receive in the almost inevitable event of my failing to complete everything on it will be unpleasant in the extreme. There's no point begging for mercy, she'll be at work all day and I'll be at home watching the tennis and guzzling sausages.

It's not that the list is particularly onerous - it has only 10 items - the problem is that I've not been at work since Christmas Eve and the majority of tasks to be completed in that time have been the same:

1. Drive somewhere
2. Eat something
3. Drink something
4. Sleep

How am I to deal with 10 tasks that are all different and have sub-tasks that require actual thought? Plus the fact that one of these tasks is 'Ironing', that isn't a task, it's a sentance (and no time off for good behaviour either)!

Bored

I think I may have reached my boredom threshold. Having battled with my commitment and motivation level at work I am actually having to make the admission to myself that I am really very bored indeed.

Not the 'not busy' kind of bored but the kind of bored where you look at your life and think 'what the hell am I doing?' For example I woke up at 5:30am today , worried about the amount I have to do today and it's all easily acheivable but I just don't want to do it, not a moment of it. Things have been this way for some time and it is something I need to address.

I am now looking at ways to improve this in my current role before I start looking for anything else or changing direction. If you aren't going to try you shouldn't have got in to it in the first pace. I am going to start using some of the elements from a strategy meeting last week and some of my own thoughts on methods I might use to sort myself out.

I'm going to start looking at new products and where we might sell them and to whom. I'm going to be looking at how I can improve the general dynamism of the company and what we do about the way we spend money on chasing things that look good but we can't do. I've also got to try and get away from one of our projects as it is quite clearly a dog with fleas, big fleas (unfortunately it is also the MD's pet).

As with any sort of consulting/change program this needs to be done with a positive aspect on anything negative and I am going to have to take a little time to find from whence can be derived. Organisations move in the directions they ask questions about so I need to start asking the questions. People tend to move in the direction of their interests and skills, so I'd better make 'em interesting questions...

...more later, just what's on my mind this morning.

Today's word is 'Dusty'

Oh, it's empty. Must be bedtime

'Dusty' is Australian for hung over. I'm so dusty that people are scrawling 'clean me' in the dust on my back. I'm so dusty when I brush past people in the office they start sneezing. Quite, quite dusty.

Yep, definitely empty

We went to the Feastibility food & wine festival yesterday at a performing arts school in Newtown and I indulged in too much of one and not enough of the other.

Besides my self-inflicted woes I am also battling the kind of apathy that, if it gets any worse, may prevent me from breathing. I think I might need a holiday, a good thing I am going to Tasmania for a few days later this week.

I have also been trying to get various technical things on here working so that I can post things on here whilst away and put maps on the main page. It isn't working and it's annoying me, a LOT. I have put most of the time I would normally spend writing on trying to fix bugs so I'm apologies if people have been checking to see what I've been doing. I have been cursing at the computer. I have figured out how to post here one way but the other ended up here, which is no use to anyone. It's going to take the nice people at blogger a while to sort it out so I shall begin ranting writing again instead.

Still unemployed

I didn't get the job I interviewed for on Monday...

...and to begin with I was disappointed but life goes on. I did well to get an interview for it at all to be honest. I was stupidly nervous and I'm not sure I gave the best account of myself, but it's difficult to perform when your mouth is so dry that your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth.

I now have a lot of people to contact and lots more searching to do. I have also restored the post below which took a quick break whilst gainful employment was a possibility.

And now some pictures!!


A cockatoo, these things are everywhere. They screech extremely loudly and strut around like they own the place, a bit like me after the third cup of coffee.


A wallaby. They all give you this look.




Big lizards are very cool and also strut around like they own the place. To be fair, having seen them fight each other, I'm not going to argue.


Sydney harbour bridge at night.




New years eve fireworks from Taronga Zoo.


The view from our front window. It's a tough life innit?!

The C word

Okay there's a month to go you are now allowed to use the 'C' word. No not that one, Christmas!

The Christmas trees have magically appeared in the AMP building and are tastefully decked out company livery. Navy blue baubles, lovely. I have to admit I am having trouble taking Christmas seriously over here. Decorations seem a little silly when it 's warm outside. Being colonised from the Northern Hemisphere there is still a British feel to the decorations; there's things like plastic holly included in them which looks badly out of place, not to mention the occasional snowflake motif which is so ridiculous you actually do a double take when you walk past it.

There are definite advantages to being in Sydney for Christmas: the food, the weather, the food, then there's the weather to think of. Christmas dinner this year will be taken on the balcony overlooking the beach (or actually on the beach). Prepare for a jealousy inducing photo-fest.

My commiserations to the American in Lynn, Masachusetts that found the Christmas post. Clearly preparing for big Thanksgiving weekend they were trying to find out how long you have to cook a 24lb stuffed turkey, to which there is only one answer: you need to have started already!

I suppose I'd better do some work. Boring.

Various bits

Because I've been fiddling about on the internet instead of doing my job I have some links to post.

First and foremost there are certain things I'm holding off from doing on here, including posting bizarre links I've found and more fiction writing, because blogger doesn't have a category system to allow you to filter what you read, and to manually code one is a right pain in the arse even with the help of "bookmarklets". So I am encouraging anyone and everyone to ask for this feature by voting for it. I'm sure Blogger, Google and Technorati are cooking something up but I'm getting pissed off with not having it.

Secondly I have discovered Google reader. This is a newsreader type thing that collates newsfeed from compatible websites to a single service. Confused? Then I wouldn't bother if I were you as it requires a little bit of technical savvy and a bit of winging it without istructions (Dad, GoatSan and BulaBulaPesci I am talking to you - did you know you had a newsfeed from your blog? You have). To be fair this is nothing to be worried about as it has taken me quite some time to figure out what the atom feed was for and even when I found out I was doubtful how useful it would be.

A good new Blogger feature is backlinks which ties in to Google's new blogsearch function. Backlinks is an active feature that each time you access a blog runs a search to see if anyone has linked to your posts. Naturally no one does. Due to some tricky display problems I'm having with JavaScript, CSS and blogger being a temperamental I am only putting this on the item page at the moment (the page solely for each post itself - click on the title of the post to see what I mean).

Other blogger features I'm looking at installing are their native comments as this allows me to format comments as I choose and display them under the post they relate to in collapsible sections and to show people who has commented underneath the post before they open the comments, which is much neater in my opinion. Unfortunately they are going to have to convince me that they have solved their huge comment spam problem before I do.

According to Modern Drunkard Magazine we should be boycotting Jack Daniels because they have dropped the alchohol content without telling anyone. I was way ahead of them but I was boycotting it because it was over-sweet American filth drunk by greasy heavy metal addicts (yes, I know I used to be one, I got better).

And finally sword swallowing xrays, just because.

sun guilt

Saturday morning and the sun comes out. I have nothing to do and no one to do it with. Still spaced out from Friday night I don’t feel quite up to calling people. They might want to talk to me, which I don’t think I would respond to particularly well in my current dilapidated mental state. I’m getting sunshine guilt, I have to get outside and do something, anything. Armour on, in the shape of sunglasses, I wander down the hill to pose around Crouch End with everyone else.

The place is a ghastly nightmare of three wheeled buggies and arguing couples. One of the things that unnerved me about moving here with my girlfriend is that people evidently move here to breed. We moved here and she goes to work on the other side of the world for six months, talk about mixed message. I decide to buy a notebook but then resolve not to, as can be seen from this page it is rare that I have particularly important or insightful thoughts that need recording. Spending a tenner on a notebook that I don’t need seems a little pointless. Dodging another three buggies and walking past yet another café I wander into a record shop, safe at last. Wandering around buying nothing and adopting a vacant look is accepted behaviour for record shops. Demonstrating an unusual degree of restraint in buying only two CDs I wander out aimlessly for a bit more toddler dodging.

Wandering up the hill again I still have no idea what I am going to do with the day and have to resign myself to the fact that it will be nothing. I am so bored of apathy.