Jun 11

Well – it’s been interesting, I’ll say that much.  I think it must be coming on for what, nearly 2 weeks since my last blog post? *checks*.  Oh my.  May 25th.  That’s disgraceful.

Some blog this is, it might as well be a monthly magazine, shame theres no content or pretty pictures.  Meh.

Anyway – interesting couple of weeks.  I’m no longer welcome on KAPS paranormal ghost investigations, but I won’t go into that here suffice to say that the owned didn’t take too kindly to me taking part in the setting up of a new paranormal investigations group called Crypt Kickers.  Website is on http://www.cryptkickers.co.uk and we can be followed on Twitter @cryptkickers We are also on facebook.  Come sign up for the forum!

She also cited my past blog posts (where KAPS were mentioned in only a positive light) as being an issue.  Apparently my blog posts about Fright Nights, another paranormal investigations company upset the owner due to me implying that their insurance didn’t cover guests when KAPS’ did – this was pointed out to me as untrue and I removed it as soon as I was made aware.

The funny thing about this blog, well it’s maybe not so much ha ha funny as odd funny is that it’s mine.  I can do what I like with it.  It’s full of personal opinion and not a lot else (unless its quoted or referenced specifically).  I understand that I can’t write things that could be construed as libellous or slanderous because I could theoretically get taken to court, blah blah.  Other than that, I have free reign and that’s always been the case and I’ll write about what I like.

Maybe in the future, I’ll be writing about exactly what happened with KAPS, maybe I won’t.  Either way, it’ll all be truth and it’ll all be my own opinion.

So, anyway – back to more important things, we’ve set up CK, it’s going really well and we’re laying down a bunch of groundwork and there’s a lot up in the air at the moment, we can’t reveal all that much at the moment due to potential issues with certain people trying to possibly cause problems – not something we want at the moment.

As a result of this, my weekends and evenings have been pretty rammed full of website setting up and maintenance, forum maintenance and just general geekery.  I haven’t had much time for anything else.  We’ve got so much TV to watch I don’t think some of it will ever be seen. At least I managed to get through 24.  Really enjoyed that.

I was away in Manchester yesterday with work, we had a conference.  It was a great day and I ended up being chief photographer.  That was nervewracking.  I haven’t picked up the camera for months and I was faced with going somewhere I had no idea was or what awaited me.  I took the tripod with me just in case – good job too, a lot of the conference was in low light.  Luckily I found myself a little alcove and set up in there for most of the day.  Managed to come away with some shots that I’m really proud of.  Hopefully work will be fairly happy too.  My shoulder is killing me – carrying around the slingshot with 6 lenses in it was maybe a little overkill but I used most of them!

What else has been going on?

Hmmm.

Oh yeah – it’s mine and Sue’s wedding anniversary next Wednesday, I’ve booked the day off and I’m taking her out for a meal.  Other than that, I have no plans, maybe I’ll take her to the cinema, maybe go bowling.  It might be nice to recreate our first date sort of thing.  We went to see Rugrats at the cinema. awwwwww

I’ve got to go to the Trafford Centre on Saturday – my iPhone seems to have developed a physical fault, the left hand side appears to be coming away from the body, its clicking when pressed and I’m getting some distortion on the screen.  No way is that going to last another 12 months, I’m going to take it over and see what they say.  Hopefully they’ll replace it with a refurb for me.  I might take out applecare for it whilst I’m there.  I’m also going to let Sue have a play around with the macbooks that are there so she can figure out what size screen she wants and things.  I think she’ll really love one.

I was using my macbook pro earlier (I’m using it now, but that’s not the point  – I’m blogging, this is something I can do on my iPhone for god’s sake) – I imported the photos to iPhoto and decided I wanted to view them in a slide show, I press play and it starts playing music and gives me funky transition effects.  I can then export this as a mov file, stick it on a disc, burn it as a dvd – it’s all just so easy.  I always used to put macs down, they were always the lesser machine, always the thing people used when they couldn’t use a pc.  A pc for babies, etc.  I was wrong.  This is the best machine I’ve ever owned.

The other good thing about it is that there are no vents on the bottom of it, which means I can sit like this in bed and type with it on my knee and not a)burn my legs b)set something on fire.  It’s all good.  The other thing is that it seems to have a semi decent wireless card on it.  My netbook one isn’t very good – I sit/lie on the side of the bed which is directly next to the part of the wall where the hot water tank is – big metal thing with metal pipes, it just zaps the signal.  This thing is uploading to my webspace, playing some music from last.fm and letting me blog straight to the web.  Yay.

I’m sure there was something else I was going to write about.  Oh yeah that was it – Work conference.

We had a guest speaker there from a company called Mindstore – Klaus Nigel Pertl.  He was fantastic.  He talked about taking time out, relaxing, making time for the real thoughts to come through and things.  It all made sense and I’d love to go on a Mindstore training course proper, sounds like a lot of good advice.

One of the talks given by a school talked about a stereotypical student who goes to the cinema on a Friday night, goes home and tweets about it/posts a review on a blog.  Gets up the following morning and plays on his Xbox 360 with people from all over the world, watches a video sent to him by his friend on youtube, video conferences with an uncle who lives abroad and is staying in Saturday night so spends it talking to his friends on facebook.  Gets up and goes to his mates house and watches a blu ray on his PS3.  It went on further with more examples. Anyway, the point of this paragraph is – this student was me.  That was my weekend.  It’s scary.  I’m so plugged in, so wired to the net, to technology it scares me.

When I take a step back and think about it, it worries me.  Technology seems to make things easier, it can also make things harder.  Spending too much time with technology can make it hard for me to relate to people again.  I mean people are weird.  At least machines generally have a reason for going bananas.  Anyway – I need to take a step back.  I need to stop spending so much time on the laptop and I need to maybe change the e-mail fetch period to maybe an hour rather than 15 minutes.  I don’t need THAT much access to my email.  It’s nice and all but I don’t need it.

We’ve booked a week away in October, a week in the countryside there won’t be any 3g signal, hell theres hardly any 2g signal.  I might even read a book.  You never know.  I think I need to maybe try some meditation and deep breathing exercises.

I hate that my parents were right about time flying as you got older – they weren’t kidding.  I want my life back! It’s this whole time perception thing and the flaw of how we measure time.  You know how the summers used to stretch for what seemed like months when you were kids – that sort of thing, look it up – it’s interesting reading.

The funny thing is – personal life is crazy at the moment, but I’m really enjoying work – loving it.  I need to find a balance somewhere!

Anyway, I came to bed early, and I’ve spent an hour typing stuff, I’m going to go to sleep now.  More frequent mind dumps to come over the coming days.

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Mar 06

Something occured to me whilst I was relaxing in and around Centerparcs this week. 

Time…

Or at least the passing of it and how we’re all forever wishing it away. 

We’re always “looking forward” to something. 

In the words of a 900 year old Jedi Master:

Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph

It’s so true it’s unbelieveable – I mean think about it for a second. 

From Monday morning you’re looking forward to the weekend.  Let’s take it back a notch, you look forward to lunch, then you look forward to going home, is it any wonder that the evening seems to pass by so quickly?  Then you’re looking forward to the weekend which seems to fly by without stopping. 

Now looking forward to the weekend doesn’t necessarily mean that you hate your job and want to get home, I know that I take great enjoyment in my work, it’s just something that everybody does – how often do you hear people say “thank (insert name of worshipped deity here/random swear word) it’s Friday?” We look forward to our own personal, private time. 

Another example is that you book a holiday and you spend the next 6-12 months looking forward to that, counting down the days, wishing your life away.  It’s got to stop.

I turned 28 this week.  It’s been almost 10 year since I left school.  10 years! That’s more than a third of my (current) lifespan – I’m working on hanging around for a while longer yet.  Still, it’s been a long time.  It doesn’t feel like it though. 

I did some reading in to time perception a while ago, the way that we measure time is flawed due to there being no anchor which ties it to how old you are – when you’re 10 years old, the 6 week holidays seem to last forever, Christmas’s and Birthdays were ages away, I remember the gap between Christmas and Easter feeling like forever! When I think back to how long the schools days seemed to last – it’s nothing in comparison to work days now and I’m at work for longer!

Now that I’ve had 27 full summers, the 6 weeks in the middle doesn’t actually feel like a great amount of time in the grand scheme of things, and it’s not really. 

I guess marketing and shops are partly to blame, Christmas Decorations for sale in September, Cadburys Cream Eggs for sale in January, everyone tries so hard to push through to the next stage of the year. 

Everyone looks forward to the next pay day, counting down the days till the overdraft is cleared in the bank account.  We spend so much time looking towards the future, we often forget to stop once in a while and take a good look around. 

We went shopping today and I tried to slow myself down, tried to take the time to have a look around, in a shoe shop whilst waiting for my nephew’s feet to be measured I spent time taking in all of the different colours, shapes, little details I’d usually miss.  I’m usually that concentrated on walking around from one place to the next that I just don’t take any of this in at all. 

It was interesting in Centerparcs not wearing a watch, time seemed to last longer, leisurely walks could be enjoyed and it was nice to sit back and take everything in.  After being surrounded by woodland for the week and not being able to see much past 20m, coming out and looking around a big city from the passenger seat of the car sends you on a head trip. 

I’m going to try to stop looking forward to the future and try spending some more time in the present.  I’m going to go to work every morning and (try to) enjoy every minute of every day, take everything as it comes and deal with things in a more logical manner.  I’ll still be booking holidays and they’ll be something to look forward to, but not at the expense of the present.  At the end of the day, we have all the time in the world, we should make sure that we try to enjoy it.  I know I’m guilty of this most days, I need to try to work out ways in which I can enjoy every minute of every day and stop wishing my life away.

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Oct 19

…Yelled Sue as she gleefully held up her iPhone to show me the new application she’s downloaded and installed. 

67 nights?

Jesus thats crept up quicker than I thought. 

Sort of looking forward to it, I mean I get a few days off, thats good – right?  The thing I hate about Christmas is I often want to buy things, sometimes with money people have given me for Christmas.  Since most of the things I buy or want to buy come from teh intarweb and the postal service is shitter than usual it means waiting around. 

Still at least I’ll still have Amazon Prime, and thats generally next day delivery. 

Clocks go back in a week, I used to love this one – it meant an extra hour in bed.  I still hate the one in Spring, losing that hour really grates :p  I just know that this time next week it’ll be darker, sooner.  I used to think the nights were cosy and great – you’d have the fire on and it was just nice.  That was back when I was little, the evenings used to last forever. 

Its funny because I remember people telling me that time seemed to fly once you got older.  Sayings like “School is the best days of your life – Enjoy it” were commonly passed.  I remember doing some reading a few months ago into time perception and how our age affects our perceptions of time.

See when you were 10 and you had the 6 week holidays you’d only had 10 years worth (possibly less than 4-5 that you could actually physically remember – if that) of summers.  The days stretched out long and far, the whole of the Summer holidays seemed massive.  Now, at 27 years of age I’ve had many, many summers.  We’re approaching almost 10 years since I left school.  Thats insane.  I don’t feel any different from when I was there – I have more money and I don’t have to spend as much of my free time doing homework and things, but still I seem to not have as much time. 

I mean look at the time now, its 18:12 (whilst I’m still writing this) on a Sunday evening.  If it were Monday I’d have been home from work for less than 45 minutes.  Maybe just finishing up tea.  Theres over 12 hours until I have to get up in the morning but whereas in my old job I’d have to be there for 7:30, I don’t have to be at work now until 8:30.  I’ve got Steve picking me up on the way tomorrow so I don’t actually have to be up until after 7 – he’ll be picking me up just after 8 so I can either get a shower tonight or get a shower in the morning.  How much after 7 I’ll actually be able to sleep I have no idea. 

Not sure what I’m going to be doing tonight after Sue goes to work.  Might fire up the 360, don’t know if I can be bothered.  One thing I won’t be doing is watching the final part of the 100 scariest moments on E4.  Enjoyed the first half but theres no way I’d be sleeping tonight if I finished it whilst I’m here on my own.  How stupid is that? 

I’ve often thought about that – why do I feel safer when Sue is in the house?  Its not like she could protect me if something bad happened – thats my job, man of the house.  I guess having someone else there, breathing gives your brain less reason to listen to the strange noises that houses make when they’re cooling down, or its windy, etc. 

She’s working nights Halloween too, I like watching scary films on Halloween, this year I’ll be watching something non-scary :p  Something like erm, Back to the Future.  That’ll work :E

Speaking of scary films, all the latest offerings from the last few years are all about gore.  Thats not horror.  We need some more Elm Street or Friday the 13th offerings, but something that is new and original. 

I watched Indy 4 this weekend.   Really, really enjoyed it.  I’d heard really bad things about it but I watched it expecting the worst and had a jolly good romp.  Some really funny moments in there.  Some pretty unbelievable ones too but its never been the sort of film to take seriously.

Sean Connery’s absence is explained by his death.  I’m perplexed by this – At the end of Last Crusade, both he and Indy drunk from the cup of the covenant.  Thats perpetual life.  How’d that happen then?

That’s enough brain dumping for me.  I’m thinking about possibly playing Day of the Tentacle or something later.

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