The past few months at work have been OK, but it’s now the silly period, and it’s even sillier than usual. I could go into details, but as the Facebook Grass (the “person” who grasses up lowly employees to the higher management should they even breathe a word of truth about our place of employment) is doing his/her thing again, I’ll just say one thing. “LOL”.

Mind you, I don’t think many people at work actually read this site any more, so I could sit here and blurt the whole thing out. It’s pure pantomime stuff, it really is.

Tonight, however, I’m going to hopefully forget about the whole fucking place, and let my hair down, for I shall be attening The Studio tonight, to watch a few local bands play, including Accidents By Design and the almighty Infernus. Should be a good night.

Back to the subject of blogging, I have completed blogging about that stupid sodding hard drive. It works, that’s the end of it. Therefore, the other morning, after another shocking 12-hour shift, I came home and decided to write a blog about music. I’d been listening to one of my favourite tracks, and decided I’d write an indepth blog about what I liked about it. Only thing was, I’d written an identical blog 18 months ago, and didn’t realise until I’d just about finished it.

ironically, that previous post also gives details about hard drive upgrade problems I’d been having around that time.

Anyway, because I’m not going to waste an hour’s worth of typing, here’s the post in its entirety..

I’ve had a shit day at work today, so you’ll have to forgive me for having one of my “ooooh, a song I like, and how I came about it” blogs.

It turned out that for the purpose of using it as a TV theme, it was sped up by approximately 10%. I think I prefer the original, slower version.

I’ve just noticed that this post contains more swearies than any I’ve written for a long time. Ah well, never mind, eh?

EDIT: Ooooh, I do like these edits. Missed out a quote mark which meant that the first section of text was missing. Quickly fixed, so sorry if the post didn;t make much sense originally.

And, for once, I’m NOT actually talking about work. I’m talking about an organisation which I have belonged to for the past 11 years, and Daddykins has belonged to for much longer. In fact, there’s been a running joke about how my birth disrupted a meeting of such organization.

I’m sure i’ll secretly write a blog post, yet never publish it, with my full feelings on this matter, and I assure you, I will be using the C word many more times.

Unfortunately, this whole situation means that I will more than likely lose touch with quite a few people who I count as friends, and disappear even further into my cold, lonely, introverted shell.

I got even worse news later on in the night. FML, as all the cool kids say.

So, you’re probably all gasping to hear what type of exciting shenannegans I’ve gotten up to within that time? The answer? None. Definitely nothing worth blogging about anyway. I’ve not even been motivated enough to type up any “filler” posts. And, as for going out photographing stuff, well, the camera hasn’t been past the front gates of Mercuryvapour Towers in sebveral weeks. I took loads of photos of the daffodils that managed to grow in the front garden this year (we got six!), but once you’ve seen one photo of them, you’ve seen them all. I’ll just let them sit there until the memory card starts to lose its data, or (much, much) more likely, that I accidentally format it (or delete all of the photos from it) while drunk.

Hmm, I appear to be having a bit of a bracket thing going on today. ((((((((Hnnnnngh, that’s better)))))))).

The only thing remotely exciting that’s happened is that we have a new initiate to the family. No, I’m not pregnant, but over the last few weeks, there’s been (what I assume) a blackbird roosting in the wash house. Now, you may be remember, for those who watched my vlogs, what I once filmed an entire episode in the wash house. Behind the camera is a large book case fastened to the wall. I was originally planning to use it for parts of my streetlighting collection, but before I had to have chance to move all of the tat that had accumulated on there, I found this…

Yes, that was the begining of a birds nest. Over the coming days, I kept sticking my head around the door to see if the nest had gotten any bigger. Indeed it had, and imagine my surprise when I stuck my head around the door on Saturday night, to see the bird sat on the nest keeping the eggs warm, totally unphased by my prescence.

Unfortunately, the friendliness between ourselves and the bird came to an abrupt end, when she got locked out of the wash house on Sunday night, as the wash house door became shut while the bird was absent. Obviously, it has to be left slightly open so it can go out and feed. Daddykins tried to blame me, until I pointed out that I’d been at work for most of Sunday, and certainly won’t have been anywhere in the vicinity. The cheek!

Either way, once the door was eventually reopened, the bird frantically flew in, and ended up in the house. Daddykins had to grab it and take it out of the house. I don’t think it’d have enjoyed it much.

He said that since he’d done that, the bird hadn’t been back to the nest, but when I went out of the back, it was there, though it flew out as soon as I went anywhere in the vacinity. At least it returned to the nest.

I’ll keep you updated on this, but you never know, there may be the… er, clattering of tiny beaks shortly.

You’ll all be glad to know that work has been one of the things, once again interfering with my life, and causing no end of chew. New systems that are infinitely less usable than the old ones, were at the forefront of my mind when I wrote “I have not felt this low for a long time.” on my twitter.

Narrowly avoiding a 13-page rant about work at the minute, I shall change the subject back to why I haven’t blogged. I think it finally hit home how pointless this blog really is a week or two back.

Chris had came round for the first time in what seemed like ages, which was always a welcome bonus. Mucky beer was consumed as always. He said he hasn’t read my website in months. Charming! He actually asked if I’d won on the Grand National! Taken aback, I pressed his face against the monitor and forced him to read the entire post until he knew it BETTER THAN THE BACK OF HIS HAND.

OK, I wasn’t quite as extreme as that. Actually, I hate telling someone to read my blog, especially when I could have just told him, but I was tired, and couldn’t be arsed to explain what was already stored on my site.

It made me realise the futility of it all, and it made me realise that if it isn’t interesting to my mates, then who is it interesting to? That one thought alone made me take blogging into stock, and whether it’s something I want to take any further, and just typing that previous sentence has filled my mind full of conflicting arguments.

(edit) This post became a bit of an extended rant about blogging in general, and isn’t really relevant, so has been removed for now. Instead, I shall use it another day when I’m less tired than what I am now.

Work is dominant in my thoughts, and as you know, I don’t talk about that place.

In second place is my bed. It seems that when I’m not in work, all I want to do is sleep, and that’s what I have been doing recently in great quantities. Probably more than what is natural.

My place of employment is, once again, getting me down. I guess I’m one of the lucky ones, as I still have a job in this time of economic turmoil. There have been no redundancies, or even talk about them.

But, for how long….

(P.S. I can almost picture Chad’s comment now. Three words… Please don’t bother.)

And no, I wasn’t the one to get so palatic that I “tripped over” a seven foot stepladder in the kitchen and had to be picked up by two of my mates. Oh, no siree. That wasn’t me. It was Daddykins.

I really cannot describe how I feel at the minute. I’ve not spoken to him since the incident, maybe because shortly after he went to bed and has yet to surface.

He suffered a considerable gash to his left arm which may, or may not require stitches…

In other news, which normally would get a blog on its own, I popped my septic finger yesterday too. Pus spurted about 6 foot across the room, and I think I went into shock for a bit.

SO, that’s the news. I can’t put into words how shit I feel at the minute. It truly feels as if my world has ended. Lovely depression, here we go again!

Even for a British summer, the weather has been truly appaling. There hasn’t a day gone by where it’s not absolutely hoyed down at some point, or been so dull that it’s not even worth sticking your foot out of the door, never mind going around and doing stuff. Ever since I’ve came back from Paris, I have had absolutely nothing to look forward to… I tried to change this by arranging a trip to Countdown for me and Chris, but seeing as he has no holidays left, this has fallen through, leaving me once again, staring to the inky void, where the only light at the end of the tunnel is the reflection from the bottom of a beer glass. Even worse, is that it would have been my last chance to see it under its current guise.

On a lighter, and much happier note, Wayne has finally got back in touch after 18 months of being silent!! Unfortunately, he missed all of the email I’d sent to him in this time, thanks to NTL/Virgin’s policy of only keeping email on their servers for 90 days, but at least he’s still alive! Coatesy, however, is still radio-silent, and it’s looking less likely that he’ll ever get back in touch.

Christ, this is an amusing entry isn’t it? Laugh-a-bloody-minute.

To make things worse, morale at Employment Palace has hit an all time low. Once again, I can’t go into details, mainly because I’ll end up putting my fist through the monitor. This has depressed me more than anything, I think.

On another note, I’m an organ donor. Or rather, I’ve been for months, but I never bothered mentioning it before. I’m only metioning it now, because I’ve just found an old registration form I meant to send off, but never did. On the back of it, it states “Discuss your wishes with those closest to you, so they know your wishes should the time ever come… I’m sorry, I know whatthey mean, but surely that’s the worst way of putting it, ever? What do they mean by “should”? Do they suddently think I’m immortal, or something?

Ahem. On the subject of death, another reason I’ve not been updating much is the “dying” of Beastbits, my main machine… You may remember a few months ago, the 250Gb drive I had, started clicking, going all weird and just not working in general? Well, I replaced it with a 500Gb drive. And that’s on the way out too. It began with The Click of Death.

Eventually, strange things started happening The drive would disappear from Windows completely, and today, during the reboot, in the BIOS detection it wouldn’t reappear. Nasty. I decided the drive was duff. My curiousity got the better of me, and after a physical power-off, it reappeared.

Now, something was up, and I decided to back everything up to an external HDD. During ther copying process, it halted with a CRC error. Not good. Files were on the bad sectors! Oooooo!

I happened to note the name mentally of the corrupt file. Thankfully, it was just an outdated SQL dump I’ve done from my website, and wasn’t of much use anyway. The rest of the backup passed without a hitch. Everything else copied. For a bit of mirth, I decided to copy the original file I’d had a problem with. It copied first time. To me, this began to sound like something more “logical” than physical.

Soooo, I powered up “Darik’s Boot And Nuke”. I had used this in the past to “fix” the bad sectors on the earlier faulty drive I mentioned. Anyway. I started it on this drive, and it failed. It quit with an error saying that the drive may have bad sectors. Duh.

Fair enough, this wasn’t playing ball, so I grabbed the diagnostic software from the Samsung website. I wasn’t expecting miracles. Still, I ran it, and there they were, the bad sectors…

Fair enough, at least they were official.

I wasted at least 3 hours of my finite time on this planet allowing the disk check to finish. It prompted me to perform a disk erase. Meh. All backed up. It can’t do any harm. After all, these sectors were goosed, so another few hours later, the entire hard drive was erased, and I ran another diagnostic check Now, thanks to that photo, I had the exact location the bad blocks. Imagine my surprise as it skipped over them without a single bit of hesitation.

OK, so unbelievably, the drive was back to its normal self. All of this took place on Monday night, so I formatted the drive while I was at work on Tuesday. I returned home, and copied all of the stuff from the external backup drive onto it. And, tonight (Friday), it has gone back to the original problem of the click of death. Joy!

In a thread on Glens’ forum, I mentioned my problems, and although Crag has a very valid point, it’s still a 100% failure rate. And, I can’t even send it back either, because the only way it will detect bad sectors is obviously after the disk has been in use for a few days after an erase, which means there has to be data on it. And, seeing as I know the sort of ahem… “data” I keep on it, I’d rather not let it out of my sight!

As menitoned before, Daddykins has been out at the pub all afternoon, so I didn’t fancy waiting around for him to come in slurring all over the place. OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, as he never really gets THAT drunk, I just hate to see him drunk full-stop. And yes, I understand that makes me sound like a hypocrite. Tough.

So, I headed off out of the door, with the intention of not returning until he was at home, and in bed. I took my normal route of King Oswy Drive, right up to the Clavering roundabout and back down the coast road. I took a detour to take in the delights of the King Oswy shops, and also to pick up a bottle of Cherry Coke.

At this point, I tried to phone Chris. he said he was coming round tonight, so just in case he turned up unannounced, I tried to get in touch with him to tell him I was out. In facft, I decided to walk down near his house, just in case he was in, and not answering his phone (as usual).

Chris is one of those people who rarely takes interest in his mobile, so no answer is a normality. I tried a number of times, and didn’t get through at all. I also tried to get through to Daddykins on his mobile to see if he was in yet, as I’d forgotten to hang my washing out.

After about 16 attempts to get though to his mobile, he phoned me. I answer, and whatever Daddykins said was drowned out by someone screaming “JAMIE”. Oh, joy. So he was still out. I terminated the call. He’d already answered all my questions.

So, I decide to ring Chris on his house phone, and his dad said he was asleep. Oh, great. So, I had nowhere to go, nothing to do, nobody to talk to, nothing. There was no point going home, so I just kept on walking, and ended up on the Marina. Did I mention I took my camera? Clearly not.

This is the only one I’ve bothered to upload to flickr yet, as a lot of them require rotating…

I shall post more photos on my flickr later, but now I have half a case of Grolsch to knock back…

Daddykins is also still out, which will mean he’ll come back in an absolute state of inebriety, which is something I really can’t be arsed to put up with today.

I have not been around for a few days. I apologise for that. I wish I could explain the reasons, but having to relive any second of the last two weeks or so would mean that I would have to inject my sensitive brain with memories, which to be honest, are better forgetting. You may notice that I do NOT discuss my proper personal life in here. This trend will continue, yet I can’t help feeling utterly depressed over the past fortnights’ antics.

Moving on swiftly, I shall begin to explain the good things which have happened.

Firstly, I’ve not been able to sleep. This means that, on the 18th, a cold and frosty Monday Morning, I decided to watch the sun come up. I left the house at 6:30, and began to walk towards the headland. For those of you who don’t know Hartlepool, part of it is on a penninsular, which means there is a lot of water surrounding it. This also means that no matter what time of year it is, you get some awesome sunrises. Unfortunately, I’d never, ever witnessed, or photographed a sunrise. Not without houses getting in the way.

Due to the fact my mind was working a mile-a-minute (due to the things that had happened a few days before), I was awake at 5AM. I adorned appropriate clothing, and awaited for an appropriate time to leave, and photograph the scenery.

I didn’t intend for this to be another one of those “Oh, bollocks, Jamie’s needlessly took his camera out of the house”, but seeing as I’ve started this section, I might as well finish.

Er, anyway. I left the house, and walked towards the Headland. Needless to say, I took my camera. After all, that’s my catchphrase, and if I didn’t say it, it would make this part of the blog redundant. Anyway, it was still dark by the time I approached the Warren Road junction…

As can be seen by the colour of the cloud, there was a bit of fog in the area. I hoped this wouldn’t destroy my photo chances. What was clear, however, that it was very cold, and that I was entirely on my own. I took the rather daring route of “Old Cemetary Road” . This is the road that leads up to Steetley, and is almost entirely deserted, except for abandoned buildings and a handful of council houses, one of which Wayne lived in, who you may remember I mentioned a few times, but I no longer have any contact with.

Anyway, this road also leads, via footpaths to Marine Drive, which is the seafront. Next stop from here is Norway, unless you stick to the roads, in that case, your next step is the Headland…

I finally managed to see the sun come up, for the first time in my entire life.

What you can’t see in the photo, however, is me, almost in tears.

I think it hit home. The shitness of 2008 so far, the fact I had nobody to turn to, the fact that I was listening to Nik Kershaw on my MP3 player (!)… it all added up.

I ended up taking this…

Best viewed large, click the image, leave this rambling blog if you must.

After that, nothing happened for the next few days. I ended up at work, which is as bad as it normally was. I ended up having to look forward to something. And I did, for you see, the new Sainsbury’s opened on Friday 22nd February!

SO, as their catchphrase suggests, I “treid something new today”, but getting there was an absolute nightmare. Now, I decided to go there for its grand opening at 9AM, but before that, I required money. You may remember that the new store is on the far corner of a new estate, at the top of a hill. The cash point is at the exact opposite corner of the estate, at the bottom of the hill. Now the shortest distance between two points, as I’m sure you are aware, is a straight line, so surely, cutting through this new estate would be the easiest thing to do… I was wrong.

I didn’t realise, this estate is a complete maze of small cul-de-sacs and faceless houses, each of them like the next, And, considering this was the first time I’d been on this estate, I ended up wandering around aimlessly, and I ended up pretty much back where I started, at the bottom of the hill. Bugger.

Eventually, I got there, 20 minutes after it opened. They were still serving celebratory glasses of orange juice. There were photographers there, and lots of men in suits laughing between themselves, and patting themselves on the back.

I bought a tenners’ worth of stuff, It was actually very expensive.

The following day saw a trip to Newcastle. There was no apparent reason for it. I just rang up Chris, who was also off at the same time as me (a rare occurence these days… sigh), so we went to Newcastle for the day.

The first stop (after getting some refreshments) was a record shop. No, not any normal record shop, but one of those “good” ones, filled with vinyl from celing to floor, with lots of strange crates lying about, filled with singles, and at very reasonable prices too… £1 each or 12 for £5. Now, I’ve always preferred the humble 7″ single to the 12″ LP, so it goes without saying that I ended up purchasing 12 of them. I’m sure most of you know my musical tastes, so I’ll quickly gloss over which ones I’d bought. However, I will mention that I finally got a copy of the original version of Star Trekkin’.

With my vinyl addiction satisfied, we continued to walk about the place for a bit. Obviously, one of the reasons we went on this journey was so I could get some photos.

And, there are plenty of things to photgraph in Newcastle. This one is my particular favourite…

Not because of its subject matter, but because what it is. It’s one of the pubs which features in the 1986 series of Auf Weidersehen Pet, in particular the episode “Marjorie Doesn’t Live Here Any More”. In fact, looking at that episode again is quite eye opening. You can see quite clearly the amount of regeneration that’s taken place in the 22 years since that episode was recorded.

Anyway, this was also my first opportunity to see some of the new landmarks up close, namely the Millenium bridge, and The Sage…

I think it’s quite clear where it gets the name “Shiny Condom” from. We actually took a walk up to The Sage, to have a look round, only to find that on that particular day the bloody thing was closed to the public. Bollocks

This is part 1. Part 2 is coming shortly.