Alasdair Watson

I would like to draw your attention to this and this. The second one, I admit, is less credible, since it’s just an LJ post, but I think that true or not, the real horror is that I have no trouble believing it of the US authorities. One might argue that the second guy did commit a crime, and therefore he really can’t complain too much, but y’know, it’s worth comparing his experience with that of someone like Erwin James an inmate of the British prison system, who recieved a life sentence for murder, if memory serves. It’s not the fact that the guy has to do time that bothers me – it’s that he did it in a system that seems designed to grind people down, rather than rehabilitate…

I would hope that none of the Americans on my friends list are planning on voting for Bush in November, but what bothers me most, I suppose, is that thought that I don’t seriously expect things to get better under Kerry, I just expect them to stop getting worse. That these experiences will keep happening to people who don’t deserve them, but at least there won’t be new legislation passed allowing worse. And I wonder – is this resigned acceptance to the idea that the status quo is the best we can hope for an inevitable consequence of growing older, or is it just me getting even more fucking cynical?

Well, I knew that getting my new tattoo was going to hurt more than my last one – this one is on my chest, the last was on my arm. Even knowing that, though, I wasn’t prepared for quite how much more it was going to hurt, or the interesting varying sensations of pain in different places, which was probably worse than the intensity – just as I’d got used to one sort of pain, we’d move one to stabbing a whole new bit of me repeatedly with needles, and I was in a whole new place of ouch that I wasn’t quite steeling myself for.

Those of my friends with backpieces/work that goes across the spine – how did you manage it? Because right now, I’m revising my plans to get a backpiece done, since it turns out that I am a big girlyman.

Also, I feel really wierd with one side of my chest shaved.

But if you’re a Pixies fan, and have tickets for anything they’re at over the summer, you’re in for a treat. They utterly fucking rocked. If you’re a pixies fan, and don’t have ticktes, then you have my sympathy.

If neither option applies to you, then you’re just some kind of freak, obviously.

Wedding lovely. Seeing friends even better. Huge thanks to everyone I saw up there for the pleasure of your company, and in Paul’s case, also the use of the spare bedroom. Massive apologies to the enormous number of people I completely failed to catch up with. I’m going to try and come back up for a longer break in October, so I’ll make sure to see you then.

And now, the sleeping.

I am both bored at work, and bored of that “nice adjectives to go with you name” thing.

A	Antipyretic
L	Loricate
A	Apodictic
S	Saponaceous
D	Dentigerous
A	Ambisinister
I	Inquorate
R	Remontant

[Update notice Black Ink has new content.]

A good weekend, although I’m in some pain now. Ran the first installment of the game, and I think it went well. Shunted some material out of it, which is probably just as well – I knew I wanted a long session for the first one, but it would have been of murderous length if I’d kept it all in. There’s time for strange machines and peculiar symbolism later on. Out of curiosty, do any of the roleplayers on my friends list have any means they use to estimate the length of time that a given amount of material will run?

And then, clubbing, for which I am paying today. Ow. Still a little confused as to why my wrists ache worse than my shoulders, but there we go…

In other news, I’m in Edinburgh for the bank holiday weekend, and will be available for, y’know, social engagements. I’m busy Monday night, and I’m not likely to be free til late on Friday or Saturday, as I’ve got family wedding type things to do, but if people are likely to be out late (11pm+ at a guess) then I’m happy to join the fun at that point, and I’ve all day Sunday, and Monday daytime free if anyone would care to clog my hours up…

So, burge came up with this last night:

Let’s call it the “Little things in life” meme.

List five little things which make you happy/satisfied/give you pleasure. Don’t go for the obvious ones like second-hand bookshops, warm baths, icecream, wanking, seeing a band live or whatever. Odd little things, which give you a little frisson and make things better, even if just for a moment.

And I think it’s ace. And that you should all do it. So get on with it.

My list:

1) The tube map.
2) Walking by the Thames.
3) The random shuffle function on my iPod.
4) Blue LEDs.
5) Music with a fiddle in it.

[Update notice: Black Ink has new content]

I have been aware for some time now that there are a distubring number of people in the world who look like me – my friends keep telling me about spotting them. I’m not sure what we all did in past lives to wind up with this affliction, but the fact remains, there are a good number of us. One of my friends suffers from the terrible affliction of running into me on his holidays – it’s happened to him a couple of times, including one occaision where he went on holiday to Norway, and found me running the hotel he was staying in. And this version didn’t just look like me – he spoken English with my accent, and apparently had similar mannerisms and demeanour.

The poor sod was almost put off his Akavit, but reported that a few glasses soon cured the shock he was feeling, so that was all right. I’m still slightly worried about it, but he enjoyed his holiday.

However, what I had not realised until this morning is that not only are there people who look like me out there, but that there is at least one man out there with exactly the same name as me. This is a little troubling, as it turns out that there’s been a mix-up at some point, and that for most of my working life, I have been paying my National Insurance contributions into his account. I think it’s all more or less sorted now (although I need to call the national insurance people in October to confirm a few things) but still, how hard can identity theft be, if this sort of thing happens by accident? It’s taken them six bloody years to notice that while I’ve been employed and paying tax, I haven’t been paying national insurance, for Christ’s sake!

Actually it’s very sad given that this is what I do for my living, but I’ve spent the last few days writing a couple of class files, that, all told, come to most of 1000 lines of code. Not wildly unusual. But today I’ve started plugging them in to the pages that’re going to need them, fully expecting to spend an annoying hour or two fixing typos, chasing missing brackets, and inserting semi-colons, as one does when one writes a lot of code without testing it as one goes along.

Not a single parse error in the lot of it. Of course, I have no idea if it’ll all do what it’s supposed to yet, but at least there aren’t any typos in it.

I told you it was sad.

Going to bed.

Who’s going to B Movie on Friday, then?