Alasdair Watson

Julius Caesar’s weblog. A marvel, my children. Not enough people give do creative things with history, which is just a crying shame, and to see something like this is just ace.

If this works, I’ll have just posted to my Livejournal using my Visor. If I’d known that was possible, I’d have signedup to LJ long ago…

I have been made redundant, and will shortly collar a large cheque (although not as large as first thought, dammit) as a result. I have then scored two weeks holiday, followed by a new job that pays better.

It’s good to be me.

That’s a morning’s work done, then. When I’m done writing this, and blogger publishes that, I’ll run a script, and this will publish to my livejournal in an enitrely automatic manner.

I’m not in the office today. I’ll be in for my last two days tomorrow and Friday, but I’ve got a job interview this afternoon, so I’m staying at home. I’m got nothing dreadfully pressing to do in the office anyway. So far today, I have got up, done a bit of work, done my yoga (I’m going to try and do at least half an hour every day, while I’m unemployed) had a shower and some breakfast (museli with fruit – someone please shoot me) and am sitting down to work. Today’s jobs – the first stage of a PHP script that will convert a blog entry to a LiveJournal post, and some notes toward The Thing With Sean.

If you look to the bottom of my menu bar over there, you’ll find a new “Now Playing” section. This is dynamically updated whenever I click a shortcut on my desktop, with whatever information on which MP3 my copy of Musicmatch Jukebox is playing right now (or the last one it played, if it isn’t running now). No need for me to type or FTP anything. I’ve been meaning to sort something like that out for while. I like the “Now Playing” option on livejournal, but I’m not on LJ, and I’m too lazy to type it by hand, anyway. So I’ve sorted it out for myself, in PHP.

Photos from last week are now available – WEFUK on Saturday, Fiona’s birthday on Thursday, and Huw and Michelle’s do on Friday, along with some shots of London sights (rather more shots of them than people, actually). Here’s the one I like best, just to be going on with:

Coming back from Tenebrae, ranting aout the state of my love life at Marysia. See it’s been bothering me lately, because people have developed a distressing tendency to ask me if I’m seeing anyone, and when I say that I’m not, they say something like “Oh, never mind, I’m sure you’ll meet a nice girl soon.” to which I am always tempted to reply one of three things:

• “Actually, I like to fuck men.” (Untrue, but it’d be worth it to watch some of their reactions.)
• “Why would I want a nice girl?” (Substantially more true, almost as much shock value for some of them.)
• “Piss off, you interfering old bat. I like being single, and your notion that somehow being in a relationship would in some way validate me as human being is as offensive as it is antiquated.” (A bit of a mouthful, really, but accurate.)

I mean, yes, a love life that could be described as something other than “non-existant” would be an interesting and not unwelcome change of pace, but I’ve got used to being single, and I like it. And I get irked when people seem to think that I must be in some way incomplete because I’m single…

It’s been a good day today. The sun has been shining down from a beautiful blue sky. At lunch, I sat in the beer garden of a pub, drank an ice cold lime and soda, and enjoyed the summer. I took a walk in a park this afternoon, and strolled underneath trees, before visiting my family for dinner. As the sun set, and the sky turned an amazing red, shot though with silver clouds, I hopped on a train to see some good friends I haven’t seen in months, visiting from the states.We sat about and laughed and drank gin and tonic and ate great food and we had a wonderful time. It’s been a really good day.

I was laid off this afternoon.

Just read e-mail from Warren Ellis, telling the world that he’s just finished writing TRANSMETROPOLITAN. The final issue is three months away. This means, allowing for two specials and a skip month, that I started reading TRANSMET five years ago this month, in the middle of an Edinburgh summer that was never going to end. It really and genuinely does seem like yesterday. I remember reading that first issue, sitting in the sun with my girlfriend, on the steps down to our basement flat, passing a cigarette back and forth between us. I remember laughing out loud at the opening sequence, and grinning with recognition at the closing page.

And I think about the time that has passed between then and now, and I smile. That comic has been part of my life for half a decade, and while I’m not going to miss it, because it’s a story, and I’ll have it on my shelf for a long while to come. But still – five years, I’ve been buying the book. It’s going to be a little odd, never buying a new issue again.

What’s been with you for the last five years?