radiac.net

Some mention has been made about how my diary entries are becoming increasingly sporadic and dull. Lack of free time aside, this is because I have become increasingly self-censoring. Partly for your benefit - a lot of my time is either spent working, or performing mundane daily activities, both of which would bore most of you to tears.

However, the main reason is that this site has accidentally become an advert for me. Clients often use this domain to contact me, and when asked "who does your site?", they give out this address. Even if they did use the other domain, thanks to years of linking and the wonders of Google, my two sites have become inextricably linked. Every time I start to write a humorous anecdote, or upload inane photos of a night out, I find myself wondering "but what if a client saw it", and I close the window. It's got to the stage where I've been tempted to take the whole thing down.

This increasing awareness of the implications of keeping the site going has been creeping up on me for the past couple of years, and that has definitely manifested itself in how and what I've posted. But the point of this site has always been to let friends know what I'm up to, and to let strangers find out a bit about me. To that end I've been posting here for over 7 years; a lot has happened to me in that time, and this diary has entries about most of it. Yes, this may be a personal website, and no, it may not always exude professionalism, but I don't think that's a reason to silence it. Everyone has a life outside work; I just choose to write about it here.

Good: proudly describing to your girlfriend how you talked an insurance salesman into giving you a month of cover for free.

Not so good: her producing a pamphlet for the same company promising 2 months free.

And for those of you who are friends with the penguin, when you're ever tempted to chmod -R 700 ., make sure you're in the right directory. Or at least, make sure you're not in /etc. Especially if you're doing it at midnight... yawn

Magazine: £1.50

Smoothie: £3.49

Running to an underground station, getting stuck behind an OAP at the top of the escalator, slowing you down by about 30 seconds, arriving at the platform just as a train is shutting its doors, waiting 4 minutes for the next one, getting off at a connecting station, running to the next platform just as that train is pulling away, waiting for another 3 minutes, getting that tube train to a mainline station, sprinting up the stairs (faster than those running up the escalator, as ever, I proudly add), finally arriving on the platform at 15:48:02, seeing the 15:48 you wanted to catch slowly gliding out of the station, and realising that the next one you can get on your ticket is 3 hours later, writing a long detailed diary entry about it all in the web browser on your mobile phone, only to discover that it has disconnected while you were typing, it has forgotten what you wrote, that you have to type it all in again, and when you're half way through the second attempt, your battery runs out: Priceless.

As it happened, I rather enjoyed whiling away the hours over my banana and raspberry smoothie; made a nice change to be somewhere and powerless to do anything other than relax. Certainly a good excuse - will have to miss my train more often ;)