The Road

Finished "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy today. I'm a sucker for post apocalyptic stuff.
Leaning towards giving it 5 out of 5. The only slight criticism was I sometimes got confused over who was saying what, the author breaking with convention and not bothering to trifle with speech marks or the verb "said".
I got his number on that though - he was trying to mirror the end of the world, the breakdown in society, by dumping the normal rules. What's the point in speech marks if the world's a smoking ruin and the survivors are going around eating each other?

For about 10 minutes I was really smug about this revelation, then I discovered the author just couldn't be arsed in putting them in.

A new hope?

Today I am unemployed.
No. That's wrong.
Today I'm on holiday.
November the 12th, that's when I'll be jobless.

But that's not right either. By then I'll be full time author! Professional wordsmith. Except that's crap too. Need to be published for that accolade. For that I guess I should finish a piece of work, then launch it, like some young sparrow on its first faltering flight. And just hope it doesn't get taken out in a flurry of feathers by a passing falcon.

A friend of mine thinks it won't be long before I'm wearing a tracksuit and eating chips in John Frost Square with all the other scallies. She is way wrong though. The riverbank is the place to be seen.

She's been saving all the 2-4-1 subway vouchers and cheap pizza meal deals that come her way, and my mum keeps telling me I can come for a meal any time, dropping hints that no member of the family has ever been unemployed.
I keep saying to her I'm a writer.
Watch her shoulders sag a little.
Of course you are dear, she says.

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Task for the day: look up the meaning of "alliteration"
Task for the week: buy a tracksuit

Things I've used in pitched battles with Brian

A bag of nuts

Two double mattress size inflatable beds, inflated (Totally forgotten this (or blanked out) until now. We emerged from the basement, red faced and panting)

About three dozen bananas

Some rancid strawberries

Grapes

Plain water, bottled

Coffee dregs

Some kind of rubber ball (not sure if this counts. He once launched it towards me just as I was welcoming my girl friend into the office. She doesn't like Brian much)

Half a baguette, ham.

Slice of toast, taped to the underside of this desk

Some of these

A couple of these. Note: Firing these repeatedly against the ceiling where your office is not on the top floor is not recommended.

I still miss Brian

So many of the people I used to work with have gone to better places. One of these was Brian.

This is an old post from my first "blog"

A fairly typical email exchange

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Brian emails me to ask for my help with something.

My reply

Rearrange these words:

"I don't fuck a give"

His reply

Don't bother rearranging these:

"James is a fucking tosser"

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Removing the blogger toolbar

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height:0px;

visibility:hidden;

display:none

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Stick it in just before the

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Bit in your html

Ta Mr R

I've been shamed

I discovered something amazing today.

My friend and colleague - Mr Phil Ruse - has a blog.

Not only that but it's over 2 years old.

He even posts stuff to it. He's posted stuff this month.

It looks good. It has funny pictures. It has opinions. It's made me laugh.

And then here's me. Part time software engineer, part time writer. Stuck in my shell, terrified by the thought that the novel I've been writing for the past year is actually a little bit shit.

So here it is - my own blog. I can't promise pictures, or opinions, or even humour (though I do have a post about slugs lined up), but at least it's some words that someone, somewhere, might actually read.

Oh yeah, shout out to Mr Phil Ruse - http://www.philruse.com/. Would have discovered it earlier but he hid it well.

Old blog - 19 May 2006

If you use the inbuilt ASP.NET user accounts (ASPNET on windows XP, network service on windows 2003) everything seems to work OK with enterprise library.

If you try and impersonate another windows account instead you end up with lots of registry entries along the lines of:

Failed to create instances of performance counter '# of Connections Opened/Sec' - Couldn't get process information from remote machine..

or

Access Denied - the current user does not have permission to perform the action.

Failed to fire the WMI event 'DataConnectionOpenedEvent'.

The solution for Windows 2003 at least is to add your impersonated user account to the following groups on the web server:

• Performance Log Users
• IIS_WPG