I meant to write a blog post earlier in the week to say what a lovely time Babel and I had on Saturday. I have to admit that I was slightly apprehensive about the day, because we were scheduled to meet up with some old friends of mine from uni, who I hadn’t set eyes on since we all graduated together nearly four years ago. It was a bit of a strange situation, as last time I saw them I was obviously still with my ex who was also a good friend of theirs. Also because having not seem them for so long, I wasn’t sure I had a lot to say to them. But we went to our local Harvester which also happens to be their local Harvester, and managed to get through the two hours it took us to get served a main course and pudding without too many awkward silences. Thank you to Babel for coming with me (more…)

They don’t. Trust me.

A number of years ago I remember my friend Damon writing a series of posts in the JEB forum, in which he suggested that BT stands not for British Telecom but for Bloody Terrible. This is a sentiment with which I can now sympathise.

For the past twelve months or so, we have been fortunate enough to have wireless internet in our house. It was a highly exciting development when my mother agreed to have it installed, and it has been even more exciting since Babel bought me my own computer and I can actually use it I got my computer at Christmas, and for the first six weeks or so, everything seemed to be going swimmingly well. But when we hit February, problems started to develop. Quite often I’d be using my computer bt night when suddenly the internet connection would cut out. Initially I assumed this was just some sort of random network problem and the signal was temporarily too weak for me to connect to, but it seemed different to any kind of connectivity issue which I had experienced elsewhere before. My computer was still able to detect the network, was proclaiming it to have an excellent signal in fact, but whenever I tried to connect to it it would say it was unable to, and Windows was unable to diagnose and repair the problem. What’s more, I soon discovered that leaving my computer switched off for twenty four hours and hoping it would cure itself was not successful. The only way to get the internet connection back was seemingly to turn the wireless hub off at the power and switch it back on again. This admittedly worked every time, but doesn’t seem an ideal solution to the problem. (more…)

I’m on audit in Wigan this week which is rather horrible. In fact there are an awful lot of work-related things to be depressed about right now, not least the severe hassle involved in trying to book off a single day as holiday, but nevertheless I am still incredibly happy about getting engaged The news is just about starting to sink in now and I’m getting a bit more used to wearing my ring as well. On Sunday I was absolutely paranoid that I was going to lose it somewhere, but the only time it’s fallen off over the last couple of days was when I was deliberately experimenting with shaking my hand as hard as possible to see at what point it might fall off I have told almost everyone I can think of to tell now, and everybody (who hasn’t met him!) thinks that I have a very romantic boyfriend (more…)

Since it is now February and I am no longer in Wantage, I have been trying to make some progress with my New Year Resolutions. Some of these have been going better than others. Buying a laptop was achieved before the new year even began, because Babel did a rather wondrous thing and bought one for me I love my new present so much that I occasionally just want to stroke it – perhaps the reason that it is now covered in finger prints. My aim this week was to buy a duster to clean it with, but I have failed most spectacularly. Does anyone have any ideas where I could buy a nice sort of duster? I’ve looked in all the homeware departments I can think of, and no one seems to be selling them (more…)

1. I have already answered this meme once on Facebook, but in Esperanto. You never know who might be reading in English, and I thought my answers would be more interesting if I didn’t have to worry about not saying things I didn’t want colleagues/relatives/school friends to hear. I’m answering it now in English because I’m at work and bored, but the answers won’t be as exciting. And I’m not going to tag another 25 people!

2. I am very frequently at work and bored, though you may already know that. I hate my job, with a vengeance. My aim for this year was to find a better job, but the recruitment consultant rang me last week to apologise and say that there are no jobs

3. I spend a lot of my time in hotels. So far this year I’ve spent one week in Oswestry and three weeks in Wantage. Between now and May, I have one week in Wigan, three weeks in Banbury, three weeks in London and two weeks in Swindon. This makes me wonder whether it is even worth me moving in with Babel, because I won’t see him any more frequently than I do now (more…)

Whilst I have been busy not posting, Babel and I have managed to have a couple of very pleasant weekends. Two weeks ago we went into Birmingham city centre, and as retribution for the fact that I had made him watch The Reader some weeks previously, Babel subjected me to a whole two hours of The Wrestler. It was nowhere near as bad as I thought it might have been – in fact I’d go so far as to say that I enjoyed it in parts, but there were bits of it which were far, far too brutal and violent for my liking, and I don’t think that I would want to watch it again! (more…)

As part of my flirtation with cpanel yesterday, I created a new folder called 2009 in which to house this year’s photos. Now I’m not entirely sold on all this cpanel business – it seems like rather a pfaff – so when I wanted to upload a photo of myself right now, I decided to be lazy and use the wordpress uploading button instead.

I selected the photo I wanted to use and clicked okay. My computer tried very hard to upload it, it really did, but in the end it failed and spat out an error message at me, saying that the server was unable to write to the parent directory

Initially I found this error message confusing and distressing. And then, suddenly in a flash, it came to me! When I’d created the folder, I’d not thought to change the default permissions from 755 to 777. I don’t know how I can have been so silly… :ninja:

Having said that I wasn’t going to review my year in a serious manner, I have been unable to resist the temptation to look up my new year’s resolutions and find out what they actually were. The result does not make pretty reading (more…)

This week I took the slightly random step of creating a Twitter account for myself. I use the word random because I have only ever had a very hazy idea of what Twitter actually is, and don’t have the patience to read the help guide, but as far as I can establish it seems to be a website for people who are obsessive about updating their Facebook status. Now I must confess that I am rather partial to updating my Facebook status myself, but the more ‘friends’ I acquire, the more constrained I feel about what I can actually say. “Clare has had a crap day at work” is not a status which will further my career when I know my boss can read it, nor is “Clare is really happy because Babel just let her suck his cock” a good status when there is a family member in my friends list. Sometimes I get around the problem by setting my status in Esperanto. Sometimes I don’t even want Esperantists to read it, in which case I write it in German because I only have a handful of Facebook friends who will automatically understand that, especially if I choose my slang carefully. Sometimes I set an indiscreet status in a fit of emotion and then delete it when I’ve calmed down. I like setting statuses, it’s an interesting emotional outlet, and it can help to focus the mind when you’re forced to express your mood in such a limited number of characters. (more…)