As you might be aware, the UK is going through what could be understatedly called ‘a bit of a cold snap’ right now.

I’ve been snowed out of going to work for two days so far, and today decided to try and free the car and at least make it to the shops to stock up on food. Here’s how …

This was the view of my car from my window this morning: blanketed snugly in snow.

Not possessed of a shovel, I needed something to help shift that amount of snow. I don’t like throwing things away, especially when they are festive in nature, so luckily I still had something to help …

This was, at one point, filled with foody items. The first step was to remove the festive cellophane, then start dismantling the wrapping paper …

This leaves us with …

Armed with my “shovel” I ventured outside – the first step was to retrieve my boots from within the car itself! The snow was rather deep …

And here’s what my car looked like when I got round the back to see it …

The snow was pretty deep …

I used the smaller piece of cardboard to clear the passenger side, as this had less snow on it and was also in the sun. Finally I got the car open!

With the boots now retrieved …

I got back into the house to put them on, then back out to clear the rest of the car.

Before beginning, I turned the engine on, whacked up the climate control to 32 degrees, and turned on the heated windscreen and rear screen.

You can’t see here, but there was actually steam rising off the windscreen

After clearing away snow from the back of the car as well, I made a bolt for it. I actually managed to get it past those garages you see behind the car into the clear area, before getting stuck for good. One of my neighbours was trying to dig her garage out, so graciously gave me a push *back* into my parking space, before we both headed off to  Tesco by foot to stock up on some provisions!

Here’s an awesome snowman we saw on the way…

Yeah … so almost 7 months have passed since I last tried doing something with this website.

Since then, I got laser eye surgery, went to Korea, came back from Korea, moved house, and set up a photography site for my piccies. The last bit is what encouraged me to get back in here.

The first bit you can read about in a post. The other stuff … well you’ll just have to wait for that. There *is* a Korea post in the offing, but I’ve been working on it on and off for a considerable amount of time.

You CAN however look at alllll the pretty pictures (there are some of me, so those don’t count as pretty pictures, before anybody sues me for retinal damage) that I took whilst there, plus a whole bunch of others. I’m particularly pleased with the portraits.

Either click the Gallery link above or to the right, or mash your mouse right on THIS FAT ARSE LINK HERE. BOOM.

That’s it for now. More to follow! At … some … point …

So it’s about ~45 hours since I underwent laser eye surgery. This is becoming quite a common procedure (judging by the amount of people in the waiting room!) but is still quite a scary prospect to a lot of people.

I thought I’d write up my experiences for anybody that is considering having it done / has considered it in the past but not gone through with it for some reason.

I chose Optical Express for my surgery, but other providers are available! (UltraLase for example)

Step 1: Consultation
Booking this could not have been easier. I sent for an information pack on the company’s website, and within a week they had phoned me at work to arrange a time and location.
There are locations everywhere in the UK – my closest was actually in Bristol at The Mall, Cribbs Causeway. We booked a time and date (4pm on a Saturday) and then they rang me a couple of days before just to check everything was still OK.

When I went in for the consultation, everybody was very friendly and professsional as you might expect. The waiting area was quite nice with leather sofas and a tea/coffee machine (and TV), but we didn’t have to wait long before being seen.
I went in with my dad – they say you cannot drive after the consultation, so you need a parent or friend to accompany you! (or a taxi, but that might not be the best idea as will become apparent).
Also – BRING SUNGLASSES.

The first part of the consultation involved hopping between three machines in a darkened room. These machines took readings and measurements of my eyes (including the awful ‘puff of air’ test) to give an accurate map of them, including how light diffracts once it enters the eye.
This takes about five minutes, then back to the waiting room.

The second part involved a fairly standard eye test, to confirm my prescription (which they ask you to bring) and to further investigate suitability for surgery.
I was told that, happily, I was a good candidate. The optometrist then put some drops in my eyes to dilate and fix my pupils (apparently I have ‘lovely big pupils’, hehe) so that she could look inside the eye with maximum detail – this also lets them predict how your prescription might change over the coming years, I think.

Whilst the drops took effect, she talked us through the various different types of treatment available, and the prices.

I was recommended LASIK with WaveForm and Intralase, at a cost of £1595 per eye.

LASIK is the type of corrective surgery (the alternative being LASEK)
In basic terms, LASIK is newer, less invasive and has a much quicker healing time (2 to 3 days) than LASEK.

WaveForm deals with the mapping of the eye, allowing much greater precision when the laser is doing it’s job. Using WaveForm, the possibility of eliminating “halo-ing” or glare during night driving, for example, is greatly increased. I drive a lot, and hate driving at night for that very reason, so I was very keen to have this done.

Intralase is the method of cutting the flap in the front of the eye, which needs to be removed before the corrective laser can be applied.
This costs an additional £200 per eye. The cheaper alternative is the Microkeratome, basically a tiny saw.
I had read about the Microkeratome, which involved putting a ring over the eye and applying suction, and thought “Hells no”, so I went for the Intralase. A little misleading, as you will discover. However the precision is that much better with the laser.

Once all the questions were done with, the drops had taken effect and everything had gone blurry as my eyes were unable to focus. The optometrist took a look in the eyes, declared everything fine, and then I went into another room to discuss treatment and payment details.

Apparently Fridays are very busy, because people don’t want to take too much time off work – having the weekend as the healing days is a popular choice. So I booked for the end of May as that was the earliest opportunity, paid a £200 deposit, and was on my way.
They advised me that they would be in touch approx. 3 weeks before surgery to arrange the rest of the payment.

At this point, I should point out a few things.

YES, over £3000 is a lot of money. However, there are a few things to consider:
1. The state of your eyes.
I was in the middle bracket for prescriptions, having a -3.50 and -5.00 for my right and left eye respectively. I also have astigmatism and lazy eye.
The most expensive “per eye” cost is £1795 so I wasn’t far off.

2. Payment options.
I chose to pay upfront, because that’s how I prefer to do things. You can also pay over 10 months at 0% interest, or 24, 36 or 48 months at 9.6%

3. The quality of life is an unquantifiable cost. You make your own decisions, but for me, £3000 for not having to worry about glasses was a small price to pay.

Note: They didn’t actually call me – I dropped by the store last weekend to pay by card.

Next up: Treatment Day!

My bowels have just expressed their anger with the world with devastating fury. I’m writing this from the toilet, bless the iPhone for bringing bog-blogging to the masses!!
I haven’t updated this in months and have just realized it still exists. Time to do something with it …

Regardless of effort or care, the loudness of footsteps is proportionate to the absurdity of the hour that one is moving around the house

So it’s 2.30am. I’ve just downloaded the Wordpress app for the iPhone to make this post.
Why? Well, I’m just not tired. Crazy thing is, I know that in two days time I’ll be begging for sleep by about 9pm …

And now here’s a blurry photo of the time, if that feature works …

The modern connected world is ridiculous. I work in it, and I love it, but still it’s ridiculous.

I’m sitting here online at my PC, with my iPhone beside me.

Han and Rob are on MSN. I start talking to Han, and it’s somebody else, so instead I start texting her.
Then she is there, and replies to the text I just sent via MSN.
I have Firefox open on Facebook, and somebody adds a comment to a status. It flags it up on Facebook, my iPhone ‘bongs’ because it’s just received the email telling me that the comment has been made, and soon enough Outlook will do the same because it’s connected to the same email account.

I can either refresh the page, click the notification, go to the email, or go to Facebook on my iPhone, all to see this update.

Then Han makes a comment on a photo on Facebook, all the bongs happen to tell me, I see it, then discuss it with her on MSN, rather than Facebook.

Whilst it’s great that we can all get information in so many ways these days (granted, Facebook is hardly mission critical), it’s all a bit ridiculous isn’t it?

I dislike New Year. I like to remember good things that have happened; things that made me laugh, happy times with friends, moments of success. Thinking back over an entire year encapsulates everything, both good and bad. Whilst it’s the bad things that shape us all just as much – if not moreso – than the good things, I prefer not to take a whole years’ worth of crap all in one go.

New Year always kind of forces that kind of reflection. For the last two years (i.e. beginning of 2007 and 2008) I’ve been really looking forward to the year ahead. 2009 I’m not so keen on, so maybe that had something to do with it.

Despite all of my mutterings though, here I am, reflecting on what a year 2008 was. It certainly had its ups and downs …

I started 2008 with one month left of my contract at HP-CDS. I was heading back to Coventry for some training which – I hoped – would kick my career up onto the next rung of the ladder and get me into Cardiff, the closest city to where I currently live and the one I’d like to live in. I turned down a few options at HP-CDS in order to leave, but I felt that I had learnt a good amount and contributed well to the company, and that it was time to move on.

The training was mostly good. I spent all my additional savings I’d accrued whilst working at HP-CDS in order to do it, but got a lot of information and a lot of learning resources into the bargain.
Almost in a carbon-copy of 2007, I got a call from an agency before I finished the training and was offered a contract role at the Welsh Assembly Government with Siemens IT Services (oddly not Fujitsu-Siemens this time). I finished the training, and took up a 5 week contract. It was advertised as 6 months at first, then 3, then ended up being 5 weeks. Cheeky of the agency, but it was well-paid work so I can’t complain.

During this time, somebody back at HP-CDS decided they wanted me back. Cue a call from Proveya Ltd whilst I’m with Siemens (actually whilst I was standing in line at Subway, but that’s by-the-by). I negotiated a rate as high as they would go (£5 per hour more than I was on before) and once I’d finished at Cardiff, I was back off to the Southern Counties of England after a short week’s break, just 3 months after I’d left.

Things had changed in 3 months. The system that myself and just a handful of others had been supporting was becoming de rigeur across the whole business, and I found myself more and more dealing with the antiquated older system that I’d not even touched when I was there before.

To be brutally honest, my second go around was nowhere near as fulfilling, and I don’t mind saying that (and have done on several occasions). The work was either boring or impossible (requiring somebody with specialist knowledge of a product to step in and effect a fix after I’d spent a week trying to figure it out on my own/with others) and almost always totally irrelevant to the outside world. Whilst other organisations were romping away with a tried and tested Windows XP/Server 2003 infrastructure, here I was muddling away with a bunch of NT4 shite and proprietary software that most people had never heard of.
It was particularly disappointing to see that after the work that myself and another colleague had put in, new opportunities were not even offered to us, instead taken up by somebody entirely new coming to work with us.

Regardless, all experience is good experience, and the money was good. The people were good too. I’ve been at the company long enough now to make some good friends there, which does help the crappier days get by!

Speaking of friends and outside of work, I saw one of my best friends finally achieve his goal and head off to stretch his considerable talent at a university down in the South, and I also saw another of my best – and in fact my longest lasting – friends come back from Durham to live much closer once more!! We set about making a weekly arrangement whereby we’d go to the cinema each Wednesday to see whatever was on. It was nice, to have something to break the week up and pull my mind away from work and the interminable commute, or whatever else was on it at the time.

I also finally realised my dream of owning a car that I could be truly proud of. In 2007 I swapped my Ford Ka3 for my parents Renault Laguna. This year, I bought myself a 2006 BMW 320Cd. It’s truly a great car. It looks fantastic, drives wonderfully, and gets better economy than the Laguna. What more could a young, car-loving commuter ask for?
The monthly repayments are kinda high, but I borrowed money from my parents at a set interest rate and I hate debt, so I’m trying to pay that back as quickly as possible.

Skipping across to 2008 money, I invoiced more money this year than I have ever done before, which marks off my 2008 goal of “Earn more money”. Note that I say invoiced, because to date, I’ve still not been paid for 7 weeks, which works out somewhere in the region of £4,000.

The aforementioned Proveya Ltd went into liquidation, along with their double-dealing bastard of a manager, leaving myself and many other contractors up a certain creek without a certain instrument. We’re still trying to reclaim the money.

As we all know, in the final quarter of the year the bottom fell out of the economy and the shit really did hit the industrial-sized fan.
Just before Christmas, I was informed that the position I held was to become a permanent role. Which basically means, either I take the position (a salaried position, and what I’m guessing will be an effective ~40% pay cut) or leave when they find somebody else to take that place.

I hate being forced into a decision, but that’s what I have to decide on when I go back next week. If the offer is too low, I simply cannot afford to continue there. If the offer is right, then I’ll be upping sticks and moving to the area, and – unless the company is generous – scraping along. Unfortunately I made the error of predicating my standing orders on being in contracted employment for the forseeable future, which means I have a large amount going out each month. Easily covered as a contractor. Not so easily once on a lower salary.

There is one thing keeping me at the company which I can’t discuss here, which would do wonders for my future prospects, so it’s in my interest to try and achieve that.

I suppose we’ll see.

So, 2008/2009.

I technically made more money than I ever have, yet end the year with less than this time last year, and head into an economically uncertain 2009 with either a massive pay cut, or impending unemployment!

I’ve made some good new friends, but by the end of February will have lost the one closest (and probably most important) to me to the wilds of South Korea, and if I’m out of HP-CDS, those new ones will be elsewhere too.

My career is pretty much stagnant. I’ve not pushed myself forward in what I learn, primarily because the opportunity to do anything of interest and/or in relation to what I learned in Coventry is simply non-existant unless I move to another company, as far as I can see (and in spite of all the pie-in-the-sky half-promises made at the company).

As for my own personal goals .. fitness, socially, etc., it’s been as underwhelming as 2007 was. I won’t even bother with excuses this time, I’m simply not performing as well as I should.

All in all, a pretty mixed bag. Plenty of good, but also plenty of bad to balance it out. 2008 sped by like a blur, and I think that was mainly because it was just so damn uninteresting.

Here’s to 2009, and lighting a fire under my arse.

The music creeps gently into my ears, pouring itself over my eardrums like warm oil.

I keep my eyes closed, listening to the chords and gentle melodies echo gracefully from the stone flags that pave my surroundings, and the glass canopy that shelters me from the inky black skies above. The gentle burbles and trickles of water from the pool in the centre of the enclave mix with the rich musical notes, soothing away any and all of the troubles that, moments ago, encroached on my mind.
My body is warm; a balmy current of air flows over me, almost too subtle to notice but despite my sense of deep relaxation, my sense are simultaneously soothed and heightened.

I open my eyes and look upwards. There is no light save for that inside the pool. Crystal blue light ripples across the glass canopy, an oblong of serene calm that diffuses outwards into the black of the night sky, providing the perfect visual complement to the aural atmosphere.
Beyond the glass walls that surround us, curving from the roof to meet the sandstone flags, there is nothing but night. It feels oddly comforting but I wonder if it would feel so were the barrier not there. It is a fleeting thought of contemplation which passes quickly.

Closing my eyes again, I stretch my arms outward, feeling as though I am drifting slowly on a current of warm air towards the earth. My hand touches another; her skin is soft and warm as always and I gently feel the outline of her hand and wrist. She is with me again. Though I cannot see her, I feel her smile.

Minutes pass, or perhaps just seconds. Time blurs, it is a meaningless frippery in this place, and I have no need nor want for its presence.

Eventually we rise, walking past the rippling, crystal-blue waters and emerge from the warm glass enclave into the night.
The air is cool and refreshing, not biting but a contrasting complement to the warm air within. We step to the edge of the building we are atop of and look downwards.

Below are the lights and noise of a busy city. Within the lights and noise are the complications, the problems, the challenges and the people of my life. I long to be there but simultaneously never want to return. I would stay here forever if I could.
I reach for my companion, but she is gone, melted away into the night sky. The enclave is receeding from view and soon I can barely make out its soothing blue light, and the gentle music that soothed me is now silent.

That place is not real, the sensations it evokes nothing but a dream. The woman is not mine to hold, the feelings forever cursed to lie entombed and locked away for none to see.

I close my eyes again, knowing that when I re-open them I will be back in a room a million miles away from that place, that person, that wonderful sense that nothing really matters …

Inspired by Leftfield: Melt

I’ve had a lot on my mind lately, of the personal variety. Makes a difference from stressing over things that I can’t fix at work I suppose, but this is the kind of stuff that means I don’t eat or sleep so well, which is a bit of a fucking pain when you’ve got to get up at half five every morning and slog 100 miles up the M4 into work.

I’ve just been sitting here tidying up bits and pieces with iTunes on shuffle, when Look for the Woman by Dan le Sac & Scroobius Pip came on. I’m a big fan, absolutely love the album, and think that Pip is a lyrical genius. Then these verses hit me, and it was almost like he was talking directly to me …

I guess lately I’ve had too much time to think and, yeah, way
too much to drink and when the paper meets the ink over
thinking is the chink in my armour. But that’s just what I do.

And I’ve always been that way forever questioning each
day and every play that’s made that may mean when I lay
my busy mind will make me pay by finding problems and
reasons that might not even be true

You can listen to the whole track here (ignore the crappy slideshow over the top of it)

But I’m listening, and thinking … crap that’s me all over! Just this week I dug a hole for myself through no other reason than over thinking a situation that apparently didn’t even exist in the first place … it’s kinda nice to have it verbalized in a song though