Before I begin, I’d like to suggest that you check this out. It’s a real-life robotic exoskeleton. Called the XOS, it allows its wearer – currently – to utilise superhuman strength, and by the look of it, it’s just the beginning.

Anyway, onto my topic of today, entitled ‘The Missing Person of the Party’.
I was supposed to be out tonight, after I got out of work at 7.20 (yup, long day today!) and after I drove into Newport, found nowhere decent or accessible to park, I came home intending on catching a bus. But being that public transport is shit as usual, there was only one more bus, and it was at 10.35. Anyway …

Those that know me, probably know me as a fairly quiet person a lot of the time, other than when with close friends when it can be hard to get me to shut up (usually with appalling jokes about meaningless stuff … my god I’m becoming Chandler more and more everyday). I’m not a massive party-goer and never really have been, but I do enjoy spending quality time with friends and generally having a bit of a laugh.

The only problem is that I’ve developed a trend over the last few years of not showing up. I’m becoming one of those people who you invite out of courtesy, but don’t really expect to show. It seems that this only applies to Newport gatherings though …

I apologise to anyone who I may offend with this, but I really, truly hate the place. It’s filthy and vandalised, mainly due to the god awful chavs that seem to infest the entire city. There are no decent bars/clubs/pubs (that I know about) and it’s not cheap enough to make it worth the odd visit, nor expensive enough to price out the Dole Queue Specials. There’s no decent parking, and I’m pretty convinced that if you park a half-decent-looking car in certain areas, the local shitheads will throw rocks at it just because they don’t like success of any sort.

It takes a lot of will and effort for me to go out there, and more often than not it’s much easier to just not bother. Cardiff is a quick train journey away, and Chepstow has proven more than often enough that it has some excellent pubs to have a nice drink with friends in.

The problem is convenience. Newport City Centre is nice and easy. What’s that? Easy? Not for me it ain’t. But then again, living where I do nowhere is – I always have to travel. So for me, going that extra step to Cardiff or going just as far to Chepstow isn’t an issue, but apparently for other people it is. I don’t want to make out like I’m a martyr or anything but when some people require a car ride for what is essentially a 5 or 10 minute walk, you realise that the chances of going further afield are pretty slim.

I have no hard and fast rule for what I like to do when I go out, but it’s either chilling and laughing, or raving my socks off to some decent dance/electronica (then anything goes after I’ve had enough to drink). A Newport night out seems to fall fairly flat on both counts, if I’m honest. Sitting upright in a soul-less Wetherspoons all night long is definitely not my idea of fun, especially when nobody really has much to talk about, and as I mentioned above, there aren’t any decent non-chav-infested clubs around.

Maybe it’s wrong, but the way I see it is, if I’m going to put the effort in to make a journey and (if I want to drink) sleep on a couch, I should be getting some fun out of it. Newport just isn’t fun anymore, and hasn’t been for years. Cardiff is full of life and has some fantastic places to go out, and to my mind there’s no reason not to go there. But it has never happened and continues to never happen, so maybe it’s time to make a break and go it alone, see what happens. Who knows?

I’ve been working with Siemens for 3 days so far with the National Assembly for Wales on a rollout of Citrix-based clients machines, running on a mixture of thin- and rich-clients and laptops.

So far we’ve just been floorwalking, which is basically walking around and helping people if they have problems. Not many people had problems. It has been very boring.

Today we had a meeting to find out the schedule for the next three weeks (I have another 4 to run on the contract after this week) and let’s just say ‘It’s gonna be busy’.

From next week I believe, we’ll all be meeting in Cardiff at 07.30 in order to do what we all need to do. I already get up at 06.30 to be in just before 08.00 so that one’s gonna require an earlier start. Next week is deliveries of kit around Wales, but I’ll be remaining fairly local.

The next two weeks (starting Sunday April 13th and working non-stop through until the following Friday (25th)) I’ll be going from Cardiff to Llandridod Wells, via such wonderful places as Tremorfa, Nantgarw and Pontypool, and ending up back at Cardiff.

It’s gonna be busy, but it’s a great way to really earn the money, so I’m looking forward to it. I just wish the starts weren’t quite so early … anybody know of a decent place to get breakfast in Cardiff near Cathays?

On another note, I connected the RSS Feed of this blog up to Facebook yesterday, and got a bunch of responses to the ‘Reading’ entry. Of course, the idea of these things is to occasionally promote discussion, it was just a bit annoying that it was all through another site

So I removed the RSS link, and we’ll see where that goes.

Talking of Facebook, it seems to be terminally broken at the moment, I can’t get it to load at all. I’m wondering if somebody’s just launched a massive Denial of Service attack against them …