03.12.2009 - 3:02 p.m.

Mixed blessings are falling over our houses, not the 'our' representing the greater collective here but 'our' as in 'mine', seems like we go through periods of staticity and then wobbly bits of change and upheaval and then settle back into a reduced waveform. At work our internet filters have been updated again and i've lost access to lolcats, youtube, flickr and b3ta, luckily (and for now i guess) i can still get to fark and diaryland so all is not lost, and bizarrely i can now get back onto 1club.fm even if it is...[buffering]... very ...[buffering]... intermittent and it's only a 65k feed too, but as i've got the office to myself for most of today i'm making the most of it, psytrance is good even if it is .... [buffering]... filled with pauses.

english is so ambiguous, but everyone loves de pawses

I've been active on ebay lately too and have sold my first big ticket item, my duplicate climbing harness, and when it sold at the buy-it-now price i was filled with a mixture of greed and remorse, i call it ebay gremorse, "i could have increased the price by another �20 and it still would have sold" never mind, the only reason i'm on ebay is to clear out the boys old toys he never showed any interest in, plus some odds and ends i've had lying around for ages, and hopefully make some space in our loft / garage, so i don't mind if i'm only making 30p on a sale as long as it's out of my house.

I'm determined to get down to brighton this month and catch up with my refugee mate, he was redundancised here in the summer and took his cash and fled south away from the town of his birth, towards a new salt tinged life on the dole by the sea, as far as i can tell he's worked non-stop since his late teens so is due a break anyway, be nice to have a few beers with a mate. He was my only friend in this town and now he's gone none of my friends live within an hours drive of me, its lucky i'm a bloke and this doesn't matter, girls tend to be all "she hasn't spoken to me in eight months so she must have fallen out with me, well in that case i'm not going to contact her either" I have friends i don't see for years at a time, but a mate is a mate and always will be, much simpler that way.

Work is crazy mad busy, year end stock counts mean i'm frantically making corrections, tying up loose ends, trying to run simulations in the test system, it never ends, i'll be glad when we reach the 21st december and only a few days left to loaf around and then ten straight days off to reeeellaaaax. At least now i've got a forky license i can get stuff done when i want to rather than have to wait for someone else to do it for me, empowerment makes me horny and happy, self reliance is the way forward.

Oberlandermann Andrew has emailed me to say my subscription is about to run out, but as i don't get paid for another two weeks i guess there's going to be a period next week when all my picchurrs vanish until i send him beer tokens, welcome to the new text based web 3.0, a picture may paint a thousand words but it doesn't use up as much of my free time as hammering out a thousand words on a subject (608 so far). Once i finally get hold of a time machine i may go back to the eighties and found a revolution in wordiness as a method of global communication, thus ending forever before it even starts the stupidity of people making stupid pouty duck faces on flickr.

I can sort of understand if you're rushing off your tits that pictures will come out with you looking pouty and strange with a blurry jaw line, but over 41.5% (from the Office of Made Up Statistics that Sound About Right) of all people photos on flickr contain one or more faces bearing the duck face of crappiness, not only is this an insult to ducks who remain sort of dignified and handsome even with a bill attached to their head, on people it makes you look like a knob trying to be not a knob, but failing and looking like a fake moron, not even succeeding as a fully fledged moron, failing to attain moronity, truly a badge of disgrace. I think i tripped over a website a few weeks back where stupid duck faced people are presented in all their silliness, coincidentally (or maybe not) i seem to remember there also being a high correlation between the quotient of facial duckiness and depth of fake tan, until you hit a value of 1 where by you look like a mahogany writing desk stained with carrot juice.

Unfortunately, none of the drawers in this stained writing desk metaphor of a person contain any self respect so these individuals are doomed to repeat their photogenic errors every time a lens is pointed at them in the belief that they look like some kind of pouty model, when in fact they are condemned to repeated submissions to the pouty duck faced website of shame. I wonder if after a set number of entries featuring the same person do they get an Ignoble Award for greatest attempt to cross the divide between "silly person pretending to be more than they are" and "gorgeous cute little platypus" which is naturally duck faced and carries itself with a happy balance of dignity and water based irresistible furriness.

Anyway i've nearly reached my limit so i can stop soon, as per the adage i could have just posted a picture of a pouty idiot and photoshopped the ebay logo and a forklift onto her forehead, but it would not have meant anything to anyone except me and i would get comments like "worst diary entry evar" and "what was he trying to say, that single picture made no sense without any kind of references"

There so a picture without words is next to useless, but words without pictures can stand up on their own, old adages are stupid and need updating.

(1076, woo hoo)