All these things that I have done

The corner of my eye really hurts for some reason. I can't see anything trapped there and it's been irritating me since last night. The trouble is that I keep feeling the urge to rub my eye to dislodge the invisible whatever and that's probably not doing any good at all. Grr. Maybe I'll go to Boots and get some eye wash before the meal tonight. Maybe. Perhaps judicious application of alchahol (to the throat, not the eye) will help :)

Memes are very strange things but kinda fun. I wonder if any psychologists have written papers on them yet. This one reminds me of the "Viral marketing doesn't work. Tell your friends" t-shirt although it's only really the same in that its artificial. Still, I'll have to check out some of the tests which appear in the stats.

The play last night was a bit mixed I have to say. And really I think the crux of the problem was that play was the wrong word for it. There was very dramatic music - a mix of Indonesian traditional and jazz I think - and the actual show was performed by shadow puppets! They raised a big screen up and shone light through it and did puppets! It was actually pretty cool and the puppetry was incredibly skilled. They started off with shadow backgrounds and then as the setting moved towards now moved to more computer generated slides and the whole thing was very slick. Unfortunately it was rather marred by the plot. They took the traditional tale of Rama and Sita and basically did a "modernization is bad and we should all go back to subsistence farming" message version of it. It was the simplisticness which annoyed me most - there was no attempt made to suggest any other point of view except for a coda in which the 2 main characters cast their votes and it wasn't clear what they were trying to do with that at all. If I go to see something billed as a play I expect a little more subtlety and intelligence than that. Maybe they should have billed it as a dance/ballet or "shadow puppet spectacle" or something then people wouldn't expect so much from it.

Good news for those of you who are fed up with me posting "I'm tired" entries in that the ginseng seems to be kicking in already! I woke up feeling much more rested this morning although I did have more odd dreams. It was bloody freezing in my room when I woke up - I'm going to have to set the heating on earlier again I think. That's one of the problems with only having me living in the house - I don't generate that much heat on my own. Oh well, I'll just have to have Alex over lots :)

The other piece of rousingly excellent news is that I can have my deposit back on the flat in London (you know, the one that I moved out of 2 months ago!) - they rang me up this morning to get my bank details and even now (or at least by lunchtime) a BACS payment should be winging my way. At last! Finally I don't have to worry about paying my credit card bill.

Hmmm. I had my flu jab yesterday and now I feel a bit pooey. I think I may have the side effect where you get a mild dose of flu! Oh well. Had a bit of a poor afternoon yesterday - went to the pub at lunchtime and had a couple and then was completely unable to concentrate on anything in the afternoon. All my things are a bit bitty and fiddly at the minute and having uninteresting problems. (IE not logic problems but the fiddling with software you don't understand to try and find out how to fix it problems). Plus because I'm waiting for input on several things I have about 6 different things going on at the moment which makes me feel a bit rushed.

On the good news side I had a letter from my next door neighbor yesterday saying thanks very much for letting me know/inviting me to your housewarming but unfortunately I'm going to be away in London til very late! This means that we can make as much noise as we like! Yay!

I think I'm going to have to not go to OUSFG tonight which is a shame. I'm still pretty tired, I need to go to Tescos and I need to pack so it makes sense but still. I quite fancied tonight which is going to be build your own SF/fantasy quest story based on various plot elements picked out of cups - quite a laugh. As you can imagine, we received quite a lot of help from the Tough Guide to Fantasyland in the planning. Ah well, next time.

OK. I am going to see a house on Saturday which looks like it would be perfect for next year, so with any luck I'll have that settled on the spot and move in on Friday of next week. Fingers crossed. On the plus side, it looks like I'm going to be able to work from home once I have moved (well, once they've set up the ISDN line and things like that) which would mean that I could avoid the only downside of living in Oxford - the commute. Not bad eh. I suppose that from the company's point of view its much cheaper to provide me with a laptop and ISDN than a desk in central London and nearly all of the stuff I do is just coding - stuff that I don't need to be in the office (or anywhere in particular in fact) to do. All I have to do it be around for meetings. Once again, fingers crossed.

Still feeling a bit ill and very tired - didn't sleep well last night cos of blocked up nose. Hopefully I'll be able to give it a kick a bit more today and get some more rest. Definitely an early night I feel.

I had the most bizarre experience yesterday. As I was walking along St Giles to see some estate agents I bumped into James Brookes who I haven't seen for about 3 years! We went to school together but then he went off to York uni and after one meet in the summer of my first year I haven't seen him since. Apparently he'd moved into Oxford the day before - his girlfriends doing a librarianship course at St Hughes! It was just so strange - it felt completely out of context. Still, we had a really good chat and I've promised to show him round when I have finally moved - it'll be cool to have a chance to be mates again.