Damned Impertinence!

Hrumph!

This morning at work I got a call from a client wanting an update on his project. As might be expected on a Monday morning he asked if I’d had a good weekend. I answered in the non-committal affirmative. He then asked “Do anything interesting?”

Well. Call me a socially inept Aspie but to me that’s stepping over the line. We’re not friends, we’re business associates. As I see it, he has no right (social or otherwise) to request information about my personal life, and to do so was frankly impertinent.

What was I going to do? Fill him in on all the details of my weekend? Tell him how I went to an old friend’s wedding lunch at the Rose in Crown at Guildford? And how it wasn’t the actual wedding because the actual wedding was in Japan and Switzerland, and explain how that was actually possible? And say that I had the barramundi but wished I’d had the steak because although the barramundi was fantastic the steak the other people were having looked even better and came with chips? And that a good time was had by all and then on the way home I saw a house flying the state flag of Wyoming for some reason? That information is mine, not to be handed out over the phone to someone I barely know.

I mean I didn’t want to know what he’d done over the weekend. Why would I? He’s a client – one among many. As far as I’m concerned he could have spent his weekend morris dancing, pin collecting or hunting the most dangerous prey of all. It makes no difference. He could be the goddamn Batman as long as he gets information to me in a timely manner so I can get his work done.

My clients are not my friends. And’s that the way it should be.

Hrumph!

(Yes, I understand the irony of saying I don’t want a client knowing details about my weekend and then posting all about it on a publicly accessible blog, but if you’re reading this then you’re either a personal friend of mine, or a complete stranger I’ll probably never meet, so it’s not the same thing :P)

Lagerphone Fever

Sports. Bah.

So, Australia didn’t get the 2022 World Cup. Big deal. I mean it’s not like it’s quidditch. I suppose it would have been nice to get more than a single vote though.

At least it solves the problem of us having to come up with an instrument as annoying as the vuvuzella. Personally I was going to nominate the lagerphone.

Waylaid by Art

Cartographical exploits

Spent far too much time over the weekend doing the first bit of art (for a certain value of ‘art’) I’ve done in ages. A hand drawn map of London.

The idea (you can’t just draw something, you need to have an idea behind it for it to be real ‘art’) was to replicate half pages from the A-Z (the London street directory par exellence) by hand and then paste them all together. As each panel would be drawn without referencing the others the end result would be a fragmented, patchwork view of the city – kind of an exquisite corpse map – with roads, rivers and rail-lines fractured or just coming to dead stops. Close up it’s a mess, but zoomed out it’s still recognisably London.

(I suppose I could come up with some art-wank about it representing the tourist’s view of the city as a collection of disconnected enclaves surrounding tube stations, but that’s just a little too pretentious, even for me :))

The end result can be viewed here. Well, sort of the end result as after I scanned it I added another panel to the lower left. But you get the basic idea.

I was inspired to create the map by Londonist’s hand drawn map exhibition.  I’ve submitted it – guess we’ll see if they like it.

Trololololojan

Trololololololololololol

Spent the last two days battling to free my work computer from the grips of a number of really nasty viruses that managed to slip in via a compromised website I visited looking for the lyrics of Eduard Khil’s trolololo song. I think it’s all clean now, I’m running a final scan in the background to make sure.

Not fun. Mr Khil has a lot to answer for 😉

Pun Unintentional

Talk about ideas that suck

So, they’re apparently making a Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie.

Hmmm, didn’t they already do that? And it sucked?

(While we’re on the subject of awful Vampire movies, I meant to say a while back that I didn’t think there was any way to make the Twilight movies worse, but that the makers of Vampires Suck seemed to have somehow managed it.)

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