We watched Alfie (2004) last night, it was fairly boring, and none of us had any (or much) sympathy for him, so when he was like "oh man my life sucks" we were like "oh man who cares?" which was a bit harsh but he seemed to get things sorted out so he didn't really need our sympathy. I have a feeling that the original is a much more interesting film. He lacked "peace of mind" in his words, which is one of the things that God promises to give to people, and he was wondering what life was really about, so it sounded like he was pondering the existance of God so it may all work out for him in the end, but again, he's just a fictional character so none of this really matters.

Anyway, onto cause and effect, Alfie was going about bonking birds, and thinking he was having the time of his life, until "effect" started, naff consequences started to happen. In life, regarding mood, if you're currently at "average", and something bad happens, the effect of that being your average mood becomes -1 (bad), if you're wanting a better than average mood, then you need 2* good things to get to +1 (good). Despite your current mood whether you're at -2 or +2 we still need to be the same people, doing things that will enable us to get back to a positive mood, or doing things that will maintain a positive mood. I think we have the ability to do things that will increase our mood despite our current mood - we can be friendly to other people whether we feel like it or not, we can make other people drinks, etc. Not that we are doing these things for selfish reasons, but that when we do them, we are putting some "goodness" back into the day, effecting other people (in a positive way), and effecting ourself in a positive way from the reactions and interactions with other people. Doing these things grudgingly and whilst complaining may have the opposite effect and effect you and other people in a negative way.

* Unfortunately as I'm just making this stuff up as I go along, mood and happiness are more complicated than just "2 good things will make you happy", so it may actually take you a large number of good things to counter the 1 bad thing that happened this morning. So this week, starting this morning I'm going to try to put into effect good things into myself and other people... I'll let you know how it goes.

Lunch today featured all day breakfast from 'eat at jo's' with a side order of latte, they provided a nice sweetie with the latte. Anyway the total price was £5.20.

My cold seemed to go yesturday, which was nice, and the main things I did to get rid of it was: Drink lots (water, orange jiuce), have multi-vitamins (Sanatogen A-Z), have natural yoghurt, plus some pro-biotic tesco drinks, and a few other vitamins and health pills that heather had lying around the house.

Bum, I think I'm getting a cold. Got a sore throat, and feeling a bit tired and coughy. It's bound to happen, I think these things happen around now, in the change over from Summer/Autumn to Winter, as things start getting much colder outside.

So anyway, the weekend: Fri - Acoustic night, Krazy House, Sat - Ooh we went to the Tavern Company for some good grub - they do great English / American breakfast - the American featuring pancakes on the side. Free coffee / tea refills in plentiful supply. I could happily go there everyday for breakfast. Almost watched all of Saving Private Ryan, pretty grim but I didn't get to see the end. We got some co-op Pepperoni Pizza's and they were surprisingly nice despite the lack of cheese (we topped it up). Sunday - we went to Reynolds park, in our Nissan, which now has a new front exhaust bit, and we figured that the gross door fabric could be removed to reveal the original nissan doors! We also found out one of our speakers is bust - so I may have to buy some nice new speakers for it. Evening - Church.

Afterwards we watched "Shadowlands" which is about C.S. Lewis and his life with his brother and an American woman who's a fan of his. It was really good - C.S. Lewis seemed to have an interesting view of God, as someone who put people in a lot of pain (to sculpt them), and he seemed to think that people shouldn't expect happiness...

That neatly reminds me that a friend of mine has a dad who's written a book about Depression, and how pretty much all modern doctors see a pill as the solution, however the gist of what he's suggesting is that the world is a sad place, and depression is often the way we as humans are reacting to it and considering the amount of suffering and distress in the world, then surely a sad / depressed reaction is fairly normal... anyway, I think it's definitely worth checking out if you're interested in the subject as it sounds like he's found the correct way to deal with it. (It's called Beyond Depression: A New Approach to Understanding and Management by Christopher Dowrick, and is available at www.amazon.co.uk)

In other news: I've put photos from when I was in New Zealand in 1999 on www.joshwaller.co.uk . I also think Flock (www.flock.com) is really good. Ooh, and http://a9.com/ is really cool - the way they display the search results of the web and images on the same page.

We went out last night to the Camel club, I was wearing my "Livercool" top, which many people commented on (top tip for those interested in getting attention in Liverpool when out and about), it was good there, then we were going to go to the Krazy House but it was shut so we went to Modo's - and after a while we noticed everybody was watching the dance floor - lo and behold, they were watching a group of break dancers, and there was suitably old skool 80's / 90s music on for them - they even had clothes that looked like they lived in the early 90s! Fantastic!

Wallace and Grommit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Saw this last night at t’ cinema. It was really good, the rabbits were SO cute. There was a fairly decent car featured, and a decent car chase similar to the Italian job which was a pleasant surprise. The dog was very good in it, in my opinion his subtle expressions and reactions were one of the best things in the film.

There was a pre-film mini film cartoon with the penguins from Madagascar doing a Christmas cartoon, that was funny as well.

There was also an advert for Sky (National Geographic) showing a dude surfing a MASSIVE wave in the sea, this wave was FLIPPING HUGE!! Which reminded me that there’s a surf film out there that I want to see but I don’t know what it’s called – it’s fairly recent though.

Winter Mornings

It’s raining, it’s dark, and you can’t read the sign on the front of the Bus so you end up at Blackpool Pleasure beach because you got on the first bus you saw simply to get out of the rain.

Here's a picture I made: original here.

Life's a funny old game innit. It seems to mainly be about people interacting with each other, perhaps that's the one thing it is about. In fact that's pretty much all that happens all day, I get up, I go out, I interact with a bus driver, he gives me a lift to town, I get off the bus, and interact with some more people as I cross the road, then I get to work and interact with everybody in the office. As long as I'm nice to people, friendly, courteous, generally there's no problems. I guess things get weird when people don't interact well with others, like when we had our car crash, the other guy wasn't very happy, we weren't happy either, and at work when people expect everybody to do things certain ways, and then they're not, they get angry too. I think people generally take things too seriously though, like the guy who crashed into us, if he chilled out a bit, he'd accept he made a mistake and everything would go smoothly for the both of us, and at work, if the everybody chilled out, realised there's too much work, not enough staff, they could get some more staff, make everybodies lives happier, perhaps there'd be more time to do things certain ways - in fact, they'd actually have time to do things the right way.

So in conclusion: Interact well with others (be nice, friendly), and basically chill out. Respect the laws of time and physics, ie. there are x numbers of hours in a working day, and expecting 10 hours of work from an 8 hour day doesn't work for anybody.

Films I've watched fairly recently: It's all gone Pete Tong (DVD) - This is a really good film about a DJ who goes deaf. It's got some really funny bits in it. I think that it's meant to be more funny perhaps, but it's not super funny. Zoo Lander - this was on TV recently and it's still a classic. Did I mention Serentiy (Cinema) on here - it's quite good, lots of suspense, action, some interesting but freaky concepts, quite cheesy in bits and corny but generally good, maybe a 6 or 7 out of 10, i.e. better than average, but definitely not excellent (like people are claiming on imdb.com). Lord of War (Cinema) - this is a good film, it's a weird mix of action / politics - a bit too much (unnecessary) nudity in my opinion, but some good twists, although some things are made really obvious (like what happens to a car in it). We watched another film in the last month, it was on DVD, and pretty crappy / average / weird so I suppose it doesn't matter that I can't remember what it was called.

So here we are with darkness starting at around 6pm - it doesn't seem quite right that Summer's over so quickly and we're going to have to wait till March / April till we get lighter evenings again? Man, Winter can be so GREY and dark over here it's depressing, you get to work and you feel like you should be in bed still, and you leave work and it's dark already!

Anyway, on a more positive note, I'm at a new place today, and to get here I got the number 4 bus outside Iceland (Queens Square bus station, Liverpool) and for £1 you get a long tour of The Liver Birds, Albert Dock, etc. Cheapest tour bus ever? Possibly.

On the subject of Albert Dock - I'm not very impressed by them starting to build something over what used to be a huge (and fun) gravel car park - they're building some kind of huge posh building - I wonder where everybody's going to park now?

we're running low on mars bars. the infinite supply is starting to run low, and I fear it's not as infinite as first presumed. i still haven't been able to find a holiday destination that's a) cheap and b) nice. i'd prefer not to fly, i think it would just be easier that way, and probably cheaper. Iona would be nice but accomodation on the island seems pretty steep! (added another work pic of me from t'other day)

It's 11.18am and I've just had a cup of tea so I'm almost awake. Flip I want to sleeeeep! Sleep sleep sleep. I don't know why I didn't sleep all day Sunday, I think I got up around 10am ish probably a bit later, but then I was up, so next Sat / Sun I'll have to remember to sleep all day - actually we're on holiday for 2 weeks (after this week) so I'll be able to sleep all day everyday! hooray! We're still just trying to decide where to go... where should we go?

I've rediscovered Megadeth - there 2004 album is really good! Been a long time since I've listened to this kind of music - I feel like moshing! (I've written about them on www.joshwaller.co.uk)

In other news - It seems to be getting colder! We may have to start thinking about turning the heating on again in our house - we've had the heating off for pretty much all of summer.

We've got a courtesy car at the moment, and I did the do: Loading the car up with various packets of mints to eat while driving (or alternatively when stopped at traffic lights). The car has a CD player so that' cool. But basically when you get a new car, you have to go buy many packets of mints (or your favourite sweets) and put them in the car so you can eat them when you're running low on energy.

Our car, that was involved in the crash, is currently "off the road" - meaning we've been advised not to drive it (and we're not driving it). (It's still physically, at this present time, on the road outside our house).

The solicitors are involved now - as we (thankfully) have legal cover as part of our car insurance, so the costs for that should be covered. I think we will probably upgrade to Fully Comp insurance in future, as it's only an extra £100 and you can get a courtesy car from your insurance company for another £12 - currently we've had to arrange the courtesy car through other means (at our expense - but hopefully this expense can be claimed back).

So it looks like the balls rolling at the moment, and I guess we wait and see what happens next. We've had the estimates done on getting the car fixed, which involves straightening the chassis arms which sounds fairly serious, especially if it'll make the car less safe in future... watch this space...

Been in a Car Crash - at about 9.05 - 9.10 pm heading into town. We were driving down London road, at about 30mph, going through a green light, a silver Merc 2 door was at the junction waiting to turn right - or so I assumed because he had stopped and wasn't going forwards, but he wasn't indicating - so I carried on going, then he starting driving in front of me! So I slammed on the brakes, we skidded into him (as he drove into us). We had all stopped, I checked everyone was okay, he moved his car back out of the middle of the junction, and then Heather told me I needed to move the car out of the way, I drove it and parked it in front of his car and then we all got out (I put the hazards on). We both asked if everyone was alright. He said "what were you doing?" to which we replied "going through a green light", he seemed to think he had right of way, he had a green light and the lane was a right turn lane to which I said "It would have had an arrow green light if you had right of way", he said he was indicating, to which we said "no you weren't". Basically it looked like his car's bumper had a small golf ball sized hole in it, and it may have been pushed in a bit - our cars right light glass was smashed, the indicator glass was smashed, where the fog lights go was smashed, the bumper was all pushed in, (this is all on the right hand side of the front of the car), the grill is wonky, the tyre surround is wonky (rubs against the tyre when turning left) and on later inspection the bonnet is wonky as well. Heather phoned the police and asked them for advice, they said to exchange full name / address etc, which we did, the guy seemed friendly and calm enough, he didn't seem to have any defence once we pointed out that there isn't a right turn light. I think he is going to get a friend of his to fix his car because his damage looked pretty minor. I guess the next step for us is to see how much it's likely to cost to get the car fixed, and then present that to him, and see if he wants to pay for it, and if he doesn't then we claim on his insurance. We went to the A&E to get checked out to see if there was anything wrong we us - and we had a friend in the car with us at the time. Heather has a slightly sore neck, I've got a sore back, and Emma said her back hurt a bit. But overall we're fine. Our car definitely looks worse than us. I've attached a picture of what his car looks like to keep it fresh in my memory.

Or so the saying goes. Perhaps even 2 mars bars, one orange, 1 cream slice with icing on the top, and a cup of tea, and it's only just gone 11am. Last night I went home, I think I got home at about 5.30pm and basically I went and slept till about 9 / 9.30 ish, got up watched the Simpsons, then went to sleep again around 12am. I was SO tired yesturday when I got home and my eyes were hurting from looking at a computer screen all day...

I think that's what I've been doing to much of, not sleeping enough, I should just go home, and sleep from 6pm till the next day, that would be cool, sleeps great but I don't get enough of it. Although people reckon you only need 6 - 8 hours a night, but anytime I have 8 or less I end up feeling tired. I guess the body's got a certain amount of flexibility, and lee-way, so to speak, but if you keep only getting 6 hours of sleep a night you're going to get more and more tired out... I think I've been drinking lots of coffee to keep me awake, and yesturday after work I almost made myself a cuppa coffee, and I guess that if I did have a cuppa coffee I might have been able to stay awake for the evening, but I'm glad that I didn't...

 

Added some random office photos that I've just taken. People often come and go here in the IT department, so photos are a good way to remember the people...

I hate going to people's weddings, especially to people's weddings where I don't even know the people getting married. It's such a waste of a day, the people getting married wouldn't even give a poop whether I was there or not because they don't know me! They'd probably prefer it if I wasn't there being grumpy at having to go to their wedding!

people say "witty" life philosophies such as "why do something today, that you can put off till tomorrow" - which although it sounds nice, you get to have a nice relaxing day today, tomorrow you end up with more work today and potentially a more stressful day, or you just end up putting it off again and again and again and possibly never do it - until someone starts shouting at you "why didn't you do this?"

Petrol powered office chairs, that's what a fellow worker wants, so that he can drive around in his chair. I don't know where he intends on going, I'll ask him... he says he'd only want to go to the water cooler (which is about 4-5 feet away from his desk), and he'd also go to the toilet as well, which is down the corrodor.