The Ramble

Last weekend I was a guest at the wedding reception of a friend. It was a wonderful occasion with everyone dressed up and looking so happy.
Unfortunately this was followed on Tuesday by attending the funeral of a work colleague.  John worked as part of our technical CAD team and will be sadly missed by myself and the rest of the guys there. He was a real top bloke as we say round here and no one could have a bad word to say about him. If you needed his help with anything he was never too busy to assist. As a Sheffield Wednesday supporter, he gave as good as he got with the football banter and enjoyed going out for the odd pint of real ale.
For all the ups and downs you have at work, it’s the people that you work and interact with that have a large influence on whether you’re happy there and working alongside John made it a damn sight better.

It’s now 9pm. Four hours since my mood changed to depressed from varying degrees of anxiousness. Two hours before that I’d been relatively happy if a little nervous. Why is this? Football.
This afternoon all Sheffield United had to do was avoid defeat and we they would have survived a season in The Premier League. That’s all; just not lose to a team below them. Sadly for me they couldn’t, and I should have know they wouldn’t.

Supporting The Blades is like the proverbial rollercoaster - plenty of ups and downs but always ending up at ground level. Take today, the goal that sent us down was scored by a player we gave away back in January. That one goal was the margin of goal difference that meant relegation.
Thirteen years ago to avoid relegation all we had to do was not lose (sounds familiar?) and if we did 3 other teams all had to achieve a positive results. We lost in the last minute having been winning & the other three all got what they needed.
In-between these two we’ve lost a play-off final the last kick of extra time. Put in the worst performance in years to lose another play-off final 3-0. How about an FA cup semi final defeat? You got it. Once, twice, three times including one where the referee sets up the opponents winning goal.

I feel sorry for the players and the staff that put a lot of effort in striving to stay up. I’m sure they feel worse than I do. The pain and the numbness was clear to see on their faces after the final whistle as they just stood there not knowing what to do.
I’m sure and would like to be doing nothing more than celebrating staying up right now.
Plenty of criticism will come their way – “not good enough” “not fit to wear the shirt”. Perhaps they aren’t good enough but you can’t have a go at someone for trying their best, which I think they did.

I wish I didn’t feel this way. I wish mine were only a passing interest, but its not and in 3 months time it will all start again with more highs and lows.

Twenty-five years ago yesterday the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was born. With its 15 colours, 16k (or 48k) of memory and rubber keys, it was the height of home technology.
Being only four at the time I was presumably too young to have one of these. However two years later my parents bought me the new ZX Spectrum + with its plastic moulded keys & dedicated reset button, along with it came a QuickShot 2 joystick and an a programmable interface to enable any of the keyboards keys to be mapped to any joystick function.
My favourite game at the time was a Formula 1 racing game called Chequered Flag where you picked a car from a choice of three and then raced round a selection of tracks with the aim of setting the fastest lap. That was it, no other cars to race against. The only way to record you times to see if you could better it the next time you loaded the game was to note them down on a piece of paper.
Back then there was no installing games to hard drives. You had to connect you a cassette recorder, get the volume right and type J followed by “” to input the BASIC command of LOAD “” You than sat back for several minutes watching alternating coloured bars of blue and red followed by yellow and back, where hopefully on completion the game would have loaded successfully otherwise you saw the message R Tape loading error.
And like the post about the classic Mini below, there is something about the old games like Chequered Flag and Manic Minor that the newer games with their 3D life-like graphics and 5.1 surround sound just can’t match for pure simple game-playing fun.

The Spectrum also introduced me to programming. With its inbuilt BASIC language, in no time at all was I able to fill the screen with the likes of Hello World or James is cool:
10 PRINT “James is Cool”
20 GOTO 10
RUN

But it did more that that, it introduced my to structured programming with the use of FOR_NEXT loops and the IF_THEN_GOTO

I probably owe it to my long departed Speccy for my IT career.

Happy birthday Speccy where ever you are!

Thats it, work finished for the week. Having had a bank holiday on Monday followed by tomorrow (Friday)  its hardly been worth working this week.

This weekend I’m off to Edinburgh for a stag weekend involving clay-pigeon shooting and whiskey tasting.

Then I’ve got the Monday off to recover leaving another short week.

Friday night took me out to a family friends 30th birthday do. Whilst I enjoyed being there, it did bring to my mind that my own 30th is now less than nine months away.
Not too long ago 30 looked like a milestone that was somewhere away in the distance and that I didn’t have to worry about. Now it’s the next junction. Now I’m starting to feel old. I’ve even got a pension.
Perhaps its time I stopped worrying about the consequences of what I might do and just live life a bit more care free?

Hello.
So where do I start. I guess at the beginning is as good a place as any.
I didn’t actually think of what I would write when signing up to this. So lets just say I’ve enjoyed my day away from work today even if I did nothing more than get a haircut and listen to BBC 6Music. With only three calls from the office it has been on of my quieter days.

Roll on the weekend and several pints of Guinness…