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I am a Man of (non) Constant Sorrow

19 October 2006 - 10:02am -- Joseph

I think I need to chill out a bit. In other news, I've heard that Bears take a dump in the woods.

I think sometimes I expect too much. I don't mean that in a "what would you say are your major faults?" - "Well. I can be a bit of a perfectionist..." sort of way. I'm not a perfectionist. It's just that I often expect to be able to do something, naively thinking it will be easy, charge headlong into something, then swing from cheerful expectation to boiling rage before you can say "script error: call to a non-object on line 36".

It's not helped at the moment by working in an office with just Heather and some random students. It's not that Hev and I don't get on working together (I've said before I think we're getting on fantastically, considering we're together all the time). No, it's just that when computers do stupid things, and when I do stupid things and can't work out what stupid thing I did, there's no one to complain to that knows what on earth I'm talking about. A typical (bad) day will go like this:

9.32 am: Right, time to create an rss feed to then consume on the site, should be easy...

9.36: WordPress installed in a new directory: that was a doddle, I'll have this done by lunch...

9.42: Right, where's the syndication settings on WordPress....

9.45: Seriously, where's the ?%^$ing syndication settings on WordPress?!?!?!

11.15: Oh right, and I was meant to know that how exactly?

13.45: aaaaarghhhhh..... I've got the feed but the consuming script is complaining it's not a valid feed, which is throwing an array error!

Hev: That's nice dear, shall we go for lunch?

14.42: Right, I'm fed, I'm calm, I'm pragmatic - bollocks to it, let's just use a Blogger account...

Rinse and repeat, y'know?

I general I've been very relaxed since we've been in Cameroon. Life is quite simple here (for us, anyway...) no tv worth watching (no change there then), we hang out a lot, read books, play football, I've been trying to write stuff (a book, short story, more Oneironaut, other comic ideas, I dunno, just thoughts really.. ). All of which is fine, when it's going well. However, when you're reminded that you're a rubbish footballer, and actually you can't write for toffee and you've run out of good books, well, there's isn't the comfort of cheese to turn to...

So I've had a dip the last week, (which is why I haven't posted), but actually, I think that always happens (to me). Since I've been writing this blog, there's periodically been weeks where I just don't post because I feel like Kevin the teenager "Eveything's rubbish, I'm so bored..." I guess that's life. One day I'll take a look through the blog and see how regularly that happens. I envy Heather, she seems to take life on a much more even keel. "But you're much more creative than me" she would say, but I don't think that's true, I'm just stroppier. I blame it on being ginger.

disclaimer - don't worry mother, I'm not about to slit my wrists, just having a whinge.

disclaimer (2) - apologies for the whingey post

Hey ho, whinge ends.

Comments

I like the word "whinge." It's better than "whine." We don't seem to use it over here, but maybe I can begin a new trend. Especially when I feel as you described-- which I do sometimes. Good post.

Don't worry mate, your not the only one to suffer from "Object reference not set to an instance of an object"-rage

The object you're pointing is null, this could be because you've not instantiated it, it's been nulled when you didn't expect it to, or your pointer is pointing to the wrong place.

Don't worry Joe, you'll get there. In times of frustration, just move onto something else. The next time you have a shower you'll figure out the answer.

cheers guys, it's mostly sorted, except that the Blogger feed sometimes fails, which causes errors in Magpie RSS (the rss consumer script I'm using), and I can't turn error reporting off (because that's per-server right? We've just got an account, not a server to ourselves - but hey it's free and full-featured so I'm not complaining)...

Ann, glad you liked 'whinge', the post also contained one of my favourite 'cuss' words unknown on your side of the pond - 'bollocks'. I usually make a point not to swear on my blog (which is hard work), but it's such a wonderful word, and relatively, mild.

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