Caught a cold off Kate the other day and have felt like a poo parlor ever since.

It’s a nuisance because not only have I been feeling crappy but I have a very fragile mood in the motivational stakes, if I’m ill I pretty much do sod all.

Even worse being ill I forgot to get my prescription and have been without Mr Zac the Professional for 4 days, I could feel it leaving my system yesterday.  Felt weird as hell.

Oh Well. But yeah, there’s been plenty I’ve wanted to blog about recently but just couldn’t be arsed.

As part of my therapy i have to visit public places and try to engage in random conversations.

Well a few weeks ago I went to a nearby pub, and I took my iBook, at first I plonked the bag on a solitary table and went to grab some ale.  On returning some old guy had appeared at the adjacent table and mumbled to me that he was concerned because there was a bag left on its own and he thought it might be a bomb, hoping he was joking I just went “oh, haha yeah.”  So I sat down and fudged around with the iBook, trying to connect to the cloud network that was supposed to be available at the establishment.  Then the old guy started mumbling at me again, not only did he mumble incoherently but he also liked to randomly insert “fuck”, which I find quite offensive when from ppl I’m not acquainted with, (make a note of that.) So he clocked the laptop and started sounding off, educating me about W3C web standards.  Turned out he was some retired teacher or lecturer in the area of I.T.  ‘Cept his brain had obviously gone to pot.

He went all weird on me and said he was gonna do a big favour, despite the fact that my contribution to his life have been zero and that I was trying to ignore him because he smelt rotten.  He continued being vague about this pearl of wisdom or whatever it was he was going to bestow upon me.  He then brought out of a pocket a flash drive and gave it to me, whilst shuffling around nervously, mumbling some more about how the contents of this thing was going to help me on my journey of self-fulfilment.  He continued this for some time, telling me his name was “Toe-Knee”, which I know because he pointed to his toes, and then his knee.

Finally, he departed the pub so I stuck the flash drive in the iBook to have a butches and it was full of warez.  It wasn’t even good warez, it had Photoshop 7 and some old version of office and some crappy anti-virus apps.  What struck me though however was that it was all Windows stuff. despite the fact that I had been sitting there with a Mac.  I was supposed to return this to him once I had gleened all I need from it, despite not knowing who he was or where he lived.  I just left it on the table and left he pub.

And you see, this is why I don’t like “people”.  The general public if you will.  Because, even though this guy was harmlessly dumb and senile, I was shaking throughout the encounter.

This week CBT is heating up, I had to visit some kind of enthusiast group. We chose a local photography club because I have a passing interest and also because this week some slide show was scheduled so I would be able to sit back for the most part.

So I stressed and stressed about it, spun between bottling out and going..what..the..heck about 200 times.  Luckily when the time came to set off I was in the what..the..heck phase.

Hmm, well from the CBT perspective it was quite a success.  Sure I felt pretty hot and bothered and couldn’t relax, but at least I went and managed to get inside.

Rather interestingly the club has been going for over 150 years , unfortunately so had most have the people there.  OMG it was full of pensioners!  I was at least half the age of the next youngest person there!

Still, I’ve been celebrating/recovering from the ordeal by getting drunk.  I now feel sick.

More therapy comes my way.

I was first promised CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) from the NHS in August 2005, but as we know they love their waiting lists.  It took until last week for them to get back to me and give an appointment.  The first of which I had yesterday and is looking kinda promising.  The pay as you go counselling I had been having I stopped a while ago because it was too much just like a cosy chat, I need someone a bit more aggressive.  I’ve gotten another woman, but this NHS specimen is a total battle-axe, she remind s me of a school head-mistress.  Scary!  Don’t get me wrong, she’s considerate and understanding.  It’s a good mix so i’m positive she might have more luck encouraging me to face my fears.  CBT’s all about exposure and shitz, that you have to force yourself to do the stuff you can’t stomach to condition your brain not to become anxious.

I don’t like it!   But I have to

Ugh, still cannot think of anything to write about, and now I feel all crappy. Achy and tired, ooh and now I think a cold is coming on. *sneezes*

I have a really stupid body I really do. I don’t know if its because of all the drugs and steroids and what not I take for my eczema but I wager it is, a lot of them work by reducing or crippling the immune system in some way. You see, part of the cause of eczema is the skins over-reaction to irritants in the atmosphere, in food, and in every-day living, so it’s obvious how to develop a drug for such a thing. Except they don’t, eczema has not enough of a high profile for money to be spent on its cure. It’s ended up in such a situation that the drugs that work the best for eczema are ones that were created for other things, such as organ transplant rejection and asthma. But of cause, these drugs don’t target eczema directly and are potent in other ways, with side effects and other nasties. I’ve taken so many different cocktails of these drugs over the years that I swear I’ve done my body irrecoverable harm. In particular, I now catch every bug and virus going around.

Dunno, what struck me earlier this week but it was weird as hell, I’ve got a strange swelling at the back of my gums, just behind the last teeth you have in your palette (I dunno if I have wisdom teeth, I think I might have one, it’s a mysterious tooth). Right now, when I chew, the folds of swollen gum get in the way. But anyway, whatever the infection, or bug is that has caused this has sent my Anti-Bodies to go nuts, all my limbs are dead, achy and useless. I’m tired, dizzy, can’t think straight and ugh.

Weird ass things like this happen to my body so freaking often these days and I am sure it’s because of the potent treatment I have undertaken in the past. Gosh.

Saturday I went to a very nice restaurant in Leeds called Bibi’s, its a very popular place which has been a staple of Leeds dining since forever, it has a 40’s style décor and you always expect Agnatha Christie to be writing a Periot there, it’s quite kitsch really but the food is yummy-woo.  I had snails in a strange pie and then sea-bass for mains.  Something i’m discovering increasingly apparent however is that the more expensive the restaurant the worse the food is for your heath, especially mine.  They stick tons of butter in everything and so afterwards I feel like i have a soccer ball in my gut and now i’ve been bitten by a skin flair up, I feel like i’m being tickled by a thousand fingers all over.

I love the Apple Keyboard to bits, it has in my opinion a perfect tactile feel, a good compromise between noisiness and jellyness. But, it’s also a good example of Apple design that absolutely has to be treated with kid-gloves if you want it to stay looking prestine.  It has a translusent case, which looks great for the first week and then begins to show everyone your eating habits and problematic hair lose.  I’ve only had this particular specimin a few weeks and look at it already!  Hey, that photo was of the whole keyboard and I cropped it to an inch of its life to show the yuck and it still looks clear, despite the knockers I love my camera, imagine the damage I could do with a macro lens!   Actually, I want a telephoto lens before a macro, the most affordable but still OK four-thirds (thats the standard of lens my camera uses) is 200 quid, but the couple I’ve watched on ebay have gone for the 120 quid mark.  Mmmm, still not an impulse buy.  damn.

I had already lost a bit of blogging fever because my cyclical in style depression is looming around the place, it’s really annoying, at the moment I’m waking up thinking to myself “ooooh, I fancy working on that coding project I’ve got going today” and I spring out of bed, read my webfeeds and then take Eddie for a walk.  Then when I get back and sit at the comp something comes over me, everything slows down… no thats not right, ugh you see this is the bit I find impossible to explain.  But yeah, my mind clouds over and I sit here for some minutes and then think to myself “fuck it, i’m going back to bed.”  Still, at least it isn’t bi-polar, did ya see that doc Stephen Fry made about it?  Twas fascinating.

So that was the first reason for bloggy slackiness but then my Cheap-assTM hosting went tits up.  They had fireworks from a hard drive and it turns out they don’t have much in the way of mirroring going on… that’s why it’s Cheap-assTM.  Felt like days passed before I could post anything, and even when the site came back the databases took a further day or 2 to be restored.

And to make things even more irritating they haven’t restored one of my databases properly, my listmania one where I catalogue shit, and is now a pretty damn vast database has been restored without the UTF-8 encoding intact.  So all them foreign films have now got titles like “La Vie Un Gar^&$son, Mons^&£@^n”.  I’d email Cheap-assTM to restore it again… properly, but I figure the chances of them managing it now are probably nil.  So I’m just going to have to go back to the last version I have of it locally, which is about a month old and merge them somehow.  It’s most annoying.

Re-Frederator the podcast is great, it’s an offshoot of Frederator and it shows a classic/antique cartoon every single day. The other day they presented an ancient episode of Casper, and in one scene, whilst the camera panned across a dark room of drapped belongings I spotted an object that can only be described as phallic, so suggestive does it look that I cannot imagine it being unintended. Those dirty animators.

The other night I was itchy intensely the entire night. It was one of my worst flare-up’s for some time and I felt absolutely terrible. When it was time to get up in the morning I just didn’t want to move, had the whole feeling clammy and yet dry, and sore and creaky. I didn’t want to move a single limb an inch. Looked so red and blotchy, I took a photo, cropped it to a tiny segment for embarrassment reasons, but suffice it to say my skin was as that photo all over my body. Thankfully, it gradually wore off throughout the day and by the next my skin wasn’t too bad. Hope the photo doesn’t put you off your food. Hmm, wonder if I can find a point where it can tile/repeat, could make a great gross out texture for a game.

Hey scan.co.uk is going straight to the top of my favourite online retailers. When I ordered the RAM I knew it was out of stock and didn’t mind waiting a few weeks. When I ordered they sent an email, separately to the confirmation to tell me its out of stock but that they expect a new batch to arrive on the 25th. Then they sent me an email to tell me the item has arrived and is awaiting to be despatched to me… then a few hours later an email arrived to tell me it has been despatched. It arrived on Friday! How is that for service! They tell you exactly what’s going on at every stage, plus you’d ordinarily expect to pay a premium for such a service and yet this memory was less than half the price of most places. Awesome. After installing the RAM (which is easy peesy lemon squeesy on the iMac CD) the first thing I did was check “about this mac” to see if it was running at the proper 667MHz speed, it was. Next I booted into Apple Hardware Test and did the extended system test, this Passed. Then ran MemtestOSX which this time managed to lock 1715MB for testing, I left it going and went downstairs ‘cos this is a really in depth test and takes freaking hours. I let it complete 3 test cycles and it didn’t make a single mistake. Next to check its running fast enough. Ran XBench and the memory actually scored ever so slightly faster than it did with the 1GB, this is possibly because it can take advantage of dual-channel optimisations when there are 2 sticks inside. Also, for completeness sake I rebooted into windows (boot camp stylee) and ran PCMark ‘05, just as with Xbench it scored slightly more than when it was 1GB. So hey, you don’t always have to pay the extra! Now all i’m regretting is that Apple don’t allow you to buy the iMac with no memory installed, would have saved about 75 GBP per GB. Sure I could have got the iMac with 512MB, but i would have had to sell the 512, otherwise end up with a mismatched pair adding up to 1.5GB.

I really cannot think of anything to say today even though i feel quite chirpy. Silly head, i have a very dumb little brain you know? That’s Sally in the picture, she occasionally invites herself into my room and chews on the crumbs. Today she managed to clamber up my desk and rested for freaking hours on that tissue box.

The other day I discovered to my horror that i’ve become a porky pig. Scales are evil. Anypoop I’ve had to start running again, flabby fights are terrifying. Oh yeah, the cure’s lost came on my shuffle whilst I was hitting that damn wall and its such a great song for running to, its got this whole running away from your life, keep running, arrrrgh gotta keep running feel to it.

There is something terribly wrong with that desk reflection isn’t there. lol