write.as/jonbeckett

This evening I erased the hard hard-drive on the old netbook computer that’s been kicking around the house for the last few years, and gave it to my other half to donate to charity. She works at a school, and a charity regularly visits to take hardware away with them for various projects.

I bought the computer about nine years ago – back when netbooks were taking over the world, and were incredibly cheap. It’s still a perfectly good computer for writing – the only problem is I have a much better one that weighs half as much, has a full size keyboard, and lasts all day on a battery charge – a Chromebook.

For the last couple of years it suffered repeated frontal-lobe lobotomies as I re-installed it’s brain again and again with various different flavours of Linux. I had no practical purpose in doing so of course – I was tinkering. I’m good at tinkering. Actually, that’s perhaps not such a good thing to be good at.

Anyway – another computer down (we donated another netbook earlier in the year).

We still have an old Macbook hiding in a bag under the desk, and an iMac in the attic (one of the pretty coloured Macs with a built-in screen). I seem to remember the iMac being a novelty birthday present – acquired from a school where it had been sitting untouched and unloved in a store cupboard for twenty years. It now sits in our attic. I really should get it back down.

In the grand tradition of discovering movies thirty years after everybody else, I finally sat and watched “Adventures in Babysitting” this evening with Miss 16. I finally get it – I get the whole thing about Elizabeth Shue, and I finally understand Jeff Winger in Community making such a big deal about Britta looking like her.

I’m pretty sure the movie will be filed firmly on the shelf labelled “great movies that can be left on in the background that you don’t have to pay much attention to”, and there’s nothing wrong with that – the world needs more of those movies. Movies like “The Breakfast Club”, “Sixteen Candles”, “Pretty in Pink”, and “Some Kind of Wonderful”.

Why were we watching “Adventures in Babysitting” in the first place? Because Miss 16 finished her first day of college today, and she wanted to de-stress. We were home alone – the rest of the family was at rugby practice – so I bought ready meals, and we camped out in front of the TV together.

I’m not sure I can put into words how happy we are about the way things are finally turning out. After two years of uncertainty – that have remained conspicuously absent from this blog – we have a happy, smiling sixteen year old that is attending college. We walked into town together to buy food earlier, and she talked non-stop about her day. I can’t remember the last time that happened. I’m smiling while writing this.

Oh – one last thing – she’s taking on babysitting work locally to make money through college. Let’s hope her experiences are a little less exciting than those in the movie.

I deactivated my Tumblr account last night. I dread to think how many times I have re-joined Tumblr over the last three, four, or five years. Every time I walk away, I miss the people that used to tell stories there, and head back to catch up with their adventures. The circle has been getting smaller for some time now though – it was time.

I’m not going to make any sweeping statements about Tumblr, or the nature of the internet, or blogging, because I’ll almost certainly be wrong. I can talk about me though – and the realisation that Tumblr had become “one more place” – another place to try (and fail) to keep up with. At times in the past I’ve found myself skipping between Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Google+, Ello, LiveJournal, Wordpress, Instagram, Flickr – the list goes on. It’s ridiculous.

I deleted my Pinterest account earlier too. I don’t use it for anything constructive – I never have. Perhaps the only thing I had of value was a collection of extremely questionable pulp-fiction book covers.

While chatting with somebody online earlier, they questioned why I have “secret internet superhero” in my tagline. I guess the answer to that could be quite easily answered by an SOS call I received on Friday afternoon. A good friend’s website had been hacked, and the webmaster didn’t know how to fix it – the site had been dead in the water for days. They gave me their account details, and fifteen minutes later the site was back up and running again.

While chatting about the above hack/repair/fix (whatever you might call it) on Saturday night with the other half of the website owner, the whole conversation about skills came up – and how I don’t blow my own trumpet enough. I suppose I don’t really. Most of my day-to-day work happens inside the firewalls of huge companies – and I don’t talk about any of it. I have done some public things in the past though – like that time I built an alternative to Tumblr (which was being rubbish at the time), and fifteen thousand people landed on it overnight.

Anyway. I’ve left Tumblr now. I’m no longer in the “build a better Tumblr” game either – mostly because I have no interest in running anything. Building things is the fun bit – running things is a horrific thing that only masochists might possibly enjoy. I know this, because I once ran a rather large website (that I built) for writers. Never, ever again. It’s like dealing with an army of two-faced toddlers armed with unimaginable insults, and infinite amounts of time on their hands. We caught several people with multiple accounts, starting arguments with themselves as “social experiments” to then draw others in. You can’t make it up.

I probably sound really cynical about everything, don’t I. I’m not – honest. Just tired. Tired of everybody else’s drama.

We were invited out to a 50th birthday party last night, hosted at the local rowing club on the river – the same rowing club where you might typically have found Katherine Granger and Steve Redgrave in years past. I seems ridiculous, but I have lived nearby for seventeen years, and never set foot in the place until yesterday.

The invite stated “dress to impress” in bold lettering, so I dug out my suit, polished my shoes, and pressed a shirt – my other half pulled a “going out out” dress from the wardrobe, and got Miss 16 to help with her makeup. The mile or so walk into town took rather a long time, because apparently high heels are painful to walk any distance in – which is why a pair of flat shoes were in a bag slung over my shoulder.

We arrived precisely when we had been asked to – we’re kind of sticklers for that, and laughed with other friends who arrived within moments of each other – all watching the clock as they walked across the bridge to the rowing club. I busied myself with buying drinks and taking photos of the river while more and more friends arrived. It’s funny – I never think of myself as having many friends, but I guess last night disproved that. I said as much at the end of the evening – that we have lucked into the best circle of friends over the years, and everybody laughed – presuming I was drunk.

I’m not sure how it happened, but five hours flew past in the blink of an eye. We drank enough to put a rhinoceros to sleep, talked about life the universe and everything, recalled countless memories of our collective children’s adventures, and danced like we never had a single lesson (no, really – none of us have ever had a single lesson – it was evident).

I promised myself earlier in the evening that I wouldn’t drink too fast early on. A friend burst out laughing when he saw me walking away from the bar with a third drink in the first hour. At least I had the wisdom to stay on one drink all night – the locally brewed IPA. I’m really not sure how many I had – perhaps five or six in total – and have absolutely no idea how I have no hangover this morning. I can only guess the pasta I pigged at dinner-time – before we left the house – had done it’s job.

There’s something about walking home from gatherings with friends in the silent streets during the early hours of the morning. As we made our way along the deserted footpaths – my other half now carrying her high heels – we laughed about the friends, conversations and antics of the evening. We giggled about the local builder dropping his drink in the middle of the dance-floor, the photos from the instant photo booth (a genius idea), and the hilarious antics of a certain pretty blonde friend who I described as “somewhat passive aggressive” in her recruitment of dance partners – to which her husband chipped in “I’m not seeing it – I think I might just call it aggressive”. You know what though? We wouldn’t change her – or any of our friends – for the world.

After much thought and deliberation last night – you know – a few seconds worth – I have decided to stop writing draft blog posts in a text editor and storing them in a ridiculous obsessive compulsive storage system. This will of course have no impact on you as a reader, so I don’t know why I’m telling you – and god forbid I write an interminably boring post about how I write my blog posts. I guess this opening paragraph is straying ever so close to that line though, isn’t it – so I better change subject quickly.

You never know though – maybe if I just plaster my thoughts straight into the mighty Wordpress, it will be like emptying the fire-hose from my head – which could be argued is the most stupid thing I could possibly do, given the madness that tends to circulate around my poor brain at the best of times. Maybe I just need a little bit of faith in the many, many filters I pass thoughts through before I blurt them out into the world?

So. It’s Saturday morning. Because I worked from home yesterday, it doesn’t feel like Saturday morning at all. The washing machine is rumbling away in the background, there are clothes on the line, the dishwasher has already been emptied, the sink-full of washing up that materialised overnight has been cleared, I’ve had a shower… what other mundane things can I list out to make it sound like I have anything going on in my life at the moment?

We have been invited out this evening to a grown up party in town – for a fiftieth birthday. I will be ironing my suit and a dress shirt later. I might even polish my shoes. There is an event on Facebook for the party, and I’ve been nosing through those attending – thankfully I’ll be able to hide among a circle of good friends. The huge majority of us are those that typically think “but it’s the weekend – I was planning on eating pizza and watching movies – do we HAVE to go out?” – so at least I won’t feel so guilty about thinking that. Of course after having a couple of drinks we’ll all be laughing, and saying to each other “We should do this more often!”. It’s strange how that happens.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go around the house and do that thing that Dads do when the kids are sitting in their pyjamas watching cartoons – rather than ask them to get dressed, I’m going to open the windows and doors “to let some fresh air in”, and then watch them wrinkle up like vampires exposed to sunlight.

I’m working from home today. This really means I’m answering emails, carrying on the research I was doing yesterday, running back and forth between the washing machine and the washing line, and trying to ignore the children who have brought friends home, and are now re-filling the sink with washing up. My other half is hiding in the lounge, knitting something.

Everybody goes back to school and work next week – the summer is over. I can’t imagine what Monday morning is going to be like – probably somewhere between “Apocalypse Now” and “Clockwise” – the movie where John Cleese loses his mind. Somehow we have to get the entire household back onto the rails it runs on during term time.

I guess the huge news this week is that our eldest got a place at college – she has an ID card hanging on her bedroom door, and will no doubt be going stationary shopping this weekend. Her college is only a bus ride away, so she will be heading out to a nearby bus-stop on a morning. There’s a long and complicated back-story around her that I’ve never written about on the blog (because it’s her story to tell, not mine) – suffice to say that seeing her leave the house on weekday mornings over the coming months will be emotional. All the happy thoughts.

Here’s something you probably don’t know – half the reason I know it’s the 1st September is because I write blog posts in text files before copying them onto the web. I always have. I store them in year and month subfolders, and name each file after the year, month, day and title of the post. I know it borders on obsessive compulsive. This morning I had to make the September 2017 folder.

While writing this Spotify is playing the “Favorite Coffee House” playlist – I really should have a browse for some different playlists, or make my own playlist, but never quite get around to it.

Right. Back to the research. Back to the email. Enough of this head emptying nonsense.

p.s. I’m amazed I don’t have a hangover today – we headed out to a friend’s house last night for drinks – mostly because we hadn’t seen them in months. They poured me several glasses of gin from very pretty bottles. I know nothing about gin, other than the history of why it became popular in the first place (150 years ago tap water would kill you, and the government didn’t tax gin). So yes – amazed I have no hangover.

During a break from the regularly scheduled mayhem at work this morning I ran the “Second Life” client software on my work laptop, wondering if it still worked. After a few moments a three dimensional recreation of an Irish bar began reconstructing itself on the screen, along with a number of crazily dressed patrons. Moments later music erupted from the headphones scattered across the desk from me – I think it may have been the Dubliners. Moments later the unfolding scene ground to a half and “Second Life” crashed on it’s backside. I suddenly remembered why I hadn’t bothered with it for the last couple of months.

In a browser not very far away, I submitted a search to the mighty Google:

“Second Life Alternatives”

This brought forth a number of incredibly nerdy articles discussing the pros and cons of various massively multiplayer virtual reality environments available on the internet. I thought it rather mysterious that “World of Warcraft” wasn’t on the list – if you ignore the quest gameplay, it’s actually a very good (and free) virtual world to chat with friends – I know because I’ve done it.

I spotted a name on the list of virtual worlds that I had seen on voucher cards in town. “IMVU”. The client was a free download, and it seemed membership was free too. Against my better judgement I installed the client, and started messing around with it.

Five minutes later a rather attractive twenty-something avatar stood in front of me, wearing a black shirt, black jeans, and black sneakers. I gave him a suitable name, and then set about figuring out how the hell any of the controls worked, or what you could actually do within the virtual environment.

Fast forward half a day, and I’m sitting in bed with the chromebook writing this. I spent several hours this evening – inbetween chores – dipping into and out of IMVU, and a virtual world filled with bars, clubs, streets, beaches, and everything inbetween. I chatted with people all over the world, and went clothes shopping for pretend clothes with pocket money the game gave me in return for poking around and trying things out.

Any normal person would probably have struck up conversation in a virtual cafe with an attractive virtual model type avatar, and made virtual babies (or whatever else it is that people do in IMVU – I really have no idea). Of course I’m not a normal person. Within an hour I had discovered a Country and Western club, and how to make my little guy dance.

I used my free credits to buy a cowboy hat, some leather boots, and a pair of Levi 501s. Moments later I sprinted back onto the dancefloor just in time to hear Rascal Flatts rip into “Backwards”.

I still don’t know what I’m doing with IMVU, and I don’t know if the novelty will last much longer than 48 hours. It all seems tremendously random, and trying to make conversation with strangers seems shallow, contrived, and forced. I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far that much of the “world” is free – after reading feedback earlier in the day on the social internet, you might have thought the company behind the virtual world were modern day highwaymen – I suspect many of those writing reviews were young kids that had tried to game the system and had been caught. Maybe not. We’ll see I guess.

I guess if IMVU has a major failing, it’s that everybody looks very similar in the virtual world – too similar. It’s also difficult to make anybody that doesn’t look like a magazine cover model (believe me, I’ve tried) – which worries me, because I think most of the marketing is aimed at young teens. Way to go with making them feel awful about their appearance, when faced with virtual Barbie and Ken dolls to masquerade as.

Anyway. Time will tell. Tonight was an exception of sorts – I generally wouldn’t have the time to mess around with virtual world rabbit holes – I may not again for a few days.

Did I mention there is a free mobile app too? Yeah – that’s going to be a slippery slope and a half.

I woke with a start at 6am this morning – from an apparently thrilling dream that I cannot remember. While contemplating the bedroom ceiling, and watching a spider attempting to kill a shield bug, something made me compare my wrist watch against the bedroom alarm clock. One was wrong. I smiled while remembering the story my Dad told me when I was young – that having two clocks in no good at all, because if one is wrong, you don’t know which to trust.

After quietly rolling out of bed I tiptoed downstairs, looking in on the younger children as I passed their bedroom doors. Both were spread at crazy angles across their beds, half-covered by crumpled and twisted sheets.

Downstairs the cats congregated in the kitchen – stretching, while trying to look disinterested as they figured out where to stand to cause maximum disruption until I fed them.

After a shower and a shave I set off for the nearest bus stop, and fiddled with change in my pocket while waiting. I was the only passenger on the bus for the majority of the journey, and became lost in thought as we made our way slowly out of town. Upon arrival at the bus station I thanked the driver, and set off on foot, rolling my shirt sleeves, and wiring myself for sound.

There’s something about walking the streets of a town before it becomes overrun with busy people, filled with their own self-importance. I could have caught a second bus, but walked the three-or-so miles to my final destination – listening to podcasts, and trying to ignore the part of my brain that was starting to ratchet up stress levels in anticipation of the day ahead. A cafe opposite the office provided a hiding place for the final minutes – I nursed a cup of cappuccino, and started to go over everything I had done on Friday – playing through the code in my head. Sometimes I can’t help myself.

Seven hours later I walked back across the car park, and began the several mile return walk to the bus station. Everything had worked. Absolutely everything. My fears were unfounded. I smiled at my own paranoia as I plugged earphones into my ears, connected them to my phone, and hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button in the music app.

The opening bars of The Pretender, by Jackson Browne filled my ears, and I smiled.

I got up a little over an hour ago. After heading to the shower, brushing my teeth, and getting dressed, I wandered into the lounge and discovered the younger children already camped out on the sofa, topping up on cartoons. I remember doing the same when I was their age – some things never change.

While clearing the junk room last night in order to do battle with the fleas the cats have brought in once again, I discovered a bag full of various Nintendo games from years past – several Gameboy Advances, and a number of various DS hand-helds. I charged them overnight, and handed them over this morning – they are once again “new” to the children. Suddenly Zelda and Mario are far more interesting than Total Reality Island, or whatever other junk they were watching.

Our eldest has become quite the Manga and Anime fan over the last year – I also found her old DS, and will show her how many Manga influenced role playing games exist for it later – no doubt she will spend a good few hours trawling through EBay in search of an original copy of Chrono Trigger once she sees the reviews.

As mentioned earlier, we are battling fleas again. This summer has been the worst I can ever remember. I get it – we have cats – they roll around in the garden, the fleas jump on for a free ride, and they bring them in. The fleas then discover the one room downstairs that has carpet (the junk room), and set-up home. Well not after last night. I kind of went to war with them – an entire can of evil powder got dumped on their party – the insect equivalent of both Napalm and Agent Orange being carpet-bombed across their entire civilisation. I tried the “kind to animals” sprays, and they had no impact what-so-ever – hence the move to weapons of mass flea destruction.

I’m not sure that we have anything planned today. I cleared most of the washing while the family were out yesterday, and tidied up around the plae – not that you would know because their return had it’s usual effect – kind of like shaking the house in a game of Boggle.

Changing subject, while standing in the shower this morning I started thinking about this blog – about paying for it. I really can’t justify it. Even though I was reconciling the cost against stopping eating chocolate and drinking wine, it’s still quite a lot to pay out each month. I need to either find a way to make it pay without selling out (any wealthy benefactors out there?), or switch to a free option. At the moment it feels like I’m paying for a Rolls Royce to drive to the supermarket.

Postscript – as you will have guessed, reading this, I moved over to Wordpress.

After watching the boxing match between Connor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather at 5am this morning, I looked at the clock, and decided to go back to bed for a couple of hours. A little before 7am. A couple of hours more sleep would probably be a good idea.

What I didn’t count on was quite the most bizarre dream I’ve had in a very long time.

The first part seemed to revolve around a television game show I was in, where I was standing next to a fellow contestant – an elderly woman who was both incredibly posh, and incredibly nosey. As the television show went around the introductions bit, I found myself talking about my three daughters – and the old lady took over questioning from the compare – asking me what schools they went to, and so on. I have no memory of the presenter what-so-ever.

Fast forward into the actual game, and we are standing around a mighty tree, whose leaves seem to be made of foam cubes – much like minecraft blocks. I am in a team with a guy I vaguely know on the internet, and we are pelting balls at the foam cubes – which vanish if we hit them hard enough. For some reason we are standing one behind the other while throwing – I have no memory of why though. As the game ends, the announcer calls the scores – although I don’t remember an exact number, we scored a LOT, and the elderly woman’s team (which may have included a younger lady friend of hers) scored two. Just two. She immediately began reeling off excuses – one of them being that she was more of “a sharpshooter” – she was having to throw too high. I can’t figure that out either.

After the game show, I found myself getting onto the Hogwarts Express – I can only imagine that we had won places onto the train, but for some reason it was being used to ferry the winners to the wedding of somebody else I know on the internet – a girl that used to live in Hawaii I’ve known for years. As the train set off, I started wondering where the toilets were, but decided I didn’t need to go that badly, and could wait until we got to the wedding venue. I stood on the boiler plate of the train (strange, I know), watching the scenery go by. We were on the coast somewhere.

After arriving, my other half approached me, half holding up the bride to be, who had obviously been drinking. Between them they had a colossal number of beer bottles in their arms, and I struggled to take them and put them into a bag before starting to walk towards the wedding venue.

Along the way I got talking to somebody about how I knew the couple getting married, and somehow I knew the entire story of how they had met – she had gone for a holiday on her own in a foreign country, and had met him entirely by chance – fast forward a couple of years down the line, and they were getting married. He had a beard – that’s all I know about him – but he seemed familiar.

As we continued walking towards the venue, somebody else joined my side, and I pointed out a beach and a slipway we were approaching – and joked that the beach was where they would be sleeping.

And then – quite bizarrely – I woke up.

I don’t even know where to start. I never analyse dreams, let alone remember them – this one seemed weird enough that I really should write it down straight away. Do you have weird dreams? Can you top this one?