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"Well, I'm back," he said.
Oct. 9th, 2005 02:37 amI'm in my new place, I have now got a land line and broadband, and so I'm pleased to be able to post here again after six weeks or so.
The move happened quickly and without any hitches. My friends didn't have to help as it turns out, because I got the van at 9.00, my dad and my brother in law turned out to shift my stuff, and we were packed, up the road and unpacked by 11.30. Upon which Dad and BIL disappeared to go see the football and watch their team get spanked.
So most of the boxes are unpacked and stuff up off the floor, I have one more set of shelves to build and my living room suite will arrive in about a month. Soon be time to have a party.
What else have I been doing, then? I have re-enrolled at the uni to finish off my thesis, I've started to go to a screenwriting circle at BBC Scotland, work is getting interesting once again, and I've read some good books recently.
On books, I have to recommend Against Gravity by Gary Gibson, and City of Pearl by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
karentraviss. Both, interestingly, include themes about super soldiers. AG is the story of experimental subjects who have been infected with nanotech upgrades, CoP is about humans visiting a world where there is a natural parasite that makes its host virtually unkillable. Apart from that they are very different books; AG deals with near-future worries about totalitarian America and what happens when Homeland Security decides to revoke dissenters' citizenship and human rights so that they can be experimented upon. CoP is about colonialism, and about the kind of self-centredness that leads people and corporations to exploit the environment and other species to destruction.
Terry Pratchett's new book, Thud, is also not half bad. It's another Watch story, about the racial tensions between dwarfs and trolls in the Discworld, and it takes apart religious and racial bigotry and the kind of preachers who would try to derail any peace process because the last thing they want is peace. It doesn't have to be any particular denomination; this year we would think about Muslims, but I was also strongly reminded of Ireland, and living a mile from Ibrox stadium, and hearing the Orange Walk go past last month only a block away, I know very well that Glasgow at times turns into Ankh-Morpork on Koom Valley Day.
At work this week I had a lot of fun putting together a horror show. The company I work for is a small environmental consultancy but we have some big clients. I dare say I shouldn't be specific, but one of our biggest clients, who is the environmental manager for one of the largest multinationals, is about to go and hit his US managers with the Corporate Responsibility stick. Specifically, George Bush may not want to belive in global warming, but we at (seriously major corporation) do and you will act accordingly. So, being one of his environmental hired guns, I get to spend a day and a half surfing the web and putting together population graphs, satellite photos of pollution plumes - forget the Great Wall; China's environmental damage is what's visible from space, and India's not far behind - pictures of city growth and deforestation, damage photos from the recent hurricanes, wildfires and floods, and other things that are less savoury. For reading matter, I got him a copy of The High-Tech Trashing of Asia, a report on electronic waste dumping by the Basel Action Network which I recommend to anyone who doesn't know what happens to your PCs and monitors and printers when you dispose of them. Go read it, then go find out how to recycle your waste electronics so that you're not killing people.
So that was fun, because most of the time I do legal compliance work and management systems and it's about how to do the minimum to comply with badly-thought-out laws and to do as little as possible to add overheads to the bottom line. Once in a while I get to act on the feeling that led me to choose waste and environment as a worthwhile way to shift my (stalled) career, and get good and angry. I will have been instrumental in changing the attitudes of a significant number of people in a significant corporation and the knock-on effect will make the world a better place. I get a real buzz out of doing things like that.
The move happened quickly and without any hitches. My friends didn't have to help as it turns out, because I got the van at 9.00, my dad and my brother in law turned out to shift my stuff, and we were packed, up the road and unpacked by 11.30. Upon which Dad and BIL disappeared to go see the football and watch their team get spanked.
So most of the boxes are unpacked and stuff up off the floor, I have one more set of shelves to build and my living room suite will arrive in about a month. Soon be time to have a party.
What else have I been doing, then? I have re-enrolled at the uni to finish off my thesis, I've started to go to a screenwriting circle at BBC Scotland, work is getting interesting once again, and I've read some good books recently.
On books, I have to recommend Against Gravity by Gary Gibson, and City of Pearl by
karentraviss. Both, interestingly, include themes about super soldiers. AG is the story of experimental subjects who have been infected with nanotech upgrades, CoP is about humans visiting a world where there is a natural parasite that makes its host virtually unkillable. Apart from that they are very different books; AG deals with near-future worries about totalitarian America and what happens when Homeland Security decides to revoke dissenters' citizenship and human rights so that they can be experimented upon. CoP is about colonialism, and about the kind of self-centredness that leads people and corporations to exploit the environment and other species to destruction. Terry Pratchett's new book, Thud, is also not half bad. It's another Watch story, about the racial tensions between dwarfs and trolls in the Discworld, and it takes apart religious and racial bigotry and the kind of preachers who would try to derail any peace process because the last thing they want is peace. It doesn't have to be any particular denomination; this year we would think about Muslims, but I was also strongly reminded of Ireland, and living a mile from Ibrox stadium, and hearing the Orange Walk go past last month only a block away, I know very well that Glasgow at times turns into Ankh-Morpork on Koom Valley Day.
At work this week I had a lot of fun putting together a horror show. The company I work for is a small environmental consultancy but we have some big clients. I dare say I shouldn't be specific, but one of our biggest clients, who is the environmental manager for one of the largest multinationals, is about to go and hit his US managers with the Corporate Responsibility stick. Specifically, George Bush may not want to belive in global warming, but we at (seriously major corporation) do and you will act accordingly. So, being one of his environmental hired guns, I get to spend a day and a half surfing the web and putting together population graphs, satellite photos of pollution plumes - forget the Great Wall; China's environmental damage is what's visible from space, and India's not far behind - pictures of city growth and deforestation, damage photos from the recent hurricanes, wildfires and floods, and other things that are less savoury. For reading matter, I got him a copy of The High-Tech Trashing of Asia, a report on electronic waste dumping by the Basel Action Network which I recommend to anyone who doesn't know what happens to your PCs and monitors and printers when you dispose of them. Go read it, then go find out how to recycle your waste electronics so that you're not killing people.
So that was fun, because most of the time I do legal compliance work and management systems and it's about how to do the minimum to comply with badly-thought-out laws and to do as little as possible to add overheads to the bottom line. Once in a while I get to act on the feeling that led me to choose waste and environment as a worthwhile way to shift my (stalled) career, and get good and angry. I will have been instrumental in changing the attitudes of a significant number of people in a significant corporation and the knock-on effect will make the world a better place. I get a real buzz out of doing things like that.
