1648: Visiting Hours

Tomorrow, our friends Mark and Lynette — founding members of the Squadron of Shame — are paying us a visit from Canada. They're not coming over just to see us (unlike the time we went to visit them a while back), but they are spending a few days with us. It has been a good excuse to get the last few bits of decorating done (except the dining room, which still needs repainting, but is fine for now) and to get the spare room into a state where people can actually, you know, stay in it.

It's a pleasant novelty, having a house that can actually host guests without having to resort to couch cushions on the living room floor or sofa beds. It means we can do things like host international guests for a few days rather than — at best — allowing people to crash if they can't quite make it home after a big night, and that's kind of cool.

As for what we'll be up to, I predict a mix of suitably nerdy things (video games, board games and quite possibly a one-shot roleplaying adventure) on the agenda, plus on Monday we're going for a day out in Oxford for what sounds like an interesting experience — a couple of "escape the room" games, the concept of which several of us are very much into thanks to our enjoyment of the Zero Escape video games Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (or some combination of those three, better known as 999) and Virtue's Last Reward, which you may recall me talking about a while back.

After that, we'll be paying Oxford's board game cafe The Thirsty Meeple a visit, as I'm certainly curious to see how it stacks up to Snakes and Lattes, the board game cafe Mark and Lynette took us to while we were visiting them in Toronto — and a type of establishment I've been wishing was more widespread ever since.

I'm looking forward to having visitors and having the opportunity to hang out with friends for a decent length of time. Having been working from home and subsequently unemployed for so long, there are many days when I've found myself feeling both somewhat stir-crazy and a bit lonesome. Mark and Lynette's visit is well-timed; just as I get a new job and just as my divorce is finalised — yes, Andie and I have been living in sin for a while now — we get some visitors. It all adds up to a life that feels like it's somewhat getting back on track. Normality? That remains to be seen, but it's certainly a step in the right direction.

1647: Good News at Last

Those of you following my personal life will know that I've been out of work for a little while now after unceremoniously being made redundant from my position at USgamer a while back. As you may recall from previous posts, I've been looking outside the games press for new opportunities, since although I once considered writing for video game publications to be my dream job, the reality was, as it tends to go with dreams, rather different: there was no progression, no stability and on more than one occasion, I'd woken up expecting to just do a normal day at work only to discover that either the site I was working on had closed, the entire rest of the staff had walked out due to the new management being… difficult, or that I was simply considered surplus to requirements. That is, I'm sure you'll appreciate, no way to live.

So I started trawling the job sites — always a soul-destroying experience, but this time around I felt like I was having a little more success and bit more of a clearer idea of what I might be able to do. I made use of a neat site called Indeed, which effectively acts as a sort of "Google for jobs" and began searching for things directly relevant to what I've been doing — writing and editing. This eventually led me to related fields like communications and digital content editing, and ultimately to the job that I today secured.

Yes, that's right; I have a new job. Technically I don't start until the end of August, but I'm counting today as the day I "won". It was a hard-fought victory — primarily against my own lack of self-confidence when it comes to this sort of things since, as I've noted in previous posts, I've actually had relatively few formal job interviews over the years — but a satisfying one nonetheless. It's also a huge weight off my mind; although I have another month or so to get through without any income, I have at least got a bit of "rainy day" money stashed away for just this sort of situation, so I won't be broke.

It is, in short, a good feeling, not only for the relief of my immediate problems, but for future prospects, too. I'm not going to talk about specifics of the position here and now, but suffice to say that although it's outside of the field where I've hung my hat for the last few years, it's a lot more likely to be a stable position that presents opportunities to learn new things, develop my skills and — hopefully — let me build a bit more of a coherent "career" than I have had to date. I'm looking forward to getting started, but in the meantime I'm going to enjoy the month or so of summer quasi-holiday I have right now. (Although with the current heat and humidity, I predict I'll be spending most of it indoors with the curtains shut at this rate.)

Anyway. Thanks to those who have offered words of support in the past; it seems that good things do eventually come, even when you're not necessarily expecting them. Here's hoping things continue on an upward trajectory from here onwards.

1646: Tongueface

I can't remember if I've blogged about this before or just pondered it on Twitter — and, writing this on my phone from bed, I can't easily check — but what the hell. Let's do this!

I do not know what the tongueface smiley — a colon followed by a P — means. Or rather, I have the odd feeling that a significant number of other people in the world think it means something different to what I think it means.

To me, tongueface smiley represents someone sticking their tongue out, and that in turn is something that I've always considered to be a mild rude gesture — a childish, non-offensive and somewhat light-hearted alternative to flipping someone off. You'd perhaps use it as a response to someone gently mocking you, or revealing a piece of information that, while not earth-shattering or mortifyingly embarrassing, you'd still prefer wasn't public knowledge.

Here's an example of how I expect it to be used:

Phillipe: You're putting a shelf up? Can you even do that? I thought Andie wore the pants when it came to DIY.

Pete: :p

Or possibly:

W'khebica: Hey, everyone, did you know Amarysse fell off Titan Extreme on the first Geocrush?

Amarysse: :p

You see? Both situations where, were the conversation happening face to face, you might want to actually stick your tongue out, assuming you are seven years old.

However, I've noticed an increasing use of tongueface smiley as a form of punctuation — a la the use of "lol", which thankfully seems to be dying down a bit — and I honestly can't get my head around it, much how I couldn't get my head around how people could possibly be laughing out loud at the most seemingly mundane and stupid things.

I'm not against the use of smileys per se — I use them myself quite a lot as a means of making things like flippant comments abundantly obvious — but I remain confused by the current and widespread (arguable) overuse of tongueface smiley.

Perhaps I'm just too old to understand. :p

1644: Contemplating My Now Not-So-New Phone

Avid readers (hah) will recall that a while back I jumped ship from iOS to Android when I upgraded my phone. My long-in-the-tooth (relatively speaking, anyway) iPhone 4S was replaced by an HTC One M8, a phone which had received some positive reviews from people I knew and trusted, so I decided to take a chance and give it a shot. It was a good time to do so, since I'd been becoming increasingly disillusioned with many of the apps available on smartphones generally, and as such I wasn't feeling particularly "invested" in the iOS ecosystem — in other words, there weren't very many apps that I felt particularly attached to.

So, a little down the line, how am I finding it now the inevitable "honeymoon period" is over?

Well, I'm still really liking it, and the one peeve I had with it — the fact it seemed somewhat prone to random restarts and reboots while I was in the middle of doing things — appears to have worked itself out, and hasn't happened for a long time now. (Watch it start doing it again now I've written this.)

As I noted in my earlier posts, I'm not a hugely adventurous smartphone user these days. There are relatively few things I actually want to do with my phone, but most of them are beyond what a simple feature phone offers — or, in the case of facilities that feature phones do offer, smartphones inevitably do them all somewhat better.

Here's the limit of what I use my phone for: Email. Texting. Phone calls (only when there is no other option). Calendar. Music and podcasts. Google Hangouts. Twitter. Web browsing. Very occasionally Facebook and Google+, though I don't use either network very much any more. And, if there is nothing else to do during an extended visit to the toilet, playing a simple, toilet-friendly game like Threes.

That's about it. There's probably more I could do with it but I don't really feel the need to right now, since the stock apps and the few additional ones I've installed cover most of the things that I want to do with it on a daily basis. I can communicate with it, I can browse the Web with it, I can take snapshots with the camera if necessary and I can read information on a screen that's noticeably bigger than that offered by Apple's iOS devices.

I've been particularly impressed by Google Play Music, which provides a number of helpful services, chief among which is something similar to Apple's iTunes Match service, only it actually, you know, works. For those unfamiliar, iTunes Match (and Google Play Music) is a facility whereby you can upload tracks from your personal music library or "match" existing songs with iTunes/Google's online libraries, then stream or download them to any compatible device. In effect, this allows you to take your entire music library with you wherever you go, rather than being limited by the storage space available on your phone — though the streaming side of things is, of course, dependent on you having a good wireless Internet connection either via the mobile phone networks or Wi-Fi.

Where Google Play Music differs from iTunes Match is that it's a lot clearer in presenting its information. With iTunes Match, it was almost impossible to tell which songs you had downloaded to your phone — and consequently available when no Internet connection was around — and which would require streaming. Attempting to download songs often resulted in failure for no apparent reason — and with Apple's phobia of error messages, there was no way of discovering what was causing the problem. Google Play Music, meanwhile, while having a somewhat clunky interface in a few places — it'd be great to have just a plain list of albums, playlists, songs and that sort of thing rather than the overly graphical, space-wasting interface it has — but at least presents this sort of information clearly. It's obvious when you've downloaded something or if you'd be streaming it when you clicked Play, and, importantly, it's easy to remove things from your phone once you've downloaded them — something which iTunes Match made seemingly impossible to do manually for some inexplicable reason.

So that's been great, and the other apps I've been using regularly all seem to work pretty well, too. All in all I'm sure I'm using this phone to a fraction of its full potential, but it's doing everything I want it to and it's doing it well, with my only real criticism of the device as a whole being that the volume control buttons are in a stupid place and are much too easy to press accidentally while simply holding it normally.

1642: Still On the Hunt

Still trying to secure a job. It's a stressful process — particularly as I'm not working right now and thus very much need one rather than just wanting one — but at least things are moving, albeit slowly.

I've had two interviews this week, one of which I felt I was unlikely to be successful in but figured it was worth a shot anyway, and the other of which was today. I won't say too much about that as I'm yet to discover what the results were — even if I proved successful at this stage, there'll be a second interview to contend with — but it was quite a pleasant experience.

I've actually had relatively few formal interviews in my overall "career", if you can call it that. Professional working life, if you can't. I had formal interviews for when I worked in schools — during which I discovered that, more often than not, any parent governors on the interview panel tended to look positively on candidates who asked them questions about the school and how it was serving their children, rather than the usual, boring, predictable responses to the dreaded "any questions?" Aside from that, however, my work in retail involved a group "interview" that was actually more of an activity day, and my work in the games press tended to involve either being headhunted directly — always a nice boost to the self-confidence — or behind-the-scenes negotiations without a formalised "recruitment" process.

An interview is an important part of the hiring process for many companies, but I'm not sure it's always the best approach. It's all too easy for a candidate to overprepare and start spewing cliche after cliche rather than giving a true picture of their personality; I try and avoid this approach as much as possible, answering questions honestly and hopefully letting the real me shine through. Then hoping that the panel actually likes the real me, of course.

What I find much more interesting and useful is an "interview" situation where there are things to do that are directly relevant to the job in question. Perhaps the ability to demonstrate my lightning-fast, super-accurate typing, for example, or maybe the opportunity to show my skills at proofreading and editing. Even the much-maligned practice of role-play can be valuable, encouraging you to put yourself in another's shoes and determine the best way to resolve a situation.

Anyway. I'm rambling and being vague, and deliberately so, since I don't want to say too much about the jobs that are still in the running. I have a second interview for a job I went for a little while back on Monday, and I should hear if the company I went to see today wants to see me again next week, too.

Here's hoping something comes of one of these. They're both good jobs that could lead on to better things, and I'd be glad to take either one — but I'm mostly just anxious to get a job, full stop, right now.

Wish me luck. I need it.

1638: Trying Again

I went to the gym today. It's a bit of a trek from where we are now, particularly without a car, but I felt the need to get out of the house for a bit rather than sitting alone in it all day fretting about whether or not I should be doing more to get a job.

They say that doing some exercise is a good idea when you're feeling low, and for sure I've been feeling physically somewhat shitty as well as mentally recently. Thus I figured doing something to loosen up my stiff, tired, stressed-as-fuck body would probably be a good idea, but I didn't want to go too crazy right away since it's been a while since I was in a good routine. (I don't know how likely I am to get into a good routine this time around, but I have done it before, so never say never.)

I decided that I'd try a programme I've had some success with in the past: the Couch to 5k system. For the uninitiated, this is a regime where you do some running three times a week, beginning relatively slow — just under half an hour of alternating a minute of running and a minute and a half of walking — and gradually working your way up to, in theory anyway, being able to run 5km — or at least to be able to keep running without stopping for half an hour.

I've made it through this programme once in the past, and it had a noticeable impact on my fitness. I'm not sure how much it helped me actually lose weight — I really struggle to shed weight, which is hugely demoralising when embarking on an exercise programme — but it certainly got me feeling fitter, less likely to get out of breath and so forth. It'd be nice to be able to keep it up enough to get back into that state.

The previous times I've tried this programme I've done it outside, running around my local area. It's easy to feel self-conscious when doing this, but I normally put some loud music on and its straightforward enough to tune out what's going on around you and focus on what you're doing.

The difficulty, however is that the environment outside is less than predictable. The weather can vary, the surfaces on which you're running can vary and there are hills to go up and down — usually at particularly inconvenient moments. As such, I decided to give it a go on the treadmill today — a predictable environment that I'm in full control of, in an air-conditioned room rather than being under the blazing summer sun.

It worked really well, and I was surprised that I managed to get through the first day of the programme without too much difficulty. I felt something of a "wall" about halfway through the session, but I pushed through and kept going rather than giving in to the little voice in my head urging me to stop and relax for a moment, and before long I was at the end.

My musical accompaniment for the session was the soundtrack to Final Fantasy XIV, whose battle themes make for an excellent workout accompaniment. I'll definitely be making use of that playlist again, just to add a little drama to proceedings.

I'm in two minds as to whether to go back tomorrow and do some weights work before continuing the programme on Wednesday, or whether to just have a rest tomorrow. We'll see how I feel tomorrow, I guess.

1637: Fire

Fell asleep with the TV on last night and woke up an hour or two later in that slightly confused manner where you're sure something's wrong, but not quite sure what.

In this case, it took me a little while to determine what had woken me up and felt "off". We had the fan on in the bedroom, so there was a certain degree of background noise anyway, but it seemed a little too loud. At first I thought it was the television, but after my vision cleared from the murk of sleep, I realised the television was off.

What was this loud noise? I got up to investigate. Andie was fast asleep so, taking care not to wake her up, I took a look out of the window and, upon opening the curtains — we have heavy blackout curtains in our bedroom — was almost blinded by the flashing blue lights of some sort of emergency vehicle.

After blinking a few times to get my sense of sight back, I could see through the glare of the lights that there were two fire engines in the street. They had floodlights trained on something over the road from our house, and there were people standing in the street.

I couldn't quite work out what was going on and didn't really want to go out and rubberneck, but it was clear that something fairly major had happened. My first thought was that a loud domestic argument Andie had heard earlier had escalated into something serious, but then I figured the police would be in attendance as well.

I couldn't see what was going on, and by the relatively calm movements and conversation of the firemen it seemed like the most serious business had already concluded. Indeed, it wasn't long before one of the two fire engines departed, but the other stayed for a while.

I eventually went back to sleep since nothing much seemed to be going on and our house didn't appear to be in any particular danger.

This morning, though, it was abundantly clear what had happened. The block of flats over the road from us had a huge scorch mark up the side of it, and the block's rubbish area — which, earlier in the day, had had a discarded bed and mattress in it — was now little more than a pile of ash.

We happened to run into one of our neighbours on the way out to the shop, who said that it seemed like someone had set the fire deliberately. She didn't seem to have any real evidence for this save for the fact she'd seen it happen before elsewhere, but it seems like a plausible explanation.

So that's that, really, and that's the reason I've been extremely tired all day! Thankfully no-one appeared to be hurt and the building wasn't damaged, either, so all is well. Nothing like a bit of drama to keep things interesting though, eh?

1636: SCIENCE!

I have an odd and longstanding love of when SCIENCE! happens. Note that I'm not talking about regular old science here, I'm talking about all-caps, exclamation mark SCIENCE!

The distinction? Science is often fascinating and useful, but a little bit tedious; SCIENCE! is when something unexpected or fun happens while you're doing something else, and it promptly makes you want to keep doing it, possibly while giggling or shouting "SCIENCE!" at anyone who will listen or, indeed, if you're alone, an empty house.

My most recent encounter with SCIENCE! came after painting the walls in the spare room. I was rinsing off the roller in the shower, as you do, and I noticed that the pressure of the water from the shower head was sufficient to make the roller spin. The longer I held the stream of water in place, the faster the roller would spin, causing the handle to wobble and the roller to spray small, bouncing water droplets around itself.

I was transfixed for a good few minutes by this, even going so far as to adjust the shower head to get a different stream of water and see what effect that would have on the spinning roller. It was fun. And I'm not ashamed to admit it.

This isn't the first time I've had improvised fun with SCIENCE!, however. I recall when I was a kid, I had a "science experiment kit" that I'd been bought for some birthday or Christmas or whatever. There were lots of bits and pieces in this kit, but I recall being most fascinated by the pair of syringes (minus needles, obviously) and a length of plastic tubing that could be used to connect them.

I discovered that it was possible to fill one syringe with water, press the plunger and cause the plunger on the other syringe to move without touching it. If done with sufficient force — or if there was enough water in the syringe — it could even cause the other plunger to pop out with a satisfying noise.

These are both rudimentary, stupid bits of SCIENCE!, I know, but they're the sort of thing I've found oddly satisfying and fascinating since an early age. These little things remind you the world isn't as simple as it appears, and everything you do can have an effect on something else.

I'm not sure what point, if any, I have here, but this was the first thing that popped in to my head when I sat down to write today, so here it is. Now I'm off to bed. Good night!

1635: Badvertising, The Return

Andie and I often fall asleep with the TV on its sleep timer, typically tuned to the inoffensive endless repeats of late-night Dave or the '80s and '90s quiz shows of Challenge. This means that we're continually exposed to some of the most stupid adverts in the known universe, what with the majority of channels on Freeview being commercial rather than licensepayer-funded.

We've already discussed the utter bollocks that is Alpen's "Characters" series of skits that bookend most of Dave's late night comedy offerings, so I won't reiterate that too much, particularly since there doesn't appear to be any clips of it on YouTube.

I will, however, discuss a few other things. Let's begin with this.

This is clever, you see, because it's for Gaviscon Double Action, and it's got two people in it. One suffers from one of the things Gaviscon Double Action treats, and the other suffers from the other thing Gaviscon Double Action treats. Except when they suffer from the other thing instead. Or both of them. Making the whole "twins" thing inherently pointless and the whole advert just looking rather stupid.

Leaving aside the dreadful play on words "carfuffle", let's ponder the question this advert asks: "do the words 'headless' and 'chicken' spring to mind?"

No! No they do not! I can honestly say at no time in my life have I ever felt like a headless chicken when looking for a new car. It can be a tedious and time-consuming process, sure, but something that gets you running around in a panic? No.

Social media is big, right? Streaming video is big, right? Let's make a mockup social media site of women who make videos about getting stains out of clothes! That won't look at all patronising!

This is… just shit.

Look, it's funny because women worry about leaving shitstains on the toilet, too. And there's a "clever" play on words at the end.

"There's nothing nicer than waking from a great night's sleep," says Lenny Henry.

I beg to differ. Sleeping is great. And I particularly won't want to get out of bed if I wake up and find my bed is on a fucking beach. Or in the middle of a wedding party. I'm not entirely sure what point they're trying to make here. Perhaps when you go to sleep in a Premier Inn you feel like you're in the middle of a wedding party.

Confused.com have had some legendarily shit ad campaigns over the years, but "Brian" really takes the cake. This ad also highlights a bugbear I have with modern advertising: the age-old art of the jingle appears to be dead, on TV at least, with modern ads tending to bastardise old, often beloved pieces of music rather than come up with their own original music.

(Jingles are not entirely dead, mind you; if you want to hear some truly awful but hideously catchy advertising jingles, I recommend tuning in to your local radio station at the earliest available opportunity. Lovett's move on up! Lovett's move on up! Lovett's move on up… ahem.)

I think I've made my point for now. Adverts are shit. And inescapable. Good night.

1630: Sunday Night

Unimaginative post title, I know, but it's Sunday night (well, 00:30 on Monday morning, technically) and my brain has pretty much switched off. When I wake up tomorrow, it's back to the doldrums of being unemployed and looking for work — not that that ever really went away over the weekend, but both Andie and I have kept ourselves busy enough that there wasn't too much time to worry about stuff like that.

We painted the spare room this weekend — something we've been meaning to do for a while but haven't really got around to. Andie's going to wallpaper two of the walls since she discovered during the initial decorating process of this place that she's actually quite good at hanging wallpaper. (I, on the other hand, can pretty much guarantee that I will not be any help whatsoever at hanging wallpaper, since I am a clumsy oaf who is not to be trusted with anything that required accuracy and careful placement.) The other two walls have been painted and just need another coat before they're done and dusted.

We wanted to get the spare room done because we have visitors at the end of the month — my friends Mark and Lynette are coming over from Canada and are dropping in on us for a few days, which will be nice. It'll be the first time I've been able to host visitors and actually offer them a proper spare bedroom in which to sleep, so we figured it would probably be best if we covered over the revolting yellow and dark blue walls the previous occupants left the room with — not to mention the big patch of bare wall where Andie had scraped off some paint having discovered it wasn't clinging to the wall all that well. (A previous occupier had clearly been a heavy smoker, since the wall behind the paint stank of smoke; hopefully we've dealt with that effectively now and won't have to worry about big chunks of paint falling off.)

Andie also remembered that the inside of the built-in wardrobe in the spare room needed painting, since it was covered in graffiti from what appeared to be a teenage girl. (I guess we know who the smoker was?) The owners before us had had a small child in the bedroom, so I don't think it was their work — I don't think they were really old enough to know what "shagadelic" meant, nor do I think that they had such fickle tastes in men as the writer of said graffiti clearly did.

Anyway, that's been painted (well, primed) over now and should actually look reasonably nice by the time our visitors arrive. Once that's all done, we just need to do another coat of paint in the toilet and the inside of the house will be pretty much done for the immediate future, though there are bits and pieces we may want to change in the long term, like the rather '70s carpets in several of the rooms.

The garden is another matter. The previous owners clearly hadn't had much to do with the garden, as it was rather overgrown when we arrived and has only continued to get worse since we've been here. I attempted to tackle the lawn with a lawnmower that my parents helpfully provided, but said lawnmower was regrettably not all that good, flattening the grass rather than actually cutting it, so we have replaced it with a brand new Flymo that should hopefully be a lot easier to manoeuvre as well as actually cutting the damn grass. I'll have the joy of trying that out at some point in the near future. Excitement.

For now, though, it's time to head to bed, and back to the job hunt tomorrow morning. I really hope this doesn't take too much longer; while thankfully I have a bit of "rainy day" money in the bank — and right now certainly qualifies as the proverbial rainy day — I would rather, you know, save that up to spend on something useful and/or nice than just spend it on the boring necessity of, you know, living. Oh well. We shall see; this whole hideous jobhunting process is not something that, in my experience, you can rush, however much you emphasise the fact that you can start immediately and would really actually rather like to.

Fingers crossed that there won't be too many of these posts before I can joyfully exclaim that I have a new job. And fingers crossed that said new job isn't rubbish, though with every passing day the fear grows that I will, indeed, end up doing something rubbish.

We shall see, I guess.