New hard drive arrived for the server this morning, so I’m resettingup (new word of the day) the whole thing as I type. Well, not as I type. More as I’m not typing. Like now. And then. Ooh, and now too.

Trying to distract myself as I’ve been really upset over Kate recently. Stupid christmas. When she left she said she still wanted to be friends, but I’m inferring that that’s no longer the case. That really hurts. Am fltting between nutso-hyper and depths of despair today.

My cold is *finally* starting to dissipate! Am still woozy, but definitely on the mend. Thank goodness for that - was getting fed up with that particular illness!

60,000 people dead. Bloody hell.

If you can spare a tenner, it’ll be put to very good use…(updated with slightly better link)

Click for a larger image…

Can anyone explain what the hell is going on in the above screen? I’ve logged into my website via ssh (I think - port 22 through putty anyway) and this command just does nothing. I’m not a big perl/linux/putty/telnet/ssh/anything user, but I swear this *used* to work. Perl’s definitely functioning properly as shown by the basic program I ran first. I’m trying to get mt-blacklist working so that I can stem the flow of comment-spam emails I’m getting all the time…

Help!

Still full of the festive phlegm here. Thought I might try a day without Lemsip, but, quite frankly, screw that.

[goes to boil the kettle]

I’m back. I had an adventure. I was sitting at my desk with my legs crossed, and unbeknownst to me my stupid lazy right foot fell asleep. So when I stood up it didn’t work. It fell over, and I went too. Right in the middle of the office. Splat. Did I get any sympathy? Ha.

[goes [carefully] to pour hot water onto lovely Lemsip]

I’m back again. No accidents this time.

[stirs Lemsip]
[sips Lemsip]
[relaxes into chair]

Anyone else watch Pride last night? Good stuff, I enjoyed it a lot.

[chooses music from playlist]

Played some more Half-Life 2 yesterday. Mum and Dad + guests could hear me yelling from the lounge, apparently. Heh. Shouting actually helped, I think.

[listens to Jeff Buckley’s ‘Hallelujah’ and cries a little]
[it’s such a sad song]
[shut up]

I sent out christmas cards to as many Joinees as I could last week, and was chuffed to find a message on the Joinee forum directed towards me specifically
Updated the layout of this website slightly earlier. Cleared out a few dead links etc. Let me know if you notice any problems, please.

I had a dream last night that people were having babies and not telling me. Please tell me if you have babies.

I’m well aware that millions have it far worse, but look what happened to the Barefoot Man!

Who knew the Sherlock Holmes stories were a victorian Midsomer Murders? That’s not totally true - last night’s show wasn’t actually an adaptation of a Conan Doyle story - but it was so disappointing! If you’ve recorded it or something, you’d best not read any further…

Sherlock dressed up as a big fat man for no reason whatsoever. With amazing rubber face attachments that I’m sure were around back then. That was Just Dumb. Did it also never occur to the great detective that the murderer could perhaps…just maybe…have an accomplice? No? Did that not happen in those days? Lets see…the victim recognises the (in this case attempted) murderer and tells everyone so. But because his fingerprints don’t match those found on a bottle outside a window he is released. What? Victim vs random bottle = bottle! The fantasic explanation for this particular feat was that the murderer had an identical twin. With a foot fetish. Then, when the murderer was captured in the act, the fingerprint still didn’t match. Because it was the other twin, you see. Despite the fact that every other time it was the first twin that…

Oh, never mind.

Seriously, identical twins. And the obsession with drugs. Yeah, Holmes was an opium addict in the original stories, but that was always just by-the-by. It’s not clever to blow this up into a big thing for no good reason. And what was with the fog? It was like London was stuck in a cloud! You couldn’t see past the end of the street! And people could happily carry bodies down said streets without anyone caring.

Oh, and while it’s true that identical twins don’t have matching fingerprints, they are similar enough to be recognisable. That was known back then, when fingerprints were in fact used to see whether twins were fraternal or identical.

I thought it was pants. Pants, I tell you.

EDIT: I changed the title to something a touch wittier. Lemsip dulls my humour buds.

Urgh.

I haven’t had a cold like this for years. Despite being dosed up on Lemsip, I still feel pretty awful. If you live within five miles of me, I’d consider evacuation. To make things even better, our office server just died and now can’t find ntoskrnl.exe, which is great. Although, to be fair to the server, it picked the perfect time to die. There aren’t many times in the year that I could take it offline for multiple days without anybody caring. I just wish I could concentrate properly! Case in point: after plugging the hard drive into Jane’s computer, I created a backup folder to copy all the data into, then promptly doubled clicked on the time to find out the date. So I think I may leave trying to fix it until tomorrow!

Hope everyone had a fun christmas day. I’m going to go collapse with a graphic novel, I think. Or just collapse. One or the other.

It’s snowing on christmas day. How very marvellous.

As I think I mentioned twelve months ago, christmas eve is my favourite day of the year. Everything’s just so very happy. If only I weren’t within millimetres of death.

I may be exaggerating slightly.

I have a cold. As is commonly known, men have far worse colds than women, so any derisory comments from that particular half of the population will be ignored. You just don’t understand. I now have a nice jar to donate to the local mucus-transfusion ward.

Many thanks to the various people who’ve dropped off presents for me! They’re very much appreciated.

To continue the (not really a) tradition started last year, here’s a short story for you. It was written a while back, and I won’t vouch for the quality!

I may post later…or I may not. If not, I wish you all an excellent day tomorrow along with many exciting presents, kisses under the mistletoe and a complete lack of brussel sprouts.

I’m leaking snot by the bucket-ful. I could run a marathon. I’m getting no warning, either - the drips just come from nowhere! It’s a freak snotticane. No boges tho, thankfully.

It’s Christmas Eve Eve!

I just wanted to say that.

Oh, and Join Me.

The Word Is Spreading! (all over The Earth) May I welcome Joinees Butcher, Robinson and Williams! Today we helped out a Joinee in need by posting them a parcel full of goodies, as well as tending a market stall for 15mins while the owner ‘went to the toilet’ but came back with shopping. Twas a Good Day. I enjoyed it a lot.

Due to time constraints we didn’t get a chance to implement the second part of today’s Plan. This involved buying a pack of cards each from Knowle Library’s charity section, then writing nice things inside and delivering them to random houses. There’s still time to do that, so if you have a couple of hours to spare feel free to send me an email/text saying ‘I wish to perform Good Deeds!’ and we’ll get right on it.

Join Me.

Nod has just pointed out to me that my Amazon Wishlist link on the right doesn’t work properly. It linked to *your* wishlist, if one was set up. That’s why it worked fine for me. I don’t really know what happened if you don’t have a list set up. Now, that link has been there for at least a year. So, there are three possiblities:

1. Nobody who looked at the link had a wishlist of their own
2. Nobody alterted me to the problem
3. Nobody looked at all and you’re all bastards
Hmmm. As it’s xmas, I’ll be charitable and assume number 1. For now. Don’t feel guilty though. No. Definitely no need to feel guilty.

It has occurred to me that my post yesterday was perhaps a little deficient. It may have left you with the impression that Join Me actually. is. a. cult.

Well, it is, if you want to be pedantic about it. But not in a creepy Heaven’s-Gate-Michael-Jackson kind of way. Noooo. It’s Just Nice.

If I told you that The Leader - Danny Wallace - was the other half of the Are You Dave Gorman? duo, would that help? He’s a BBC producer. And a presenter. He’s just a guy who had an idea. He’s a normal person, not a nut. It’s not an obsession. We’re not all waiting for the Joinee Day of Redemption When Venusians Rise From Their Burrows Inside The Earth And Bake Us Cookies.

It’s not a cult. It’s a collective.

Join Me.

As a Joinee for the last couple of months, I have been lax in my duties. I am now attempting to rectify this.

• Become a soldier in the Karma Army!
• Perform Random Acts of Kindness each and every Friday!
• Warm those cockles!
• Evangelise to friends and family!
• Make strangers very happy!
• Take part in Join Meets!
• Make friends with other Joinees!
• Join a collective with members worldwide!

What is Join Me? Well, the full explanation is here. A shorter one here. And here’s mine:

In 2000, a man named Danny Wallace (The Leader) placed a free advert in a small London paper. It simply said ‘Join Me’, and provided an address to send a passport photo to (argh - grammar police go go go!). 4000 photos later, after a massive word-of-mouth movement, people started to demand to know what they had joined. Then, in a moment of pure Genius, Join Me properly began. Joinees now, as set down in Scripture, perform Random Acts of Kindness for Strangers, each and every Friday. We buy flowers for people on the street. We send Christmas cards to random addresses. We carry shopping for old people. And young people. We don’t discriminate. We leave cakes on doorsteps. We smile happily at passers-by. We evangelise like we have nothing else to do.

We are Joinees.

You should Join too. All you need to do is send a passport photo to:

JOIN ME
PO BOX 33561
London
E3 2YW

They’re swamped with photos atm, so you should probably fill in the Official Questionnaire and post that along with your photo. Then that’s it! You’re a Joinee! No need to wait for confirmation or anything, you can begin doing Acts Worthy of Joinees.

So pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease Join. Pleeeeeeeeeeease. If you’re a friend, chances are you’ve received an invitation to the First Group Join Meet this Wednesday in Solihull. I hope enough people will be able to come. Anyone, in fact. It’ll be great. Think how Christmassy you’ll feel. Family members will be able to warm themselves by your cockles. Pleeeeeeeeeeease come. I have a whole plan for the day arranged. We’re going to make as many strangers happy as possible, after signing up all the uninitiated as Joinees. We’re also going to help out a Joinee in need.

Join Me. You know you want to.

Join Me.

Great googly moogly on a stick it’s cold outside.