Random notes, w/e July 28, 2001

Been a strange week, one way or another. Well, more unusual than strange, actually. Been out every weeknight, which is at least four nights more than usual. Been out with Nick and the very lovely Cathy a couple of times. Seen Anna twice which was pretty cool. Would have been nice to see more of her, though. Went to Henley on Tuesday for a wander along the river and a few drinks. She came out for a drink Thursday night after Andrew and I had been working on some ideas for songs. He's got some pretty cool riffs, including a great one which started life as an attempt to re-write "Pretty Persuasion" by R.E.M. but which is similar only in feel, not in sound. I played him a tune I was working on last week when he was in Spain and that seems to have potential too, so between us we've got four or five pretty good ideas we need to work on. Best thing now seems to be to record them and swap tapes, so he can work out some electric guitar to go over my 12-string acoustic and I can put some bass lines under his Rickenbacker.

Work continues to suck like an Electrolux, though at least for the next two weeks it should be slightly less mind-numbingly, spirit-crushingly dull, as I will be working in Holland. Eindhoven to be precise, continuing the rollout of our Enterprise Monitoring System. So I've been to Duisburg, Paris and Warrington. Duisburg was okay, Paris was fantastic and Warrington blows goats.

I'm also looking for an alternative source of peanuts at the moment. I had a proper full interview for a gig at SGI, after a phone interview last week (in German, which was way scary). OK, it'd be back to customer support which I left behind a while ago, but it's bi-lingual so I'd get to speak German all day and learn a lot more UNIX/Linux which I've wanted to do for a long time. They're also committed to training, with everyone getting 20 days' training a year, which is 20 more than I get at the current comedy outfit masquerading as my peanut supplier. I guess I'll hear next week. I'm not optimistic. My German was apparently more than good enough, which is nice, but whether or not my UNIX is good enough or whether I was asking for too much money, I don't know. We'll see.