One of these days I gotta get myself organizized

No, I’m not becoming a real life Travis Bickle, nor am I uploading another post of quotes that I like.

I really do need to get myself organised.

It’s more than a month since my last activity on WordPress.  For several months I’ve been posting nearly every Thursday; each month saw at least four offerings from little ol’ me.  So what happened?

It was the middle of May and I had to work late one Thursday night.  I actually finished at 1 am on Friday morning, slept a few hours and was then back in work that same Friday morning.  After work, and up until dusk on Sunday, I was busy with ripping down my old garden shed and putting up a new one.  So, no posting activity that week.

At least the new shed looks good

From then on, I started to find that things happened to me rather than be controlled by me.  It has become clear to me that I am not controlling my life so much as I should do.  I have never been well-organised and this has got to stop.  It’s affecting my health.

Every week, I’ve being feeling increasingly rough each day when I’ve awoken and Monday was spent in the bathroom emptying the contents of my stomach rather than going to work.  It’s a good job I have made some improvements to my diet and my weight already this year as I dread to think how bad I would be if I hadn’t.

Enough already, I must take control of my life.

No, this has not been a complaint against life but rather a confession of my own failings.  Life has treated me very well over the last few weeks when I consider how badly I’ve been pursuing my life.  I gotta get myself organizized.

They never really grow up

I’m only going to throw up onto this WordPress site a short blog post today.  Why so brief?  Well…I’ve been feeling rough all day and today was particularly hard at work.  It’s not always the easiest thing to do to reinstall bespoke software and databases on new servers after you wake up with a banging migraine.

No more moaning from me about my ailments.  I have things to be thankful for this week.

After sixteen years of marriage to her mother, Yasmin announced on Christmas Day to Gloria and I that she would no longer be calling me Harry.  Instead she will call me Dad.

Yasmin and I – you might want to open this photo in another browser window on a smartphone if this falls off the side of the page!

Yesterday, she met me at work as she wanted me to help her renew her car insurance.  I was introducing Yasmin to the Technical Director as Gloria’s daughter – he got on with Gloria well when she was also working at the same place as me – and I realised that I wasn’t sure how to introduce her from now on.

After she left for her flat I exchanged a WhatsApp message with Yasmin (I wish she’d use Telegram) and checked with her how she wants me to refer to her in the future.  She wants me to introduce her as my daughter.

So there you have it.  Yasmin is my little one.  Yes, she’s less than a month from her 24th birthday, but she is my little one.

I would love to have a second little one, but that’s another story.

 

It finally happened…but nothing changed

It’s easy to become too gullible and believe everything that people or the media tells you.  I remember growing up filled with the belief about how Britain yearned for a men’s Wimbledon tennis champion.  However, nothing much changed when Andy Murray finally won this title a couple of years back.

This week, the media built up the vote in Parliament on whether to authorise British air strikes in Syria.  I was eating my supper and watching the headlines after the vote was announced.  They then cut to a correspondent in Syria and asked the reaction.  I wondered why as surely no-one in Syria was sitting by the radio listening for updates.  The correspondent confirmed that no-one in Syria even knew about the vote.

But that’s Britain for you – and possibly it’s the same everywhere.  A number of British people (I suspect the vast majority is a good estimate) think that the World revolves around the life experience as they see it.  We live in the same street as each other and have no idea of the life experience that each of us experiences.

No one is safe from stress

I had a text message at 12 noon today from an old school friend who doesn’t work.  She was offering me an appointment for when she would visit us with her husband.  It was four and a half hours later that I answered her when I started my lunch break.  I told her that I was starting my lunch break and that I am working on the date that she offered, right up until the evening so it depended on the time.

Yes, she was offering a weekend date, but things are hectic where I work right now and I also have several things to organise in my spare time.  There’s Monday’s visit of a workman to fix the after effects of the water leak for example, which will involve me moving all of the lounge furniture about.

I haven’t heard back from her.  Maybe she’s sulking that I didn’t answer straight back.

Oh well, she might have no idea of my life experience.

Stay home and do nothing

This post is a more serious than normal.  At the end of it I’m going to make a suggestion for anyone reading this that can make a massive difference to the world whilst costing you nothing more than a few moments of your time one evening.

I wish that I could think of something really funny to post this week.  Being able to do so would provide the perfect antidote to the conversations at work.

If people aren’t ranting to release their stress from the multiple projects at work, they’re instead discussing foreign affairs and especially the recent events in Paris, France.

I try to keep out of any discussions at work merely for the fact that political arguments in the workplace can be divisive.  There used to be someone who worked with us who would get quite angry when people did not agree with his views.

As far as I am concerned everyone can do exactly what they want so long as what they do  doesn’t affect anyone else’s freedoms.

Using this basis as my moral code, I know it’s not okay to spend the weekend in a football fan mob physically attacking passers by for no reason but for the love of a fight.  Yes, this obviously affects the freedoms of others.

But it goes further than this.  Everything that each of us decides to do has the potential to affect the freedoms of someone else.

Driving your car above the speed limit in urban areas removes the pedestrians’ right for safety.  Hmmm…a lot of people seem to have difficulty realising this.

And what about buying chocolate or coffee that isn’t fairtrade?  What about the freedom of the coffee or chocolate workers not to be slaves?

And what moral stance robs the helpless more of their freedoms?  Do we ignore the atrocities being committed in Syria, Iraq, Yemen etc?  Do we ignore what happens to girls, women – and men – in these far away countries?  Do their freedoms mean nothing to us?

If their freedoms mean something then we are morally obliged to think of how we give our fellow humans freedom.

By the way, this is not an argument either for or against war.  I do have my own belief as to what we should do but I don’t feel it’s important to try and convince anyone of it via this blog.

Doing nothing is often the greatest way to remove the freedoms of others.  Recent British history is littered with people doing nothing and letting a few famous people continually sexually abuse children.  An extreme example, maybe, but I hope that you get what I mean about doing nothing rather than something…anything.

I’m not going to make a case for or against war on this blog.  What I will say is that I respect those who are ready to go to war as well as those who don’t feel that war is right.  So long as they have sensible reasons for their stance it’s not a simple answer to say that either is wrong.

The most important thing is to be doing something to make the world a better place.

If all you do is talk about what’s right and what’s wrong and not do anything yourself to help anyone else, then what are the consequences of your actions?

To paraphrase a saying that I once heard, evil wins when the good stay home and do nothing.

Right, I started off by writing that I’m going to suggest something that you can do to improve the world without spending more than a few moments of your time.  Well, if you cannot work in a hostel, in a poor country helping the needy or by giving to charity maybe you can write a letter.  And I mean a letter that can literally save a fellow human from being tortured.  Here’s something I’ll be doing.  It’s called Write For Rights and is organised by Amnesty International.

Innovation at work

Did I mention before that I work in IT, installing software for a Multi-National company? If I haven’t already mentioned it…well, I just have.

The office desk of the innovation director – complete with 1990s floppy discs

In the corner of our larger shared office is the Innovation Director’s office. It’s his job to develop the cutting edge ideas for the company to take forward into the future. So, it was with great amusement today that we looked through his door and found a stack of floppy discs on the side of his desk.

Close up of the floppy discs

I still have a zip drive and zip discs under the bed or elsewhere in the house. Maybe I’ll take them into work tomorrow and convince him that they’re the next big thing which will kill off floppy discs. He might not have heard that prior to CDs, zip discs were doing just that! I wonder if he has any punch cards…

In all seriousness, I think he is doing a review of all of the old ideas within the company to see if anything from years before can be successfully re-visited now that the world has changed.

It is amazing how some things can be abandoned one year and then come back into fashion at a later date.

Staying in the field of IT, I enjoyed the return of old PC games on the Wayback Machine site. Those games coming back to be played sure made for a great revival.

Until then, the only great revival that I enjoyed was revisiting an aged bottle of single malt whisky!

Boy, me talking a lot of IT will reinforce the perception that some people have always had of me. Before I’d even seen an episode, people would compare me to Maurice Moss from the IT Crowd.

Harry…er, I mean Maurice Moss from the IT Crowd

I think that there are worse people to be compared with than Richard Ayoade, so I was never offended.

Tomorrow – and for this I should thank the internet and the nature of my job – I will be connecting to my desk computer from home when I start work in the morning.  That will confuse everyone else in the office when they see me replying to internal emails but not answering my desk telephone.

Why am I starting work from home, you might ask?  Actually, you might not be too bothered why but I’m going to tell you anyway.  We have a workman coming to our house tomorrow morning and the only promise I could get was that he will be here by 12:30pm.

Maybe, I should cut a wedge into the side of my hair and say that my name is Maurice Moss.  Will he get the joke?