Not much could have been worse after Monday, and as luck would have it, it wasn’t. Since then things have been going far more smoothly.

After work on Tuesday I headed down to London for a few drinks with Swan (probably a few more than a normal weekday). As he’s spending most of the coming month on the Costa del Holiday, and the folks are taking a few days in Venice I was pining to get out of Stourbridge so thought it was a good opportunity to catch up and relax, even if it was midweek.

The great thing about train travel between here and London are the sockets. Laptops just don’t die, and even without wireless I can get on with things, rather than waste two hours wondering why my iPod runs out of battery after half an hour, or skips tracks intermittently.

I’ve finally also had the opportunity to get some design work done this week. That might sound odd coming from a designer, but for some reason it seems like an age since I have been asked to do anything really creative (I mean from scratch - there has been plenty of tweaking and editing).

I also managed to catch up with Jon yesterday too, before he heads off on a three month polo-truck driving mission. It sounds too much like a lot of socialising with a little bit of commuting in between - potentially finishing up in Spain, so you won’t be surprised to hear that I’m even more itchy to get some travelling in. A year ago today I arrived in Pokhara to discover Sammi and myself had been featured on sitting on an elephant on the front page of a Nepali national newspaper. In contrast, today I enjoyed a delicious chicken and bacon pannini. I can’t help thinking the level of exotica in my life is currently at a low.

It’s not often I have bad days, or even pretty awful days - I generally am upbeat even if most things conspire against me. I like to think I’m a committed optimist on the whole. If I wasn’t, I don’t think I’d be doing the things I’m doing, or enjoying myself at all.

It therefore comes as a nasty shock when you have one of those days, and today I feel has been a pretty abysmal one. Shit, you might say.

Unfortunately if your curiosity has peaked, I’m not going to divulge exactly why today has proved disastrous - needless to say, what started as bad, just got worse. Even the things I would normally brush aside as those annoying day-to-day facets of life, but each one of these tiny things just prickled so much more today with everything else going wrong. It was like falling off a motorcycle; the initial experience of hitting the ground really hurt, but to add insult to injury you rolled off the road and into a ditch full of nettles, and then found you were sharing it with Hannibal Lecter, a canteen of sharp cutlery and a bottle of chianti.

The one positive I’m aiming to take out of this is that I haven’t had a really bad day for a very long time. The last one this bad was likely six years ago. I know that seems extraordinary, but most of the time my off-days are interspersed with glimmers of joy. Today lacked that little luxury.

I think perhaps I may have even predicted this. I couldn’t sleep last night, and that’s pretty rare too. I also knew exactly what was going to go wrong (at least for the first part of the day) - all the other stuff that happened after just appeared to be the bonus ball.

Tomorrow should be better, but there is still dread looming. None of the problems thrown at me today have been resolved, so I’m going to do the best I can, then sloop off to London for some catharsis.

It’s been at least a year since I went to my last proper match, but when I got a phone call out of the blue from Flash (who also incidentally I hadn’t seen for over a year either) with tickets to see Newcastle take on Worcester at home I couldn’t turn it down.

Turns out it wasn’t a bad way to get back into live rugby - the weather was great, the Sixways was busy, and Worcester put in a resounding victory against a side which included Wilkinson, Flood, Tate, Noon and the rest. It couldn’t have been better spectating.

Yesterday I went over to TIm and Stacey’s for an evening meal and can’t say I was disappointed by that either. Thai green curry washed down with a mixture of beer, wine and inevitably, business chat - made for a really pleasant evening - so hats off to the Site Doctors for their hospitality work too :)

It was sad to hear of the death of Humphrey Lyttleton today. Over the years he’s done so much for both jazz and radio comedy that he truly was an under-acknowledged great. I’ll now make an effort to get through the second half of his biography which has been lying by my bed for over a month.

I’m quite relieved it’s the weekend.

Well I’m hoping this has worked, but one more slice of the virtual pie has moved off shared hosting onto a virtual host which should really help out with the old speed issues. I’m also hoping that my decision to put some expires headers on things especially the large images that appear on this site in places mean anyone coming across this properly will have a slightly less bandwidth intensive visit. My apologies for this not being done earlier, it’s just one of those things.

The past few days have been pretty technically/business focussed by anyone’s standards. What with insurance, wholesale backup solutions for me, my clients and a bevy of meetings to boot - it’s been extremely productive but not overly exciting.

I’m really pining to see some folks I’ve not seen for a while, so I’m thinking impromptu trips. There isn’t anything stopping me really - except that nobody seems to be available when I am (yes I’d thought of that too, but I’m hopeful it’s just scheduling conflicts) - so I may choose to dart off at a moment’s notice and come back at an equally odd time in order just to get some variety in this week.

I’m also strongly thinking about car right now. The old Polo footspa, although refreshing, needs some urgent attention and I’m thinking get myself sorted now for the summer and beyond before we all end up in a giant recession and I’m forced to sell it. I’m still hopeful we won’t get to that stage (in fact if you asked me seriously I’d probably tell you we’re going to see a lot more web based growth if everything else slows down - even if the effect is only delayed).

Currin has been volunteering suggestions for what I should get - a Lotus Elise or a mock Ferrari perhaps? I don’t think so. 

I thought I’d managed to kick the habit getting too busy with stuff to not write for over a week, but it turns out I was wrong.

Last weekend was Multipack once more, and as well as the usual faces there were some new ones too - Sam finally made it down, but I’m unsure how much he had reckoned on debating the correct height of a building you need to throw a cat off (don’t worry - it was all theoretical - but the answer is 7 stories). Si bought along Flickr stash which naturally went down well, and Tim bought along Site Doctor stash too, so my bag was packed full off goodies by the time I got home.

En route I had an opportunity to also see Tim’s ridiculously large media system, complete with (and I think I get this right) a 96” screen. It is vast and completely stunning in full HD.

Aside from collecting things and watching home cinema, I spent most of the rest of the week filling out forms, in the bank and asking questions about insurance and accountancy. Not what I would consider truly gripping, but a necessity unfortunately.

On the flip side I got to have a few drinks earlier in the week, and a new book of Moo stickers arrived which can’t do anything but put you in a good mood. Not even a up-until-four-in-the-morning work stint for an emergency brief managed to really dampen my spirits, although I’m really hoping I get a chance to see some people I’ve not seen in a while soon. It occurred to me that my travels to London have not been so frequent of recent, so I want to correct this.

Mike got in the paper.

If you are looking for something to amuse yourself for a while today - check out this awesome site by Uni-Qlo. I generally don’t do these sorts of things, but this one is just so ridiculously catchy…

Out of the blue I got a phone call from Will asking if I wanted to go go-karting yesterday and it didn’t take much convincing. I didn’t even realise we had a go-kart track in the Bridge, but apparently we do, and for the hour or so we spent there was much enjoyed. It’s not something I’ve tried before (not for not wanting) and found the whole experience much like paintball; great fun but one of those things you’ll only ever do every so often, so I was keen to make the most of it. I’d definitely do it again one of these days, though the unusual surge of adrenaline in the morning meant I had to drink coke all afternoon to stop myself from falling asleep.

In the evening I helped Dad assemble a vast collection of parts for his new compressor. It involved visits to Brierley Hill, Netherton and Wollaston before we finally got the whole apparatus together. While we were up near Quarry Bank we went over to one of the family graves which hadn’t been visited for by anyone for years. Despite being 99 years old this year, the memorial is still intact and good to see still standing. Only four or five of the nearby graves (out of many hundreds) are still tended and most have been vandalised, collapsed or fallen apart. It’s the first time I’d seen it and it’s a pretty impressive bit of stonework, put together for my great-great grandfather (Edward) in 1909, then used for his wife (Emma) and their son (Richard, my Gran’s dad who died four days after she was born, yet whom she still eulogises for).

I love this sort of stuff - not the macabre aspect of the graveyards, but seeing things that are genuinely important to your family history. There was something striking about this, probably the biggest memorial in the whole cemetery, in the highest plot, but now so wrapped up in brambles you cannot get to it without climbing through trees and round collapsed stonework. It’s completely lost to most people, but thankfully remains intact apart from some minor ageing. The other thing that intrigues me about this stuff is that I simply would not have existed without the people who lie in that grave, buried almost a century ago; people not even my 95 year old Grandmother ever really knew. And yet there it stands still.

I finally completed all the paperwork I needed to, created some interesting vector work and took a trip up to Sheffield to organise a new project this week. Despite this, it doesn’t quite feel like Easter yet - it seems to early - and I think next weekend is likely to be more relaxing than this one (says the man who’s organised a photography trip to mid-Wales).

Last weekend was the largest Multipack meetup that we’ve had for a good while. As well as a good turn out of regular faces, there were also a large assortment of new ones, and despite some awkward seating arrangements and the lack of rugby being shown (the projector was broken) it was a very good afternoon.

Talking of rugby, I can only be pleased at the final England game in the Six Nations, however the disappointment at our general/earlier performance doesn’t inspire confidence. I’m prepared to be a bit more optimistic, but really, how did we manage to go and lose the Calcutta cup? Come to think of it, I’m glad the projector was broken.

I’ve got a mountain of forms to be filled out this week. With what can only be described as a marathon event of bureaucratic gymnastics ahead of me, changing one or two details with Companies House is clearly not as simple as I had hoped.

A client invited me to a business seminar earlier this week, and so I asked Will if he wanted to come along. We had to get over to Villa Park, but it was a good evening, and it provoked some in depth discussions about the types of work we are both involved in. I’m not one for schemes and things, but the psychology and profiling techniques were fascinating and I definitely was able to gain some perspective on my own situation right now.

I’ve made a couple of gem-like discoveries this week on the software front. BluePhone Elite has solved my problem of writing text messages quickly while working. I believe it can also allow me to take calls through the iMac too, but I’ve yet to figure out how to do that. It does pop up and tell me who is calling though. If there is one thing about phone communication that inspires a rage in me, it’s txting, especially when speaking is a more effective method of communication. Admittedly, there are times when a text works - a time, a number, a two word confirmation, but my inclination to create an essay or use long words make predictive text and tiny keys only confirm that these are the tools of Beelzebub. I bet he uses text messaging for every piece of communication.

The second piece of software that has solved a problem that until now I couldn’t explain fixes a niggling problem with my Macbook. I didn’t realise, but the having to wait up to thirty seconds for my laptop to go to sleep isn’t a consequence of age - it turns out that it has to save all the memory to disc at the moment. As a matter of course I put in the full amount of memory possible into all my computers, and didn’t realise this is why the process has become agonisingly slow of recent - it’s moving 2GB to hard disc every time I close the lid.

Well as a person who’s laptop spends more time on his desk than on the road, this is something I’m prepared to cut out, and with the SmartSleep preference pane the Mac now (once again) sleeps the instant I close the lid. Of course, on the move it’s more important to use the hibernate feature, so when the battery power drops below 20% it automatically turns it back on for safety reasons, but it’s bliss once again being able to flip the thing closed and put it directly into the carry case without having to wait for it to brace itself for some kind of nuclear disaster.