Ok, everyone’s linked to this already but its still awesome and very much in character with me.
Christmas wishes to y’all, every one.
All posts by Armand
Ethnic Santa and Citizen journalism *updated*
Had a great time at my office Christmas party last night; our bosses do really know how to throw a good party. Am glad I’ve taken today off to recover; more from need of additional sleep than any particular excesses. That said, someone did seem to have slicked the floor in Strawberry Moons and, as a result, I slipped and injured my ankle. A day of RICE for me, methinks.
But to the point of the post: I was asked this year to be Santa for our office Secret Santa gift exchange. Very honoured, I think I rose to the challenge and donned the (rather slimming) Santa outfit. Of course, it was all rather hilarious. After the gifts had been delivered and my task fulfilled, I headed back to my desk to shut down before we went out for the evening and found an instant message from a client waiting: one of my ‘citizen journalist’ colleagues had, within a minute or so of the pack splitting up, emailed a picture of me in my Santa garb to my client, who was duly amused.
The curse of camera phones ;)
The really annoying thing, of course, is that I forgot my own camera and have no photographic evidence of the evening myself. Hopefully people will email some things across to me in the fullness of time…
DSL down: week 2
The escalation of the fault is absurd. As far as I can tell, it’s gone:
Stage 1 technical support
Stage 2 technical support
BT Exchange technical support
Ericcson technical support
And now the fault is being managed by some kind of crack ninja network technical support team. If anyone knows of a simpler way to resolve this, please let me know: what’s happened is that, despite the DSL being in sync at 17 meg / 1 meg, the ATM/PPPoA connection won’t resolve, so I gots me no t’internet.
I may write a song about this.
The flood subsides, and I’m happy
Now that the crushing flood of discount seekers has subsided, and my traffic levels have gone down to their previous levels, I’m a little less self-conscious than I have been about writing. Ok, so I was never really that self-conscious, but my internet’s still down (it wasn’t the modem), and I’m busy with Christmas things. But, now whilst I wait for my broadband provider to ring and talk me through some diagnostic tests (that I’ll inevitably have done and which won’t make any difference to the broken-ness of my internet connection) I find I have a brief interval in which to blog.
Ah, crap, nothing to say.
Well, that’s not true. I have a few things to say. And because it’s a happy season, I’ll bore you with all the happy stuff. It’s not smug, I promise. It’s about a shift in perspective: try it, if you like: struggling with blog posts? Write some things that are making you happy…
I’m pleased with Spurs recent performance in the premiership. We seem to have finally remembered how to score goals. Now if we can just win an away match…
I’m happy the Christmas season is here. I love buying gifts. I love receiving them too. Hint hint.
I’m happy my brother has posted my membership application for Soho House. That’ll be a thing of awesome beauty and power if it comes through.
I’m happy following a great Christmas party last weekend.
I’m happy planning a Thames-side Christmas lights walk this weekend.
I’m happy to be receiving review copies of games from Electronic Arts, which I’ll be writing up on this blog. Expect the first one, a review of the PS2 format Superman Returns videogame, this weekend.
I’m happy from all the Orange Wednesday films I’ve been watching, especially the Tenacious D movie, and, oddly enough, Stranger than Fiction. The power of the narration device is strong in this one.
I’m happy with gig tickets to see the Killers and the Fratellis early next year.
I’m happy having a skiing holiday booked.
I’m happy, listening to the Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny album for the 45th time in a month.
I’m excited, about Christmas parties and the trip to Malaysia this year (even if I have contempt for this. Sorry, had to get that out of my system).
That’s it, for now. At some stage I’ll see how this perspective on life fits into my overall philosophy on crap in general and write one of Hugh’s manifestos. For now, stay happy, people.
Wii for sale
No time to play it before Chrimbo, so willing to part with it. Auction is up on eBay. Good luck!
Help out Russell Oatlicker!
My friend got stuck in Paris. Help him out by watching his YouTube videos!
I got WII
I broke and ordered one in the Amazon 3-4pm availability binge. It’ll arrive next week.
Exciting.
Internet’s still down, btw, and I’ve had a ridiculously long week. So expect more to follow as time starts to clear up around that Christmas thing that is rumoured to be happening soon. Apparently.
Damnit, I missed Day of the Ninja…
Whoops. And I have the costume uniform, sword and everything.
Quiet on the bloggy front
Despite my determination to keep to regular updates here, external factors may keep me silent. My DSL-modem is on the fritz and a new one won’t arrive for a couple of days, so updates will be occasional. I’m far too honourable to hijack my neighbours’ hotspots. Even the one with the Netgear SSID I can access from my living room sofa that has absolutely no security on it. Not even that one.
Threshers proves power of social media
At least, it has as far as my bandwidth bills are concerned. Since I posted in response to Hugh’s original blog post, in the last 7 days I’ve had (according to Google Analytics):
3,569 visitors (+631%)
6,877 pageviews (+870%)
717% more referrals from Google
5100% more referrals from Technorati (I know, I get very few T’rati referrals)
My humble post has been viewed 5,406 times and is the most popular post on my blog ever (no 2 is this one with 1,827 views).
My bandwidth usage is also at 340MB of a 1GB cap (4 days into the month) — typically I use 600MB of bandwidth by the END of the month. All of my photos are hosted on Flickr, so don’t contribute. Cripes. Fortunately it seems to be dying down.
On the story itself, Hugh has full updates over at Gaping Void – particularly interesting is how the mainstream media picked up on the story, and the impact it has had on Threshers. Threshers’ employee Sam commented here on division6 today on how it is affecting him on the ground (and how to get six bottles of the same kind of wine if they don’t have it out front – ask – apparently it is hard to keep restocking with current demand!).
It’s all pretty durn impressive. Good stunt. I remain impressed. And plan to use my voucher this Saturday, if my local Threshers hasn’t run out of stock of everything.