OK, so maybe Valentines Day wasn’t all bad. Or at least the end of Top B wasn’t. By which point you could argue it wasn’t actually Valenines Day any more, due to it being past midnight. So perhaps my cynical attitude to it all was spot on all along.

I think I did alright in the end. I managed to juggle the desire to drink with the need to not get too drunk (c.f. last Thursday), and I even kept up the pretence that boys are silly and not worth bothering with for a couple of hours. Well, almost. Then we went to dance and everything seemed better anyway.

That’s what I want to remember when I (eventually) leave Warwick. Because you can never have enough memories of dancing in the middle of a packed-out Marketplace with a bunch of friends, collectively fighting to hold onto the tiniest bit of space and yelling out the lyrics of various top-notch anthems at the tops of your voices.

So next time I’m fucked off about random things on a night out, somebody please drag me onto the dancefloor. Then I’ll be happy, I promise.

Yesterday I was kind of ambivilent about the whole Valentines Day thing. For once I wasn’t getting depressed about the fact that the day on which single people are made to feel like a big bunch of rejects was looming around the corner. I was mindful of the fact that aside from a few recent family things, I’m generally happy with the way my life is at the moment.

But now it’s fucked me off. All day I’ve been bombarded with messages by the popular media that Valentines Day is such a really big thing that really can’t be ignored. At all. Not even for ten minutes.

First there were the random overheard conversations in the hospital earlier. Then Colin and Edith nattering away about it all on Radio 1 in the car as I drove down through Wales. Apparently Valentines day is only about straight man-woman relationships, or at least that’s all they appeared to be interested in hearing about from the listeners. So not only do I not matter because I’m not in a relationship, but I also don’t matter because I’m not straight. Great.

Even Kerrang wouldn’t stop talking about it. Although they were slagging it off and playing songs about breaking up with people, there was still no escape from it all.

Finally, everywhere round Leamington there were couples. And there were people on their own, nervously eyeing up the slightly-battered-looking flowers by the cigarette counter in Tesco, trying to find something to take back for their loved one in the name of Valentines Day.

I don’t mind the whole Valentine thing, but it really should be optional. It seems no matter how happy you are in yourself or in a relationship, it still manages to make you feel inadequate that you can’t live up to the idealist stereotypes that we’re all bombarded with for the sake of selling a few poncy flowers and posh meals out. The fact that there’s no little box you can tick on a form to not receive information about it annoys me.

Rant over. I’m going to cook my meal for one. I’m going to turn the TV and the radio off and I’m going to enjoy it 🙂

I gave up blogging about my work a while ago, but sometimes you just want to share your acheivements with a wider audience.

Today I finished writing the first version of a perl script that actively monitors a list of servers, and generates a RSS file showing when devices (or any defined services running on them, such as HTTP, POP3, etc.) go up or down.

There’s still loads of things wrong with it, cheifly a problem with the system clock running slow that makes all the times and dates wrong. But it’s a proof-of-concept exercise more than anything, to show how RSS feeds can be used for things other than syndicating blogs. I think it does that, if nothing else :-).

South Stack just before sunset, taken the other day.

I haven’t touched a web browser for five whole days. This is quite a feat, and one I’m sure I can’t have acheived for a good few years. How scary.

As a result, it’s been so long since I read Planet Afterlife that the new entries go off the screen. I wonder if I can set up archiving on it… Would that be good or quite a scary thing to have, I wonder?

I went for another run this evening after work. Despite being slightly dark by 6pm, I managed half an hour or so down to Newbold Comyn and back up the edge of the golf course towards Lillington. There’s a climb of about 40m from the Leisure Centre up to the radio transmitters at the top of the route and then back down a bit, so it’s a good up-and-down run. Probably not quite as pretty as running to Offchurch (especially not in the dark), but I can save that for another day :-).

Soon it’ll even be light enough in the evenings to be able to see where I’m running to. Roll on Spring!

It seems exercise is what all the cool kids are doing this morning (it’s still morning, right? ;-).

My personal contribution to getting Britain fitter today has been a 50 minute run over towards Offchurch. I haven’t really done much cross-country running since I stopped living on campus, and it’s something I actually quite miss. I find running through Leamington too stressful – you have to concentrate to much on avoiding people, cars and random items of street furniture that you don’t get to enjoy your surroundings or concentrate on the running. And you don’t get to be on your own.

I love people. I love the buzz of cosmopolitan spaces in lively towns and cities. But I’m a country boy at heart, and sometimes you just want to get away from it all.

Someone’s stolen the ‘e’ from the word Rootes on the side of the Rootes Social building, overlooking the piazza. Was it a student prank? Perhaps a cheap elections publicity stunt? Or maybe it just fell on someone’s head?

Either way, the Boar should be covering this – it’s clearly far more important than a load of bitching about the VC 🙂

Or more to the point, I need to start spending more time at home (in Leam, as opposed to Wales). For reasons I won’t go into here, I left work a little early today so I could make it to the stupid shops that all close at 5.30 (why is that still, in the 21st century?). And for once I had time to get a few things done in town, go for a 20 minute run, cook a nice bolognese for myself (and drink the remainder of the red wine that I didn’t pour into it) and chat to a couple of people on the phone. I’ll probably still not get to bed until after midnight, but at least this time it won’t be because I’ve sat in the office until six ‘o’ clock.

So this has been one of the most boring blog entries ever (aside, perhaps from Laurie’s famous blogs about his lunch ;-). But it’s been that kind of evening and anyway, I’m going out to DV8 tomorrow. Woot!

I really should. I’ve made it back from Top B, removed my contact lenses, washed my face and brushed my teeth. In fact I’d be ready to go to bed, if it wasn’t for the fact that I stripped it earlier in a fit of cleanliness and haven’t yet made it again.

So I’m sat here at my computer with no T-shirt on, writing this blog entry, chatting on MSN and trying to work out why Planet Afterlife isn’t updating. I’m deliberately not looking at the mess beind me that I need to fashion into something in which I can sleep tonight.

If I don’t go to bed real soon then I’ll be tired at work tomorrow unless I drink lots of coffee.

Mmmm, coffee.

I’m procrastinating about making my bed. How bad is that?

I did the test a while ago at Dave’s, but I didn’t get round to blogging it and I couldn’t remember what I got. So seeing Laurie’s results prompted me to do it again.

And yes, I’m aware that I’m at about the same position as the Dalai Lama on the interpretation thingy. But it’s fine being in that kinda bracket when you work in the higher education sector (albeit at one of the country’s most corporate-minded instiutions). Isn’t it? And anyway, I’m not as far off the scale as Matt was the last time 🙂

What are you all waiting for? Go do it yourselves!