Diary of an up and coming sociopath

That’s my first week over, then. It went pretty fast, though I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to the weekend. It’s taking me some time to adjust, since I’m currently down to about a quarter of the free time I used to have, per day. At the moment I’m operating on about 7-8 hours of sleep a night, which is working well. I haven’t even overslept yet. But then, I have three alarms, and I hate the last one so much I always make sure I’m awake to turn it off before it goes off (it’s just a clock radio tuned to static, at maximum volume.)

Still, I stand now on the brink of the weekend. In theory, my money troubles are over, and I’m considering using some of the weekend’s abundant free time to go and buy a bookcase, which I desperately am in need of. I also compiled a Christmas list after weeks of deliberation. It contains a bunch of DVDs, 2 CDs, and a book. Can’t go wrong with pop culture consumables.

The other day I was thinking how it looks pretty sad not to update on the first day of a month, if only for the calendar’s sake. Unfortunately, I need sleep, so I somehow managed to only just make updating on the third day. Oops. I did implement a spamblocking procedure the likes of which christ himself would approve of. Actually, I nicked a plugin which did the hard parts for me, but I made a crappy page with no styling that tells you what it did! The amout of spam I was getting really had hit ridiculous amounts. But no longer. It’s fucking gone for good, this time.

I notice that Miriam-Webster has picked “Blog” as word of the year. Good going there, guys. Right on the ball with that. What’s the word for 2005 going to be? Cowabunga? According to the article, “Another trend this year has been the increasing numbers of weblogs that detail the daily lives of many ordinary workers in jobs that few people know much about. ” Well colour me trendy. Where else can you learn about the ins and outs of a Database Product Matcher? Huh? HUH? Glad you agree.

Speaking of which, today the head of the UK office, a genuinely cool guy named Glen Drury (Sample quote: “WHO IS IT THAT MUST DIE BECAUSE MY CONSOLES CATEGORY ISN’T WORKING, RIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS?”) called us all up for a meeting (as in, everyone in the company) and announced to us that Pierre Chappez had decided to leave Kelkoo, effective of 1st Jan 2005. Now, I’m not exactly clued up on the place just yet, but I did manage to recall that Pierre was the guy who set up the company in the first place, and who recently sold it all to Yahoo and joined them. I guess working for Yahoo’s instead of himself wasn’t really cutting it, or something. He can now retire to a villa in france and sleep on top of a pile of money. It seemed like quite an important announcement, especially what with gathering the whole company together to give it, but it only tangibly affected about 4 people in the office who actually reported to Pierre. It felt more like being told that a relative I never met had died. Like something should be different, but wasn’t. I delighted in informing other people though, who greeted the news with about the same disposition I did. “Who is that, and does it affect me?”

actually, speaking of Glen, I believe he’s going to be on Channel 4 news tomorrow evening. They were filming today, at least. I’ve only been there 8 days and already the TV cameras have been there twice. What a place. So, anyway, if you want to get a good look at where I work, we were told that they filmed the office. I doubt I’ll be visible, since they wanted a tidy part, and the tech team bit where I work wasn’t especially tidybecause it had new terminals in boxes stacked up against the wall, but if you can see anything, it’ll probably be the same room that I work in, and an incredibly similar setup. Maybe I’ll try and get some screenshots to explain in more detail.