On my lunch break I upload some photos to Flickr that I’ve been meaning to get online for a while. The process is less painful than I remember (broadband speed really makes a difference). I do have to troubleshoot a problem with portrait shots displaying as landscape, but it’s an easy settings fix after a trawl through the help forum.

University Challenge in the evening: good exercise for the mind. The album covers round is too easy, but it freaks out Bee that I know them all instantly. Well I did work in a music shop for quite a while.

Wednesday — I spend most of the day editing shots from our holiday to Paris two years ago: 1,200+ photos cut down to a much more manageable 200 or so. I think I’ll leave the posting to Flickr till the weekend.

Thursday — Home early from the office: not feeling so good. Could be sinusitis, could be a stomach bug. Whatever it is, I’m better off at home (should have called in sick in the first place).

Turns out I don’t get to rest for long, as I still have work to do – and Project Hannibal really kicks up a gear. So many e-mails and phone calls so soon! My brain is frazzled trying to figure it out. But at the end of the day we have three appointments scheduled: one tomorrow and two more next Tuesday.

Friday — That appointment today? Not happening: I check online in the morning and the flat’s already gone. Maybe it’s a good thing, because I still feel like crap. Despite that I catch up with work in the afternoon. I hope I feel better tomorrow; it’s never a good thing to lose a weekend to illness.

Saturday — We bail on a viewing this morning; it’s a scummy-looking building, and it’s across the street from a methadone clinic. No wonder they didn’t put any photos on the website! Besides, the estate agent was late; we didn’t even wait around to see him. I hope this doesn’t turn out to be the pattern for every place we see.

Off to the shops for food, printer ink and root beer (from the Asian market near the Jervis Centre, of all places) then it’s afternoon already. Feeling slightly less ill than yesterday but still not great. My head feels hot but my body feels cold. I’m pretty much this way till I muster the energy to make burgers for dinner; they go down a treat.

Up late photo editing (I’ve got my Paris photos down to 165 and ready to upload) then bed. I’ve got the sniffles…

Sunday — Coming down with a cold now, but I get up early to finish off editing the Paris photos and upload the lot. After that it’s time for the Belgian Grand Prix and I enjoy my root beer and I’m on fire with the puns today.

Then evening comes and I’m feeling weird, uncomfortable and claustrophobic. Like the last day of summer before school begins. Guess it’s just the mounting stress and unmanifested worries under the surface. I hope the week ahead brings better feelings.

Also: still writing up my NYC notes. Need to upload my (mostly rubbish) photos to Flickr, too. I didn’t shoot as much or as often as I expected; guess I’m just not confident/comfortable/shameless enough with the camera. But I’m also thinking: it’s great to have photos as a memory aid, but do they need to be my own photos? Surely I can get the same feelings/memories from looking at others’ snaps of the same places. Yet there’s still a part of me that says that’s cheating.

Sautéed sweet potato for dinner. Didn’t turn out as nice as the last time; maybe it was the chicken that made that meal. Will try again.

Later on I read more Eno and listen to noise rock on my iPod (Arab On Radar, Mars, AIDS Wolf – not in the right mood for the latter, makes me feel claustrophobic) while Bee plays Red Dead Redemption. Games always look great on the Enormotron.

I’m finding myself amused by Bono’s bullshit philosophising about music in the Eno book. This coming from the singer of one of the most musically uninteresting bands in recent memory! I’m reminded of Socrates’ maxim that true wisdom lies in knowing that one does not know everything. Clearly that concept doesn’t apply to Bono.

Aside: on p187 Eno makes a cryptic reference to Negativland, misspelled as ‘Negativeland’ – although elsewhere (p396, Sharing Music) he’s apparently sympathetic to their position. (Must listen for context: the songs that caused the ‘U2’ controversy in the first place.)

A quick browse online before bed turns into an hour-plus session: an ILX thread about bad artist-created album art grabs my attention for far too long. I’m fascinated with musicians who must honestly put a lot of hard work into their recordings, yet seem determined to self-sabotage their efforts by saddling them with such amateurish, cringe-worthy covers. It’s not even a case of making a virtue of a shitty aesthetic (see Pen & Pixel); it’s like they simply can’t see what’s wrong with the picture.

Friday — Terribly humid this morning. I wake with yet another fever. Legs feel like lead. Am sluggish most of the day. Work not worth mentioning. Popped to the shops on my lunch break and picked up ingredients for a chocolate fridge cake. But I’m too tired to make it when I get home – too tired for much of anything, really.

Saturday — Nachos for breakfast, and more Eno reading. Went out at lunchtime to collect the laundry and pick up the paper, then back to the book. Returning to my earlier point about Bono, I disagree with Eno’s take on pretension (p381):

Robert Wyatt once said that we were always in the condition of children – faced with things we couldn’t understand and thus with the need to guess and improvise. Pretending is what kids do all the time. It’s how they learn. What makes anyone think you should sometime give it up?

I’ve got an answer for that. When children pretend, it’s with an implicit awareness that the whole group is pretending and in on the game. The problem when grown-ups do it is that they’re not playing – they actually purport to be something they’re not/understand something they don’t. Games and play are useful, maybe even necessary, but pretention is just bullshit.

Eno’s take on the mid-1990s CD-ROM/interative computer craze is more interesting for seeing how much has changed in the 15 years since he said this (I wonder if he feels the same way today):

Shall I tell you something? Conceptually, the whole project is wrong from the ground up. I think the whole idea that you want to sit in front of this and go to places is a bad idea. I think that’s the whole principle that has dominated the thing so far. Only idiots actually want to do that with their lives. Only people who have nothing else to do actually find it interesting to go and look at bloody pictures on a computer. It’s a pathetic way of looking at things.

I make that chocolate fridge cake in the afternoon, and it turns out well. Very sweet though; next time I’ll only use dark chocolate instead of half-and-half dark and milk.

Out to Crawdaddy later for Estel’s gig with Steve Mackay. Awesome, noisy show, but totally unpretentious. Bushie’s stage banter is hilarious, and Steve looks like he’s having a whale of a time. Also: that makes two people who played on Fun House and aren’t named Iggy that I’ve seen in the flesh.

John’s downstairs filming the show with his crew. I play sidemouse taking photos from the balcony; my Plastic Fantastic lens gets some great results in the low light. And my hearing holds up pretty good, too (I forgot my earplugs, but improvised with wads of tissue).

Home by half eleven with a chip supper from Burdock’s, but I save most for tomorrow’s lunch.

Sunday — Up at nine to read and watch wrestling. The current WWE storylines don’t inspire me; in fact I’m getting really annoyed by creative’s failure to comprehend the face/heel paradigm. Two cases in point: Randy Orton is booked as a face but looks/acts/feels like a heel; and John Cena is supposedly the top face in the company, but does decidedly heelish things like attacking opponents unprovoked, or like he did this week: walking away like a coward when a group of heels turned on one of their own. If the characters never obey the conventions of their own characterisations, how the hell can we suspend disbelief? Why this complete ignorance of basic storytelling logic?

Discover two more mysterious cuts/scratches on my hands. What am I doing when my eyes aren’t watching?

Noon supermarket run for Pepsi Max. Vicar Street smells of piss and Fisherman’s Friends. Afterwards I take out the rubbish to the bin shed. The nerve of some people: why do they always fill the front dumpsters to the brim and beyond, but leave the back ones completely empty? I mean really, just suck it up and hold your breath for 10 seconds, it’s not that hard.

Idea: Ireland’s second city as the world’s premier producer of hybrid cultery — Cork, home of the spork.

Bee’s playing Red Dead Redemption, at the point where John Marston meets the character named ‘Irish’. Jesus H Christ, that accent!

After lunch I finish the Eno book, and go through the notes I made along the way (cf Thoughtwax’s notes from 2008). A good eureka moment on p128:

Violence in movies: perhaps this whole thing about kids becoming immune to violence is wrong – what they’re becoming immune to are media. They know they’re just watching a film (a detachment I can’t make).

On p169, a telling insight on Tony Blair at the time of the Bosnian crisis:

Blair has said nothing whatsoever that woud reveal even the beginning of a policy line on this. He’s so anxious to get elected he can’t actually say anything about anything – and doesn’t. Very disappointed in him lately – not just about this, but about his lack of fibre. Is this what it takes to get elected these days?

Just wait till 10 years later, Brian – you don’t know the half of it! Last but not least, Eno gets prophetic (p283):

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.

In the afternoon: the All-Ireland semi-final is a let-down. Dublin do well in the first half, getting four points clear of Cork, then proceed to throw it away in the second with a stupid penalty. Guess it’s back to ignoring Gaelic games for me – and hoping the Mets get a wild card for the playoffs.

I bookend the day with more wrestling, this time TNA. Two things: What’s going on with the weird blue lights? And what’s up with Eric Young’s nipples?

Loud music/drunk singing downstairs starts as soon as I finish the call; makes me wish we could move tomorrow, just beam all our stuff into a new place. Curse you Heisenberg and your uncertainty principle!

Up to p164 in the Eno book, plus however-many pages of the appendices. It’s a two-bookmark job, this one.

Idea for a new TV show – Sportacus: Blood and Sand. (Somebody Photoshop a poster for this, please.)

Caught up on ILM and the top 300 metal/heavy rock albums poll; more fodder for the listening queue, and reminded me of albums I forgot to vote for in my own ballot.

Nothing of note on TV in the evening. Then up half the night getting started on Project Green, which involves taking my record of movies watched from Google Calendar and putting them online in a more easily accessed format. Flixster seems to be the best site for the job, though it’s far from perfect.

Wednesday — More Project Green. I twitter my surprise at having watched so many; I love film, but I’m not really a ‘buff’ and can easily go for weeks without seeing one. My list is complete by mid-afternoon: 238 watched and rated since summer 2005 – and that’s only the ones I noted down. Funnily enough, now that I have a number, it makes me want to set a target: how long will it take to get to 250? 500? More?

Realise I haven’t been keeping up my half-year resolution to listen to a podcast every evening. But at least I’ve been reading again. I’l say no more on the matter; don’t want to jinx myself.

Thursday — Early to bed, late to rise. Too much sleep is as bad as too little.

Some writing after lunch and in the evening, making notes on our New York trip. In the afternoon, I meet Bee with Debbie and John in Temple Bar. Project Hannibal comes up in conversation.

A day of bus rides and listening to Voivod.

Also, I learn a new insulting gesture: make a fist with your thumb sticking out between your middle and ring fingers. It’s like flipping the bird to a Capetonian, says Bee.

Friday — Today I improvise dinner: chicken breast marinated in yogurt and peri-peri sauce, with sautéed sweet potato. Needs some refinement (potato needs to be sliced thinner and microwaved beforehand) but I think we’re onto a winner.

Leaving Bee with the Xbox, I go to Castleknock in the evening for a Friday the 13th movie marathon at John and Debbie’s. By 5am we’d made it through the first five films in the series – at which point everyone else retired to bed. Since I was leaving early I stayed up. Watched The Accidental Tourist; the dog is the best thing in it.

Saturday — Home by nine, sleep till after two, head foggy for the rest of the day. Some life admin in the evening, pruning RSS feeds in my feed-reader. I need to be more ruthless and discerning about what feeds/sites I follow; must try to avoid an informational grey goo scenario.

Sunday — Making more notes on NYC, Sunday afternoon TV, dinner of marinated steak curry, half-way into Culture novel number three, and winding down with a wrestling PPV. All in all, a good way to end the week.

Long term, it might help me get closer to my vision of this site as a hub for my aggregated self (that was before I lost my enthusiasm for a while). But I’m not really thinking about that; it only invites creative paralysis! In the short term, it’s just something to keep myself engaged with things. However mundane my week has been.

But hey, enough of my yakking. Whaddaya say? Let’s boogie.

Monday — Bank holiday today, spent mostly reading and watching TV. Caught up with the first two episodes of Mad Men S04; enjoying the change in tone, and looking forward to seeing how things unfold (also hoping it grows to be more than just The Don Draper Show).

In the evening, watching an advert for mango-flavoured yogurt, I turn to Bee with my thinking that most yogurt flavours seem to be chosen to match the tartness of the yogurt itself – those that aren’t (chocolate and vanilla being the best examples) result in gustatory dissonance. Will they one day crack The Yogurt Problem and achieve the comparatively neutral taste of fromage frais?

More television: Mastermind and University Challenge make for a great quiz hour; don’t know why they’re not always scheduled together. Make it happen, BBC.

Later I finish reading The Player of Games by Iain M Banks. It gets four stars from me. I’ve already begun the next in the Culture series, but may take that one a bit slower. I have a lot of books to read, indeed.

Tuesday — Woke with a fever; I’ve lost count of the number of times that’s happened over the past few weeks. Felt ill in the office all day, headaches and nausea. Managed to keep down lunch, and get things done regardless. Probably a mistake. I leave early to pick up a new USB mouse for Bee, then home to veg on the couch and recover.

Wednesday — Still feeling off today; headaches returned in the afternoon. However, I did manage to get the XP partition on my MacBook working with my external monitor once again, thanks to Bee’s tinkering. She knows far more about Windows than I ever will.

Thursday — Woke up feeling better, more or less, despite stress of late-night noise from the flat downstairs (not to mention the strain in my calf from stomping on the floor in frustration).

Haircut today: much needed as it was more than two months since my last. Think I may have found a new barber to frequent, too; next time I’ll go between Monday and Wednesday as it’s cheaper. Briefly considered, as I occasionally do, the opportunity cost of getting my own razor – and once again decided to stick with the bimonthly barber visit. For now.

I take the 124 home. It’s my favourite bus route; it only goes as far as St James’ so I never have to fight to get off at my own stop.

Friday — Slow day at the office. Lunch skipped as I forgot to bring the sandwich I’d made. Out to mam’s in the evening for a flying visit. I help tune in the analogue channels on her new TV. Then home by nine. Oven-baked chicken breast for dinner; I have mine on toast with beetroot and hummus.

Saturday — I’m up early to watch A Serbian Film which I’d downloaded overnight. I share my thoughts online with John, my go-to guy for exploitation film:

I just watched this one this morning. Before I go wash my eyes out with caustic soda… agreed on the Chris Morris-esque nature of the ‘shock’ scenes. Also: to me the whole thing is just a heavy-handed metaphor for post-war Serbia, as inspired by that Dennis Hopper line from Blue Velvet. Too contrived to be believable or really deliver a message.

After lunch Bee and I take the Luas out to the Point Village Market, which is a let-down. It’s described as Dublin’s biggest open market, and “a haven for food lovers”. But it’s really just small clusters of anonymous tents, set too far apart from each other in a windswept concrete square – the whole scene conspicuously devoid of atmosphere. Maybe it needs more people to make it vibrant, but it also needs more/better traders. If you build it, they will come.

Rather than settle for the market’s meagre offerings, we take the next Luas back to town and have lunch in Temple Bar. Dublin can be expensive, but it’s nice to know one can still eat out on the cheap occasionally.

Dinner: casserole of steak, potato, carrot and onion in a Guinness and beef stock. Might not be ‘summer food’ but it goes down a treat.

Up late-ish to watch the Mets game. The season’s been going downhill since Beltran returned. I know that’s a coincidence, but sport is as much about superstition as skill – at least to us spectators. Winning streaks? Lucky clothing? The peculiar US fascination with meaningless statistics? It’s all about our simple minds making sense of a complicated world.

Sunday — Hitchcock double-bill on the TV this morning: Spellbound and Notorious (the latter we save for later). Ingrid Bergman is stunning; Gregory Peck looking nervous in the former, eyes unfocused in the early scenes – stage fright, perhaps? Towards the end Bee and I have a chuckle at the ski slope sequence: they’re so close together, not even a budge between them, they look like they’re standing on the same skis.

Up to mid April in A Year with Swollen Appendices. Good quote on p59:

It’s nice arriving somewhere at night – night cloaks the mundane with intrigue.

Then p300, in Eno’s appendix on ‘axis thinking’:

It’s extraordinary that when the Berlin Wall came down everyone assumed that the whole world was about to become one big market economy running on the same set of rules. What happened instead was that the old dualism communism <—> capitalism was revealed to conceal a host of possible hybrids. Now only the most ideological governments (England, Cuba) still retain their fundamentalist commitment to one end of the continuum: most governments are experimenting vigorously with complicated customized blendings of market forces and state intervention.

Also taken aback by Eno’s description of the American consulate in Antigua as a ‘Zone of Pragmatic Deceit’, designed to deter the locals from entering the US without actually admitting it as a policy decision. He writes that visa applicants are required to address staff

through a thick glass panel which has a small hole 7ft from the ground, and a narrow slot at the bottom, about 3ft from the ground. Since the staff routinely feign inability to hear or understand what anyone is saying […] applicants are soon forced to their knees so they can talk up through the little slot. This induction into American society sets the right tone: instead of ‘Bring us your poor, your sick, etc’ it’s ‘On your knees and beg.’

It seems an extreme, Kafkaesque example (I find no other reference to it in a brief search online) but the concept is familiar: some ‘free’ countries do make those considered ‘undesirables’ jump through hoops simply to pay a visit. Case in point: for a South African resident in Ireland, the tourist visa form for most of Europe is two pages long; for Britain – including Northern Ireland, with whom we have a supposedly ‘open’ border – it’s 11 pages.

UFC 117 on the DVR to round out the evening. Great main event; glad to see Anderson Silva get taken down a peg and humbled in the octagon, even if he did squeak out the victory.