When was the last time you used an audio cassette tape? Have a little think and pop the answer in the comments.

By the way, I’m watching Zombie Flesh Eaters 2. My second question, should you choose to answer it, is how do directors make crappy so-bad-they’re-good films like this and know how terrible they are and yet still make them? It’s unlikely that they’re made bad on purpose, so they must really think that they’re good. How is this possible?

Maybe a psychologist or philosopher could answer me that one, it’s a mystery too deep for laity.

I like drinking UHT milk portions straight out of those little plastic containers, especially when the milk is at room temperature.

Join me next week when I will be confessing to something else disgusting.

Sometimes my mind wanders off to places where I know not how it got there. This frequently happens during, for example, my driving lessons.

The latest instance of this was when we were approaching a roundabout and my instructor was telling me about gears and braking and so forth. My eyes happened upon an advertisement featuring someone who looked like Gwen Stefani. Suddenly, all external input was completely blocked out, while inside my head this happy refrain was being repeated, over and over:

I spent the rest of the day pondering whether that last line should read ‘hey’ or ‘hay’.

So this morning I rock up to work for 7.45, as I do most days, only to discover that I didn’t have to be in til 9. No-one else from the office is in yet, so I’m taking this opportunity to tell you about a game I have been playing. Possibly ever since I was born, but maybe even earlier than that. I call it, “How low can you go?” and the main object is doing anything and everything to stay in bed for as long as possible.

It’s called “How low can you go?” because squeezing those extra minutes out of your lie-in can be achieved by omitting parts of your morning routine. Things like showering, eating breakfast, that kind of thing. The sad part of this game is that there is no way to win. Unless you wish to lose your job, you really do have to get up eventually.

But then the great part is that once you are up, it’s actually not that bad! This is the amazing part of each and every morning. You (and by “you”, I mean “I”) look upon getting out of bed as the most terrible mission, to be faced with bravery and gritted teeth. Removing yourself from the warm confines of the duvet, that most motherly of all household objects, appears to be the same thing as removing yourself from all that is good, holy and true. It seems like throwing yourself into the very pit of hell itself. Dante’s hell, I mean, which at its heart was not hot and fiery, but cold and frozen.

On that note, why is it that the coldest temperatures in the Universe are found not in the Arctic, nor in the far flung corners of outer space, but precisely four inches from the inside of your bed? Science tells us that absolute zero is the coldest possible temperature, at which molecules lose all their kinetic energy and stop moving completely. I have proof otherwise. If they were to come into my room just seconds after I had woken up (and if they had survived the onslaught of language so foul it solidifies in mid air, like shards of bitter, bitter ice*) they would find that the air defied physics and remained gaseous even though it was cold enough to form black holes.

The most amazing thing about “How low can you go?” is that you get to be a champion every morning. Every day, for the whole of my life, I have eventually gotten out of bed. (That qualifier, ‘eventually’, is there to cover my student years. And most weekends. And most holidays.) This very morning, I had the victory over despair and despondency, over laziness and lethargy, over fear and fright.

So there’s something for you to do in the mornings. Let me know how you get on.

* This is dramatic license, I’m not that bad, actually.

This is the view from one of the windows where I work. It’s one of my favourite views of Sheffield. The Energy Recovery Facility burns rubbish to make energy.

This was taken in the evening, about 6pm. The light was really good. This was taken on my phone camera. I miss my digital camera :(

Here I use the word ‘programming’ loosely. I am a hobbyist web developer, who is pretty good at XHTML and CSS (or I was the last time I checked, which hasn’t been for a while) and not too bad at PHP with MySQL. I have to look up the odd, rarely ever used, obscure MySQL command, like INSERT or UPDATE, and every now and again I find myself researching the date() function, but I can do quite a bit with PHP. Classes and objects are still beyond me, yet I can use other people’s classes in my own scripts.

After I finished my degree I went travelling, and on my return to the UK I took up wasting my life as a full-time occupation: beforehand I had only been doing it part-time — what with my being a student. I did the odd bit of temp work (cleaning for the council, sitting at a computer for a day in my sister’s school, data entry for a mental health trust) but largely I spent my time getting up late, watching Star Trek: Voyager, walking the dog and, most productively, working on various web development projects.

It was during this time that I picked up my web skills, and really developed them. After I moved back to Sheffield in August 2006, I got a job working in a restaurant. It left my days free to do with as I pleased, and I spent most of them working on a plugin for WordPress that will allow me to manage all my photos from the same admin interface I use to manage my posts. I’m still working on it, over a year later…

I now work at Church (Hope City Church, Sheffield) in the conferencing department. The hours are long, and I also serve on the production team where I work on stage lighting, meaning the hours really are long. We often have things on in the evening, and there are events on both Saturday and Sunday. I don’t quite work a seven day week, but it does feel like it sometimes.

But I really love programming. I love seeing bits of code, and I just think monospace fonts are really pretty. I love the way everything is so neat and orderly, and how things always end with my most favourite punctuation mark, the semi-colon. It reminds me that code is a strange mix of language and mathematics.

Writing code is like setting up dominoes: each statement flows into the next one and the end point is totally different from the start point. The only difference is that you don’t have to set the dominoes back up again afterwards.

This post has been a retrospective of one of the best year of my life so far. Thank you for joining me on the journey. I am now going to eat vegetable samosas.

Everyone who knows me will know that I love to eat. Strictly, this isn’t quite true. I love to eat when I’m hungry, but today I am tired of being hungry. The cost of eating is that you have to buy food, and frankly this makes the whole process of eating lose its shine. So today, instead of buying food and eating it, I am just not going to eat.

Seriously, it’s the only way my hunger will learn. It can’t just arrive unannounced and expect me to satisfy it. I have other things that I want to do today, and eating isn’t one of them. So I’m not eating today. No sir. No thanks.

That’s really the end of my post.