End of an ambition...

Today, I cycled to a meeting. Not extraordinary in itself: people regularly cycle in the city, and it's a good way to get around. But it was an external (i.e. different companies) meeting in a faraway town, and on the way home I realised that it was more significant than I'd thought. For the last few years, I'd been moving slowly into management. I still did my technical work: the teams I had were generally young and not familiar with the technologies and techniques that were needed on my projects (I tend to pick up the more difficult, less charted areas of work. In fact, I can't remember when I was last asked to design and build something that had been done before; it's possible that that hasn't happened anywhere outside my education), so I'd teach them, pick up the bits that were too hard to learn quickly, and manage the workload as well. And so, reader, I tried to do all the things (except golf) that made me fit into the management miasma: wore the right things, went to the right meetings, fought my team's corner. Which in retrospect was a mistake: in doing these things whilst trying to do real work as well, I left myself wide open to management politics. And lost: which is all I'm ever going to say about that particular fiasco.

Anyways, I ramble. The significance of cycling today is not just part of my return to a simpler life (less stuff to worry about, more time to concentrate on work and play), it's also a symbol of my return to my techie self. My management politics days are over, and now I can get down to some serious work. I still dress smartly whilst there, but I'm no longer afraid of the image implications of turning up to a meeting on a bicycle. It's a lovely day out, I got 4 hours work in on the train instead of being bored witless on the M25, and I got some much-needed exercise out of it too. Period. And if anyone has a problem with that, they can ask themselves whether they'd rather have their systems designed by someone who genuinely thinks about them, and has thought about their impact on the world, or someone who just looks that way. And if they choose the second answer, then they really do get what they deserve.

Enough: I have life to sort and coding practice to do. With a small coda: a good manager knows how to tell their team what to do; a good leader understands what it is and gives their team the encouragement and space to do it well. We need more of those.

Things I didn't buy today

Not a lot really (helped mainly by continuing to spend lots on my project at work). It's interesting to see what's happening around me though. I live in a relatively poor town (I chose to be able to cycle to work over having access to a good social structure: possibly a bad idea), and have watched the locals spending like crazy over the last couple of years; if I'd been blogging here then, there probably would have been a rant sometime about how much the local banks were prepared to lend. And now it's coming home to roost big time: the pubs are almost empty, it's easy to get a taxi because they're all waiting at the station with very few fares each evening (2 in 4 hours for the driver I talked to this week); none of this is happening in the less-poor town nearby. And then there's the supermarkets. The short-dated shelf (what I call the 'dead and dying' shelf and Hwsgo called 'God told me to eat') up to now has been an interesting source of short-dated raw ingredients at stupidly small prices: great if you just want to grab some quails eggs for that evening. Not any more. The shelves are almost empty, the stock there is low-to-mid price and there are always people hovering, waiting for new things to go near them.

The trolleys, however, are still full. Not mine though: this virtue in spending seems to be creeping into the rest of my life too. Tonight, I spent just over £10 on my week's shopping, half of which was to replace my flatmate's shelf in a recent freezer defrosting unhappiness. Not £10 because I bought cheap things, but because I've finally organised my food cupboards. I'm now dealing with the things that have been loitering in these cupboards because I'd rather buy something else than eat them: anything I really don't want to eat has left the cupboards and I'm cooking my way through the rest. So I currently have a freezer full of self-cooked one-person ready meals (courtesy of the defrosting), a shelf full of basic lunch ingredients and a big box of cereal: that's dinner, lunch and breakfast sorted for every day for over a week. I still have ingredients in the cupboards, so today's shop was for things to supplement that: chorizo to add to the white beans, cream and onions, cheese and tomato soup for those evenings when I really can't be bothered to cook (which goes with leaving work at 9pm) and peas because I just happen to like peas and they add vitamins to the ready meals. So that's another set of ready-cooked meals and snacks. Nothing less, nothing more (and certainly none of the tempting ice-cream, even with a £1-off offer). And it feels surprisingly good.

Oh, and I now know the price of fish. Just over £2 for smoked mackerel, £4 for lumps of fish (haddock etc), £10 for the good stuff. Which is quite a bit more than it used to be. I played the £2 game tonight - see how much fresh meat I can buy for around £2 - and the answer now is surprisingly little; quite a difference from playing the same game last year. I do have a small problem with the newspaper though. It's not food or transport, but it is important to know what's happening in the world sometimes. Maybe if I chewed a corner I could re-classify it as food? No, I think the Guardian is too important to put on the banned list, so July 2008 is now a no-buy (except food, travel and newspapers) month. Not magazines though: I went past the girl magazine rack and suddenly realised that the main reason I buy them is to look for interesting clothes and shoes to buy. Duh.

Things I didn't buy today...

Things I didn't buy today:
* Flights to Newquay (for the light and the sand)
* Evening gown (for dinner with S)
* Small desk (for working away from the sofa)
* Solar-powered colour-changing coasters (for the heck of it)

Things I did buy:
*Lots of seriously cool minature electronics components (for work)

The no-buy experiment

Okay, continuing on with the experimenting where other people have experimented before theme, I've started myself on a no-buy month. It's a little like a financial version of a diet, but instead of asking myself "do I really need these calories", I'm asking "do I really need these things". This question was triggered by another pair: "why is there so much unnecessary stuff in my house" and "what exactly am I spending my money on", neither of which I have a polite answer to.

So, for June 2008 (and this started on Monday already), I shall attempt to pay only for food and travel. Nothing else, although I may have to negotiate for essentials (list to go here: prescription medicine, for example). And every time I think about spending money on something, I'll list it here, possibly also with the reason I don't need it... so far, the list of things I didn't buy is:
* 1 book: my life as a quant. Recommended by my currently favourite author and possibly useful for future career. But I have plenty to read right now, and Hwsgo's and the programming books will probably be a lot more useful
* 2 t-shirts from my favourite t-shirt company. Can't remember the name, but they helpfully put their website address in my unicorn t-shirt. I have enough cute t-shirts: I just need to lose a little weight to get into some of them.
* 1 blue book (title as yet undetermined) to fill in a gap on Hwsgo's bookshelves. He has enoguh books, and there are better ways to be sweet (like delivering food parcels to the sick...)
* 1 whiteboard, for listing all the things I have to do at home. I've simplified the freezer and can use the freezer whiteboard for this instead.
* 1 cheap printer, for the 2-3 pages I need to print at home every month. It will only encourage me to print more at home, especially stuff I don't need to keep.
* 1 work top, because I'm currently failing to lose enough weight to get back into my shirts. Just lose the weight: that's what the gym subscription is for.
* 1 pair Foo Fighters concert tickets. I have the cds.
* 1 pair flower show tickets. I'd rather visit the RHS or the national fruit-tree collection.
* 1 pyrex cooking bowl. Very impressed by what Hwsgo can do with chicken. But I have a glass bowl; I just need to check if it's pyrex.

I expect this will hurt, and I'll forget I'm doing this at least once during the month. But it will be an interesting experiment nonetheless. Ah... already a modification: the list of things I did buy:
* 1 ticket for a day's paintballing with work mates. Prior commitment. £15.
* 1 train ticket to Wolverhampton to see little Bro household and the most evil cat in the world. £51.50 (of which £50 was the ticket, £1 the posting fee and 50p the card booking fee, neither of which were optional online).
* 1 ticket to mess ball with Sara £45 (to bring in tomorrow).

I think I may have a bit of an answer here already: the money seem to go on seeing my friends. Maybe I should persuade them all to take up cashless hobbies, like, say, long-distance cycling?

Timeshift, yippee

Well it's been a strange time of late; huge passions and hopes and quiet revelations. But enough of that; back with the getting-life-on-track thing. And first with the getting-tv-at-the-right-time thing too. Now I'm not stupid, I know i'm not stupid, but I do have a strange attitude to the flashing box in the corner. If I read the tv schedules I'm either in despair at the rubbish on and the fact I just missed something I'd have liked to watch, or make plans to watch something specially (classic line: "sorry I can't talk but Torchwood is on") and mostly miss it altogether. Hwsgo has a box thingy that records programs easily, of which I'm most jealous... or at least jealous until I can find a workman to come round and point my TV aerial in the right direction for receiving channel 5 without the permanent snowstorm special effect. But there's hope: I've also found bbc iplayer, which wonderfully has just allowed me to watch this week's episode of Dr Who curled up in bed with my laptop (I do like David Tennant as the Doctor but not in *that* way, okay) well after the event. I shall be looking for similar... Oooh, oooh: Five Download. Back issues of CSI *and* pre-screening copies too: heaven! Not so excited about Channel 4 downloads, although Dispatches, Scrapheap Challenge and How to Look Good Naked (any help is very welcome in that department) may have something there. And ITV catchup? What's on ITV again? Oh gawd, I've just re-read the order I put the channels into, and I've finally turned into a Guardian reader...

Oh, and timeshifting. I had this with my video recorder back in the -ahem dark ages before the internet took off- I keep forgetting that I have control of the recording. Do silly things like open up another page whilst it runs in the background. But at least there won't be any advertising breaks for me to run to the bathroom in. Honestly, I sometimes wonder if the brain that can dissect part of the universe and make sense of it is inhabiting the same head as the fool that does that sort of thing...

Slightly better shape for book?

Well, novels have arisen from smaller seeds before... I see a body dangling precariously from that dropped ledge in the foreground, a message fluttering uselessly down towards the sodden dirt; evil lurking within the tower and a crane-driver who keeps finding himself in the middle of trouble. And there should be collar-turned up raincoats and dark dry heat; lurking thugs, shots heard outside in the night, mysterious phonecalls...... a fair description of this trip really...

Old and new?

I think this would make a great book cover... I just need to get round to writing the book! I could write lots of arty nonsense about the Metropolis-style tower rising up out of the 19th-century decay and the apparent mundanity of the rest of the shot. But I won't.