Author: Tom Coates

Ooooh. More Bubbles.

Ooooh. Bubbles.

Interesting how this might seem to be a confession – I smoke.

Observations on Smoking and Being a Smoker:

• I have smoked on and off for nearly seven years now.
• I smoke the evil Marlboro Lights, because everyone knows that that’s all you are allowed to smoke if you don’t want to look like a bookie, a ponce or a dirty old man.
• I smoke around 10 cigarettes a day, which is remarkably little I think.
• I started smoking during my undergraduate finals at Bristol University. Almost everyone I know smokes or has recently quit, but it wasn’t peer pressure that started me off, it was wanting some excuse to duck away from revision and sit on my roof in the summer.
• Smokers Anonymous is a website. It isn’t what you think it is.
• Lots of other gay people smoke too. I think they think it keeps them slim, but actually I hear that that’s a load of crap. I am gay, I smoke, and I am not fat. But I don’t think the three things are related.
• Smoking makes you smell of smoke apparently. But I have no sense of smell anyway, and everyone I want to sleep with seems to smoke anyway, so it’s not like that really matters to me.
• I decided to stop smoking on my 30th birthday. But now it seems like a awful lot of pressure waiting two and a half years to stop doing something. So I might stop earlier.
• When I was in America I stayed with Kerry and Sean. They are gay too. They are not fat. They smoke as well. I repeat, I don’t think these things are related.
• People in California don’t seem to like smokers very much. They make them smoke outdoors. But then in California it is really nice outside most of the time, so it’s not that big a deal. If they tried to do that in the UK there would be uproar. People would still stand outside in the rain though if it meant they could have a cigarette.

Is it just me, or does Blogger work really strangely on IE5 for Macs?

I’m in a much cheerier mood today, but I still can’t really focus properly – everything I try to write spirals out of control. So (as you can probably see) I am restricting myself to short snippets of interest (ooooh – a traditional weblog) rather than my usual vaguely coherent longer posts.

A few days ago, Zeldman mentioned me in his daily log. At the time this came as a pleasant surprise, but more and more over the last few days it has started to encroach on my mind. I am in a more paranoid space than I have been for months, but I have started wondering why he would want to read my shambling missives. I honestly don’t understand it. And of course it doesn’t help when he goes and declares war on Microsoft. Now I’m actually scared of him. And what kind of person is not only mentioned in important articles, but has those articles screencapped for the product demos of huge companies? I mean – the man’s got to be some kind of superhuman godlike uberman.

I got a charming e-mail today (thank you Txiki). It directed me towards glassdog.com and the Lifechange Cardwrack. Very cool indeed. I’m familiar with glassdog of old, but this new aspect… Very cool indeed.

Yet another Tiny Tom Time Out Microproject. All you Londoners, win tickets to MTV’s Five Night Stand.

I keep being reassured, but this still alarms me:

“If you become too indispensable to a specific project, then that is likely to be your project forever. If you get bored with that project, too bad. If you want to learn new, saleable expericence in case something does happen to your job or to your project, too bad. I can understand not wanting to move into management, but if that is what you want, too bad. Finding one particular job that you want to stick with is great, but it could become an albatross around your neck.” [Excerpt from Considered Harmful]

Today I feel jittery, unable to concentrate, prone to extraordinary mood-swings, exhausted, claustrophobic and wired. I have no idea why I should feel so awful, although I am currently researching Sleep Deprivation.

If you do a search on Yahoo! for “Sleep Deprivation”, the first thing you come up with is needcoffee.com. It’s not that helpful, frankly, but it is quite entertaining…

So I have been a bit lax on the old weblogging over the last couple of days, which frankly is unforgivable. But all that is about to end. I stumbled upon the Guerilla Banner Project today, and I haven’t been as chuffed for ages (translation for Americans: thrilled/pleased). These random people look at their favourite sites and produce alternative banners for them. Most of them are pretty cool. Particular favourite of the moment “Love Me, Love My Penis… Prehensile Tales.

There are reasons for my recent laxity though. One of the unpleasant ones involves the bill finally arriving for March’s excess bandwidth. I have to grab together another $150 to pay them off, and (in doing so) dispose of the epic Nexus debts. This charge having been disposed of, I can get down to the business of moving hosts. I didn’t want to do anything until the bill finally arrived (and I had actually put down the deposit on a flat) and now it looks like that was the right thing to do!

Something to make people jealous here. You never can tell in these situations, so it might be a fraud, but I appear to have been sent an extremely entertaining and in depth e-mail by none other than Michael Moorcock of Jerry Cornelius fame. And it’s all about The Bomb and Grant Morrison…