X Files, Rollercoasters, Thomas the Tank Engine etc: A Complete List of my Geekouts in Chronological Order

I am a geek. I am one of those cool ones that is cool, but still a geek, and I have been comfortable with my geekiness for years. I was always worried about coming out of the cool-closet but my family have been very supportive and understand the courage it takes to admit it to your closest friends, and I have been out and proud geek for a long time now.

A friend once said that if it weren't for Hazel I would've ended up endlessly wanking and sitting my room not ever having sex or meeting a lady. He's probably right after reading this list...

Thomas the Tank Engine
A couple of months ago a cracked open a bottle of wine and watched episodes of Thomas on Youtube which, then, became my official "Greatest Invention". It reminded me of when I was enthralled in the gorgeous world of the Isle of Sodor. I had all the main toys and characters and loved nothing better than to act out the story lines when I had the chance, such as Henry's tunnel escapades or the episode when Thomas thinks he drive without his driver and crashes into the Fat Controllers house during breakfast. This is where my geekiness stems from.

Lego
The Reason I am an engineer without a doubt, the intricate worlds and buildings I built with the tiny plastic bricks are exactly also the place where I grew my infinite imagination and probably my habit for meticulous arrangement of objects - nothing breeds OCD-esque tendencies that rigid block formations and symmetrical designs. I would love nothing more than to crack open my Lego and build an epic object using my knowledge I have now like I did back then, but it ain't going to happen - my mum is never going to let me take it out.

Rollercoasters
I started playing Rollercoaster Tycoon back in 1999 after a chance reading about it in a computer game magazine. I got the demo off a PC Gamer CD and feel in love with the graphics and the simple menu system and the fact that there was a massive scope for creating pretty much anything out of the game. I lost literally months to this game (that's total time, not how long I played it) and also bred the first really geeky thing I have ever done, and still have with me, which is a large and encyclopeadic knowledge of Rollercoasters and Theme Parks in the US, which surprised a recent friend who was impressed (is that the right word) that I knew about Six Flags Over Texas.

X Files
I used to watch the X Files on Sky 1 whenever they were on - much to my fathers distaste as he grew bored of the storyline at around the moment the series started to jump the shark. In anycase since then I have acquired 7/9 series and plan, in the future, to complete my collection, even if it means putting up with Dogget and Reyes. It is that OCD thing coming back to me.

Music
I now geek over something a little more social acceptable. Music is okay though as other people like it though, yeah? Cool.

Things that I missed out on:
Dungeons and Dragons, Lord of the Rings (I have read them and they are not my favourite books though), Computer Games on Consoles (never had a Playstation), Role Playing Games (Warhammer... shiver...),.

The thing is that I am not alone in being a geek - in fact I think that everyone is a geek about something. I mean, Hazel enjoys Sex and the City and Oscar award winners, my father is the ultimate Chris Rea and Ed McBain geek and the majority of my friends are into things like Computers, Geek out over football transfers and statistics and even Star Trek. Maybe I am not so unusual.

Christmas 2

Merry Christmas

Review of 2008, Preview of 2009 Part One: January to April.

La persistencia de la memoria, (The Persistence of Memory) - Dali (1931)

Here is something I should’ve done last year. It would have made for a good benchmark to track my progress. In any case here is the first four months of the last year in a digestible format, not unlike a catch-up round up type thing. Also, pinned to the months is my expectations for the future months. And then I’ll check later in the year if they meet what I thought.

January
PAST
Went offshore for the first time, clocking in a whole two weeks in one sitting. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) The weather was dreadful, the platform shook and the guys who were there was depressed to the point of wanting to kill each other. The whole experience was… interesting, if a little soul destroying. It made me glad for an office and dry land.

Before I knew it the month was almost over and that was that. Quickest January ever.

FUTURE
This year I think January will have some of the most important decisions in the longterm for myself. Hazel and I have to figure out what is going to happen with the whole location issues, her being over there and my being over here. She has to find something that she wants to do in the same way I have and go for it. This is something that is important for her and me. Also: I am going to London for a weekend with people who I have never met before – exciting times!

February
PAST
Once again my month was punctuated with going offshore, this time for shorter while, but more excruciatingly on night shift. This led me to write the most meandering post I have written on here, and probably the only one that I enjoy rereading… it captures my feelings exactly. After this stint my respect for Riggers went up quite a bit, their bodies routinely being pummelled by swings in their sleeping habits. Took me quite a bit of time to get back on track after returning to the Aberdeen.

This blog turned 1 in February, which was exciting. It only dawned on my later that it actually was 1 in November 2007, with the posts from my old blog on Bebo counting I suppose as the premature birth of the blogging me. I also posted the second in the retrospective posts about my time university, which are the most honest to god I have been on here.

Sleepwalk Capsules launched.

FUTURE
February is such a non event month that I can’t even think of things that might happen. I have a training course booked and will try to fit in some hillwalking with friends – the great outdoors, how I have missed ye.

March
PAST
March is a month that I can’t really remember much about – it obviously was when I wasn’t paying attention. Shayan was living with me good a proper at this point and all I can remember about March was the excessive amount of money I spent travelling up and down to Glasgow every weekend.

This month saw my return to the ex-28th Scouts weekend with all the old boys. I will be making it three in a row this coming March and I am looking forward to it rather a lot, and promise to myself to be in better shape by preplanning 6 hill walks, starting in January, before I turn up to meet loads of guys double and thrice my age thundering ahead of me up the steep inclines.

I also went on my first “training course” being patronised to the point of being a child by a woman who pretended to know loads about everyone in the room based on three pieces of card an an arbitrary colour. The irony is that this training course has stayed with me better than any technical training course that I went on is not lost on me.

FUTURE
I have the 2009 ex-28th meeting to look forward to, and plan to go away somewhere nice for a week, maybe Rome or Prague with people or a person. This plan is up in the air and requires me to start thinking about booking it kind of about now… but Credit Crunch and all that might make me think twice about it. Probably not though.

April
PAST
In April I fooled you all (well, most) and it was glorious. April fools day is such an odd celebration of pretty much nothing and now with the internet mischief can far and wide reaching without actually needing to do anything worthwhile. I can pretend to do anything and in the mist of 1/08 many people will forgive such hoazes – try it any other time of the year and you shall be hung, drawn and quartered by the heady crowds of the Internet.

I went to my first technical training course with the work and found out I knew even less than I remembered, being suitably put in my place by a cocky, swearing cunt of an English man that endeared to me with his words of fucking wisdom and fucking tips that made sense at the time. Having been on further training courses I have came to conclusion that not only was he a colossal prick, he didn’t really teach us anything… which goes at odds to what I said in my post. Hey, cool, I changed my mind.

FUTURE
April? Nothing planned. I suppose that around about now the powers that be will be initiating the Houston – Aberdeen exchange for 2009 and 2010 and pending what agreement Hazel and I achieve I will either be looking to apply for this to move to America for a year to work for Mustang.

The first third then:
Strange one, it really flew in – I became an office based drone, working day in day out in the place for a long time, drifting along not noticing anything worthwhile. No drama, no excitement, no curve balls. Pretty much the most boring couple of months I have had… since the summer between school and University. The biggest upheaval was that Hazel was officially in Glasgow short-middle term and I was working offshore, living with Shayan. Things were trundling along at a pace not unlike meandering and slow.

The next first third then:
Could be interesting for all. I plan to move the blog away from Blogger to a new place that is slightly better called Wordpress in the new year and will most likely never get round to doing it properly – it is actually already there in some capacity. Some major things need to be decided though, and they will be sooner rather than later. Shall be tumultuous and exciting - the opposite of the counter part months last year.

Christmas Tree

Topical this time: I am going to buy a Christmas tree this weekend I think. I don't know where to buy one, I don't know how much it will cost and I don't even know why I fancy it... but unlike last year this Christmas seems a bit more like the real deal, and even I have become a little caught up in the whole... bullshit really. The place has been snowy and cold and the nights are darker than I remember but mostly it is because that even when it feels like Christmas I still think that it is a crock of old shit.

Now you might misunderstand me. I like the days off, I need the time off from work, and I enjoy the fact that for a few times in the last weeks and coming weeks all the old pipers and engineers really like going out and getting lashed to the heavy nines and pay for drinks for all the young ones, of which I still am. I also like the fact that towards the last week everything goes a little bit mental as people and attendance starts dropping like flies, noting that I mean the insects and not the little willy peep holes at the front of trousers.

As an atheist the celebration of the birth of our saviour the Lord Jesus Christ is kind of lost on me - I know the significance and I know that hundreds of million of people all over the world will be like "How can he be like that?" but to be fair, I don't preach about it. However, surely I can enjoy the time of the year as well as everyone else, whilst giving thanks for a stellar group of mates, healthy family and a securish job.

So why the want for a Christmas tree? I don't know... but the flat will seem nicer for it I think, and I also think it might be fun to put it up - or it might be a total ball ache. If I buy one I'll post it on here in glorious photo-vision. Bah Humbug.

Reading 2.0

So I have been reading for quite a while. Recently I have been unable to really delve deep into books, unlike my past years where I read a multitude of novels, be it pulp or factual, my recent reading lists have been dominated by comic books and graphic novels, punctuated by the sound of a blockbuster-novel that is not exactly well written but moves along at a pace that ticks quite well. I have in my head a list of books I want to read and that list is forever growing.

Early this year I picked up Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and dived into the rather wining English that he uses to explain things that are quite technical and profoundly boring to the casual reader - the ways of the space time continuum might not appeal to all who read this but it managed to engage in a way long since forgotten in the ways on physics.

Another book I planned to read (and almost bought) was Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil - for it might not be classical, and I might not even understand it but I always fancied reading it to see how well I understood his theories and if it was possible to actually... well, kinda learn a bit? Not sure how well it would've worked.

Anyway, I never did buy the book. But at the weekend I did pick it up, along with The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare. Why? Well I downloaded a new thing for my iPhone and it is pretty amazing. It is a free application that allows you to read eBooks on the phone and gives you access to hundreds of thousands of books that are available for free on the internet.

So I have started to come round to the idea of an eBook reader - say the Amazon Kindle. It is a little clunky looking and a bit big, and possibly too expensive but the concept is quite marvellous - hundreds of books in your pocket? Why not?

I don't know about it replacing books - nothing is more pretentious than having a good book under your arm or a shelf filled with dustcovers with pages of words quivering inside... but it quite a novel idea.