At last... Dan's (actually Zak's these days) features are done, and I should be pretty much finished with Nevada Casting dot Com :-)

I'm listening to Music of the Millennium at the moment, and its all nostalgia :-) Songs like Phil Collins' In the Air Tonight, Beautiful South's A Little Time, and Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights... I have to get home so I can play soon :-)

No Logo is fantastic :-) Her analysis of corporate branding strategies is pretty deep, though I have yet to get to her conclusions and solutions for this "problem". Its nice to see that I'm not as susceptible to it as I could have been though... I did go shopping in Gap and Donna Karan yesterday, and both of those companies are fairly high on her shit list ;-)

Yesterday I picked up a couple of books on the way home from work. One was called Black Box, and within 10 pages it turned out to be completely crap, so I dropped it. The second is one I've been meaning to read for a long time now, the infamous No Logo, by Naomi Klein. Its riveting! Apart from short spells where I played Jedi Outcast and took some time to be a husband, I've had the book stuck in my face all day :-) More later when I finish it.

Yesterday, I woke up, and my left eye hurt. I don't know why, but it did. It conttinued to hurt until late afternoon. Today its the right eye's turn. Its as if I slept with my finger stuck in my eye or something... strange.

I've just seen the final episode of 24. It rocks!!! The ending is... interesting, and powerful, and not what I had hoped it was going to be. But it rocks :-)
We're going to Munich next Wednesday... and Anna has packed already ;-)

Anna went to see Panic Room last night, and said it was fantastic. By all accounts, its worth going to :-)

Pay attention children, here's the lesson : The contents of this site do not reflect that of my employer. Just in case any of you thought it did. There seems to be a lot of confusion at the moment about that. So you know just to clear things up a little I thought I would just point out what I thought was fairly obvious. The contents of this site do not reflect that of my employer or any employer I have previously worked for, nor does it reflect that of any of the people I link to; my parents, my friends, in fact anyone except me.

Its actually a pretty fucked up idea, Dave. When we get to the point that we have to ask each other questions or make comments in such an indirect route, then we need to re-think the whole communication thing. But perhaps I'm being old fashioned ;-) No, actually I doubt that, because I'm doing it right now.
Now, are you all confused? You should be. There's an interesting attitude going around at the moment, that blogs can be used as a way to communicate directly with someone, and that this is a two way conversation. I think it shouldn't be like that. I was going to say that there are two ways to interpret this, but I've just thought of a third, and back spaced over the entire sentence. There may be even more reasons than I can imagine. Firstly, either our inter-personal skills get so fucked up that we are incapable of direct vocal conversation, or secondly, like telephone and emails, blogging is becomming an acceptable way to conduct your affairs. I prefer the first reason actually, I think the way we talk to each other by email is sometimes horrendous, and we can cause harm a lit easier than we would do were we face to face. Don't get me wrong, I think email is fantastic, but I think its dangerous too. I dislike the idea that we can't just talk to each other. Ultimately, work shouldn't be as important as our relationships with those that we love, or hate. Therefore, conversations that we have about thigns that are happening in work shouldn't be as difficult as those we could have with people we love or hate. So why don't we just sieze the chance when it presents itself, or make the chance now, and say what has to be said? I don't know, but I'd love to have this conversation with Max sometime. Oh, and the third reason was that this is just an extension of emails, or the paper-based "Letters to the Editor" etc idea, which kinda works. Our conversations become like a living document, always growing, always changing in response to what other people write in their documents. Cool :-)
I was just talking to Anna about this, and she said that she thought that my entry from a few days ago where I was bitching about work was a bad idea, and could get me into trouble. I disagreed, but now I'm not so sure, and that fucks me right off. In between my typing "Cool :-)" about three sentences ago, and the moment when I type this, about twenty minutes has passed. I've had a cigarette, taken some clothes out of the washing machine, and baked some ciabatta for lunch tomorrow. I'm probably going to remove that entry, and that both angers and saddens me. I get a lot of traffic from AOL, and can think of several people with the ability to influence the loss of my job who know where this blog is, and who I am. For some strange reason, I'm a afraid of the potential for serious reaction that might result from someone reading it. So its gone, I've just changed it. It has been bastardised, and the integrity of my blog is no more. I'm influenced by opinions other than my own in such a way that what I have written the is truth, but not the entire truth, and the things I have concealed are not because I want to conceal them. I have changed it to suit the sensibilities of my audience, and not reflect what I feel. Well, fuck you.

Speaking of the internet ruling... have a look at Broken Saints - for the first time in a very long while, I've come across something that makes the web be interesting. You know how it all gets the same? You look at some site and think "thats nice, looks like {insert one from a myriad of similar sites here} but with a different colour". I hate that. I've been looking for something new and great for a while now, and this is it. Of course, its ephemeral; once you've seen it, there's no more, but hell... the novelty value alone is worth the download time (for those of you without DSL ;-)