Microfiche. Tiny leetle feesh!

Today's Links of the Day:

Cleaning the Fucking Kitchen for Dummies. A rather amusing spoof of the "Dummies" books, featuring lots of swear words (but we're all adults, aren't we?). Page 4 in particular is hilarious!

It's Driving Me Crazy. A link to a Guardian article from babysimon, about the "interesting" questions that you might get asked in a driving test in Maryland. Also really rather funny.

Health stuff - touching wood...

I've been delaying posting this for a while. Not that I'm particularly superstitious, but my mother is, and no matter how sensible and matter-of-fact I try to be about things, some of her attitudes have rubbed off on me. One of them is that it seems too much like tempting fate to declare things until you're certain of them. I'm not sure that I even believe in fate, let alone the kind of fate that could be "tempted", but I still prefer not to get too excited about things until I know they're fairly definite.

Well, though I can't be certain that these things are permanent, it is true that a couple of good things have happened to me recently. For the past 19 days or so, I have been falling asleep at night and getting up in the morning. This is the longest stable sleep pattern that I've been in for more than a year. I know this might be extremely hard for you to understand, because the sleep/wake cycle is so fundamental that most people take for granted - they just go to bed and are asleep in a couple of minutes. It's never worked that way for me - I've never found going to sleep easy, and as I've got older, I've had more and more trouble with it. For at least the past year, I've been suffering so much with circadian rhythm disorder that I haven't been able to maintain a stable sleep pattern for more than a couple of days at a time. I haven't even been able to maintain a "reverse" sleep/wake pattern, where you deliberately stay awake at night and sleep during the day - even those have only lasted a week and then collapsed.
( And there's more... )

catching up, part 2.

Well, as I said, I had two job interviews last Wednesday. Following that, I got offered a job, and then everything in my life went all hectic, and I stopped having enough time to do anything. So here's the rest of the catching-up post.

On Monday and Tuesday last week, I applied for a load of jobs and went around a load of temping agencies. This was almost entirely a complete waste of time, because almost all of the temping agencies took my CV and filed it into /dev/null. One of the agencies even refused to take my CV, because my most recent experience of office work was in 1997 and that was deemed too long ago, despite the fact that I haven't stopped using a computer since then! Only one of the agencies really expressed any desire to take me on, and I'd made an appointment to come in on Wednesday morning to take a typing test, etc.

Well, I got woken up early on Wednesday by a phone call from one of the market research companies I'd applied to in the summer. I'd left my name and phone number on several places' answerphones, but none of them had got back to me. A woman told me "we're recruiting again, would you be able to come in for an interview?". I said "OK, when?", and she said "How about 3 o'clock today?". So then I found myself with two job interviews on the same day.
( Read more... )