Skip The Budgie

First off, an excuse. I said I was going to get a Creative Jukebox Zen Xtra, so I did. It cost me £180 off Ebay, and can hold 60GB of stuff. I have spent the last week or so putting almost all my CD's onto it, and am pushing 6,000 songs, with the player 2 thirds full! They say you can get 16,000 mp3's of dubious quality on it, but as a muso dilettante, I like my quality, so I get less... I like it so much, I bought some etymotic ER6 isolator headphones too, so I don't have to put up with all that background noise either!

I have upgraded the firmware, having discovered that thanks to the French (apparently), all personal players are quieter in Europe than everywhere else. Places where no-one can hear, presumably. What a difference a bit of code can make! I got the American version, and suddenly I can hear bass again. The other distraction of course, is GT4.

The leaving do wasn't that bad really. All the people came who said they would come. Some didn't, good absence of people we don't like, and all the speeches went out of the window because no-one was listening. We had a performance from a group called the Allstars, who have recently been commissioned to do the music for a series of adverts about kids and guns. The Evening Pest had a subtle approach: 'IT'S TIME YOUTH GAVE UP GUNS'. They did their gun song for us and were very very good. Yay for St Pauls...

We were hijacked by a Christian evangelist type who did a meaningless poem about the Police banging someone's door down and arresting him for beating up his wife even though he hadn't but it was all because he was black, you see... No I don't fucking see. Pointless bloody histrionic inflammatory crap. Then she did a poem about Jesus and how we are all bad, but God loves us. Then a two second poem about us that no-one could here, then a big plug about her poetry night and church and stuff. I don't want to sound too down on the woman, but it wasn't really the right forum. Trouble was, it was too late by the time anyone realised. I think I was the only one who paid any attention anyway.

I smiled and nodded and answered the 'what are you going to do now?' with the same bland pleasantries a million times. I've managed to hopefully get myself an extra bit of cash completing the database for my work since it will just fade into the vaults if I don't. I am going straight into an average data entry job for 5p above minimum wage. last week I applied for 5 jobs, only two of which I actually want.