Friday, January 01, 2016

Back in the red

Taking an excellent suggestion from Danny at work, I spent three hours of today very productively; watching Red Dwarf. He was thinking more in terms of watching the DVDs, but I'm old-fashioned and still have video tapes that I recorded off the TV, twenty years ago. Nearly exactly twenty years ago, as it turns out - my tape of series 6 was apparently recorded when it was repeated in early 1996. I can tell this from the BBC announcement that because of the events in the news at the time, "Rimmerworld" was postponed and replaced by "Out of Time". I had to check the internet to find out that it was the Dunblane massacre, which just made me wonder why the latter episode was considered more suitable - if anything, it's got rather more shooting and violence in it than the other. I also find myself wondering why I didn't also tape Fist Of Fun which according to the BBC continuity announcer was shown right after the Red Dwarf repeats - not only was it hilarious, but it had text at the end designed to be recorded and watched with the aid of the pause button. Maybe I did tape it but lost the tape at some time since then, I don't know. Twenty years is a long time.

I haven't been entirely idle today, though, because XMT qualification starts soon, and I've been doing a bit of practice for that. I'll blog at greater length soon about the qualification tournament and how I'm going to arrange it around a two-week visit to China. You know, once I've worked out how exactly I'm going to do that...

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

I'm going to China!

I know I've been going to China for a while now, but it's official - I've got my visa, and they'll let me into the country! Unless something goes wrong. I mean, they might change their minds...

I always worry too much about this kind of thing. Anything that involves getting official approval just scares me. Officials are frightening people.

Sunday, December 27, 2015

Job satisfaction

I'm starting to worry that I really like my job. It's not what you'd call mentally exerting, but it's sort of fun. This is a terrible kind of mental attitude to have, I really should try to do something about it.