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...

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.

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.