the proverbial "perfect timing"

Has it ever felt like there was a best time for everything to happen, and that if those things dint happen at those times then they'd best even not happen at all? Alongside best timings, have you ever felt there was a time that couldnt possibly be worse for a certain event to occur? Now, have you ever noted that fate actually picks the latter of the times to slate said events? Maybe its just Murphy [see Murphy's Law below] and me then, but as we speak [or as I write, w'ever], today was the day I had made plans for five jioni after work yaani my day was just overflowing, and just my luck it's 4.50PM and the rain has just started falling - cats, dogs and actual raindrops! - the kind that looks like it will go on for two hours! And of course do I really need to add that I have no car waiting to pick me up and drive me home?:( I work at the same company as my mum, but she works till seven at night! I dont like my job that much, at least not yet. Is this fate, or is it just a creation of my mind [again]? Oh well, since it looks like Im gonna be here for a while, now's as good a time as any to take on gmail. Me against the server, one-on-one. We'll see who manages to out-persevere the other. [You can sleep easy Sergey, or Brin, or Page - damn! I used to know those names - there's still much love for gmail. Despite their crappy server, I still prefer them to Yahoo coz when they do work, its... oh! heaven]

Thot for the day - Murphy's Law:
Nothing is as easy as it seems; everything takes longer than you think it will and if anything can go wrong, it will and at the worst possible moment.
END

Let's meet at two at...

Those five words.... If I never hear them again Im starting to think it will still be too soon! Is it that I had a wierd upbringing, I wonder, because when someone says something like that I am usually led to believe they mean that we should meet at two [of course the one that makes sense, not AM :) ] and not 3:27 or 4:50, but I am constantly being proven wrong. I find that people actually say two meaning that's when they shall be starting the journey to our meeting point, which is always invariably six hours away from where they are [coz Id hate to think that people just dont make it on time on purpose in a bid to exasperate]. And so I am forced to look at my childhood and ask myself: What is it they were taught when growing up that I missed that makes me actually show up at two for a meeting slated for two and them at five? How is it that time ceases to be a universal concept when we need to be somewhere by a certain deadline, so that two and five are construed to mean the same thing for some and not for others? And why, why oh why doesnt the same consience that stops people from pulling stick-ups in banks also stop them from holding up others?
I speak like this because in the past week alone I have been held up not once not twice but three times. Three times! The first time from 4.30 to 7.15, the second time from 4.00 to 5.20 and the third time from 6.00 to 6.45 {{{times plus/minus five minutes}}}. I am starting to get so used to waiting I always walk around with a book to read, and if it were possible I'd also carry around a ka-little foldable chair. And the worst part of it all is that I still cant bring myself to go late, it's just not who I am. When I do that my psyche makes kish out of me. Of course after having run myself out of breath I still get there first, then the other person shows up 45 minutes later, strolling and telling me "Heh! That jam was horrendous today. I have never seen anything like it before"{{{until the next time you're late, I add for myself}}} - and this in a small town with a car population of about 200(!), or even in a place where jams are credible but honestly, at two in the afternoon! And so I lend a sympathetic ear to the transport woes [as if I who made it on time came by plane] and they promise it's never gonna happen again and the cycle repeats itself next time.
Im thinking Ill one of these days stop making plans that involve people. Machines are so much easier to work with!

END

first day

So finally I got a casual job, not the kind I wanted but a job anyhow [gotta thank Providence in everything, dont we?] My first day at work, and how did I spend it? Shovelling old invoice books that were being moved "to a new and safer location" for "easier record keeping and reference." Yeah right! These are books that hardly even had pages inside them, they were for 2003 and before [the carbon copies that are supposed to remain at source when an invoice is sent out]. They were so old the pages were white [you know the ones that are usually pink - like the bank deposit slips at, you guessed it, banks ], and we are being told to "handle them carefully" because "they will be needed at a later date." And to make matters worse, there was the equivalent of two truckloads of them, it was just endless. We were only praying we do not catch asthma or anything else [you know how quickly dust accumulates on top of fridges and doorframes? Now imagine three uninterrupted years worth of it!] All this does not come into perspective until one knows what my job is: I was hired to be a clerk. Can you believe that?!!? My contract letter actually cites "Clerical duties" under my job description! OK, so maybe in my employers' defence I was working with books, only Id kinda thought Id be writing in them, not shovelling them around, you know??!?!?! Makes one wanna @#(*&(*&(@#!>. Anyways, hopefully tomorrow and in the days to follow there shall be actual writing involved and less of the menial labor, otherwise I run the risk of actually building up some muscles :)
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Eureka (I have done it!)

THIS ONE FOR THE COMP LOVERSSo I finally hit a milestone in my IT life last nite. I managed to install Linux and add my own custom packages to it, all from commandline. This process called compilation, it takes on a whole new meaning for programs that were written in C and C++. When I was compiling said packages, I saw characters displayed on screen I dint even know existed, and needless to say the process took 45(!) minutes [I actually timed it to see] for a less than 10MB program - of course Linux itself had taken an hour and a half just to install. The custom packages I was installing were an mp3 player for Linux [it doesnt inherently come with mp3 support coz someone doesnt have as much dou as Microsoft hence probably wouldnt be able to survive an antitrust lawsuit, so they just support open source file formats like ogg and flac - formats virtually no one, and perhaps three other people, in the world uses(!)] and a video player. One gets the rpm's [for Redhat Package Management - equiv of Windows setup files] from the net - or if you're really geeky you write the program yourself in C, me Im not yet up to that level - then compile, install and run. The moment I started watching the How you remind me video for Nickeback inside Linux, I have seldom felt such sense of achievement. I watched it over and over again just to tell myself it's actually real, coz this is something I've been trying to do since like '02. Ts taken me a while, but Ive arrived bigtime, and Im proud of myself.
Next milestone, connect to a Windows network and subsequently the internet from Linux [commandline, of course - none of that samba crap, {{{my bad}}}, stuff]
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A long, long week

START After my classic weekend at that rocking uni, I decided to go visit an uncle of mine who stays on the other side of town. It had been a while since Id been there so I thot it would be a pleasing exprerience, but I am fast learning to never underestimate fate: no matter how syched up and happy you are, fate will always find a way to get you down. So in my case there was no power. And when I say no power I dont mean for 20mins or even three hours, I mean for FIVE days, two of them in the weekend. Ati sijui wires were cut, the transformer was missing a thingamajic or other and crap like that. And then there's Kenya Power[KPLC]. These people are just in a league of their own. They are very efficient, unlike parastatals in Kenya, or so they like to think of themselves. For all those five days we had no power, in the spirit of efficiency and quick response, they would come early in the morning [very early, at around 11.30 :) ] - and proceed to sit around their van and study the cabling talking among themselves. At around 8.00PM they would head, after a long, hard day's work, and the routine would repeat itself the next day. You know us people were just there wondering, what happened to all the actual engineers who used to work at KPLC? and is the strategy here gonna be to sit the catastrophe out ama are we actually going to see some work being done? I even ended up missing Scrubs! and it was a continuation from last week :( Anyways, all's well that ends well, I guess, and it seems their sitting and studying strategy does work, [albeit not as fast as some others like actually fixing the problem] because we now have power. It's been a long wait, but after the first two days you're pretty much used to it I daresay. So we're celebrating, alongside the rain like the rest of the country, the return of power. ENDIT

Friendships do last forever

START I recently caught up with some of my old buddes for high school at [ge this, coz things like these dont happen at places like these] a classical concert. Id met one of them earlier and he happened to be going so managed to drag me along and boy am I glad I went, coz these were people whom I hadnt seen in like two years going on three, and we just up and picked up where we had left off as if nothing had happened, never mind all the changes our lives had been in since 2002! Turns out the only thing we had in common was that we once knew each other, oh, and our love for classical [well, theirs more than mine coz I have since diversified into rock :) ] Some of us were driving, others had lil missus's by our sides, and yet others were dressed in crisp suits, but all that dint matter. We were friends, and we had a lot of catching up to do, and catch up we did! Now that I think about it, did we even listen to the Morzat rehearsal? Maybe just a lil bit.
And alongside meeting some of these friends comes new stuff, and for all gamers alike at a time like now [at least in Kenya and other nyuma places where we get stuff next year or the one after], it dont come any newer than Need for Speed Most Wanted, the latest in the Need for Speed series from Electronic Arts, and yours truly is now the proud owner! I love my friends. [I know what you're thinking, Im not materialistic. I love them regardless of what they give me and what they dont give me] ENDIT

Classic weekend

START For the weekend I went to a friend's uni to visit and slept over mpaka Sunday. I tell you their place absolutely rocks. It's like when anything new gets produced, the producers themselves make sure these people get a copy to sample, [either that or they are just that good at pirating stuff] and sometimes they even get it before it's released to the mass market. Case in point: two programs titled CSI New York and 24 season 5 - those are the ones currently showing in the States on their respective producers' networks, and here the guys already have the entire seasons on not one not two but like sixty hard drives for entertainment - and their parents are sitting at home happy thier kids are in uni doing engineering. Hmmm... si ignorance is bliss! I got to watch the two seasons plus a host of other movies so now I can say Im way up. In fact on Friday and Saturday we dint even sleep coz there was so much to do and so little time to do it in.
In other unrelated news(TM) [that phrase has been used by the BBC so many times I think they should have patented it by now], I dropped my CV's and applications for the job at several places successfully and so now the waiting game begins. Too bad I may have to do the waiting in Western. For those of us that live in Kenya, we'll know that there's not an inkling of life those sides, but oh for choices. Im just gonna try and make the best of a bad situation and if I manage to stay sane doing it so much the better. But on the brighter side, with nothing else to do I might even get some studying done for my June exams, which would be very nice coz I do NOT want to pull another stunt like the one last November for the Dec exams. T almost killed me :) ENDIT

One for the holidays

START It's that time of the year once again when school is closed [can I get an Oh yeah!] and I realise that it's what makes up my life, coz I have no clue whatsoever what to do with myself. And this time it's a long one... like Id said before - a whole of four months, maybe even five, and that's on the lower side!! So in order to avoid developing any bad habits[the devil's workshops and idle minds thing] - BTW would you believe so far I have none! I kid you not, my self control is massive I tell you! - I am looking for employment. Also coz "I would like to gain much needed hands-on experience in the fields of commerce and IT, and get exposed to the working world where I can apply concepts learned in class for an all-round aspect..." Syc! That's just what I write on my CV to jazz prospectives, the real reason is I want some quick cash, and past experience has proved that parents are not the way to go for such needs, especially if the reason I need the cash is not so that I can pay my small sis' school fee or buy myself Commerce text books.

Im so hoping I find something here in the big city [the one in the sun, as our govt would have us believe], coz I also want to avoid having to go home. Us people stay so far away from civilisation someone actually described our place as "..in the back of beyond.." :) Yaani nothing ever happens there plus the only people I could call good friends - people you look forward to seeing again - have since moved out. But on the upside, if Im there I'll be better placed to save up for that comp I want, there's really nothing to spend cash on thosides. A small town "is a place where there's nowhere to go that you shouldn't be going" and that's classic us. But it's all good, life is still sweet. ENDIT

The whole group thang

START So recently I decided to become a member of a group in church. Ive never done anything like this before, you know community development, cleaning the environment, youth groups, mumbo-jumbo... hell - going through primary and high school I wasnt even a member of the Science club! despite common belief that it helped a lot of its members do well in the examinations. See Im just not a group person. Things we do alone, those ones I love. It's probably why Id go to a movie but I wouldnt go raving - coz at the movies no one expects you to be talking, they actually expect you to be silent and consider talk a nuisance. Also why my fave pastime is computer games, and why "making friends and meeting new people" are nowhere on my list of hobbies. When I started reading Digests [Readers Digest], I came across this quote from Jay Leno that just blew me away: "I love mankind and humanity; it's people I cant stand" I just loved that one, and I think I share his sentiments.

Anyways, the church group. We come up with lyrics to accompany people when they are singing during service, kinda like a slide show. Actually it is a slide show. We have already met like thrice we've even done one show for one weekend and Im proud to report the commitment bug hasn't bitten me yet and I still show up on time for all meetings, and I actually like it in the group. ENDIT

Sweet guys finish last

START There are two different types of guys, methinks, the type that's cocky, arrogant, and often annoyingly good-looking, and miraculously, this is the type that always seems to get the girl, no matter how badly they treat her. Then there's Guys Like Me. Guys Like Me are polite, considerate blokes who possess a fundamental respect and high regard for women - characteristics often summed up by that one word: 'Sweet'. Which makes us about as sexy as stamp collectors. 'Sweet' in this regard isnt really a compliment. "You're so sweet" translates into "I dont want to have s*x with you". Take it form me, when it comes to pulling, us Sweet Guys really do finish last.

By sweet, I dont mean out and out losers. Sweet guys can actually be good-looking, sporty and sociable, but they're just not like the alpha-male studs who go around believing that any woman who wont sleep with them is either insane or a lesbian. These guys are overconfident, do not fear rejection and will hit on any woman they find attractive.

Unfortunately, us Sweet Guys wont subscribe to this philosophy. We fear rejection too much. Naturally this means we soon grow accustomed to disappointments.

Thankfully, it seems the tables are finally turining in our favour. After years of having been sandkicked in our faces in the game of love, it seems Sweet Guys are now in demand. Today, the blockbuster heroes are more likely to be complex, anguished types like Tobey Maguire (Spiderman), or Jake Gyllenhaal (The day after tomorrow). Witness too the success of sensitive male TV characters like Ross (Friends) and Yuen(Off-center). And then of course there's the story of Chris Martin, lead singer for Coldplay who once quipped about his succes with women "I've been turned down more times than a stereo", and yet ended up marrying a Hollywood beauty in the shape of Gwyneth Paltrow. There is, after all, light at the end of the tunnel for Us, and that makes me happy. ENDIT