Droning on

Well.  The first thing about the mini-drone is that I've cut my hand twice (fending it off, not trying to catch it).

The little *** is hard to control...

Just the other day - Stressed

I saw a strange man wandering around, his shirt covered with slogans.
One of which read:

Stressed spelled backwards is desserts

As indeed it is.

Off

I had my work leaving do last night, and I now have a month’s gap before taking up my next role. Quite a strange feeling: I have rarely if ever taken such a long break between jobs – probably the previous longest was in 1981/2. I left before Christmas and began the new job a week or so into January.

This comes with a strange feeling of freedom. There is a hiatus. I’ve been working in IT and managing teams and departments for a long time, but suddenly it feels like I have a few weeks off, released. When I’m not defined so wholly by what I do for dosh.

And we do tend (in the UK at least) to characterise people by the jobs they do – and to quite a degree I fear. Further, we often define ourselves that way. This is not new of course – see the Canterbury Tales for example. Chaucer’s pilgrims are famously categorized and named through their trades and callings – they may be typical or atypical examples, but that is the starting point.

So anyway, for a few brief weeks, in a minor way, I don’t (have to) think of myself like that.

It’s quite liberating, and in a good way...

Obama Spin Laden

OK, so I may be a glass half empty kind of person, but all the same. The weight of expectation being placed on Obama, the sense of uncritical relief that a discredited, right-wing conservative executive is finally leaving, the notion that the new bod is a great communicator, who has also brought together a collaboration of many different talents, the use of the family to help with the message, the sloganising - they all remind me of someone else.

The parallels aren’t exact, of course, but where we now have the Bob the Builderesque “Yes We Can” we once had “Things Can Only Get Better”. Just as with Blair, people are projecting all of their hopes on Obama, in reaction to his predecessor. There is a desire for radical change being invested in a politician who I suspect is profoundly uninterested, at heart, in the concept.

The only direction left to the new President is down; he will disappoint. Not all of the time, not everybody, and not every day. But he will disappoint.

Like I said, glass half empty.