A year back, in the previous version of this blog, I announced that I finally knew what I was for.
Like everyone, there are lots of things I can do – more things than I could ever tell you. I can ruin perfectly good food in a way that can transfix an audience. I can blog for a living, and indeed half-do. I can pretend that I am qualified to work on an IT helpdesk, or that I am mentally qualified to teach. I can predict the end of the world and I can dally with foreign women – a story that needs to be finished off, I see. I can squint. Have you seen my squint? Here it is (complete with added Athenian tan).
But what I’m for?
I feel this strongly: I’m meant to travel, and I’m meant to write about what I see. That’s what I’m for.
So finding a practical, career-supporting way of combining the two would seem the perfect solution to my existential worries. I’d have to be pretty thick not to try.
Which is why I’m very excited to show you this.
ps. You may be wearily, contemptuously familiar with the first article that is below my name on that page. Don’t worry, I’m capable of writing other things too. You’ll see.
Woot!
And there was much w00tery, it’s a fact.
Woot2!
Look, more of it!
(Thanks!).
Shall we start sending you around the world like Flat Stanley?
Great news! Congratulations on the discovery. Can you figure this out for me, too?
If I could become as widely-travelled as that chap, except retaining my three-dimensional status which I’ve become quite fond of, then I’d be a happy man indeed.
Thanks for the congrats. (But now I have to get busy and fill that profile page up).
You’d like to get more into travel-writing too? I think you should. Especially if you combine with your foodie-guru skills. Definite call for food-travel-writing.
You’re wrong Mike, so wrong. Give in to the dark side. Come back to archaeology, think of it: the glamour, the excitement, the foreign women, the holes, the filth, the daily grind, the farce and the giant otters. All yours, just give in!
As for the IT helpdesk but: do you work for Dell, is your name Dave and do you have a thick Indian accent (strange, everyone at the Dell call centre has a Hebraic name but an Indian accent. You could be forgiven for thinking that they’re based in India and just pretending to be jolly-hocky sticks Englishmen)? If so then you need to phone me back about why the 3 month old hard-drive in my laptop is kaput
You sweet-talker, you.
Oh, I am still entirely willing to entertain the possibility of mucking out filthy old drains for the good of national culture – and probably even more so, when I go fulltime freelance and have complete control over my time (or as complete as possible, anyway). So yes, the dark side will always have a sumpy corner of my soul…
It’s a Dell? Well, from my wide experience of working with IT I suggest this: drop it in the Thames.
No, no, actually they’re like Peterborough – they have a dreadful reputation only partly earned. However, the 3 month old hard drive issue is simple: you’ve been using it for something important. It’s like this:
Gates’s Law:
Probability of hardware failure is proportional to the importance of the data store upon it.
This is why hard-drives filled to the brim with ripped YouTube videos, amusing PDF’d web-comics and pre-1995 PC games that won’t work on any version of Windows after 3.1 will endure *forever*.
What you need to do is find lots of useless downloadable crap on the Internet, a few hundreds MBs of it, and go through your hard drive, placing files in various important folders. In IT this is known as Trivializing your FAT (File Allocation Table). Once the data is below a certain level of average usefulness, the hardware it is stored on will become more reliable, and even repair itself in extreme cases.
Hope that helps.
I’m late to this, but congratulations anyway. Very cool!