So I took the brave decision to remove it the other day and get some sleep. After a good hearty cry I slept for about sixteen hours and it was good. I awoke to a sunny day with a clear mind.

But now I’m free and I’m stuck with no idea as to where I should focus my time. A few weeks later AD (After Doom) and I’m either shouting at people or animals that happen to be in my living space or catching up with people I haven’t caught up with in a while because I’ve been catching up with other people I also hadn’t caught up with in a while.

In an ideal world where my productivity blossoms and I am able to live and look after myself with some degree of independence I would like to focus my productivity on the things I love. Other than moaning on the Internet, I have quite an ear for music. I have hundreds of hours of recordings that could be turned into hundreds of hours of what could sound like music if you listened to it in a specific way. I won’t elaborate on the details but you get the gist.

What am I saying?

Time is a virtue, and I’m getting round to sorting mine out. Aside from the hours of Doom I’ve committed to, I’ve been building a very complicated website system. It’s very complicated because I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. Guess that’s karma for not going to University.

When this is done I’ll be building websites. I’ll be like an art student and a writer. One always building an imaginary portfolio and the other never finishing a novel. Hopefully with more success. Like I’ve been saying for probably a year now — it’ll start here with a branding overhaul of this blog. I’ll call it Calm & Madness. But for now it remains Madness & Madness.

Fear not. I’m still here, hard at work.

Recently, the BBCs well renowned Andrew Marr said stuff about amateur writers and people that post literally (literally literally) anything on the bountiful resource, the Internet.

I noticed this on Twitter, when something trends on the right side of the screen. Often it’s full of idiots believing that they’re opinion is well backed and cited, even through it’s obviously not. Things like current affairs, bad chart music, MPs, Justin Bieber and X-factor. From this sample of Twitter trends you can understand why the more intellectual discussions loose out.

It’s from here, the glorious Twitter trending topics, where I found the most recent hate for a guy involved with politics, Mr Marr.

I have to be honest here, I have the opinion that the Internet is less bountiful, more a giant, shit-filled spaghetti bowl of rambling, miss-information, spam, porn, bullshit and really bad marketing, propped up by a load of nut-jobs with either a free-and-open-truly-fucking-useless approach or money-money-money-money-kill-small-innocent-children-to-get-it approach. The subject of Andrew Marr being the latest turd in the giant toilet bowl that is the Internet.

He made the following comments, according to the beautiful Guardian web-site, who also sounded a bit angry about it (but they’re sticking up for the people, right?):

A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother’s basements and rating. They are very angry people.

Sounds about right to me.

It’s the future. A silly touch interface that can access the Internet at ease. Thanks to it I can quickly dismantle some of the more exhuberant bullshit my farther comes out with just by tapping it’s shiny screen a few times. Next time he claims Arriva do cheap bus tickets for off-peak hours, I’ll click a few times and call his bluff. Awesome.

It’s an audio player, so I don’t have to get an MP3 player. It’s a mass storage device. Well, if you can call 32 gigs “mass storage” anymore it is. It feeds me with vital information from my twitter, news feeds and social networkings in which I could otherwise not function. Thanks to my addiction to useless real-time information, I no longer crave nicotine.

So there’s a heads up. Expect a lot of App reviews. With a personal twist obviously.

Taa taa for now!

So what have I been up to? Firstly I’ve been on holiday with my family. Where did I go? Wales. Saundersfoot, near Tenby in south Pembrokeshire, to be precise. Here’s a photo, click it to make it bigger.

This photo pretty much sums up every day of that fortnight. Well, that and about a hundred hours of gaming on my phone, something I’ll refuse to indulge in whilst at home, normally.

So apart from getting drunk in Welsh taverns, what else have I done? I’ve been recording and mixing down demo recordings for post-rock band Former Miss Czechoslovakia, for who I also play lead guitar and sing lead vocals for, a very odd mix I know.

I also got a car, but because of ridiculous circumstances, I haven’t been able to drive it to work in the seven days that I’ve had it for. It’s currently sitting in a garage, while hopefully mechanics are working ten to the dozen fixing the steering and the boot-cap (the what?) so I can take it to another garage tonight and then they can give it a full service and a cam-belt change. I kind of know what that bit means.

So for the mean time I’m catching the trains and buses, listening to really bad music while I’m on them and trying to find time to get these bloody mixes down.

For now I’ll leave you with a link to a rather intriguing tweet of mine.

I’ve already scared one member of the house-hold by shouting and clutching at a pillow with more vigour than I’ve ever know. I’ve gotten over-emotional at a silly episode of Doctor Who, and shouted at a politician on a rolling news channel.

So how long’s it been? 11 hours. Not even a day.

Why am I giving up? I’m skint. Also I need to sort my life out a bit, and I guess cutting out the crap is a kind-of start to it all. Wahoo. I’m also getting a car and don’t want to crash it because I was too busy rolling one at the junction. (I can still remember the points in the roads and journeys where I used to light up.)

Couple months back I did a fortnight before crashing on a really sticky night out. I smoked because I was in town I was drunk and looking for highs. I didn’t pick-up the fags during my hangover the next day like I thought I would- I got over it and carried on without them. But then something happened and I marched to the nearest shop for 20 Embassy number 1s. And I was back to my ten-to-fifteen a day.

I stayed indoors last week for the Sunday and the bank holiday. I was playing on my new phone and it did such a good job of distracting me I didn’t need to smoke. But then I had to get the bus really early the next day and the absence of nicotine from my system made the physical pain distracting. I had too much work on to loose concentration.

But now I’ve not got much work on because I done it all. I was quitting this morning, and there was a point where I was really happy I hadn’t gone out for a smoke at all, and then, something happened.

These “something happened” moments suck, but they’re not related to my smoking (except they only seem to happen when I’m trying to quit) and I figured I need to get over them. Shit will happen in life, and a cigarette seems so insignificant. So I’m going to learn to take news like a real person, and talk when things are upsetting instead. Also, the less I try and quit the less these catastrophic events will happen. I’m sure of it!

So why am I blogging this? Why is this being broadcast? Why have I dramatically changed my grammar?

BECAUSE I’M GOING FUCKING CRAZY!

Or I’m just being a bit of a wuss…

I’ll let my profile on my family’s website introduce this one [warning: very outdated information can be found on this page - I'm talking about 6 years out here!].

John Christopher Nigel Gutteridge was born September 26 1988 5:30am. [...]. After a long debate by the family he was named John but informally called Jack.

My actual name is John. If I’m being formal, I’ll use John. So at work, my colleagues call me John for example. If I’m talking to my bank, registering something (you get the idea :P).

So let me set this straight, I’m called Jack but my actual name is John, right? My parents called me Jack, my family called me Jack, my friend called me Jack. Simple, right?

This used to prove very confusing to pupils in the same class as me back in the day. In Primary School it was okay, because I only had to explain the situation to one teacher a year. However, by Secondary School and into College I was having to explain myself to a tutor about once a week.

My fellow learners would be amazed and bewildered by this two-named freak :P

But it’s completely justified! All these morons thought I had some weird naming complex. Even the Wikipedia article on “Jack” agrees with me:

In English it is the diminutive form of the name John [...]

It was used back in the day (I’m talking around the Great War here) by a father called John calling his son John, but to avoid confusion would use the nickname Jack. Yeah?

So there! Get over it :P

Image source: BBC News Magazine – 7 questions on baby names

So I’ve migrated to WordPress and I’m happy. I nearly had a theme down but I changed my ethics half way through and ended my love affair with Microsoft. But we’re delving into geek territory here. More on that later.

For now I leave you with this. It’s my very subtle office workstation. Didn’t want to settle with one monitor see.

So if you haven’t noticed, we’ve been getting a fair bit of snow recently. Today it was about a foot deep. I eventually got on the roads.

Was fine until I got there. Then things got a little slippy.

I came off of the roundabout that leads to work and my back-end kept going. I came off the road and right into a hedge. Whoops.

So I leave it, head to the office for help. Something like “yeah my parking’s a bit improv”. We got her out. She hadn’t suffered too badly, a little damage under the bumper. I’m amazed I didn’t take anyone out (I’m parked on the pavement).

Harborough wasn’t too bad on Monday, but Leicester was. Today it’s the opposite. Driving like this after only passing 6 months ago ain’t fun. Ah well!

This was my car before the journey

Well January has been nice to me so far. Last week I awoke to snow. I beifly thought about how this would effect road conditions but having passed in July I was fairly ignorant to it all – and blissfully so!

I hit the Southway through Blaby and couldn’t understand for the hell of me why the lass infront driving her kids to college insisted on 20mph. It took me all of 10 mins more to figure it out.

Instead of changing my usual route through country lanes and narrow bridges, I thought I’d carry on as normal. Applying brakes on ice just makes the car skid. I didn’t think about this before. So at a steady 5mph though untreated roads I went until I got to the prangs. It was fairly obvious. It took half an hour for the traffic to turn around and head back. I managed not to find a ditch or hit a car.

Still, lesson learnt.