I am sick of this house.

I am sick of waking up to filth; to dirty floors, the same piles of crap day after day because nobody can be fucked to lift a finger to clean them up.

I am sick of my property being abused under the assumption that since we live together it is theirs to do with as they please.

I am sick of being treated like a piece of shit every time I try to get someone else to do something that might be of collective benefit to the household.

I am sick of being made to clean up after everyone else if I want to live in what might be described as clean and tidy surroundings, and then receiving no thanks for doing so.

I am sick of being forced to chase people for their share of bills, since the concept of prompt repayment is apparently some sort of fantasy.

I am sick of looking after every single administrative facet of the house without a word of thanks because nobody else is prepared to take any responsibility whatsoever.

I am sick of having the piss taken behind my back every time I ask something of my housemates that might require looking beyond the ends of their noses at issues outside of their immediate personal atmosphere.

I am sick of being shown no respect by anyone in this house, who claim that they are adults capable of handling their own lives without being told what to do, yet are utterly unable to maintain any kind of decent living standard without my continual janitor act.

I am sick of living with people who have never had to take any responsibility for the care of their surroundings, and so feel no need to start doing so now.

I am sick of living with people who through their own negligence, inconsideration and laziness create large amounts of filth and then have the gall to suggest our collectively paying someone to come in and clean it up.

I am sick of living with people who cannot or will not realise everything I have done this year to help them and the household, or look upon it as some sort of duty of care that merits no thanks or support or recognition.

I am sick of being looked at like an idiot when I try to convey an idea of consideration for others to my housemates, such as when they insist on screaming at the tops of their lungs while playing video games at 11pm on a Sunday in the living room of our terraced house.

I am sick of being told that I have a need to control people when I try to get people to do something to help.

I am sick of worrying about having to fight for my property at the end of term as my housemates conveniently forget what was bought and what was brought by me at the beginning of the year.

I am sick of the inevitability that I will have to work my ass off to clean the house single-handedly at the end of term in order to secure the return of my security deposit, as my housemates who spent most of the year moaning about how they would surely be swindled out of theirs by the landlord conveniently find other things to busy themselves with (or just leave).

I am sick of being brought to the end of my tether by people who simply do not give a shit about anyone or anything besides themselves.

Spotted in a supermarket near you…

Celebrate the death of Jesus through self-love. Go, the eggs command you.

Started before Christmas, mothballed until last week, finally completed. jayphoto.co.uk, my attempt at a “professional” web front for my photography, is finished.

The site showcases all of the photos available as prints from my deviantART page, while hopefully avoiding some of the slightly less professional elements of the dA site and helping the visitor get through the selection checkout process with the least difficulty. Hopefully it will help me get some exposure and sell some art; my main motivation to get it done was the looming on the horizon of a couple of higher-profile photo jobs that I’ll be tackling in the coming weeks - details will be forthcoming.

Techie note: The Flash used on the main landing page is a heavily modifed version of the “Gallery Tween” sample application included with Flash 8. It reads in a randomly ordered list of image filenames from XML (generated by PHP from the site’s image database) and then displays them on the Stage, using a one-frame loop with ActionScript to shift them from side to side. If people are interested I’m happy to publish the code.

I was having a little play with referer data from wpStats earlier, while I should have been writing my essay, and stumbled upon the comedy gold mine that is “the things people type into Google that lead them to my site”. Among my logs I found people who came here while searching for information on SMS.ac, “fuck the world”, and images of “middle east cars” to name but three. So I spent a few minutes writing up a module for wpStats that would show the most popular web and image search terms of users coming to the site from Google.

It’s not bulletproof - I’ve used basic string functions rather than pattern matching with regexp (Note to self: learn regexp) - but it seems to work well enough. In the next few weeks I will try to find time to put together a release of wpStats that will include this along with various other enhancements as suggested to me over the last few months, along with a bit of a tidy-up. Consider this a call for suggestions - if you want your little tweak or widget included, let me know. Suggestions so far include a timezone setting to display times in your local zone and a rewriting of the bot-detection routines to use a table of patterns rather than an awkward list of string test functions. The comments in the code and general documentation also need a solid clean.

Anyway, no guarantees of when, but sometime soon with any luck. Failing that I’ll have lots of time over Easter to persue projects like this, so it should get done then if not before.

The snow has given way to rain, and the town looks like an illustration from a depression pamphlet. I went for a walk last night and ended up in a 2-hour circuit around the outskirts of town, which succeeded in clearing my head. For a few hours at least. I have been unsuccessful in establishing how fast walking pace is, but I’d imagine I put a few miles under my heels - so good exercise in any case.

My subconscious battle of procrastination against my Marketing essay culminated in my cleaning of the entire house this morning in preparation for the (brief) arrival of my folks later today, which was a bittersweet process if there ever was one. The house is now what might be described as clean (by those who don’t look too closely), but I’d bet my bollocks to a barn dance (to use the vernacular) that it won’t stay so for more than a day or two. Though Josh is going back to Geneva for Reading Week, so hope springs eternal. Nor, since a clean house is apparently not an expectation of my housemates, am I likely to be acknowledged for doing so (as if the place magically became clean again) - “well I didn’t ask you to do it” etc. Sigh.

Time to do some essay-writing. See? Yet again I find something to do besides that. Hoho.