I’ve just had a fantastically bad day, far beyond the usual things not working and nothing getting done. Today involved holding on to spiky things, burning rubber, being stiff as a board at aikido, the foulest cup of tea that I’ve ever paid money for, discovering expensive things are broken, discovering other expensive things are worn out and can’t be replaced, further expensive things rubbing on yet more expensive things, finding out that I can’t use a compass, the sun being in the wrong place, mould, not having a deep 10 mm socket and that no-one in NZ knows or cares what a doweling jig is. Apparently you just drill the holes in the right place. Well, thanks.

And everybody else is stupid, lazy and wrong.

My day was so bad that when I discovered that I had put my phone through the washing machine, I just had to collapse laughing, in a strangled, manic and probably scary way.

But hey, look on the bright side – I now have a clean (though non-functional) phone. And it hasn’t been attacked by ducks.

So I got a letter from the chief executive of (big organisation that we deal) with and a letter from the chief executive of the (bigger organisation that we deal with).

Wow I’m so important. Unfortunately both letters said I was wrong and a f’uckwit. And you know what? Yeah, I’m pretty much wrong, in a measureable way. As to my f’wittedness, I’ll leave that for you to decide.

Oh botheration.

but I have this theory, coz I am a scientist at heart, though currently be-suited and pretending to be an economist. Though right now I am a wonk, and have been wonking hard all day.

There are only three forms of human communication*. Firstly, idle chatter for the purposes of generating social capital. Which theoretically I can see the importance of… Secondly, flirting, for purposes we all know and love. And that’s far more fun in the flesh, and too bandwidth intensive otherwise. Thirdly, questions for the purposes of actual information transfer. This is best done by me working out exactly what the question is, then going off, hiding in a lab and coming back several years later with a provably correct answer, with a highly optimised proof-of-concept demonstrator. This approach is only applicable to certain classes of questions, so for example, if you ask me what my favourite colour is, I’ll get very lost and resort to my default communication mode, namely flirting.

So that’s why it would be utterly pointless for me to get a lj. Then again, a man cannot spend the entire day wonking…

The real home page can be found at happyinmotion.com, complete with useful things such as an abstract of my thesis on laser welding, 9000 pixel wide pans of pretty parts of NZ and a sadly unfulfilled lust for curry.

* Yes, this is a totally arbitrary delineation with a shiny, brittle varnish of scientificyness, but hey, I work in policy, what do you expect?