It was a totally clear night last night. Not a cloud in the sky, and the moon looked full, which was very eerie for hallowe’en. The police helicopter was buzzing over again, which it seems to have been doing continuously for the last week or so. I don’t know what they’re looking for, but it’s taking them a long time to find it.

I didn’t see any trick-or-treat kids (a small mercy), but there were lit pumpkins in Chelmer Village, which looked very festive. I think they were about to set a tree on fire, which would look more impressive but less appropriate.

It was another day of proofs. Nigel came in to drop off some pictures for the issue at lunchtime, just as I was finishing my pumpkin and parmesan soup (no doubt made for the season) and we got nattering about Wonder Woman, somehow. We did a hunt through Google and found a Shockwave game where you had to use her metal wristbands to deflect bullets that had us captivated for a full five minutes.

I hunted around for some guests for the show and came up trumps with Will who said he’d come on and do the news for us, which should be fun - he’s not been on for months. Come to think of it, I think this’ll only be his second time.

Later in the afternoon, Janet popped in on the way to her leaving do at a club I thought was called Propaganda. It seems to be poorly documented online so I couldn’t really work out much about it. From what I could tell, though, it seemed to do an evening called Lipgloss. I couldn’t make it - I ended up stuck in the office until late writing my column, which goes off to repro tomorrow afternoon. It’s bad enough having to come up with one column idea a month, but this month I need to do two - my regular 404 column, and one for the editorial at the front of the mag, too.

Came home and watched a late-in-the-series episode of Porterhouse Blue over dinner. Episode five out of six, I think. I was 12 when they were on first time around, so missed them all and was quite lost for the first half hour.

Anyway, It turns out they didn’t go to Propaganda last night at all. I don’t know where I got that from. It was some place called Digress, but they soon dispersed to a press do for free beer at Jamies, a hyper-expensive wine bar near the office. I’ve looked up Digress on the net and the verdict seems to be young, dim and no good for pulling. Sounds like half the people in Soho.

PC Mag Henry popped up behind me as I was walking through Soho Square reading the letters in Metro and pointed out the police tape blocking off the street through which I normally walk home. He dragged me over to take a look, but there were so many trucks and vans in the way we couldn’t really see what was happening. They’ve been doing a lot of building work down there the last week or so, and there’s a big rack of scaffolding up against a building. Perhaps they’ve found something nasty inside the brickwork.

It turns out I massively over-wrote on my column last night. I was accounting for there being too little time to commission an illustration, but as it turns out, there’s plenty, so I had to cut 150 words first thing so production could get it to fit onto the page. They’d laid it out with the words flowing right across my face which, considering most peoples’ verdict seems to be that my picture makes me look like I work for Smash Hits, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I had almost finished when the woman publishing the Dorling Kindersley book called to tell me they were scrapping the whole project. It’s nothing to do with my bit, apparently - that was only 10 pages of the whole almanac and she said they were happy with it.

I can’t decide how I feel about this. On the one hand I’m disappointed. I was only doing it to get Dorling Kindersley on my CV - the pay was awful, after all. On the other, though, I’d only done the first draft and being scrapped at this stage means I won’t have to do the inevitable editing and rewriting that comes with a project like this. I’m glad I worked hard to get it finished last weekend and submitted a week early, though, because they’re still going to pay me full whack for doing it, even though I haven’t yet signed the contract. If I’d hung on to it until the deadline they’d have told me it had been canned before I submitted and I’d probably be leaving with nothing.

We had a rather mixed show this evening. Will was good, but one of the other guests told us he was being picked up in a taxi in two minutes. This was just before we were going to talk to him. He asked if we could be quick because it was apparently going to be ‘tight’. He had a very confusing name that I’m sure I got wrong a couple of times, but we managed to keep him for five minutes and he turned out to be a decent kicking-off point for a chat about Internet conferencing and online security.

Inspired by that, I came home and tested my firewall and was rather shocked to find my PC was wide open to all and sundry. I’d forgotten to re-enable it after I reinstalled Windows on Friday night. I dread to think who has been through my files.

Actually, come to think of it, probably nobody. My asthmatic cable modem is close to useless now. It loads half a web page and then gives up. I thought it was bad before, when they got me to shut up by giving me a year’s subscription for free, but it’s never been like this. I’m going to have a difficult decision to make when the freebies come to an end and the bills reappear.

Following on from last Thursday’s free lottery ticket, Kyocera sent free Skittles today.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2001 at 12:23 am and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.