Congestion Charging

Manchester had its say on whether or not to implement a Congestion Charging zone this week, and overwhelmingly (79%) rejected it. A number of people have had a go at me for voting 'No', and predictably enough, the 'Yes' camp are now trying to say the 'No' voters 'didn't understand what they were voting for'.

Now apart from this being very simplistic, it's also rather patronising. So the 800,000+ 'No' voters are dumb animals who haven't the mental capacity to think it through? I would have to say I was initially in favour of Congestion Charging in principle, but on looking into it, and into Manchester's proposal in particular, I changed my mind. Here's why:

• The suggested improvements to Metrolink basically involve 12 miles of new track that don't go anywhere I need to go, plus a few more carriages on a massively overcrowded system. Plus Metrolink is nowhere near where I live.
• Bus and cycle lanes actually increase congestion, since there is less space on the roads.
• More buses in the early mornings and late evenings? If there's a demand for them, why are they not already there, providing more profits for the bus companies?
• Train improvements seem limited to a few extra carriages, a couple of new stations and more CCTV.
• To enforce the scheme, there would be £300 million of new cameras. Is it just me that sees that amount of money as obscene?
• The route of the 'inner charging ring' was never clearly defined or shown on any of the literature sent out about the charge, but was clearly a LOT bigger than what most people would define as the city centre.
• If I wanted to go away for the weekend (reducing Manchester's congestion!) I would have to pay for the privelege of leaving Manchester.
• There would be a unified payment system for public transport in Manchester, similar to London's Oystercard. This would actually be a good thing.
• Many of the posters for the 'Yes' campaign talked about reduced bus fares. But in the detail of the proposal, there was NO commitment to doing this.
  
• Congestion charging in London has not worked. Congestion has already returned to the previous levels within just a few years.
• Many businesses have no choice but to use vehicles at peak times. So many of them would potentially go under due to this charge.
• Crucially, since it would be car drivers who paid the charge, there was NO improvement to roads as part of the scheme.

So yes, I did understand the issues. And I decided the scheme was flawed and voted 'No'. Well done to all the other voters in Manchester for rejecting what is essentially a tax dressed up as a public improvement scheme.

LCD TV

It's easy and fashionable to knock TV programmes like X-Factor, Big Brother, Hole In The Wall, I'm a Celebrity etc. etc. 'Serious' people call such programmes 'Lowest Common Denominator' television. I say compare the viewing figures for these shows compared to Horizon or Panorama and for these channels compared to BBC4 or Discovery.

Like so much in life, don't criticise people for liking something just because you don't!

November Quickie

I've been busy with university... finally today I got some marked work back from a lecturer and it was good news, a really high score on my assignment in Object Oriented Programming. It is by far my favourite unit though, very practical, so I'm not celebrating too much.

Unfortunately the poor teaching continues on 2 units... I complained about it and was basically told that since the pass rates for those units are fine, I should shut up. And so I will - I can see when the university are about to close ranks - but I certainly won't be recommending MMU to anyone!

Anyway with five assignments on the go at once right now, I don't have time to complain any longer, too much to do!

Student Life

Thought I'd do a quick blog update - I get occasional nags from you readers... (A bizarre thought that people actually read this guff!)

Been on my course for 3 weeks now, and I’d have to say it’s a mixed experience. I’m certainly enjoying studying again and the freedom that being a student brings along with it. The course itself is odd... I’m doing 5 units – two are very practical learning-to-program units that suit me down to the ground and I’m enjoying hugely. One is part practical and part theoretical (not so good!). The other two are very theory driven so far, which is driving me nuts.

The quality of teaching is certainly not good on 4 out of 5 units – I’d say extremely poor on 1 or 2 of them! But I guess I have to take into account that as someone who’s taught people things my whole working life, I have high and possibly unrealistic standards that don’t really fit university lecturers, who after all, have had no teacher training. Overall it’s going OK, though my first assignment is due in a couple of weeks’ time and is an essay on a subject I know nothing about... My experience of essay writing last time I was in education is poor – just something I’m definitely not good at!

I’m still looking for some part time work, and desperately trying to avoid having to go for supply teaching (which would mean joining the GTC etc etc blah blah). Hopefully some Christmas jobs will appear in the papers soon... I do like not working at the moment, but I know I will run out of savings at some point in the summer if I don’t get something more :-)

Gay Pride

Manchester Pride sucked!

The main events in the gay village only seem to cater for the 'mincing-queen' type of gay man, along with their fag-hags and a few assorted lesbians. We decided not to pay the £20 per head charge just to access the streets and see some mostly 3rd rate entertainment. Yes, I know it's for charity. Yes, I know I could have got it for £12.50 if I'd bought it months in advance. But really, why would I pay it - there is seemingly nothing for me there!

Legends was similarly disappointing. Friday night gave us the choice of 2 events taking up the whole of the club. The first was the dresscode and attitude night 'Alert'; the second was the rock-and-pop-not handbag-and-house night 'Bollox'. We settled for Bollox, since previous trips to Alert reminded me of a BNP meeting.

I really want to like Bollox. I like the change in music style. I really like the guys who organise it. But I don't like the event, because it's gone from a gay event to a gay-friendly one, and attracts a crowd which seems to be 50% straight women, 10% lesbians and then some gay men to make up the numbers. I don't want to knock it, it's hugely successful in the market it's aiming at. It's just not for me.

Saturday was a more general club night at Legends, but it seems most of our friends went to another event elsewhere, which meant that although the club was packed, with few folks we knew to talk to, it was quite boring.

I've never really got what there is to be proud of about being gay anyway. It's like being proud of having brown hair, or size nine feet. I feel the same way about nationality... why be proud of things that are simply accidents of birth? Be proud of things you have achieved, not things you have no control over. (By the way, I know that 'pride' here is being used as the opposite of 'shame', and that it's not so much being proud as not ashamed. Just wish there was a better word!)

I think I had the right idea a couple of years ago when I booked a holiday so that we'd be away for pride weekend!

Shy

Being shy is a real curse. I hate it. People around me sometimes don't believe I am shy... maybe shy is the wrong word. Maybe it's that I'm painfully self-conscious. I know I really struggle to start friendships, because I just don't know how to do general chit-chat. And that means people see me as rather stand-offish. I guess it doesn't help that what I think of as my 'neutral' expression seems to be interpreted by the rest of the world as 'pissed off'!

And with being self-conscious, comes being self aware. I'm very aware of my negative points... that I'm grumpy, intolerant, bossy, slightly misogynistic, cynical, morose, opinionated... (This is not a desperate fish for compliments... I'm also aware of my positives!)

All this leads to many of my friendships being a bit superficial, and if I meet other shy people, it's almost impossible for me to connect. I know this is mainly down to me not opening up about myself, but I'd have to say that my life has shown me that a lot of the time, being open comes back to bite me in the ass, and ends up in me getting hurt!

I would love to have the sorts of friendships I see other people have – where you can just hang out together and kill some time in pleasant company. Where instead of lurking on the internet for hours at a time like some freakish saddo, I can spend time relaxing with affable people in the real world. But guess what? The reason I don't really have friendships like that is because I don't know how to be that sort of friend.

Jeez... reading this back, it looks really self-indulgent and whiny; I generally try to keep my blog entries light, factual and positive... Is that the self-conscious Seamus creeping in? Don't worry, it's all quite tongue-in-cheek. Maybe I should look on it as an attempt to be open :-)

PS - To my friends - I love you all, don't read anything unnecessary into this post - I'm grateful to have you!

Universally Challenged!

Just a quick update... I've been accepted by Manchester Metropolitan University to study for a Masters degree in Computing. So I'm now awaiting the start of term with excitement and trepidation... hopefully this time next year I'll be Seamus McAteer MSc :-)

Orlando

After our journey to Toronto, we were expecting the worst from our travel plans to Orlando. But as it happens we had a perfect day... Two on-time flights, luggage first on the belt at the airport, and we were even the first drop off from the airport shuttle bus.

Orlando was a busy nine days, mostly spent visiting Disney theme parks - Epcot, Magic Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, Animal Kingdom and Downtown Disney. Getting to and from the parks on the buses seemed to take forever - usually 2 hours or so each way. I was surprised that there were only really a couple of headline rides in each parks, but I guess the Disney parks are really for kids. As you might expect in mid-summer, the queues were horrendous, and I'd have to say the 'fast-pass' system of booking a time to return to a particular attraction made things worse, since you'd normally get a return time 6 or 7 hours later. In one case, the queue time was shown as 40 minutes, and we were still not on the ride 2.5 hours later! But the bigger rides were good - Space and Splash Mountains, Rock 'n' Roller Coaster and Expedition Everest all ridden with glee :-)

As well as the parks, we also did a lot of shopping in the outlets - it was so cheap it would be daft not to... We were slightly worried about fitting it all in the cases, but we managed somehow! Food was also cheap and unavoidable - I seriously lost count of the number of 'all you care to eat' meals we had. I can actually say I was getting sick of food by the time we left, though we did have a nice meal at Planet Hollywood.

The temperatures were HOT - 32-35 degrees in the daytime, 24 degrees at night, and very, very humid. Almost every day had a thunderstorm - usually incredibly forceful rainfall, but short lived.

We went to Typhoon Lagoon towards the end of our trip, where we got sunburnt again within about 2 hours. The water slides in there - ouch! I managed to hurt myself on both the ones we tried - one from my shoulders bouncing over the joints on the slide, the other from landing awkwardly in the pool at the end. But I guess we fatties build up more momentum on these things, so it's the price you pay!

A good trip, but now I'm all Disney-ed out!

Toronto

It was holiday time again, and we set off from Manchester to Toronto. We were using US Airways, which meant we had to change planes in Philadelphia en route, and only had about 90 minutes to get across the airport to make our flight. We did make it though, and were soon aboard the plane and pushed back from the gate. Unfortunately, that's as far as we got for the next 3.5 hours...

There was a massive thunderstorm in Philly, which meant we were eventually offloaded and sent back to the terminal, where we were informed we would now have a 24 hour delay. Now in Europe there are laws about these things, but in the US you get absolutely no help at all from the airline to find overnight accommodation, have a meal - in fact, they wouldn't even offload our luggage from the plane, so we were literally left with nothing but the name of a hotel to try. When we eventually found out how to get to the hotel, there was a queue of about 50 people ahead of us to check in. Finally, we were in a room, and walked down the street to a pizza place for some food at 10.30 pm!

Now to be fair, the TV news told us there's been 10,000 (yes, ten thousand!) lightning strikes in the Philadelphia area that night... but seriously, a 24 hour delay and all we were offered was a glass of water - the US needs to sort out looking after its travellers!

Naturally we were worried about whether our bags would make it to Toronto (since they were now on a different flight from us!), but luckily they were there when we arrived.

So we'd lost a day of our holiday, but Toronto was great. The Just for Laughs festival was on while we were there, which meant plenty of street entertainment. We trundled up to the Bear Night on the Friday, which was held in the open air on the patio of a cafe, which was novel, though we find the US and Canada's insistence on shutting everything down at 2am a bit strange!

Two highlights - an open-top city sightseeing tour with an excellent guide in glorious sunshine, where we got a bit pinked up; and our day tour to Niagara Falls. Yes, we picked the cheapest tour, so it was excellent value, but the tour guide on this one was chronically bad - to the point where he had a go at one of the other passengers while on the microphone to the whole bus! And SO, SO dull! No tip for him!

New Opportunites

Having moaned about my job for... well, forever... I finally handed in my notice earlier this week. At this moment in time I don't know what I'm going to do from September (yes I had to give 2 MONTHS notice!!!). One option is going back to university to do a Masters (if they'll have me!), but failing that I guess I'm just hoping something will turn up. Slightly scary I suppose, but that fear is more than cancelled out by the relief of knowing there's an end in sight for a job I HATE.

Anyone who has any (sensible) suggestions or job offers, let me know!

All the Small Things

A couple of days ago, I choked on my lunch. Not a minor choke, I might add, but a full blown 2 minute coughing fit that left my shoulders and chest throbbing. It was slightly scary as I was home alone at the time - good job I didn't need the Heimlich manouevre (though it felt close)!

Within a few minutes of this incident, I could feel my breathing was impaired. I could only take very shallow breaths, any deep breaths or yawns were causing a relapse of the coughing fit! I could also feel that something was lodged in my windpipe, and I was making a wheezy sound when breathing.

This is where my inner hypochondriac kicked in... I was straight on the internet to find out what to do - most of the advice was to wait 24 hours then seek emergency help at a hospital, which was quite alarming! This led me to looking at what happens if food goes into the lungs and lots of searching about aspiration pneumonia!

The following day was a very uncomfortable one, trying to get through work meetings suppressing as many coughs as I could. I decided to have a nap when I got home, and as soon as I lay down, I started having another coughing fit... and voila... out pops a completely intact kernel of sweetcorn. Much relief - but also amazement that something so small could cause so much pain and hassle. I'm still feeling pain in my ribs every time I cough or yawn!

Also this week, one of my customers e-mailed my boss to say that I had "been a star" over the last few months. Now my job still sucks big time, but that one small gesture at least let me have a happy day!

Small things matter!

YouTube goes nuts!

Thanks to a bit of promotion by Jonathan Robinson, my latest YouTube video has had over 1000 views in 3 weeks... almost as much as all my other videos put together. Weird!

Watch it here.

Eurovision

Another year, another Eurovision. I make no apologies for enjoying this event, despite criticism from all quarters about how 'gay' it is. A couple of stand outs for me: Iceland had a great dance track that would not have been out of place in any club on a Saturday night; Latvia's pirates gave us a camp, fun number; a simple, catchy pop tune from Denmark; and the usual couple of truly bizarre entries... this time from Spain and Bosnia...

In fact the one track which didn't stand out was the eventual winner from Russia... as is so often the case! Ukraine in 2nd or Greece in 3rd would have been much worthier winners. But politics blah blah blah...!

We had a fun night watching it with a gang of mates round - though you didn't eat the food, you gits! A few pints out at Legends afterwards topped the night off nicely.

Blog fatigue

Well I missed blogging in April. The first month since I started that I haven't done it... I just don't seem to have a lot to say at the moment.

We did manage to go to the Bear Bash in Manchester again. I've been saddened by some people who've simply slagged off the event - in one case it was someone who didn't even attend! As someone who's organised these events in the past I know just how much hard work is involved in putting them together... so I say thank you and well done to Manbears.

The event itself was very busy and I'd say I enjoyed it, particularly being able to catch up with friends from other parts of the country that I rarely see. We went to the Saturday afternoon fair for the first time this year, and the naked oil wrestling was quite a sight - particularly with the copper-chopper buzzing overhead! Sunday's Birdcage entertainment was again excellent, though I'd have to ask: does anyone really care about bear beauty contests any more?

Otherwise life ticks on... work still sucks, though I've managed to have an interview (unsuccessful but good experience). Roll on July and our hols!

Rumour Squashing

Don't you just hate it when nasty people start nasty rumours abut you? Well there's one going round about me right now that goes along the lines that I think I'm too important to take on a small role in the latest Manbears film, and said if I didn't get a leading role I wouldn't take part.

Truth is this: filming was taking place the day before I left for my holiday. I didn't get time to do all the stuff I needed to do in the week leading up to the trip, so unfortunately I couldn't make it to the filming day. As any member of the film group will tell you, I am more than happy to help out in any way with the films, either on or off camera, and I look forward to involvement in future projects.

Some people need more going on in their lives!

Holidays

Sunday 16 March and we were up at 3.30am to get our flight to Malaga. Why on earth did we need to fly at 6.20am!

We were actually going to Torremolinos for a week's break. It was mostly warm, sunny and quiet, which is certainly what I needed. We also fitted in a day-trip to Gibraltar, which was an excellent day out, but slightly weird to feel like you were back in Britain!

Inevitably, there was a delay coming back on Easter Sunday - caused by SNOW at Manchester Airport. A bit of a come down from the sunshine we were experiencing! Seriously, snow in March is just plain wrong!

Just as inevitable was the post-holiday blues... luckily I booked the next week off work too. But the thought of going back to work is a very unpleasant one... if anyone's got a suitable job opportunity, please let me know!

Website Update

Thanks to the ever-geeky BBC Click, I've found a nice online tool that makes sorting out a website really easy. I spent this morning giving my website a freshen up with it.

The tool is called Weebly. It allows you to choose a template (from a fairly wide range) and then drag and drop elements into it. Simple as it can be, and free too. They even host your finished site, and the only price to pay is a small text link at the bottom of your pages.

Nice!

Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous

When I got an e-mail today from Forrest at PlanetBears telling me that he'd written an article about me... I thought, "This is weird!"

But actually it's pretty cool, he's bigging up my acting work on the BSI films I've made with Jonathan and the Manbears team. Keep on like this and maybe someday I can be a real actor. LOL

You can check it out here. Big thanks to Forrest for his kind words!

New Year, Same Beer

Well it seems that New Year's Eve in Legends wasn't too bad! I'd even go so far as to say I enjoyed it. I clearly drank way too much though... there are photos of me looking particularly pissed that I don't even remember being taken!

And I've joined Facebook. I'd been resisting for some time, not really understanding what it was for... but I took the plunge and set it up and am getting the occasional poke...