From the Lynn News (my emphasis):

THREE West Norfolk police officers risked their lives to make a dramatic riverside arrest linked to the armed robberies at households and businesses across the area.

[...]

The male passenger ran into nearby marshland near the River Delph, hotly pursued by a firearms sergeant and a police constable based in Swaffham and a specialist police dog handler from Lynn.

The dog handler said: “As the tracker, I went into the water first with my dog and the other two followed behind. I thought it would just be up to our knees so I jumped in and ended up in thick sludge up to my neck.

“We thought that would be as bad as it would get but for most of the way we were wading through water full of algae and mud up to our necks and getting cut to bits.

“It was freezing cold and our protective clothing and belt rigs were weighing us down and there were a few times we thought we were in trouble, but the adrenalin took over and we were determined to find him.”

[...]

After 55 minutes in the freezing water and struggling with the onset of hypothermia, the three officers found the man holding on to a tree. As he passed out, they had to drag themselves and him out of the water.

[...]

The suspect and three officers were all taken to Lynn’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital to be treated for hypothermia and were later discharged. The officers, who do not want to be named, were back at work on Sunday evening.

Thank you.

I go downstairs for something to eat. Down the hall. Enter the kitchen. And there, on the worktop, is half a chocolate cake.

I look at it.

For some reason I want some cake. It’s junk food, and I know it’s bad for me but I don’t care. And no, not because I’m weak willed. I hardly ever eat junk food, so I don’t feel guilty when I do.

I cut myself a slice.

I remember that chocolate cake goes well with ice cream.

Scoop. Scoop.

Into a bowl, add a spoon and I’m done. Then I rush upstairs to enjoy my simple creation.

Or rather I don’t.

I’m sitting here right now with that bowl in front of me. It’s half finished and I don’t want any more.

I feel sick. Not in any dramatic way. Just that the more I eat, the worse my body feels. I’m not used to that any more. Food is supposed to make you feel better. That’s what it normally does.

I could leave it; but instead I’m going to force myself to eat the rest. I want to memorise how disgusting it is.

Then I’m going to eat something nice. Probably some walnuts (a food I used to hate).

The other day I wanted McDonalds randomly. I had to remind myself of the last unhappy meal I had there some two years ago. It tasted the same as it always had before. I remembered the taste from years previously and it still tasted the same. It’s just this time I actually realised that it tasted of rubber salted cardboard. For some reason I’d stopped liking that.

We must all know this food tastes disgusting right? We must know from our lips to our anus that it makes us feel awful. I think we’ve just stopped listening. Or we assume it’s normal to feel bad. And when we try eating actual food again, we have trouble tasting properly.

Leave the crap alone for a few months. It might help you remember.

It’s been a long time because I’ve actually been doing some work. I’m learning to exit dream-mode and get on with some practical things for once in my life.

(You can’t blame me, school lulled me to sleep for so many years. Yeah learning is good, but doing nothing but learning for almost 20 years is actually a bit insane. Some people believe they wake up when school ends and reality hits them. In truth, most have simply stopped dreaming.)

I’m busy partly with more education (a part time psychology degree). Like I said learning is good; you’ve just got to be doing something practical as well.

The practical element is that I’m starting up a business.

This was inevitable I think. I was a bit of a childhood entrepreneur until I went to high school and they kicked the spirit out of me. (Why didn’t I just rebel?) Anyway, as soon as I exited full-time education the numbness started to fade. Looking at a job advert was like the splash of ice-water on my face; a stark reminder that the only thing worse than dying is dying after a lifetime of corporate misery.

Coming in a few days I’m going to be putting up my new blog where the main topic will be user interface design (primarily from a website perspective). My hope is to improve the technology climate a bit by making some of it easy to use.

My core belief is if you make technology easy, you give more people more power. Which is usually a good thing, but granted not always! The alternative is to only give power to the government and huge corporations; which is sometimes a good thing, but very rarely.

On a wider scale my interest is in how people interact with technology. But I want to keep my focus reasonably narrow and practical so I’m making no commitments to write anything about that wider interest.

This blog is going to become my outlet for writing about whatever I feel like. I don’t care if nobody reads it; that is pretty unimportant. In fact I don’t even have any statistics for this site; and that’s refreshing. Sometimes I just need to write. This is a place for my key presses to go.

The new Nintendo Wii is the funniest gaming device I have ever seen, but watching people play it just cracks me up. The link below takes you to their brilliant advertising campaign.

What I find interesting is how much they are marketing this as a family device rather than something for serious gamers. Nintendo are increasingly trying to expand the gaming market (smart move) by making it accessible to more people. The Wii seems to do that well, but I wonder how long the appeal will last. Most people that play games reguarly seem to start out laughing and joking, but then they become more serious (in a good way generally). Can the Wii offer that or is it just a gimmick? The answer probably lies in making a hit game that uses the innovative technology in a way that won’t cross-over better to other platforms.

The marketing videos are here.

Edit: I wonder how many people will accidentally throw the controller at the TV while trying to throw a baseball.

Captain’s blog, stardate 97343…

What a lame way to start this blog (I don’t even really watch Star Trek). But it doesn’t matter because it will gradually fall to the bottom of a long pile of random musings.

For too long I’ve been trying to blog about relevant things that are important and are perhaps even interesting. Now I’m giving myself permission to talk about myself.

This will be self indulgent, but it will also be revealing. It is my way of splurging my brain into the written form and being less private. It may be so boring that everyone will miss the revealing things. Unless they have developed the ability to search and scan text.

The important thing is this diary is available to anyone who wants to read it. To anyone who wants to discover me. To anyone who is willing to look through unedited prose. This is not supposed to be greate literature; if that happens it happens by accident.
I will be honest with it as if it were a private diary, but I’ll remain discreet when discussing anyone else. This is supposed to reveal me; not anyone else. It’s supposed to make me vunerable.

If you read, you will discover things about me. Probably at the same time as I am discovering things about myself. I introspect a lot. I keep thinking I have reached a point where I need know no more. But the journey is interesting and really concerns how I find my place in the world. How can this wondering soul find his place in this universe when he doesn’t seem to fit in at all? The answer I believe, is that I will have to make a place for myself. Maybe in the corner, maybe on the mantel piece. I really don’t know.

This is my journey to become more me. To be the best damn Alan I can be. To stop being ashamed of who I am. To grow confident in my shell. And to share myself with the world.

I don’t want my life to be private any more.

That has always been distructive.

I want to be free of that.

I want to expose myself.

I mean that quite literally. For years I was ashamed of my body, but I am over that now and I feel a need to show it off. I want to feel comfortable showing it off. I may post naked pictures of me. You have been warned!

If you want to know anything about me, you will find out.

If there is anything you don’t want to know about me, you should not read.

These are thoughts which are quite random. They are the things on my mind. To be fair, many of my thoughts are concerned with the psychology of intelligence and education. But I won’t talk about that here because I write about it elsewhere. This site, therefore, will probably be a more extreme version of my thoughts. It will be edited by interest, and if I don’t post for days on end it does not mean I am in a coma.

This is a cathartic process. But one I share with anyone who wishes to read.

I know I am an interesting character; I know not if that is a good thing or not.