Oddverse.com

We had the auditors in at work.

Well, not us precisely. Our marketing team. Or, as we've started calling them, "document management". It was decided that our document store wasn't secure enough. So this week we had the password routines upgraded.

This is a system that stores technical documents and my sarcastic comments on them. It has no personal client data. No financial information.

Now we've got to change our passwords regularly. I use the system roughly every couple of weeks, so now I have to change my password every second time I use it.

The password has to contain letters and numbers, a mixture of upper and lower case, and a punctuation mark. That's good password practice anyway, but they're a swine to remember. Really, they should be saved for important things.

This is a system that stores technical documents and my sarcastic comments on them. It has no personal client data. No financial information.

Eight of us in the office have logins for this system. All of us now have our new passwords written on post-its on our desks.

Yes, we got our security upgraded really well.

Be vewwy quiet.

We're hunting property.

Mr Twinky and I are channelling Phil and Kirstie and learning as much as possible about the Edinburgh property market before we take the plunge and buy ourselves a second home in Scotland early next year. Fortunately we're both thinking along the same lines - as it'll be me there most of the time, and I am something of a lazy bastard, we need something that is in walk in condition, and doesn't need anything knocking through or even a lick of paint.

However, on the topic of furnishing, we differ.

I favour the retro bachelor pad look - a few cardboard boxes, a microwave oven, a takeaway menu and a Playstation.

Mr Twinky likes furniture.

So, the games begin... I'm trying to find somewhere right at the top of our price range, and that way there's no money left over for any of these frippery luxury nonsenses.

Like Elmer Fudd, I don't really expect to win this one.

Some key events in my life.

I was born in 1968.

I started working in 1989.

In 1997, I was living in Scotland, in a relatively small town. Two major things happened within a couple of months - I came out, and I got a job in Hong Kong.

In 1999, I adopted a stray evil cat - Mr Twinky, who now owns me. Through a chain of coincidences and comical escapades, we ended up in Dublin, where we remain to this day.

In early 2008, I will be leaving the company I have been working for since 1989. I will be taking up a new position in Scotland, where I will be living most of the time, flying back to Dublin for weekends. It's a good job, working with people I know and respect and I'm somewhat excited by it. It has its scary side - a change of country, a change of career and a change of domestic circumstances. But it feels good (and scary)

Edinburgh here I come.

Finally.

Rob Kazinsky, from EastEnders

When I was a kid, soaps were called soaps, and I'll tell you something. They were nothing like as good as they are these days, when they're at their best.

For a kick off, soaps were definitely for women. Men had sport, and so women had soaps, all about love, and affairs, and a little bit rubbish really, but that didn't matter because the main purpose of soaps was to sell soap powder to their target audience - home makers.

Somewhere in the last four hundred years, though, there's been a change. True, soaps may still be targeted at women and the gayers in the community, but they're the most watched programmes on British television and they're big business and they're hugely competitive. They're now called serial dramas, they've got awards and magazines devoted to them and the drive to win audience has led to a stunt-driven conveyor belt of plane crashes, hostage situations, disaster weddings and family teenage stepson nutter hostage tower block shooting calamities.

There's an odd side effect to this.

There's actually some damn good acting in there. Some well written, intelligent scripts. There's even some consistent character development over a period of years. Sometimes, these things are actually worth watching.

They say that if Shakespeare was alive now, he'd be writing for the soaps. That's probably not true. He'd be writing soppy love poems to a dark lady, tossing off the odd dirty limerick, and he'd have a new blockbuster in the multplex every six months based on a real life true story. He'd have written a cracking screenplay for The Queen, and Helen Mirren would sing his praises. However, if he Dickens was alive, he'd certainly be writing for the soaps, and he'd have come up with some cracking stuff for Christmas Day.

I remember, back when I cared about these things, that I was asked to categorise my blog by someone who wanted to bung it in a list. That was when I discovered that there are a zillion different categories of blogs - from political blogs to mommy blogs to blogs about collecting knicker elastic. And each of these categories has its own internal hierarchy and elements that definitely think they're better than anyone else and that anything else *isn't really blogging*.

This is of course, nonsense.

Mind you, at the moment, I am at something of a loose end of what to write about, partly because I don't want to suddenly become a categorised blog. It would be so easy for this to have become a blog about the OU course that I did, or about the job hunting that is going on at the moment, or about the sheer hell that is, at least this week, my current job.

All of which leaves me wondering what I'll write about. So, in the mean time...

Yesterday, after the polite rejection from the Sontarans (they wanted me but couldn't afford me, apparently), I was hijacked in a meeting room by two dachshunds. These are crackberry addicts, small and wiry, with faces you wouldn't tire of holding in the sink. They nipped away at my ankles and thighs, caused me a lot of pain, and I couldn't kick them because I'm bigger than them.

The next rejection is due on Thursday.