over the counter culture, well that's right where you belong you tried to sever your ties with the london sky, but you got the whole thing wrong you try to be so different, as does everybody else create your own distinctions and flaunt them for yourself over the counter culture, with your cards and catalogs the mainstream wipes the riverbed clean you're just wrong, you're just wrong you think you followed your heart again now it's in to be out destroy your plans and just start again don't pretend to not pretend at all over the counter culture, well you live your life in waves last year's dream was a terrible scheme, this new fad will fade let's see, what can we be now that hasn't been done before? shut your eyes, look inside

I'm pretty antsy to head off to Europe. Our departure is now 15 short days away. It'll be nice to get my mind off work for a few weeks, even though the end of our vacation occurs at the Society of Molecular Imaging meeting in Germany. Which is decidedly NOT unrelated to work. How's that for double negatives?

The inevitable feedback war between my eBay persona and the seller of the cabinet we just received has commenced, initiated by my negative feedback regarding their extremely substandard shipping practices. They left me a retaliatory negative feedback calling me "difficult". Umm, i paid within a day, and as far as i'm concerned there ends my obligation as a buyer. They now want me to agree to remove the feedback i left on their profile. V is going to try to get them to refund our shipping fee (which was 75% of the item cost!). I've got no technique for those sorts of things. Like when i told BestBuy the TV they'd sold us had one S-video input, not two as claimed in the store and on the web site. I told them this was unacceptable and that i'd reported them to the Better Business Bureau (a total fib on my part). V tells me i need to threaten these things and give them a chance to offer me something. I have no head for these sort of commercial mind games.

The conversion of my imaging software to an object-oriented scheme is proceeding, albeit with much cursing and fist-pumping on my part. Rewording 2000 function calls over the space of 30,000 lines of code is no easy task. Especially with an editor that leaves as much to be desired as the IDL development environment does. Despite that, it's coming along, and the bugs are being progressively worked out.

The on-again, off-again transfer saga of Michael Essien to Chelsea continues. Lyon president Jean-Michel Aulas needs serious psychological help. If you thought Steven Gerrard was wishy-washy ("I could never leave!" ... "I can't play here again" ... "This is where i want to be forever!"), then the Frenchman has all the solidarity of a mound of jello. Essien seems to be genuinely annoyed by this whole development, having stated his desire to go to London a while back. He hasn't played in two (soon to be three) matches for Lyon this season, with coach Gerard Houllier (former Liverpool lead nitwit) stating he won't add him to the squad until his future is settled. Honestly, the Chelsea offer is already outlandish (£27 million for an unproven midfielder? Sure, he could be the next Cantona, but he could also be the next Kezman) ... Lyon should take the money and run. They have no one to blame for this farce but themselves ... Lyon were the ones who continually left the door open to a transfer. If they'd initially come out and say "We will not sell Essien at any price", like AC Milan did with Shevchenko and Juventus did with Trezeguet, that would've been that. But they wanted to play games with a team that never met a price tag it didn't like. I want this whole thing to be settled if only so i can add Essien to my Winning Eleven 8 International Chelsea lineup and put the new squad through its virtual paces.