The Adventures of TinTin and Snowy

I honestly feel like that poor little doggy in the window, staring out at freedom and bliss. Blackpool is so sunny and gorgeous and I have a view of the beach from my office. But I'm stuck indoors all day, pining away, cheek stuck to the window watching women in various stages of undress strolling down the promenade. However, when I'm released from my cage in the evening, all I have to look forward to in Lancaster is a dull shade of grey and miserable rain. The new BBC weather graphics shows how the clouds form and disappear over UK. There is a rather stubborn cloud over Lancaster that refuses to budge no matter how glorious it is everywhere else.

Got some disappointing news at work today. My main contact at a potential client of ours, who I've been working on for the past 6 months, and who the company has been dealing with for the past THREE years has left his company and placed our project in someone else's hands. Its back to square one for me. After all my hard work building a relationship with this guy, he just ups and leaves his company. How inconsiderate of him. Now I've got to retrain his successor and re-pitch the benefits of our products to him and wait another year until he sees for himself the long term benefits of our systems. Christ!

Live 8 has been announced. I HAVE to get tickets for this concert. Its a concert that's going to go down in history. Over 5 million people are estimated to be trying to get their hands on the 150,000 free tickets in the UK. The whole purpose of Live 8 is to raise awareness of the poverty crisis in Africa and to push people into doing something about it and pressurizing their governments. Its not about money this time. How effective is it going to be? How many people really care? How many people lose sleep over the thought of millions of starving children in Africa? Donating to charity is an easy way to ease our guilt for living in a developed country and spending more money on bin liners than those poor buggers spend on their monthly food. One trip to work costs more than what it takes to educate 5 children for a year. How do we deal with it? We get pissed and party at Live 8. But hey, we're raising awareness.

I read that if Africa got just 1% of the world's trade, it would end their poverty crisis. What they need is trade justice. Not our money. We need to start buying Fair Trade goods even if its a few pounds/dollars costlier. Make Poverty History.