Monthly Archives: March 2008

It’s a lovely feeling – waking up on a Friday morning knowing that the ‘weekend’ is already here and there’s no work to go to. Pity we spent most of the morning tidying up for Emma’s Dad’s visit!

I’m dispatched over to Morrisons to pick up a few essentials and figure I must be in for a rough time, as it takes me three laps of the car park to find a parking space.

Inside, it’s crazy. It’s only Good Friday – why are there so many people shopping? It’s a full, normal Saturday tomorrow… weird. Almost all the people in Morrisons have full trolleys, loaded up the very top – and they’re all wandering around muttering to each other about it being ridiculous that so many people are here.

“Anyone would think the shops were closing for a week!” and “I don’t know why they’re all here!” – wake up, nutbars – you’re the nutters doing your full weekly shop on Good Friday! What is it that makes people decide to stock up on absolutely everything just because there’s a bank holiday? I’m only there because we’re out of milk and need some bread, eggs and other staple bits – I’m not filling the freezer and cupboards!

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Finished the single-player element in Call of Duty 4. Excellent game – shame the single-player mode is so short. Some of the touches are just outstanding though – like being the thermal-imaging gunner on the plane, or the frankly fantastic slow-motion sequences when things go a little hairy – like just after your helicopter’s been flung out of the sky by the blast of a nuclear explosion, or when the bridge your jeep is travelling over is suddenly shot out from beneath you by enemy helicopters – it’s certainly the most atmospheric first person shooter out there.

I gave the multiplayer a whirl tonight…and, well, it’s disappointing. There’s just not that level of control and precision available with the joypad controllers. First person shooters need WSAD and a mouse – it’s the law. Maybe, given enough practice, I could get competent with the joypad, but, I doubt it.

It seems you have to ‘unlock’ some of the more interesting multiplayer modes, and until I earn some points I’m stuck with the deathmatch modes – which are pretty dull. Lots and lots of spawn-point campers. I might just’ve been unlucky, who knows?

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Ok, so…. leaving it a day or so to fill this in really isn’t working – as I plainly just can’t remember the things I did yesterday. It’s a bit worrying, really.

I know I got up. I went to work. I probably did some work too, maybe. Then I went home. Had some tea. Went to bed. Probably. Is my life that drab that I can’t recall a single interesting element of yesterday? Continue reading →

Morning came along and yesterday’s sickness and diarrhea disappeared as quickly as it arrived. Very odd. Work is fairly tedious and somewhat depressing. Anyhow, this cheered me up when I discovered it…

I’m an avid Mac user, and have only just noticed this little nugget in 10.5…

Open the finder. In the Devices, Shared, Places section on the left, if there are any machines with SMB/CIFS shares available, they’ll appear with an icon of a blue computer screen – I’m sure you’ll have seen the 16×16 icon many times before. Maybe you’ve not seen this, though – click on the icon, and then press Space…

Seems Jobs’ contempt of Windows knows no bounds! Continue reading →

Slept very uneasily last night. Woke at around 3am with terrible indigestion and heartburn. Found some Ranitidine tablets and necked one and went back to bed. Woke again around 6.30ish with the uncontrollable urge to visit the loo – great, diarrhea.

No sooner have I flushed and stood up and my head is in the bowl. I throw up four or five times – thick, dark brown chocolaty coloured puke – it certainly doesn’t taste sweet though. Almost immediately, though, my indigestion disappears! I don’t think I’ve ever threw up dark brown puke before. Great, vomiting.

All I’ve eaten in the last day or so is my Mum’s Sunday dinner – and, there’s no way that could be responsible! – and that Indian on Saturday evening. Hmmm.

If it’s a virus, Aimee hasn’t got it yet, and she’s been with me all weekend, and my Mum and sister aren’t reporting any ill feelings. I don’t feel poorly – I just cannot stray too far from a lavatory. It seems, when the urge comes, I’ve got to go. I call in sick and spend most of the day alternating between the bed and the loo. All things being equal, Id’ve rather gone to work.

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Spent most of a very wet and miserable Sunday entertaining Aimee at my Mum’s. Had some roast beef for tea and then trundled back up the M1 at about 7-ish. It’s a fairly uneventful journey, and quite a quick one thanks to the dearth of traffic on a wet, windy Sunday night. I only stop to top up petrol, and to buy a drink. Aimee is awake all the way home, but she isn’t upset or bored – which is odd.

When I get home, I scoot Aimee straight up to bed, and she settles down with no hesitation or fuss at all. Poor bugger’s knackered!

Forgot to mention yesterday that I picked up Call of Duty 4 for the Xbox 360 from the Game store in Corby town centre, after half-a-dozen of my friends recommended I do so. I’d played the original on the PC a few years ago, where you’re a World War II soldier, and it was quite good, but my experience with First-Person shooters on a console is somewhat limited, and I can’t quite fathom how these games play-out without the aid of WSAD and a mouse.

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Turns out that my Monarch flights never did actually go through, so I spent a bit of today looking for alternatives – and I’m glad I did. Turns out the flights are cheaper via XL.com if we travel from East Midlands instead of Manchester. Plus, these other flights are at better times – so everyone’s a winner. Holiday = booked! Hurrah. Roll on the 24th April, coz we’ll be having a week in Lanzarote!

I’ve never been to Lanzarote before. I’ve been several times to Tenerife, which I like – mainly because I’m so familiar with it, I guess. Lanzarote is also in the Canaries, so I’m expecting a similar climate. I understand that Lanzarote is much less commercialized and developed than Tenerife (at least, at the moment) – but I really wouldn’t care anyway; we just need a break away from our respective working environments for a while in the sun. If anyone has any travel tips or ‘must see’s’ regarding Lanzarote, let me know!

Had Indian for dinner with mum. I had the lamb karai, she the lamb dupiaza – when we opened up the pots everything looked so similar it was hard to tell which was which, but they both tasted delicious, even if the difference in actual taste between the two was very subtle indeed! Like most Westernised ‘Indian’ food, it’s all just meat in a creamy brown sauce, with varying degrees of spiciness.

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I’ve never really taken much notice of the SXSW (South by South West) music symposium that happens in and around Austin, Texas – probably because over here, it’s not really news and isn’t covered by the general music media. Radio 1′s alternative programming has touched on it in the past, but this year they seem to be going with it in a bigger way – sending Steve Lamacq over there with a handful of ‘hand picked’ acts on a ‘BBC Introducing‘ stage.

SXSW is seen as a way for underground US acts to get noticed, and – increasingly – as a springboard for popular UK acts to broaden their US marketability. For example, US unknowns, but UK chart-troubling acts like The Pigeon Detectives, Scouting For Girls, The Wombats, Duffy and socialist-pop troubadour Billy Bragg will be performing at this year’s SXSW.

However, SXSW isn’t like Glasto, or Reading. It’s not a ‘festival’ in the traditional sense. It’s a collection of 100′s of gigs across a few days in and around Texas. As such, it’s not a case of there being 20-30 acts on – there’s, literally, thousands. With so much choice, I guess it’s difficult to know what to look for.

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Tonight I decided that it was silly to get hung-up on whether or not I’d posted my blog before going to bed. I’ll always be chasing my tail – the same happens if I go out on the lash and stumble in at 3am, or when we’re on holiday, or away from a computer for a night.

As long as I have an entry for every day, that’s fine. When it is composed is of less importance, I feel. And, with that, here’s today’s (yesterday’s) entry:

Thursdays are becoming my new favourite weekday, I think. Work is usually ok – it’s approaching the end of the week, and the downhill into Friday is in full effect. Also, I leave early on a Thursday as I have to pick up Aimee from nursery, as Emma works late.

I enjoy this little extra time I get to spend with Aimee – on other weekdays I tend to get home from work too late to see her before she goes to bed, and the only real quality time I get with her is at the weekend, and our little Thursday afternoon play.

Before, when I’d bring her home on a Thursday, she’d want to go directly to bed. No messing. As soon as we’d get in through the front door, she’d be crying and gesturing for me to take her up to bed. Not now. Nowadays we get in and we have a play with her toys and watch the last hour of CBeebies before bed.

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So, Alistair Darling released the details of his first budget as Chancellor of the Exchequer. In doing so, he revealed the sweeping changes that would overhaul the Vehicle Excise Duty tariffs. These tariffs were brought in in 2001 after some pointed-headed ‘green’ boffins started whinging about CO2 emissions from vehicles.

Now, these old tariffs clearly aren’t good enough, and there’s too many 4×4′s and ‘gas guzzlers’ on the roads, so the government’s new solution is to tax the living shit out of the owners of such vehicles. Or, not, as the case for the majority of owners of these highly pollutant, toxic, carbon-unfriendly, whale-killing and seal clubbing vehicles…

I own a Mazda RX-8. Yes, it’s a sporty car. Yes, it’s not particularly economical to run, and it is, unfortunately for me, capable of putting out 284 grams of CO2 per kilometre. This places it in the highest of all the new tax-brackets – class ‘M’. This is the same class as such MPG-fearing giants as the Lamborghini Murcielago, Aston Martin DB9 and the Ferrari F430. Zippy the RX8 may be, but ‘supercar’ it is not.

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