leslog

And later, I will wear my new Lego Star Wars t-shirt

Just me laugh that MS has not set its own site as something you can trust.

A couple of years ago, Gir and I were thinking of holidaying in Florence/Rome, and though we never went, I’m still keen on going at some point, and me hating the thought of not being able to understand the language at all, have decided to swot up.

This may well turn out to be one of those personal projects that never get finished, but a week ago, I bought a “teach yourself beginners Italian” book and accompanying CD and have since been plugged in at every opportunity. So far, I’m absorbing it quite well, and having mastered the essential cheating-man’s phrase, “parla englese?” I have reached unit four, which introduces adjectives, likes, dislikes, preferences and numbers over 20. I’m quite enjoying the learning experience right now; if it lasts, there’ll be another update when I’ve got to the milestone of unit 10.

So, on Friday after work, Gir brought home our Wii. We had half an hour before we would need to get out the house again for the evening’s boozing, so we had a quick game of bowling. This is the first time I’ve ever played Wii, and this is the score sheet from that first game. Honestly.

At frame 5, I was feeling the pressure and crumbled mid-game, but otherwise I can’t help but feel a bit smug. Not bad for my first go.

Just had to look up the HTML character entity for a right arrow → which pleasingly is →. I’ll not forget that one in a hurry.

Also very memorable is ∴ for the therefore symbol ∴ though I doubt I’d ever need to use that in real life.

When will they introduce smiley characters into the specification? That would be so cool.

I had a really fun time on Friday, and had a wicked view from the balcony, stood behind just two short girls. The other bonus of being upstairs was that Gir could sit comfortably on a sofa, have a table to rest his drink on, and play Solitaire on his phone to keep himself vaugely entertained. Oh, and there was no queue at the bar, or the toilets! I’d not been there before, but the Palais has become one of my favourite venues. As always, apologies for mobi cam crappiness.

We did fork out £4 a throw for pints of lager, just to get the plastic glasses, only to find that mobi cam was too shit in the darkness to make out the “binoculars” we had made for Gir. It would have been a great photo.

So someone’s invented another international day where we should all do something to better ourselves or the planet or something. Saturday is the inaugral “shutdown day”, where we are supposed to leave our computers offline.

www.shutdownday.org:

It is obvious that people would find life extremely difficult without computers, maybe even impossible. If they disappeared for just one day, would we be able to cope?
Be a part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the internet. The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate!
Shutdown your computer on this day and find out! Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer?

I haven’t figured exactly what the point of this would be, so don’t intend on taking part. I only wonder if they’ll be turning off their website server for the occaision?

Reminds me of Sysadmin Day, only that’s much more like an excuse for a nerdy website.

Since I know Gir will moan about me dragging him along to another “boring” gig, is anyone interested in coming with me to see Idlewild on Friday at Hammersmith Palais?

Edit: Oh, and there’s Incubus next month too.

You can come with me for free!

A survey of 4,000 Britons by Teletext reveals that of the peoeple who started to read Harry Potter [4] The Goblet of Fire, 32% did not finish it. (Full story on the BBC)

I’m not at all surprised. The books are written for children; why should adults expect to enjoy Rowling’s prose? Frankly I find her dull and patronizing, and didn’t get past chapter one when I started reading the first one.

The films have been enjoyable enough, though I’m not sure they’ll continue to work now the actors have grown up and lost their babyfaces. Radcliffe has grown up to be far too good looking.

A long-overdue update on the move out of Ruislip (Sat 24 - Wed 28 February).

Saturday and Sunday was spent packing, the majority of stuff being things to go up north. Since it wasn’t our stuff we didn’t waste time caring about how neatly it was packed, which was just as well because there was a hellava lot. Top tip: use supermarket shopping bags as packing material for crockery and fragiles. Save a fortune in bubble wrap!

On Monday morning the skip arrived. With the help of neighbour J, we’d filled it by the end of the day, ready for collection on Tuesday.

Tuesday we were starting to get worried about the logistics of moving everything out of the house to three locations and decided it would make Wednesday easier if we moved the bits round to my flat that evening, leaving just the storage bits and “up north” bits for Wednesday. A quick Google, and we found a man with a van called Dan — really — who helped us ship stuff (including Min and Goob) round to mine that evening.

First job on Wednesday was to get the remainder of our stuff into storage. I’d pre-booked a lockup at a local facility, and the removals men were happy enough to do a run there first and then come back for the main load of stuff to go up north. I’ll tell you what, 50 sq.ft. looks way smaller than I’d imagined, but everything went in nicely, thanks to the cunning packing and stacking skills of the removals men.

Then back at Ruislip, the remaining boxes and furniture were loaded onto the van, until we were left with an empty house; we waved the van off at about 10.30.

We weren’t done yet however: handover was meant to be at midday, but we were still in there cleaning till 12.30! Although we thought the house was empty, there was still a lot to chuck out, and the kitchen needed a scrub. We left a couple more bin bags with the neighbour then got a cab round to mine, relieved that the job was done and after five days we could finally relax.

How we are getting on at my place now, I’ll leave for another post.