Not a good day at work today. Had one of those "keep running into brick wall" days where everything I needed to know about our website <> mainframe interactions is something that Jim knows, and he's not here; or something that Adele knows, but she's busy... So at seven pm I left my work half done and came home. In a bad mood.
Luckily, at home, we had well tasty mushroom & spinach breadcrumb type things (thanks to Sainsbury's online for the recipe - and the uber-useful "add all these ingredients to my basket" functionality!) and this evening I think I'll play some Transformers (on the Wii). It came yesterday via the LoveFilm postal rental service, and it's rather entertaining. Pretending to be a giant robot and blowing sh!t up is always good. Graphics aren't bad (although the demo I saw on the PS3 in Curry's a few weeks ago was just awesome), controls are a little tricky (although that might just be me repeatedly holding the wiimote pointing up, which pushes the camera up) and the levels get pretty tough rather quickly (although that might just be me being crap).
Anyway, tomorrow's going to be a better day. I'm playing squash in the evening. Which is always fun.
And on Friday we're going up to Yorkshire, so should get the chance to take some photos! Yay!
Tuesday 13 November 2007
Wednesday 7 November 2007
Good things = Bad press
Today they are going to announce the design of the Olympic stadium. I think it is almost guaranteed that the British press will hate it, and spend the next two days ripping it apart and complaining that the Olympics is going over budget, it will fail, yada yada yada.
GET OVER IT! Winning the Olympics was a great thing for London and for Britain. Get behind it (or at least something) and stop being so damned negative the whole time.
This is why I want to emigrate.
In other news, St Pancras opened yesterday for the Eurostar. Whoo! That's much easier for me to get to than Waterloo. Paris, here we come!
Have yet to see any bad press about St Pancras being updated. Maybe the journos are so happy at the roadworks outside having finally been removed they have forgotten to be negative.
GET OVER IT! Winning the Olympics was a great thing for London and for Britain. Get behind it (or at least something) and stop being so damned negative the whole time.
This is why I want to emigrate.
In other news, St Pancras opened yesterday for the Eurostar. Whoo! That's much easier for me to get to than Waterloo. Paris, here we come!
Have yet to see any bad press about St Pancras being updated. Maybe the journos are so happy at the roadworks outside having finally been removed they have forgotten to be negative.
Tuesday 6 November 2007
What's new this week?
Just a couple of things this week.
First - some good stuff. We did an IT AGM at work last week, and I volunteered to do one of the workshops. I thought this would be a nice little extra curricular activity, which might get me noticed by some bigwigs. It ended up taking me ages to prepare for. But it was good fun. The worst bit was that we were told kinda last minute that we would have to do a 60 second advert at the beginning of the day to convince people to come to our workshop, as there were 7 running and people could only do 3. I'm not great at the whole confidence and public speaking thing. And the chap who did the workshop with me is a stand up comedian and script writer (as well as doing his Tech Lead day job). So he wrote a rather good little advert, which involved acting, comic timing and some rather nice Shakespeare gags. But I think we pulled it off admirably, and I even had some compliments from high up people afterwards via my Manager. Result.
Then we had MPH07. The "Prestige and Performance Motor Show" at Earl's court. We went on Saturday. Mrs G bought me two gold tickets for our first wedding anniversary last month. Paper, tickets, geddit? So we went along Saturday morning, saw the three Top Gear lads messing about, saw some rather fantastic and expensive metal, then came home. Now I am a big big fan of Top Gear, of the three chaps and of expensive cars in general, so this for me was a very exciting day. Just a shame the super cars weren't driven with a bit more vrooom; they just kind of pootled round the arena while the presenters said how great they were. Just a few little blips of the throttle would have been nice. Photos at the bottom of the post.
And now of course, on top of the driving day, I really want a sports car. The Renault Megane CC just isn't very exciting.
Two quick whinges: MFI still suck. We have now paid the bill for the kitchen. Still can't get hold of the damn fitter. Had to pay the whole balance in advance. Not very happy with them. And the bloody hot water tank has broken again, so currently having to get up at 5am every day to turn on the immersion so we can have hot water when we get up. Although the shower is still broken, so still having to have a bath every day. Mrs G is getting very annoyed, and we're thinking of moving house.
So back to the Picturesmith part.
On Sunday we went to Windsor so I could take some pics for the DSLR User magazine online two week challenge, this time round titled "Towers". It was a fantastic Autumn afternoon. Blue sky, quite cold, sun getting lower so there were plenty of shadows. The plan was to wait til sunset and get the castle in the dying light, but I'd forgotten my tripod so we went into the castle instead. And residents of RBWM get in free! Which is good, cos we didn't get there til about 45mins before closing, and we didn't want to go into the inside bits, just take some pics from outside. So saving ourselves almost £30 was a good thing.
Here are some of the pics (you can click on them to see the full size ones on Flickr):
Excellent!
First - some good stuff. We did an IT AGM at work last week, and I volunteered to do one of the workshops. I thought this would be a nice little extra curricular activity, which might get me noticed by some bigwigs. It ended up taking me ages to prepare for. But it was good fun. The worst bit was that we were told kinda last minute that we would have to do a 60 second advert at the beginning of the day to convince people to come to our workshop, as there were 7 running and people could only do 3. I'm not great at the whole confidence and public speaking thing. And the chap who did the workshop with me is a stand up comedian and script writer (as well as doing his Tech Lead day job). So he wrote a rather good little advert, which involved acting, comic timing and some rather nice Shakespeare gags. But I think we pulled it off admirably, and I even had some compliments from high up people afterwards via my Manager. Result.
Then we had MPH07. The "Prestige and Performance Motor Show" at Earl's court. We went on Saturday. Mrs G bought me two gold tickets for our first wedding anniversary last month. Paper, tickets, geddit? So we went along Saturday morning, saw the three Top Gear lads messing about, saw some rather fantastic and expensive metal, then came home. Now I am a big big fan of Top Gear, of the three chaps and of expensive cars in general, so this for me was a very exciting day. Just a shame the super cars weren't driven with a bit more vrooom; they just kind of pootled round the arena while the presenters said how great they were. Just a few little blips of the throttle would have been nice. Photos at the bottom of the post.
And now of course, on top of the driving day, I really want a sports car. The Renault Megane CC just isn't very exciting.
Two quick whinges: MFI still suck. We have now paid the bill for the kitchen. Still can't get hold of the damn fitter. Had to pay the whole balance in advance. Not very happy with them. And the bloody hot water tank has broken again, so currently having to get up at 5am every day to turn on the immersion so we can have hot water when we get up. Although the shower is still broken, so still having to have a bath every day. Mrs G is getting very annoyed, and we're thinking of moving house.
So back to the Picturesmith part.
On Sunday we went to Windsor so I could take some pics for the DSLR User magazine online two week challenge, this time round titled "Towers". It was a fantastic Autumn afternoon. Blue sky, quite cold, sun getting lower so there were plenty of shadows. The plan was to wait til sunset and get the castle in the dying light, but I'd forgotten my tripod so we went into the castle instead. And residents of RBWM get in free! Which is good, cos we didn't get there til about 45mins before closing, and we didn't want to go into the inside bits, just take some pics from outside. So saving ourselves almost £30 was a good thing.
Here are some of the pics (you can click on them to see the full size ones on Flickr):
Excellent!
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