Daylogs and stuff

Gig

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:31:35 GMT

My flatmate Marc, aside from being French and a nice guy, is in a band called Plastic Heroes. They're not goth but they do rock.

See also facebook or spotfiy.

They have a gig on Tue 15th, at the Islington Academy 2 - N1 Centre, 16 Parkfield St, London, N1 0PS
On stage around 9:30pm. Tickets are £8 at the door, I think. There are some fan tickets for £6
I'll be going. Anyone else want to come?

I can lock all the doors

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 17:25:11 GMT

The car is for sale.

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:33:50 GMT

The time is coming to sell the car.

Suggestions on how best to do this? I don't want to trust it to eBay.
Details are below:
The car is a Vauxhall Corsa Active 16V S-A,
3 door hatchback, 4 seater, 1.2 engine.
Easytronic gearbox
2006 Model
Full service history, low mileage, around 25 000
Current MOt, no accidents.
Dark blue
CD Player, FM/AM as per standard

Engine Size: 1,229 cc
Fuel: Petrol
Transmission: Easytronic Semi-automatic
Safety Features: Immobiliser, Driver Airbag, Passenger Airbag, Safety Belt Pretensioners, Rear seat belts, Anti-Lock Brakes (ABS)
Interior/Comfort Options: Power-assisted Steering (PAS), Air Conditioning, Power Locks, Power Windows

Whitby travel

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:30:49 GMT

It looks likely that Sue can't make it, and I will have space for a passenger in the car on the way up to Whitby. It's a small car, a 3-door Vauxhall Corsa so there's room for just one person and their Whitby stuff. Does anyone want a lift?

I'm leaving North London N19 in the morning of Thursday 29th Oct (hopefully around 9am, that way we'll be in Whitby before dark), and am coming back on Tuesday 3rd Nov, probably leaving early around the crack of noon.

You will need to supply a few CDs for the journey, and some petrol money. And to not smoke.

I thought I'd put this on my f-list before posting to the Whitby forum.

Writer's Block: Most memorable concert

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:31:59 GMT

What was the most memorable concert you ever attended? What made it so magical?

View 1501 Answers

Depeche Mode - Cape Town, early 1990s.

It was just after Violator, an album that I loved, one of their best I think, and they played in the Good Hope Centre (a huge concrete function and expo hall). I hadn't seen a lot of international bands then - Depeche Mode must have been the first that I liked lots and saw live, They were just amazing, at the height of their musical powers - loads of good music, huge sound (let down a bit by the acoustics of the venue) and big-budget visuals. Dave Gahan had a powerful and expressive voice, and Martin Gore's singing, e.g. on "A question of trust" was delicate, emotive and perfect.

Nothing like it until The Prodigy played a post-Fat Of the Land gig a few years later.

Don't worry, it will all end soon

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 13:58:41 GMT

Stolen shamelessly from deathboy's post.

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:03:48 GMT

I am in Cape Town. The memorial service for my Aunt will be on Friday. I won't say it's easy, but I am coping. There are lots of little things that need doing for this. My brother and his wife are doing most of it.

Cape Town is in late winter/early spring mode - it was wet when I arrived, but has been mild and sunny. Very green.

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 08:34:58 GMT

My Aunt's health has taken a turn for the worse and she is not expected to live much longer, I am likely to be off in Cape Town very shortly, for a week or two.

I have been expecting that this could happen, but didn't know when it would come.

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 11:30:41 GMT

Picture by me. Caption suggested by first_fallen

Dig yourself

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:09:04 GMT

I decided to do some Guerilla gardening in my own garden. Specifically the front needed more big fynbos. I set out to Kirstenbosch plant shop with the idea of:
1) A Leucadendron Argenteum (silver tree) for the spot where there was one a few year back.
2) A Coleonema Album (white confetti bush, has very fragrant leaves) for the sunny spot where one flourished before.
3) A protea of some kind for the shady spot between two trees.

What I ended up with was:
1) A silver tree as planned.
2) Finding out that Coleonemas tolerate partial shade better than Proteas, I swapped these around. The Coleonema Pulchellum, as the name would suggest, was pretty in pink, and just as fragrant as the white one, so I got that for the shady spot.
3) A Hybrid (cordifolium X conocarpodendron) Leucospermum (not quite a protea, but closely related) for the sunny spot under the window. The distinctive "Pincushion" flowers should bring birds. There's an old sugarbush protea in the garden already which brings birds, so this may have some synergy.

All in all, win! Planting out will happen tonight.

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 09:12:40 GMT

Due to ill health of an elderly relative I will be flying to Cape Town tonight. This will probably be for one week.

Stab the night, Kingdom of numb

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 19:55:48 GMT

I am safely back in London, and feeling rather zombified, but a long night's sleep should sort that out. The flights were not bad, just long.

While en route I read a couple of magazines and Death at Victoria Dock
Then I went for the movies with old favourites: The Usual Suspects and L.A. Confidential Then off to foreign language movies,
Flammen & Citronen is about two guys in the Danish resistance against the Nazis, in Copenhagen, 1944. Flammen has flaming red hair, and Citronen has his face in a permanently sour expression. I enjoyed it quite a bit, the atmosphere is somewhat noir rather than thrilling. It seems that in Copenhagen 1944, the only things to do in Copenhagen were: brood ominously in hiding, chain-smoke, do a drive-by assassination, double-cross someone, conduct a doomed love affair, drink. Repeat and combine. It had well-drawn, flawed characters.

After that I watched a couple of episodes of The Simpsons, including off-the-wall rock ones where Homer does a Kurt Cobain impression in a band called Sadgasm, complete with hilariously obscure and emo lyrics; and one where Bart is Johnny Rotten in the Sex Pistols, and Lisa is Nancy Spungeon. Yep.

Then a rather different film called Go Go 70s about rockers in 1970s South Korea. The plot arc is standard, but the cultural layering was rather appealing to me, as the band in the film gradually found their feet, going from bad Asian covers of "Mustang Sally", "Soul Man" and the like, to eventually building their own scene with hybrid influences. Or possibly by then I hadn't slept in over 24 hours and my critical facilities had shut down, which let me enjoy watching young Koreans jumping around to recycled soul/rock in 1970s clothes (and thereby somehow sticking it to the Man).

Doha on the way back was still flat, brown and hot (35C at 8am. Ouch) but mercifully brief. London on arrival was overcast and wet, a bit like Cape Town on departure then. Seasons, we has them.

Things I have done in the last few days:

Sun, 31 May 2009 19:46:45 GMT

Things I have done in the last few days:
Driven around Cape Town buying lights and other house fittings. Mostly done now.
Various meetings with various people. More to follow on Monday.
Not gone into most of the house; the floors have been sanded and are covered in varnish.
Driven around in a tiny Hyundai with a very annoying gearbox.
Been to gym a couple of times.
Been to Cavendish mall many times. The bank is there, among other things.
Drank wine and gin and tonic while watching funny movies:
- Who is killing the great chefs of Europe? Very watchable, very 70s,
- Gamers: The Dorkness rising – better than it had any right to be.
- Black Sheep- Baaaad. Ewe. And other sheepish puns tht get your goat.
Ate excellent food at Cargill's in Rondebosch with extemporanea
Ate pizza and drank caipirinhas with mac1235
VIsited my Aunt B, who seems in better sprits than she was last time I was here. I'm not sure if this is becuase she's healed up after her hip replacement, or the Zoloft is working.
Vaguely applied for contract work in London, but not chased it too hard yet, because I can't interview until week after next.
Bought fabric, honey and other perishables that will surely push my suitcase's weight over 20kg on the way back.
Read a couple of books. Fiction, next up some ASP.NET MVC or silverlight, honest.
Watched overcast weather alternate with drizzle and pelting rain.
Wondered how sunny London is getting on without me.

No sleep 'til bedtime.

Mon, 25 May 2009 19:06:49 GMT

Short summary of travels: took 24 hours, nothing went awry.
Qatar airways is OK. they have bad movies on demand, and airplane food served regularly. I've had worse.
London to Doha, flying southeast on a summer night made a very short period of darkness.
Doha early on Monday morning is, at first impression, hot, flat, brown, dusty, smelly. Skyscrapers loom in the distance through the dust/smog. The airport is not totally tiny, has busses trundling from long distances from aircraft to terminal. Transfer was mercifully brief and painless.
The flight to Cape Town is also the flight to Johannesburg. It was more than half-empty before the stop in JHB, and even emptier after.
Cape Town is in winter, which means it's dark before 7pm as we arrive, and cool damp air.
My phone is still not working right, probaly O2 have not yet ported the number in properly.

On the flight, I watched Quantum of Solace which made not a quantum of sense but was stylish, Bolt which was light enough for my sleep-deprived state- I liked the cat but the dog's character was underdrawn; and Gran Torino which I knew wouldn't suffer from small screen and poor light to mar special effects since it's character-driven. It was OK human drama set in the US Hmong community. And Clint Eastwood does has best grumpy old man. With a shotgun.

I also read Bruce Sterling's "The Caryatids", which was excellent near-future fiction for 2009, a sort of chillingly believable post-catastophe utopian farce, with clones; though it was a bit lacking in plot focus. I will read it again, to see if I misssed the subtleties.

Now I am realy tired, but the jetlag rule applies: No sleep 'til bedtime.

Help me chose a mobile phone provider, lazywebs

Tue, 19 May 2009 09:11:30 GMT

This is a long shot, but does anyone have experience of using O2's sim-only contracts? Particularly with a G1 or similar webby phone? How good is the Unlimited (*cough* Excessive usage policy applies *cough*) Web Bolt On? Will the webs work this way? Is it a better deal than the T-Mobile package at a similar price?

Sun, 17 May 2009 14:18:53 GMT

I'm going to have to replace my phone very soon, as the existing handset will go back to my employer. I might need to do it in the next week.

I will be pleased to be rid of Windows Mobile, and have a couple of handsets in mind that have nice stuff on them like GPS maps, twitter clients and POP email.

1) iPhone. Inevitable, really that it would be under consideration.

2) Google G1 phone. Can I get an unlocked handset?

3) HTC Magic. My attitude to the G1 when I didn't need a new phone was "good, but like most things the V2.0 is when it will start to shine". So now the HTC magic is out and it's not exactly a G1 V 2.0. No physical keyboard, which I really like on my current phone. How much is the premium over G1 for getting a newer model?

Any thoughts, comments, experiences of the HTC magic?

Welcome to the jungle

Sat, 16 May 2009 10:41:07 GMT

A few months ago, fired up with gardening enthusiasm, I bought a packet of tomato seeds on borough market. They are some funny continental variety (Saint Pierre) and I sprinkled them thickly. All of them came up, and now we have an incipient Tomato Jungle of Dooom!!!1 (where's the blink tag when you need it?)

I planted out one of the many pots of deedlings today, and filled the bed allocated to them, probably a bit too densely. The other pots sit there, rustling ominously in the wind.

Who wants some tomato seedlings? Going free to good home. By good home, I mean someone who will feed them chemical fertilisers, tie them to sticks, leave them out in the sun and rain, eat their babies and then throw them on the compost heap in Autumn.

Offer is valid only in North London.

Fri, 15 May 2009 13:39:38 GMT

In light of my free time I have booked a trip to Cape Town to finish up family property-related business.

Dates are:
Leave London on Sun 24 May 2009, Arrive in Cape Town Mon 25th
Leave Cape Town on Thur 4 June 2009, Arrive in London Fri 5th

If you're there I can meet during that time, but I'd suggest evening meeting. Business will take priority over wine routes and the like.

every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end

Fri, 15 May 2009 12:29:26 GMT

I have accepted the my employer's redundancy package. I will miss them.

Meanwhile, I am an experienced .Net developer at large in London. Job offers and suggestions are welcome.

Wed, 13 May 2009 09:15:38 GMT

Data from Jobstats: The crash of '09 is looking worse than the crash of '01. It's not fallen from such a height, but it has fallen a lot closer to zero. Aaargh.

Punk Lamb

Tue, 12 May 2009 08:36:37 GMT

This is a small Connemara black-faced sheep, photographed in Ireland. They often range freely, avoiding traffic in a very un-ovine manner.

I can has? They're cute, all jet black and snow white and splodges of bright colour, with little horns. I'm sure it would be happy in the back garden, and as a bonus it would save me from having to mow the lawn.

a mission in two or three editions

Sun, 10 May 2009 16:54:39 GMT

The books that I read while on holiday last week are :

1) I brought with me short_mort's copy of Kerry Greenwood's Cocaine blues. This is the first of the novels featuring Phryne Fisher, the female private Investigator in 1920s Melbourne. Mort is a fan of Phryne.

It was light and a quick read, and the plot wasn't always believable, but the characters are well-drawn, and are likeable when they should be. The background of the time seemed believable to me. Phryne herself is a financially and sexually liberated woman, and that is an anachronism with which the modern reader can identify. I will read more of this series, since it's fun and they're in the house.

2) After that went rapidly, I bought a copy Charles Stross's Saturn's Children for 20 Euro from a bookshop in Galway in the rain. I have wanted to read Mr Stross's latest since it came out.

Stross doesn't fail to do his thing of raising uneasy ideas in an intriguing read (and is also a Heinleinesque adventure story). It's solar-system-travelling sci-fi, and the best tale of sex robots in space I've ever read.

Oddly, many of the reviews that don't like it get the basic details wrong - it's Solar System not galaxy spanning, and a few hundred years from now, not far-future. It's not as straightforward or satisfying a story as some, but it does have a gnarly, weird logic to it.

3) After I finished that, I decided that I needed something cheap to fill in the last few days, and stopped into a second-hand bookshop in Clifden. I got an old copy of Different Seasons by Stephen King for all of 3 Euros. I haven't read much Stephen King, but I do like the stories that I have read. The first story in this anthology is "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption". You may have seen the movie of it, the story turned out to be quite good (the movie is quite close to it). As you know, it's a prison drama, not the horror and supernatural that King is famous for.

The second story, Apt Pupil, has also been made into a movie (which I have not seen). It's not supernatural but is quite chilling. I read most of it on the flight back home.

The other two short stories are yet to be read.

We fade to grey

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 19:51:06 GMT

OK, lazywebs of London:

Has anyone else noticed a lack of Dreft Dark/Woolite dark clothes washing liquid in Sainsbury's and Tesco? Or is this just a local issue?

IF not, what has happened to it? Where can one get some?

Voted

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:26:11 GMT

I have voted in the South African Election. I went down after work, and the queue was shorter. It took less than an hour. People were cheerfull, took the bureaucracy and random paperwork in good humour. I have a loony afrikaaner/religious/political pamphlet. My ID book has been stamped and my left thumb inked, as is the South African custom on this occasion.

That's better. I'm glad that I voted after work. I voted for ... let's just say that it wasn't a Congress.

Disappointed, once more

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:18:09 GMT

I'm way too busy doing everything. Some days you can't win.

I got to the main office at 9am today, to find that the review meeting for $PrevClient had been cancelled at the last minute. Took the time to catch up on my timesheet (still need codes for $NextClient) before I was going to head over to $NextClient. I looked up that I am indeed registered to vote in South africa's general election on the 22nd (they hadn't sent any email in reply), I checked details of where to go on that date ... and found that overseas voting was being held on the 15th. Yeah, today.

I had time due to the cancelled meeting, so I went home to collect ID (and while there, unload washing machine, load it again, and take in some parcels that had arrived outside the door. Busy). I got to Trafalgar square by 11:30, and found the queue winding past South Africa House to the National gallery to be long, wide and not moving much. After a few minutes I gave up and headed to $NextClient, who are near TCR.

Despite the crowds, I did not think that a large percentage of the estimated 600 000 South Africans in London (update: probably 100 000 not 600 000) were present. None of the ones that I know are. The process has not been well-publicised at all, and many were discouraged or missed the cut-off dates. If I'd known about it even a few days ago, I would have been there at 7am when it opened. The government may have been legally required to allow foreign voting (voters who mostly do not support the government) but that's about as far as it goes. If they could have put the polling booth in a swamp filled with aligators, they might well have.

No, it's not a bad thing to vote against the current South African government. They've been in power too long. it happend to UK Labour, it happend to the ANC. the party of Jacob Zuma is not the party of Nelson Mandela anymore. It's not even the party of Thabo Mbeki.

On the plus side, our 2pm meeting is in the cool and freaky cat building of Mornington crescent. I used to live across from there, but have never been in.

Update: I went down after work and sucessfully voted