Trap Door , CPC nostalgia and just random things

We didn't have TV when I was growing up so when my friends reminisce about the programmes they used to watch, I can't really join in. For example, I once caused outrage by daring to suggest I thought the Muppets were stupid. I still think that, but I'm much more careful about saying so now.

The only two programmes that really stick in my mind from seeing them on other people's TVs are 'The Mysterious Cities of Gold', mainly because of the theme tune, and The Trap Door. I always really liked The Trap Door, it was a really fun program. Another reason I remember it is because there was a game released on the 8-bit computers, and it was really good. I played it a lot on my Amstrad CPC6128. It was also voiced by Willie Rushton, who had a very distinctive voice and I heard him a lot on Radio 4.

So anyway, they have released the whole lot of Trap Door on DVD, and it's cheap, so I got it. And it is surprisingly good to watch. The plasticine animation is not quite as polished as something like Wallace and Gromit, but it's really well done, and there are lots of nice details.

On a side note, here is a YouTube video of The Way of the Exploding Fist, the first ever game I played on the Amstrad. I really liked that computer, I was absolutely gutted last year when I hooked it all up to find it didn't work any more. I threw the monitor away but I still have the machine itself. Hurrah for emulators!

Even scarier - here is a Nintendo DS running a CPC emulator, and I remember the game running on it well! Hmm. I've already explored the homebrew scene on a Sony PSP I brought back from the dead, perhaps I should find a spare DS and take a look at that. I did once build a DS from scratch out of spare parts, which I gave to Steve and Kara, so faulty DSs might be the way to go. You can even run Linux on it.

Oh and I love this Flickr photo, which is safe for work.

And the iPhone has been released, cue a buying frenzy at all Apple stores. I'm intrigued to see what the multi-touch interface is like, but other than that...meh, not too impressed, though the screen does look beautiful. As Apple tends to be rather a trendsetter, I reckon in a couple of years time, keypads will be a rarity on phones. Which will be a shame, I'd rather have a Nokia E61 or E90 than the iPhone.

Thinking about the Cities of Gold theme tune, I remembered the very cheesy intro to the Soul Blade game on the PlayStation. It was the predecessor to the Soul Calibur series, which we played an awful lot on the Dreamcast (a great machine which deserved better) and the PS2/GameCube.

This was only supposed to be a short post, but it's rambled on rather. So I'll publish it now before it gets any longer.

Stupid weather

The weather today is hot, rainy, sunny and yuck. It's just annoying. Every time I decided to take the dog for a walk, it rained. So I compromised by taking him out across the fields, where we could hide under trees and things if it rained. Which it did. I also came across some fur and the part of the rabbit that things never eat, which explained the screaming I heard outside the back of the house early this morning. Presumably it was a fox or a cat.

Work yesterday was enlivened only by going out to see a councillor near Corwen. I hate going to places like that, I invariably get lost or something. In this case I found the house all right after taking a rather convoluted route, but there was no answer to the doorbell or my knocks. There was however a baby on the front step in a pram, so I phoned them up and said if there is a baby on your front doorstep, then I'm outside your house.

Last night was good though, went to Will's house and played some games with him and Lorna. We played a bit of Dead Rising, before going out to a cemetary and playing with his radio controlled dragonfly. It's quite interesting, but hard to control and exceptionally hard to get a good picture of. After that we experimented with some interesting music making while Lorna played Viva Pinata. Then there was a rather drawn out session of Red Steel death matches, which was great fun as always, with Lorna demonstrating her amazing (and ANNOYING) skill at headshots. Then spent some time mocking the Wii version of the Godfather game, which has about the same level of detail as a PSone game.

This is an interesting video because he's playing a fretless piccolo bass strung upside down. Piccolo bass is where you put guitar gauge strings on, so it is in the same range as a guitar. I'd never seen a fretless one before though.

Boredom, Ostrich Farming and an illicit Chinese

Work was dull, nothing spectacular happened. Had a call which went something like 'Our Printer Hath The Flashing Light of Evil, Woe is Us for it is the Unspeakable Paper Jam of Death!'

One button press and off it went, causing a great shout of dismay.

THIS is the best thing I have read all week, a huge flock of plastic ducks roaming the oceans for the last 15 years. Brilliant!

Ostrich farming has always intrigued me, because ostriches are quite worrying creatures. They are up to 8 foot tall, can run at 45mph, bad-tempered and irritable, and can eviscerate a man with a single kick. And all of this is powered by a tiny, tiny brain. They make nice burgers though. When we went to the zoo a few weeks ago, we saw some Rhea. They're similar to Ostriches, but smaller, and apparently much more manageable and even friendly. They're rather cute in fact.

Badminton tonight was good, played badly at first but got into it after a while. It was good. But on the way home I had a sudden URGE for food. So I pulled over, and phoned in an order for a portion of Sweet & Sour Chicken Ball from a Chinese. After I picked it up, I parked on the side of the road and ate it there and then. It was really really nice too. I also occasionally got dripped on, it was raining and I haven't had a chance to look at the sunroof yet.

2nd Processor Joy and a singing Tesla Coil

Well, I finally got hold of a Dell 8R578, the heatsink I needed. It was brand new and still had the thermal gunk on it. I cleaned that off in favour of some Arctic Silver and popped it all in. It works fine and the fan activity is no more than it was with the single CPU. Performance has definitely improved, so that's good. The old-school 2.4ghz Xeons don't really compare to the new Core series but it seems to run nicely enough for what I need. The only other thing I might upgrade is the graphics card, but that probably isn't necessary.

I also got my Xbox Live 12 months voucher today so got that all activated and sorted. Will and I jumped into Gears of War and spent some time battling our way along a train for some reason. And the the final boss appeared which caused Will some dismay as he hadn't managed to get past it. But all it seemed to take was some strategic timed gunfire and that was it - end of game. To be fair, it's a very good game and well put together and it looks amazing too, it just seemed a lot shorter than I expected.

Now this is terrifying - someo worked out how to make a Tesla coil play music...

Amazing.

It reminds me of when someone worked out how to make a Commodore 64 disk drive play music by vibrating the read/write heads, and I think you could do something similar with early dot-matrix printers. Next thing they'll be making the Krupp Bagger 288 dance.

Also some of these people in Gordon Brown's team sount like they're made up. Ed Balls? Tom Scholar? Oh dear! Imagine going through life with a name like Ed Balls (says the guy with a name no-one can pronounce).

Also someone, finally, took a stand and refused to do the Paris Hilton story, to the point of setting it on fire live on camera, this was Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC news. Check it out. Probably a publicity stunt, but fun nonetheless.

Matrix

Work was dull.

I watched the Matrix this evening, as I hadn't watched it in a while. It's not bad, though it is dating quite badly. I sometimes wonder what it could have been like if the animated plank of wood known as Keanu Reeves hadn't been cast as Neo. Anyway, it's a good thing they never made any sequels.

That's about it really.

Argh

It rained today. A lot. I drove to work quite happily and did my thing until after lunch, where I had to travel to a nearby office. I opened the door of my car to find at least two inches of water on the front seats (which have waterproof covers). The sunroof was leaking. It was leaking so much that it was very nearly a constant stream of water. It's never leaked so badly and this was because until 3 weeks ago I had never opened it. But when Andy, Rob and I went to the zoo with Ed, it was very very warm, and Rob insisted on opening the front sunroof. It made no difference to the heat in the car, but obviously broke the seal. The rear sunroof appears to be OK.

The rain just got heavier and heavier in the afternoon, so I came home with a damp arse. Not particularly fun. I hate extras on cars, last year the driver's side window motor died while the window was down, on a rainy day. Pointless gadgets that just cause more aggro.

In theory I should have been in London this week attending the 'AIX Jumpstart for Unix Professionals' course. But IBM canceled it due to not enough people signing up. The guy I'm doing Unix with was doing another course the same week, arranged deliberately so we wouldn't be bored, so now he's stuck down in London by himself for a week.

Looked at http://www.rightmove.co.uk/ and there was not a single thing that I could even remotely afford locally, which is depressing.

Just tried to play Wii Tennis and started to lose badly and hurled the Wiimote across the room. Good thing they're pretty strong, it's not so much the controller you worry about when this happens, but whatever it hits. Tried to have a play with Ableton Live, but again got angry and turned it off. It seems to be one of those days where nothing seems worthwhile and the air clangs with oppressive failure. Once again nothing achieved. Sometimes it's hard not to feel like a pathetic loser.

Wasted day

I left Andy's remarkably comfy sofa at about 8:00 and drove home. And then other than uploading the photos from yesterday, achieved absolutely nothing. I didn't have a hangover or anything, just tiredness and a feeling of mild depression. At one point I was going to walk the dog, but then it rained.

Feck.

Ed and Kat's Wedding

On the 23rd June, it was Ed and Kat's wedding. And what a day it was. The wedding was at 11:00am in a Llangollen church with Ed making a dramatic entrance in a real live Back to the Future DeLorean. The ceremony was really appropriate, the vicar referenced Star Wars and the Force several times in the sermon, and Ed and Kat left the church to Leia's Theme. It was really good, and Rob did his reading very well indeed.

This was then followed by the reception in a massive marquee in Kat's parent's field. Lots of good food was eaten, with plenty of music from Ed's band, featuring a drum solo by Ed and Kat, and also three songs sung by Kat, which were really amazing. Also the speeches went well, including Will's Best Man speech, which he was worried about.

Basically the whole day was an absolute blast from beginning to end.

My photos are here. Forgive the slightly gimpy layout and idiocy of the up link going back to Page 1 all the time - it was generated by iPhoto 2 which is pants. One day I'll find the time get get another photo manager.

2nd Processor Woes

I got the parts for my Precision 450 2nd processor finally, except the heatsink wasn't the right one. For some reason the sockets are mounted at right angles to each other, so if you were to put the heatsink from CPU 0 on CPU 1, the vanes are at right angles to the airflow. So that was no use. I did power it up briefly like this and the VRM and 2nd CPU worked fine, but if the processor had to do any actual work it would have run too hot. So now I need to source Dell part number 8R578, which is the correct heatsink. There were a couple on Ebay UK that ended at the end of May - typical! Other than that there is a place that has them in the UK for £32, a tad pricey. The other possibility would be ditch the Dell heatsinks and airflow shroud entirely and get some other Xeon coolers but getting them to fit might be a problem.

Oh well. In other news I am unbelievably glad it's Friday.

Full of food

Today was again quite boring and crap until the evening. It was the Rhuddlan badminton club meal at the Bod Erw in St Asaph. Wow, the food there is excellent. I had garlic mushrooms to start and a huge, huge chunk of gammon to follow. Everyone else's food was just as good.

Full. Need sleep. Need time to digest...

I found that my niece is pregnant, and due in January. That'll make my brother a grandfather, my Dad a great-grandfather and me a great-uncle! Worrying.

A queasy unpleasant day

Not sure what it was but Mum was up in the night to be sick and then I was up to have a nasty upset poo and then the dog had a hysterical fit because of a nasty, evil fly that was terrorising him and wouldn't settle down until I let him sleep on my bed at 4:00am. So I spent most of today feeling slightly queasy, very tired and desperately unmotivated. My appetite didn't really return until this evening.

Also it rained, rained and rained again today. It was pretty unpleasant all round really.

And I wish Idiot Passat Woman would stop driving through the local village at top speed. Pretty much every time I go through the village in the morning after 8ish, she comes hurtling down the narrow roads in her T-reg Passat TDi and having to slam on her brakes when she encounters me. It's really bloody annoying. I hate people who drive fast down narrow roads especially round here where you can still encounter horses on the road quite regularly. Once Mum and I were nearly run off the road by a local git in a blue Merc who I had once followed and saw him nearly cause an accident. It was annoying, but a couple of months later the guy was arrested, jailed for three months and banned from driving for five years because he tried to escape from the police by doing 80mph down a single track road, completely pissed out of his head.

It was also rather annoying that he was driving a Mercedes W124, one of my favourite cars and is what I'd probably have bought instead of the Discovery if I didn't need the 4x4 - a diesel one would have been about the same to run and insure. The Coupe looks amazing though if you have one in black with alloys you probably look like a drug dealer.

Urgh. Sleepy time. Still don't feel 100%. Hope I feel better tomorrow.

2.5gb RAM - joy

I stuck an extra 2gb RAM in my Dell Precision 450 for a total of 2.5gb. And wow, what a difference. It is like a whole new machine. I admit it's an old machine now with a few generations old 2.4ghz Xeon, but it runs very nicely with the extra memory. I have a matched 2.4ghz Xeon to go into it but I have had to order the VRM and heatsink from the USA as I couldn't find them in the UK. They haven't turned up yet, but when they do I'm sure the second CPU will help as well.

But the burning question is this: why is DoubleL, a huge Mac fan, using a Dell running Windows 2000? Well, to do what I've done, take a slightly old computer and beef it up a bit, is not so practical with a Mac. This Dell Precision cost £110, probably a tenth of it's original price at about three years old. If I'd spent the same amount on a second hand Mac, it would have been a PowerPC G4 running at about 500mhz with no AGP slot and slower memory, and would have been royally spanked by this machine. The other issue was that I don't see any point in getting a Mac now unless it's got an Intel processor and they are still expensive, even second hand. A new Mac was out of the question.

As it's far too much effort to run OS X on a non-Apple Intel box, I went Wintel for the first time in seven years. This machine hasn't even got a Linux partition, which I had previously considered mandatory since about 1996, even my Macs usually dual-booted into Linux. The Dell is also a rather ugly black square box, nowhere near as pretty as a Mac. But the tower is hidden behind two 17" screens, so that doesn't matter either. Part of the problem now is that when Windows 95 and 98 were current, they were so crappy that the Mac was a compelling alternative, despite the extra cost. However Windows 2000 and XP are much improved, and so now Windows is basically Good Enough. It is still incredibly stupid in many ways from a Mac/Unix perspective though. Vista is a whole new ball game, I think it's ugly and bloated and has yet to be proven.

I don't see any reason to replace this Dell in the near future unless it suffers from hardware failure. As the Precision line is Dell's high-end range, let's hope it doesn't. But if it did - would be replacement be a Mac? If the Intel models are cheaper by then, probably.

Unable to take the dog for a walk today as he cut one of his back feet. It wasn't too bad, but it did leave rather gory footprints for a while.

Thunder and lightning again! ARGH!

A dull day

Work was the usual fun. I succeeded in getting a gimpy program that didn't like running without admin rights to work, and filled in the form for my performance appraisal, which is due shortly. I hate doing those.

Didn't do much this evening. Watched some more Little Britain in the vain hope of finding something worthwhile in it, but it's really not all that good.

I was about to take the dog for a walk and the heavens opened and it rained solidly for a while, so I gave up on that idea. Exercise was provided by a game of Wii Tennis, which went quite well.

Not a productive weekend on the whole

I didn't really get much done this weekend. It basically consisted of watching films, walking the dog, and occasionally dabbling in Second Life.

The main things I watched were Anchorman, Terminator 3 and Casino Royale. Anchorman is pretty decent and funny and Terminator 3 was suprisingly not a bad film, against all the odds. Casino Royale was a bit of a drag, this time I managed it in one sitting, mainly because while it was on I was paying most of my attention to designing a proper 2-string bass on my laptop.

Dog walks were uneventful.

Second Life was once again treated to the dynamic duo of myself and Will invading various areas. Will tends to go for the less subtle behaviours, and his avatar deviates wildly from the tall and beautiful people usually found, being a tiny squat dwarf with deformed features. His typical behaviour involves going into an area and throwing a fit with a huge object attached to him, the favourite being a giant cow being loved on by a bison, making a constant mooing sound. Best results are found in sex dungeons as giant mooing cows tend the spoil the amourous mood, though we were slightly disturbed by one guy who apparently wanted some guy on dwarf with bonking cows action. The image is of one of the adventures, I'm the unaturally skinny tuxedo clad guy in the foreground and the squat dwarf is Will.

Despite the many, many flaws of Second Life, including a serious memory leak which means the client rapidly consumes over 1gb RAM if left unattended, it has a strange appeal. There are some well put together places to visit in it, and it is possible to find areas which aren't focused on having badly animated glitchy sex.

Payday tomorrow! Yay. I'm going to get an Xbox Live subscription so Will and I can carry on Gears of War.

Hot Fuzz, Chinese Food, Farting and Second Life Crossdressing

Ironic that my post about Batman and Optimus Prime getting it on was my 69th post on this blog.

Sat through a remarkably dull course today, which was only enlivened by a colleague farting loudly during a particularly quiet moment and it being blamed on someone else entirely, causing much indignation on her part and hilarity amongst everyone else who (in theory) should know better. It was like being back in school, going red trying not to laugh. Then again farting is always funny, it's one of those universal rules.

The Hot Fuzz and Chinese evening was a great success. Myself, Will, Lorna and Em piled into Andy's house, armed with the Tai Wing Express menu and a copy of the Hot Fuzz DVD.

We watched some peculiar music videos while we were eating, including Kiss, Cradle of Filth, and Living on the Edge by Aerosmith. Also 'Dr Feelgood' by Motley Crue, again, a sad disappointment after 17 years. The food was great, between us we had Sweet & Sour Chicken Ball, Shredded Beef with Chilli, Szechuan Chicken, Chicken Fried Rice, and a whole lot of chips. And the free Prawn Crackers. I still feel full now. We asked for no vegetables with the beef, so to compensate they went insane with the garlic. I shudder to think about tomorrow.

Hot Fuzz stood up well to a repeat viewing. I'm not sure if I prefer it over Shaun of the Dead, both are excellent films.

Please can everyone take a look at the image of the bass guitar I have attached to this blog. It's the MusicMan Bongo and was designed by some BMW engineers. It constantly gets slated for its looks, often compared to a toilet seat, though it sounds amazing. I played one in January, and absolutely loved it. So what do you think? Toilet seat, or a good looking bass?

I accidentally applied a shape called 'Heroic Firefighter' to my Second Life character, transforming my carefully sculpted athletic figure into some bloatedly muscled retard with a huge chin. Took a while to get it back to normal, and for a laugh I put him into a silky black dress with matching high heels and 8-ball earrings. That caused a somewhat hilarious double-take and cry of 'Holy Crap!' from someone I bumped into while still in male clothing, and then again in the dress.

Tired now, must sleep.

Second Life just hit a new low

Where else can you see Optimus Prime and Batman making sweet love in a jacuzzi? Or Dennis the Menace strolling around with an enormous erection?

Mild depression

Work was blah, nothing spectacular other than an argument about 20" and 24" monitors which got wildly out of hand for such a boring topic.

Played badminton tonight, the first two games were OK but then the last game was dreadful. Also I did some kind of stupid stomp going for a shot and hurt my foot. Also by then it was getting late, so I went home. It was a sinister drive, with lots of dark and overbearing clouds. I followed a Fiat Cinquecento for a while. I had one for three and a half years and it ranks as one of the best cars I've owned but I'm always shocked at how tiny they are now. It was a brilliant little car, but I was so paranoid in it I went right past defensive driving into aggression. For whatever reason, I need to be in a big car, I've noticed that my driving was calmest in my Pimpmobile and the Discovery.

Not in a good state of mind right now. Feeling pointless and useless. Oh well.

Crappy 3D vs Point and Click

Not an interesting day on the whole.

I did however rediscover the delights of 'Killing in the Name' by Rage Against the Machine. What a great track that is. It happened to come on in the car on the Shuffle on the way to work. I was quite enjoying it until the Shuffle went flat. Which reminds me, I was going to charge it this evening.

Will and I tried briefly to get on Second Life again this evening, however it was down for maintenance a lot of the time and when we were able to log in, it was so unstable and crap that we gave up. I don't know how all those people stand it, I really don't. It's so annoying because if it wasn't so shite, it would have a lot of potential.

While talking to Will, he told me to take a look at AGS, which allows you to create point and click adventure games like the classic Monkey Island and Simon the Sorcerer titles. I had a quick play and it's pretty good. Heavy on the Magick was an old example of this, which I played a lot on the Amstrad CPC. The old text adventures were good too, I particularly enjoyed Leather Goddesses of Phobos, which was surreal and very funny in parts.

Typing this on Ubuntu 7.04, otherwise known as the 'Breezy Badger' release. Not quite sure about the peculiar animal codenames, but it's quite a nice OS. It's just downloaded shedloads of updates though, which is a pain. Unusually it's telling me that I need to reboot to apply them, an annoyance that you normally see on Windows.

Also DAMN Mini Pringles, they are far too addictive. Also it rained today so no walk in the evening to try and work some of it off.

Update on yesterday

Ed's stag do was perhaps not your typical stag do, there was no excessive alcohol consumption, no strippers, and no cross dressing. However, there was a visit to Chester Zoo, followed by copious amounts of burgers and sausages. After this, five lightsabres were produced, causing people to emulate the Star Wars films with varying degrees of competency. All in all, a fantastic day which carried on until about 1:30am.

Pictures can be found here. I wasn't hugely fussed about commenting them as most of them are reasonably self-explanatory. There are also some movies, but my camera seems to save them in some gimpy AVI format that my Windows 2000 machine won't play and crashes my Mac. So it might be worth downloading VLC, which will play pretty much anything.

Just how cool are giraffes? They are absolutely amazing creatures. I looked them up on Wikipedia and they are basically like nothing else. Especially when they run, it all looks so precarious but it's somehow so graceful at the same time.

Today I hooked up my Xbox 360 to my Dad's 40" Samsung TV. It does full 1080, and I have to say, it looked really nice. I used the VGA connection and the image quality was very, very good. It was a world away from my little 21" CRT, but surprisingly enough, when I hooked it back up at home, I didn't recoil screaming from the small, blurry image. I mean, it's not great, but it's fine for the time being. I don't want a new TV anyway, there's more important things to worry about. If I did get a new screen, it wouldn't be a TV, I don't want any form of TV reception. If/when I get a house or something I have decided that I don't want to receive any form of TV as it's 99% total shite. If there is a good series, I'll wait for the DVD.

Ed's Stag Do

It was an awesome day, a visit to the Zoo and fights with real light sabres - how can you go wrong?

More info and pics tomorrow.

Embarrassment

Embarrassment can be summed up thusly: Emitting a loud and sturdy fart on what you think is a deserted country road, only to look up and see a woman walking towards you who has clearly heard it.

Work today was warm, frustrating and annoying, despite my jobs being lower than they have been for a while. It was a huge relief to get out of work this evening and take the dog out for a walk in the sunshine, although the incident referenced above was not fun.

Ars Technica went to the Creation Museum in Kentucky. It's frightening, absolutely frightening. There are so many things wrong that I can't even work out where to begin. Definitely check out the Flickr photoset.

Article here.
Link to Flickr Photoset here.

I can feel another rant coming on, so all I will say is that I strongly disapprove.

If anyone else read the Famous Five books when they were young, here is a list of the books with summaries and reviews and things. I came across this quite by accident, and it was rather weird to read about those old stories again.

My Dad's Birthday

Work was as per usual. I am now booked on a course called 'AIX Jumpstart for Unix Professionals'. Should be fun. It's a week down in London towards the end of June.

My Dad's 73rd birthday was today, and so I went over there this evening to drop his presents off. It's quite scary to think he's that old. I remember his 60th and how that seemed like a mad event. I got him a couple of presents as he didn't ask for much, one was a classical music CD and the other was a copy of 'Second from Last in the Sack Race' by David Nobbs, which is a very entertaining book. We had a copy many many years ago, but it was lost, but I was able to get another from Amazon Marketplace.

Also he and his wife have invested in a Samsung 40" LCD TV - can't wait to try the Xbox 360 out on that as it is full 1080p. It's a new model and the picture is really good, even when it's showing normal TV.

If you drive a metallic green BMW 318i compact and were near Llanddulas this evening, it is NOT clever to go all the way round a mini roundabout without indicating what you're doing. In the future, indicate, that way you won't nearly get hit by three cars in every direction.

The irrelevant picture today is hedgehog babies. Aww. I love hedgehogs, our cats found one in the garden many years ago, so we brought it in the house. It uncurled after a while and it was a lovely little thing.

WTF?

Wow, I wish I could get paid £400,000 to throw some random shapes together. The new London Olympics 2012 logo is just unspeakably hideous. The BBC has been overwhelmed with entries for a new logo from people, and all of them were better than the official logo. And that includes the Goatse (safe for work) parody logo that they broadcast.

This is a Flickr pool of people seeing Goatse for the first time, also safe for work and quite funny.

Gah, Monday

Today was warm, and annoying, and just typically Monday. Strangely enough, after my lack of sleep, I was able to get through the day easily enough, and feel OK even now.

Work was fairly routine, although my test machine in work came in very handy (a not very old laptop with a smashed screen that nobody wanted) which runs various VMWare virtual machines. It's useful for testing software issues as the virtual machines can be broken utterly, and then restored with a single click.

The office was typically warm and uncomfortable, and so I was tempted to get drinks from the cold can machine. Sadly the new one is crap and only has five drinks, and Fanta Zero isn't one of them. So Diet Coke it was. To make things worse, I (voluntarily!) had a Pot Noodle for lunch, mainly to get revenge on my colleage who had some sort of revolting pasta cup thing. It was actually WORSE than a Pot Noodle! So a nutritionally horrific day, all in all, though I did manage to avoid the hypocritical vending machine. Why hypocritical? Because they keep trying to promote healthy eating and then stick a vending machine in the building full of chocolate and crisps.

There was a massive chemical explosion in Crewe, and some guys I used to work with were working 500m away from it. They kept sending camera phone pictures of fireballs and smoke - scary stuff. More about this here.

Hair...getting bigger...wilder...more...powerful...nearly...ALIVE...

Currently listening to 'This Love' from the Pantera album 'Vulgar Display of Power'. I got this album when I was about 13, when it was first released. It was the first album I got that wasn't an Iron Maiden one, and it blew my mind. It is a stunning album.

Now it's playing 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Iron Maiden, which is another track that really had an effect on me. It's an epic 13 minutes long, and really, really good. That came from the 'Powerslave' album.

Just had a VERY weird experience...I was searching in Google Images for a picture of a smashed LCD. I went through a few pages, and a picture of a Land Rover 101" Forward Control came up. Curious as to how this could possibly be relevant, I clicked on it - and was greeted with my very own blog. As in this page. How utterly weird. I think it's because I linked to a page on a 4x4 site and also mentioned the Xbox 360 looking good on an LCD, and the word smashed was there too when I referred to a laptop with a broken screen (the one mentioned above in fact). How utterly bizarre and very circular and strange. Google works in mysterious ways.

Can't sleep

I can't sleep. It's midnight and I feel absolutely wide awake, not a bit sleepy. I hate it when this happens, I really do want to go to sleep, but I can't. So I then worry about not getting any sleep which makes sleep all the more unlikely.

Bah.

Shoes and Star Wars

Despite my decision that I would stay at home all weekend to avoid using any fuel and spending any money, I had to go out and get some new work shoes as my old ones had finally fallen apart. Also tried out a short-scale Epiphone EB-0 which I didn't really like much despite the classic cherry red SG looks, but I think it needed a good setup. The real Gibson version is probably a lot better, but far more expensive. Found a copy of Shaun of the Dead for £5, so picked that up. Can't wait for Hot Fuzz to come out.

I watched The Empire Strikes Back yet again. Is it me, or are the crew of the various star destroyers absolutely useless? I'm surprised they didn't drive poor Vader to tears.

Also having had people in work rave at me about Little Britain, watched some of that too. It's OK, has it's moments but I wasn't massively impressed. I can see why people criticise it as well because some of it is quite dodgy.