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Discoveries on packing
Dec. 22nd, 2008 12:02 amAnyone borrowed my copy of The Prestige???
Dec. 22nd, 2008
And so it begins (Christmas, that is)
Dec. 22nd, 2008 01:18 pmJulie left for Northern Ireland yesterday. I went with her to the airport and we ate and chatted for an hour before she went through security. She hates flying (it makes her terribly nauseous) so the least I could do was help her calm down and keep her company before she left. By strange coincidence Hugh's flight was three hours late, so Julie was browsing in the shop when a small, very familliar, child wandered up next to her and took her entirely by surprise, and she got to chat to Meredith for a while before her flight was called. Apparently I'm tech-support if Hugh ever dies - which is _like_ being a godfather, only not quite...
We exchanged christmas presents in bed on Saturdday - I got a small cute penguin (with a token enabling me to drag Julie to the zoo at some point), two Simon Schama documentaries (Julie had remembered me wanting to see his series on the future of America), and Dave Gibbons' massive book on Watchmen (which was the very essence of a christmas present - something you'd love to own but can't justify buying for yourself). And I'm typing this on a christmas present I bought myself - a brand new laptop.
I've been using my old laptop more and more recently - Julie's getting stuck into the final year of her PhD and if I want to spend time with her (which I do) then it's largely going to be sitting next to her doing something to entertain myself. The laptop was perfect for that kind of thing, as I could happily browse/email away. However, it struggled with some Flash stuff (or anything involving video), and wasn't powerful enough to run Visual Studio well, so once a week I'd fire up a browser window and gaze longingly at Dell's latest offerings.
At which point Scott walked by. Not the one I live with, but the one at work. A man who _never_ fails to get a good deal. I watched him deal with retention departments for both his cable and his phone company, teasing an extra few pounds off his bill and minutes onto his allowance. And he popped by my desk as I was looking at laptops and said "I recommended a good deal to Alan last week and he's been very happy with it.", and directd me to Ebuyer, where they had a HP Compaq 6375s going for £100 off at £400.
Now, I remember the olden days, when the internet was all text and computers were stupidly expensive. And I also remember the slightly more recent days, at some point in 1998, beiing in awe because you could now buy a desktop computer for _less than a thousand pounds_. Such thoughts were nigh uninaginable then. So the thought of owning a laptop for £400 was pretty exciting. Espeically when the specs are: dual core, 4GB of RAM, 250GB hard drive - and a Radeon 3200 graphics card with 256MB of RAM on it. A laptop that seriously outclasses my desktop. One which, from the three minutes of testing I've performed so far, allows me to play Portal at the full resolution of the screen.... You can colour me rather happy at this point. Anyway, this post wasn't supposed to be about laptops, but Christmas...
My flight this morning was carelessly booked in for 9am (well, it's that or 5pm, there not being a vast number of travellers from Edinburgh to Exeter), so I had to be up at 6am in order to leave at 6:30 to get a bus into town, change to the airport bus by 7:00 and make it to the airport by 8:30 (giving me half an hour for emergencies before checking in). 6am isn't my idea of a good start to the day, and what with seeing Julie to the airport yesterday, dropping by Lizzie and Ari's Christmas Whimsy all-too-briefly, getting to hang out with Morag and Erin for slightly longer (and someone I've now met three times and _should_ remember the name of, if I was capable of remembering names), setting up the Wii at their place (to keep Morag entertained with Guitar Hero while I'm gone) and packing I didn't get to bed until half-past midnight.
Travelling always makes me nervious - not that anything bad will happen (the plane crashing, etc.) I just worry I've forgotten something, that I'll be unprepared for some event at the other end. A sense of nervous foreboding hangs over me the night before I travel any reasonable distance (i.e. further than Glasgow), and I find it hard to fall asleep. This is something that travelling with another person makes easier - Julie and I double-check and reassure each other, so we both know that we've both checked that we have, at the very least, got the essentials with us. Lacking that last night I lay there, turning things over in my head until about 1am. Of course, knowing that I had to be awake at 6am didn't help, as I consciously tried to put myself to sleep, something guaranteed to keep me awake.
Of course, at around 1am my upstairs neighbours came home and turned on their stereo.
This doesn't happen often - maybe 4 times in the 18 months since I moved into this flat. And it's only been really loud once (I complained, they turned it down). But when I'm having trouble sleeping even a small amount of rhythmic noise is enough to keep my eyes intermittently opening. Especially when they seem to enjoy strange drum/synth music that's both irritatingly simplistic and changes beat all the time. Especially when they can't bear to let a single track play all the way through, and have to skip to the next one after a minute or two. I got to the point of wondering if it wasn't a CD they were listening to, but instead they were slumped, stoned, over a keyboard, randomly pressing buttons every minute or so.
None of which made me any more awake when my alarm went off at 6am. I nevertheless staggered from my bed, dropped my toothbrush into my rucksack, answered a surprise phone call at 6:30 (flatmate Scott, who wasn't content with trying to persuade me to book a taxi last night to make my life easier, but had clearly woken up himself in order to make sure I got my plane ok - he really is lovely underneath his exterior of pure evil), and staggered out to get a bus. Which arrived as I got to the nearby bus stop, and then the airport bus in the center of town left about a minute after I got on it. And I got through security with only a small hitch when Julie's bottle of water from yesterday turned out to still be in my jacket pocket. And breakfast wasn't entirely inedible. So, all in all, things could have been a lot worse.
Occasionally people ask me why, as an atheistic agnostic of Jewish descent, I do Christmas at all. And the answer is family. Christmas, to me, is about family - from the early ones involving 22-odd relations on my grandmother's side to the recent Christmases with just the closest members. Mine is waiting in Devon. I'm looking forward to falling asleep at them across the lunch table.
We exchanged christmas presents in bed on Saturdday - I got a small cute penguin (with a token enabling me to drag Julie to the zoo at some point), two Simon Schama documentaries (Julie had remembered me wanting to see his series on the future of America), and Dave Gibbons' massive book on Watchmen (which was the very essence of a christmas present - something you'd love to own but can't justify buying for yourself). And I'm typing this on a christmas present I bought myself - a brand new laptop.
I've been using my old laptop more and more recently - Julie's getting stuck into the final year of her PhD and if I want to spend time with her (which I do) then it's largely going to be sitting next to her doing something to entertain myself. The laptop was perfect for that kind of thing, as I could happily browse/email away. However, it struggled with some Flash stuff (or anything involving video), and wasn't powerful enough to run Visual Studio well, so once a week I'd fire up a browser window and gaze longingly at Dell's latest offerings.
At which point Scott walked by. Not the one I live with, but the one at work. A man who _never_ fails to get a good deal. I watched him deal with retention departments for both his cable and his phone company, teasing an extra few pounds off his bill and minutes onto his allowance. And he popped by my desk as I was looking at laptops and said "I recommended a good deal to Alan last week and he's been very happy with it.", and directd me to Ebuyer, where they had a HP Compaq 6375s going for £100 off at £400.
Now, I remember the olden days, when the internet was all text and computers were stupidly expensive. And I also remember the slightly more recent days, at some point in 1998, beiing in awe because you could now buy a desktop computer for _less than a thousand pounds_. Such thoughts were nigh uninaginable then. So the thought of owning a laptop for £400 was pretty exciting. Espeically when the specs are: dual core, 4GB of RAM, 250GB hard drive - and a Radeon 3200 graphics card with 256MB of RAM on it. A laptop that seriously outclasses my desktop. One which, from the three minutes of testing I've performed so far, allows me to play Portal at the full resolution of the screen.... You can colour me rather happy at this point. Anyway, this post wasn't supposed to be about laptops, but Christmas...
My flight this morning was carelessly booked in for 9am (well, it's that or 5pm, there not being a vast number of travellers from Edinburgh to Exeter), so I had to be up at 6am in order to leave at 6:30 to get a bus into town, change to the airport bus by 7:00 and make it to the airport by 8:30 (giving me half an hour for emergencies before checking in). 6am isn't my idea of a good start to the day, and what with seeing Julie to the airport yesterday, dropping by Lizzie and Ari's Christmas Whimsy all-too-briefly, getting to hang out with Morag and Erin for slightly longer (and someone I've now met three times and _should_ remember the name of, if I was capable of remembering names), setting up the Wii at their place (to keep Morag entertained with Guitar Hero while I'm gone) and packing I didn't get to bed until half-past midnight.
Travelling always makes me nervious - not that anything bad will happen (the plane crashing, etc.) I just worry I've forgotten something, that I'll be unprepared for some event at the other end. A sense of nervous foreboding hangs over me the night before I travel any reasonable distance (i.e. further than Glasgow), and I find it hard to fall asleep. This is something that travelling with another person makes easier - Julie and I double-check and reassure each other, so we both know that we've both checked that we have, at the very least, got the essentials with us. Lacking that last night I lay there, turning things over in my head until about 1am. Of course, knowing that I had to be awake at 6am didn't help, as I consciously tried to put myself to sleep, something guaranteed to keep me awake.
Of course, at around 1am my upstairs neighbours came home and turned on their stereo.
This doesn't happen often - maybe 4 times in the 18 months since I moved into this flat. And it's only been really loud once (I complained, they turned it down). But when I'm having trouble sleeping even a small amount of rhythmic noise is enough to keep my eyes intermittently opening. Especially when they seem to enjoy strange drum/synth music that's both irritatingly simplistic and changes beat all the time. Especially when they can't bear to let a single track play all the way through, and have to skip to the next one after a minute or two. I got to the point of wondering if it wasn't a CD they were listening to, but instead they were slumped, stoned, over a keyboard, randomly pressing buttons every minute or so.
None of which made me any more awake when my alarm went off at 6am. I nevertheless staggered from my bed, dropped my toothbrush into my rucksack, answered a surprise phone call at 6:30 (flatmate Scott, who wasn't content with trying to persuade me to book a taxi last night to make my life easier, but had clearly woken up himself in order to make sure I got my plane ok - he really is lovely underneath his exterior of pure evil), and staggered out to get a bus. Which arrived as I got to the nearby bus stop, and then the airport bus in the center of town left about a minute after I got on it. And I got through security with only a small hitch when Julie's bottle of water from yesterday turned out to still be in my jacket pocket. And breakfast wasn't entirely inedible. So, all in all, things could have been a lot worse.
Occasionally people ask me why, as an atheistic agnostic of Jewish descent, I do Christmas at all. And the answer is family. Christmas, to me, is about family - from the early ones involving 22-odd relations on my grandmother's side to the recent Christmases with just the closest members. Mine is waiting in Devon. I'm looking forward to falling asleep at them across the lunch table.
-
Mostly about the Panorama program on tonight about the banking crisis in the UK.
-
Nice little js effect. Completely pointless, but captured my attention for a couple of minutes.
Someone named John sucks
Dec. 22nd, 2008 04:11 pmI got a christmas card from John.
The problem being that I know, ooh, four people called John...
Anyone want to own up?
The problem being that I know, ooh, four people called John...
Anyone want to own up?