Christmas Tree

I love Christmas. Turning my livingroom into a shrine to a confused mixed-up mess of religion and tradition makes this dark, cold and wet part of the year seem so much nicer.

The Northern Lights

Wow. I've just got back from an amazing trip to South Norway at 38000 ft, where I took this photo.

Amazing stuff. I'm very tired, so I'll post more pics in the morning.

UPDATE: My photos are now on Flickr. Click here or on the photo above.

I floo!

I did it ... after several years of 'saying' I was going to do it, today I actually managed it: I flew a plane. Me!

We went to the Hull Aero Club, somewhere near Beverley, and I had a one hour flying lesson. Apparently I did quite well ... which I suppose means I didn't barf or scream during takeoff.

The experience was not quite what I had expected. The planes are a lot smaller than I expected, and they're so light they get thrown around quite easily up there. The view was amazing, when I got chance to actually look at it. We flew out to Bridlington and over the sea before turning around and flying over the Humber Bridge.

I was expecting the session to be a case of me sitting back until the pilot got the plane up to about 2000ft and level ... ah. No. I had to do the whole lot! He had me taxi to the runway ... (the runway: it's that field ... made of grass ... very rural!) ... then he had me takeoff ... ascend ... the fly the plane around all over the place ... play with the radio and locators ... then descend an hour later and land. I hate landings, but was surprised when I brought this hunk of metal crashing into the field how light it was.

All in all, a fun day. Thanks to my girlfriend and sister who got me the lesson as a gift. :o)

I've uploaded the photos to Flickr if you fancy a peek.

Flickrtastic!

Finally, after months of playing with the website, I decided its time I joined. I can't believe how easy it is to upload and manage photos ... and post to my blog. And it's free!

Anyway, have a look at some of the photos I've posted. Miss T and I went for a walk at St. Ives forest, and took some lovely photos.

iPod Woes

My repaired iPod arrived this morning (Yay!). They sent me the original one back instead of replacing it, but that's OK. A coating of Mr Sheen will hide those old scratches :o)

I get it home, and start putting all my music back onto it. 10 minutes goes by, and I notice it's only transferred 5 songs. Not a good start.

I take it out of its dock and discover that the iPod has locked up. I reset it, and all seems fine ... but now I can't get iTunes to recognise it. I take it out of the dock again, reset it ... and this time it starts making weird mechanical clicking noises. This is tres tres not good.

It finishes this theatrical display of clicking and resetting and finally I see a familiar icon on the screen:



Ah heck. Back to Apple.

It worked ... albiet for 10 minutes. I had 10 minutes of iPod pleasure, but alas ... it did not last.

What have I dont to deserve this, Steve?

:o(

Today IMDB, Tomorrow ... Hollywood!

Hey, check me out. I did a Google search for myself (You know ... as we all do from time to time to make sure we don't have a stalker), and look what I found:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1399408/

There are a few films missing that I want to get added, but it's not a bad start.

How cool is that?

Well, I'm impressed ... and I'm having a muffin to celebrate :o)

Birthday Bowling

I've not been 10-pin bowling since I was a ... well, since I was fairly small and had a high, squeeky voice. I thought I'd include these two photos, since my mum almost knocked me out with the first shot ... and my sister looks silly in the second one. Always a good thing :o)

UPDATE: These photos are now available on my Flickr account. Click here to access the photo set.

Birthday!

It's my birthday!

Well, it's actually the day after. I didn't feel it necessary to take time out of my busy birthday schedule to write in my blog.

Hmm. OK, so it wasn't that busy. I spent most of Saturday recovering from the previous night. After loosing the lightweights at around 7.30; Tim, Tom and I carried on. The rest of the evening is a blur (mentally and visually), but I remember a very long walk back to Tim's house at about 1am, and waking up in his spare room. Ughhh! Not drinking that much again! Thankfully I didn't take any pictures, so there's nothing more to post here :o)

I managed to recover enough to go to a Greek restaraunt with Miss T last night. Now we're off again .... this time for Sunday lunch with my family. Busy busy busy.

:o)

Hacking The Airwaves

This is weird. I'm sat in my car waiting for those nice people at Pizza Hut to burn by Pizza ... so I open my Powerbook to do some work. Without thinking I open my web browser, and curse myself for being so stupid ... but hang on a minute ... there's my homepage. Wuh?

I try clicking on a link ... and it works ... eh?

Let me go through this one more time: I'm in my car (Check), I'm not anywhere near my house (Check); I'm browsing the web (Wuh?).

After a bit more investigative work I find that my laptop has automatically found and connected to someone's personal WiFi network. Dunno where it is, but it's not secure and I'm connected :o)

Let this be a lesson to all those WiFi users: SECURE YOUR NETWORK!

Hmm. Having said that, my network is not secure. I wonder if the sheep have been using it? It is a risk. Maybe I should turn on the encryption.

Anyway. Pizza awaits.

Oli Out.

One Unhappy iPod

Not again!

One moment, everything fine: Happily playing songs. The next minute, a sad face on the screen and its now refusing to play anything.

I think it's depressed and needs to be sent back to the Apple hive for motivational therapy. Either that, or I must live in an area not covered by the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field :o)

Thankfully it's still under warranty, so it'll get replaced. This will be my 4th iPod ... and the 3rd I've had replaced under the warranty. Not bad, eh? I never knew warranties could be so much fun. That said ... I'm now seriously contemplating extending it!

Just to put this into some sort of context, here's a photo of my previous ipod from only 3 months ago:

Ho hum. Back to listening to the radio in my car for a while.

C'ya.

Sinking Ship Feeling

Wow, has it really been that long?

Since my last post I've done another show called "Little Me". Miss T was on stage this time, and despite the fact it was an enjoyable show ... it was hard work, and we're all exhausted. As such, I've completely neglected my Bloging duties. But here I am: Refreshed, Ready for Action ... and fed up with work!

Things have been a bit miserable for a while now, but the last 48 hours have marked a distinct dis-improvement. We had a so-called Staff Day on Monday which did much to improve the general morale of staff ... (Hmm. Sarcasm doesn't really come across in print, does it?!). Then today I've had non-stop abuse from a corporate client who didn't just want the moon on a stick, but most of the solar system stringing on a rope, polishing to a shine, and then electroplating with a Nickle-Aluminium alloy ... and still wouldn't be happy with the result. Nghh! One of THOSE days, huh?

Anyway. Tomorrow can't possibly be any worse. Can it?

In other news: Bonfire night is fast approaching. Our neighbours are having their usual party, and this year they've even hinted at the possibility of fire ... Although I don't hold much hope of that given the current weather. Still, it should be fun. I stupidly forgot to invite everyone this year, so there'll be a reduced selection of friends around this time :o(

Hmm. What else? Oh, that's right. I've been swayed by advertising, and have decided to get Sky+ installed this month. (Yay!). We're fed up with the 38 channels of junk that we currently get on DVB, so we're going to be paying £15 to upgrade to 300 channels of junk. That should keep us busy!

Other than that, life if fairly uninteresting at the moment. Miss T is job hunting, I'm tempted to do the same (!). It'll never happen, of course. It's just wishful thinking :o)

See ya'

"I'm gonna wash that show right out of my head..."

So, here I am. It's Wednesday, and I'm three performances into "South Pacific" at a local theatre. I have to say that it's not my favourite musical. Despite that fact, I can't get that damn song out of my head!

Ah well, only another 5 to go, and then I'm off to do another show. More about that one in another post, save to say it should be more interesting than this one :o)

On another note: I'm on holiday! (Well, sort of. I'm on holiday 'at home'). So far I have achieved nothing, which is exactly what I set out to do. Everything seemed to be going well until one horrifying moment this afternoon where I thought 'it would be nice' to do some gardening!

Evidently I'm bored out of my head, and didn't realise. Tomorrow shall be more interesting. Don't know how, but it will.

Over and out :o)

Anyone home?

Hi there. I haven't posted to this thing in a while, and I just wanted to apologise to my audience of zero.

I have neither an excuse, nor an interesting story. I shall, however, make up for it in due course ...

The future is not so bright!

So ... I bought a new PDA a month ago. I primarily wanted it to act as my diary, but the fact it could also do email -- and that I had GPRS enabled on my mobile phone -- gave me an idea: Why don't I have my PDA check my email every hour during the working day? That way, even when I'm away from my desk, I'll have email. Sensible idea, if you're a geek like me.

So I did the math, and figured checking the emails every hour of every day for a month would equate to about 4Mb of data. Not much, and therefore not much extra to pay on my phone bill. All the same, I thought I'd trial it this month and see what my phone bill came out at.

Oh dear.

Look at this extract from my Orange mobile phone bill:

Now, as you can see, my estimate of 4MB was a little off ... but not too much. 5.4MB to be exact. Then I notice the next bit. You know, the bit that says I now owe Orange £55

£55??! And that's just for the data ... the phone bill was £102! That can't be right?! I put my highly mathematical brain to work, and figured out that they're charging £10 per MB! For God's sake Orange -- this is the 21st century. Not even AOL charges that much!!

I go to their website and check their tariffs. Nowhere does it state anything close to that amount. In fact, according to their website, the most I could possibly end up paying for that amount of data is £9. Something is wrong here, so I give Orange a call. First time I redirected to another number, then I get disconnected. Second call I get through to a human, then get disconnected as she speaks to her manager. I call back, get through to another operator. I get half way through explaining that I was cut off when the other operator calls me back on the other line. So I have to apologise, disconnect, switch calls, get back to where I started. The operator then helpfully tells me that I've been charged £10/MB. I tell her, "I can see that. I figured that bit out for myself." ...

I won't bore you with the details, but after about 5 minutes on the phone, and several trips to the 'manager', I get a £46 refund. Apparently I hadn't setup 'Pay as you use GPRS' on my account. *I* hadn't set it up. Little me. How silly of me. I asked, "How come if I didn't have 'pay as you use' setup, I've still been charged for the amount I used? Isn't that the same?". Reading between the lines it appears that, as a loyal Talk 120 customer, I had been elevated to a special 'Pay Through The Teeth as you use' service.

The moral of the story? Check your phone bill!

Sister T

Sorry ... I've been spending too much time fiddling with the Starbucks Blog, and have somewhat neglected this one. I tell you what, why don't I post some random photo to keep you all happy?

Introducing Sister T: She's scary, likes orange and has an unhealthy interest in trains.

Starbucks Blog

I've just spent the last hour setting up my second blog. Not content
with just the one, I've created a second 'team' blog for my lunchtime
buddies. Hopefully everyone will join in, but if not it's still a
nice looking site :o)

Starbucks Blog

I've just realised that I've missed half of "Space Race" on BBC 2.
Damn, I was looking forward to it. Anyway, time to settle down and
watch "Lost".

Adios.

Splat!

We think the bird who made this work of art is OK. I don't think it'll be doing that again in a hurry ;o)

IBC, Amsterdam

Just got back from the International Broadcasters Conference, hosted in Amsterdam. My day started at 3.30am, and has just finished at 11.00pm, so I'm exhausted ... but it was worth it.

IBC is hosted each year, and is a huge tradeshow / conference venue for anything broadcast related, including television and the web. Its a great place to see new technology and pick up some freebies :o)

I've not been to Amsterdam for several years, and I'd forgotten about how scary their trains look. Efficient, but still scary.

The day consisted of mainly wandering around the show floor -- getting lost -- finding a map -- finding coffee -- getting lost again -- finding more coffee -- etc.

Just when we thought we couldn't go on any more, J and I found a beach (yes, a beach) in the middle of the complex. It was great to get away for 5 minutes, so we spent about an hour there :o)

One technology that really caught our eye were the LED screens. I knew they'd been improved over the last few years, but to actually see the screens, and what people were doing with them was pretty interesting.

HDTV is big. Very big, and with Sky beginning HD broadcasts next year I expect to see a lot more of it soon. I'm feeling better about buying that new LCD TV now :o)

Mmm. Chocoladehagel Melk :o)

I've not had this stuff since I was a kid. With 2 hours to wait at Amsterdam airport, I couldn't resist buying a box of the stuff :o)

Fuel Panic

I'd normally say 'some people are stupid', but in this case LOTS OF PEOPLE ARE STUPID! We were travelling back from IBC, Amsterdam (See next post) when I took this picture of a queue at a local petrol station:


All caused by news of a protest at some fuel refineries this Wednesday. The protesters are saying 'Don't panic. We're not blocking fuel deliveries. There's no need to panic buy fuel'. I believe them, but the actions of the majority have caused the effect any fuel blockade would have: Petrol stations have run out of fuel, which has lead to further panic.

Crazy.

So then. Blogging...

I suppose it was inevitable. Only a matter of time before I gave into the temptation of downloading the contents of my mind onto a website for complete strangers to read.

So, here goes...