Pitch Black

I watched ‘Pitch Black’ last night. Well, actually I started watching it on TV last Sunday, remembered that I had bought the DVD of it cheap, so put that on instead and then fell asleep half way through, and then actually finished watching it four days later. It was good, stylish, SF fun, albeit spectacularly stupid – how does a species that dissolves in sunlight evolve on a planet where it is only dark every twenty-something years? 

I watched one of the special featurettes after the credits had rolled, and it was film of special promotional rave parties that they put on before the film was released. Supposedly, these events were supposed to recreate the full ‘Pitch Black’ experience, although all this seemed to involve was the lights being turned off half way through and didn’t feature anybody being ripped apart by horrible things with razor sharp teeth. I had a much more realistic ‘Pitch Black’ experience in the woods tonight, with pouring rain, a failing light source (the batteries in my torch that hadn’t been used for six months starting to fade) and a group of chavs, tanked up on White Lightning cider grunting like neanderthals somewhere in the darkness. I gave them a wide berth and hurried home.

I spent two and a half hours last night collecting snapshots in San Fiero, but I was slightly miffed to find that I hadn’t saved my game properly, so I’ve got to do it again. Still, the surreal sight of a homie from da hood flying with a jet pack around the districts of Garcia and Hashbury (who are supposedly organizing a ‘Joint Festival’ according to the street banners) is wonderful fun.

Ah, time for QI … :-) Evening all!

Business news

business news
Originally uploaded by neilh.

What do *you* eat for lunch? :-)

Bits and bobs

Well, the darkness has returned – it’s now dark for the morning walk at a little after six, and by the time I got home from Birmingham tonight it was persistently raining and almost dark enough to need my torch to pick my way round the woods. I need to buy some new wellies as my left boot has a leak in it and my foot was soaked after trudging through the puddles.

Still, I’ve got some positive things to offset the lack of sunlight – I finally cracked the problem of replicating a sql database across the firewall by using ftp to transfer the snapshot files, so I no longer have to copy the backup files and restore them manually. It’s taken nearly a week of messing around off and on, and I now know more about sql server security than is healthy. Also, I’ve finally beaten the remote control plane mission in San Fiero – the little Red Baron is frustratingly difficult to manoeuvre and shoot at the same time, and the fuel limit allows very little room for error. I went back to using my original xbox controller which has the black and white buttons (for rudder control) at the top of the button layout rather than at the bottom as with the S controller, and that did the trick. Just one more mission for Zero, and I can finally cross that annoying Z icon off the map.

Now, it’s time for a cup of coffee to stop me nodding off half way through Lost, and to watch the excellent drama documentary Space Race. It’s fascinating to learn more about the Soviet space programme, in contrast to the rather more well known US efforts as seen in ‘The Right Stuff’ and ‘From the Earth to the Moon’.

Music Quiz Answers

The answers are hidden below – just select the text with your cursor to reveal all (just in case anybody still wants to guess)

1. Luther Wright

2. Las Ketchup

3. John Otway and Richard Holgarth

4. Cabaret Voltaire

5. The Shaman

6. Goldfrapp

7. The Doors

8. CW McCall

9. Bjork

10. Melle Mel

 

Strange Days

Just when did my life get so god damn weird, exactly?

I’ve been working for Woozie down at the Four Dragons casino on the main strip in Las Venturas. We were getting ready for a heist and seeing as how high explosives always come in handy on such occasions I went to check out a quarry on the edge of the desert. After taking care of some business there, including disposing of a dead cop and his bike before any more heat turned up, I ended up running the place. A kid from downtown Los Santos driving a dozer sure is weird, but that’s not the weirdest thing – no sir.

I got another call from Mike Toreno, up at the abandoned air strip to the north of the quarry. Not many men scare me, but Toreno is one of them. I still don’t know who he was working for – CIA, FBI or the Russian Mafia – and after a lifetime of double dealing, I don’t think he does either. The crazy mother got me learning to fly a plane so I could run some deals for him, and somehow it ended up with me blowing up a cargo plane full of goons in dark suits somewhere over the desert and bailing out with a parachute on, so high up I couldn’t even see the ground. Sheeee-it.

Then it got weirder. The Truth turned up again, talking about aliens and conspiracies and green goo. He gave me a pair of night vision goggles so I could sneak into a secret military base (Area 69, would you believe?) and steal their secret project which turned out to be a jet pack, like something out of a whacked out James Bond movie.

A homeboy like me flying round on a jet pack is powerful strange, but it’s still not the weirdest thing. It’s not even my new girlfriend – a croupier from the casino who likes me to dress up in a gimp suit and whup her ass with a two foot long plastic johnson.

Nope. The weirdest thing was standing at the side of the road and seeing Elvis riding by on a motorbike. Damn straight – the King on a Harley.

Strange days indeed …

The Last Laugh

Thursday night is comedy night at the Lescar, and my friend Andrew had been nagging me to go for years, so this week we finally got the necessary circular tuit and went, and well worth it it was too. We got there slightly early, but that was no great hardship with some excellent Timothy Taylor’s Landlord on tap. The show kicked off more or less on time at nine o’clock with an excellent warm up from the resident compere Toby Foster – it seems that everybody who has ever appeared on Phoenix Nights is now destined to compere stand up comedy nights for the rest of their comedy careers. He had an excellent rapport with the audience, particularly the girl celebrating her birthday who was sat near the front with an unopened present. He got some good comedy mileage out of the gifts, which turned out to be a chick lit novel and a packet of friendship tea (“Stalkers Tea more like. Ingredients – includes rohypnol”) – bet she wishes it had been a dildo now …

The first act was Susan Murray, who was born in Scotland and raised in Wolverhampton (“because my parents wanted me to sound like a twat”). Some of her material was deliberately controversial, but it all went down well with the crowd, particularly the stuff about internet dating which struck a chord with a rather drunk woman sat in front of us called Diane who was offered a ten minute open mic spot next week by Toby Foster.

The headline act was the excellent Paul Sinha whose act was based on his experience of being fat, gay and asian, and also being a football fan. Tales of doomed stag weekends, being mistaken for a fellow squaddie and of being asked some thug one night – “Oi! Do you fancy my bird?” – and wondering how to tell the bloke that he was the one he had his eye on. Painfully funny, and it’s refreshing to see a gay standup who isn’t in the least bit camp.

So, an excellent night out, and one that I’ll definitely be up for again.

Random Music Quiz

Here's a simple idea for a music quiz - open up your music player of choice, shuffle the playlist and post pictures from google images of the first ten bands that come up. Anyone want to try to guess these?

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

20 Lives

I have just lived my first day on 20 Lives as a ruthless media tycoon hiring and firing, and wheeling and dealing to broker a deal to expand my company. I'm not sure if I made the right choice about dressing casual for the media party though ... hmmm.

Has anybody else played it yet?

Autumn Colours

Garden 021
Originally uploaded by neilh.

Dog and flower pot

Garden 013
Originally uploaded by neilh.

Best of Friends

Garden 011
Originally uploaded by neilh.

Knackered

I'm well and truly knackered tonight. The day started early, walking the dog in the rain a little after six o'clock, crowbarring Alicia out of bed in time to drop her at the bus stop and then heading onto the motorway just in time to hear that it was completely shut at junction 26 due to some sort of high speed chase and fatal shoot out. Blimey - is this Grand Theft Auto : M1 or what? Mind you, if they did do a UK version it would be full of contraflows, coned off lanes, lorry drivers hogging the middle lane, bikers undertaking you just as you are about to change lanes, BMWs driving right on your rear bumper in a queue of traffic and of course, massively overpriced petrol so you can't afford to drive anywhere. As you might guess, I didn't have the best journey down to the Birmingham office this morning ...

When I got there, it was straight into a project meeting for our new web based purchase ordering system that we are implementing before the end of the year. It's good software, but the air conditioning in the room wasn't working and the atmosphere was extremely stuffy and humid and by mid afternoon I was seriously struggling to stay awake. We were supposed to finish at four o'clock, but my pointy haired boss managed to turn a ten minute wrap up into another three quarters of an hour of pointless waffle and by the time I managed to escape the motorway was crawling with rush hour traffic again.

At least the car was cooler than the office, and I perked up a bit listening to the new Milton Jones series on radio 4 as I plowed through the rain on my way home. I got back at half past seven, and I'm ashamed to say I really couldn't face going out in the darkness and rain to walk the dog again, even though he was looking me with his "I'm being murdered" face.

Time for a strong cup of coffee, methinks ...

The Gasman Cometh ... Eventually

Ok, so I spent most of Sunday playing San Andreas, but I did get down to the Jurassic Layer of the ironing pile before returning to finally drive down the main drag of Las Venturas for the first time. The only problem was that the boiler decided to conk out again – it’s done it a couple of times, usually a couple of weeks after it has been serviced for some reason and it’s getting to be a pain in the mo’ fo’ ass (sorry, came over all San Andreas for a moment there). It meant no heating and hot water, which is not the best way to start Monday morning.

Jan rang up the British Gas help line first thing, and they promised somebody between twelve and six in the afternoon, which sounded OK. We had to take Frank and Barney to the vets for their injections first thing, but we were home at a quarter to ten. The time rolled on, and we still hadn’t seen hide nor hair of a gas man by half past six, so I rang them again.

“All operators are busy … blah blah … held in a queue …”

Oh great. I eventually got through to ask where the engineer was, and was told that somebody had called but that there was nobody in. It is fair to say that there was a free and frank exchange of views at this point. Either the engineer called in the morning, before he was supposed to, or he went to the wrong address or something. Grrrr. Anyway, they did promise somebody at eight o’clock the next morning and they did actually turn up and fix the verdamte boiler, so I was finally able to get a shower – woo hoo!

In other news, I managed to find Kenna’s camera charger for her with my spooky psychic powers, and dealt with one of the stupider support calls that I’ve had recently. If you have two fields on a screen for installation date and live date, why on earth would you think that ‘Y’ might be the correct thing to put in the ‘Live’ field.

Viva Las Venturas

I’ve been busy.

I’ve been working for Woozie. Gotta say, I respect the guy. Even though he took Catalina off my hands, that turned out to be what you might call a blessing in disguise, seeing as how she was a psycho chica an' all. I wrapped it up with the Da Nang boys – left a container ship full of bodies in the process – and then decided to finish things with that punk ass pimp Jizzy B. Man, it felt good to finally tell that mother what a fool he had been to trust me. Once I had his cell phone with the number for his contact in the cartel there was no need for that low life scum sucker to draw another breath of San Fiero air, so I capped his ass and left his body by the side of his burning pimp mobile.

We knew where the meet was going down, and Woozie’s boys came good. I cleared the roof of gunmen and then headed down to the pier for a Ballas turkey shoot. Some of the turkeys tried to fly the coop in a chopper, but hey – that’s why the good lord gave us rocket launchers, right? The final act in this drama was to take a car bomb to the factory where the cartel was making the yay and indulge in a spot of urban renewal. Guess those crack heads back in Los Santos are going to be going hungry now.

If I thought I could kick back and work on running the garage with Cesar, boy was I ever wrong. An anonymous call gave me address somewhere in the desert in Bone County and promised information about Ma. Time to go.

It was the first time I had crossed that bridge, and once I hit the highway I kept going. The stranger would wait for a day or two. I was ready to see the bright lights of Las Venturas.

Oh baby, gonna set my soul on fire …

Twenty Lives

Is anybody else going to be playing Twenty Lives next week?

I've played the Nokia Game three times (and got into the European Final round once ... :-) ) and this looks to be more of the same - lots of different mini games and challenges against other players over the course of a couple of weeks. If the previous events are anything to go by then this should be fun, even if we only compete amongst ourselves.

View from the shed

Garden 001
Originally uploaded by neilh.

Our circle

Garden 005
Originally uploaded by neilh.

This is the new home for our chiminea

Keep off the grass!

Garden 006
Originally uploaded by neilh.

Rainy Day

I awoke this morning to the sound of rain falling steadily outside my window, as well as the noise of two cats bickering while they waited for me to be sufficiently awake to feed them. I bunged a load of washing in the machine and set off with Barney, listening to the news on my muvo only then realising that it was only just seven o'clock in the morning ... groan. Both dog and man got soaked by the time we'd been once round the woods and I was ready for a nice cup of tea by the time I got home. Still, the rain is exactly what we need for the new lawn, which is looking satisfyingly green now.

Today was another workshop day, and judgement day for four of the Sheffield Crew. It was a tough session for them with one stabbed arm for Amber and an impressive tondo to the face for Kat that resulted in a rather dented mask. Congratulations are due to Luisa, Rachel and Kat for passing in fine style, and commiserations to Amber for missing out, but that's a story for another time, I think. We were all a bit frazzled from the emotional rollercoaster of the day, but we had a bit of new stuff to play with (disengagements, counter cavationes and doubles) followed by a bit of freeplay to finish with. Rachel's parry zebra left me weak with laughter and was a real high point to the day.

Home for another walk, with a steady drizzle rather than rain this time, a shower and a glass of cold beer. Jamie couldn't wait to try on the junior plastron and jacket that the Prof had found for him, and he was delighted to find that they fitted him, with a little bit of growing room as well. He's just been looking on Go-Fence.com for a mask and gloves to go with the jacket ... :-)

Pocket Stonehenge

For the druid on the go ...

Garden Update

Tony the gardener has now got most of the turf down, and it looks fantastic. The garden seems much bigger than it used to which is probably something to do with curves and sightlines, or somesuch technical thing, but all I know is that it's fab. It's just a shame that there's not much more of the summer left, at least judging by the rain and mist this morning, but the patio is still going to be usable for a while yet with the chiminea of an evening ... I'll post some photos of the garden over the weekend, if we get a bit of sunshine.

Same old, same old ...

A new school year, crisp mornings, mist rising off the fields as the dawn chorus tweets merrily, and - oh joy - traffic jams on the M1 and problems with the sales spreadsheet again. As you may recall (or possibly not unless you've been paying close attention to my blog for the last 18 months) the sales spreadsheet is a baroque monstrosity of visual basic macros and odbc links to an encrypted price list database, and against all odds it has been running without any problems since the last major update at the start of the year. I got complaints that spreadsheets sent from the sales team in Leeds were crashing with weird and wonderful errors. I spent some time tracing the problem and eventually realised that the sales team in Leeds all have new laptops with Office 2003 installed and every time they saved the spreadsheet it included a reference to the latest version of the Word object library, thus rendering the spreadsheet unusable by anybody with an earlier version of Office.

I found a copy of Office 2003 to play with but I couldn't see an easy way to stop the program saving with the reference file included. Of course, you can go into the VB references screen and remove it from the list, but this is the sales team we are talking about here ... Faced with either downgrading all of the Office 2003 installations or upgrading everybody in the company from XP to 2003 I tried just copying the object file and installing it in the office program folder - result!

Metaphorically buffs nails on an imaginary lapel ... :-)

Balance

I think I've caught up on my sleep deficit of the last two weeks at last.

Following the fun and games last weekend, I've had a stupid amount of work to catch up on followed by a three hour return journey from Brum on Thursday. I made up for it with a rather nice Saag Paneer in the recently refurbished Indian Chef on Crookes (and Jan drove so I could have a pint of Greene King IPA as well - yaybo!). The curry was made with lovely fresh spinach and big chunks of paneer cheese - very tasty.

Friday I was working at home, but spent most of the day on the phone remotely driving somebody else's desktop to show them the expenses invoicing procedure (and finding all the problems with it - grrr). The paved side of our garden is finished now, with just the turf to put down on the other side, so we had the first chiminea night in ages - beer and half a dutch cigar with the lights on the pergola providing some illumination.

Saturday was an early start, playing furniture tetris in the garage to clear enough space to get our two old sofas out and into a van for their two new owners, namely Shullie and Amber. The day was then spent shuttling backwards and forwards shifting furniture and boxes accompanied by a range of interesting squeaks and rattles from the old transit van that had been hired for the day and we were regularly refuelled by sandwiches from the co-op and cups of coffee, fizzy pop and chocolate bars. After watching a bit of The House of Flying Daggers and The Duellists (two films I really want to watch now) on Burgi's sooper dooper big tv we set off on the quest for Key Lime pie, with some eventually being found in Tescos, before arriving at Luisa's 40th birthday party having missed the clown (fortunately for me, and for at least three or four other people that I talked to who suffer from Clown-O-Phobia).

Today I have mostly been stealing helicopters, base jumping off a cliff riding a mountain bike, dancing in a nightclub, being told I am too muscly to be attractive, returning to my old house to stock up on molotov cocktails and finally catching a train back to the garage where I now operate from. In the afternoon, I got stuck into reading The Algebraeist by Iain M Banks and I think I've now got past the point of alien-name-overload and can enjoy the intriguing space opera story behind it all. A nap, a walk and finally a chance to catch up with this sat in the back garden with a cup of tea. Ahhhh.

Park Life

A slightly belated post, but wow, gosh and fabaroonie - what an amazing weekend. It was a year ago that I was the other side of the barriers watching the prof holding forth on the history of the sword.

This year I was holding a sword and trying to convey to members of the Great British Public that swordplay is simply the most undiluted, pure, unadulterated, downright fun that you can have with your clothes on. Through the weekend there were a handful of folk that I talked to who got that particular gleam in their eyes and started to grin when they picked up a sword for the first time - I hope that that wave of enthusiasm will carry them through to their first six hour workshop and beyond, and that we'll be seeing another group of newbies alongside the rest of us in a year's time. There were a lot of kids who seemed to have been bitten by the bug as well - it is a pity that we don't have any way of teaching them as well, but I guess there would be a lot of problems with it - insurance, safety and suitable equipment for starters.

The other side of the weekend was the superbly surreal spectacle of watching Greeks and Romans parading alongside American Civil War troopers, Arizona Rangers, German soldiers, Vikings and countless others in a living history camp. On Sunday night as we walked amongst the tents and admired the different camp fires it was very easy to imagine that we had stepped through some sort of strange time warp to another dimension with voyeuristic intention (and we didn't even have to get dressed up in basques and stockings to do so). The rest of the weekend is somewhat of a blur - I can remember various fights in the arena, not least the big melee where I got my fingers rapped with a sword before being wrestled to the ground, teaching hordes of kids how to use a cutlass effectively, chatting to strangers and friends in equal measure, camping for the first time in umpty-something years (and being kept awake by a bloody hooting owl), bacon and avocado sandwiches eaten al-fresco, coffee by the fire, putting on my yellow sash for the first time and watching the weather change from a chilly drizzle to scorching sunshine in a few hours.

I now have aching muscles, bruised fingers, a sun burnt face, fatigue to my very core and a strange urge to do the whole thing over again. I'd booked Tuesday off and slept for most of it, as it was back to work and and overflowing inbox on Wednesday with a 6:00 am start - groan. Ah well, if all the year were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work ...