30th Birthday

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Jan 312006
 

What a weekend! First off, for the impatient, the photos are here.

I’ll have to summarise this in bullet points as far to much happened for extensive prose!

Friday

  • The actual day of my and a day off work for me. Hurrah!
  • Presents! An antique-style wall clock from my mum and, rather excellently, the Anansi Boys audiobook, as read by Lenny Henry. Result!
  • Into Guildford for some exploring
  • Off to Craggy Island again for some climbing (once the test had been passed). Some traversing, some top-rope graded climbs and some bouldering. I had to borrow a harness because, oh horror of horrors, I’m not the svelte 25-year old I once was and my harness no longer fits! It seems I ate all the pies.
  • Dinner at , an oriental restaurant. A miso soup for starter and an excellent Mongolian chicken dish for the main course, all in view of
  • Snow! I win!

Saturday

  • A gentle start to the day
  • Saw on the train to London! Who knew how far Penny’s organisational skills ran! Certainly much better than my ‘appear suave and cool while talking to celebrities’ skill as all I managed was a “Hi” and a bit of a smirk, which was rewarded by a fairly dismissive smile. But at least there was an element of communication there, or so I’d like to kid myself
  • Got to at 14:30. Somewhat late as I was expecting to meet Mark at 14:00. No Mark though, who phones at 15:00 to cancel, pleading ill health
  • Due to a combination of accidents, incidents, misunderstandings and other reasons, nobody arrives for the next two hours! Numerous conspiracy theories, fueled by the Budvar I’m drinking, begin to develop. Do I have the wrong time? The wrong pub? The wrong day? Thankfully, eventually, everyone makes it.
  • The first presents! One never knows when one might need an album of 70′s music or a talking Captain Hook action figure!
  • Eventually we head off to Kentish Town to the restaurant. We go to the Ethiopian restaurant, and a most excellent meal it is!
  • Major present time… And it’s a PSP! Much desired and not-very-secretly coted by yours truly since release and now it’s mine, all mine! Muahahaha!
  • At the end of the night it was off to a hotel for Penny and me, much better than trying to negotiate the engineering works on the trains home.

Sunday

  • Chinese New Year! And what that seemed to mean was an ocean of people, 200,000 reportedly, gathering in Trafalgar Square waiting for the dragon procession.
  • Rather than wait around, Penny and I went into the Nationall Gallery, just long enough to view the , and the .
  • Back to Trafalgar Square for a bit of the dragon procession, at least those glimpses stolen in between even more people. Time to move on.
  • To go forth and purchase PSP paraphernalia. Hurrah!
  • Met Karen, Lynsey and Kev in All Bar One for a glass (or two) of wine before heading into China Town to observe the cabbage eating dragons and to buy ourselves some food poisoning
  • The London Eye was perfectly timed. Just at sunset, the sky literally changing colour as we moved around, all the building lights coming on and the Chinese New Year fireworks viewable just as we reached the peak. Most excellent.

And that was it. A highly memorable and very enjoyable 30th birthday. Thanks to all who were involved in any way at all.

 Posted by sandeberg at 14:56  Tagged with: , , , , ,

Walkin’ along, signin’ a song…

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Jan 262006
 

ahem

“One more day to go, one more day to go,
Hey ho, hey ho,
One more day to go!”

Catchy song, no? Needless to say, by now I’m more excited than a baby in a strip club about the events of the next three days.

One day shy of being 30 years old. Three decades. It does make me think about the myriad of events has occurred to me in that time, excepting maybe the first decade, which was singularly uneventful. Don’t worry, I’ll spare you a tedious listing of greater and lesser bouts of nostalgia. Although I do look back fondly at the the arrogant teenager who thought he knew everything; Who learnt a lot and became the arrogant young man in his twenties who was fairly sure he knew everything. I’ve learnt a lot since then, so I look forward to being the arrogant man in his thirties who is absolutely certain he knows everything.

But I’m more prone to looking forward to looking backwards. I’ll start by looking forward to the events of tomorrow, the events of the weekend and seeing my friends, to moving in with Penny in the next couple of months, to road-tripping around Germany later in the year and to everything else that can and will happen.

Anyway enough of that rubbish, where are my drinks! Avast!

Update: Grrr…. Everyone here on site has signed and presented me with a birthday card today. Which means they all know that it’s my birthday tomorrow and that I have the day off. Which means it’s going to be impossible to sneak off early today! How inconsiderate is that? I’ve been in a celebrating mood since waking this morning and I’m supposed to sit and be productive all day? Don’t they know how this is supposed to work? Sheesh!

 Posted by sandeberg at 11:27  Tagged with: ,

Whale rescuers’ £300 parking bill

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Jan 232006
 

BBC NEWS England London Whale rescuers’ £300 parking bill: “‘It upsets me a bit that we are facing over £300 worth of bills,’ said Mr Knight, who was in charge of the rescue operation.

‘I guess they have got a job to do. However, all of our cars have ‘marine ambulance’ on the side or ‘marine medics’… and I would have hoped they would have given us the benefit of the doubt.’

He added that as a small charity with limited funds, it already faces a steep rescue bill of £5,000.
‘We are hoping the public will show some of the enthusiasm they showed for the rescue by donating to us,’ he added. “

The link is above for those that wish to do so!

 Posted by sandeberg at 14:25  Tagged with:

Pirates and Pyramids Ahoy!

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Jan 202006
 

Hurrah!

I’ve been given permission by everyone that has to approve my holidays and I’m going along with Penny to her work educational in May! We’re off on a ! Here are the highlights:

  • CAIRO – Half-day guided tour to the Pyramids and Sphinx and Egyptian Museum.
  • LUXOR – Guided tour of Karnak with ‘calesh’ between hotel and temple; Valley of the Kings and Hatshepsut Temple by donkey.
  • NILE RIVERBOAT – Cruise from Luxor to Aswan via the temples of Edfu and Kom Ombo.

Note that it’s a trip to , not !


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 Posted by sandeberg at 13:17  Tagged with: ,

Whale spotted in central London

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Jan 202006
 

BBC NEWS England London Whale spotted in central London: “A large whale has been spotted in the River Thames in central London by boaters and sightseers.

The mammal, thought to be a pilot whale which can grow to 20ft, was seen swimming past the Houses of Parliament. “

Not much of a pilot then, is it?
I’ve just seen the video footage of the poor whale. He seems quite desperate to swim further upriver.

Update: Seeing the footage reminds me pleasantly of seeing the pilot whales off Teneriffe last year, where we saw a whole school (is that right) of them.

 Posted by sandeberg at 12:19  Tagged with:

Google defies US over search data

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Jan 202006
 

: “The internet search engine Google is resisting efforts by the US Department of Justice to force it to hand over data about what people are looking for. “

Why does the DoJ want to peruse the Google databases? Do they want to track the illegal activities of a terrorist suspect? Crack a paedophile ring?

No, they’re just looking to justify some of their anti-porn legislation that has been blocked by the Supreme Court because of legal challenges over how it is enforced.

The DoJ will probably win, but it’s still encouraging that Google is less than willing to breach the civil liberties of it’s users. As opposed to Yahoo, who were so ready to allow pro-democracy protestors to be fed to the lions (or should that be dragons?) in China to protect their business interests. (That news article )

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 Posted by sandeberg at 11:39  Tagged with: ,

It’s the end of the world as we know it!

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Jan 192006
 

: “We are in a fool’s climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”

Strong words from James Lovelock, an independent environmental scientist and Fellow of the Royal Society. I’m sure the fact that he has a new book to sell is entirely unrelated to this apocalyptic message.

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 Posted by sandeberg at 15:57  Tagged with:

Satirical photocropping at the BBC?

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Jan 192006
 

BBC NEWS Politics Are Lords out of order on terror?

Check out the link, scroll halfway down to a picture of our fearless leader and check out the first two lines on his manifesto…

 Posted by sandeberg at 15:12  Tagged with:

Games Galore

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Jan 192006
 

Sorry for the lack of updates. It’s been busy at work, and I was out in the Netherlands yesterday. While there were frustrations involved with that, the bonus was that I was actually able to write the for 2006 written. It’s a good thing I always keep my notepad with me; When the words come it’s good to get them on paper straight away before they escape into the ether. I still have to write one for the one to two Vampire/World of Darkness games I intend to run, but I’m expecting those to be more closed group with perhaps a few happless passers-by added. I still don’t know whether the game will turn into a one-slot or two-slot game. It depends how it runs. Most likely I’ll take the last slot of the day so I can run over. I’ll definetly be doing that with the Vampire games.

More gaming at the weekend. Hurrah! Vampire on Saturday and Aberrant on the Sunday. The Aberrant has been long-awaited. We might actually finish a plot thread this time! (There. That’s cursed that!)
Should be going to see at the cinema before the game, which should give me something to do in the two hours between me arriving and everyone esle showing their faces!

As for tomorrow, the travelling this week has got me grouchy as hell. If I can work from home tomorrow, I will.

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 Posted by sandeberg at 12:06  Tagged with:

Review: Memoirs of a Geisha

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Jan 162006
 

A quick précis of the review for the impatient: It was pants.

Right then. Penny and I went to see it on Sunday in between our two climbing sessions. As background to this review, Penny has just recently finished reading the book by Arthur Golden, which she enjoyed immensely. I have never read the book.

Right, personally I thought the film was drab and uninspired. It made me feel how it must be living a life on anti-depressants. No excitement, no awe, no sadness, no joy, nothing. The only thing it made me feel was it made my arse ache from sitting there all the time. As a film of a very symbolic subject matter, set in a very ritualistic society, it lacked all the hallmarks of an Asian film. Hell, even Last of the Samurai was better in it’s use of Eastern symbolism than MoaG! So overall, somewhat interesting but really nothing to write home about at all.

Penny despised it with a passion. Apparently, if I hadn’t been there too, she would have walked out of the film after about the first hour. She stated that the characterisation was extremely poor and that the entire story was robbed of pretty much all of it’s subtlety and grace and been replaced by a kludgey story that was about as subtle as a smack in the head with a brick.

It’s not that she generally objects to film adaptations of books, generally she has enjoyed most adaptations, even if it means considering them as independent entities. This one had her facing away from the screen for periods, muttering curses at the director under her breath.

Ah yes, the director. With hindsight, that might have been the problem. It was Rob Marshall, the director of ‘Chicago’ (a poor adaptation of a theatre musical) and a TV rendition of ‘Annie’. That’s it. I think we know where the blame falls.


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 Posted by sandeberg at 15:20  Tagged with:
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