Oh yeh, I nearly forgot...

ULTIMATE CODE RED

Hahahahahaha!

No wait...

MAXIMUM EXTERMINATION!

Hehehehehe!

And why is Billie Piper speaking so strangely? It's like she's wearing someone else's teeth.

Work has been stressing me out lately. Too much going on all at once and no matter what thing I work on then other things get delayed and people get annoyed.

Last weekend I was down near Oxford visiting fishthecat and we went walking at the Whittenham Clumps. The weather was lovely and I only wish I'd brought my camera. I got an OS map of Leicestershire while I was in Oxford so hopefully I can find some walking routes nearby. There's the Leicestershire Round which is a circular route around the edge of the county which might be interesting. Would be nice to do that in parts.

I still haven't done anything about driving since my theory test but I need to because it would make things like going for walks a lot easier if I didn't have to carry biking gear around.

Talking of bikes, I was at a meeting at East Midlands Airport yesterday and there where loads of MotoGP team members around getting ready for the British MotoGP at Donington this weekend. That was very cool.

You'd think Terry Jones would know the protagonists of the Battle of Hastings but he just said:

"And then all hell broke loose and the French charged."

Today I feel really old and ugly :(

Also, I'm going to do another theory test for the car since the last one has expired. Costuming is meaning I need to be able to transport things and so I need a car. I learned at 17 but never did the test because I went to uni. I hated driving so the thought of getting in those big metal cages again fills me with dread. Oh well, I need to so I'm going to do it. Waiting times are 8 weeks for tests so I'll book one straight away and hopefully get proficient in those 2 months.

Edit: passed the theory test

A world without Humph is a sadder one.

Ok, people use emoticons, I use em too. I remember the first ever email I received in 1993 was a list of emoticons and what they meant. I've almost always used the traditional :) type ones rather than the more trendy anime type ones that are everywhere these days like ^^ and so on. I dunno if they're anime, they just make me think of anime.

Anyway, this one :P means sticking your tongue out. However it's always confused me as to what exactly that means. You can smile and stick your tongue out in a cheerful way or you can stick your tongue out and sneer in disgust or you can stick it out to insult someone or show your derision of someone. I'd like to ban this smiley because everytime someone uses it I think they're taking the piss when they don't mean that. Even with the context of the conversation it's impossible to choose which meaning is correct.

I do think emoticons are useful in net based conversations because they fill in the hole left by the lack of readable facial expressions. I don't like them in written passages but they're a useful shorthand to say, "This is what happened and I'm happy about it." or to make friendly banter without the other person taking what you say seriously by adding a wink. To this end the :P emoticon fails utterly because it just add ambiguity to the sentence and therefore should not be used!

I've missed both the RPM2008 challenge where you had to write 10 songs or 35 mins of music in February and the start of Project365 which is a photo a day for a year. You could say that you can start any of those at any time but it doesn't seem right really. I suppose the fun thing is doing it with everyone else at the same time. I'm annoyed.

Google Maps is complete shit. Not only is it dreadful at route planning and yesterday didn't tell me that I couldn't enter a street which got me going in circles in Leamington but it causes my router to boot me off for flooding if I scroll or zoom the map at anything more than a crawl. It's really damn annoying because I lose connection to everything and have to wait about 30 seconds before my router decides to let me back on only to have Google Maps flood me out again. It's extremely annoying when there's someone at the other end of a phone trying to get directions for me in real time and I'm just getting booted of the network over and over.
It's not just my home router that Google Maps kills either, it does it to the one in the office too!

I used to love Microsoft Map Point for routing and map browsing. Does anyone use software like that anymore?

Anyone out there looking to do some freelance work, turning designs into good CSS based HTML pages? I'm looking to employ for a project.

In other news... the muscle under my left eye won't stop twitching :( It's driving me nuts.

I really truly can't understand this. Why would anyone want to attack fire fighters? This makes me feel so depressed. This country is just such a horribly cynical place where kids attack the heroes of our society for a laugh.

I'm in Amsterdam airport bored out of my skull. Got 90mins to kill still. Flight from SF was good, had 3 seats to myself again.

Well I'm off very early in the morning to California. I'll probably be online before I get back but see you all in a week!

Is there anyone out there who'd like to play EVE Online with me?

Yesterday was a strange Christmas for me. My first ever Christmas at home. Home being my own home and not that of my parents. My parents' divorce came through two weeks ago, my Dad having now been in Australia for 9 months. This year it was just me, Donna and smelly dog Gus at home plopped in front of the TV or in the kitchen cooking.

We managed to make a really lovely Christmas dinner. Pork, turkey, roast potatos and parsnips, carrots, brocolli, lil sausages and yorkshire pudding. It was very tasty and far too much for me to eat! I'm sure we're set for sandwiches for a while yet despite buying a tiny turkey.

Mostly it was just chat and movies on telly. The house looks really pretty this year as we've put more effort seeing as we'd be here.

( and now for a spoiler filled rant about the Doctor Who tripefest )

This is all kinds of awesome.

Here are a couple of random things I've been pondering about...

1. How do people in the US put up with being charged to RECEIVE text messages? How can you even charge for something you've no control over? It's like running up to someone, stuffing a muffin in their mouth and then demanding payment.

2. Ok, so space is expanding and the rate of expansion is accelerating according to current observations. Now as it's space itself that's expanding, kind of like the surface of a balloon as you inflate it but in all directions, then does it follow that microscopically atoms are going to get further and further away? Does this mean that we're all slowly dispersing until the forces holding the atoms together are no longer sufficient to hold us together?

Answers on a postcard...

I've just completed Mass Effect. Not all of the side quests but the main storyline. Annoyingly when you finish the main storyline, the game ends, that's it. If you want to do all of the side quests then you have to do it before going to Ilos, after that it's a single track to the credits.

Warning, the following contains MAJOR SPOILERS.

( Don't look if you don't wanna know stuff about the storyline )

So when I said that Assassin's Creed was one of the best games I'd played in years, that was before I played Mass Effect. Both games have their flaws. Assassin's Creed, while being incredibly detailed and atmospheric, is very repetative. I still loved it and enjoyed the storyline but Mass Effect is the sci-fi equivalent of Oblivion, but better.

I've been totally sucked into the incredibly deep and detailed world and if I didn't stop myself I'd have played it all day long. Sure the team based combat isn't as slick as Rainbow Six Vegas but just unfolding the multiple storylines, finding out more about the races and history of the game world is totally compelling.

I've never played a game with such fantastic voice acting and the dialogue system is really very nice giving you a feeling of truly interacting with everyone. Whereas I doubt I'll play Assassin's Creed again, I can already see that this has big replay value.

Woo! Completed Assassin's Creed last night, next up, Mass Effect.