Bad news for Wheel of Time fans
Book 12 may be a little delayed.

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Driving
Over recent weeks I've been getting interested in the idea of actually learning to drive. As a result of my incessant pestering of boobook while she's been driving to explain how it all works, she dragged me out to the Sheffield Arena carpark on Sunday afternoon and gave me the wheel.

I don't think I did too badly, given that it was the first time I'd ever driven a car. I mean, I stalled all the time (mostly because I forgot to put the clutch down while coming to a halt), but I managed steering OK, and a couple of fairly smooth shifts up to second. Apparently down-shifting is harder, so we didn't try that. I also have to learn to actually release the clutch properly, because I was leaving my foot on it to stop the car going too fast (i.e. more than about 5mph).

After I got over the initial nervousness, it was actually reasonably fun. I'll have to see about getting proper lessons sometime.

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Happy New Year + some other stuff
First of all, Happy New Year to everybody reading this!

Now on to more important celebrations; my birthday. I'm going the lazy route this year and just heading down to Corporation on Saturday 13th (I seem to be really busy this weekend with other stuff). So, if people feel like wishing me happy birthday/buying me drinks/watching me make a fool of myself, that's the best place and time to do so. I know Corp isn't always the most fantastic of nights out, but it normally goes pretty well if we take a big gang along, so that's the idea.

So, stick a comment on the post if you feel like joining me, so I have a rough idea of who's going to be there. I don't need firm commitments at this stage (or at all, in fact), but just a rough idea would be nice.

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Busy, busy, busy...
At some point there will be a long post describing my holiday in Scotland. I had planned to start writing it today, but it seems that I instead have to plan an office move. The good thing about the office move is that we have about three times as much space in the new office; the bad news is manyfold.

• The move has to be done by the beginning of September i.e. Friday


• There are many heavy items that need to be moved


• The goods lift is broken


• The only people actually moving stuff is the development team


• The development team consists of three fairly typical skinny geeks, and one very strong ex-rugby player. Guess which one is on holiday this week

Currently I'm measuring things and making a floor plan; this makes a good substitute for actual work. If I'm lucky the lift will be fixed tomorrow, which is when we're actually going to move things.

Anyway, I've been away from LJ for a week, so if anything fantastically interesting has happened that you've posted about, stick a comment on this post, because the idea of reading my friends page backlog gives me the Fear.

Current Mood: lethargic

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Information request
Anybody know any good van hire companies in Sheffield? I'm moving house next Thursday and require a van to shift the bigger bits of furniture.

UPDATE: we've got one booked now.

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Random grammatical musing
The Guardian currently has a front page story titled Exam body declares war on greengrocer's apostrophe. The gist of the article is that they're considering making punctuation more important to GCSE grades.

While the meat of the article is interesting, I keep looking at the title and thinking shouldn't that be "greengrocers' apostrophe"?

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Stupid banks
Why exactly is it that only people who can drive or have been abroad are permitted bank accounts in this country?

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Putting on the years
Given that today is my birthday, I thought I'd break my long LJ silence and say hi to everyone. Hi.

My sister has bought me a new shiny knife. I have yet to test it in the way I test all my new knives, by waving it at fractured_ident and seeing how much he cowers. My brother got me Anansi Boys, which due to him being lazy and not wrapping it before giving it to me a freak time accident I finished reading yesterday. It's the first book I've ever read with a deleted scene at the end. It's also really really good.

Other stuff: New Years Eve was fun: boobook and I ended up doing a slightly crazy trip to York in the afternoon to visit deliriousplanet in hospital: it was one of those strange days where you try and do something relatively complex (travel to York by train, get to hospital that we've never been to before, not knowing when visiting time ends, then try and get food before heading home, all on New Years Eve when all opening/running times go crazy), with absolutely no plan or checking ahead, and which all ran mysteriously smoothly, up to and including randomly bumping into verte in York city centre.

The houseofgoth party was fun, although I wasn't in a massively party mood, so once I'd finished wandering the house wishing everybody a happy new year I buried myself in the corner of the quiet room (where all the cool people were :) ).

Below the cut is one of those "what did you do last year" memes, just because.

( Meme thingCollapse )

Current Mood: cheerful

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Court issues drunken, abusive lawyer with ASBO

I hope _sycorax_ is paying attention.

Current Mood: amused

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Give me money!!!!!
I've been meaning to post about this for ages, but my normal scatter-brainedness has made me completely forget.

boobook and I have formed a team for the 2005 ASPIRE Channel Swim. For those averse to link clicking; basically we have to between us swim 22 miles in 12 weeks (from the 12th of September to the 4th of December). That basically boils down to both of us swimming 1.5km (just under a mile) each, per week, for the next twelve weeks*.

The charity in question (ASPIRE) is for people with spinal injuries: they do research into various technologies to make people's lives easier, as well as providing temporary accommodation for people whose homes are being renovated to deal with their new disability. And some other stuff too: click the link if you want details.

Obviously, to do all this takes money, which is where you, the lovely people of my friends list, come in. If you feel like sponsoring me to drown myself by degrees (I used to be a good swimmer, but that was a long time ago, and I've been discovering the hard way that I've forgotten quite a lot of it), I shall probably be around the Beer Festival thing tomorrow (incidentally, there's a beer festival this weekend in Sheffield, starting tonight. thegreatgonzo can tell you more, since, you know, he knows everything about beer).

I may try and set up one of those online thingys; if you really don't want to talk to me but still want to give me money, stick a comment on the post and I'll see how much demand there is.


*Well, it's ten weeks now, but we're on schedule with what we've done so far

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Getting a bit political...
So, there's a whole new anti-terrorist bill type thing about to try and move through Parliament. Lots of people who are much better political commentators than me have already started shredding the 3-month detention without being charged, and the "glorifying terrorism" bit, so I'm going to leave those alone, and concentrate on this one:

( Those applying for British citizenship must be "of good character"Collapse )

Ok, rant over. Feel free to pick big holes in it.

Weekend stuff: I am being cruelly deprived of boobook this weekend. Moo

Saturday will feature me actually doing some exercise: I seem to have foolishly volunteered to do a lot of swimming for charity, which means I shall have to go and re-learn how to swim, since I haven't set foot in a swimming pool for about 7 years. I shall probably be begging for sponsorship money on here at a later date, once I have the forms and stuff.

Sunday will be spent in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where we shall be playing Twilight 2000 :).

And I'll leave you with a couple of links:

For those who don't read elanya, and so haven't seen this: The Lord of the Rings, by S. Morgenstern

And for computer geeks: It gets everywhere

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I'm Alive
So, back in Sheffield, and at work, of which less said the better.

The title is a dual reference: partly to my last post (in which there was fear), and partly a nod to the fact that my corruption of boobook's music taste has now reached the point at which she will voluntarily listen to Helloween tracks.

Anyway, I went away for the weekend, and did ( stuffCollapse )

So that was the weekend.

Quick question for English geeks out there: running the spellchecker over the preceding text had thrown up a spelling error for 'practising' (context for those not reading behind the cut, the phrase is 'practising Christians'). Now, as I recall, 'practise' is the verb and 'practice' is a noun, which would mean that my spelling is correct, but Dictionary.com disagrees with me (of course, it's American, so it's probably wrong). Just wondered if anybody out there who knew more about English than me would like to comment on it.

Anyway, it's just about home time now (this post has taken about 2 1/2 hours to write, although I did have to work a bit, and there was a fire alarm as well), so I'm going to go away. See people later.

Current Mood: hot

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Fear
In a few short hours I shall be travelling to Swindon, where I will meet, for the first time, boobook's parents.

*has the fear*

The "meeting the girlfriend's parents" thing always makes me nervous: I suspect it is because damia1's parents hated me on sight. I, on the other hand, was much more open-minded, and didn't start hating them for months.

Saturday sees me at a wedding in Hythe (there seem to be several of these in England. I'll be in the one that's next door to Southampton). I've met the bride once, and can't even remember the groom's name.

Sunday is coming back to Sheffield, with a stop in Swindon again for Sunday lunch (and further interrogation meeting of the parental types).

Wish me luck...

Current Mood: scared

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Structural failure
Oh, it's been a fun old week for the house.

( Cut because it's long and occasionally descends into computer-y stuffCollapse )

Oh, and as a result of a random discussion elsewhere in LJ-land about how people keep adding random 'k's to the end of words (magick being the primary reference) I ended up here. Trying to read this caused me a great deal of pain.

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I have now seen my new nephew
He is small, and red, and cries a lot, while he isn't eating or sleeping.

So, you know, pretty much a normal baby.

Hopefully he will have developed a basic personality by the next time I see him.

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Mostly for kaickul...
A distraction from work, which I think I promised you in the pub last night.

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Book meme and other things
Have been tagged by the book meme that's been running around, so I'll deal with that now:

( Book-type questionsCollapse )

A couple of links:

I promised somebody a link to the Darth Vader blog: I'd advise downloading the PDF, as it makes it a bit easier to read.

I was going to write something longer about what I've been doing recently: the problem with updating from work is that occasionally you have to actually do some. I'll try to do a quick update another day.

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One day I'll update this thing properly
but today is not that day. I'm only here to post this link for my fellow Dr Who fans.

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The evils of EBay...
Today I discovered that EBay (US version, anyway) has an entire category devoted to swords. This is very bad.

I have restricted myself to bidding on one: a nice shiny cutlass to go with the Jack Sparrow outfit (assuming I ever wear it again...)

I'm not supposed to be spending money. I need to keep telling myself that.

Current Mood: entranced by shiny swords

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Promised link
Just a quick post, mainly aimed at asw909, although other people may find this amusing...

The Happiness of the Katakuris trailer (Quicktime, 9.6Mb). It's a Japanese horror musical, from the man who directed Audition. It looks very silly.

Beyond that: Batfink was ace. More extensive updates may follow, but I think the photos from the evening may reveal a clue as to why I had such a good time :)

Current Mood: happy

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