Monthly Archives: April 2011

Tim Curry and a ten pound note

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday was the day of the royal wedding. Emma and JonP had organised a bit of an event at their house to celebrate. Cheryl and I headed over there between 10 and 11 in the morning. When we got on the train at Stratford two girls got on behind us and we heard them ask “does this train go to Pudding Mill Lane (nearest stop to Emma and JonP).

We got off the train at that stop, and so did the girls. We all walked along Pudding Mill Lane alongside the Olympic entrance. A guy walked by us on the way.

We got to the entrance of the building and the girls and the guy were at the entrance too. We heard the guy asking the girls if it was George Hudson Tower, but they didn’t know, so we told him that it was and then we all went through the gate together. We all got in the front door together and then all got in the lift together. When we were all in one of the girls pressed the button for the 19th floor. It was at that point that I decided to ask “are we all going to the same place?” Quite surprisingly we were! 🙂

It turned out that we’d briefly met the girls, Vicky and Florence, at a club in London for Florence’s birthday a few weeks before. The guy, Mikey, was a friend of Emma’s but we’d apparently not met before.

JonP had prepared scones with clotted cream and jam for everyone, and there were several bottles of champagne. It felt a bit weird to be drinking before 11am, but it was a celebration.

Another couple of Emma’s friends turned up (Ellie and Jo) a little bit after the rest of us and we had a little wedding party thing going. I wasn’t planning on having anything to do with the royal wedding, so I was quite surprised to find myself watching it on TV all the time. I guess it’s just the kind of spectacle that it’s hard to ignore.

After Prince William and Kate Middleton-William-Arthur-Philip-Louis-Windsor had kissed they were waiting for the flyover by the RAF. JonP kept saying to look out to see if we could see the planes going by the building. A minute or so later JonP spotted them and we all went outside to watch them fly past on their way to the palace. A few seconds later a second set of planes flew by. We went back inside as they reached the palace. It was so weird to see stuff happening knowing how close we were to it. 🙂

People started to leave Emma and JonP’s apartment after a little while and Emma went for a nap. JonP kept drinking the champagne, enjoying the bubbles. He was quite drunk after a while, so we had a rather interesting conversation about politics, immigrations, and various other things (including his “well-fed” girlfriend).

When Emma got up we decided we would go to Jamie’s Italian restaurant in Canary Wharf. We met back up with Ellie and went in. The food there is really delicious and I am sure we will go again.

After dinner we headed to SoHo to enjoy the street party atmosphere. On the way to one of Emma and Ellie’s friends’ houses we walked right past Tim Curry! I made eye contact and realised it was him, but I didn’t want to bother him, so I just walked past and then Cheryl and I turned to each other with a look that said “holy crap, that was Tim Curry leaning on a wall!” He’s the first famous person I’ve seen in London. 😀

Literally about a minute later I was stepping from the pavement into the road and I spotted a £10 note folded up in the road. It was basically the best 60 seconds of the entire day. 😀

The rest of the night was spent drinking in various places around SoHo. The last place we went to was this little basement bar about the size of the cellar at my mum’s house. It had a Staffordshire Bull Terrier walking around the place and lots of posters of boxers, members of the mafia (mafiosa?), and musicians. The music was mostly from the 1950s to the 1970s and it was a really cool place. It cost £1 to get in and 4 drinks came to less than £15 (good compared to everywhere else I’ve been in London).

We managed to catch one of the last tube trains back to St. Paul’s tube station and walked back the rest of the way from there. It was a really good day. 🙂

Moved to London

Posted on by
Reply

Blimey, I’ve had a busy few days!

Cheryl came up to Nottingham last weekend to help me get the last of our things packed so that it was clear for me to move down with her. We spent a bunch of time sorting out our things and putting them in boxes and suitcases. I also had to sort out a whole bunch of things for the house I’m renting out on Crown Street because of a bunch of annoying plumbing stuff. I also spent a while seeing friends and family, and a few of my (now former) colleagues.

I didn’t really feel the same sense of everything being done for the last time that I felt before I moved to California, but I was a bit sad to see things for the last time out of a taxi window on the way to the train station.

The first day in London was Tuesday. It was fairly late when we got to St. Pancras so we just caught a taxi to the apartment and spent the night unpacking and getting ready to sleep in the lovely single bed.

On Wednesday we decided to go out and be tourists for a day. We needed a destination so I randomly picked Little Ben and we set off for a walk. We walked for about 3 hours or so and managed to see St. Paul’s Cathedral (about 5 minutes from the apartment), walk along the Thames, see Big Ben, Westminster Abbey complete with idiots in tents for the royal wedding, and then finally Little Ben! 🙂 It was a really nice day, and I believe I got a bit sunburned.

St. Paul's Cathedral

Little Ben

We went back out a little bit after getting back from the walk to pick up some pillows, pillow cases, and a blanket for the inflatable mattress I brought along with me.

I inflated the mattress when I got back and sorted out all the other bedding stuff. The blanket turned out to be a bit too small, and the fricking mattress decided to deflate during the night. I woke up at least 3 times and gave up on “camping” at about 5am. I got into the single bed with Cheryl and a short while later she got out and slept on the mostly-deflated mattress. I told her not to, but a single bed is not a comfortable place for two people.

A short while later we woke up and started to make plans for the day. Cheryl wanted to make sure that we got a drying rack for the laundry, so we reserved one from Argos near Old Street. They offered to deliver it within 90 minutes for about £5 or so. As tempting and awesome as that was we decided to go and pick it up ourselves. Before we could pick that up from Argos we had to go and look at some furniture in a show home so that we could pick things for the new apartment (currently expected to be complete in June).

When we found the Argos on Old Street we were both pretty hungry, so we went to a pub and grabbed some lovely food. While we were sitting there a NAVTEQ car stopped at the lights beside us with a camera mounted on the top and this weird bit revolving constantly. So I assume that means Google Maps for London will be updated soon. Cheryl and I were sitting in the pub by the side of Bunhill Row near Old Street. 🙂

We bought the drying rack from Argos, and I also bought a new blanket and cover for it so that I could sleep better. Then we headed home and watched Stargate SG-1 for a couple of hours. 😀

Lasts

Posted on by
2

I’m contemplating lasts today.

This is my last Monday working at Heart Internet. Tomorrow, however, is not my last Tuesday. Wednesday and Thursday are my last Wednesdays and Thursdays here. My last Friday was last week. Weird how things work out. 🙂

Prague

Posted on by
Reply

The other week I went on my first holiday with Cheryl. It was also my first holiday with Dave and Hayley. Here is a bit of a run-down of how the whole thing went.

On Wednesday I finished work at 5pm and went back to Cheryl’s to get everything ready. We left the flat in the evening and caught a bus to Mansfield so we could stay at Dave and Hayley’s house. We had a bit of food while we were there and the drinking got underway too.

We woke up early on Thursday and got ready nice and quickly. We set off on the way to the airport at 8:56 and got as far as Glapwell before turning around and going back because Dave forgot his coat(!) and Hayley forgot her toothbrush (Chris Evans would not be impressed). We set off for on the way to the airport at around 9:20-something and didn’t have to turn around again. The journey there was fairly easy. There were a few moments where I thought Hayley was going to have a heart attack as lorries closed us in a horrible moving tunnel of death, and Dave was going to have a heart attack because of Hayley, but it wasn’t so bad.

The car was parked in a big car park and we caught a bus to the terminal. We went through security and stuff and then sat down for some food. We thought we had plenty of time, but within a couple of minutes of them announcing which gate we should go to they were giving the final call. We ran the last part of the way to the gate only to find the doors weren’t even open and we were at the back of a huge queue.

Once we’d gone through the regular hassle of getting on a bus to be taken 40 metres to the plane we got on and found that people had taken all of the space in the overhead lockers. My bag ended up at the other end of the plane, Dave and Hayley had theirs somewhere in the middle, and Cheryl’s had to go into the hold. I could go on about how this wouldn’t be an issue if they didn’t charge so much to bring a case in what must often be a 75% empty luggage compartment, but I won’t.

The flight was pretty short, which is a good thing because the seat was not very comfortable. I managed to fall asleep for a few minutes and when I woke up my neck ached because of the rubbish seat.

When we got to Prague airport we had to wait a couple of minutes for Cheryl to get through the passport check point because the person she was being served by didn’t know if a visa was required, but we all knew it wasn’t. While Cheryl was waiting on the other side of the barrier Dave grabbed her bag from the carousel and then we pretended we were still waiting for it when Cheryl joined us. It took her a few seconds to notice that Dave was holding it.

We left the airport nice and quickly and stepped out into the freezing cold Czech day to find a taxi into the city. We got one at the front of the queue and started the last part of our journey. The view from the taxi was quite bland and grim-looking, but I guess that’s what it looks like when your country is freezing cold for 6 months of the year (even more than England!).

We checked in at the hotel, found our rooms, and set down our bags. It was nice not to have to pull them around any more.

After a little while we got ready, took some of our money, and headed into the city under cover of darkness. We were half way to the National Museum when Dave decided to cross the road in front of 3 or 4 lanes of traffic just as they started to move. He ran and the rest of us stayed on the pavement like normal people. We walked a bit down the road, crossed safely, then walked back to the end again and continued the journey to the museum. It looked absolutely awesome with all the lights on it and we took some pictures before realising it was too cold to just stand there.

We walked back towards the hotel for a minute and decided to go into a hotel/restaurant called Mušketýr. It was set mostly underground and was nice and dark with a really warm log fire. We had some drinks and some nice food and then decided we should move on to another place because it was a bit quiet and we were a bit loud.

Then I got bored of writing this blog post and got busy with moving to London and completely couldn’t be bothered to write it any more, so instead I posted another incomplete post about a holiday. I’ll include the random list of things that I was going to write about so that you can fill in some of the very exciting gaps for yourself.

Rocky O’Reilly’s
Singing along with Liverpool fans
Astronomical clock + old square
Little garden place just off the square with weird statues
Hard Rock Cafe
Tacky tourist shops
Book shop
New Yorker
Van Graaf
Zoo + shit restaurant
Chillis
Stags Russian dolls
Restaurant near the hotel
Strip club
Museum
The Pub
Mr. Krakoviel (crack a feel) missing the flight

That was easy.

George Takei keeps me awake at night

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve had a headache for most of the day and so I should really be sleeping now so I can get up in time for the F1 qualifying session at 6am, but instead I am writing a blog post about George Takei.

The reason for my annoyance is actually his annoyance. He has posted on Twitter a couple of times since I started following him about how the new Akira movie is not including any Japanese actors in the lead roles, despite the original Akira movie being Japanese.

My knee-jerk reaction was to agree with his disdain, but then I thought about it for a few seconds and completely changed my mind. Different countries remake movies or TV shows in their own languages with their own casts all the time. Did George Takei complain that the fairly recent Italian Job film featured very few English actors and was mostly set in L.A.? Is he complaining about the upcoming Bollywood remake of the same film not containing English or American actors? No. Of course not.

It makes complete sense to cast people who are from the country in which the movie is being produced. Stop feeling so targeted, it’s nothing personal.

E.ON and npower suck

Posted on by
6

I don’t care how stupidly the electricity providers have decided to spell their names any more. I’m more annoyed by spending over 2 hours on the phone to the idiots over a fairly simple problem.

Cheryl, Tsomo, and I moved in here back in September. Cheryl got our meter number from the building manager (they’re locked away in a room downstairs) and gave it to npower after going through the process of swapping with uswitch. We’ve been paying them by direct debit since then without any issues whatsoever.

On the 11th Tsomo answered the door to receive a hand-delivered letter from E.ON addressed simply to “customer”. The letter informed us that we owed them £705.86 plus £30 for the cost of hand-delivering this letter to us. We were all quite surprised by this.

The letter didn’t mention our names at all, so we were a little suspicious of that. It did, however, contain an account number. It was at this point that we remembered that we’d been receiving mail for a Miss Mi and Mr. Gao who used to live here. Among some of the mail we had sent back marked “Not At This Address” were many letters from E.ON. Obviously we didn’t go around opening mail addressed to other people… Until today. We had a letter for Mr. Gao that we hadn’t put back in the letter box, so we decided to open it. Sure enough the account numbers matched.

I called E.ON to explain the situation, and it was very confusing. I got a bunch of details from a lady there who wanted to get the initial meter reading so that she could set up an account and charge us the right amount from the date we moved in. At this point it seemed like npower would just be able to give us a refund or whatever. Then I began to think of why we switched from E.ON in the first place. npower was cheaper, so why should we have to go with E.ON?

I called npower and explained the situation again. The lady there told me that it seemed there were two entries for our address in the national database. E.ON were charging us (or Mr. Gao) for one and npower were charging us for the other. There were two different meter numbers even though we’d only ever given npower the same one E.ON claimed to be the provider of.

My conversation with npower ended with the lady telling me that the account had been frozen for now and that there would be an investigation into the mix-up and that they would be back in touch with us on the 13th… of JULY! By that point I don’t think any of us will actually be living here any more, so I explained that, but it didn’t seem to interest her very much.

I called E.ON again to explain that there were 2 entries in the database, and to make sure that they wouldn’t cut us off or fit a prepayment meter for the time being. Sadly I got through to a different person because the first lady I spoke to had gone home or something. I explained the situation again (third time) and the new lady did some more investigating and gave me two supplier numbers and told me that I needed to call the National Grid, find out which one was being provided by E.ON and cancel it.

She gave me a number for National Grid. I called it and got a very unpleasant response from the lady who answered. E.ON had given me the gas leak emergency number. The lady hung up, and I felt a bit angry.

I called E.ON for the third time and explained the situation briefly. The third lady there gave me a different number to call National Grid on. It was half way through the automated part of this second call to National Grid that I realised they only deal with gas meters. I hung up before wasting any more of their time and called E.ON for the fourth time.

A guy answered the phone and I had to explain the entire situation again (third time to E.ON, fourth time total) and then he put me on hold to do his own investigating. He told me that the problem was because the previous tenant hadn’t closed their account or paid their bill before they left. He asked if I could try to get a forwarding address for Mr. Gao from the landlord/letting agency. I highly doubt he left one with them when there are £700 bills waiting for him, but we’ll see.

Thanks a fucking bunch Mr. Gao. You appear to have vanished from the flat without paying your debts, and in doing so you have wasted hours of my time. You absolute bastard. I hope you keep in mind that now you’ve caused lots of stress and several hours of my life I will think nothing of devoting a few more hours to finding you, tracking you down, and punching you in the face (or reporting you to the police, E.ON, your bank where you have an unpaid overdraft, and any other interesting places who are still sending you mail that I will now be reading).

Dick.

Birthdays

Posted on by
Reply

I guess I know I’m getting old because for the last few days I’ve been forgetting it’s almost my birthday. Today, in fact, I have had the occasional message come as a bit of a surprise. I’m 27 now, and that’s scarily close to 30. *shudder*

One thing I’ve noticed more and more over the last few years is that birthdays have changed. I remember many birthdays when family members came to visit, or called if they couldn’t make it, and “happy birthday” was the first thing someone said to you when you met them.

So far today I have had 2 people say happy birthday to me in person. Len and Tsomo were both there and awake after midnight last night, so they said happy birthday to me. Since then I have received somewhere in the region of 18 posts on my Facebook wall, 6 people have sent me a text, 3 random companies have sent me an email because I’ve entered my DOB on their sites in the past, but nobody has said anything to me in person. It’s very strange.

I guess it could just be because I’m at work, I live quite far from almost everyone I know, and I haven’t arranged any sort of birthday celebration… That’s probably a large part of it, but I still think Facebook and mobile phones have a large part to play in it.

Cheryl’s gone to London, 1700th post

Posted on by
Reply

Cheryl set off for London earlier this afternoon. It seems quite strange. So far I’ve spent most of the time at my mum’s house so it’s not really had much chance to sink in, but I’m sure it will when I wake up tomorrow, and when I get back from work and stuff.

I guess all that’s left now is a few more weeks of work, and a whole bunch of packing/moving and I’ll be off to London too. Then only a few weeks after that we’ll get to move everything once again and end up in the new house in Canada Water. I really can’t wait for that.

This is the 1700th post to my blog since I started it back in January 2003. That’s quite a lot of writing. A fairly big history to be able to go back and read. It’s mostly only interesting to me though. 🙂

I’ve been aiming to blog a bit more over the last week or so. I kinda got out of the habit some time in the last couple of years. I seem to have written a bunch of entries about programming and stuff. Those will probably carry on, but I would also quite like to go back to using my blog how I used to when it started.

Comic Sans

Posted on by
1

I decided that what the world really needs is more Comic Sans. I’m sick of having to read Facebook in another font. So, with that in mind I made a bookmarklet that I can click to change all text on a page to be in Comic Sans. 😀

If you drag this Comic Sans link to your bookmarks toolbar and press it on any page you will be able to view the web how it should be at the click of a button.

Enjoy. 🙂

Things changing

Posted on by
Reply

This morning I hugged a very sleepy Cheryl before I left the flat as I have done 5 days a week for the last few months. It wasn’t until I was half way to work that I realised it’s probably the last time I’ll do that.

On Sunday Cheryl is leaving for London and her new job. I will be heading down there in about 4 weeks, so we will be together again fairly soon, but Cheryl will be getting up to go to work at around the same time as me. It’s weird when something like that changes. It really drives home how big the upcoming changes are.

I remember writing a fairly similar (but more emo) entry about a similar thing almost 6 years ago.

I am looking forward to all the new things, but it’s very easy to get distracted by all the old things.