Initial thoughts on my new Kindle

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I bought my Kindle when I realised that I would be spending somewhere in the region of £200 on books that are part of The Modern Library’s Top 100 list. I figured I could get quite a few of them for free from Project Gutenberg because they’re out of copyright, and I could get the others fairly cheaply because they’re pretty old, and digital media is cheap.

I was wrong.

The prices of ebooks on the Kindle store is bordering on the ridiculous. Most of the books I want were published in the first 3 quarters of the 20th century. You can pick up a second-hand copy at any book store or market for a couple of pounds. You can even buy a copy of some of them from Amazon/eBay for 1 penny (if you don’t mind paying for the postage).

The book I’m reading at the moment is Sophie’s Choice. Amazon’s price list says that a second-hand paperback copy on their marketplace can be bought for £3.05, a new paperback from the marketplace costs £4.27, and a new paperback from Amazon costs £6.99. If you want a digital copy with no associated printing or shipping costs then it’ll cost you £6.64.

I don’t understand how it’s so expensive. I’m not taking up physical copies of the book requiring more to be printed. I’m getting a copy of a digital file. It’s sent to my device automatically by machine. There is no postage, there is no physical storage required in a warehouse somewhere. Does that really only amount to a price difference of 35p?

I’m a little disenchanted by the whole thing, but I do also enjoy owning a Kindle. It is very convenient, and I suppose that’s what I pay for. Also, I suppose the book publishers are the ones who ultimately set the prices and I’d say they’re about as far behind as the music and film industries when it comes to embracing the digital age.

Summer Hours

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This is the first job I’ve had where I (legitimately) get to leave work considerably earlier on a Friday. Sadly it’s only during August, and I have to make the time up during the rest of the week, but today is Friday so let’s not think about the details! 😀

I have a couple of little bits to sort out when I get home, but I should still feel a considerable benefit. If the sun stays how it is now then I might even head up to the roof terrace to read my book and drink a beer. Having said that I’ve already realised that what I will probably do instead is close the curtains, switch the PS3 on and sit on the sofa until Cheryl comes back and yells at me. 😉

Transformers, Harry Potter, Submarine, Zookeeper

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I watch a lot of films. If you don’t already know that about me then you probably don’t know me very well at all and I wonder why you’re reading my blog. 😛

Cheryl and I used to go to the cinema between 4 and 10 times a month when we were in Nottingham so it’s been a bit strange not to go very often while we’ve been in London. Over the last couple of weeks we’ve had quite a few visits to various cinemas though and it’s been quite nice.

We went to see Transformers 3 at Paramount’s office in Chiswick and they gave us free drinks and pizza before the film. That was pretty awesome. The film wasn’t too bad either, if you forget about the acting of a certain member of the cast.

Earlier this week we went to Cineworld in the O2 to watch the final instalment of Harry Potter with Dan, Fran, and Hannah. Most of the film was pretty good. A few bits seemed a bit lame, or funny, or just awkward, and then at the end it flashed up with “19 years later” and Dan I looked at each other with a look that said “what the hell?” The last few minutes basically made me come away with a worse impression of the film. it was completely unnecessary.

Yesterday Cheryl and I went to see a screening of Submarine at the Charlotte Street hotel near Tottenham Court Road. After the film–which is brilliant–we took part in a Q&A with the writer/director Richard Ayoade. That was really cool. I’d never taken part in something like that before so it was pretty exciting to be there. Richard Ayoade was very self-deprecating during the whole thing, which is how I think I would be if I ever became famous. I spent the entire Q&A session thinking whether I should ask him the stupid question I’d come up with or not. I went with it for the last question of the night: “how deep is the ocean?” If you’ve not seen the film then you won’t get why that’s funny. Everyone in the room laughed though, so my worries about nobody getting it were baseless. 🙂

Next week we’re going to Sony’s cinema to watch Zookeeper. I’ve not heard a great deal about it, but I’m hoping it’s good. Definitely looking forward to the refreshments. 🙂

Tube Tales

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One of the best and worst things about living in London is the massive underground system. Developed during the Cambrian age to transport the smaller dinosaurs to their offices palaeontologists maintain that the tunnels of the London underground system hold significant scientific value and are currently excavating several sites during the weekends.

But seriously, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the tube. It’s usually very impressive; there are frequent trains running on time to basically everywhere I could possibly want to go. It’s only when it goes wrong that I hate it. It’s not often, but when it happens it has a huge impact on everything because it’s only then that I realise how much I rely on it.

The people I encounter on the tube are a constant source of, well, mostly fear, but sometimes also amusement. I got on the District Line at Ealing Broadway yesterday with my colleague Rob. We got on and saw that the carriage was almost full, but there were 3 empty seats with a man sitting on the fourth by himself. We sat opposite him suspecting nothing. I looked up and noticed that the girl behind him and the guy opposite her were looking at me and laughing. At first I thought I had something on my face, or my hair sticking up or something like that. It’s quite disconcerting having strangers laughing at you and not knowing why. A few seconds later I learned the source of their delight. The guy we’d sat opposite started moving his head closer and closer to me, staring, trying to make eye contact. He kept repeating “Hello…. Hello…” and I avoided his uncomfortable attention. I ended up closing my eyes and resting my head in my hand. I could hear him still saying hello every few seconds for the rest of the journey, and when I dared to open my eyes I could see the people behind him laughing at me. I’ve never been so pleased to get off a train in my entire life.

This morning I got on the train with Cheryl as usual. I got all the way to Green Park without a hitch and then the driver announced that Bond Street was closed due to overcrowding. I got off at Green Park and waited for the next train after it was announced that Bond Street was open again. There wasn’t enough room to get on, so I waited another couple of minutes for the next train. I got on and the driver announced that the train was only going as far as White City. I decided to get off at Queensway rather than White City so that I could get on the train behind before everyone else did at White City. That plan went well enough and I got a seat before the train got crowded, but then the driver announced that the train was terminating at North Acton. That’s not a huge problem because that’s where I work, but it means that the train had to wait 5 minutes for another train to pull out of the middle platform and then I had to walk up the stairs and over the bridge to get out. I was 15 minutes later to work than usual. Not impressed.

EPIC WIN at the BBC

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I got an email about being in the audience for the recording of a TV show called EPIC WIN. I booked two tickets so that Cheryl could come along with me.

The BBC building

The BBC building

I’d never been to a TV recording before, so I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. The evening began with meeting Cheryl at White City tube station near the BBC building. We wandered over to the queue outside the building at about 6pm, and within about 15 minutes we were inside the BBC cafeteria. We queued up in the cafeteria and bought the last remaining baguette to eat between us, some crisps, and some water to take into the studio. One we’d finished eating we queued up a third time to be taken through to the studio.

We were shown to some seats in the smoky studio with hundreds of lights on the ceiling and stars hanging down as part of the set. We sat there for a little while as everyone else found their way to a seat and then the floor manager, Rob, told us that we would be listening to a warm-up guy from Manchester whose name I seem to have forgotten (Carl?). He was pretty camp, and a little bit strange. He was basically Paul O’Grady in pantomime mode. 🙂

We were all told about how to sit and to keep smiling, and to always overreact to everything. If something is remotely funny then give it a big laugh. It was a bit stupid really, but oh well.

The show itself is basically a panel of future celebrity reality TV stars with Alexander Armstrong hosting it. They bring in people from around the country with various talents that are basically useless. The person performs their talent in the form of a challenge. If they succeed then they are an EPIC WINNER, if they fail then they have to leave via the EPIC FAIL door. If they succeed in the challenge the panel rates how much they think the talent is worth from £1 to £1000 each. The contestants are then given a buzzer to press when they think the amount of money their talent is worth is up on the board. If they buzz too early they get less than their talent is worth, if they buzz too late then they get nothing.

One contestant was a butcher who could tell what a meat was only using his feet. The second was a man who could pour a bottle of champagne using a digger (with a special modification added on). The third was a lady who has changed her name to Sharon Johnette Travolta on John Travolta’s birthday and could identify the name of a movie based on John Travolta’s hairline. The fourth and final person was a guy named Robin Wood who used a chainsaw to make cutlery and a bowl out of a tree trunk while also cooking a stir fry…

Pretty weird show. I’m not convinced it’ll be particularly amazing, but I certainly get the impression that it’s the kind of thing you might catch being repeated at 2am after a few drinks and decide to watch. I could be wrong though because I haven’t seen the properly edited version. 🙂

Silverstone

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I’ve been a follower of F1 for many years now. I started out watching it at my dad’s house on a Sunday. I grew up with the voices of Murray Walker and Martin Brundle on the weekends. The Chain by Fleetwood Mac always signalled the beginning of next few hours of fun.

I stopped watching F1 for quite a few years after the coverage moved to ITV. I hated having the adverts, I disliked the change of staff. The BBC has got it right in the last few years. I have become a proper fan again. To cement my fandom I have finally attended my first ever race.

6AM has never felt as early as Sunday morning. Cheryl and I had rather stupidly spent the night at a party and only managed to get 4 or 5 hours of sleep before having to get up to catch a train. Parts of the tube were surprisingly busy any shoulders began to ache before we’d even got off the first train thanks to having to stand for the journey.

We arrived at Euston station about 10 to 8. We got the tickets and then sat around waiting for other people to show up. Everyone JonP, Emma, Rachael, and Stephanie showed up at around 8:10 and the train pulled into the station a couple of minutes later. We all got on board and 4 of us went one way and Emma and JonP went the other. Oops.

The train to Northampton is basically the slowest train on the face of the planet. The fact that it was delayed by 20 minutes didn’t help it seem any faster.

When we got to Northampton we decided that a taxi would be better than the shuttle bus. The shuttle bus would come to £14 return for each of us and the taxis would come out to only a little bit more when split 6 ways. The taxi dropped us off just outside an entrance and we were all pleased to finally be in the right place. We all got our tickets out and walked through the gate and we were in!

Silverstone from Vale

Silverstone from Vale

Dave and Hayley were already there so we decided it would make sense to go and meet them at Vale. We walked down along the side of the straight while a Porsche race was going on. There was a brief stop so that people could buy merchandise, and then we carried on to Vale. We picked a place and walked onto the grass. We eventually decided on a place to sit and put our stuff down. Literally 2 seconds later we turned around because Dave and Hayley were calling us from about 5 metres away. Pretty good positioning. 🙂

Cheryl and I set up our chairs and everyone else got settled on the floor. That was when we first noticed that there were spiders and greenfly everywhere! Cheryl was not very happy with this, but there wasn’t really anything we could do about it. At least we weren’t on the floor.

The Red Arrows turned up after a few minutes and performed a pretty awesome show for everyone. I completely failed to get a decent picture of one of the arrows as it flew over, but oh well. Hardly surprising when they’re moving so quickly!

Towards the end of the Red Arrows’ show it began to rain. Cheryl and I moved our seats closer together and huddled under a big umbrella to keep the rain off us. Sadly the umbrella wasn’t quite as wide as both of our seats, so we both had a wet side of the seat to contend with. The rain didn’t last very long, and then the sun came back out and helped dry off the seats, but parts of the track remained wet. JonP was very happy about this.

People generally just stood around chatting or went to buy drinks and stuff like that before the first F1 cars came around. I was expecting them to be a lot louder than they were because of a warning from JonP. Don’t get me wrong, they were very loud, but I think we were quite lucky in our placement. They were loudest after they’d gone through the corners and had moved quite a distance away from us.

The whole race went by pretty quickly for me. It was interesting trying to keep up with what was going on as the cars came by us on the track so we were very pleased that there was a big screen that we could watch to keep apprised of events on other parts of the track.

The best bit of the whole event was watching Hamilton and Massa fighting for position at the very end of the final lap. They went by us side by side and stayed that way as far as we could see until Massa went wide onto the straight to let Hamilton through. The crowd all jumped up and down and cheered. It was pretty awesome. 🙂

After the race the track was opened up to everyone. Cheryl and I stayed with everyone’s bags and jackets while everyone else ran onto the track with the crowd. Some of them came back for their stuff a little while later and we went down onto the track to meet up with the others. It was pretty cool to be standing on a track I remember driving around on so many computer games over the years, and a track where, a few minutes earlier, F1 cars had been driving around at a couple of hundred miles per hour.

The F1 Gang

The F1 Gang

We walked up the new start/finish straight along the new “wing” of Silverstone and had a couple of big group photos taken. We carried on heading towards the after-show events off to the side of the end of the straight. Before we got there Dave and Hayley decided they were going to get going home. I think they were both pretty knackered, and Dave still had blisters from when he was walking around London the weekend before, so more walking seemed like a bad plan for them. Sadly I heard they got stuck in quite a lot of traffic and it took them hours to get home.

The remaining group sat around for a few hours watching bungee jumpers jump from a crane. One man even did it naked, which was… interesting.

We watched David Coulthard up on stage for a little while. He was really funny. A hell of a lot more 18-rated than he is on the BBC!

It began to get cloudy and windy so once the girls had finished eating we all headed over to where the buses and taxis were. At first the taxi driver told us he couldn’t take us, but then he asked if we could pay £50. When we said we could he changed his tune and we all piled into his car.

He spent the first 5 minutes of the drive texting one one of his 3 mobile phones. I was not very impressed by that. If someone is being paid £50 to drive for 20 minutes the least they could do is avoid breaking the law in a dangerous manner while doing so.

We didn’t have a long wait for the train at Northampton station and we managed to get 6 seats together on the train. That’s when things got silly. We were all really tired and so we had a serious case of the giggles. Everything everyone said was funny, and there was usually no reason for it. It was a long journey to Euston station!

Once we’d got to Euston we separated ways with Emma and JonP and went down to the northern line where they somehow caught up with us again and we parted ways with Stephanie and Rachael.

We waited for the train to turn up for a couple of minutes and then a random drunk guy walked through the crowd and stood directly in front of Cheryl at the front of the platform. We didn’t say anything because it’s not worth it. He was rocking backwards and forwards on his feet while he stood there, so we knew he was wasted. The train arrived and he made sure nobody got in front of him. We got ready to get on behind him and as soon as the door opened he put one foot forward and tripped over into the crowded train. He was sprawled out on the ground with his jeans pulled half way down his ass by the trip.

We managed not to laugh, but I caught the eye of some of the other passengers in the carriage and they found it as funny as me. A few seconds later the train set off and the door between carriages came flying open right beside me. Everyone looked at it and then looked at me like I’d done something. Obviously the drunk guy had knocked the handle as he was falling or something. The guy got off at the next stop and the rest of the journey home was very uneventful.

That’s the story of Silverstone!

New house

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This is something like the 8000th post on this blog about having moved to a new house. Hopefully it’ll be the last one for quite a while!

Cheryl and I have moved into an awesome new apartment in Canada Water. We’ve got a large amount of stuff sorted now and it’s already starting to feel like home. It makes me happy every time I get home, or wake up in the morning. It’s way more awesome than anywhere I’ve ever lived before, which is reflected in the rent, but oh well. I think I can manage it, and eventually it should get easier.

We’ve still got things to buy to make it better, and things to do with stuff we’ve already bought, but nothing show-stopping.

I’m really looking forward to having some time off work that I can spend in the house when it’s ready. The weekends and evenings just aren’t long enough! 🙂

4 days to go, London so far

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In 4 days we’ll be moving into the new apartment. Everything’s still on target. The flooring and furniture stuff should all be sorted by now. The payment is going through in the next 2 days, and come Friday at 4pm we will be getting keys! 😀

It seems like a good time to reflect on how the move to London has been so far.

I’ve complained a lot about sleeping on an inflatable mattress for the last month and a bit. It hasn’t really been too bad, but I am definitely looking forward to a nice comfortable bed!

We’ve been to quite a lot of places. Most of them have been fairly cheap or free, thankfully. There’s so much going on in London that we can’t come close to seeing everything we want to. I’m really looking forward to having nice reliable weather (come on global warming!) so that it’s easier to plan more stuff.

Work has been going pretty well, and I finally feel a bit more like I’m settling in with everything. I feel more comfortable saying I’ve finished code, and I don’t worry so much when it’s being reviewed. I think that will help me write better code in the long run. There are big differences in going from a small development team to a very large one, and from one system to another, but it’s nothing I can’t handle and get on with after some experience.

It’s been really nice to get a chance to hang out with JonP and Emma a bunch more than usual. It’s good to do some proper hanging out with old friends, and I’ve known Emma and JonP for longer than anyone I’m not related to. Longer than most of the people I am related to, in fact.

Of course I miss having my family and other friends around a bit, but they’re not that far away and I should be able to go up and visit fairly easily when I’m completely settled. Of course, they will be able to come down to stay then too. 😀