One Man's Notes

Sainsbury's Stripes

Silly phone grab while out shopping


Beware: Doctor in Distress

Who Cares - Doctor In Distress

Warning: here be the worst of the 80s. This is a music video calling for the return of Dr Who after it was put on hiatus.


The management accepts no responsibility for damage to sanity or taste inflicted on viewers of this 80s horror.


More quarters please...

The only video games that stick in my mind from my childhood were The Hobbit and Stargate, on the good old ZX Spectrum. Ah, those were the days, text adventures and blocky action games.

My favourite game now is, unavoidably, World of Warcraft.


Go, Ravens, go!


Number one with a bullet

When I was born, Rod Stewart's Maggie May was Top of the Pops (ho ho). It's a pretty good song, and certainly beats the Slade track that replaced it the following day...

When I turned 21, End of the Road by Boyz II Men "topped" the "hit parade". It was the only No. 1 from that year I have no memory of - at all.


Weekend Plans

This weekend, I went to sell books at a charity fund-raising event in Suffolk. I spent Sunday browsing a food fair. More on my other blog.


Commute


Something afoot at mansion house


The soundtrack to my life

In all likelyhood an odd, unpredictable selection of mainly mainstream stuff, that would all clash really badly with each other and make the soundtrack album unsellable.

I have a really odd taste in music. It's eclectic enough that people will see albums they love and hate sat next to each other happily.


My desk, Monday afternoon


Mother-in-law

Barbara Ebersole

Duck! Test!

Orderly Ducks

A quick test of Vox's new Flickr intergration.


My weekend plans...

This weekend, I shall mainly be painting the kitchen, doing some writing and generally tidying up the flat.

I'm so dynamic.


Over the bridge

A quick movie, captured on my camera on London’s Millennium Bridge last Thursday.


From my walk home


In my head tonight

Maneater
Nelly Furtado

Seriously stuck in my head right now.


World cup in the office


England vrs Trinidad & Tobago

My brother's showing off by texting me this picture from the match…


Review: A Hunger Like Fire

I finally got around to reading this book over the weekend. In common with so many books I own, it's been sitting on my shelf, unread, for over a year.

First up, a disclaimer: I've worked alongside the author on several projects for the same publisher as this book.

That said, Stolze is one of the best writers they have, and the prose he produces is always readable, and often rises well above the rather mediocre median for the game fiction world. In this book in particular, you can see him playing with themes in a way that's better suited to far more serious fiction than this piece of, with the best will in the world, lightweight reading. The plot, such as it is, chugs along at an enjoyable pace and the characters are far richer than you normally find in this form of writing.

The downside is that this is very evidently the first novel in a series. It doesn't really hang together as a narrative it its own right. While there is a distinct plot arc that is resolved, there are many others that are clearly just gearing up by the time the book ends.

Still, an enjoyable enough read for all of that.


Piers

One of my fellow hacks.

Piers and the coke can

Vox Off

Finally, my login problems have been solved and, I discover, not only can I login, but I can now post. How very exciting.

The posting interface is really clean and easy to use, and I'm seriously looking forward to experimenting with the media options.

But right now, I should be writing a feature, so I'll get back to that...


Animation Corner

A stupid, yet fun, cartoon for anyone who has ever used AOL or been called by a parent about a computer problem:

Dad vrs AOL


Duck

Some people have asked if the “rubber duck” mentioned in my description of my stay in Edinburgh was, in fact, a real rubber duck. Some even suggested that it was a euphemism for something.

Duck

No, it was a duck all right.


Conclusion

My trip is all but done. I’m sat in the departures lounge of Edinburgh airport, enjoying a nice, chilled Diet Coke and preparing for the flight home. I’m not the world’s best flyer. As a child, flying was an experience that I loved. Watching the houses dwindle away beneath me was something I looked forward to seeing. As I’ve got older, though, I’ve become more and more nervous. These days I have to fight down the panic when taking off, and take the time to clam myself if we hit a patch of turbulence.

I’m not sure why this has happened. Lorna has suggested that the older one gets, the more one feels one has to lose if an accident happened. Perhaps. I would put it down to the slight hypochondria and fear of death I developed during my Dad’s illness last year, except that I know I felt this way when we went to Copenhagen and Malta. That said, I remember the flight to New York being OK.

It is, officially, a mystery.


Redemption

OK. The Apex European Hotel wins back a little respect. That was one of the best breakfasts I’ve had in a hotel in a long while.

Mmm. Haggis.


Aggravation

The adders, on the whole, is a placid beast, not much given to anger or annoyance. He sails through life, letting idiots and their actions wash over him, while he goes about his business. Tonight, circumstances have contrived to vex the adders and he is far from happy about it.

That’s quite enough of talking about myself in the third person. That way lies madness or politics, and neither of those appeals to me right now. I’m in the middle of a brief working trip to Scotland. It’s just an overnight thing: go up there, spend a night in a hotel, do an interview, catch a flight back. The usual features writer’s trip, in fact. So far, so good.

The first thing I forgot was the fact that if you fly Easyjet at odd times, you fly surrounded by scum. Easyjet is generally great. Most of the time, it’s a cost efficient way of getting yourself from point A to point B without having to actually touch any of the ground between those two points. Fly during the day, and you fly surrounded by canny, cost-conscious businessmen. Fly late at night, on the other hand, and you fly surrounded by scum.

I don’t like the word “scum”: it’s pejorative and condescending. However, the people who shared the plane with me deserved it. For a start, there were the two geniuses who managed to stop a lift at one floor for the best part of five minutes by repeatedly pressing the button for the floor they were on and swearing when the lift doors didn’t shut. The group of foul-smelling, foul-mouthed Scots gentlemen waiting to board next to me were worthy recipients of the epithet as well.

Still, we got to Scotland in one piece, and I jumped in a cab bound for my hotel. Or, at least, what I thought was going to be my hotel. No, they informed me, there was a problem with the air conditioning in my room (air conditioning? This is Edinburgh, not Florida) and I would have to be transfered to their European hotel, some distance away. Well, possibly. There then followed an amount of confusion as to whether the European Hotel had any rooms to spare for the displaced International Hotel customers. Finally, a taxi was summoned and I made my way to my new hotel, some distance from both the original and tomorrow’s meeting.

I settled into the room, with its suspiciously canine odour, and decided to check my e-mail before bed. Could I get online? Could I hell. Could I get an outside line? Could I hell. I called reception to enquire about this little problem, causing the receptionist to have a panic attack, based on the sounds on the other end of the phone. He squeaked something about getting me another room (errr…aren’t you rather short of those?) and promised to call me back. In the 20 minutes that took, I established the lack of a minibar for immediate whisky-fueled relief and he established that my phone had had outside calls barred for reasons unknown. The phone problem is now fixed, but the whisky issue has yet to be resolved.

However, they have provided me with a rubber duck for my bath. Well, that’s all right then.

The guilty parties here are Apex Hotels. Avoid them.