WYRMLOG

What a lucky man he was!

Tuesday October 6th 2009

Hmmm, well I haven't done much posting recently have I? I'll put it down to getting back into the swing of work and spending much of my time uploading and annotating photos from my UK trip. I've almost finished the first day's worth!

I've also got caught up in a writing challenge on Whitechapel. It's the first time I've tried writing anything but mindless blog drivel and role playing material in ages, so we'll see how it goes. The deadline is November 1st - with luck it'll actually be readable by then.

Kraft has come to it's senses and realised that "iSnack 2.0" is one of the worst marketing decisions in history. They've posted a bunch of more popular names to their website for the public to vote on and will be announcing the replacement name this week. I didn't bother to vote - I'm just happy that clueless tech-speech abomination is being banished. Anyway, the only name I would have voted for is 'Voldemite' and that wasn't on the list.

Before I go I'll direct everyone's attention to this song, which I discovered over the weekend - "Lucky Man" by Emerson Lake and Palmer. The song itself is (in my opinion) nothing special, a fairly dreary rock-folk dirge about a guy who goes off to war and gets shot. What makes it remarkable is the play out, the only explanation for which I can come up with is that they got a humpbacked whale in to do guest vocals and dosed it up on LSD.

Listen to the first 20 seconds or so to get the scope of the piece (it's all like that), then jump to 3.20 to be astounded by the assorted wails, shrieks, groans and howls you get when you pump twenty litres of hallucinogens into a giant sea-going mammal!

That's all I've got to say.

I can't stop listening to this...

Wednesday September 30th 2009

I'm not very good at singing songs but here's a try...

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch,
You must first invent the universe,
Space is filled with a network of wormholes,
You might emerge somewhere else in space,
Somewhen else in time,

The sky calls to us,
If we do not destroy ourselves,
We will one day,
Venture to the stars,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

The cosmos is full beyond measure,
With elegant truths,
Of exquisite interrelationships,
Of the awesome machinery of nature,

I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos,
In which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky,

The brain does much more than just recollect,
It intercompares, synthesises, analyses,
It generates abstractions,
The simplest thought like the concept of the number one,
Has an elaborate, logical underpinning,
The brain has its own language for testing the structure and consistency of the world,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

The sky calls to us,
If we do not destroy ourselves,
We will one day,
Venture to the stars,

For thousands of years,
People have wondered about the universe,
Did it stretch out forever?
Or was there a limit?
From the big bang to black holes,
From dark matter to a possible big crunch,
Our image of the universe today is full of strange sounding ideas,

How lucky we are to live in this time,
The first moment in human history,
When we are, in fact, visiting other worlds,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

The surface of the earth,
Is the shore of a cosmic ocean,
Recently we have waded a little way out,
And the water seems inviting...

Glorious Return

Tuesday September 29th 2009

Well, I'm back.

Actually I've been back for over a week, but madness involving unpacking, getting back to work and getting my landline fixed (no internet for days! days!!) have prevented me from doing much online. Even the Queen's birthday weekend was a blow-out thanks to a nasty 24 hour cold that had me coughing like a Dickensian orphan and feeling like death for most of Sunday and Monday, but I'm more or less back on deck now.

I've started uploading my holiday snaps onto Flickr. This is quite a daunting prospect as it turns out I took hundreds, if not thousands of the things. I haven't even managed to get all of the first day's up yet - let alone annotated and geotagged. It's clearly going to be a long term project, you can check my progress here.

Other things of note. The new Vegemite product has apparently been named "iSnack 2.0". If this is the kind of thing that's going to happen when I leave the country I can clearly never take a vacation again. Also, although I can't speak as to the accuracy of the last panel, this XKCD pretty much describes every day of my life :)

OK, that's it. Expect more updates soon. Probably.

Hotel

Friday September 11th 2009

I have completely failed to make any blog entries while I've been here in the UK haven't I? This is mainly because I've been having too much fun to spend time sitting in front of a computer typing away, but since this is my last day with regular internet access I suppose I'd better make some kind of effort, lest everyone thinks I've died. So I though I'd write a review of my hotel.

For reasons that will become obvious I'm not going to name the hotel. I'd also like to state that overall my experience there has been good. There are just a few things that got on my nerves...

So let's begin.

The staff at the "Mystery Hotel" are well organised and friendly. Check in and out are quick and efficient - if on arrival however you are allocated to rooms 114 or 115 it's best to ask for a map. These are placed far away from the rest of the first floor, requiring extensive navigation to locate. There are signs, but these peter out before you hit the first of several staircases. Be careful - one wrong turn and you could end up battling a snow-witch in a land where it's always winter but never Christmas.

Your room will be clean with a wardrobe, a dresser, tea/coffee making facilties, a television, a phone and a safe. If you're shelling out enough cash there may also be room to swing a cat - this is however London so a lack of space is only to be expected. You will have an onsuite bathroom, which is just the perfect size for you to brush your teeth without difficulty while sitting on the toilet. Hot water is both hot, wet and plentiful - in an unusual twist however cold water is in short supply, your tap producing just a half hearted trickle which refuses to alter in volume no matter how far you turn it.

Your toilet is a source of unending wonder - you will wonder for all eternity how it manages to produce noises akin to the base stop of a major pipe organ for several minutes after being flushed.

A continental breakfast buffet is provided in the basement restaurant. This is clean, well organised and packed to the gills with Spaniards by 8:00am, so get in early. The selection of food, drinks and condiments is perfectly adequate. The restaurant may be open for other meals - I'm honestly not sure. I did go down to check it out one evening but it was like the Mary Celeste down there, so I fled.

Eating options in the immediate area include the Pride of Paddington pub which does a very nice grilled chicken, three separate Italian restaurants in the space of about twenty metres of road, and a diner named Garfunkle's just past Paddington station. I can recommend the gnocchi at Bizarro (perhaps that should be 'me can recommends tasty potato dumpaling things'?) which comes with a free floor show from the serving staff who race around the place without break like their pants are on fire. Garfunkle's is also very nice, but beware of the tendancy of the waitstaff to assume that any change they owe you is intended as a tip.

But back to the hotel. It offers a laundry service where you place your dirty clothes in the bag provided and leave them in your room. By the time you get back from your day's activities the maid will have tidied your room, made your bed and neatly left the bag of still-dirty clothes on top of it. I found the best laundry option was to haul your clothes one block along the street towards Paddington Station to the Harlequin laundrette where a nice Muslim lady will have them washed, folded and ready to pick up by 5:00 that evening for about ten pounds.

Your hotel room includes a phone. This will not work. The procedure to get it working involves heading down to reception where they'll explain that you need to pay a deposit of either 40 or 50 pounds (depending on who you're talking to) before they'll switch it on. It's best to do this before you head out in the morning, as it gives them the full day to do absolutely nothing about it. On your return in the evening confirm that the phone is still not working. Head back down to reception and query this. They will express puzzlement and poke at a computer for a while before stating with confidence that they have no idea what's going on. Ask them to look into it again, and with any luck your phone line will be sorted out by the time you return to the hotel the next day. Probably.

Transport connections are excellent with the hotel only two blocks from Paddington station. Busses charge up and down the street at all hours, and if you feel lucky you can try to catch one of the wildly bucking black cabs that hurtle around the Hilton in the nightly running of the taxis.

There is an internet terminal in the bar. You're probably better off heading down the street to the Reload internet cafe. A weekly or monthly membership is fairly cheap and you not only get decent hardware and speeds, but you can enjoy the sound of the Underground trains as they whiz back and forth only a few metres through the wall from where you sit.

So, that pretty much sums up my hotel experience here in London. Tomorrow I'll be heading to Southampton for a few days before flying home mid next week...

PS: The wedding was excellent! I've put some photos (note that "some" - I've got heaps more) up on my Flickr Stream