Claire and I will be back in Aberystwyth by about 8:45pm: if you want to come over and let us bore you with video clips from our holiday and stories and whatnot, we’ll feed you Toblerone and a glass or two of sangria. See you at The Flat at a quarter to nine if you want in. You know who you are.
Author: Dan Q
Preston, Houghton Tower, etc.
Claire and I are in Preston. Saturday evening we went to an orchestral concert at Houghton Tower, which was better than the year before last, but still not as good as the year before that. Live outdoor music, dancing, drinking, and fireworks are all fab, but my mum got a little more drunk than she might have intended: as characterised on the journey home, when she couldn’t seem to see the problem with being in the passenger seat of a car as we drove past a policeman… while she was wearing blue flashing lights on her head, swigging from a bottle of some Baileys’ clone, and alternating between shouting at my sister to get her head down in the boot and at pedestrians we passed.
In any case, Sunday was, comparatively, a day of rest. It’s intensely hot up here, and even taking the dogs for a walk is an exhausting experience. We bought some holiday essentials: a high-factor sun lotion to prevent Claire’s skin from completely charring while we’re in Spain, some shorts and dresses and other ‘light’ wear, etc. This afternoon we’ll be exchanging some currency, getting sunhats, and I’ll be stepping into the Oxfam bookshop to try to buy back some of the books my dad gave away to them in my absence (just days before I decided I needed them and came up here only to find them gone). And perhaps I can teach my folks to play Carcassonne this evening; who knows…
Looks like you’re having a fab time down in Aber – it’s a shame to be away during graduation week, but… Spain calls… – I saw the photos from the Animalarium. We fly at 8am tomorrow, so that’s a 4am start for a train to Manchester at some ungodly hour. Our tickets indicate that the five of us will be occupying almost an entire row on the plane, apart from seat D (right in the middle), in which some stranger will be very scared, I imagine. Fun. There’s nothing like playing “try to catch maltesers in your mouth” during turbulance.
Oh; if anybody in Aber is passing The Flat, could you check on Duality – I can’t remotely access her and I suspect that she’s crashed: if you can give her a reboot before this evening, that’d be much appreciated.
Off To Barcelona (Via Preston)
Claire (on a new blog!) and I are off to Barcelona, via Preston (for a concert by an orchestra & a fireworks display at Houghton Tower, as we did a couple of years back). Here’s the usual series of updates for everybody who remains:
- Troma Night is on this and next Saturday. Sort it out between yourselves. I’ll be leaving a key to The Flat with JTA, most likely.
- Naruto Night is off. Damned if I’m missing any Gantz. In related news, I have episodes 7-13 (the end of the 1st series), but I’m lacking 5 and 6. I’ll probably have them soon after returning, but could those of you with good sources for these things keep an eye open for me, please.
- Geek Night is off. Not that I can stop you playing board games, it’s just that I suspect it’ll just be Ruth and JTA.
- Whatever you use The Flat for, try not to leave it any more of a tip than it is: it’s quite disheartening to come back from a holiday and find your home messier than when you left. And if you’re feeling particularly nice, I’d love it if one of you would put the bin bags out on Tuesday morning.
- Most of the ‘community’ domain names are up and working correctly again, including the Troma Night website and Abnib (finally got it up-and-running as it should be again, not least so I can read it abroad). Yes, I know comments aren’t working on my blog again, yet: I’ll get to it.
- Claire and I can best be contacted by e-mail on my GMail account. I can’t promise I’ll check it from Spain, but I’ll try to at least once. And I will check it from Preston.
- We’re back in town on the evening of Sunday 10th July.
So; have a great week, those that are left, and don’t forget Castell Rock this evening: support shouty Welsh bands! I’m really sorry I won’t get to see those of you who are visiting for graduation this week, but you’ll all come visit again sometime soon, right? Right?
ANSI Escape Codes
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This Looks Promising
Hmm… my blog works. On it’s new host.
This looks promising.
More when I have it.
Bash Prompt Configuration – PS1
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How to configure your bash prompt to show a sensible path, or time, or whatever
Penguins
Funny picture. Just needs a caption.
The Scat Men
Don’t usually go in for these memes, but this one was too funny not to publish.
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Widescreen – Huge free wallpapers
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No2ID: The Musical!
Abnib Gallery
As you may be aware, Jon is developing the next generation of Abnib (preview – looks fab, eh?). To coincide (and integrate) with this, there’s now an Abnib Gallery, to which Abnib-ettes can post photos relating to the activities of themselves with other abnib-ettes: a place to collate our photographs of the fires we have on the beach, the things we get up to at Troma Night, etc. etc. I’ve put some of my pictures up there already: if you’re on the Abnib/Troma Night website and you want a login (so you can add photos, vote, leave comments, etc.), just drop me an e-mail or leave a comment and I’ll sort you out with access.
Fab storm last night: Claire and I went out in it to see the lighting from the prom, and got completely soaked.
Sewage Leak Update
I see that the council are still recommending that people don’t swim in the sea off Aberystwyth, with signs all along the promenade, after a pollution incident at the weekend, although they’ve allowed access to the beach again. I called the hotline number and determined that the sewage leak most likely occured at the pumping station near Rummers.
My suspicions were confirmed today when I took this photograph on my way to work:
Catch-Up: Back In Aber
Yeah; more catch-up stuff. Server was down, and I was lazy. Get over it.
Having returned from Preston/Manchester/Milton Keynes/London, this week has been spent back in Aberystwyth. Thursday’s Naruto Night had us in front of Future Boy Conan, an early Miyazaki cartoon series, among other things. Friday’s Geek Night saw us play two of the games I brought down from my trip to Preston: Man O’ War, a classic Games Workshop tabletop battle game, and Scotland Yard, an early-80’s deduction game which I’d always enjoyed as a kid. Ruth in particular seemed to enjoy disassembling the probability tree of the former, forming long mathematical chains of possible moves in her notes in order to catch “Mr. X”.
Saturday should have seen JTA, Ruth, Claire and I acquire a couple of rubber dinghies and ride the tide as it escaped down the River Rheidol and out to sea, but a major pollution incident (involving a ruptured sewage pipe near the river) put us off somewhat. Another time, then. Nonetheless, we had a good Troma Night, with the better-than-expected Ocean’s Twelve and the pretty awful Teenagers From Outer Space (which featured very few teenagers, none of which were from outer space). Hilareous watching, though.
Right; I feel caught-up, now. Time to get back to work on Troma Night Adventure 2…
Catch-Up: Concerts
Yes, it’s true, I’m bad at blogging. But as we all know, weblogs suck anyway. Regardless: here’s the long-awaited catchup of my whereabouts and doings of the last week (as all I’d previously said is that I’d left and that I’d got back again.
Claire and I went to Preston a week last Thursday evening, for a busy weekend of travelling around and attending concerts on what turned out to be the hottest weekend of the year so far. At the Old Trafford Cricket Ground, Manchester, on Friday, we saw REM, who are absolutely stunning live, it turns out: on stage, they throw a lot more energy and a lot more emotion into what is (in recordings) quite quiet and sombre tracks. A wonderful concert, although we did get somewhat crushed when we were (at the start) within spitting distance of the bands, and so we had to retreat back before the end. Supporting them were Idlewild, who turned out to be brilliant, Feeder, who were very good, and The Zutons, who weren’t so good. Claire was more impressed by the latter, but I think that may just have been because she could look down on their saxophonist (not in height, of course, but in saxophone skill).
Then, on Saturday, we travelled down to Milton Keynes to see Green Day at the Milton Keynes Bowl. The bowl is, to all intents and purposes, a large grassy crater just outside of the city, in which they’d erected an enormous sound stage. Green Day were supported by a handful of pretty nondescript pseudo-rock bands, much of which we slept through with our t-shirts over our faces to help us breathe in the sticky air until the sun set. Green Day themselves were brilliant – aside from a slight problem with the video link (the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound meant that by the time we could hear what they were singing we’d already seen them mouth it): they could have done with repeater projectors as well as the repeater speakers they had – a royally rockin’ gig. A good selection of stuff from their new album and older material, lots of crowd enthusiasm, a few bottle fights, all the stuff you expect from a nice, loud concert. We spent the night at a draconically-run travel lodge-like place a little way between Milton Keynes and London.
And on Sunday we went into London (well; if you’re going to travel 700 miles around the country anyway you might as well take a minor diversion if you pass a place of interest) to go to the National Science Museum, which was good as ever. Their new “Hitch-Hikers’ Guide To The Galaxy” exhibit wasn’t very impressive, but I don’t know what I expected from it, though.
The highlight of the trip has to be a conversation between Claire, my sister Becky, and I in the cafe at the Science Museum. It went thusly:
Dan: Claire doesn’t like carrot cake.
Becky: (to Claire) Have you ever tried carrot cake?
Claire nods
Becky: (to Claire) And did you like it?
Claire nods
Becky: (to Claire) So… do you like carrot cake?
Claire shakes head
Unfathomable.
Meatball Wiki: SoftSecurity
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Soft security in community projects: share and share alike, and you don’t need “Hard security”