Dragonfly!

I love photography :D 

I like swords!

That's right, I've finally discovered the violent side of myself - I enjoy slicing people! But more on that bit later...

It would appear that I'm blogging only once a week now, ah well, still better than none :) The past week has been, again, mostly uneventful (though some might disagree...), very irregular sleeping pattern and random working hours... Met up with Helen few times before she disappeared for yet another holiday! Work still going OK, although realistically this project won't get finished by early September as I originally hoped, maybe end of the month...

So the A Level results are out, and once again people are criticising the rising pass-rate... not really sure what to make of the rise myself but then I don't need to be :) so that was a fairly pointless sentence... Anyway, had a look on the Guardian league table thing, apparently my old school (HAHC) came 158th in the comprehensives. Not too bad I suppose, I certainly had a fun time there :)

Yesterday was a lot more exciting - met up with Toby at Waterloo after work, from where we walked, via the London Eye, to, erm, Waterloo... That's what happens when you do things without a plan... Anyway, we found a fish and chip place where we had some food (pie and chips for me), then proceeded to walk further, via Westminster to, erm, Waterloo again! What fun! :) Naturally we were bored of Waterloo by this stage so went back towards Westminster, and somehow found ourselves in the arcade by the river, which was where we stayed for the rest of the evening :)

We started with Metal Slug 4, which felt rather weird as I have all the Metal Slug games (1,2,x,3,4,5) on emulator and have never had to pay to play them... I hadn't played in an arcade for years so was bit rusty with joystick controls, but still, we had fun killing everything that moves :)

Toby: "It's like driving a real car!"

Maybe that's why everyone's scared of sitting in your car... :p

Air hockey next, me winning 2-1 (7-5, 5-7, 7-4) :D

At this point we found this amazing sword game, where you kill people by actually waving a plastic sword in front of the machine! True, we must have looked silly, but who cares - you get to kill people! :D

Here's Toby blocking a deadly enemy move:


and me doing something similar; photo turned out too dark though, and I didn't look exciting anyway - I blame Toby's poor photography skill... :p


Content with all the slicing, we moved on to Marvel vs. Street Fighter - the violence continues! Wolverine's no match for Akuma:


And just as we were going to leave I spotted a table-football table! I was sooooo excited! (In case you didn't know, I LOVE table-football! It's what I spent all my time doing at Cambridge.) So naturally we had to play a game, which I won, mwahahaha!


Nothing much happened today, I didn't wake up until noon... hurrah for excessive sleep :) and I'm not actually sure what happened between noon and now... ah well, it's the weekend, I don't need to be productive... Maybe I should have gone to Cambridge today - was invited to Emmy's housewarming party which would been a nice opportunity to see UCPO friends; also Toby and Hane are moving stuff into their new house so I could have met up with some King's friends too... maybe I'm just too lazy...

Possibly going to Eastbourne with family tomorrow, just randomly...

Oh, and I don't really enjoy killing people /that/ much... :)

Random game OTD: Podge Slap - made by Brett and his brother.

stuff and things 2

Last week's been bit dull, with Helen being away again, nothing really happened apart from work, which is going reasonably well - making slow but steady progress on the database sytem :)

Today was more exciting though, did lots of random stuff with Helen (who came back from Yorkshire yesterday), which included random shopping/book ordering/Orange shop visit in Bromley, buffet and Deep Pan Pizza and movie at Odeon Marble Arch. Am too tired to write in any detail, but I guess Helen'll blog at some point... :) Instead, have few photos:

Rather impressive sand sculpture in Bromley:


Close up shot of the sculpture:


Random House! This place should belong to me!


Random photo of London, taken from 5th floor of John Lewis on Oxford Street...


In other random news, I have the new Family Guy movie :D - it was scheduled for straight to DVD release in September but a production quality copy got leaked and spread all over the internet... naturally I managed to acquire a copy :) It did take me two attempts though... first time I downloaded a 700MB file claiming to be the movie but turned out to be a rather bizarre anime called "Goldfish Warning!", it's actually really funny though, kinda like Excel Saga, so I guess it was a good thing :)

me

violin

Hmm, just realised that it's been 8 weeks since I last touched my violin, which was the UCPO May Week concert back in Cambridge... I really ought to do more practise. I've given up on the professional soloist thing long long time ago, but I still want to be good, really good. Hopefully I'll get to play in LOPO's first concert in December, and not look totally out of place there, considering everyone else will almost certainly be better than me...

This post is really random... guess I'm just bored...

Right, back to VB.NET coding...

I blog again!

Well, in case you were wondering... I'm still alive :) Have been reasonably busy and lazy hence the lack of posting, but I've finally decided to do it after death threats from certain individuals...

Well, the problem with not blogging frequently is that you end up accumulating so much stuff! I'll try to at least cover everything but will probably miss stuff out anyway...

Anyway, photos first! Some of you may know about my attempt to write my own online photo album management thing in PHP/MySQL several months ago, well, I've given up on that now, having discovered the wonderful Gallery2 software which is better than what I can come up with in every way. So I've installed that and have started uploading my old photos... it'll take a while, considering I have many thousands of them... it's only really the King's photos that's there so far, as well as few of the more recent events (see later). The URL is http://www.randomfan.com/gallery/.

You can all write comment for the photos, although that requires you being a registered user. But you can register yourself, very simple form, so please do that and leave lots and lots of amusing comments :)

As I mentioned before, I'm currently working at EGS, mainly doing a project to totally redesign their database system, with occasional sysadmin tasks too. E.g. this week I actually started learning how to use Active Directory and Group Policy Objects to make administration easier; and set up Windows Software Update Service so that all computers can be updated automatically without any attention from me :) all very exciting! On the database front things are going slower, with me currently learning VB.NET 2003, having abandoned VBA for Access :) Job seeking for something more permanent is still happening, I'm sure I'll find something suitable eventually...

Working does make everything strange though. Mostly important change being that I can never have enough sleep, always having to settle for less than 7 hours... Also I don't really have time to do anything else once getting home after work - still have a huge stack of brilliant computer games waiting to be played... doubt I'll really get round to them, ever... And I have to spend so much on the evil journey everyday, my monthly season ticket costs £116... But one good thing is that, with the 3 hours journey time every day, I get chance to read again! Borrowed Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy from Helen and only just finished them yesterday - excellent read although I didn't enjoy the ending as much as the rest of the books... Now I've been recommended some Terry Pratchett :)

3rd July

Bloggers BBQ, already mentioned. However I do have the photos online now - 90 of them!

8th July

Mike's 21st birthday, big party in a school dining hall... well his dad works at the school and it was a good venue anyway :) It was great to see the friends from school again, who I hadn't managed to see for almost an entire year! And there were lots of old people too (relatives, neighbours, etc...) Well, just like any other great parties, we had excessive amount of food and alcohol, and even had Mike's dad's band entertaining us! (they rock!) Highlights from the evening including Ben finding blue hair spray and making everyone's hair, erm, blue, funnily enough; George turning up late and start falling asleep straight away; and Mick scaring me with his new long hair... Photos are here.

13th July

Askes, my old school, puts on performance of an opera (Gilbert & Sullivan mostly) every summer. For the past 4 years I've always been playing in the orchestra and hence not getting to see it properly. Well, time for change this year :) I declined the invitation for playing in orchestra and decided to sit in the audience for the first time, taking Helen with me on the last night. HMS Pinafore (G&S) was the opera this year and it was highly amusing as always, oh I really love laughing :) Also managed to avoid most of the teachers successfully... Here's a photo of the full cast on stage:



15th July

Helen's friend Emilia invited people for her birthday celebration, so naturally I went along, not wanting to miss out any chance for alcohol consumption! (I'm not alcoholic, honest...) Helen and I went to her house on High Street Kensington, where we jumped on the bus to Hammersmith to meet the rest of Emilia's friends (sorry, can't remember all the names anymore...) We ate LOTS of crepes, and went to this pub called The Oxford and Cambridge, which is certainly THE CHEAPEST pub I've ever come across! I bought a round with roughly ten drinks and it only just went over £10... well, can't really complain I guess :) Helen and I were being sensible and left reasonably early, before all the real exciting stuff happened, which apparently included downing bottle of tequila and much vomitting as a result...

23rd-24th July

Yay, another birthday party! This time UCPO friend Helen (Eburah, not Oxenham), and it was in the distant land of Stratford-upon-avon. The party was going to last for three days but I had to leave on the Sunday because of evil work stuff that had to be done on Monday... So I arrived there around noon, having been on two trains and one bus, thanks to the silly engineering works and tunnel collapsing... despite all that I was still the first person there! Helen came back having picked up Emmy little later, so we just sat outside catching up, eating ham sandwiches and talking about sam handwiches... it made more sense at the time... Then I had to disappear to pick up Helen O, who travelled there with parents from Devon, after their week long holiday. So we returned to Helen's house (confused yet?) to find more people, and started messing with the barbeque, which was fun. Becky burnt lots of sausages, Helen was scared of the smoke, and we were convinced that the sausages were alcoholic... Soon got bored of this (and also totally filled up stomachs), so we started making cocktails, with rather limited selection of spirits and mixers... and some more unusual stuff such as ice cream and love hearts... It was fun nonetheless, with a lot of cocktails made, some less successfully than others... Helen's parents went shopping for more ingredients so we had more exciting cocktails, more food appeared and disappeared, and cake at the end, mmm :) For the evening we went pub crawling, and everyone was impressed by Paul's drinking skills! The pubs were fun and varied, drinks rather expensive though... and last stop was Coxes Yard which opened till 1:30am, by which point we had some really amusingly drunk people :) I think Helen O and I possibly spent most of the evening laughing at Emmy and Simon... Photos are here. Woke up the following morning to find that everyone else actually woke up ages before Helen O and I, and all Helen's home friends had left, leaving only Helen, Emmy, Simon, Helen O and I. We just sort of lazed around for 4 hours watching TV and DVDs before Helen O and I departed for London (got a lift from Helen's dad to Banbury so we didn't have to use the rail-replacement bus :)

2nd August

Considering that Toby was doing his job training stuff in London, we decided to meet up for some food after work. Met him at Waterloo and found it really weird to be seeing him outside Cambridge... Still, it was fun, we talked about work stuff, walked to Westminster where we found Caffe Nero, but not before me taking some new photos of the London Eye:




Decided that we were still hungry afterwards, we walked to Victoria and found a sushi stall in the station. Talked more about random stuff and his new phone, which he got from work for free! How unfair... I was also going to reveal what my dissertation really looked like, but we both forgot about it...

5th August

That's today! I've worked overtime rather a lot in the past few days (didn't get home until 11:45pm on Wednesday, and waking up at 5am for work Thursday morning) to sort out few problems. So took today off work to see Helen, who had only got back from America very very very early morning... We just sat around watching some of the tv stuff I brought with me (Family Guy, Black Books and Coupling), laughed lots, as one would expect :) Had lunch then departed for Regent Street, Hamleys in particular, so that Helen could buy presents for her cousins' kids. Well, I had never been there before, and WOW! it was like toys heaven! Such a pity that I didn't grow up in that store! As you can probably tell I got bit excited with all those toys, even the ones for pre-school kids... even played with some of the stuff... It was all very exciting, and I certainly found myself adapting to the surrounds very quickly :) I really miss being a kid now... Helen managed to choose the presents at last and we had to go, but not before discovering this:



Well, it wasn't a total shock to me as I knew about him from google searching my own name before, but Helen was certainly surprised... It was very tempting to buy one of them...

So yeah, now you know what I've been doing for the past few weeks :) and hopefully my next post won't be 3 weeks away... Now I must disappear and dream of happy memories :) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz