I attended i33 this weekend, and it was awesome fun. We (the CantFitMyN clan) played in the TF2 and Battlefield 2 tournaments, drank lots of beer, played Werewolf until the early hours, slept in the freezing cold and won prizes. I took a few photos and found some other amusing ones - I’ll upload and link them soon.
I will definitely be attending i34, as it will be summer and made of win.
There is one week to go until the first night of the pantomime. This fact is a little bit scary, but also rather exciting.
It’s not coming together too badly. I’m still a bit hazy on a few of my cues, and the actual content of my lines is not always the same, but we’ve got most of it right. The dancing was the part that scared me the most, but I think I’m actually going to be OK with it all now. We’re certainly a lot more together than I ever thought we would be!
The only issue with this is that we’ve rehearsed every day since Sunday, and I’m pretty tired at the moment. What with having been to Bulgaria last Friday, having my work Christmas party on Saturday night and then rehearsal for most of the day on Sunday, I am shattered. Definitely looking forward to Saturday when I can finally get myself a nice lie-in and catch up on my rest.
I went to Brighton last weekend to meet some guys from IRC - namely #linux on irc.netgamers.org. I’d met a few of them before (idimmu, SIR-Millar and HRH_H_Crab) but the others (Jeekay, RR|Away and queball) were all new faces to me. It was a good fun day though - we sat on the seafront and drank quite a few pints, visited a good chip shop and talked a lot about things.
One of the highlights of the day though was visiting Choccy Woccy Doo Dah, which is a rather flamboyant cake shop. They apparently made all the cakes in the recent Charlie and the Chocolate Factory film, and I have to say that when I set foot in the shop, it was quite apparent. The cakes were absolutely massive, and for £3.95 you got a huge slice, drizzled with chocolate sauce and garnished with strawberries. I selected a cake that was all chocolate, with chocolate buttons on the top, chocolate filling and chocolate icing. It was totally decadent and I did almost feel guilty afterwards, but I have to say it was totally delicious. I just about managed to finish the slice and felt there was just the right amount there. Unfortunately for queball his eyes were bigger than his stomach, and he ordered a chocolate sundae *and* a slice of cake with jelly babies on - this wasn’t bad in itself, but he got the biggest slice of cake I have ever seen! It was nearly the size of his head, and he didn’t manage more than half of it before having to give in through sheer sugar overload.
I heartily recommend the place though, although it’s so unbelievably over the top, the cake is delicious and really something to try if you ever visit Brighton.
Here’s me enjoying my cake…
Today is my last day of work for 7 days. I’m having tomorrow and Monday-Thursday next week off, which is brilliant news.
This is mainly because my friend Marthe (Shy^ from Managerleague) is coming over from her home country of Norway to visit England for a week. Myself, Kloopy and his girlfriend Charley are going to look after her for a week, take her to all the touristy places in London and make sure she has a really fantastic time here. She’s going up to Kloopy’s parents’ in Suffolk too, which should be quite an experience - they live in a lovely seaside town, surrounded by brilliant English countryside.
I also have plans to take her to a castle, which apparently they don’t have in Norway… I hope she likes it. I’ll post some pictures and stories during the week to keep you updated.
In other news - I auditioned for a play on Tuesday evening. I didn’t really expect to get anywhere, I just went along because Xsara was auditioning and said that I should go along and try for one of the male parts. There are in fact only two male parts, and they are both parts for older men (a schoolteacher and a father) so I wasn’t very hopeful, but they asked me to go back this evening for the second lot of auditions. It’d be quite nice to get a part - I’ve not acted properly since I was 18 - but I won’t be that gutted if I don’t. Rehearsals are always a lot of work and they can really take it out of you. There’s nothing like the feeling of being part of a cast though, and the adrenaline rush you get before you go on stage is fantastic.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
I went to London this weekend to meet a load of people from #php - it was great fun. It’s always interesting to put faces and voices to the people you talk to every day.
The photo was taken outside a Tescos near Hammersmith, where we went after the pub to purchase some beers before heading back to SIR-Millar’s flat for alcohol and Werewolf. Good times!
Today, in my role as roving IT bod for a travel software company (i.e. one part of my job), I am at my company’s Redhill office. Redhill is about a 75 mile drive from my normal office, so usually I would get the train here. However I needed to bring a printer and some NAS with me, so I decided that driving would be better than sitting on a train cuddling a large Brother laser and a LaCie Ethernet Disk.
This morning, I left my house at 7:45am. I arrived in Redhill a bit after 11:30am. For the non-mathematical or lazy amongst my readers, this means that it took me nearly 4 hours to travel 75 miles. That’s absolutely fucking ridiculous.
The reason for this delay was pretty much fourfold. Firstly, it was raining cats and dogs this morning, which means everyone has to drive a bit slower and there are usually more accidents than there would be on a lovely sunny day. Secondly, there was heavy traffic on the A1(M) approaching the Hatfield tunnel. Thirdly, it took exactly one hour for me to travel 0.3 miles towards M25 junction 21A at Chiswell Green. Finally, there was a lorry blocking two lanes of the M25 at junction 12, which caused me a further 45 minutes delay.
On top of all that, the colour laser printer that was my primary reason for coming here hasn’t actually been delivered yet. If the traffic is anything like this bad on the way home, I will probably be home at around 10pm.
Christ :(
