Month: April 2002

Well, to celebrate my 30th birthday Rich and I went to La Fourchette, a French restaurant on Western Road. To be honest this wasn’t originally my first choice of restaurant, but my first choices were not open on a Monday – bah!

Anyway, we went and for the first hour or so there were only 4 of us there – the other couple were celebrating their 2nd wedding anniversary. There is a lot of choice on the menu, and there was also a whole blackboard full of sea food – yum. We made our orders and sat drinking our way through a nice bottle of red wine, when there was suddenly a lot of screaming and crying going on. It seems that one of the front room staff had cut herself with a chefs knife and severed a vein or artery or something – sufficient to cause a lot of bleeding anyway. One of the other diners had just finished her refresher course with St John’s Ambulance and so went and attended to the girl in the kitchen before sending her off to the hospital to be sorted out properly. The panic over, we went back to drinking and were shortly served our starters. These were good, and my scallops with bacon were truly wonderful. Our main courses were both good, although I think Rich’s roasted Red Mullet was a tastier choice than my pan fried Sea Bass. As it was my birthday, we also had desserts – my choice was cheese and a really good selection there was too, whilst Rich had the sorbet.

So, despite it not being my first choice to start with, I’m pretty sure I’ll visit again as I was really, really impressed with the selection of dishes available – especially the fish choices.

Paul told us on Saturday that they’d received a letter from Center Parcs telling them that our weekend break was cancelled. Not a great surprise really, but good to have it confirmed.

We went out for some beers last night, and didn’t get around to eating anything until 10.30. By this time our favourite fish and chip shop had closed. So, we decided to try Uncle Sams burger place. I should have read the description on the board better, but I didn’t and so was a bit surprised when I got home to discover that my Veggie Samwich was a bread cake, 2 slices of cheese and some salad – and that was all, nothing burger shaped. I won’t be ordering that again :-(.

It’s strange, we hadn’t been to the cinema in ages, and have been twice this week. We went to see Ice Age on Sunday with Susie, and then to see Bend It Like Beckham last night.

Ice Age is pretty amusing, an animated tale about a group of animals who are trying to return a baby to its “herd” (yes, a little bit Jungle Book). There are some really amusing bits, and it isn’t just for children.

Bend It Like Beckham is a great film, about two 18 year old girls who are both football mad. One is an asian girl who wants to play football like Beckham despite her families protests and their expectations for her. The other is a white girl whose Mother just wants her to be a “normal girl”, and not spend all her time practising football.

I got sent some e-mail spam today, not altogether unusual, but this was a scam spam. The basic details are that it is sent from a DR. SAM BASHIRU (Director, ECO Bank Plc) basically telling me that a JAMES AKMEH died over a year ago in a ghastly air crash and had in his bank account at the time US$21.6M. The email wanted me to pose as a next-of-kin to James Akmeh and in doing so I would give my account details and 30% of the money would be mine, 5% would pay joint expenses and 65% would go to the originators of the transaction. All they needed from me would be my bank account details, and personal telephone/fax details. Tempting. Not!

I did a bit of research, and of course found it noted on several websites – some of the details were changed but the format were the same (Scam o Rama, Tanko Zuba). I also decided to do a search on a few of the other details, like Eco Bank. There is no Eco Bank (and google helpfully points to several scam sites when I search for it) but there does appear to be an EcoBank (although I can’t seem to get a response from their website at the moment). The email is sent by a sam_bash2000@yahoo.com – sounds like a good, solid email address then! I just wonder how many poor unsuspecting people actually do give their details out.

I have a bit of a reputation in our office as being the Google Queen. Whenever anyone wants to know the answer to some unusual question, I crank up google and mostly find the answer. Because of this, I was asked to find the submission urls for various search engines so we could publicise our new website. I found the submission forms on the big sites, and a few Free submission sites who submit your site to lots of search engines for you for free (we’re not interested in paying for submission at the moment, although we may go down that route later). One such site is Submit Corner who seem to have a lot of search engines listed. I’ve given them a try and we’ll see how we get on.

Further to an earlier blog about the fire at Center Parcs, a BBC news report is saying that the Suffolk Fire Service have released a report which says that contractors working on a roof caused the fire to start, and that it spread too quickly for Center Parcs own Firefighters to deal with it.

Still haven’t heard anything about our weekend in June yet, but seeing as how the BBC report says “Rebuilding work at the centre is likely to take several months to complete” I’m not hopeful about it.

Yesterday I got the strangest text message I’ve ever received. Susie was off playing tourist in London before she goes back to NZ and sent me a message saying “A squirrel just ran up my leg and a pelican just ate a pigeon!”

Lately with been to the Tin Drum, Kemptown (lovely starters, but dissapointing otherwise), The Bayleaf (perfect Indian) and Moshi Moshi (it’s a conveyor Sushi chain, but a good one).