”
The guy on the left (without the beard) is my grand nephew, Reece. The main post office in
Canterbury has one of those photo booths which allows
you to get your face on a book of stamps. So Reece did, and the
above is a scan is off the envelope from the Christmas
card he sent to us.
I think he looks worryingly like Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes).
Google have made the last 20 years of Usenet news available of searching.
Searching on your own name brings back some interesting things. In my case, things I’d forgotten about. It seems that in 1989 I was posting in comp.ai.neural-nets. In the first half of the 1990s I was spending a lot of time writing LaTeX macros, by 1995 I was worried about Pro*C and Oracle, but by 1996 everything was web related.
The first result from google for me is a posting to rec.pets. I had no idea what it was about, but a bit of digging revealed that some one in San Diego was offering to digitize pictures of a cat for me. In the days when scanners were not commonplace.
There’s a nice write up about what google have dug up from the archive.
The world cup (football, soccer) is still six months away, but I’ve started to prepare for it. I’ve keyed in the fixtures and you can download them for your Palm PDA. Sad, isn’t it?
I’ve known about the GPS Art web site for a while, but I didn’t realize that there was a Brighton Elephant or that it had made it as a BBC News story. Must have been a slow news day.
On Friday we were eating at Barry’s At The Tureen. As well as having great service and great food, Barry turned out to know our next door neighbours, gave us a phone number of someone near by who could help track down some of the history of our house, and for good measure, told us about the murder that took place in our street this year.
Yesterday we made the trip up to the Hammersmith Apollo to see David Sylvian play. It was a good show but I think “Dave” was pushing his luck waiting so long before coming back on for an encore. I think the stage manager was probably telling him to get back out because he had another 20 minutes to do, or something. Luckily there were enough fanatics in the audience willing to clap and clap and clap until he did come out (the guy who shouted “we love you Sylvian” probably shouldn’t be let out alone again…). Oh, the keyboard player was Rowlf from the Muppets. I’m sure of it.
This one is probably a bit sad, but here goes anyway. If you wanted to fly around Mars (hypothetically), you’d get in an aircraft and…fly. Right? Turns out that it’s a bit more tricky. Although the laws of physics are the same, the parameters mean that “all airplanes on Mars are airborne Titanics”.
If the idea of Kylie Minogue flying around as a sexy fairy seems about right, and you like the thought
of Jim Broadbent singing a baritone version of
Madonna‘s Like a Virgin, then you really should go and see Moulin Rouge! at the cinema. We loved it (Drama/Musical/Romance… but don’t let that put you off).
A quick Brighton restaurant round-up. So far, the places’s we’ve tried include:
Jim Thompson’s a mix of all things oriental. It’s right by the Palace Pier, over looking the sea, so
I thought “oh-oh, it’s going to be great location, terrible food”. But I was wrong
the food is good, but the cocktails are terrible. Watery is the only way I can describe them. Could it
be because we were at the “2 cocktails for the price of 1” night? If so they should rename it to “2 crap cocktails for the price of 1” night. One of the local radio stations ran one of their ads which claimed “the best cocktails in Brighton”. God help us.
In contrast is the small Greek/Spanish/Italian mix of Ipanema. We were tempted
with the sign out side selling us fresh Snapper and Monk Fish. What were we expecting? Something
along the lines of the fresh fish we’d eaten in New Zealand. Naturally we were disappointed.
It’s not a bad place; but we were underwhelmed.
Le Gastronome is an expensive but lovely French restaurant. Yum. It was full when we
arrived, so we left despondent. Half-way down the road the owner comes running
after us to tell us they’ve just had a cancellation and there was now space for us. And
to top it all off, the food was good too.
Last one: the Viceroy of India. It was empty. We went in, and drank beer and ate
curry. Tasty curry.
Rather than us burning it, or turning it into landfill, that pelmet can now be yours.