Unsurprisingly, the last post was just to check if my Wikipedia plugin for WordPress worked. Now I just use square brackets to link directly to a Wikipedia entry about anything. Even [[halitosis]]. Or possibly [[narcissism]] itself.
All posts by Armand
I want my own wikipedia link
It’s true. [[Armand David]] on [[WikiPedia]] leads to someone who’s not me.
Outrageous!
Raymond Feist is entertaining
Once again, wading through volumes of fantasy – need to turn my attention elsewhere for a while – but just finished the Riftwar saga, which was pretty durn good. From talking to a fan-friend at work, it sounds like Feist, more than most, has spun this franchise out far and wide to make money, and it seems likely its going to work on me. I’ve just ordered the next six books from Amazon…
Bring on the Serpentwar Saga…. (well, after a short interlude of reading books not written in flowery English, with characters riding on dragons, casting spells and being generally invulnerable/immortal).
Actually; I’m going to read Shalimar the Clown next, and old Salman does like to put in a character that’s a bit like him into his books sometimes (“Fury”, anyone?), so there may be someone godlike in there. At any rate, it will be better than “On Beauty”…
Lactose-free dreams
Last night, so weird, that I feel I have to blog about them.
(1) I was about to go on holiday to New York, which was about 20 minutes away somehow. I was struggling to manage handover notes and for some reason had to brief Simon Cowell on the campaign plan we’d work him into for one of our clients — although the “Router-Factor” really doesn’t have the same ring to it.
(2) New York was a 20 minute walk across an Ocean (in my dream, “Atlantis”), via a raising bridge (qua Tower Bridge), and I was walking up the incline with my friends. It was too steep!
(3) I also took a train to get from work to the start of the bridge, from which beautiful views of a teeny-tiny and barely recognisable New York were visible, which gave me bad vertigo (a flying train – Astrotrain?) and noted that a very normal, very unlikely friend from work had 8 piercings and silver rings in his face.
Who needs cheesey pizzas or hallucinogenic drugs? Just eat a bowl of crunchy nut clusters with Tesco soy milk and you’re away, evidently….
It ain’t got Jack
Lamenting the loss of “Jack O’Neill” from cult-favourite sci-fi “Stargate SG-1”. This Cameron Mitchell character is fully sub-par.
Wonder if I’ll finally stop watching a series because its gotten too bad, or if I’m adequately hooked by 8 preceding series…? I suspect I’m hooked, and will watch in the hope that Richard Dean Anderson will make a return…
< / geek>
ImmiNation
Chris’ post about the recently introduced British-ness test is damned astute, and pretty damn funny.
Its something I’ve thought about for a while: I am technically eligible for the ol’ pork pie and bowler hat passport, but haven’t as yet done anything about it. This whole test shenanigan kind of grates on me…
Makes me think vaguely about a TV programme I was on, years ago… “England my England”, a show that sadly screened before the full heyday of the Internet made it linkable to…. In any case, Peregrine Worsthorne and Darcus Howe came to my school (amongst others) and interviewed a bunch of us about Britishness, and what it meant to be who we were.
I don’t remember the detail of the conversation but I do remember thinking of it more as an exercise in PR for my school, and so pretty much missed the point. As the royal suck-up that I was, I wedged a couple of silver spoons in my mouth and came out with the catchphrase they used in the final cut — a (bearded) Malaysian Oxbridge candidate surrounded by an atypically International selection of students — claiming that “it’s more about who you are, than what you are.”
Crikey.
Well. Right. Apparently the British government agrees: at least, as long as you can get 80% on a test like this.
I have been to a pitiful number of countries
Two types of day
There are two types of working day that people have; one of which is the normal kind, at which I guess you have to be really concentrating — and I mean really concentrating — for about 40% of the day.
Today was not one of those days. I was “on” all the time – in the sense of juggling lots of different things and never taking a moment off to do anything other than wait for my lunch to reheat. Concentration level – 80%. Fatigue level – extreme.
Time to find a cup of non-caffeinated tea and the appropriate brand of escapism do help me relax for a little bit…
Internet woes
Bizarre; my net connection kept dropping out last night and I was worried it might be my service provider – but it wasn’t – MSN Messenger’s troubleshooter managed to track down the true source of my problem (and I only activated it by mistake, meaning to press “close” when that window popped up). Something to do with my DNS server not being able to allocate IP addresses, presumably due to some configuration glitch on my machine.
How strange! It would have to be Halloween when MS gets stuff like this right!
Gem’s birthday do
…went really well. I managed to do reasonable justice by way of gifts — most significantly, spent 4 hours shopping with her for a storm watch (model = vista, in pink, if you care to google for it), from Debenhams. Shopping for that period of time made me really hate people (by which, I mean the crowds that inconsiderately march Oxford street…)!
But I coped, just about, and a bunch of us went for a very nice meal at a restaraunt called Octave8 in Covent Garden, which was awesome – and first time I’ve had “surf ‘n turf” in ages! Was a great evening, and glad Gemma enjoyed herself.
For those who think that I’m getting more egocentric than necessary by posting a picture of myself here, it’s at Gem’s request that I don’t post her pic too flagrantly on my blog! Privacy concerns from the non-exhibitionists out there!
Other photos on Photostream, though!