I’m going! Yay! It’ll be my first ever festival and its very exciting!
It was a stressful few hours getting tickets, though. There was just no way to get through to the order line or the website – Chris managed to get through and get us all tickets, but who knows how. Damn, they needed some loadbalancing.
To all my non-UK readers, the temperature in London is a balmy 18 degrees. You can tell by the heat and, more to the point, the fact that EVERYONE is out on the streets of London taking advantage of it to shop. And the tourists are out too. Oxford Street was absurd today.
London in the summertime… Call me now use the satellite…
My work email has been mullered by a bizarre conflict between Google Desktop and Microsoft Outlook. If you’ve been unable to right click on emails, or forward emails as attachments, you might have the wrong version of Google Desktop installed. Upgrade!! They’ve fixed it.
More on the problem here, if you’re interested. Without search, email is that much less useful: one of the reasons why I love Gmail, and the new search features built into Vista and Outlook 2007.
We had an amazing weekend in Hobol last week, near Oslo. We were staying with the Tingulstads, old family friends. My parents were meant to join us too (Arvind, Sheila and Dave came), but were unable to for various reasons. If you’re a long time reader of this blog, you may remember this adventure that my siblings had with Trond and Iren…
Seven generations of Tingulstad have lived on Tingulstad Gard, their farm. Four generations of them were around the table for dinner at one point, which was pretty awesome. They are a wonderful family; fully embracing us into their world and providing some fantastic opportunities for fun:
It was amazing. Photos of the whole lot available, as ever, on Flickr. I recommend Norway hugely: delicious food, amazingly varied landscape, wonderfully fresh air.
I’m nearly recovered from a two week cold (damn unpleasant business) but my review copy of C&C: Tiberian Wars has arrived. I’ve fixed the performance issues on my machine (caused by mediocre drivers for my graphics and sound card) and it plays well… and is hugely enjoyable. Nothing like a bit of silly acting to camera coupled with some strategic bombardment of those evil Nod scum.
I’m also off to Norway this weekend to visit some family friends, have a party on Thursday and may have preview tickets to a screening of that new Will Ferrell movie, so it’s likely to stay a little quiet till after the bank holiday. Have a few things I’d like to write about, though, so expect a little more after Easter.
Not me this time, but Damo, erstwhile of BBC World in Bolvia, is currently reporting for BBC World TV, amongst other things. Pretty cool stuff: you can see one of his packages here (for the time being… – WMP required).
Today was a good day. Lazy, but good.
I…
(1) Got tickets to Glasto. Woo! My first ever festival. Very exciting.
(2) Witnessed Spurs victory – we played a decent game and glad it came out a victory.
(3) Saw the first episode of the new Dr Who – which is excellent. The new companion is cool, but mainly: the moon. Space Rhino Police. What more could you possibly ask for?
(4) Got tickets to see Hot Fuzz in a couple of weeks. Finally!
So, all in all, a good day.
In and amongst all the media madness this week, a brief return to my usual brand of randomness. I’d like to ask Mr Polite Dissent (aka Scott) if he’d do a medical review of The Last King of Scotland. Scott: enjoy your blog, and wonder what your thoughts on this film were. (Thanks to Dr Gil for pointing me to Polite Dissent).
In particular, could a freshly qualified doctor, at the ripe age of 22 (or thereabouts), cope with the conditions he encountered in Amin’s Uganda in 1970? Even a Scottish one?
Would he be as diagnostically astute and capable of delivering the appropriate level of treatment he’s portrayed as managing?
And would trapped gas, caused by the combination of beer and aspirin, cause a man to think he had been poisoned?
What poison pills was he dishing out?
And what ‘booster’ would make you feel ‘strong’?
I’m sure there’s more. Be interested to read your thoughts!
Drew B, a PR blogger, asked his Twitter contacts (including myself) for our thoughts on how to keep people enthused about blogging for an interview he was doing with the Guardian (not found the article as yet – possibly still in development here’s the story). I responded (full list of responses nicely summarised here) and the BBC Radio 5 Live blog has picked up on it (although no link love / and my real name not used)…
Still… Twice on the BBC in a week! My advice, FWIW, is to get blogging buddies – you can be spurred on by a few incoming links from friends asking your thoughts on things.
If you want to add me on Twitter, I’m over here.
…and apologies to my regular readers. Normal service will resume shortly.
Had a fun interview with CNN’s Jim Boulden just now, about the same Viadeo research I wrote about yesterday. We covered much the same ground and he interviewed our HR manager as well, so will be an interesting piece when it airs, on one of their business programmes today or tomorrow. They did a close up shot of me accessing this site, though, so am curious as to whether I’ll get a flood of visitors tomorrow…
Had a nice chat with Jim whilst the lights, etc., were being set up — we talked about codeswitching, something my mother looks at as part of her socio-linguistic research. I adapt to accents – particularly American accents – much to the chagrin of my more English friends. I think I managed to sustain a consistent British-ish accent for the interview, but let me know what you think if you see it. Jim has lived in the UK for 17 years (he’s American), but his kids speak with fully British accents. Must be an interesting house!