MaW’s Blog

I spent a very pleasant weekend in Nottingham. Big first was driving there myself, which is the longest drive of any kind I’ve done so far. Doing it solo was perhaps better than doing it with Dad or someone in the passenger seat, as it didn’t feel like there was someone watching and evaluating me all the time, and I desperately need more driving experience before I can put up with something like that. I realised about halfway home that there’s no way I could do the kind of driver training Matt’s had as a police officer, let alone what Mick’s done — at least, not until I’ve had years more experience of driving. Normal driving is taxing enough before you start to add breaking the speed limit and attempting to get to emergency calls quickly.

Still, I got to Nottingham safely if late due to four lanes of the A1 being shut northbound (should’ve gone on the M1 I suppose). Stayed at x3ja’s house, went into Nottingham, went to the Apple Centre. Apparently the new 12″ Powerbooks are quite rare at the moment, but it seems that when the time comes it’ll be fairly easy to get hold of one if I’m willing to wait a bit.

Saw ‘Finding Nemo’ which is fantastic, then met up with x3ja and jimbo (another #nott person) at Wagamama for the ritual meal. I had a seasonal special, shichimi spiced roast duck ramen, which was absolutely spectacular if more expensive than most other things on the menu. Still, it was worth it, and you get so much duck that a side dish wasn’t necessary even if I had been feeling deep-pocketed enough to fork out for one.

The apple and cranberry juice was of course wonderful, as usual. Kudos to Wagamama Team for their mindboggling management of the queue, I have no idea how they do it but it works very well.

Then went back to x3ja’s house and exploited the DVD player while he went out again to places I don’t like. Slept on living room floor on cushions nicked from sofas - surprisingly comfortable, and long enough, which makes a change from my bed at home. More width would’ve been nice though.

Saw Ross this morning, then came home again and lazed around a lot. Am now rather tired, so I’ll probably go to bed quite early in order to be in a fit state of mind to go to work tomorrow. And that’ll be weird, because Nigel won’t be in for a couple of days and the desk next to me is going to feel very empty. Hopefully though I can get this LCD stuff signed off at last, if I can find out where the extra 0×01 is coming from. Sometimes Perl is gorgeous, but other times it’s not — this is one of the nots.

Only thing I missed was attempting to see Mick and Ruth, but since it was such short notice anyway I doubt very much they’d have been free — it would’ve been nice to have tried though. And having said this, I’ll probably find out that they were free anyway.

But then again, if they were, a welcome weekend to relax would’ve gone down quite nicely I think, and I had a good time anyway, so all is not lost.

Makes a change really, doesn’t it?

Finally, this blog has recently become a target for preteen and big tits spammers using the comments system. I’m dealing with them as soon as I’m aware of them, so don’t panic if you run into any; I’ll probably get rid of it pretty quickly. Since they’re mostly on older entries anyway, one wonders why they even bother… it’s probably some kind of bot trawling Google results for MT blogs to post to, in which case I should probably take an axe to the comments script so the bots don’t work with it anymore.

Now that is tempting.