Facial deformities on the tube

Right... I apologise sincerely in advance for any offence this may cause but I need to get it off my chest.

I was back at work today after a very enjoyable five days off from work and as if getting up in the freezing cold and having to leave the house to sit on the tube for an hour isn't bad enough I was greeted by a new poster at Marylebone station. Now this wasn't one of those nice adverts for holidays in the Ukraine or even some of that pretentious poetry on the underground that's been popping up recently. It was a five foot tall picture of a Joseph Merrick lookalike. Now I'm really sorry but facial deformities scare me. I mean really scare me. I didn't feel right all morning. It's a feeling not unlike the one you got as a child when you watched the climax of The Fly when Jeff Goldblum's head splits open to reveal the monster underneath or one of the Robocop goons meets his end by getting covered in toxic waste and partially melting.

I'm a bit scared now that I might run into this poster at other stations when I'm similarly unprepared... or even worse having it in front of me in a carriage when I have to travel from Balham to Edgeware... or opposite the platform blown up to about 20 feet high.

Everyone needs a phobia but I wish mine wasn't so horrible to people that already must have a really shit time.

Top Games List - Burnout Legends

I thought I better get going on the first game nn my list before I completely forgot about it and wrote about something else.

I was a bit of a late comer to the whole Burnout party. I never played the first three games on PS2 which is strange because Ridge Racer 4 is one of my favourite racing games and I'm a huge fan of the arcade style. I picked up Burnout Legends on the PSP fairly early after it came out as during that time there was a distinct lack of great games on the PSP. I played it to death and I truly believe that it's one of the contributing factors in me only getting a 2:2 at university. This was also during the period where I was travelling to Brighton, London or Milton Keynes to see Jordan every week so it helped me through a lot of long train and coach journeys.

My only gripe with the game was the rather horrendous load times. When you were playing crash mode and had to restart the level every 30 seconds or so the 15 second load times really got in the way.

Once Christmas is over and I have some free cash I'll definitely be picking up Burnout Paradise on the 360.

Favourite games

Today at work I was listening to the Final Fantasy VII Advent Children soundtrack. Advent Children is a CGI movie sequel to Final Fantasy VII - one of the most loved video games ever made. This got me thinking about FFVII and then about all of the other games that I have loved over the years which gave me the idea of doing a top 10. After thinking about what would make my top 10 I ended up with a mental list of about 15 or 20 and could not for the life of me decide what would make the list and what wouldn't.

So I decided it would be more fun to write a series of posts over the next few weeks in which I would name one game on the list and describe why it's there. The list will be in alphabetical order (or in no order at all) so as not to show any favouritism.

I must stress that this is just my own oppinion and I will inevitably leave off many amazing games due to me not playing them or just thinking they aren't very good. Over the years I have owned a fair few consoles and a pretty decent gaming PC so the list will cover most formats. For your information, this is what I've owned...

ZX Spectrum, NES, Master System, Mega Drive, MegaCD, 32X, SNES, Sega Saturn, N64, Playstation, Playstation 2, Game Boy, DS, PSP, Pocketstation (ahem) and XBox 360.

I have only recently acquired the XBox 360 so don't expect to see many new games on the list and I haven't really played the N64 since Jordan told me she had one a couple of years ago.

I hope you all enjoy my trip down memory lane and please give your oppinions on my choices!

New albums!

Hurrah! There is nothing quite like listening to a new album by one of your favourite bands and it not being a huge disappointment. Having been fairly hard up for cash over the last few months I have held off from buying Sigur Ros' new album Með Suð Í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust. I had watched the excellent video for Gobbledigook a few times and decided to at least download that one track. Upon searching iTunes I found that the album was going for £5.99 (iTunes Plus, hence no DRM), an offer I couldn't pass up. 

My tube journey to work takes around an hour so I decided that it was the perfect opportunity to give it a good listen from beginning to end. I cant be bothered to go into a track by track review or anything but I have to say that overall, the album is definitely a candidate for my favourite album... that's right... even better than Takk... and ( ).

If you are one of those people that only download single songs (I couldn't do it. I'm too anal about my iTunes library - single tracks piss me off) I would highly recommend Goggledigook - even if you had previously written off Sigur Ros as pretentious bollocks. There are several more 'catchy' songs, i.e. not 10 minutes long, throughout the album but they do not in any way sound dumbed down or unlike Sigur Ros. There are a couple of epics on there too so lets not get too scared that we'll see Jonsi playing his guitar with a violin bow on T4 just yet... although they like to be all edgy and underground nowadays so we just might...

Now the reason for the plural in the title of this post is because I also wanted to quickly write about The Cure's new album 4:13 Dream. I've deliberately waited a while to voice my opinions because they have a habit of changing over a short period of time as was the case with 2004's The Cure. At the time I listened to it non stop but now I only ever really listen to Lost, Going Nowhere and, if we are talking about the vinyl, This Morning. A similar thing happened with 4:13 Dream. I listened to it once through and made up an opinion which after several more plays had completely reversed. 

I hated it.

Well... maybe hate is too strong. I couldn't really hate an album that included Underneath the Stars and The Perfect Boy but the rest seemed a bit of a disappointment. At least The Cure (the album) flipped between upbeat songs and more dreary ones. 4:13 Dream is practically musical Prozac in comparison. I know Robert has promised that we'll see the darker songs on another album released next year but rarely can we trust our mate Bob. After listening through a good few times (as of this time, the play count is at around 20) I've realised that it doesn't really matter that there are no Disintegrations, Bloodflowers or Colds. It is still a great collection of more energetic, punchier Cure songs that will be remembered alongside Just Like Heaven and Inbetween Days rather that the aforementioned epics. 

You can decide for yourselves over at the album's Last.fm page where every track is available in full. I'll just sit and wait in hope that we do actually see this dark album next year and I finally get to hear a non live version of the almost legendary song 'A Boy I Never Knew' - a song recorded for the 2004 album but scraped because it was so sad the recording had Robert crying for the last minute. It was lost for about four years until they played it on this year's 4Tour. Now that's The Cure that everyone really wants. Not all this happy lark.

My early Christmas present

Yet again, I apologise for the complete radio silence on this blog over the last month.  I'm not sure why I haven't posted as there have been several important events that have occurred over the last month which I have been quite interested in such as the new Cure album, The Cure playing the O2, the U.S. presidential election and the wonderful Dead Set.

One other thing to happen to me this month is my (almost) free acquisition of an XBox 360. I have a friend who earns a fair amount of money. He is also quite impatient. His second XBox 360 started showing the infamous red ring of death and was therefore useless. I assured him that he could get it repaired and that I would even sort it all out for him and send it off myself. He didn't want to wait that long and the next weekend he went out and bought himself a brand new premium model. He then donated the broken console to me to send off to be repaired.

I bought some packing paper and bubble wrap (this is the almost part of the previous paragraph - cost = £6.00) and sent it off to the Microsoft repair centre in Frankfurt. It has only been a week and I have already been told via Microsoft's support site that they have sent out my new XBox. I should have it arrive some time next week.

Now the last time I wrote a post about video games was back in April. I was annoyed at not being able to play Grand Theft Auto IV and I mentioned I was very much a PlayStation fan. It's not due to any mindless fanboyism, it's just because I have had Playstations since 1998 and most of my favourite franchises are Sony exclusives (WipeOut, Gran Turismo, Metal Gear Solid). I do not, however, have a spare £299 + games to spare on buying a PlayStation 3 so a free XBox will make a pretty good stand in since other than the franchises I have mentioned, most games are cross platform or indeed Microsoft exclusives. 

I am still faced with the problem of disliking the controller and of course having to quickly translate A, B, X and Y into X, Triangle, Circle and Square. I'm sure after playing GTA for a few hours I will have worked it out but I still doubt I will ever love a controller more than the Dual Shock.

Another problem I am facing is the fact that I'm not a huge fan of first person shooters. OK, this may sound strange coming from someone that often cites Half Life 2 as one of his favourite games but that's different... that's Half Life 2. I am looking forward to Bioshock and maybe one of the new Call of Dutys but I couldn't care less about Halo 3 or 90% of the other FPSs that clutter up the XBox game catalogue. I am also not fussed about XBox live. I don't particularly want to pay £30 a year to be called a 'gay' or a 'pussy' by a fifteen year old American kid because I don't play the game 19 hours a day. Online gaming is really something that has passed me by.

So there we are. I am a PlayStation fan forced to go over to the dark side. When I bought my iMac back in April 2007 I thought I was rid of Microsoft but they have a funny way of getting themselves back into your life. Lets just hope that they've sorted out their god awful quality control and my shiny new box won't die a horrible death lit by three red lights in a few months time.

I shall report back once I've had a few days of play with it and I can say for sure whether I feel cheap and dirty from cheating on Lady Playstation with her most bitter of rivals or whether I will be starting divorce proceedings.

Sound

It's been weeks since my last post and I'm afraid this one isn't really going to make up for the lack of attention being paid to this blog at the moment.

Lying in bed this morning I was flicking through the channels and ended up settling on Sound which is a trendy music show presented by Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac and generic, indie funny-man Nick Grimshaw. This usually isn't my thing but I do sometimes like to see what music is popular nowadays. 

There was a band... no wait, that's the wrong word... I'm not quite sure how to describe them. Think of Blazin Squad with only three members and one of those members being female... got it? They are called N Dubs if you want to look them up or maybe listen to a 30 second preview on iTunes.  You know, just for fun.

Well, (the?) N Dubs were being interviewed by the aforementioned Annie and Nick and were discussing how they feel that they have worked really hard to get where they are and, even though they respect other artists who don't write their own songs, they see themselves as more credible because they do everything. 

It then cut to their performance of a song called Ouch. Now bear in mind that they have just 'bigged up' their song writing skills in the interview section. The chorus consists of the line 'I loved you so much but you cheated on me' and 'You need to recognise that she was just a whore.' 

Top notch lyrics if you ask me.

Hypnagogic States

Every month from May to August The Cure released a new single on the 13th. The Singles were The Only One, Freak Show, Sleep When I'm Dead and The Perfect Boy. Now I wrote my thoughts on The Only One  back in May when it was released but I didn't get round to writing anything about the other songs. All were a good listen but it was The Perfect Boy that made me wish it was the 29th of October so I could hear the new album (Dream 4:13).

In September they released an E.P., Hypnagogic States which includes remixes of all four singles and one mash up, as it were, by 65DaysofStatic - a band who have already reserved £8 of my first pay packet to buy an album. 

I'm not usually a big fan of remix albums as remixes seldom live up to the original. Hynagogic States is like that in a way. A little of their Cure-ness is lost in the translation but overall they are all still great songs. The Perfect Boy would still be amazing if Robert Smith sang it over the sound of tortured kittens.

The final mash up track, Exploding Head Syndrome, is slightly different. At 21 minutes long it almost feels like Godspeed You Black Emperor if they went a bit disco. As it bears so little resemblance to the original material, Exploding Head Syndrome holds up as its own piece. I would expect little else from one of my future favourite bands.

Not bad for £3.99.

1001 Movies

A few years ago my girlfriend received a booked called 1001 Movies to See Before You Die. Due to Jordan's love of ticking things off lists, we decided that it would be fun to tick off the films that we have seen and work our way through the book. To be honest, we haven't been the dedicated high brow film watchers that we hoped but we have managed to watch a fair few. 

Some time last week we decided to make a concerted effort to work our way through the list. We have also set up a spreadsheet to mark off each film so we get a running total... it also makes searching for a film on there much easier.

So this week I have watched...

Roman Holiday 

Annie Hall 

The Great Escape 

Wolf Man 

Notorious 

Easy Rider 

Grave of the Fireflies 

Things to Come 

Frankenstein 

The Maltese Falcon

The Great Train Robbery 

Only Angels Have Wings 

Rabbit-Proof Fence 

Muriel's Wedding

There was, I'm sure, one other film on that list but I cannot for the life of me remember what film I watched before The Maltese Falcon. I suppose that says something about how much I enjoyed The Maltese Falcon... good ol' Bogie.

For any one curious about what's included the 2008 list can be found here.

3x3 Eyes

As I have mentioned many times before I grew up watching Japanese animation. Not the nice Studio Ghibli stuff, but the fairly mature films and series. One of these series was a four parter called 3x3 Eyes. It followed the story of a teenager who meets up with the last of a race of triclopse who is on a quest to become human. The fourth episode ends with a fairly exciting cliff hanger. This being the early-to-mid 90s there was no (for me) internet in which to discover that this was in fact based on a manga series and there was lots more to the story. 

After rediscovering, and subsequently watching, many of my old anime videos I realised that there were probably more episodes available. I managed to grab the last part of the series a few months ago but never got round to watching it due to travelling. Well, today I sat and watched a couple of episodes today and it feels so odd continuing the story about thirteen years on.

A similar thing happened recently with the release of an updated Guyver series that was much closer to the original manga and expanded on many story elements that were left out of the early 90s series. 

On a side note, it seems very odd that Hollywood haven't tried to remake any of the high profile anime. I'm surprised we haven't seen a live action Akira starring Leonardo Dicaprio as Kaneda yet... oh dear... after writing that I did a search on IMDb and found this. 

I despair, I really do.

What next? Ghost in the Shell with Keira Knightly as the Major and Orlando Bloom as Batou?

Buy me one of these

Remote controlled zombie robot... need I say more?

Last.fm

Now I know I'm late again on this one but I've just started using Last.fm. For anyone who hasn't heard of it, it's a music recommendation site where you type in (or import from iTunes) a list of your favourite bands and it recommends music to you based on this information. You can also just search for music like (insert band name) and it'll play you a seemingly never ending playlist of songs from bands in the same genre. You are also given the option to add songs as they play to your 'love this' list or banned list.

At the moment I'm listening to music like Mogwai and I've already made a list of bands I need to buy albums from. Some highlights are Mono and This Will Destroy You. I wasn't aware of the fact that there are so many good instrumental post rock bands around. I'm very picky about vocalists in bands and I often finding myself liking the music and hating the voice - these bands do away with that problem which is probably why I pretty much like them all. 

Finished promo

Here is the finished promo that I have been working on. 

I was supposed to have an interview today for a runners job at a post production company but the northern line was broken. I've managed to reschedule it for tomorrow but I'm a little worried that I may have blown it... I'll have to give myself two hours to get in rather than just one...

Skelebones

On Wednesday mornings we have to vacate the house as the cleaner comes and (strangely enough) cleans. This usually includes breakfast out and then a fair amount of time killing until we can return at 12 o'clock. Today Jordan and I decided to head over to the Skeletons of London exhibit at the Wellcome Collection in Euston.

It was fairly odd experience staring at long dead bodies and reading about their lives - most of which included a good deal of rickets, gout and dental problems. There were even a few that were excavated from a similar area that all exhibited signs of facial damage thought to be caused to drunken behaviour. Not much has changed in London in 200 years then.

The skeletons' ages range from about 1900 years old to about 150. They are in various states of wholeness... some only having a few limbs and about 2 ribs and others only missing the tips of their fingers. One even had had a craniotomy which gave us the opportunity to peak inside the cavity... spooky.

All in all, a very fun and interested hour or so was spent staring at these skinless fellows.  Not bad for a free exhibition.

Google ranking

After changing my sub heading on this blog to something containing my full name, I now actually come up on the first page of Google results when you type in my name. I have always been a little miffed that my name didn't link to me in any way on the net but now it does.

My internet pseudonym Louisblack (one word) however reveals my many little homes around the web. In the top five results we have my Flickr, my Macrumors profile, my Myspace and my Youtube profile. Stupid Austinist.com and their tags. I could have been five for five there as my now defunct Livejournal page is hanging around at result number seven.

Editing

In my post from last week I wrote about how I had managed to get some unpaid work editing a band promotional video. Well sadly hat project fell through due to my camera being unable to transfer HD footage into Final Cut Pro. 

This week, however, I was given some SD footage to use for a different band. I spent a day or so playing with the footage and sent it off to my contact who is organising these promotions. Apparently it was the best he's seen so far. I've sent it over to the visual effect guy who will add a few touches here and there and hopefully I will have the final piece by Monday or so.

In the mean time, here is my edit of the footage. In classic Youtube fashion the quality is terrible but you get the idea. I will upload the final version when I have it. The band is called Kojo (there is no link because apparently they are revamping their Myspace at the moment).

Fun with British Gas

Good ol' British Gas. This rather astonishing bill came through the door today. It is, of course, wrong. Just like every other bill we have recieved from this awful company. Jordan is currently waiting for them to call us back so we can get this stupid mess sorted out. They are two hours late in calling.

I think I can safely say that British Gas has outdone NTL in complete idiocy and I am often known for complaining about my year using NTL Internet and dealing with their customer service.

Louis the freelance editor

I've just arrived home from a meeting with Media Circus. They are an advertising agency based in Leicester Square and they want to move into creating band promos. For this they need editors and that is what I hope to be. 

I have been given a couple of tapes of live footage from a band called Cats and Criminals. I'm having a listen now and they aren't exactly my thing but I'm sure I'll be able to fling something exciting together. They have a cool logo that I'm thinking of taking advantage of.

This is (of course) unpaid for the moment but it could lead to a permanent position and I can at least add it to my show reel and put it on my CV.

Living with the JesusPhone

Hurrah and Huzzah. I am home at last... well, I have been home for about a week but I have neglected my blog in place of many important tasks such as seeing missed friends, searching for a job (my most hated of activities) and of course getting a hold of the iPhone 3G.

As you may have read back in July, my trusty K800i gave up after around 22 months of loyal service. Upon arriving home I quickly went about trying to acquire another phone. I was given two phones but each one was locked to a different carrier and, as I am new to Balham, I have no idea where I would go to get these things unlocked. This of course proved to me that an iPhone was meant to be and after much confusion and O2 generally being arses I managed to procure an 8GB GodPhone.

It arrived on Monday so I have had a while to play with it and come up with a few first impressions.

Firstly, it's beautiful. But everyone knows that and everyone knows how fun the multi touch interface is. I haven't had any of the problems that seem to be popping up on Mac and iPhone forums. My battery life is as expected - if I use Wi-Fi or 3G to surf the web  and download apps from the app store or use the GPS to find my way I get about 13 hours of battery life. If I leave it in standby and only use the net every no and then, it'll last for days. As I bought it because I liked the idea of always having internet access, I am happy to charge it every night.

My 3G signal is fine. Inside the house I get two bars which is still enough to comfortably surf websites. Outside I get full signal. In fact yesterday I had to go to Ealing Broadway and on the final part of the journey where the tube goes over ground I managed to read my e-mails to get an address and then use Google maps to search that address. All from a train carriage.

As you can see I have never had mobile internet so this is all rather exciting. It's a long way from spending 5 minutes checking your e-mails and paying about £2 for the privilege. 

Typhoon!

Our last few days have been spent holed up in our room as Hong Kong has just been narrowly missed by a typhoon. Typhoon signal 8 was in force which tends to close down most businesses for the day such as the stock market and urges people to stay indoors.

Of course we had not prepared for this and had no food. So we psyched ourselves up to get out into the pouring and went out... it was actually fairly pleasent. The rain wasn't too bad and the wind was a huge relief after two weeks of above 30 degrees temperatures. It turned out that this was the tail end of the storm and we weren't quite as brave as we thought. Later we saw on TV that the worst part was in the night and there had actually been quite a lot of damage caused.

The storm has left us with lots of rain which will certainly mean that our last few days in Hong Kong will be spent in the pub next to our guesthouse watching the Olympics on the big screen... oh well, sounds fun.

Big Buddha

Greetings all. Our holiday is nearing an end, we have less than one week until we fly back to the UK.

After my last post we had a break from sightseeing for a few days as Jordan felt really ill. After a couple of days we decided it might be a good idea to go to the hospital to get her checked out. This turned out to be a much easier than we expected. A lady from the guesthouse escorted us by taxi to the hospital. We registered quickly and were seen in less than 10 minutes. The doctor diagnosed the problem as an infection of the stomach or intestines and prescribed a cocktail of drugs. The total cost of this great service... 269HK$ (about 20 quid). She's fine now.

As Jordan was feeling better we headed off to a couple of the outlying islands over the last few days. The island of Lamma is about 2km south of Hong Kong island and has no roads or cars (although I did spot a couple of cars so I reakon this is all a scam). The island has a huge coal fired power station that overlooks one of the beaches. It's a very odd sight to behold as it is surrounded by lush green scenery and a small fishing villiage teeming with expats.

Today we visited Lantau island and caught a cable car up to the Buddhist Monastary close to the peak (around 900m up). This was a fairly... unnerving experience. In the words of Edward Hitler 'On a scale of one to ten I think it's bicycle clip time.' You'll have to look at the pictures and video on Flickr to see what I mean. At the monastary there is a rather large statue of Buddha and a very dissapointing vegetarian restaurant. You can tell these monks tend not to visit nearby Hong Kong island as their idea of vegetarian food is fairly pretty basic. We caught the cable car back down the mountain (even scarier than the way up) and headed back to the bright lights of Hong Kong.

Smog

Originally uploaded by Louisblack

I haven't posted for a while so I decided I should probably say hello so that people don't think that we have been sold into prostitution by triads.

We arrived in Hong Kong on Friday and had to rush to our guesthouse because if we didn't get there by 10pm, they would let out our room. So we jumped onto the airport express and grabbed a taxi to our guesthouse in Causeway Bay on Hong Kong Island.

Oh yeah... I completely forgot that I haven't mentioned the situation with our accommodation in Hong Kong. We were originally meant to stay in the notorious Chungking Mansions. 'It'll be an experience' we naively said as we placed our booking through Hostels.com. We have learnt a few things over the last 2 months. One of which is that we are pretty terrible backpackers. We dislike 'slumming it'. So when we checked out some recent reviews about the Hong Kong hostel we quickly decided it might not be the best idea to stay there. We managed to get into a guesthouse on Hong Kong Island for around the same price and we are much happier staying here than the more 'colourful' Kowloon.

As you can see from the picture, the smog here is awful. We have only had one day of blue skies and the rest have been like the picture. On a plus note we have found ourselves a nice local pub and a local restaurant where we can get two huge bowls on noodle soup with two milkshakes for 68HK$.

Stopover

I'm currently sitting in Taiwan airport waiting for our flight to Hong Kong. It's nice to know that we will only be sitting on the plane for an hour and a half. Before we went away Gill (Jordan's mum) said 'I wonder when it is that people stop being excited by air travel?' I think the answer to that could be 'after having to do three fairly long flights in 24 hours.'

Anyway, we had a pleasent, albeit breif, stay in Taiwan. We got in late and were met at the airport by Tom ( a friend of Jordan's mum). We decided to go for a quick drink in a bar before heading home with a rather large can of beer each. Today we just hung around Nan Kan which is a small town outside of Taipei. Sadly, we didn't have the time to get into Taipei to see the 101 (the current tallest building in the world). After a rather hair raising taxi ride, we managed to get to the airport with time to spare.

I will hopefully post something after we have been in Hong Kong for a few days but I have no idea what the situation will be at the guesthouse - we will have to venture out and find an internet cafe.

Only two weeks until we get home and in a way I am looking forward to being back and seeing everyone again. I'm sure you'll all scoff at me saying that all this travelling and sightseeing can be fairly tiring... although in my defense it is around 30-35 degrees round these parts.

More photos

I'm just posting quickly to say that I've uploaded a few more pictures from Japan to the set of Flickr.

Broken phone

I thought I should probably post again regarding what I wrote yesterday. I was mainly talking about in our price range... we have since found a few English or French restaurants but they are on the more expensive end of the spectrum.

I also thought I better post and say my phone has died. I'm not sure what finally did it but it has been on it's way out for a while. The little joy stick didn't go up and pictures kept coming up as scrambled. Oh well, it just means that as soon as I get a job I will have to invest in a 3G iPhone... it just wouldn't be proper not to.

Oh... and Jordan's phone doesn't work in Japan so at the moment we are uncontactable by phone.

Food, glorious food!

Well, I almost feel like Oliver Twist at the moment. Whilst I really do enjoy Japanese food and I used to happily eat a box of sushi for lunch most days at work and eat at Pompoko every week, when it is your only choice for breakfast, lunch and dinner you start getting a little tired of it.

Jordan and I have spent most of this evening fantasising about sausage and mash, pizza and various other forms of culinary delights.

I should explain. The Japanese really like Japanese food. They are content with eating rice bowls, noodles, yakitori, tempura and various other dishes. There just aren't the abundance of ethnic restaurants like there is in London, Brighton or even New Zealand and the US. Every restaurant listed in our Rough Guide is Japanese cuisine which has made it really difficult to find anything else as we cannot read the signs and I'm not even going to get into the Japanese address system.

This may be because, from our little experience, the Japanese are not very good at replicating other country's dishes. We ventured into an Italian restaurant as it was the only one in the area with an English menu. Jordan ended up with the most bizarre minestrone soup and our pizza tasted more like a savoury crepe.

We have decided that tomorrow we will make a concerted effort to find an English restaurant... maybe even a beloved Irish pub to see if we can actually find a completely vegetarian meal (one that Jordan won't have to spend the meal picking pieces of fish out of).

On a brighter note, we had an excellent night last night at the Kamiya bar where we had giant glasses of Asahi and I ate deep fried squid tentacle. We were also sequestered by several drunk Japanese businessmen who were so excited to see a pair of westerners in the bar that they hummed the British national anthem and tried to buy us beers several times. Of course this was all conducted in Japanese so we were very confused and just kept bowing, nodding and smiling.

And to finish, let me tell you I am currently drinking the weirdest tasting milk I have ever had.

Hot

We have been here in Tokyo now for a few days and time is really going quickly.

After my last entry, we went out to a restaurant in Roppongi Hills, a really flash, newly built area with designer shops. The place we found is a restaurant where they serve you a selection of things fried in breadcrumbs. Whilst this may not sound like the tastiest thing in the world, it was in fact quite nice. Jordan had a load of different vegetables but I had a much more exciting dinner. The pieces started out quite tame with beef and chicken but quickly moved to a slightly more bizarre affair. There was a whole fish and a prawn with his legs still on. The octopus tentacle was interesting... a bit like squid but with really chewy suckers.

The following day we headed over to Harajuku which is well known for it's clothes shops, some of which are designer boutiques but there are a few alleys that remind you more of Camden Town than Oxford Street. The streets were incredibly busy and it was difficult to get into any shops so we have made a note to come back and maybe pick up something.

We then ventured across town to our hostel which is in Asakusa. We managed to find a restaurant that had an English menu so we wondered in. We were a little confused to find a hot plate in the middle of our table which we quickly worked out was for us to cook our own food. It was all very confusing and again we didn't really know what had meat and what did not so we just had to hope for the best.

We spent some of the next day looking at the huge shrine in Asakusa and investigating the surrounding area. Today we went over to the zoo which was both fun and a little depressing - are polar bears ever not the saddest thing to see in a zoo? Also, Ling Ling the panda had died 4 months before so we couldn't see her.

We have the rest of our time in Tokyo planned out and even with a fairly hectic schedule we are going to have to miss some stuff out. I'm not sure what people are saying when we said two weeks would be too much.

Japan

Greetings from the land of the rising sun.

We flew into Tokyo on Thursday night after visiting (briefly) four countries in twenty four hours. We are staying with Dave's friends who have lived in Tokyo since 2006.

We spent our first day exploring Shinjuku Gyoen, an amazing garden in a traditional Japanese style. We then wondered the streets of Shinjuju for about 30 minutes trying to find the Tokyo Metropolitan Building. This I thought was quite hilarious as it the tallest building in Tokyo by a fair margin. Once we found the thing, we went up to the (free - stupid Sky Tower) observation deck to get a better view of the city. Apparently on a clear day you can see out to Mt. Fuki but it wasn't a very clear day.

After trying to find a 7/11 shop with any lunchy things left and wondering into a closed restaurant causing much apologising and bowing we decided that Shinjuku is probably a little too busy around lunch time. For lunch we decided to take the train to nearby Harajuku where we could sit and eat in the park... although it did start raining straightaway.

We decided to brave going to a bar in the evening as we both were craving beer. The original plan was to get food too but the bar we found ourself in had a menu with very few pictures and was exclusively in Kanji (the symbols). We finally found somewhere to eat with nice easy english descriptions but it just happened to be an Italian restuarant... now the Japanese have an interesting take on Italian food. The pizza was bizarre but very tasty.

Today we got up and headed out to an animation museum out to the west of the city. The website had a fairly awful map and our Rough Guide didn't provide a great description of it's location so we stood looking bemused in front of a map at the station. This of course attracted much attention from concerned travellers. One man asked if we needed help and looked over the map to see if there was anything written in Japanese that would help. As this did not uncover any useful information and he did not know where the museum was himself he charged off to find someone who did know. After about five minutes he came back and said he could not find anything useful and the look of sorrow on his face that he could not help was quite moving. It's definitely different from England where no one would offer to help a tourist and certainly not to that extent.

Anyway, after much walking we found the musuem which was actually a lot smaller than we would have hoped and we got round it very quickly. I did get to play with a 5 foot tall Gundam robot though!

As I expected, so far Tokyo has been the most amazing place. I have wanted to visit this city since I was a child watching films like Akira when other kids were watching Disney. We have a great deal planned over the next two weeks so I'll hopefully add to what I've already uploaded on Flickr.

Cold

Rather annoyingly we have spent the last few days with little to do in the lakeside town of Taupo. We arrived in the evening a few days ago and straightaway we knew that this was not going to go as planned. The weather has been distinctly colder than the other places we have visited in New Zealand to to it's elevation and position next to a large lake. This has hampered our ability to do anything remotely to do with the outside world. We planned on taking a boat ride out on the lake but all were cancelled due to the weather.

We leave for Auckland at 2:30 this afternoon and then fly to Tokyo on Wednesday at 11:30PM. We are both looking forward to being warm (possibly too warm) in Japan after two weeks of cold weather.

Apologies for the lack of photos on my Flickr stream. The internet cafes have been a little crap at having flash player and I'm not uploading each picture individually. I may just save them all until Tokyo and spent 3 seconds uploading them all in a high speed internet cafe.

Rotorua

It's been a few days since I last posted anything and that is mainly due to the lack of notable events in Tauranga and the abundance of things to do in Rotorua.

I think we have accepted that we may have made a mistake by stopping off in Tauranga and Hamilton. They are really not very important towns and we have missed out on seeing some much more exciting places because of it. I think being in New Zealand has just increased the list of things I would like to see here. I believe another trip out here would be great with what we have learnt. I think a car and no prior plans on where to stay would have made for a much more exciting trip but when you haven't done a trip like this, you think everything has to be planned down to the finest detail.

Anyway! On to Rotorua! We have been very busy here as there is a real bustling tourist industry here and travellers without transport are catered for excellently. We spent our first day exploring before spending the afternoon in the Polynesian Spa getting massages and drinking wine... ridiculously decadent I know but the spa uses geothermally heated water so we convinced ourselves it was a cultural experience. After such a day, our original cheap idea of having beans on toast for dinner seemed a little of an anti climax so we followed Dave's (Jordan's step dad for you who don't know) advice on visiting a restaurant called Freos. The food was amazing and it nicely concluded one of the least backpacker days we have had on our very unbackpacker backpacker holiday.

The next days adventures allowed for a relaxed morning before being shuttled off to a place called Paradise Valley Springs - a trout farm that just happens to have a pride of lions. We managed to get round the farm, which consisted of some trout, pigs, sheep, goats, deers, an evil emu and the most hassling ducks we have ever met. One made the most depressing noise ever heard because we neglected to bring bread. The parks main attraction (other than the trout) is the pride of nine lions. At 2:30 every day they make a spectacle of feeding the lions chunks of horse meat. This was fun to watch if a little unnerving when two females fought quite ferociously over the meat which ended with one bleeding from the nose. The lions are surrounded by a simple fence with an electric fence behind that which gives us onlookers an incredibly close look at the animals - when I upload the photos you'll see what I mean.

In the evening we decided to go along to one of the Maori cultural performances. This consists of a walk around the Maori land and a show of traditional songs and dances. They also provided a dinner off various foods cooked under the ground and the last part of the night was a walk focused on seeing glow worms. The show was interesting but it felt weird when the chief started talking and cracked a few jokes - it jarred a little against the otherwise serious atmosphere.

This morning we ventured out to Hell's Gate which is a thermal reserve outside of Rotorua. We saw bubbling mud and sulphur lakes although there were no geysers.

Now we are just waiting around for our bus to Taupo where we hope to do a few more interesting things. Apparently you can do a tandem skydive for 150NZ$ (approx 60 pounds) which could be fun although it may be a little too brown trousers for me...

Photos... finally

By the time I finish writing this, all of the pictures so far should be uploaded to my Flickr account. We had to get out of our hostel at 10am today and our bus isn't until 6 so we have had to kill a few hours. We found an internet cafe that has gaming facilities so the connection is really good.

That's all for now.

Rain and the Irish

How many Irish pubs must a traveller walk in to before he meets someone who knows Niall?

The answer is quite a few. So we have been in New Zealand for a few days and we have basically spent our time in Irish pubs and getting wet. It has rained every day that we have been here so we have ducked into pubs when we can and they have all been Irish themed. I suppose it would be better if we actually liked Guiness but they are definitely a huge step up over the bars in America.

Although we have been stuck inside alot, we have managed to go up the Sky Tower in Auckland, go to the Auckland museum and go to the Zoo. We were allowed to go into the back of the Red Panda enclosure and feed them because it was too rainy for them to come out. We also fed a giraffe. It gave Jordan a huge lick on the hand... it obviously prefers a shorter lady (Jordan's joke).

We made it into Hamilton yesterday and we've just been hanging round as it's been so wet. We've bought some big jumpers for the time we have left in NZ as it's so cold. We look a bit silly but at least we are warm. The hostel we are staying in is really nice. There was a whole netball team staying last night so we were put into the owners house in a really nice room with a bed so much more comfortable then the ones we have been staying in.

I'm fast running out of time on the net so I'll finish here. I'm trying to upload a few pictures to flickr but it's going really slow (again). I don't think I'll even get to the Alcatraz ones...

America

I seemed to have lost Tuesday. It's quite a strange feeling but my week so far has consisted of a Monday and the first of Wednesday... Tuesday hasn't happened for me. It's a strange feeling.

We have arrived safely in New Zealand. We have booked into our hostel which seems pretty decent. The owner is friendly and was happy to chat about the city for a while... it turns out he has visited Milton Keynes before which I thought was funny if slightly odd.

As not much has happened here, I thought it would be a good opportunity to write about our last few days in America and our overall thoughts on the place. We spent our last night in the Venice beach area. The hostel was alright although we were in a 3 bed dorm so we had to share with one other person. It worked out okay but we felt a bit nerdy when we were in bed by eleven and we was off out drinking some more. Our excuse was that we had to check out in the morning and we had already had a fairly heavy night the night before at a bar called the Powerhouse in Hollywood. That was quite a fun night. We ended up talking to a rocker couple called Vic and Brook (how American can you get?) and drinking 3$ pints.

Venice beach was a really fun place during the day. It was very hot so we sat by the beach and I got in a few times. There was a real festival atmosphere with stalls selling all kinds of things and street performers along the promenade. We had some dinner in the evening and had a walk up the beach as the sun set. After popping back the hostel, we decided to run out to get some bottled water - our room was ridiculously hot. The place was a little scarier at night. There were gangs of people hanging out everywhere and the lively atmosphere of the day was long gone. We promptly bought water and retired to bed!

We spent our last day in L.A. just lounging on the beach and having a long lunch in an Italian restaurant just off the sea front.

It has been a strange but fun couple of weeks. Although it may have seemed like we have been moaning about a lot on this blog, we have had some really fun times and after some initial feelings of disappointment when in L.A. we have decided that we would definitely come back. I think L.A. is maybe hyped up a bit too much. Hollywood is touristy and a bit rough and Sunset Strip consists of very few bars that are really far away from each other.

San Francisco, on the other hand, was a great place. You can be a tourist and do all the touristy things or you can just hang out in bars and soak up the atmosphere. There are a lot more places to just sit in SF than L.A.

I really should sleep now as I didn't sleep on the plane (how do people do it?) but I am wide awake. I think I'm currently on about 26 hours but I could be screwing my maths with all the odd time zone business. We have much better access to the net here so I will hopefully update this blog a little more over the next few days. I may even chance hogging all the bandwidth and upload a few pictures to Flickr.

Greyhound

We are currently back in L.A. after spending a very fun 6 days in San Francisco. We have agreed that San Francisco is far superior to Los Angeles for many reasons but I will get into that another time. This post is all about Greyhound buses.

So we decided to get the Greyhound from L.A. to San Francisco as we thought flying would be too expensive and our original plan of getting the Megabus fell through after it sold out months in advance. So we booked Greyhound without doing enough research... don't worry... we paid for that little slip up.

Our journey to SF was fairly uneventful... apart from the fact it took 9 hours and was an hour late in leaving Simon, our friend we were staying with, waiting at the less than safe Greyhound station. Whilst waiting he did witness someone getting their bag stolen so you get a good idea about the kind of people that hang around these stations. The L.A. one is situated in the beautiful surroundings of Skid Row where homeless insane wonder aimlessly... nice.

But it was on our return journey that the fun really started. We made our meal stop at 12:30 (which only gives you the option of eating at Burger King by the way) and things were going well. We were making good time. It got to 1:10 when were supposed to be leaving and the driver wasn't getting up from his table leaving many of the passengers a little annoyed. After about 15 minutes, he lets us know that the bumper is hanging off and we will not be able to proceed for an hour. This was quite annoying. After waiting for the mechanic to turn up and fix the bumper we set off. Now the air conditioning was not working and the bus was spluttering along even stalling a few times on the way out of the car park. This was quite worrying. We all got out and waited for the engine to cool down so we could get on our way. We did this and set off on the freeway.

We made it about a mile down the road before pulling into a truck stop. Here we sat for over two hours while we waited for a replacement bus. No shelter except for some trees, lots of flies and some not very desirable toilets were our landscape for these few hours. After the replacement bus was delayed yet again (the driver first said that it would be there at in an hour... then it was 5:30, then 7:30) the driver said we were going to get back on the bus with the top hatches open and we would deal with the heat - everyone was pleased although annoyed at the fact that we didn't do this two hours ago. We were back on the road... but for how long?

Not long is the answer to that. About an hour down the road we ground to a halt on the side of the freeway. In the arse end of nowhere if you pardon the expression - about 100 miles outside of L.A. and 30 miles away from the nearest town. Here we stayed for three and a half hours while we waited for another bus. In the desert heat with very little water and no food we stood for this time. The sun slowly set and we were in darkness although at least we were slightly less sweaty. At 11:00 the replacement bus showed up. We arrived in L.A. at 2:00AM (luckily we forced the driver to let us off at Hollywood rather than our planned stop of the Skid row one) and we booked into our motel at 2:30.

The thing that worried us most while we were stuck was the fact that we had no way of contacting our motel to say that we would be late. We didn't have the number and for the majority of the time our phones didn't work. Eventually we decided to phone our friend David in the UK (at 3AM UK time) and asked him to look up the number so we could let them know. It all worked out fine in the end and we got our room.

So today we are going to the Hollywood Greyhound office to lodge a complaint and demand a refund.

I am currently uploading some pictures from SF to Flickr but it is taking forever on this internet cafe connection. I may have to try again tomorrow to finish the set including the pictures from Alcatraz.

Wind

Mark Twain once said 'the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco'. This I can personally vouch for.  Out of the four days that we have spent in this city, only two have been what we would consider hot. Even on the warm days there have been moments of chilly wind. 

We arrived quite late in the evening on Friday after a nine hour bus journey through the desert of California. We were met at the bus station by Simon, our friend who lives in San Fran, and dropped our stuff off at this loft apartment. We headed off to meet some of Simon's work mates who had stayed drinking at work. This is one of those moments that you really wished who worked for a silicon valley tech company. We walked in on a few people sitting on huge sofas in the middle of the office drinking what can only be described as the largest bottle of Barcadi you have ever seen. We sat drinking there before heading back to eat pizza at the flat.

The next day we went out to a street festival with two of Simon's friends that are visiting from Amsterdam, Jos and Vicky, and ended up holing up in Francis Ford Coppola's restaurant (yes, he owns it). We spent a few hours drinking and ,unbeknownst to me, getting very burnt. I noticed once we got home that I had a bright red forehead and nose. Luckily I didn't get any pealing as I covered myself in aftersun about ten times per day.

On Sunday we decided it would be fun to have a picnic in the park. We got on the Muni and headed over to Golden Gate Park with cheese, olives, bread and things to eat with wine.  This ended up being a huge mistake as the temperature dropped dramatically and we ended up shivering through our little picnic. We decided to head over to a bar to heat up and ended up spending about 4 hours there.

Monday was fairly uneventful but today we walked over and booked our tickets to Alcatraz before walking up to Golden Gate Bridge.  We got fairly close before decided it was time to start walking home. Now we are having a long relax and considering watching something shitty on the home cinema.

San Francisco

Apologies for the lack of posting over the last couple of days. Although we have found a fairly nice internet cafe near to our motel in L.A., we have generally just been checking e-mails and looking up bus routes as it's 1.75$ for 15 minutes.

Anyway, the last few days have been quite eventful. We are currently in San Francisco staying with a friend in the centre of town. After posting this, we are going to go for a little explore.

But back to L.A. After the last post, we went out and found the Hollywood sign. We caught the subway a few stops down Hollywood Boulevard walked back. This took us about 2 hours as anyone who's been to LA will tell you, the streets are quite long. We realised this again the next day when we caught the bus over to Beverly Hills. It took us quite a while but soon we were wondering around all the ridiculously expensive shops on Rodeo Drive. We stopped for lunch (I had a chilli dog and Jordan a salad and fries) before heading over to Santa Monica. There we sat in a beach bar and had a pint... well as close to a pint as you can get - about 600ml. We then wondered around the pier and tried to get in the sea but it was a little bit too cold. Jordan got annoyed because she was then covered in sand as the sun cream we have been using is practically just grease. Due to our sandy state, we decided to do the long bus ride back to the motel to have a shower.

That night we decided to go out for dinner and walked down Hollywood Blvd looking for a restaurant. We passed some decent looking Italian places but were taken in by a swanky looking bar/restaurant that seemed to have some reasonably priced food. We decided to go in and were seated and brought menus. The waitor explained that it was a tapas style affair so the prices became a little less attractive. We then looked at the wine which was around the 50$ mark. At that point we were quite worried that we may have wondered accidentally into a really expensive restaurant. We ordered a couple of dishes each and a bottle of Chablis and worked out that we would probably end up spending about 80$ which isn't too bad but was a little more than we planned on spending. The waitor brought us out our food which consisted of some rather overdone flame grilled asparagus, mashed potato with truffle oil, miso soup and the largest mountain of calamari you've ever seen. After eating a bit of these we decided that there may be a reason that the place was empty apart from ourselves and another table. We picked at our food for a while before decided that we should just pay up, finish our wine and go. We paid the bill and sat in a more comfortable area drinking the rest of our wine. It was at this moment that we had a great idea. As the food had been so bad, we would not tip. The problem was that we had already put a tip in bill. We chose our moment carefully and quickly emptied the tip into Jordan's bag before making a hasty getaway. The tip money went to good use on beer and crisps to fill our empty bellies.

I'll leave the next day for another post as we really should go out exploring. I am currently uploading some pictures to Flickr so you can have a look at those while you wait with baited breath for the next post.

Hostel - Part III

Greetings from Hollywood!

We landed safely last night at 7pm local time... 3am in real time. We got driven to the hostel in a mad shuttle bus with a driver who put on his glasses to read his text messages (whilst driving along) but took them off to drive! We arrived in Hollywood at about 9:30 (5:30 UK time) and walked into the grotiest little place on earth. The guy behind reception was wearing a vest and we could smell him across the desk. They had no record of our booking and seemed very hard done by that we were asking for a room. So after paying almost double what we were told (as we didn't have a reservation) we walked into our dorm room.

Oh dear.

There were no blankets, dirty leopard print sheets and some crazy european boys. Jordan was clearly a little distressed at this point so we had a better look around. Our horror at the room was only compounded when we saw the bathrooms. Communal showers and minimal doors on the toilet cubicals didn't help the overall vibe of the place.

So we went for a walk.

After looking for a shop to buy some water we decided to look for better accommodation. We found a rather scary looking motel which didn't have anyone in the office so we carried on looking. It was then that we found our saviour. The 7 Star Hollywood Motel (I doubt it really has 7 stars). After inquiring about room rates and availability we made our decision. We would stay in the dirty Hollywood Hostel for one night and leave promptly in the morning. And this we did.

Now most of you will not believe this but we were up and getting ready at 6 o clock in the morning... no, really. We went out for breakfast at the International House of Pancakes and ate a very small amount of the huge portions given to us (photos coming soon). We went over to our motel and checked in before heading back to pick up our back packs from the hostel. After chucking our bags into our motel room and having some nice long showers we found ourselves in much better spirits and prepared for the day of exploring ahead.

We are now going to see if we can see the Hollywood sign through all of the smog and cloud.

Quote of the holiday so far - 'Is this the Walk of Fame? It's a bit shit isn't it?!' - Jordan.

T minus 3 days

I'm a bit scared.

My girlfriend and I start our two month holiday on Monday when we fly out to Los Angeles. Whilst I am very excited and this really is a trip of a life time, it's really bloody scary.

I've traveled on my own before. I managed to get to a festival in Germany with no grasp of German whatsoever but at least I was only a few hundred miles away. This time I will be half way across the planet.

I think we are pretty prepared. I'm currently printing off a few copies of all of our e-tickets. In fact, the e-tickets are probably not helping the situation. It used to be that if you were booking something you would have a ticket in your hand, or at least a letter telling you that you had booked your hotel. We have a few automated e-mails telling us that everything is A-OK.

That's all I wanted to say at the moment but be prepared for several more posts describing my apprehension over the next three days.

Aural ponderings

Our big move from Brighton to London started this past weekend. The first load of stuff was taken up in my infinitely small car and unloaded at Jordan's parents house where we will be staying for a while until we get on to our feet.

Jordan had to stay in London to settle in our cat so I am at home trying to decide what to take in phase two. I have packed away the last few hundred DVDs and a few of the lighter books. I have filled a few bags with clothes that I rarely wear and I've take apart a bookshelf and the two units that I keep my stereo in.

I was then left with the decision to pack away my stereo and rely on my iMac's internal speakers or keep it set up and deal with it later. Firstly I tested out the iMac's speakers. I think I have used them possibly once or twice in the entire life on the computer. They are surprisingly good. Of course they are not up to the standard of even a fairly cheap all in one system but I imagine the average person could happily use the internal speakers for movies and even music.

I then decided to place my stereo's speakers on the desk, as they would be in our new room, and give them a good listen. Now my house mate, Richey, has just managed to get back his vinyl collection and record deck from his ex-girlfriend so we were having the obligatory conversation about how much better vinyl sounds than CD and (obviously) MP3. This got me thinking about my stereo and, in particular how CDs sound on it, as I rarely use my CD player. I just run my computer into my amplifier (with a £30 cable no less) and listen to my iTunes library.

So for this test I decided to use a few CDs - the first being The Cure's 2004 self titled album. The verdict was fairly obvious. Even through my pretty mid range stereo, the difference in quality was huge. I think the shape of my room and the rather sorry state of my speaker stands weren't doing me any favours as the new placement of the speakers on the desk has really helped with the wobbly bass sound I was getting.

Anyway, I think I have decided to keep the stereo set up and I will deal with it when I have to pack away the iMac.

Clearly I'm not just a nerd for computers...

The Cure - The Only One

Apologies for the lack of updates recently. I'm moving house in two weeks and going on holiday in three so I have been completely rushed off my feet. I am therefore a few days late with my opinions on the new Cure single. 

First off, I must say that I was a little annoyed that I preordered the single a week before it's tuesday release date and it didn't reach me until thursday.  That's two days that I had to resist spending £1.5o on iTunes or going the morally dubious route of bittorrent. I resisted in the end as I wanted my first listen to be the CD through my pretty decent stereo. 

I have now had the opportunity to give the single and it's B-side, NY Trip, a few listens and have formed a few initial opinions. Firstly, The Only One is definitely closer to The Cure's later efforts such as High from the Wish album. It's an uplifting love song with (surprisingly due to the recent line up change) a dreamy, Cure-esque keyboard track underlying the chorus. Robert Smith wails over a more rocky guitar sound and the tempo keeps up throughout the entire track. It's a song that grows on you, although it never really started out bad.

Of course, this is all coming from a deeply devoted Cure fan who dislikes very few songs in their back catalogue, so I wouldn't take too much notice of this little review. 

This week I have also been listening Nine Inch Nail's new album that they released free of change. It seems to be following their recent trend of moving into more guitar driven music which I'm a little disappointed about. The earlier albums that consisted mainly of programmed loops sounded a great deal more original than the more generic rock/metal albums released over the last few years. Oh well, at least it was free.

Guns Don't Kill People...

... the police do apparently.  Only joking! Although I often made my views on the shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes very clear to anyone that would hear them, it seems that the recent police shooting of Mark Saunders was fairly justified.  However, the Guardian have run a piece about how he was shot 'a number of times' as the police disabled him. The family are also quoted as saying 'he didn't endanger anyone at all to my knowledge'. 

Sorry, but the man had a shotgun which he was using to shoot at his neighbours houses.

From the reporting so far, it seems that the police officers has just cause to shoot the man. I agree that when dealing with these situations, the officer should always aim to disable the target - preferably not killing him, but if the target sustains fatal wounds then it really can't be avoided. 

I know this post sounds really a little right-wing, and for that I apologise, I really do, but people really shouldn't be walking around with shotguns. I know he had a license for it, but why are we even still issuing licenses for firearms? 

And who needs a shotgun in Chelsea?

Searching Flickr

Power Station 

Alex DeLarge

I have had a Flickr account for a while now but I have never just sat and really looked through other people's pictures.

I've really been missing out.

There are some really amazing photographers out there. I found a few pictures of the Hong Kong skyline and some of the amazing looking people in Harajuku, Tokyo. However, it was this HDR image of Battersea Power Station that really excited me. It is my favourite building in London because it looks like something pulled straight out of Nineteen Eighty Four (in fact, if I remember correctly, it was the Ministry of Love in the 1984 film). I also have a bit of a thing for HDR - it makes things look so surreal and dream like. It also has a tendency to make skies look very ominous. I liked it so much that it is currently my desktop wallpaper.

Although all this has just made me want a DSLR. Anyone got a spare £500? 

My new home

Oh dear. Today I found out that the city I will be living in from August will be run by a cartoon character.

We British officially now have no right to make fun of Americans electing celebrities as politicians. At least Arney was in Terminator 2, which was much more of a success than our friend Boris could ever hope for from his TV appearances (which mainly consisted of him being humiliated by Paul Merton and Ian Hislop on Have I Got News For You).

From watching interviews with Boris supporters from around the city, I get the feeling that people have incredibly short memories. This is a man who vehemently opposed gay marriage, attacked Liverpool so soon after the beheading of Ken Bigley and is essentially a racist - not really a great choice for the face of London. Just look at the controversies section on his Wikipedia page! 

But oh well, in the words of Charlie Brooker 'ROFL!! LOOK AT HIS FUNNY HAIR!!!! LOL HE IS A LEGERND!!!!11111'

Ahem...

Games

So by the time I finish writing this post, Grad Theft Auto IV will be on sale. This is probably the first time that I have been genuinely jealous of PS3/XBox 360 owners. 

I have never really been one for putting the time and effort into games to complete them - most of the time I play it until I get stuck and then leave it for months with the optimistic idea that I will come back to it. The only games I have completed in the past few years would be New Super Mario Bros (DS), Star Fox Command (DS) and Half Life 2 (PC). Then why am I annoyed about not being able to play GTAIV? Because you don't need to finish a GTA to still enjoy it. Admittedly, the reason I didn't finish San Andreas was because my disk wouldn't load past half way through the last mission but I still had hours of fun flying the planes and '9/11-ing it' (tasteful I know).

This, it would seem, would put me firmly in the newly coined casual gamer category that Nintendo has so successfully captured - but I'm not so sure. I enjoy my DS, I really loved Zelda on it (that one I put down and just never picked it up again. I'm sure I'll find the time on one of my many long haul flights though), and I often lust after the idea of playing Mario Kart Wii and Super Mario Galaxy. The only problem I have found with Nintendo consoles post SNES is that the third party games tend to be really really awful. Anything made by Miyamoto is going to amazing, that's obvious, but what the hell is all this Catz, Hamsterz and bloody Pippa Funnell?! Girls want well designed games too.

So this leaves me with only one option. Buy a Wii for the less challenging games that you can pick up for an hour here and there and fork out a whole £300 for a PS3 for the odd big game that comes out. I know, I know, most people would recommend buying a 360 as they are cheaper and there are more games but to those people I would say 'please go away and die'. Not only is the XBox noisy, unreliable and really, really ugly it also has possibly the worst controller ever created. Any controller that makes me... ME unable to play Street Fighter II is not worth using. I don't care if it's expensive or has no games, give me a Playstation 3 any day. Plus, I am already crying inside about not being able to play Wipeout HD and Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. 

I really am a Sony Fanboy at heart.

Mornings...

The only reason I look forward to Monday morning is Charlie Brooker's excellent weekly column on the Guardian website. I could read it in the Sunday paper but I'm high-tech... and I like killing 5 minutes at work whilst pealing crusty chunks out of my sleep deprived eye sockets.

This weeks column got me worried. I have never been good in the mornings.  I do always get up on time for work, but it's not easy or pretty. I have, however, always been under the impression that once I hit my mid to late twenties I will enjoy getting up early.  I will be up and eating an elaborate breakfast at 8am on a Saturday morning whilst planning the days activities.

Well, it seems this will never happen as I believe I see more of my morning thoughts and feelings in our friend Charlie's little rant than is practically healthy. It's not like I don't get enough sleep.  It's just that getting up with 7 hours sleep in a lot more palatable at noon than it is at 8am.

Oh well, at least I have Charlie to greet me good morning on that most terrible of days.

Psystar

I'm sure that anyone who is remotely interested in technology, Apple in particular, will have heard of the small company Psystar who have recently hit the headlines with their Open Mac. For the rest of you, the Open Mac is a regular PC that is (apparently) able to run OS X with no difficult fiddling. You can even order it with Leopard pre-installed. 

Sounds fishy? You'd be right.

Over the last few days several websites have been trying to contact Psystar to get some details. A few have succeeded in getting a phone interview with the Director of the company but nothing new has really been learnt. The most details came about when the Guardian's Charles Arthur did some digging. He couldn't find anything about Psystar from before this week and the company isn't even listed with the Miami Chamber of Commerce.

Hmmm.

The best bit came when Charles did a google map search for the address and found it to be a small residential home. A few minutes later the address had changed to an industrial estate. Gizmodo popped down to this address and found no trace of the company...

I'm loving this little mystery. I hope no one got caught up in the hype and actually ordered one of these things because it's looking more and more likely that they will never see their much anticipated Hackintosh. 

I wonder what surprises tomorrow holds!

Hong Kong - Tokyo

I booked our flight from Hong Kong to Tokyo this week. We ran into a bit of trouble with Tokyo as it seems that travel companies aren't really too fond of the little island of Japan. 

Our original plan was to fly in with Air New Zealand and then get a one way ticket to Hong Kong as Air New Zealand doesn't fly out of Tokyo. This, however, turned out to cost around £700 each. 

Instead we had to change our flight so we went straight to Hong Kong and then look into getting a return to Tokyo.  A return is considerably cheaper than a one way ticket. Although this did throw up a positive in the sense that we get to spend a night and half a day in Taipei.

So this is the last flight booked and once we book our Greyhound bus from L.A. to San Francisco we will have all of our travel booked. Huzzah.

Louis Theroux's African Hunting Holiday

I noticed Louis Theroux's new documentary on the BBC's main page under their little iPlayer heading. Firstly, I wonder why this one didn't get the publicity that the earlier episodes of this series received. Or is it just that I'm not as clued up on TV's goings on since I lost my access to digital TV and it's EPG.

Anyway, I'm always happy to see a new Louis Theroux, I find his films both fascinating and horrifying. 

This particular film opens with a child pointing a rifle at a warthog. Louis watches on nervously as the child fires killing the animal. We then see her smiling and posing with the corpse.

Louis is spending time with an array of 'farmers' in South Africa who raise (what us Brits would consider) exotic animals for (mostly American) people to 'hunt' in fenced off parts of land. As they are paid by the animal, the 'farmer' is forced to make the 'hunt' as easy as possible.  This is usually achieved by placing the hide next to a watering hole, preferably with some food near.

The hunters we see along the way are exclusively American.  They talk excitedly about how much they want to shoot a Rhino or an Elephant or a Lion. There is no emotion there. They standing laughing and drinking whilst their children laugh and play among half a dozen dead animals being skinned and dismembered. 

This is their idea of a holiday in Africa.  This is how they interact with the continents stunning animals. Some people go on safari, these people go hunting endangered species.

One moment that worried me above all was when we find ourselves watching Louis pointing a crossbow at a warthog. He takes the safety catch off and you genuinely think he is going to shoot. Thankfully he backs out.

We meet some odd people along the way. One farmer is particularly fond of his giraffes. He forbids anyone from hunting them. There is also a real sense of sadness when he realises that one of his animals may have been shot and not killed - only injured and in pain. I don't think he will be in the business for much longer.

The Cure photos

I know this is really late but I have uploaded a few pictures I took at the Wembley Cure gig I went to the other week in March to Flickr.

Dexter

I have been fairly terrible at giving this blog the attention it deserves over the last week or so. Partly this is because my girlfriend has been using my iMac for her university dissertation (her TiBook is still out of service due to a faulty power supply. I've ordered another one so hopefully I can use that while she uses the iMac. It's running Leopard and I think Time Machine was designed specifically for people writing two 8000 word essays). 

But mostly it is because of Dexter. Now I usually detest american serials. I did watch the first series of Lost over the course of about 3 days but I gave up after episode 12 of series 2 when I realised that nothing significant had happened. 

But Dexter is different.

Dexter is a US cop drama with a twist. The protagonist, Dexter Morgan, is himself a serial killer who hunts down murderers to relieve his dark urges. The characters are generally likeable with the exception of Debra, Dexter's adoptive sister and the dialogue is clever and witty. The audience is supposed to identify with Dexter thus supporting him in his morally dubious affairs (a device that found the show embroiled in controversy when it aired on American non cable TV). 

I won't carry on with some lengthily review but I will urge you to give Dexter a watch. The first series is coming out on DVD next month and I think ITV are running it at the moment. I suggest going down the DVD route as the idea of having to wait a week between episodes is really quite terrifying...

The Smile-Manner Squadron

I came across this story whilst flicking through the BBC site. It was on the most e-mailed list so it seems others feel the same way I do.

The Japanese feel that the 'old ways' of etiquette and politeness are being eroded in modern Japanese society. Any other country would put this down to changing times and accept the sad inevitability that this is just the world we live in now...

Not Japan!

They send in The Smile-Manner Squadren to put a stop to people talking loudly on their mobiles, listening to their MP3 players at annoying volumes and (this is Japan) not respecting their elders and social betters.

This makes me really happy. I'm sure there are people that think this is ridicules (I'll refrain from throwing in a Big Brother/Thought Police reference) and in some ways it is - manners shouldn't have to be enforced (no matter how cool the name of the enforcers is). However, I would happily have this in England. The English are supposed to be known for their manners but that doesn't really equate to the experiences most people have of our fine race (sarcasm?).

So the next time you see some teenagers playing music through their mobile phones on the bus or train, think about the world we could live in if only we employed the Smile-Manner Squadron.

Movies of Last Week

The Hunger
Deliverance
Grease
Bubba Ho-Tep

Movies of Last Week

The Green Mile
To Kill a Mocking Bird
Eastern Promises

Eastern Promises

I've just finished watching Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg's latest film. One thing I really can't get my head around is that fact that Cronenberg is not considered one of modern cinemas greats. His last two films, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, are arguably two of the most stunning pieces of cinema of this century. Both films have been highly praised by critics but very few people seem to have seen them and although recognition from the film academy has provided a few nominations, performances from Viggo Mortensen and Cronenberg's direction clearly deserve more.

As anyone who speaks to me will know, The Fly is one of my all time favourite movies. I also consider Videodrome and Scanners as two of the best ventures into body horror by any director. Cronenberg, however, has moved away from the grotesque body and seems to be focusing realistic and altogether more disturbing event - violence, human trafficking, rape and families being torn apart by lies (made even more frightening when it's set in your future home city). 

These latest ventures may not make your skin crawl like watching Jeff Goldblum pull out his finger nails but at least you know the chances of becoming a human/fly hybrid are slim to none... getting embroiled with the Russian Mafia on the other hand...

Applecare 2

Success!

My iMac is covered under warranty until 2010.

Applecare

I've been trying to decide on whether it was a good idea to purchase 'Applecare' for a while now. I'm not usually one for buying extended warranties but I kept having a really niggling feeling in the back of my head over my iMac. If a console breaks after 18 months, it's not a tragedy. It's not an essential tool and will only cost around £200 to replace (probably a lot less than it's price 18 months prior). Even a regular computer tower is easy to fix yourself with it's easily accessible insides.

An iMac on the other hand.

Everything is soldered to the logic board (motherboard) including the CPU, GPU, sound card, USB, Firewire.Add to that the fact that the monitor is attached to the thing and it really starts to look like a DIYers nightmare. I wouldn't even know where to start taking it apart.

For this reason I have done the responsible thing and acquired myself an extra couple of years of peace of mind. I even shopped around a bit. Apple sell Applecare for £139.00.  It's a bit less with the student discount (available to me if my girlfriend uses her name and card) but it's still more than I can comfortably afford at this time.

eBay to the rescue! I managed to grab a great bargain - £65 from an American seller.

Now lets just hope an American code works over here in Blighty...

Another reason to hate Windows Vista...

... As if you needed any more.

I'll set the scene.  A friend of mine purchased a shiny new Sony Vaio laptop. It came pre-installed with Vista as most computers do nowadays. It quickly became a bit of a running joke - his two favourite wording being 'fucking' and 'Vista'. 

Now I took it upon myself to tout the advantages of Ubuntu Linux - free software, easy installation, can easily dual boot with Windows.

Or so I thought.

Apparently Vista doesn't like it when the partition it resides on is split or resized. I discovered this halfway through partitioning the drive using gParted.  This, as you can imagine, caused me quite a bit or worry. I had rendered my friend's computer unusuable (well, it was running the Ubuntu Live CD fine). 

After much googling I found that Vista required me to insert the Vista DVD and perform a system repair which would put everything back to a nice workable state.

This would be easy if it were not for the fact that my friend has a Sony Vaio. I like Sony, I think they make excellent consumer electronics but the fact that they don't include system disks when you buy a computer is awful.  What you get is a 'Recovery Partition' that not only steals 9GB from your hard drive but can only be booted from Vista (What the fuck!?!). 

So to fix my friends computer (well, I say fix, I mean return it to it's previous state.  To fix it I would have to continue with the Ubuntu installation) I had to illegally download a copy of Vista just to use the system repair utility.

I am now too scared to continue with the Ubuntu installation for fear of destroying everything on the Windows side. I am sure that this is a devilish ploy by Microsoft to stop people exploring the wonder that is Open Source computing and frankly, it will work. 

I know I use a Mac, which is probably the most locked down system you can buy, but at least I made a conscious decision to buy one. Most people don't know about anything outside of Windows and Microsoft is making it impossible for people to enlighten themselves. I'm not saying Windows doesn't have it's uses (such as gaming) but a basic Linux installation would be sufficient for 80% of computer users. We just need to move away from the Windows-centric model where everything on the internet is explained as though you are using Internet Explorer.

Anyway, this is probably a subject for a whole other post... 

Movies of Last Week

I'm very pressed for time as I need to get back to work, but here is this weeks Movies post. Have a look at my previous post on Diary of the Dead for my reaction to the new Romero Dead film.

Sin City

Sixteen Candles

No Country For Old Men

Diary of the Dead

Diary of the Dead

I was pleasantly surprised on Tuesday of last week when I discovered that the new Romero Dead film was being released this week. 

I was, however, less than pleasantly surprised when I actually went to the cinema to see it on Friday. I'm not sure I like the emerging 'found film' genre  that we've been seeing recently. I absolutely despised 'The Zombie Diaries' - a low budget British attempt at the zombie genre that was presented in the form of 'found footage'.  Cloverfield is probably the best recent attempt although it still suffered from annoying characters and awful acting...

I think that is the real trouble with these films.  When watching a regular film, we expect the acting to be just that - acting.  The action is stylized and we accept this because it is a film... it's not real.  This does not work when a film is masquerading as a documentary or a home video (with the obvious exception of Rob Reiner's Spinal Tap, Best in Show... etc).  The audience has to be completely convinced that the actors are real people dealing with real (although completely impossible) events.

Anywho... Diary of The Dead has all of these faults and more and this is coming from someone who loves all four of the other movies... hell, I even love the Tom Savini remake of Night of The Living Dead. The acting is atrocious, the characters are arseholes and the story is almost non existent.

I think the real problem is the lack of claustrophobia.  The thing that made the original trilogy, and to a lesser extent Land of the Dead, great was the interaction between the characters while they were holed up either in a house, a shopping mall, an underground bunker or a fortified city. Zombies are just a sideline in these films - a threat that brings a group of mismatched people together and forces them to cooperate (or not) to survive.  

I did, however, enjoy the 'zombies don't run' jokes. You're right George, they really don't.

Xubuntu

I've been meaning to post about this for a while now. As was mentioned in the previous post, my girlfriend's 7 year old Apple TiBook died... well, I think it may just be the power adapter as it was making some iffy, sparky sounds in the proceeding weeks. This forced me to dig out our old 12 inch Samsung ultra portable (PIII 700Mhz, 192MB RAM, 20GB HDD). It was running Windows ME (eugh!) so I decided it was time to try out the streamlined, Ubuntu  derived Linux distribution Xubuntu. 

I am really impressed with it so far.  Obviously my RAM is really hindering performance (the website recommends 192MB RAM but that's probably in the same way that Apple recommends 512MBs for Leopard) but overall, it's definitely usable.

Our living room PC was running Ubuntu 7.10 briefly before it kept confusing guests (and myself a few times I have to admit) and I do really think that this is the version that has 'made it'. The one problem I had when I first tried to use Ubuntu back in the days of 6.06 was my wireless card.  My card used a Broadcom chip and back then it was a real Linux no no. 

Now with 7.10, this is no longer an issue. 

It just pops up with a helpful message informing you that Ubuntu needs to use a 'non free' driver to properly operate your wireless card and once it is clicked... bam... internet without restraints!

I doubt I'll ever ditch Apple for Linux completely but I am seriously considering purchasing a cheap Core 2 Duo Wintel laptop and using Ubuntu rather than forking out £700 on a Macbook.