Thingomy.co.uk

Packing is going well, and I have recieved an email from BA to tell me that infact I exist.

This week has been somewhat heavy with all the people that I have visited and things that I’ve had to sort out before disapearing.

I had a little confusion over the flight times — I thought the flight to london was at 0800 on tuesday morning — it isn’t, that’s when it lands. I’m going ot have a really early morning on tuesday. on top of that, I finally get to where I’m going after 3 flights, one of which is transatlantic, at about 9pm local time (which is about 3am uk time)

Right — I’d beter get packing…

I finally managed to get ot edinburgh, and find a computer that works, this involved fixing cabages internet.

Between sleep deprivation, the boat and some unfamiliar suroundings, I havent quite recovered yet, and my balance is still a little off.

I went to a Beltane[www.beltane.org random pagan festival that I do photography as part of] party last night and had much fun, the 2 highlights were:
the processional drummers doing thier act — the feeling of your ribs bouncing off each other in time to a drum beating is somthing that you just can’t ignore;
and the chance to get a hold of the new Carl Ziese 135/1.8 lens that Twotruths has bought — very impressive piece of glass — I want one, completly useless to me, as it weighs about a kilo tho.

Having spent the morning packing, in anticipation of going on the boat tonight[14 hour overnight ferry from home to civlisation] I have come to the conclusion that either i’m taking too much stuff, or the bag isn’t big enough…

With all the stick I’ve been getting from a list of people about not taking a cabin, I decied to stump up a third of the price of a basic new lens (£20) to get a bed for the night.

Well, I should finish packing.

Oh hell, now the cat is sitting on me, licking my arm, drooling all over my keyboard, and giving me involuntary piercings.

Programming Can Ruin Your Life

This is a really interesting artical, stolen from del.icio.us/heliomass

Well the credit cards arrived — all 3 of them.

The TSB one turned out to be 2 cards on the same account, so I am now armed to the teeth.

On the assumption that one of them works — (is that a silly assumption?) I am now good to go.

I have just watched the last episode of Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda.

I have to say I am really impressed.

The first couple of seasons are pretty good and are nice and logical — after that it just get’s weird, until in season 5 it’s just distilled weirdness, but in the last episode everything is tied in together and you realise that the whole thing was in fact carefully thought through.

some would say that Kevin Sorbo (I think that’s his name anyway) is a bad actor,

I’m no experianced critic of acting, but I really can’t see where they are coming from.

if you want a really good Sci-fi series, and are willing to sit through 110ish episodes, it’s well worth it.

My accent is an odd character – it has some form of split personality disorder – it automatically responds to whoever I’m speaking to. If I’m speaking to someone who is from Shetland it turns to Shetland dialect, but defaults to a more neutral dialect when speaking to others. The first couple of times my dialect turned off I thought I’d lost it and got a little worried, but it came back within minutes of getting back home from uni for the holidays.

Having said the above, it does have a sort of a delay built in, for the first few days after moving it’s confused and sits on the fence until it gets the idea and changes properly.

My question is – when I go to America to see someone with an American accent who is from Shetland, what is going to happen, I have 3 theories:

1) It’s going to default to neutral, and I will come out sounding weakly Shetland with some English.

2) Because I’m speaking to someone from Shetland, and there is no neutral English present, it will go back to Shetland.

3) It will revert to what it thinks is neutral given the surroundings, and I will end up with the mother of all bastards of a dialect half way between Shetland and Texan.

Feel free to take wagers, I suspect it will do 1, but I really don’t know.

Then there’s NZ, and I’m not even going to think about HK.

Well — Why are we here?

I have started this blog ((weB LOG – diary that is on the internet)) so that I can successfully keep people up to date while I’m on holiday [for those of you not aware, I’m going on a 5 month round the world trip to America, New Zealand].

I was going to use LiveJournal but as some of you know already it has it’s problems for that sort of thing, so I decided to go all out and get a WordPress sit of my own.

Things aren’t perfect around here — the theme is a little off, and some f he stats gathering stuff still doesn’t work. The image displaying stuff is a little broken — it works, but doesn’t exactly display useful stuff. but as it is right now, It’s usable.

I would like to say that I am only going to post stuff here if I think that people are actually reading it. I will be measuring the interest by the number of comments, so if I don’t get at least some comments, the posts are going to slowly spread out to the point that it’s a waist of time.

For those viewing this on LJ (you know who you are) I’ve done a yoda, and will be continuing to crosspost using black magic.

For anyone interested, there is an email subscription system such that anyone can sign up their email address and have all new posts sent out to them automatically, to anyone who registers this accessible through their profile. If you just want an email update with no extras, see the box in the red bit. I recommend that people sign up as they can post comments though.

I have heard some really nasty roumours that the Bank of Scotland has been outsourcing call centers to some random third world place called yorkshire…

on a more serius note, I just relaised that my credit card expires while I’m in NZ — this is a pain as it won’t really be feesable to have my mail redirected there.

I called the bank and they told me that if they were to send another, that it would come with the same date on it. They told me that there was no way they could sort it. Only after I sugeted canceling the card and applying ofr a new one did they agree that there was actually a way to do it — screw that — I’d likelly end up with no card at all.

So I went into a branch, and I was — after a short conversation — told to go to the TSB round the corner.

The TSB’s competers were down, so after filling out a form I have given up hope that they are competent enough to get it right at all.

I have however applied for an MBNA card and within 12 hours I’ve been told that it’s been accepted (pending some further paperwork…)

Right — I have made an entrance into the world of WP — it’s an odd environment, and I have not yet fully gotten used to it.

The skin is a little off at the moment and needs work, but all in all, things are usable.

Please read the ground rules page before going any further.

Any feature requests are more than welcome.