I've seen Daniel Radcliffe naked.
Yes, it's true -
I've now seen Daniel Radcliffe naked. I was looking for a facebook group that says just that, as a sort of joke, but they all actually sound a little bit scary considering he's still underage. UNDERAGE, people!
In other news,
Phil wrote a cool summary of the Munich and Amsterdam trips, and also posted revealing video footage of his failure as a man. It's riveting stuff, you should go watch it. I also feature prominently in another video in the hofbrauhaus, and yes, I really need to upload that artwork Phil... it's on The List. :)
your-internet-history | /dev/null
I tried to check my old yahoo mail account today to see what was in there, but alas! I haven't logged in for over four months, so the whole thing has been deleted. :(
I've had that email account since year 11, so there was a lot of mail in there from my school and uni days. Lots of banter, angst, x-philean/buffy ravings, mailing list hysteria, websitery, and conversations with random internet friends that I'd made... email was a very important slice of my life, since I counted myself rather socially inept at the time. I hadn't read most of it for years, but it was something I'd keep if I could.
It's a bit sad to think that a whole chunk of my internet life has been wiped out because I met arbitrary criteria for a random batch file running on yahoo's servers. I'd probably pay to get my account back if I could, just to download all the mail.
Ah well. That'll learn me. I cried (not really) when my hotmail accounts were nuked, and made a vague attempt to try and get my yahoo mail saved off somewhere back then, but stopped when it became Too Hard.
It's a bit like losing a computer hard drive... or two... in the space of three days, which happened to me in Sydney a couple of years ago. Oh, I cried then - no more ICQ history, no more old website designs, some lost photos, and the effort of having to rebuild and get all your settings just right again. And then having to do the same for my work machine. :p The pain of it all!
negotiating London
I never realised how hard it is to get around London until I couldn't walk properly. My usual 30-second commute to the tube took about five minutes on Tuesday, and I missed a tube and two buses getting to work because I was just too impaired to negotiate stairs or long distances comfortably. I can't imagine what it would be like being permanently disabled or in a wheelchair. You couldn't do anything without a car, really... so, youth and mobility - don't take it for granted, kids! very soon you'll be old and crusty and mumbling about young people not appreciating their youth.
Anyway, my ankle is healing fairly well. I can get around at about 3/4 of my normal speed, but I'll probably need the bandages and support for another week or so. No more frisbee for the forseeable future... I can see myself spraining it again during a game and everything going horribly wrong.
A lot of random six-degrees-of-separation stuff has happened to me lately. When slightly tipsy on Wednesday night and devouring a late-night chicken burger, I found out that one of my colleagues and I share an ex-workmate who moved over to London a couple of years ago. I used to work with him back in Sydney at my very first full time job, and my colleague worked with him in London. Ha! Also, I was travelling on the tube tonight with another colleague when we found out that we both went to the same primary school in Sutherland for a couple of years, but not at the same time... though we do know the same people. AND, I also found out that a friend-of-a-friend (whom I've never met) has friends who work in a company back in Sydney that I knew a few people from. So, the world is feeling very small right now.
Otherwise, I'm feeling very unhealthy right now. I've eaten at home only once this week, and that was Monday when I couldn't go anywhere because of my ankle anyway :p So terrible. (Feeling guilty is probably not going to stop me from going for vietnamese food tomorrow night, though... mmmm...)
Hope you are all staying safe and enjoy your weekends :)
ankle sprain
I sprained my ankle today thanks to all that wonderful London rain.
I'm not so enamoured with it now :p
I haven't sprained my ankle in years. It wasn't my dodgy ankle either, it was the good one, which means I guess they are both dodgy now. It actually hurts a lot more now than it did at work after I had sprained it. sigh. :(
photo of the day
I finally updated my
photo of the day collection on flickr. yay me :)
rainy days
It's been raining in London a lot the past few days. I got a good drenching walking around on Friday and Saturday, which has never happened to me before. I don't even own an umbrella now, because when it "rains" in London it really is just a vague sprinkle of water that you can walk around in for half an hour before you start feeling wet.
Anyway, I like rain. A lot. I used to love it in Sydney when there was a complete downpour and I would sit at the window and watch it fall down. It's a very calming and soothing experience that I never get to have in London, so this week's rain has been a treat. :)
Check out these two wacky people when they got stuck in the rain waiting for a bus on Friday night.
Earlier in the evening it was much more sedate. You'll note that we are all dry, and that my hair is different than what it was in Sydney :)
I want to thank everyone who called/emailed/messengered after my last post as well... I really appreciated it. I didn't realise I sounded so down, but it was a really pleasant surprise to hear from people out of nowhere! *hugs* to all. The rain this week has pretty much made it an introspective week, but a good one. :)
temporary lifestyle
When I'm alone and not busy, I'm frequently confronted by the question "what am I doing here?"
The "here" can mean anything from "London" to "contracting" to "being single" and "sitting at home when there's all sorts of exciting things going on in your city right now". It never used to bother me when I was cruising along without much purpose, but now it seems like I just don't have any, and it's not a good feeling.
Everything I do feels like it's so easy - I do what I please whenever it suits me, and there's virtually nothing that stops me from doing it. I don't have to overcome financial obstacles or save up annual leave. After three years of having everything on demand, I need something else huge and new and different in my life. What the 'thing' is I don't know (my ticking biological clock calling? :p), but not knowing it just makes it a lot harder to remedy...
My lifestyle feels very temporary to me. A bit like I'm filling in time until some new challenge comes along to make me focus my attentions and efforts into something useful. I try and create new challenges for myself (like... moving to London) but they don't really end up being what I'm after. (But don't get me wrong - I like it here, and I'm much happier here right now than if I was back in Sydney still working at my old job and wondering what I should do.) The search for the real challenge I'm supposed to be tackling just continues in the background.
I wish I had the comfort that uni and school provided - knowing that even if you idle away this week or month or semester, you're still on an ultimate goal of getting a piece of paper with your name on it at the end. You know the end result -- it's the journey that makes or breaks the experience for you. Right now I'm on a path ending in a passport full of stamps (way cool), but is it enough? I'm too busy keeping myself busy so I don't have the time to think about the answer...
all fired up and nowhere to vent
No merit in this post - 100% venting.
I came home from my weekend away and found a half-drunk McDonalds soft drink sitting in my bedroom. Grrrrr. Why would you drink a McDonalds drink in
someone else's bedroom and then leave it there? More annoyingly, how long has it been sitting there?? Did it get left there on Friday night and have three days to fester?
Two of my flatmates deny all knowledge. The third doesn't eat McDonalds as far as I know, and is unlikely to be eating it in someone else's bedroom.
why?!?! argh!!!! Flatmates are totally overrated!!!!
I'm MORE annoyed than I would otherwise be, because our last day in Amsterdam was cold and rainy and we all had lack of sleep from the night before, and our flight was crappy, and in spite of this I had some thoughtful things I wanted to blog about.... but instead came home to old food in my room. BLEH.
hilarity!
I had a massive panic attack and thought that Mothers' Day was THIS sunday when I would be in Amsterdam and probably unable to make phone calls to Australia, also that I hadn't arranged any flowers or anything and mum was going to hate me forever.... turns out it is the NEXT sunday (13th May).
so in the midst of the panic I was brainstorming with my brother over gmail about what to get her, when he started panicking too. He sent an email to a whole bunch of people going "isn't it THIS sunday?" just before I googled it and discovered that it is the 13th instead. Now he looks stupid in front of a whole lot of people for not knowing the date (as opposed to me, who is admitting this to an unknown quantity of people over the intermaweb).
But anyway... don't panic kids. It's all good. You have another week to sort something out. :)
UPDATE without WHERE = uh oh...
I wrote a great SQL command today that lets admins direct a downloadable data stream to a different computer for any given user. Yay me! There was only one tiny bug. I forgot to put a WHERE clause in the command, and now our director of development has downloaded the entire catalogue of movies the company has ever sold onto his laptop. Seems he's got a lot of space on there. (Lucky it was only on our dev environment. phew. :)
enough geekery; I'm heading off to Amsterdam on Friday for a weekend of flowers and debauchery, so I'm sure there will be photos of things that are pretty as well as things that are pretty illegal come next week. I'm a little bit apprehensive about Amsterdam; I've heard Stories. I'm also arriving by myself late at night, which really creeped me out in Munich, so I'd like to stop making it a habit. Note to self: next time, get earlier flights. However! I'm keen on the Van Gogh and Anne Frank museums, and we'll be spending some time admiring the tulips in the flower park, which should be colourful.
It has been super warm in London recently, many degrees warmer than average for this time of year (go global warming!). As a result of all this balminess, people are gradually waking up to the fact that there is actually an environment, and we need to stop screwing it over. Out of seemingly nowhere there are huge campaigns to reduce packaging and waste, and 'Carbon footprint' has become the new buzzword of '07, used to describe the level of impact you have on the environment. For example, camping has very little carbon footprint; easyjet flights are like pouring a dirty big vat of ugly sludge over a pretty rainforest, and taking ten of them a year is like running your own
Pacific Gas & Electric company. In the past few days I've seen two TV news stories, advertising campaigns on the eco-friendliness of companies, new slogans to help people reduce their carbon footprints, and I just finished watching a TV show where this guy had
hand built his family's self-sustaining home from scratch, all from environmentally friendly and recycled materials over eighteen months... This is not to say that everyone's changing their habits, just that a lot of the big companies are advertising the fact that they're being more environmentally friendly (ironically probably increasing their carbon footprint in the process). The Brits are a bit like the japanese in the packaging stakes - they make food portable for busy people, environment be damned. A news story on BBC this morning showed individually wrapped apricots inside a plastic bag of apricots. Isn't that just crazy?
Anyway, the advertising got to me, and I considered my current carbon footprint on the earth. I came to the conclusion that staying in Sydney was probably the best thing I could have done for this world, since we have no recycling in my building, we waste water, leave lights on, read free newspapers that generate 12 tonnes of paper wastage each day, eat packaged food, buy extremely cheap non-sustainable goods, and take our dirt cheap holidays overseas on a regular basis.
I
have to start doing something better for this world :p
