monaco pics 3

So here it is - day 3, race day.

Let's crack straight in shall we with the establishing shots. These are where we sat on day 3:











For these next ones I'm actually hanging out over the side of the stand, which I can assure you I didn't really enjoy as I have a serious fear of heights:







Monaco is so small that there's not much room for, well, anything, really. So instead of the paddocks (where the teams 'live' being in the pits, they're a ways off to the side. These shots are aimed at the paddocks, but you can't really see them, as such:



This is actually the 'RED Bull experience'. Whether that means 'overly sweet with and with an unpleasant after-taste', I can't confirm.



Hubba-hubba:



The next lot of shots are all of the pits:





















We were actually facing 'the rock' from this stand:







Here's one of the support races with Porsches:



Note how the red and white thing is there to keep them in the race-track and not skip the corner. The curbs are not much of a deterrent at all for an ordinary road car:



And some GP2 action:



Note the red and white thing has gone now:



This is them wheeling the Red Bull into the garage. At most circuits they don't need to bother, because the paddocks are right there, but as mentioned, Monaco is so tiny they can't fit them in:





Before the race they have a pit walk about where people can wander around the pits. If you can see anyone famous, let me know:



And here's the driver's parade. See if you can spot anyone you recognise:



And here, finally, is some F1 race action:



Not that I took many photos during the actual race, because you're so focused on the racing, you forget to:



A Ferrari skipping the corner. They got told off for skipping this corner:



A pit stop. On telly, pit stops look quite smooth and well-oiled, but in real life they're barely controlled chaos:



And here was one of the more exciting events: Kovalainan crashed his car right next to us:











And that's pretty much it, really. Here's a shot of Button holding his trophy aloft as shown on the big screen:

monaco pics 2

So here's the photos for day 2 of our little excursion to the Monaco GP this last May.

Again, clicking the pics should take you to the full album to have a look through.

On day 2 we were in casino square. If you look at the photos yesterday there's one where I refer to the hill being really steep. Well, that hill leads up to casino square, which is where we were on day2.

There's only one stand up there and it has to be the most comfortable stand I've ever been in. The seats are moulded to a bucket/back-side shape and while that may sound uncomfortable, it's actually exactly the opposite. Unlike all the other days where I got a numb-bum and a slightly sore back, on day 2 I was fine.

The first shots are the establishers, then. Building on the right of Casino square:



Big crane, big screen, expensive casino:



Man with natty t-shirt distracts me from the point of the photo:



Over to the left of the stand. Quite empty at the mo, but it soon filled up:



Some close up now. First off the restaurant:



Next the big screen, which was unfortunately covered by the arm of the camera crane thing:



And a shot of the crane. Crane's are very important at Monaco as there's little in the way of run-off:



And the casino:



A side street to the right of the stand:



And this is the track. So that must mean it's time for some car action:



I've actually mixed these together - they're from both the morning practice session as well as the actual qualifying. From your point of view, I figure a shot of an F1 car is a shot of an F1 car :/.











So, halfway through the day was luncheon and this gives me an opportunity to show you the gardens that were out the back of the stand. I have to say it was incredibly civilised being in this stand. And no, shots of statue cocks was not my intention, it just happened to be the closest statue to where we crashed out over lunch.



In the afternoon was qualifying, so here's some more cars.





Of course, for qualifying, the crowds filled up. Here's some people on the balcony and in the restaurant. This is one of the things that gives Monaco the atmosphere it has.





Some more car action and then guess what happened?



Lewis Hamilton binned it just up the road from us. And here he is, walking back to the pits, helmet still on because he knows it was entirely his own fault:





And here's two more cars failing to crash like Lewis:





Overall, I'd probably say that day 2 was my favourite day (the actual race not withstanding).

monaco pics

Well, here's the good stuff - pics of the Monaco trip. Really it was only about two months ago, but it already feels like ages.

You should be able to click these pics and it'll take you to the full photo album if you want to go through them there. The versions in the photo album are 1024*768 res.

So, first off, here are some establishing shots of where we were sat on the Thursday morning. We were at a place called Tabac, which is called that because there's a tabac (a tobacconists) under the road in a subway walkway.









From where we were we could see the top of 'the rock' as it's called. I understand there's a palace up there:



And we could see the harbour pretty well:



Monaco's pretty damn compact, and I guess they always need to save about as much space as they can. This is a little golf buggy that's done up as a fire truck!



So anyway: the important stuff!

Here's a Brawn coming around the corner:



And a Renault doing the same:



Not sure who this is, but then I was more focused on trying to get the "whizzing past" effect. This also demonstrates just how close you are to the track and the cars at Monaco. You don't get anywhere near as close as this at any other circuit.



And here's a shot of the rear-end of a car as it blasts down past piscine. I think this was a Renault:



But Formula 1 is not all that happens on race weekends. Here's the rear-end of the GP2 cars as they go around on their parade lap:



And here's a front-shot of a GP2 car. Notice just how similar they are to F1 cars - it's meant as one of the feeder formulas for F1.



And off they go away from us:



But wait, who's this:



Why, it's Martin Brundle and David Coulthard of the BBC's commentary and formally of driving about in F1 cars fame:



And here's Coulthard staring 'right down the barrel' as it were. There's a good chance he was looking right at us, rather than this being a coincidence, because my Dad was almost totally unable to see them.

I don't mean that he couldn't see them because his view was obstructed, I mean he was looking, but despite both me and my sister pointing them out, he couldn't spot them. Since me and my sister were pointing at them, he may have noticed and wondered what was going on :/.



So anyway, that was morning practice. After lunch we moved to the next door stand, which was one of the good things about the whole harbour area - the seating wasn't assigned, so you could sit basically where you want, and there were about 6 or so stands.

These are some establishing shots. As you can see, we're much closer to the piscine area here than tabac.







And here's more of those yachts. Millions and millions of pounds worth of yachts. And these are the small ones :/.



This is a long shot of the tabac corner now, because of how far we've moved down:



And the cars whizzed past in the afternoon session:



And that's your lot for today. Hopefully I'll be able to bring you day 2 either tomorrow or the day after. Day 2 is actually the Saturday - Friday there's no F1 action, so that was when we went to Cannes. Although I took my camera, I was sufficiently unimpressed that I didn't take any photos.

the joyous return to work

So I'm back at work.

Hurrah, obviously.

The weekend was pretty productive. I'd say I got most everything ticked off. Partly that's because some of them didn't take as long as I was dreading.

I also got a bonus thing done - I put a load of stuff on for e-bay auction when I hadn't planned to do that at all. I didn't put everything on that I identified for my to sell this, although that was kinda deliberate.

Experience has taught me that having too much stuff ending at the same time is a little counter-productive. I get very confused as to what's paid and what's owed, and it ends up with huge a amount of, often heavy parcels and numerous trips to the post office. Chopping it up into more manageable chunks makes life so much easier.

But it's not all good news. I utterly failed to do any scanning whatsoever. That also meant I failed to make any headway on the growing list of new anime shows I need to sample. I also failed to watch any new anime and read a paltry amount of manga, where I'd hoped to really crack into a series.

I don't really even have the excuse that there wasn't enough time. If I'd been a bit more ruthless with all my Anno playing, I'd have had the time to at least do something.

But then the counter to that, of course, is that it was a holiday - I should be allowed to have some fun, right?

Hopefully, over the next couple of days I might be bringing you some photos from my Monaco adventure, but don't hold your breath, as I'm feeling a bit lazy, if I'm honest.

two-finger typist

I'm a two-finger typist.

I basically use my two index fingers to type all the letters, though my thumb does the space bar and I use my little finger for holding the shift and control buttons. I'm quite quick, but it's more because I've kinda learned the keyboard than because it's an inherently quick technique.

One of the things with touch typing is it gives you the ability to not look at the keys while you type. Well, I've learned the keyboard to such a degree that I can almost do this with my two fingers. Especially if I kinda relax my brain. If I think about it too much, I start to loose the ability.

However, I make a lot of errors, but they're errors caused by a specific thing - my left finger hand seems to be quicker than my right.

The best example of this is the word "of". I virtually never actually type of. I type "fo", because my left finger gets to the 'f' just before my right finger can get to the 'o'.

Anyway, this is my last post for the week, as I have Friday and Monday off work. Hurrah and Huzzah!

Let's just hope I don't blow all my time doing useless stuff and actually get some things done. It'd be good to come out of a weekend 'ahead' for once.

the end of furuba

I'm on the verge of polishing off Fruits Basket, or furuba as it's known.

I've kinda not read furuba for a very long time, but now that it's finished publication I've gotten around to finishing it. That should reflect badly on the manga, btw - I really enjoy it, it's just, I dunno, I kinda stopped reading.

There are a variety of reasons for that.

First and foremost is probably that I found it very emotionally draining. I'm a bit of a soft-touch when it comes to drama and I cry all the time, like some sort of big girl's blouse, but that's how I am. Furuba is/was a veritable blub-fest for me, and not always in a sad way. A lot of it's crying for joy.

There's also quite strong emotional connection in there for me - my mum died of cancer and there's a lot of lost parents stuff in Furuba (not always through death - it's more of a general theme).

So yeah, it got to the stage that I was blubbing a lot and while I enjoyed it I wanted to take a break.

Another issue was that it doesn't really work broken up. No, that's the wrong way of saying it - it's more like it works far better read continuously. I was experiencing a heck of a lot of frustration with the 6-month wait between volumes, so it seemed sensible to build them up.

I then discovered that the series ended with volume 23 and it then seemed sensible to wait until I had them all before reading again. What I didn't really think about was that meant, with 6-month gaps, it would be around 4 years before I would start again :/.

A problem I've always had with furuba is the sheer number of characters. I mean, it's based on Chinese zodiac, so you've got at least 12 main characters for starters. When you add in the other main characters and the secondary characters, and the occasional/incidental characters, there must be 30 characters you need to keep on top of.

That's a heck of a lot for my meagre brain. Especially when they all have unusual (to me as a westerner) names. When two characters are discussing an off-screen third is when I struggle the most. I'm often referring back to the front of the book where some fo the main characters are listed out, though it's a long way from being comprehensive.

The above may all read like criticism, but a lot of it isn't really.

I mean, lots of characters has made for lots of interesting plotlines, for example. And my rubbishness with names is my own problem, not the fault of the manga.

So yeah, I've been really reading it with some gusto and remembering why I liked it so much too.

you have new construction options

The old Anno obsession doesn't seem to be abating.

Even though I did my best to abstain, I still played for several hours over the weekend. Several hours that could have been put to better use, but that's my life, I guess.

I'm this close to finishing the quest (you can't see but I held my thumb and index finger really close together then). I've got just one more chapter to do. I didn't start it yet, because it turns out it's some timed missions and I didn't want to get trapped into playing it for that long.

Instead I tried one of the scenarios. This was an opportunity to try out some fo the theories I've been developing about the placement of things.

One thing I've discovered is it's easy to get trapped into getting carried away with your industries and neglect enlarging your population. The problem with this is that you rapidly run out of cash.

The basic idea of Anno is that you produce goods that your population needs. Some of these, like basic food and drink they can take raw (so fish and spices they take as-is), but others you have to process.

However, things ramp up in complexity. So your population starts as peasants, with only pretty basic needs, but they then become citizens, with slightly more complex needs. Some of these needs require you to do processing.

So they need clothes, like linen garments. Well, you can't grow linen garments, but you can grow hemp, which a weaver can weave into linen garments.

But one of the tricky things about it is that you can't manufacture hemp until you've got some citizens in your population that need it. This means you can't pre-build: the need arises before the means of fulfilling it.

To add further complication, there's two types of population in the game: the occident (i.e. what you start with - the West) and the orient (the Middle East). Eventually you end up with settlements of both of these across your islands. Islands are clearly delineated too: green occident ones and desert orient ones.

But here's the thing: some of the goods are inter-linked. The easiest example of this is spices. You can only grow spices on orient islands, but oriental people don't have spices as one of their needs, occidental people do, so you have to grow it in the orient and ship it to your occidental population.

However, there are things the orient doesn't have. For example, you need 'tools' to build almost everything, but tools are made from iron, which is only found on occidental islands.

Add into that fertilities - you can only grow certain things on certain islands - and the fact that you can only get advanced oriental buildings by 'buying' higher diplomatic ranks and you can see how complex things can get very quickly.

Which is where I come unstuck - I get so carried away with the industrial stuff, I forget to keep building my population properly and my accounts go into the negative (red). Now in some ways that doesn't matter - the game doesn't end if you run out of cash - but it does mean you can't build new stuff... like new houses to increase your income :/.

Oh - forgot to mention yesterday that the bread pudding was something of a success. Certainly it was very edible, although somewhat ironically, since the recipe was essentially custard + bread, it could have done with some custard to accompany it - instead, I used the left-over double cream, which was good, but some custard would have been better, I think.

how much? blimey.

Bit of an odd weekend.

It was my intention to do a whole bunch of stuff and, to be fair, I did do a whole bunch of stuff. The oddness was that some of the things I did took absolutely ages, which meant that there just wasn't the time to do everything I planned.

I think part of the problem was that I remembered that this weekend I've got a four day weekend. So, rather than cut my loses on the things that took a long time, I went ahead with them anyway, thinking that I could play catch-up next weekend.

The big problem with this is that I then end up with far too much to do at the weekend, especially when my primary aim is likely to be to relax.

One of the things I really do have to do but didn't get the time to is move some credit card debt around. I've not really been paying proper attention to them and one of them hit a (low) limit and I don't want to incur any over-the-limit charges. I could increase the limit, I guess, but that would be a little counter-productive.

A thing I did do - and one of the ones that took a lot more time than anticipated - was sort out my e-bay auctions. I've ranted before about the utterly retarded thing e-bay has done with postage costs.

I have a work around using the "courier" option, but the problem with it is that it means it's a lot more effort, because I have to actively ask people what postage they want (generally I offer 1st class recorded and regular second class). This generally adds a whole bunch of steps into the process that mean it takes longer.

But anyway, the thing I wanted to mention is that the e-baying went surprisingly well. I mean, there was the usual thing of stuff selling for meagre amounts, like 5p or £1 when they cost me twenty time that, but a couple of things actual sold for half-decent prices. So yeah, it's not all bad news.

I've been trying to work out ways I can slice out extra spending. One of them was to kill off my AOL subscription. This was originally for dial-up modem that I kept in case my broadband went totally tits up.

However, in all the years I've had broadband it's only gone tits up to that degree twice, and even then the time it took to fix wasn't enough for me to break out the dial-up. Plus we have broadband at work (admittedly it's just about the world's slowest broadband, but it's quicker than dial-up).

Also, there were two other factors. Firstly, I'd heard it was a nightmare to get them to cancel and secondly they were planning switching it to "broadband" and charging more than double.

Obviously, the second one didn't make sense - my broadband wasn't with them, so I dunno how they figured it was broadband, but the more intriguing one was that cancelling my subscription was actually incredibly easy. It just took one two-minute phone call. I phoned up, asked to cancel, they did it. It was really that simple :/.

At the time I was worried they'd done something sneaky and maybe not cancelled it properly, but it seems they have ad I've not been charged since.

Another thing I'm thinking of cutting down or reducing is my phones. I have a subscription phone, but I should really switch to a pay-as-you-go service, because I just don't use it enough to justify the expense.

And also I need to investigate my BT landline - they suddenly seem to have basically doubled my bill for no apparent reason :/.

ankles and uunties

I realised something as I was driving in to work this morning: I didn't post a blog entry yesterday.

I've no real excuse for not having done one - I just kinda forgot :/.

Also as I was driving in this morning, Chris Moyles made a spoonerism slip that lead to the title of this blog. It still makes me smile.

A spoonerism, in case you're wondering, is where you switch the first letters/syllables of a phrase - so fucking hell becomes hucking fell, for example. My family has something of a long history with the spoonerism. For some reason it's one of those things we just used to do.

One of the appeals is how it can both turn words into other words (in the above example, fell is an actual word) and words into nearly words ('hucking' sounds like it should be something, but isn't).

This weekend I am going to attempt a new cooking extravaganza: bread pudding! The recipe I have is really simple. Not that bread pudding is complicated in any recipe by the sound of things, but this one seems particularly simple.

The jist of it is "Put buttered bread and home-made custard in a pan and bake for half-an-hour or so." I've never made home-made custard before, but when I found out what the basic recipe was I was intrigued to have a go. It turned out to basically be egg yolk, sugar, double cream and milk. That actually sounds easier than instant custard.

I've never had much luck with instant custard if I'm honest. It's weird in a way, because it's so simple. I mean I can make the stuff where you just put water on it (though even then usually end up with a bit of powdery stuff that I've not dissolved properly) but the more complex version with heating milk, adding the powder and sugar I always seem to make a complete arse of, so we'll see how I get on with the proper custard.

The blogs pretty rambley today, huh?

I've watched two more eps of BSG in between my marathon Anno sessions. It was really depressing. It was meant to be depressing - that's not a depression brought on by the quality of the show or the impending end of the show. It's depressing in the sense that everybody is miserable - indeed, one of the characters actually kills themselves so that's what I mean.

I'm going to try very hard to abstain from Anno this weekend. My hope is that this weekend I'll go hell-for-leather and get loads of stuff ticked off and then next weekend I'll hopefully be clear to play it solidly.

How successful I'll be I don't know.

indiana jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull

Er... yeah.

I'm not sure quite what to say about this as I both really enjoyed it and got really annoyed by it.

I think I'll take my usual approach of moaning on about the stuff I didn't like and then undermining myself at the end by going "However, I actually kinda enjoyed it too".

So, stuff that annoyed me.

First off, although I don't expect an Indiana Jones film to be 'realistic', what I do expect is for the stunts to seem like actual people are doing them and they're not all CGI.

I've mentioned before that I've embraced GCI after some initial scepticism, but let's face it: Indi films are all about doing practical effects. As a film series they are a massive homage to early cinema - specifically the cinema adventure serials. Those films couldn't possibly have had a lick of CGI, so Indi should have as little as possible too.

Most especially in terms of stunts. I didn't mind them doing CGI for things like the nuke blast or the aliens, but to have bits where clearly CGI was used to make the stunts seem 'doable' or more dangerous than they actually were was not good.

The most glaring example involved a tree, a car and a river. It just looked so fake and so naff it was laughable, but not in a good way.

There were quite a lot of (often furry) critters in the movie too. Specifically some rodenty chipmunk/prairie dog things, some monkeys and some ants play fairly significant roles.

The chipmunks I quite liked - they were used for comedic effect only and it worked. The ants were a bit dodgy. It worked on some levels, but it was also a rather uninspired and flat sequence generally. It also seemed to have quite a few logical holes that made it seem a bit daft.

The monkeys, however, were really poor.

They made no sense, they lead to something that made no sense and was both daft and unrealistic and they seemed very cheesy. I mean, why the hell would these monkeys suddenly decide to help Mutt? It was just utterly random. Plus, of the three they looked the most obviously CGI.

What else?

Russians instead of Nazi? Fair enough, but they should have been emphasising they were Communists, not Russians. Just like they emphasised they were Nazis, not Germans.

The head Russian was a good evil character, but she seemed a little, I dunno, nice? It could have done with a few scenes of her heartlessly killing her minions or something to really make her seem nasty. Her death was a bit rubbish too.

Also, there seemed to be a weird relationship with Indi and the Communists. He didn't really resist them enough and seemed to help them out in too straight a fashion. Normally you'd expect him to help with an eye to setting up his escape route, but instead his escape routes seemed more improvised.

Indi having a son was good - that worked - but the return of Marion less so. She seemed very flighty and random - not how I remember her at all.

But lastly, the thing that really made me think the film was a big meh was the lack of humour. It just seemed to be playing things to seriously, too po-facedly. A lot of the gags miss-fired and too much seemed funny not because it was meant to be but because it looked daft or made no sense.

Where was the witty repartee between the good guys and bad guys? Where were the something happens to Indi that's both scary and funny? Where was the shoots the swordsman bit or the goes to shoot the swordsman but find he's lost his gun bits?

So there you go, it just leaves me to say that despite all that, I still kind enjoyed it. Indi firing on three cylinders is still Indi.

at last

Had something of a breakthrough with Anno last night.

A big part of the reason I was playing it so much was that I was effectively flummoxed by the fifth chapter in the campaign. For some reason, the 5th chapter seemed to increase exponentially, both in terms of difficulty and time taken.

The breakthrough was that I finally completed it last night on my third go. Don't get me wrong, I've been enjoying it and I still like the game, it's just that it emphasises again the disadvantages of both the lack of a manual and the way the missions in the chapters aren't quite like tutorials.

The difficult was that it kept adding more and more stuff to do or achieve. This meant that were you'd gone all out to achieve the last mission, any errors or silly things you'd done to get it done in a timely fashion then became a bit of problem.

For example, you ended up finding that the wheat fields you'd placed to finish mission 3 where then right in the way of you completing mission 4. But there was now nowhere else to put them unless you removed all of your hemp fields. But you couldn't do that because you desperately needed ropes in order to complete mission 2 :/.

Since there were so many complex mission, as I was getting to the end it kept getting to a stage where it was an almost impossible task to finish. Well, without completely redoing all my towns and when you're faced with that option it seemed better to simply restart and plan better from the beginning.

Anyway, the point is I finished the chapter and I think there's a chance I may be happy to put Anno on hold for a while until I can knock some other stuff on the head.

I also discovered last night that two of the things I'd recorded and not had a chance to watch were actually totally unwatchable. Why were they unwatchable? Because of this bloody weather. The wind and rain is playing total havoc with my reception and it's getting beyond a joke now.

I just don't understand why it's so bad - it's like my normal reception is just on the cusp of being okay and any little thing tips it over. This would actually make some sense if I'm honest - the reception on normal terrestrial has never been that great.

Roll on digital switch-over. When they finally do that, the broadcast signal strength will be turned up (if it was on maximum now it would interfere with normal telly, apparently) and so it should get a lot better.

time management

Guess what I did this weekend?

It's not as interesting as you may think. I played Anno 1404.

This was not entirely a good thing as it means I didn't do a load of stuff that really I needed to get done. So basically I've essentially created a whole bunch of problems for myself.

One of these could be a big problem, but isn't at the moment. The others are minor problems that represent my total inability to control my own life on some level.

That sounds massively dramatic and it is in the sense that I've massively over-dramatised some minor niggles. But the thing is I'm actually kinda annoyed at myself for doing this.

If I'm honest, part of the problem is that I didn't predict I was going to do it. If I'd thought about it properly I'd have made an attempt to clear some of these to do things before the weekend, leaving the weekend free for some guilt-trip free entertainment.

Ah well. One day I'll get the knack of things.

This weekend saw something of a bizarre Grand Prix.

First off, things went rather badly on Saturday with Felippe Massa being involved in a bit of a freak accident. He was hit on the crash helmet by a rather heavy metal spring that had fallen off the back of Rubens Baricchello's car after his suspension failed.

It was a weird convergence of both good and bad luck.

Obviously it was bad luck to hit the spring - if he'd been slightly further up or down the track it wouldn't have hit him at all. But equally, it was lucky it hit him where it did - if it had struck him on the visor of his helmet, then at the least it would have blinded him, if not killed him outright.

Having hit him it's likely he blacked out )his skull was apparently fractured) and his car continued straight on, running into a tyre wall. This represents another weird piece of luck - he could have hit a concrete barrier or Armco and that part of the accident would have been a lot more severe. But then equally it could have happened in a slow part of the circuit and he may not have even lost consciousness.

I ended up recording the MotoGP race - as mentioned my current Anno obsession demanded more of my time - but I've heard it was really good. It was wet, apparently, and they were falling off all over the shop :/.