Are you sitting comfortably? Well I don't care, so we'll begin...

Are you sitting comfortably? Well I don't care, so we'll begin...

mogglewump

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Spore	[Jul. 1st, 2008\|11:11 pm]
Um...I finally had a go at the Spore Creature creator and wanted to share my scary offspring... http://www.spore.com/view/postcard/500004477808 Enjoy. :D
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Holiday Blog	[Mar. 25th, 2008\|07:51 pm]
Just so you know, I've finally got around to posting my holiday blog entries. You don't have to read em. In fact they might be boring. But I enjoyed writing them which is rather the point. :D I've done three days so far...will get round to more tomorrow. :)
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The bright lights of Las Vegas	[Mar. 1st, 2008\|07:50 pm]
Saturday 1st March The bright lights of Las Vegas Viva Las Vegas and all…um…yeah. Can’t say that I was all that impressed by the city itself; Joe described my reaction thus ’he thinks it’s culturally devoid’ which, to be honest, is a fair assessment. There’s very little here to see; whereas most cities have museums and architecture Vegas has casinos, casinos and flashy lights. That’s about it. Once you’ve stuck a fingernail through the veneer expecting to find something else you’ll be sorely disappointed, at least I was. The best description for Vegas is an American playground, it’s entirely tailored to amuse Americans, leaving little for anyone who’s looking for more. Our first port of call was the Café at the Bellagio which was interesting, if not exactly the same feeling as you get from Ocean’s 11. This being my first experience of the ‘American choice’ I’m not used to being asked a bewildering series of questions after ordering something as simple as a glass of fruit juice. The food was rather nice, marred only slightly by the intrusion of a Bingo-like game onto the tables by the casino. Afterwards I dragged Joe around the hotel / casino complex exploring and taking photos of everything, seemingly that wasn’t something he’d ever done, despite having lived there. After breakfast, we went on our first shopping expedition for a mobile SIM card and contract for Joe. Seemingly we in the UK have the technological advantage in this arena as the phones available and the range of contracts seem limited. Then again Americans spend more time actually speaking on their phones than people in the UK but spending 50GBP per month to have unlimited calls to anywhere in the country is maybe not such a bad thing. What really struck me as strange was the coverage area, there are huge blooming great holes in the coverage area. Admittedly there might not be anyone living there but breaking down by the side of the road and not having access to ANY phone networks seems strangely intimidating. Of course, after walking in the door we were descended upon by a salesperson, though I don’t think she was expecting to have to make a sale to a rather sceptical Brit. I’m one of those annoying people who asks ‘Do I really need that?’ when buying things (yes, apart from games, but I’m allowed at least one…or two vices). So Joe ended up with the cheapest package and a free phone which, despite being Nokia, has utterly unintuitive interface – not that it’s overly important given he just wanted the SIM. Afterwards we lunched on Hawaiian BBQ and then went sightseeing, at the Luxor hotel casino which was one I really wanted to see. Inside…it’s a big empty pyramid…but it really looks dated. We did actually catch the lift (which were card controlled) after someone else put their card in and let us into the lift…so we rode it up to the peak of the pyramid and looked out. Again, it really looked rather shabby from up there…you could see the damaged patches of concrete at the peak. This is one of the things that gave me the veneer impression of Vegas, it looks good until you get close, at which point you’re somewhat disappointed. So having viewed the building we went to the attractions both the 3D IMAX Cinema and the Tutankhamen tomb recreation. The Undersea Creatures film, being my first experience of IMAX was very enjoyable, even if I did come out a little cross-eyed. :P It certainly is big, I’ll give it that much and the picture was awesome. The tomb tour was really interesting, but Joe was disappointed by the fact that the only original piece in the tour was a rock donated by the Cairo museum from the Valley of the Kings. Interesting to see, but I suspect it doesn’t look as fresh as when it was originally created. Then again, I could be wrong and it was supposed to look like that. Our evening was yet again strange as jet-lag seemed to have hit both of us though we’d already booked tickets to go and see the Circus de Solei show Ka. Thankfully I managed to stay awake through the whole thing though my eyes were too tired to focus. Joe on the other hand lost consciousness a couple of times which made a difficult story to follow, an impossible one. No matter it was splendid and well worth seeing. Afterwards it was so late, and we were so tired that we went to straight to bed and zonked out. I should at this point return to my point earlier, of culture shock. The Us is very different from the UK in as much as it feels like an assault on the senses. Every single shop, every single sign shouts at you for attention; simply driving through town means viewing literally thousands of signs. Personally, I find this barrage to be physically offensive, it’s just not necessary, but in the land where everything is bigger I suppose it’s part and parcel. So I didn’t really enjoy that aspect, I prefer the British method, where everything is a little bit more, reserved, I think would be the word.
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Flights, more flights and taxicabs	[Feb. 29th, 2008\|07:49 pm]
Friday 29th February Flights, more flights and taxicabs Continuing from the previous day, I was so worried about the sheer volume of stuff that was occupying my front room that at 5:30am I phoned up the taxi company to upgrade our transport to a minivan. In hindsight, this wasn’t such a bad move as even the boot space in that was chock full of stuff. I was only taking one out of the two allowable bits of luggage as himself had said he might need my other luggage space. After being dropped off at the station we then had to do more manual transportation of the stuff. This was clearly not a problem we’d thought through fully as we ended up having to pile up and pull along big stacks of suitcases, which, as you can imagine, repeatedly fell over here, there and everywhere. So a short direct train to Stansted later, we managed to lose the check-in desk, despite the fact that we’ve been there before. :D We eventually located it in section D after asking at the executive class desk; we could clearly tell we weren’t suppose to check in there as we had men with guns on either side and we got that ‘their looking down their noses at us’ feeling. Well it all seemed to work out ok and eventually we boarded our plane and got a nice seat just behind the wing which had an interesting view of the working bits of the plane itself. Joe was at this point trying to fall asleep already. I find zooming around on planes brings out the inner child in me so I was all but bouncing up and down in my seat. Yay acceleration! Wheee. A large number of hours after we got off the plane in New York; our choice of seats meant that I didn’t even get to see any of the buildings or even Manhattan Island. I’m hoping that on my return flight through NY will have me on the right side to ogle the buildings. We were then wandering through the airport along all the moving walkways and escalators. At this point…all of two minutes after getting off the plane I realised I’d just said the b-o-m-b word to Joe (admittedly in a very quiet voice). Remembering some news stories about the zero tolerance policy the world has at the moment I quickly shut up about that. Wandering through the airport was a small preparation for the mild culture shock that I seem to have gone through while I’ve been here; more on that later. Since it was a point of entry into the US we are required to wander through Customs which annoyingly requires you to pick up your luggage from the carousel, walk it through the Customs room and then check it back in a special desk. I suppose it’s necessary, but as they don’t even check the luggage, just that usual wandering through the Green Channel that everyone does, it seems unnecessary. So began our wait for the 2nd flight. We visited the various shops, the Microsoft adverts which are bordering on Minority Report style wall sized things (but they are nice though) and my first All-American Starbucks experience. It’s the same, but cheaper. The buying power of the GBP over here is stupendous; it’s like having lots of monopoly money and it everything really doesn’t seem to cost anything. Eventually we boarded our plane…full of New Yorkers doing the weekend trip to Las Vegas…which for some reason meant that they all had sunglasses on. Not the nicest flight but only 6 hrs or something like that, the pilot did sound exactly like David Sedaris which was a huge source of amusement for Joe and I every time he spoke. :) By the time we arrived in Las Vegas I was absolutely shattered being incapable of sleeping on the plane. Getting off the plane here was, thankfully, a lot faster than NY since it was an internal flight. We queued for a taxi (a revelation to me, I thought it was just us Brits that were the world authority on standing in lines) then got to our hotel (the MGM Grand), skipped diner since Joe went to see his folks while I crashed in bed at about 11pm.
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Last day of Work!	[Feb. 28th, 2008\|07:47 pm]
Welcome to my holiday blog, admittedly I planned to keep this up to date on a day-by-day basis but have failed miserably by not even starting it until the Wednesday :S. So while Joe drives us down Interstate 40 I shall do some mental housekeeping… Thursday 28th February Last day of Work! While not strictly part of my holiday I thought that I may as well start here. Fun at work today involved the delay of just about every project I’ve worked on for the last month on three working days before launch. Sigh. I suppose that I should be used to it considering where I work but it just one of those things. Also had fun in realising that I hadn’t done Gallery 19…so there was a mad rush to get that out by the end of the day. After getting it sorted I realised that the dates on my spreadsheet had been wrong and I didn’t need to do it after all. Oh well. :D So anyway…ignoring work issues…from work I drove straight to Lakenheath to pick up the short one. I can’t believe quite how much stuff one small person seems to need to take with him. Thankfully there were only two of us in my little car or we’d not have had enough space in the car. We zoomed back towards Milton where I packed my luggage and then headed out again with the idea of grabbing some food and bits and bobs from a Tesco. The sensible choice in this case seemed to be the large Tesco at Bar Hill where we thought we might be able to find everything we needed along with some food. Unfortunately, the food providing place that we chose had just stopped serving (it now being 9pm) which that left us without any food for the evening so after raiding Tesco we went to the local Chinese near my new home. At this point I was feeling somewhat dubious about eating that kind of food before spending the whole of the next day sitting down in a plane since MSG seems to disagree with me these days. In the end it didn’t turn out to be all that bad, so after 30 mins spent frantically packing remaining things, we went to bed.
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Being a bit more regular

[Nov. 24th, 2007|09:06 am]

[	Current Location	\|	Home	]
[	Current Mood	\|	lonely	]

In a bid to increase my posting to something above once per year...I played with internet explorer. Let's hope that it works.

Just got up, so I feel groggy as hell. Yeugh.

Two main points at the moment are:

Joe's leaving in Feb. Which You may or may not know but it's inconvenient for us. Am currently looking at jobs over there in the hope that I might be able to snarf one.

Point 2...I think I have an addiction. In this case, shopping. Or it could be a compensation for the fact that I'm so bored out of my wits writing walkthroughs. Seemingly no-one else is...appropriate for the job, so I've got 6 to write at the moment and not enough time with our pressing release schedule.

Meh to that.

Just to have a return to the form for my LJ, I miss my man. :(

Ok, off to shoot some 'insert generic baddie here' to distract myself.

Oh and books are awesome...but series are annoying. :D

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