Why I love Dork Tower

Unfortunately, this is more accurate than I'd like to think:



Now I have to find Leisure Games, now that I know about it.

Thanksgiving in London

Thanksgiving here was really a lot of fun.

Daniel and Zeke (friends from NYC) and I went out to dinner at the Texas Embassy and then went to see "Avenue Queue" on Thursday. It was absolutely a blast.

Then on Saturday, Zeke invited me and others over to his place for a potluck Thanksgiving dinner with his friends. It was an absolute blast: good food, good conversation, and board games.

It wasn't my family, but it was a lot of fun, cat and all.

Update: Added the picture of Daniel and Zeke. (Normally, Daniel's head isn't that big unless he's just won a board game and done the happy dance.)

Thanksgiving Week

I'm kind of bummin' this week.

I miss turkey, cornbread stuffing, a day off and getting to torment my family.

The good news is that I get to see them next week. I just wish it was sooner.

Here's something I saw that made my morning:

Praise the Lord and Pass the Laptop...

Broadband at home is FINALLY turned on today. Hopefully, this weekend, we can get the damned wifi portion of it working.

I'm not holding my breath.

Update: We have access to the Internet at home.

YES!

Mark Fiore's DemoGlad from 11/15/06

OMG. I normally, look forward to Mark Fiore's new cartoon every week, but this one really made my day:
DemoGlad 11/15/06

There's Nothing For Free

Well, I learned an important lesson.

When your mobile phone company says, "no, it's included in your plan; don't worry."

When you check your first bill and don't see any charges.

They don't mean it.

My charges for three weeks of using my mobile phone to dial up to the Internet was absolutely astronomical.

Suffice to say, I'm very very happy that we'll be getting broadband wireless in the flat on Thursday. I'll be able to go online again.

I'm also going to chat with O2 to find out just WTF is going on.

A New Look

Unfortunately, it seems more George Michael in the bathhouse than anything else. As such it probably won't last the day.

Update: It didn't.

Best Morning In Years

Went to bed nervously reading the Talking Points Memo and Salon's War Room; both had been reporting some sleazy behavior going on in and around the polls. (My personal favorite was in Maryland. Busing in homeless from Philly to misinform voters—that's in a class all by itself.)

Very very glad to get up at 5am and to read/listen to the returns, as I got into the office early.

Can't wait to see how it falls out in the senate.

Update: Texas politics at their best.

It's All Down To Today!

If you haven't already voted, get out and vote today.

It couldn't matter more.

*Head shaking moment of the day* You just have to love the GOP last minute stuff. Nice to see the lessons learned from the New Hampshire phone-jamming case.

Another Manic Monday

Thrilled to be at work today. Fighting with Visual C++ and the joy of complilation issues. My day is going to be the best day ever! (Okay, probably not.)

This weekend was nice, saw my old flatmate from Dublin, her cousin, his wife and friends on Saturday. Had a lot of fun. Saw her again on Sunday morning. And then crashed in the afternoon.

Felt bad that I didn't make it to the gym over the weekend and didn't have time this morning before work. Have to go tomorrow. (Feel free to pile on the guilt—any further push to go will help.

Talk to you guys later.

Trying the Whole Gym Thing Again...

I've been on a spending spree since I got my check last week. (Picking up essentials like non-flattened by time and countless heads pillows, new pants for work, and extravagences like an electric shaver, replacement batteries for my laptop and paying off major chunks of credit card bills or paying for rent and utilities.) When you only get paid once a month, you budget or die. (Or don't budget and float.)

The other thing that I've wanted to do was to join a gym and try to get into a non-oval shape. Not that there's anything wrong with oval—I'm familiar with it—but I'd still like something a little more greyhound than basset hound.

Found one that I like in Soho Gyms. Knowing my usual slug-ness, I got a weekly membership, so that I could check it out, find out how difficult or not-difficult it would be to get to. This morning was the first day of the week. Getting to the gym at 6:30 wasn't a problem, but the train to work was much more crowded 45 minutes later than I usually take it.

I also found out—when I got to work this morning—that the new building that we'll be moving to in Blackfriars has a gym in the building. It might make more sense to get something on a month to month basis for the couple of months until we move—if we ever do. After all, free is better than cheap.

Fireworks...

Guy Fawkes day is still a few days off, but the explosions have already started. Boom, baby; boom.

Another Fun Weekend in River City

The weekend was fairly low-key: laundry, checking out gyms, wandering along the Thames and looking at the sites, before meeting with two people from my fledgling GURPS group for dinner and cards at a local Starbucks in the West End.

We had a lot of fun, which is always a good thing, and I got home in time to watch "Torchwood".

Here's some pix of things that I saw over the weekend: an escape artist (or amateur bondage monkey) by the London Eye. I was only able to see a little bit due to the huge crowd, but he was actually pretty good. When I went back later, there was another fellow that escaped from a strait jacket.

And here's a picture of someone blowing massive bubbles. There was a gaggle of children clustered nearby charging back and forth so that they could try to capture or pop the bubbles floating through the air.



And lastly, the student march on Parliment to argue for less money spent on Iraq or nukes, and more money spent on education.



Can't argue with that sentiment.

The Lovely Lori

My first visitor from home. Lori's here with her bf for a few days before heading to Barcelona. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to meet her for more than a quick lunch.

My Bedroom

This is my bedroom. You don't get to see the window overlooking the garden, the desk or the closet. Trust me, I have it pretty cushy.

It's Enough to Restore Your Faith in Mankind...

I got home from work last night and found that I had a letter from the Lost Property office of the London Underground. They thought they might have found my Palm LifeDrive. I headed over this morning and found that they did indeed have it. (Unlike in the States, you have to pay to get your lost property back here; £10 later, I had my old Palm in hand and headed back to the office.)

The person that returned it didn't leave a name/number or anything. As far as I can tell, the only thing that the faceless person (or the Tube staff) did was diddle with the Palm enough to see the menu of programs.

Now I've got two of the damned things to schlep around. It could be far worse. (I did make sure that I set up both of them to secure themselves and need a password to log back in. I thought about using the data encryption office on the LifeDrive, but the damned thing is just way too slow to encrypt due to the hard drive (versus the flash drive on the other Palm, the T|X.

Getting everything up and running while trying to get some work done this afternoon.

Gaming!

Went to the London Gamers group last night for their usual Monday night gaming. I know that I said this last time I was here, but damn... I do like the way they do things here.

We meet at the Black Horse pub, where we're ensconced at the upstairs bar/events room. It's quiet, well lit, pleasant, and the staff is fantastic. Want something to eat? Pop downstairs to the pub and order your dinner or something to drink. Either carry up your drinks or wait for them to be sent up in the dumb waiter with the food orders.

Periodically, the staff will come upstairs to take away empties, plates and the like. You can't complain about that sort of service.

When you have a room full of gamers, at times, it can get loud, but for the most part things are much quieter here than they are in the States.

I joined a new game recently and last night was the first table top game. The GM is an Italian web designer/programmer/writer (he writes cyberpunk stuff) and the other players are his girlfriend and a German that works for Yahoo! in marketing. We're playing Star Wars, which was a lot of fun.

Due to scheduling conflicts, we won't be playing again until November. I did hear about a GURPS player over the weekend. Hopefully, I can find a game for my GURPS fix, soon.

National Insurance Number Interview

Had fun with the NHS bureaucracy today. Woo. Get there early, find paperwork is lost, fill out the paperwork again, smile, nod, correct things, smile, nod, correct things again, smile, nod, sign the paperwork (initially all corrections), and head back to work two hours later.
Rah.

My coworkers

The first post on my week in the life of Jp in London series of blog posts. This is a picture of two of my co-workers as they discuss a problem. Unfortunately, it's not the best picture but that's more me than them.

Test of my New Phone's 'Blog This' Functionality

Ceiling in my bedroom. What can I say, it's a test. (My new mobile phone allows me to take pictures and send them to my blog. Ta da! It works. Expect to see more of London, as I do in the future.)