September 2004 Archives
..by Focus. Ah the many happy hours spent pogoing to that track in college. Or something like that anyway. A classic track that consists of Yodelling, Guitar and Organ freakout, Drum flourish and repeat. This and many others were heard this evening at the Junction.
They played a bunch of tracks from a recent album, Focus 8, strangely skipped over 5,6 and 7 and played most of the old favourites from the first four albums. They closed the first set with House Of The King, their first UK single, which everyone at the time thought was by Jethro Tull - pretty much because it featured a flute - a fact that they stilll mentioned in the intro. It's also a track which for years I've been sure was once used as a theme tune to something but still can't work out what.
So they closed with Hocus Pocus and then came back for a pair of encores - neither of which I recognised so I kind of wished they'd left on the high after the finale.
The final intro featured some of that infamous Dutch humour. "This track is called 'Brother and Sister' - but we have to finish at 11 so tonight it is just called 'Brother', but it is for the sisters too".
UPDATE: Apparently it was used as the theme to "Don't Ask Me" (1974).
Just finished reading Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. I'd been thinking about picking it up for a while - probably next time I took a long trip - since it's been a bit of a hot topic of late. Let's face it spawning a cottage industry in books that try to debunk a work of fiction is no mean feat.
Anyway turns out my sister is a bit of a fan so I borrowed it and saved some money - and shelf space. I read it this afternoon and evening. It's 600 pages or so but has that undermanding style that is easy to read, each chapter is only a few pages. It travels at quite a pace also - the action takes place over a period of only around 18 hours.
It's quite fun and although I think the final (well next to final I guess) mystery is a bit of a letdown - as in I'm not convinced it actually makes sense - the puzzles up to that point are enjoyable. One thing that struck me was its resemblance to some older science fiction books I've read. The kind that are written by real scientists and have frequent digressions into info dumps on the science behind things that you don't really need to know. This kind of does the same in that the author doesn't want to waste all the research work that he's done so it all had to go down on the page - even if it doesn't really add anything.
And I know it's been a while but I didn't think you could see the Houses Of Parliament from St James Park (excepting Big Ben of course).
After installing FireFox PR1 I noticed it's new Live Bookmarks feature and had a bit of a play. I thought it could be a useful way of cutting down the time I spend each evening going through the same old sites. I wasn't too impressed though. A bit too basic as all it gives you is the titles, you still need to click through each story individually to read them.
So then, following up a bloggers recommendation, I tried Sage which is more of a tradtional aggregator. This builds complete pages containing the new articles from each feed. It's still missing the feature I really want of having all the new articles on the same page - the way that the LJ Friends page works.
So now I've moved to Bloglines. In fact this also doesn't offer complete aggregation but it does have the big advantage of being a web based service which means I dion't have to set it up on every machine I use. Also following on from recent news stories on Slashdot and elsewhere about the stress that news syndication is putting on sites I feel happier not adding to the strain by polling loads of sites every hour.
Update: Oops. Just realised that if you select a folder in Bloglines then it shows you all the updates below it, so selecting the root item gives all the new articles. Excellent.
Got this a while ago from the SciFi channel. I scored 42%.
Try the Estimation Quiz if you dare. I came out with a staggering 29%
What I didn't really consider was that if you really have no idea then put in very wide margins of error and you'll still get points. ie basically be honest about your ignorance and you'll do better than me.
Well, here I am in CKS International Airport, Taipei with nothing to do. I decided to leave plenty of time to get to the airport and check in, with extra time because it would be rush hour when I was trying to get here and of coursen I didn't need any of it. The meeting I was at was outside Taipei on a Technology Park which meant that despite the fact that it was the opposite side from the airport the journey was quick because we never came off the freeway. No baggage for the hold meant checkin took 5 minutes, I've looked in vain for any English language reading material (Telegraph Weekly or USA Today is all I found), and I've still got 90 minutes before I need to be at the gate. So why not tell you all (three of you) about it I thought.
Quick summary so far. We left at 8:20 on Monday night, travelled to Hong Kong on Virgin Atlantic (watched Saved! and Mean Girls - look then up on IMDB yourself - and half of the latest Harry Potter - hope it's still showing tonight) then changed to Cathay Pacific for the last leg to Taipei. So we reached the hotel at around 10pm Tuesday I think. Just in time for a quick briefing/strategy meeting and to bed.
Slept poorly - of course - but at least a little and went for breakfast in the hotel. The breakfast room is quite the most amazing room. It has just gigantically high ceilings (several floors high) and serves food on 3 sides of the room. There were, I'd guess, around 50 different things to eat. The price was high for Taiwan, around GBP10, but normal for a hotel breakfast - and it's expenses so who cares, right?
The day was taken up by a couple of meetings, the first was fine, but in the taxi ride to the second the jet lag started to catch up with me and I really didn't feel well. I was mostly hoping I didn't have food poisoning as I'd somewhat foolishly drunk tap water the night before to counteract the effects of the beer. It was then made worse by the fact that we'd gone to the wrong address - Francis had the business card the wrong way up and we'd gone to the right street in the wrong town - and so had about a 45 minute trip round a busy town where the driving is a little on the aggressive side. Also, there are an awful lot of scooters around. Possibly even more than in Rome.
That evening we went out for a real Chinese meal, which was actually very much like a Chinese meal in Cambridge except half the price and then did a little sight seeing. We visited a night market, which is a street market that is open at night (strangely). You can buy much anything there, the latest Hollywood releases on VCD for GBP1.50 next to a large amount of soft porn, huge amounts of food of many different types, a wide variety of pets (lots of rabbits, various birds, what I think were iguanas, and a pig. Yes, a pig. It was small so I assumed it was a piglet and wondering what they did with it when it grew up my colleague informed me that they ate it. Apparently however it would have been a dwarf pig so it wouldn't have grown further anyway) and the usual clothes and tourist junk you find in street markets the world over.
There were some video arcades there as well and it seems the latest craze, after the dancing game, is the drumming game. 1 or 2 of you have to bang a big drum with a large stick in time with music. I think there's a bit more to it than that but that's the basics. Good way of letting off a bit of steam I expect.
At the end of the street is a very nice old style temple. There's been a temple there for 250 years, it's not clear how much of the current one was there before though, certainly much of it is obviously very new, the design is old, but the craftmanship is new. Inside it has different rooms for different gods and they are all in continuous use. You can pick up incense sticks to burn or wave and even wads of fake money that you chuck in a furnace to bring luck for yourself and your family.
Lastly we took a taxi back to the hotel stopping for some photo opportunities outside Taipei 101 (also here - currently the world's tallest building. And so, skipping today's meeting as that's confidential (and dull) that brings us up to date. I'm really not sure whether I'm coming or going and have got 17 hours of travelling to go still to go. And no book.
I really hope the flight is not full so there's room to stretch out.
