Long weekend

Well, what an average weekend it's been. My sore throat was a bit of a downer on friday evening while out with friends trying out a different tapas bar, and afterwards coffee at Browns (both in Bath). I also managed my goal for the weekend to read all 5 Harry Potter books, with enough time to watch the second part of Arabian Nights on Sky Mix, and The Wedding Singer on uktv gold. Saturday consisted oh having a sore throat and a cough - while reading the first 3 Harry Potter books, Sunday involved reading the 4th Harry Potter book, while trying to breathe through a stuffed up nose, and today, it's all gone except for a mingin' headache. I suspect that by 7am tomorrow when I'm back at work, I'll feel fine again. Typical!

Sore throat

In the space of the last 30 minutes, I seem to have got a bit of a sore throat. Seems a bit odd...

Calm before the storm...

Well, not a lot has been happening recently - work, eat and sleep, with DVD watching at the weekends. I've downloaded and started playing Rubies of Eventide - it's currently based on a shareware principle; previously it had a monthly subscription based model, but it didn't work out and for some time disappeared from the MMO game scene, only to be brought back by some of the ex-employees of the original company that developed it. It's just nice as a stop gap while waiting for World of Warcraft, although it is possible I may continue playing both concurrently.

Obsfucated and Pretty or Accessible and Bland?

Today I've had the dubious pleasure of using two totally different "search engines". While both do more or less a similar job, each has it's own strengths and weaknesses. htdig is an opensource search engine which has been around for a while, and while it has lots of options to customise it, it's easy to mess things up. The other piece of software I was looking at was the Microsoft Indexing service. It's got a nice enough interface for the configuration, and it performs quickly, however it seems to be extraordinarily difficult to access it via a web frontend. It seems rather heavily oriented to local file systems rather than for use with web applications, and trying to glean the web for information didn't return anything useful. Ah well, maybe it's just that it will take a long time for it to become used in this way and for people to document examples etc.

Save the World!

Blimey! It's amazing how much Hollywood can milk the "Save the world" theme. I don't actively dislike it, but I do think it would be a good thing to have a bit more variety. True, it's a tried and tested formula, and there have been some brilliant films based upon this formula, but for goodness sake, please make some films that are different, and ideally, in somw way unique!!

If there's something strange, in the neighbourhood...

So far, my holiday has involved a lot of playing games, most notably Ghost Master. Lots of strangely familiar names and taking the mick out of movies (using them as themes for different parts of the game) and is just really good fun - it makes a change from the usual run of the mill games, and the puzzles are sufficiently challenging too.
I've also been playing Civilisation III: Play the World multiplayer - it has evolved from its humble beginnings as one of the founding games of the "God Game" genre, although it still does have a few quirks.

Hmmm... I wonder what's for tea, I'm feeling hungry...

Holiday!

A good start to my weeks holiday - last night was spent having tapas at La Flamenca in Bath, followed by a concert of country blues guitar. Ah well, I know have a week where I don't have to go to work! Woohoo!

The Fog

Why is it that some people, while driving in fog - in some places visibility being less thant 100 metres - insist on driving with no lights? It's bad enough with just side-lights, but how anyone can let people like that pass their driving test in the first place makes the mind boggle.

Swelter

Swelter - it is really, really hot and humid at the moment. It's really quite annoying, more so that neither at home nor at work do we have air conditioning to cool things down. The sooner this weather is over the better.

Swelter, Abiatha - now there's a tenuous link to this subject - I've finally finished reading the Ghormenghast trilogy. The first two books are really good, but the third is a bit of a let down. Ah well, I can carry on reading the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov.