Tag Archives: Personal

Kenya: Reef Walk: Starfish

Posted on by

On the last full day of the holiday, after the gf had injured her foot, I went on a guided walk out to the reef.
It was about a kilometer out, and I was shown various creatures by the beach boy (who was probably my age actually).

Starfish

This is a male starfish (the females are 5 sided blobs), and I was told that there are also green and blue versions of this.
You can see some damage to the end of the lowest ‘arm’ – this is where it had been nibbled at by a __ (I forget), and it was unable to move away from it. (I have video of Spider Starfish moving – it’s quite bizarre that they can even choose a direction to move!)

Kenya: Hotel Pool: Me Swimming

Posted on by

The drip-feed continues…

This is me in the hotel pool on one of the three (iirc) wet’n'windy days.
My gf had hurt her foot by this point so was taking photos, and I wanted the exercise.

Hotel Pool Me SwimmingHotel Pool Me Swimming Hosted on Zooomr

Note the swim-up bar, where (as at the other bars at the hotel) they didn’t use measures, and the alcohol was free.

Working Nights

Posted on by

My girlfriend is starting her first week (7 days) of night shifts, and I’m going to try to do the same hours.
I work from home, on t’intraweb, so why not? I’m going to see how well it can work, if there’s anything which makes it difficult.
(For example, we’ve already been woken up twice by the doorbell.)

Obviously I shouldn’t be awake right now, but I am – we’re in the transition phase.

UPDATE: (17 hours later)
I’ve actually had a reasonably productive, er, shift. I don’t really know why, but I had longer periods of concentration than usual.
I did sleep (or at least doze) in the afternoon, and so I’m not even feeling that tired right now. I’ll probably sleep well today though as I will be needing it.

Baby!

Posted on by

Congratulations to my brother and his wife!

She is 12 weeks pregnant and doing well. (Due date: 23rd February 2007)
I’m going to be an uncle, which now I think about it, and as suggested by the gf, makes me feel quite old.

I’ll see them both at my sister’s wedding which is in a few weeks.
For now, it’s still a little surreal.

Antec Fantastic

Posted on by

I recently got myself a secondhand Aria SFF case from Antec.

Unfortunately I found that the card-reader which is built into the front was missing, and the eject button on the optical drive fascia plate had been broken and was MIA.
I contacted Antec to see if it would be possible to get a replacement drive cover, expecting to have to buy it and other bits and pieces in a bundle.

Amazingly, I got a short, but very sweet, email back saying that they would send me replacements free of charge!
They even apologetically mentioned that it would be shipped from the States, so may take a while.

Just a couple of days later they arrived in perfect condition.

UPDATE: I’ve realised that I don’t have the cables to attach the front audio and card-reader to the mobo, so am going to see if they can help again.
UPDATE 2: (Aug 18) I’ve finally got round to asking, let’s see how it goes…

Cars Review

Posted on by

Cars was a real visual treat.

If you can look past the cartoony style of the characters in the film (all vehicles of some kind, even the wildlife) you’ll see that an enormous amount of effort has been put into the look of the film.
Genuinely photo-realistic, make that ‘actually-in-front-of-you-realistic’, backdrops and scenery, complemented by great little visual details make this real eye candy.
There are many who, I’m sure, won’t fully appreciate the graphics – not because they’re not impressive, but because there’s much more to the film.

Yes, the jokes are mostly for the younger ones, with occasional slap-stick, but there are a couple of great lines for the adults which I won’t spoil here.

Great casting too: Owen Wilson as the lead, ‘guest’ spots from Michael Keaton, Jeremy Clarkson, Michael Schumacher, and a Pixar perennial John Ratzenberger supply very fitting voices.

My criticisms lie mostly with the script – at 2 hours and 1 minute (5 more minutes than in the US), it’s a long film – especially given that it’s a PG rated film. There were a couple of flat spots, too deep for a ‘cartoon’ and boring for the youngsters.

I was happily surprised and I’ll definitely recommend this film to those who aren’t sure.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,