Off work with some kind of fluey virus. It was one of those slight sore throats the other day which I knew would mutate into an all-body-onslaught. It did.

Of course the plus side is that I get to play lots of Half-Life 2, which I purchased and downloaded through Valve's Steam system last weekend.

Half-Life 2 is definitely the best computer game ever. By a long way. I'm sure there's plenty of other people ranting about this elsewhere so I'll leave it at that, except to say that getting yourself a copy is highly recommended.

For my birthday the other week, my mate got me a Growing Sealife squid. Pretty weird. You put them in water and they grow. Apparently the size of the container affects how big they get.

I only had a small jug. The thing started out at about 8cm long and grew to this size (iPod there for scale).

Pretty weird huh? I've got rid of it now, in case it has a massive growth spurt over night and smothers me.

It's my birthday. I'm 27. This scares me...

I'm back in Manchester 'til Wednesday and not back at work in London until the following Monday. I'm going to spend that time relaxing and probably watching my new Star Wars trilogy DVDs. Nice...

I saw the 'diabetic' woman I gave money to about a year ago again. She used the same line.

I wouldn't mind giving the odd bit of money to beggars if it weren't for the fact that most of them seem to be blagging it.

51% of Americans voted for whom?

This is a sad day for humankind.

**Geek Statement Alert**

I've switched to using Mozilla Firefox as my default web browser. It's actually rather bloody good. Much better than MS Internet Explorer. For years I saw all Netscape / Mozilla derivatives as strict standards-compliant browsers used for testing, but which weren't worth using as the default because nothing looked right on them. Firefox seems to manage to be both standards-compliant (a GOOD thing for us HTML programmers) and make nearly everything I've looked at display properly.

*My making this statement is justified by the fact that I make websites for a living, OK?

After about ten days of working thirteen-hour days, including weekends, I've finally finished the new Starbucks Summer website. I did most of the Flash (not the e-cards), though the concepts and designs were the result of a few people's work.

Today I'm enjoying doing absolutely nothing. I'm looking forward to my holiday in Kos in at the end of July, then a festival in Spain a not long after, at the start of August.

Well, that was the most stressful and upsetting football match I've ever watched. England beat Portugal 2-1 but for some bizarrre and unknown reason our second goal was disallowed. Therefore it went to extra time and it ended up 2-2. They won on Penalties 6-5. We were clearly the better side. I just can't believe it. The referee must have been Potugese. Agggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Here are my photos from the London to Brighton bike ride.

Yesterday I rode from Clapham Common to Brighton with a group of people from work (as well as a further 30,000 cyclists). We met at 06:00, set off at about 07:00 and got to Brighton at about 15:00. It was a really pleasant day's ride, apart from the final two hours when bad weather hit big time on the hills outside Brighton. Near-horizontal hail stones followed by torrential rain left everyone completely soaked and shivering.

I managed to meet up with a couple of people from our group near the finish, and we located a dodgy cheap clothes store where we purchased some emergency dry clothes. We then found a bar in which to recover, dressed in our new, near-matching, tracksuit trousers and fleece tops.

The company paid for a coach back to London and I got home at about 21:00 where I promptly fell immediately to sleep.

I have some photos in my camera, I'll post a link tomorrow.

I love this sort of headline:
"Teleportation breakthrough made"

Just completed my first legal purchased music download through iTunes. I feel somehow cleansed, from all the illegal downloads I've made in the past.

I bought an album, and at £7.99 (and it's qutie a long album) it's a fair price, unlike the high street stores.

Hurrah!

OK, so since last time I've taken part in a 10km run round Hyde park. Here's some photos of me from the day. I look like I'm about to die in the third one. That's because I did feel like I was about to die. Since the race I've done a pitiful one run, and that was this morning.

What else?

Oh yeah, I dated another girl for a short while, but decided, yet again, that she wasn't what I was looking for, so that was that.

Going for a bike ride with some tomorrow morning, so having a night in tonight. The bike ride is practice for the London to Brighton bike ride I'm taking part in on the June 20th.

DJing at a wedding reception / after party this evening. Should be fun. They're providing the records, I just have to turn up and spin them.

You know, anyone who's about to commit a crime, or hurt someone, or just say a harsh word against somebody, should stop and listen to Belfast by Orbital. It's an oldie but what a fu^&ing great tune...

We split up.

The end.

Dinner went well on Thursday. I seem to have myself a new lady.

Well! Boozy weekend... 'Going to watch the football' in the pub on Saturday turned into an all day session. I received a text message from a lovely young lady whom I have been in contact with through a dating website, and I called her back. We ended up having lunch and a few drinks on Sunday and, basically, it went quite well. We're having dinner on Thursday. Nice.

Well, it's just gone one year since i started at my company, and i'm back working on BT web banners - the lowest of the low for a designer. That's career advancement for you...

This company really is stupid. They have a freelancer in (at great expense) working on some interesting Flash project, all well within my abilities (in fact I'd be much better suited to the work), and here I am doing the über-dull stuff. So long as they continue to see their design staff as simply 'a resource' and not as people with career aspirations, they're going to continue to lose their best people.

The sort of place I want to work should not need to be given this hint.

</moan>

Apple have got me hooked in. It's iTunes.

I'm addicted. I've almost completely turned my back on CDs. The first thing I do when I get a CD is skip through the tracks. If I like it I copy it all into my iTunes. I love it - it's a joy to use. You see the thing is - I can't keep my CDs in order, I can never find the one I want and when I think I have, it's not in the right box.

Not any more - I just pick the artist or genre and it's right there. The thing is. The THING is - now I want an iPod. Funny that isn't it? I want to take my music with me. Sucked in... They are SO cunning. First they write the nicest bit of software EVER. Then they release it for Windows, then they sit back while everyone, in their own time, goes out and buys their iPod. Genius. I'm saving up...

I'm currently reading Life of Pi by Yann Martel. It's the one you see everyone reading on the tube. Really enjoying it though, it's a nice human break from all the cold science fiction I've been reading recently.

I love walking through the city in fine drizzle at night. As the tiny droplets hit the eye, all the lights appear to momentarily flare.

Seeing Kraftwerk live was possibly the coolest thing ever.

I've just finished reading Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds - a highly recommended read. It's the best sci-fi I've read since Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey and Rama series. It's not the best written book ever, but the ideas are simply vast, and the science (like with Clarke) is fairly solid and convincing.

Tonight, I'm going to see Kraftwerk at Brixton Academy. I can't wait.

I finally made it down to Tate Modern after work tonight to see Olafur Eliasson's "The Weather Project". It finishes this weekend. Here's my version of the same pics you've probably already seen:



GR.

So, Amsterdam was fun. Not really much to tell really - suffice to say we sat in some coffee shops, drank lots and ate well. Nice break from work though. I got back late Monday night (plane to Heathrow).

I've just been to my weekly Athletic Training class. It consists of an hour of various intensive excerciese such as burpees, running, press-ups, lunges, and the use of weights. The thing is, you don't get a break during the whole hour - not even to catch your breath.

It felt especially hard after a weekend in Amsterdam...

GR.

I ended up travelling home one the same tube as two people from work, one of whom I know fairly well and the other, a girl, whom I know less well. Sometimes I should just shut T.F. up - I managed to dig myself into some kind of whole whereby it sounded like I was insulting her, yet I was unable to explain what I really meant.

Sometimes I don't think even I know what I'm talking about. I wish some level of editing was available during real-time speech.
<sigh>

Maybe it's just today's lack of sleep disabling my basic communication functions...

GR.

P.S. Going to Amsterdam on Friday - hurrah. I'm going with some friends, for the weekend.

Sorry it's been so long - the novelty of keeping the blog wore off so I just stopped making entries.

What have I been doing since Christmas then? I'll be brief:

• I haven't seen the girl again since our one night thing; the mystery has gone out of it so I've lost interest


• I've been going to the gym at least three times a week, and have been going running on Saturday / Sunday mornings


• I've cut down on the pizzas and pasta in the evenings and have swapped them for salads and proteinous stuff like Mackrel


• As a result of the above two, I've lost almost a stone in weight and have also started to put on some muscle


• I've been getting on really well with my brother (the one I had the weird falling out with before Christmas) and we've joined the local snooker club. I'm starting to become quite good at it.

Other than that, doing OK. I'm now in the main design team at work and that's going kinda OK. Being paid more money helps, but unfortunately I now have to start paying back my student loan :(. Ah well.


GR.