Caboose

Since watching the first Shuttle launch at school I’ve always been fascinated by it, so I just had to watch these videos.

Reminds me of the fun I had wandering around Kennedy Space Center.

My flight back from Edinburgh last night was delayed a bit, you soon run out of things to do in the departure lounge unless you want to drink yourself unconscious at Wetherspoon’s.

As I was walking out to the plane I noticed an amazing fan of light in the sky to the north, which I worked out must have been the lights from The Bridge.

Approaching Stansted I spent a while trying to clean the blurry bottom half of my window before I realised that the blurriness was due to the jet exhaust outside. Even though I now find flying very tedious there’s still something special about approaching your destination, especially at night.

The delay to my flight meant that I arrived at Stansted just as the Cambridge bus was leaving, so I had to hang around for an hour. Pretty much everything was closed, including all the checkin desks. The only signs of life in most of the terminal building were the car hire desks and the poor souls trying to sleep on the deliberately uncomfortable seats.

Sony are now selling their Bluetooth Memory Stick in the UK.

I really want one of these as it means I can use my Clié for email and web access without having to balance my phone on a convenient surface (or my knee) and make sure I keep the infra-red transceivers lined up.

On the other hand GBP140 does seem a bit steep.

While I was spending the compulsory hours hanging around airports this weekend (Edinburgh and Stansted, could have been worse) I noticed an odd thing.

Around checkin there were a couple of BT’s shiny internet payphones but once through security there are only standard payphones, no internet access.

A quick peer through the windows of the BA lounge at Edinburgh revealed that their two terminals were out of order. Is this some kind of additional security measure or just a bizarre coincidence?

It’s encouraging me in my efforts to work out a way of posting to this site from my phone and PDA.

We had a family gathering at the weekend, to celebrate Grandpa’s 80th birthday. I flew up on Saturday morning (the 0410 bus from Cambridge [shudder]) and returned last night.

I took a few photos:

Grandpa is in the foreground on the right, with Granny to his left and my cousin Kirsten standing behind them.
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I’ve been fiddling around with some of the template for this site, to try split things up a bit more. It’s now easier for me to add links (have a look in the column to the right).

The next thing will be some serious thinking about how to integrate the Journeys section of the site with this part. A good start would be including it in search results… tricky…

As I was driving through Cambridge this morning it seemed that an unusually high number of people were carrying buckets. Must just be one of those things, once I noticed the first one I was more likely to notice others.

Or maybe it’s some kind of weird conspiracy?

OK, I’m a bit late with this one. I went to see Bowling for Columbine yesterday and was impressed. I had expected an anti-gun humorous tirade but instead it was an often funny exploration of why it is that Americans shoot each other so often.

Bits of it were also intensely sad, whoever is shot and whoever is shooting it’s always a waste of life.

The slight conspiracy theory bit surrounding Lockheed Martin seemed a bit out of place but I felt this was more than made up for by the interviews and the South Park style brief history of the USA.

Worth watching but of course the people who need to watch it won’t.

Dancer in the Dark was on on Monday night, unfortunately way past my bedtime so I videoed it and watched it last night.

It’s very odd.

Björk’s accent is especially weird, she sounded more English than Czech to me. It’s also very emotional, I really felt for her character by the end. I was almost screaming at the TV every time Selma kept digging herself into deeper trouble.

So, not as bad as I had been led to believe. Could have been a bit shorter but I couldn’t stop watching because I had to see what happened to Selma.

Went to see Evil Dead at the Picturehouse last night, it’s another film I had never seen in full before. The acting’s terrible, the dialogue is laughable but it’s still very scary.