UnorthodoxY Archive It's wasn't what you thought

February 7th:

Britain is today (February 7) bracing itself for blizzards that are predicted to sweep across the country, but those with flights over the coming days have been reassured that they should not face any disruption.

…

“No disruption whatsoever is expected at any BAA airports,” a spokesman confirmed. Airports controlled by BAA include Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Southampton, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen.

February 8th:

Air passengers around the country are facing disruption today, as several airports have closed their runways and others are predicting severe delays.

Ha!

Snow. In Britain. In Winter. Who’d have thunk it.

February sees the start of “Edinburgh’s very first citywide reading campaign“. They’re encouraging everyone in the city to read the same book (“Kidnapped” by Robert Louis Stevenson) by giving away 25,000 free copies in various libraries from the 1st of February. There’s various events scheduled throughout February that tie in with the book and they’ve also created two new versions a ‘simplified’ version and a graphic novel. It’s interesting to see a literature campaign unashamedly plugging a graphic novel, I’m wonder if a few purists raised an eyebrow at that. I’m not sure if the whole thing will make that much of an impact but it’s a novel (if you’ll excuse the pun) approach to getting the city reading.

The cynic in me does wonder if, since the original text is out of copyright, the new versions are just a way of making some money once the freebies run out. Particularly since all the versions are also for sale and there’s two other versions of the graphic novel with the same artwork but different text (one using Scots language and one in more modern text) that aren’t going to be available for free.

Still it seems a worthy cause, I’m not convinced it’ll take off but I’ve never read the book so I’m might try and give one or more of the versions a read if I can get hold of a copy.

I overheard an interesting order while I was waiting for my lunch in the sandwich shop today. I wasn’t deliberately listening but my curiosity was piqued when the lady ordering looked at me in a guilty fashion and then lent right into the counter to whisper her order.

I didn’t catch all of it but it seems she wanted a hot sausage roll. On a bread roll. With brown sauce. A sausage roll roll, if you will. There may have been more components that I missed. Sadly I didn’t get to witness the eventual masterpiece as my turkey sandwich and a pie arrived before it was complete.

And I thought the deep fried mars bars where the low point of Scottish depravity. I’m only glad that the Americans have already laid claim to deep fried butter.

Gah, I just realised that this is a ‘what I had for lunch’ post.

I had a rant written out yesterday about the general unreliability of builders. While the bulk of it still stands the venom is somewhat dulled today, as the company in question actually started being somewhat competent and flexible this morning. Of course if they’d turned up yesterday, when they should have, then I’d not have had to get up two hours early this morning.

The upshot of all of this is that I now have a hole in my fake bathroom ceiling, revealing a hole in my real bathroom ceiling (and yet another dubious looking wiring job). Hopefully one of the people I’ve had in will manage to grasp that sending me an estimate might be a good idea, a first step to the ultimate resolution of no holes, and less ceilings, and me paying them.

To take my mind off ceiling issues I’ve taken advantage of RyanAir’s current “free flights” deal which I found from the, always useful, Cheapflights newsfeed. This time, unlike a lot of their cheap deals, they mean really-almost-free — they even pay the taxes, but only if you’ve already booked with them already in the last fortnight. Although they still charge for checking luggage and for paying using anything that’s not a RyanAir branded credit card so you’re likely to end up paying a few quid a flight. Still pretty cheap.

So I’m in Dublin this Saturday night. Groovy.

Something to distract yourself with:

Open a box in Warehouse 23

It’s quarter to one in the morning. I’m sitting in a kitchen/living room, there at least five other computers running in this room, I’ve not sure what’s running in the other rooms.

I’m at a LAN Party (heh, wikipedia scores again). We’re not as bad as you might expect, there’s a significant amount of booze being drunk and we’ve not set off any geek alarms yet (although me posting this form here might just tip it over…)

Hopefully we’ll manage to make all our various brands of supposedly compatible technology talk to each other shortly, at which point I’m likely to get my ass handed to me in some game or other. Until then I’ll just get myself slowly happy on vodka and Bru …

Blimey, I posted more when I was half way around the world.

Eh, not much to say. I’d hoped to have something to post about around now but there isn’t. So this is filler. Posts about my holiday will take a good while longer, pictures (of some form or other) might make their debut sooner.

Go see Children of Men if you’re bored. It’s pretty good.

I’m going to leave the last Guangzhou post for the moment, but it’s not strictly true as I’ve finally deviated from the original plan.

I opted to spend a couple of extra nights in Beijing with the majority of the Vodkatrain group, and then fly directly to Guangzhou for a night before leaving for Hong Kong. This meant we got a have a couple of really good days and nights in Beijing before leaving and I’m glad I opted to stay.

But it made me a bit of a sad panda yesterday when I realised that the tour was over and I was leaving some great people behind, in fact this morning I woke up confused — wondering if I’d forgotten what time I was meeting everyone until I remembered that I wasn’t any more. It’s quite bizarre because I thought I’d be quite glad to be back on my own and able to explore at my leisure but it’s been a lot more of a shock than I expected.

Add that to the fact that this marks the last leg of my trip and real life looms on the horizon plus my rejigged travel plans gave me less than 24 hours in Guangzhou means that all in all yesterday was a bit of a write off. With hindsight I should’ve scratched Guangzhou and just taken the overnight to Hong Kong but at least I can say I’ve been here and I’ve now taken a ferry across the Pearl River at night. I don’t have much else to say about the place, it’s very industrial in look and feel and not nearly as ‘buzzing’ as other places I’ve been. I failed to find any of Guangzhous famous restaurants or the nightlife I’d read about, perhaps more time and research would have turned up more interesting places to go. It is stupidly hot here, walking out of any air conditioned building is like walking into a sauna — it’s not like Las Vegas where the night time is actually quite pleasant because the humidity is still so high.

I take the train to Hong Kong in a couple of hours, I expect it’ll be stupidly hot too but at least I’m based there for a good few nights so I’ll have time to have a look around and see the place.

Posted from Guangzhou, under time contraints with no spell check.

Just a very quick update from an Internet cafe in Irkutsk, basically everything is on track. Weather is still stunning but getting colder, Lake Baikal is about as beautiful and dramatic as you could hope for.

Tonight is my last night in Russia as we cross the border into Mongolia sometime tomorrow morning. Hopefully that’ll not be too much of a pain but we’ll see.

More when I have the chance.