Tuesday, August 28, 2007 1:02:03 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

I had an absolutely STUNNING weekend, which involved:

Moshing at a hardcore metal concert in London (rugby tackles, flying leaps and lots of punching/kicking).  Not something I'd normally listen to - but live it just kicks ass because of the untamed violence! A thanks to the wonderful girlfriend and her colleague from work for inviting me along despite wondering if "It might be a bit too heavy for you"...

Heading down to Southampton to meet some people from the Lionhead Community and ending up in a flight simulator was pretty darned awesome too. I won't go into details, but we had a nice quiet drink at a pub, then headed into the workplace of the guy hosting the little meet-up to fly in a 737 simulator.

There were four of us in total, including the programmer who worked at the flight center, so we each had plenty of time to fly the plane while we were there.

I went first:

As you can see. I had a bit of fun taking off, and circling around for the landing. I may have also attempted to make my passengers sick by rolling the plane around the sky a bit - but I deny everything - I was just making sure the motion system was working..

All was going well until the landing, where I managed to get a bit enthusiastic and broke the hydraulics temporarily. Apparently I was too violent and I managed to deplete the rather large system of its oil supply, so whoops. Crash.

Roger went next.

He went much the same end, except he didn't perform any aerobatics and managed to miss the ground entirely when landing. I think he got a bit scared of the tarmac and ended up pulling up too soon. Flyy!

Jason was up next:

And he scared us all by not quite being able to fly in a straight line at all. Somehow.. somehow 100ft from the ground on the landing attempt he managed to pull it all together and complete a successful landing - much to the amazement of the rest of us. I think Norrie our trusty programmer/co-pilot may have had something to do with that, as he was working hard on the rudder to make sure we actually hit the tarmac and not the grass/buildings next to it...

We spent the rest of the day back at Norrie's place drinking and eating and I stayed the night at Jason's (Who I've never met before haha) where we stayed up until a silly time watching The Simpsons and playing Bioshock. Good times!

A cheesy slideshow of the whole sordid event can be found here, and photos can be found here, here and here.

So really, a rather amazing weekend, and that was without the Bank Holiday Monday of relaxation, where I managed to sit around and do nothing all day and still enjoy myself!