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!

Friday, August 03, 2007 12:28:39 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

First off, a big thanks to Shirley for hosting the MeAggregator BBQ the other night, I think we can probably claim it as a success, although I do regret making a tit of myself trying to keep with Karsten on the chinese rice wine..

Life is cool at the moment, Redgloo is taking shape on the devlopment machine at work, and I'm doing my best to follow T-rex's expert advice outside of work. Got a party tonight, and tomorrow I'm meeting a girl who doesn't suck for a spot of one on one drinking tutelage .

Anyway, one of the things I aimed to do once I was back in Reading was to buy some of the musical instruments I used to play, and erm.. start playing them again in my free time. First up is the Guitar, as anyone can play guitar, even if you haven't owned one in four years :)

I popped onto Ebay and found a chap who was getting rid of his musical instruments so he could go jetting around the world. I found a nice simple classic guitar which appealed to me and placed some bids and ended up snapping it up for about £150 (Retails new at around £350).

I stayed at home late this morning so I could sign the paper and pick it up from Parcelforce, the seller was amazing and was very honest and forthcoming about the delivery. "I didn't get time to do it today, so I'll make sure to get it sent tomorrow", and he did! It took just under 17 hours for it to get from him to me and I had great fun unwrapping the parcel.

Well, it plays just like he said it plays. It's got a really rich sound, it's amazingly loud and clear compared to other classical guitars I've played in the past and I'm looking forward to learning some new stuff once I've gotten into playing it again.

Starting off with the familiar and over-played, I'll be jamming with The Rolling Stones and moving onto anything which has an interesting finger pick. I'd love to get Buckets of Rain (Couldn't find a video of Dylan doing it himself )Nailed before I visit my dad again, it's such a lovely piece of music and would sound really nice on something which didn't have those orrible steel strings O_o

And here's a picture of me with the lovely thing, Ok I'm posing a bit but I was actually playing something, honest!