I'm an Uncle….

What the?

I didn’t think I was that old, but now I’m beginning to feel I’m passed it. Just today I fell like I’ve aged about 20 years….

Yep, my sister has just had a baby – which makes me officially an Uncle, I don’t rmember ever agreeing to this – actually I don’t even remember being consulted – but its happened and now I’ve got responsibilities: I’ll have to start buying toys… for my nephew… though obviously I’ll have to check whether they are OK first…

His name is Filbert and his Mum and Dad are called Raquel and Anthony.


#flag:

I've got a living room!

It came, its here, I have somewhere to sit.

Yes, it only took three months but they are here and I think they look great.

My front room looks SO much better now, with the Futon (An ancient torture device) thrown out and my brand new sofa and chair in its place. Its sitting on them now, and I’d say it’s somewhere in the region of 1’000’000 times more comfortable than my futon…

I’ve been really worried that the delivery guys wouldn’t be able to get them up to my 3rd floor (or is that 2nd floor?) flat. In fact when I first met one of the delivery guys he looked up the first flight of stairs and said “It’s not going to get up there mate, there’s no room“, which was certainly reassuring… Luckily the other delivery guy knew that the sofa I’d bought actually had a really clever trick up its sleeve (or should I say through its underbelly) the sides of the sofa are designed to come off with a simple turn of a few screws. Hooray! (I didn’t even know that when I bought it, big bonus!)

Anyway, I’m well pleased with my new furniture, all I need to do now is buy a 32 Inch high definition LCD screen and my life will be complete (!)


#flag: Sofa, furniture, flat

The age of the Snowmen…

So did you get the film title from the cryptic title? Well, it’s Ice Age of course, actually Ice Age 2. And I went to see it last night. I thought it was very good. The animation of the characters had much improved and the lighting made everything seem closer to reality than before. They almost look like really models. Although the water effects sometimes looked a bit funny, noticeably when a wall of ice collapses.

The story was also very funny, and I laughed to myself throughout the film. I’d recommend it. Scrat is as funny as ever – can’t beat a good bit of slapstick!

I thought it was better than the first one, but others didn’t. Have a look at trailers and games here.


#flag: Film, “Ice Age”

45 years out of Earth

Its 45 years to the day that Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin became the first human to leave the Earth and fly in space.

Some nice information here


Flag: Space, history

Girlfriends better.

Horah!

She’s back to her old wonderful self… but more importantly I didn’t get what she had!


#flag: Girlfriend

Zoom to Mars.

This is rather cool. It’s by those clever people at google.

http://www.google.com/mars/

Its another map but this time of Mars. You can scroll around and zoom in. Take in the martian sites like Olympus Mons or Valles Marineris.


#Flag: Mars, link, space, science

Boinc at home… or at work… or in fact anywhere

This is really new, but It’s still pretty good. Remember the Seti@home software you could down load years back, well its still running, but now there’s 10 other projects running to, and you can download all of them if you want and run them on your computer when it’s not doing anything.

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

My favourite ones are:

BBC Climate Change Experiment – Save the planet (running for half the time on my work computer)
LHC@Home – CERN’s particle accelerator
Einstein@Home – Pulsar search
SETI@home – Hello world!


#Flag: software, links