Posts Tagged ‘drinking’

Had a bit of a mad weekend - a good party in a crap club in Mayfair on Friday night, and a great house party on Saturday night. Plus some infuriating computer issues.

Anyway, I’m in a mad rush to get ready for Glastonbury, but before setting off I thought I’d add some details and pics from last year’s festival. I actually wrote this a few days after returning from Glastonbury last June - primarily to serve as a kind of aide-mémoire for me, so probably only of interest to a very small number of people - but for some reason never got round to posting it. If you’re interested, here’s Glastonbury 2007 - the gory details.

I have to admit this weekend didn’t quite go according to plan. I was meant to be having a few drinks on Friday night to celebrate a friend’s birthday, then travelling down to Devon for a big party in the countryside on Saturday. Unfortunately Friday night turned out to be more of a heavy-duty session than intended - think sambuca shots by 9pm - and by lunchtime on Saturday I was still far too ‘unwell’ to face a 4 hour journey to Devon. So, no big party for me, just a rancid hangover and guilt. (I’ve since heard that it turned out to be “the best party since 1991″ - how gutted am I?!)

With no Plan B in place for the weekend, I found myself at a bit of a loose end today, and decided to stroll over to Belair Park in West Dulwich to see Carters Steam Fair. (more…)

Work’s been pretty hectic these last few months (actually the whole year’s been really busy), so it’s a relief to say “That’s it, no more work until 2007!”. As of 5.30pm today we’re officially on holiday, and will only be responding to client emergencies (our definition of emergencies, not theirs - crashed servers or compromised security qualify, but cosmetic changes to e-commerce sites or the inability to use a simple CMS do not).

I’m having a fairly low-key Christmas in London this year, so despite my good intentions, I’ll be surprised if boredom hasn’t driven me back to the computer by Boxing Day. Top of my list is getting the new design for World of Badger finished and live. I’ll probably try to catch up on a few other bits and pieces of work without the pressure of deadlines and client reviews too.

But for now my Chrimbo R&R kicks off properly tomorrow, when I’m meeting friends for an afternoon and evening of eating, drinking and being merry in central London.

I managed to get away from London last weekend to do a bit of long-overdue catching up with friends. I took my iBook with me so I could get a couple of hours work done on the train, in between enjoying the complimentary drinks and muffins in first class (not because I’m too stuck up to travel with the riff-raff in standard class, but because this country’s stupid transport policies mean that it’s cheaper to buy two first class singles than a standard class return).

Unfortunately, within a couple of hours of arriving, my friend Chris managed to spill a very large glass of wine over my iBook as we browsed the web. It got well and truly drenched and immediately cut out. Chris quickly turned it upside down and I whipped the battery out, and we then dried off as best we could before leaving it to one side. Chris was pretty mortified, but with a few glasses of wine in me I had to laugh.

The next day I popped in to a shop and had a play with the latest Apple laptops, and started to think that perhaps it wasn’t such a disaster after all… claim on my insurance and get my 18 month old iBook replaced with a new Core 2 Duo MacBook. Sweet.

After three days drying out time I decided to try turning the iBook on, still convinced that all that wine would have shorted out the logic board and turned it into an attractive paperweight. Much to my amazement it booted up with the familiar Apple bong, and I was able to log in as usual. Screen, sound and hard drive all fine. By now I was looking forward to getting a new MacBook, so I wasn’t sure whether to be happy or not (I decided I was happy, as a new MacBook would mean shelling out on a larger Crumpler bag too). Quite how the iBook survived I don’t know, but it’s definitely earned the tag “Old Faithful”.

If only the same could be said about the Antec PSU in my Windows box. When I got back to London I fired up the PC and within seconds the PSU died. I was not a happy bunny, especially as this is the second Antec PSU I’ve had to replace within the last year. Although it’s still under warranty I decided to buy a different one rather than wait for Antec’s painfully slow RMA process.

My shiny new 600w PSU arrived yesterday and what did I discover? Not only did the Antec PSU die, but it seems to have fried my rather expensive motherboard in the process too (and I had to try every component in Rob’s PC to be sure). So now I’m waiting for a new motherboard to delivered.

The moral of this story? Don’t buy Antec PSUs. In fact, don’t buy/build a PC, just get a Mac. And be careful with your wine.

Since my rather inebriated post about Rob & Em’s wedding, I’ve rather neglected World of Badger. Obviously the last week was rather taken up with my gran, but I thought I’d do a quick-ish run down of the ‘highlights’ of the previous week. I will be making copious use of links to e-street, a rather cool site I read about years ago in Internet Works magazine, but only just got round to visiting. It’s one of those “look up a bar/shop/bank in your area” sites covering lots of cities in the UK and Ireland, but with a difference: it includes photos of all the places listed (and it’s also very well designed, has details of disabled access etc, maps, and is very fast).

On May 5th, the Bank Holiday Monday, I met up with Troy for the first time since his return from Les Arcs (some of his photos of his season in France are up at Planet Sub-Zero). After some Rolo Muffins and a few pints by the river in Putney (and a trip to the cash machine — I mention this uninteresting fact purely so I can point out that e-street even have a photo of Barclay’s cash machine on Putney High Street!), and a few more elsewhere, we popped into a black-Dell-machines-for-hire place to watch Rob & Emma getting married in Vegas via live webcam. Naturally, as the service was delayed (second thoughts?!) and we were paying by the millisecond for the machine, Si and I swapped between the wedding and the trailer for Matrix Reloaded. In our pissed state this got a little confusing, but we’re pretty sure Emma was kick-boxing in lots of black leather, and Rob ended up getting hitched to some guy he’d met on the Strip named Neo.

So after weeping at the spectacle of our best chums getting hitched, what else could we do but go out to celebrate? After a disconcerting “Blenheim Crescent in Notting Hill, please.” — “Sorry the, the only Blenheim Crescent I know is in Notting Hill…”-type conversation with the cabbie, and a drunken chat to Simon H. on the mobile (if you’re reading this Si, sorry, we were a little tipsy), we eventually found ourselves outside the flat where Mel, Si’s mate from France, was staying. A couple of glasses of red wine later, we popped in for a meal at Mediterraneo, where we had some absolutely delicious spag bol and a super bottle of Italian red. Then back to Mel’s, before getting a cab back home.

The next day Troy and I did a little shopping (he wanted some obscure arthouse DVDs), then a little basking/people-watching in Soho Square and outside the Toucan. Then he dragged me along to see X-Men 2, which was surprisingly good fun, I have to admit.

The rest of the week was taken up with work, until Troy came over here on Saturday evening (10th May) with two bottles of cracking Grand Reserva Rioja. After that sort of start, the rest of the evening was inevitable… Guinness at the EDT and half a bottle of Absolut in the kitchen until the early hours. Utterly wrecked. I finally got up at about 1.30 the next day, with the foulest of hangovers, and we forced ourselves to head off to the pub with the Sunday papers to watch the Chelsea–Liverpool match (the less said the better). At least Troy knew a Hammers supporter to phone up, which did bring some much-needed schadenfreude. Still feeling like death-warmed-up, we went for an early-evening Mexican (alright, I admit it, I did try a hair of the dog pint of Guinness in Franklins too), and spent the rest of the evening watching TV (the highlight being Bremner, Bird and Fortune’s Beyond Iraq and a Hard Place — why the hell are they the only people on telly mentioning the PNAC?).

Right, that about brings me up to date.

The PC gremlins have prevented any updates for the last few days (the drinking and hangovers didn’t help much either). Went to the East Dulwich Tavern with Rob on Wednesday night, before too many nightcaps back here. Despite feeling grim all day, met up with Rob again on Thursday afternoon, and we proceeded to drink our way from the London Assembly building to Waterloo over the course of the next four hours. This gave us the chance to play with my new toy — a Mustek gSmart Mini digital camera.

It’s a tiny little thing, only 69mm by 47mm by 11mm, so it’s small enough to carry pretty much all the time. It recharges through its USB connection, and can even record ten seconds of video. The photos it takes are only low resolution (100 pictures at 640×480, or 200 pictures at 320×240), but the quality’s OK — examples below — and for thirty 45 quid, I can’t really fault it.

After our South Bank mini pub crawl, Rob and I headed back to the Curry Cabin in East Dulwich. Lovely grub. Feeling a bit bloated, we decided a stroll over to the village was in order, and ended the evening in the Crown & Greyhound.

(The thumbnails of Rob link to pop-up full size versions — original jpegs re-saved in Fireworks)

Forgive me Father, it has been about a week since my last birthday, and still I have been running round, getting squiffy with my chums. Very pissed, going to bed. Amusing pics to follow shortly… (update: some photos now uploaded)