Birmingham to Dundee flights!

Well, I guess if they're not going to fly from Kidlington Airport, this is the next best thing.

A Polish airline, White Eagle Aviation, will be operating a service from Birmingham to Dundee, booking through the website flyWhoosh.com (not yet operational). If the prices are reasonable, this will be great! I will save so much time on my journeys home that it would be worth paying much more extra. I could even ride my bike to Birmingham Airport and leave it there.

Maybe I'll see if I can get myself on the maiden voyage and get a frequent flyer card!

Maybe because I blogged nicely about them to give the publicity they can give me some free flights and I will mention them again and again every time I use them? Maybe I will email them to offer them this great opportunity.

I'll have to plant a few trees to off-set the carbon emissions.

Ocean & Collins

I often end up comparing my home town, Dundee, to where I currently live, Oxford. They're both about the same size and have two universities, but that's about where the similarities end.

I love living in Oxford, but I've decided it totally sucks for one particular thing - clubbing!

Luckily I'm not a huge clubber, or I would probably hate living in Oxford. Last night, I made my long overdue first visit to Ocean & Collins. The people I know that have been either loved it (Miguel) or hated it (pretty much everyone else I know who has ever dared set foot in the place).

I can now declare that I fall into the latter category.

It's basically a big room, with no atmosphere.

Some clubs have smoke machines on the dancefloor, or sometimes have bubble machines. Ocean & Collins don't go for any of that boring rubbish - they have a layer of broken glass to dance on! Brilliant - add the element of danger to your dancing - fall and you will lacerate yourself! I was probably about 2cm taller when on the dance floor with the amount of glass embedded in my shoes. At one point a guy came onto the dance floor, kind of pushed me out the way, then started sweeping up some glass. Quite futile. I held up my foot so he could scrape some of the glass of me too.

Maybe it would be an idea to ban bottles from the dancefloor?

Dundee is no clubbing Mecca, but, expanded commercial sell-out that it might be, Fat Sams is a decent "large" club and London is also quite good (I'm really talking about them as venues - I'll make no comment on clientèle and music).

...and I still remember the good ol' days in the Mardis Gras... not forgetting the Student Union where I spent most of my student days. It's been completely refurbished since I was there and is quite a modern club venue now. I reckon it's probably lost of of it's "student" charm. The shape of the old Liar Bar, whilst completely impractical, was great for me and Kev to go on "tours".

Ahhh those nostalgic student days...

Pirates on the Cherwell!

Pirates on the Cherwell!
Originally uploaded by major_grooves.

It wasn't even International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

Oxford City Council Pretend Recycling

Oxford City Council Pretend Recycling
Originally uploaded by major_grooves.

What is the point of trying to recycle in Oxford? The council don't care. What they have cleverly done is set-up a "pretend" recycling scheme, whereby they hand out recycling boxes and leaflets and then never, ever bother come to collect the recycling. Genius!

Our recycling hasn't been collected since way back in January. When I complained at first I was told it was because there was a new recycling scheme and I needed a blue box. Well why not tell me that instead of just leaving the recycling you dumbasses?

So I get a blue box and put all the tin cans into. Ooh - now we can even recycle plastic stuff (PET1 and PET2). We got our blue box around the 26th of January - and it has not been collected since. The green box with glass and paper still gets collected.

I've made three phone calls to Oxford Council about it. Each time they tell me they will look into it as a priority and get back to me. LIARS! They've never got back to me and my recycling box is still full.

I'm perfectly prepared to accept that I could have done something wrong. Perhaps I've committed some heinous recycling crime, like left a label on a tin can or something. It's a new system - if people do things wrong they need to be told. Not just ignored.

Well, I can only presume that this is all part of Oxford "bloody useless" Council's clever pretend recycling scheme.

We'll stop trying to recycle now. We'll just chuck everything in the main bin. Serves us right for bothering to try.

Upload and Download speeds

I'm going to have to ask Curtis what this means...



I don't think it's very good - and it's smuch lower than the last time I tried it.

Test your internet connection speed using the tool linked from the image.

Last time I did it I got a download speed of 395Kb!

I just repeated it - download is the same - upload is huge!



What gives?

Free Alan Johnston

Fake HT820

Yup, as suspected, my Motorola HT820 is totally fake. :(

Ebay fingers burnt

I think I might have had my fingers burnt on Ebay.

I bought a Motorola HT820 bluetooth headset from a seller in Hong Kong, intending to use them with my Nokia N95 for wireless music listening. Unfortunately there is so much sound pausing that they are nearly unusable.

There is a good guide to getting over this problem here, but reading it does also lead me to think that my headset is either a fake, or a refurbishment. There are traces of glue at the connection to the earpieces, there is no designation/serial number on them, and I can't get it to enter flash mode so that I can even try the above linked fix.

So although I got them cheap - I don't think I've got the real deal. I've emailed the guy to tell him I think they are fake/refurbs, and I have asked for my money back. I suspect he will ignore me and I will have to escalate this with Ebay.

Family visit etc

Mum, Dad and Andrew came down to visit over the Easter weekend. Highlights included one of the best meals I have ever had at Brasserie Blanc in Jericho and a trip to Pendon Museum. See the photos from the weekend (Wendy was with us but she's shy so I have to remove any pics with her in).

Also this week I took a quick trip to Budapest, Hungary, for work, but I didn't take any photos and I was there for less than 24h so there's not much to report.

seeds, peers and leeches

Oops, sorry for not posting for a while! me bad!

I've been trying out using BitTorrent to download some TV programmes. To be honest I don't really know anything about downloading files, so I think I am doing it like a complete n00b. I'm using µTorrent and so far I've had to change my connection so that port handling is done manually. Nope, I don't really know what that means either, but I found some instructions for how to do it online and I can now download some files fairly quickly.

I don't actually advocate just downloading movies and TV programmes for free. These programmes cost money and someone has to pay for them. I still think that if we want to see quality movies or TV programmes get made, then we have to accept that we have to watch adverts, or pay to go to the cinema.

So I'm a hypocrite? All I want to download is TV programmes that I've missed on regular TV. I've missed the last two episodes of Prison Break and the last episode of Life on Mars. I can't find anywhere to legally download them so I turned to the BitTorent.

Unfortunately as I mentioned I am a bit of a n00b at this, so, so far, I have managed to download one episode of Prison Break... in Spanish and an episode of Life on Mars where the sounds isn't synched with the video. Bah! I did manage to download another episode of Prison Breaks which seems fine but it is the second one!

I do have a DVD of Borat to watch tonight... but the freakin' TV died this morning!

I suppose I can be grateful the toilet isn't blocked too...

edit/ I downloaded DivX player and now Life on Mars plays fine!

miguel 1 - steve 0

miguel 1 - steve 0
Originally uploaded by major_grooves.

Another Scottish loss against the Dutch. This time the stakes were much higher than some poxy game of football or cricket. Steve orders new phone in advance and arranges transfer to new network. Steve still has on new phone. Miguel walks into O2 and gets an upgrade for the price of a McChicken sandwich. Bah! Even more worrying is that i now blog about myself in the third party. Pic is of shrunken head in Pitt Rivers museum oxford.

Rabbits

Because Wendy likes the video...

Nokia N95 Cheap with E2Save

I couldn't wait any longer. I've bought the Nokia N95 with E2Save.com.

I've spent ages looking at different offers on the web, but in the end I've gone for the Orange "Dolphin" tariff, which costs £35 a month for 500 minutes and 500 texts. Seeing as the N95 is designed for lots on internet stuff I've bought a 4MB a month bundle which costs £4 a month.

The handset itself cost only £89.99, which isn't bad for something which, sim-free, is around £500. I should actually save money overall as I can now bundle my broadband in for free saving me about £22 a month! In fact I will pay £4 to get it upgraded to an 8meg line.

So overall for mobile and broadband I should be saving around £5 a month. Plus I still get Orange Wednesdays (not that I've ever actually used it yet - they only allowed it for broadband people recently - I intend going with the little miss once a week).

With E2Save you actually get cashback on a number of your bills too. However, it must be said, that looking at the reviews of E2Save (which is a CarPhone Warehouse company - so at least secure financially) they seem to have very poor customer services and actually claiming the cash back seems to be torture.

So E2Save - good deals and potentially very cheap with cashback, but bad customer services and difficult to get said cashback.

I have a referral code, so if you want to buy from them I would be very grateful if you use my code - once you sign up you get a referral code too and can make £20 on every phone purchased through the site.

http://www.e2save.com/?money4me6879471

Golden Compass preview

We went down to Oxford Town Hall today to see Philip Pullman give a discussion about the Golden Compass - the movie adaption of his book "Northern Lights" from the trilogy "His Dark Materials". Also talking were the producer, Deborah Forte who bought the rights to the books 12 years ago and Michael Fink, the visual effects supervisor.

We didn't get to see any actual clips of the movie, but Fink did show us some of the proceses that went into making some of the special effects. So we saw some animation testing of Pantalaimon as a ferret and a mouse which looked quite cool. We also saw the ship that takes them North and the Mrs Coulter's sky ship.

Apparently they won't be shying away from the anti-relgious theme of the book. Philip was keen to point out that the book wasn't anti-religion, rather anti-organised political religious theocracy (at least I think that's what he said). That said, I guarantee there will be religious types denouncing the book as blasphemy and there will surely be organised book burnings in the US bible belt.

So we know the book in the UK as "Northern Lights" whereas in most other countries it is "Golden Compass". Apparently the person who changed the title was the same publisher who changed Harry Potter's "Philosopher's Stone" to the "Sorceror's Stone". i.e. this person is an idiot.

Philip's favourite scenes in the movie are when Lyra first meets Iorek Byrnison and when Lee Scoresby and Serafina Pekkala are flying in Lees' hot air balloon and Lyra is lying asleep.

How will they represent Dust? Fink was very elusive about that, so I'm not really sure what the answer is.

I would have liked to ask if they will continue to use Dakota Blue Richards in all three films as by the time they get to the third film she'll be too old. Unlike Harry Potter where the characters grow older with the books/films, Dark Materials takes place over a short time period. I would also like to know how they found an English girl called Dakota Blue? What a daft pretentious name to give a child. Odd considering there's another precocious child actor by the name of Dakota Fanning who probably could have fitted the role, had they not been looking for an unknown. As it was, someone asked a similar question, but all they would say is that the next two films were not yet confirmed but would probably go ahead.

I think it's going top be a great film and am looking forward to seeing it!

16th

Okay, so Scotland might be rubbish at most sports, but, somehow, we are ranked 16th in the world for football!

We're playing Georgia this afternoon in the European qualifiers - where we're top of the group ahead of France, Italy and Ukraine - let's hope the Scottish losing streak ends!

Scotland - officially useless at all sports

In the battle of the lanky, orange, healthy socially advantaged gits vs my short, tubby, narrow arteried countrymen there could be only one winner. Cr@p!

Market Harborough

Do I know anyone that lives there?

Teaching English in Scottish

Sorry Ireland

On behalf of the nation of Scotland I apologise for our poor show against the French. :(

Rubgy - bad idea?

With the Six Nations being on at the moment, I'm getting kind of tempted to take up rugby again. I'm 27 now, the last time I played was for Carnoustie HSFP when I was about 20. My memories from that one season include:

1. Feeling like my head was about to explode and having to put it under a running tap for about 10 minutes after my first summer training session on the beach.
2. Scoring 2 tries on my debut against Waid and getting into the Guide and Gazette with some kind of headline like "Youngster Score Twice on Debut" (I think they thought I was about 16 - Kev my still have the cutting).
3. They thought I was some kind of new star - but I never scored again!
4. That 7s tournament where I had to go and lie down for about 2 hours after the first game. "It's only 7 minutes each way - I can manage that!"
5. Sexually deviant Royal Marines with an unsettling penchant for young blond wingers...

Obviously something has happened to my memory over the past 7 years as there are some very good reasons for me not to play rugby:

1. I'm skinny and fairly weak.
   
2. I'm not a particuarly fast runner.
   
3. I'm aerobically very unfit - one sprint and I am shattered.
   
4. I'm not very good at playing rugby...
   
5. I was always rubbish at tackling
   
6. and spin passing to the right
   
7. and taking passes
   
8. and catching high balls
   
9. and kicking
   
10. Sexually deviant Royal Marines are everywhere!

However there are some reasons to play:

1. I like rugby
   
2. I should try to get fitter rather than just accept the wheezing.
   
3. It is a good excuse to try and bulk up a bit

So there are some reasons to play, but they are more than outweighed by the reasons not to play.

I think I'm one of these "take something up then forget about it again" type people. Yeah, trying Ju-Jitsu again at Uni was a great use of my time!

Maybe it's some kind of "late 20s" crisis? I think it will be rugby or wargaming. Or maybe both? Hmmm....

Well, maybe I'll join Oxford for their summer training and try to get fit before the next season. I'll also try to gain some weight. Apparently I am 72.5kg at the moment.