In what is something of a tradition, I will now post my flight details. I don't know why I do it, or if anyone cares but I'll do it anyway. So..

Monday 23 August
Delta flight 11 - Leaves Gatwick at 9:20am London time, arrives Atlanta at 13:35 Atlanta time.
Delta flight 349 - Leaves Atlanta at 16:11 Atlanta time, arrives Seattle at 18:15 Seattle time.

Tuesday 31 August
Delta flight 616 - Leaves Seattle at 22:05 Atlanta time, arrives Atlanta at 05:35 (Wednesday) Atlanta time.

Monday 6 September
Delta flight 12 - Leaves Atlanta at 17:45 Atlanta time, arrives Gatwick at 07:10 (Tuesday) London time.


That first day is hell. Leave home at 5am UK time, arrive in Seattle 2am the next day (also UK time).

GUESS WHO HAS MONONUCLEIC HYDROCARBONS AND THEIR HALOGEN DERIVITIVES! :D

Hmm, nearly a year since I last touched this thing. I don't really have a good reason to now, but I decided that LOAF's friends page need un-LeHahing. In true Livejournal tradition, I'll now type of load of things that NOBODY ELSE CARES ABOUT. That being my flight details so when on the news they say "Terrorists have blown up flight [number]!" you can easily check if I died. I have four flights this time so that's four times the chance of getting blown up. Or if you're good at maths like LOAF, double the chance. Anyway, flights.

Friday 22 August
Delta flight 11 - Leaves Gatwick at 10am London time, arrives Atlanta at 14:10 Atlanta time.
Delta flight 349 - Leaves Atlanta at 16:15 Atlanta time, arrives Seattle at 18:19 Seattle time.

Wednesday 27 August
Delta flight 616 - Leaves Seattle at 22:10 Atlanta time, arrives Atlanta at 05:41 (Thursday!) Atlanta time.

Monday 1 September
Delta flight 58 - Leaves Atlanta at 20:00 Atlanta time, arrives Gatwick at 09:10 (Tuesday) London time.

Yay.

Whew, just got done installing a nice new 160GB hard drive and copying all of my anime stuff across to it. I still need to rename stuff. For some reason I still have 60GB free on that drive which disappoints me. I thought I had more anime.

This also means there's a load more junk on my fileserv which can be leeched. Go to it, Mr. Byydo.

Well, Dragon*Con was a lot of fun. Everyone spent way too much money on little plastic Mechwarrior Dark Age robot things and ended up playing like two games. Most of my money went on DVDs. I ended up with 9 official DVDs, 3 bootlegs and 4 audio CDs. Or I could just upload the picture.

There. Click here to see it.

I spent way too much money on that stuff. The To Heart and the audio CDs are getting sent to Kris whether he likes it or not though. In case you're wondering about the big boxes at the top, they're FM Towns games which were generously given to me by LOAF. Blitzkrieg Nurse and Wing Commander.

The flight home wasn't too bad since I was sat between a semi-hot blonde and a really hot brunette named Emily. I spent a fair bit of time talking to her. I note that name here so that next year when I go to Atlanta, I can look back at this to remind myself of her name. Then proceed to stalk her.

Yes, I know I haven't updated this thing in ages. I do have a good reason for that though. Other than the "laziness" one. So I've been in America like 5 days now and I'm just about getting used to the weirdness of things which I suppose many of you would consider normal. Things like the annoying constant droning-clicky noises at night, which I assume are down to crickets. I still have yet to get used to the whole driving on the wrong side of the road thing though. I guess I need to learn how to suppress the urge to look for traffic when I'm in what is the passenger seat in this country.

Dragon*Con soon. I notice the schedule got published, but I still haven't planned which things I'm going to. I guess I should. Anyway, enough of this for now.

Dear Byydo. Comic Party sucks. Thank you.

The only good thing about Comic Party was the To Heart references. It's kind of crazy that Comic Party got licensed and To Heart didn't. There's at least one other show with a Multi reference. Happy Lesson.



Also, I like the chatzone's new Swabbie image.

First off, apparently a "727" is a 777-200. So yay.

The similarities between this year and last year are quite something.. things like being on exactly the same plane types as last year, me messing up and booking my return flight a day after the convention finishes.. and not having a clue what I'm going to do between arriving in the US and Dragon*Con. I imagine I'll beat Joe with my Update-the-OM stick or do it myself.

However finding things to do at D*C really shouldn't be a problem. Last year I couldn't find anything at all appealing so I didn't buy anything. That is because D*C sells only three types of things -

* Swords/weapons - Besides being heavy and would probably end up sending me over my baggage allowance, they'd also result in my arrest and imprisonment. I'm fairly certain that will go double for this year.

* Shirts/clothing - Available in two sizes.. Typical Bloated American size and Andre the Giant size. Neither apply to me.

* Bootleg DVDs/videos

Going from memory the bootlegs consisted of copies of "Star Wars Episode 1 - The Anti-Jar-Jar Cut" and anime. This time last year I didn't care about anime and barely knew what it is. This year will be quite different. In between attending to porn panel (they'd better not cancel it this year) and whatever other things are going on you will probably be able to find me spending money on bootlegs.

Since LOAF updated about his plans for Dragon*Con, I shall copy since I never have any ideas of my own. Also, I'm still as lazy as I ever was so I'll write half of this thing now and add some more later.

Of course my exciting adventure starts earlier than everyone else's since I first have to leave the Land of Eng - the place which condemns me to such names as "Limey" and "Teabag".

For your enjoyment, and my salvation when do something incredibly stupid like lose the bit of paper it's written on, here are my flight details.

British Airways Flight BA0229
Thursday 22 August
Depart London Heathrow Terminal 4 at 11:00
Arrive Baltimore MD at 14:25

British Airways Flight BA2226
Tuesday 03 September
Depart Atlanta at 18:20
Arrive London Gatwick North Terminal at 07:30, Wednesday 04 September

As you can see, my flights are incredibly confusing. Why do UK airports have terminal/names numbers when it is apparently unnecessary in the US? Then there is the confusion of the departure/arrival times which don't actually state which time zone they're in. Luckily I know that the duration of the flight is a very very painful 8 hours of boredom so I can figure out the times from there.

The thing which puzzles me the most is the plane type.. the first flight is a 767.. normal enough. The flight home, however, is a "772". What the hell is a 772? Isn't there some law which dictates that airplane model numbers must end in a 7? You can bet some odd plane like that is bound to attract terrorists.

Anyway, more later.

I haven't updated this thing in a long time.. it's one of those things I do when I have nothing else to do at work. This is one such moment. I'm having to take a break now since once again I have hurt my back.. this time more badly than any time I can remember in the past. I won't go in to the reasons why, but I had to move my new server from it's old home up to my office and me thinking I'm strong and clever attempted to do this alone. I got about ten feet before I tried to go sideways through a doorway and twisted my back.

Looking back and after seeing two quite strong guys having to each take one end of the thing in order to carry it, I realise carrying it myself was a very stupid thing to do. Especially now that I've weighed the server and realised that it actually weighs more than I do.

Oh yeah, I also got the greatest DVD and Soundtrack ever. Yay!

My Afterburner light thingy for my GBA arrived yesterday. I chose to install it myself. Taking a Dremel to the plastic case and soldering the motherboard.. what could possibly go wrong?

Actually, neither of those. First problem I only noticed when I switched the machine on : small air bubbles in the plastic coating that I tried to put on smoothly. Attempts to get the bubbles out ended up making the situation worse with dust contamination, so now my screen is no longer clear. The other problem was that I screwed up the black plastic cover which says "GAMEBOY ADVANCE" on it, but that's not a problem since it's easy to replace those.

The plus side is that the light works and where I screwed up the case shouldn't be noticable. So now I have a dilemma. Do I make do with my less than perfect GBA or do I spend money on getting a brand new pre-modded GBA?

It's a crazy situation when I'm forced to update this thing when I have no real subject in mind so I'll just type about whatever I think of.

Prophecy!

Given the news about Prophecy coming to GBA, my interest in the game has been revived. I hadn't played since DragonCon and I decided to play the sim mission.. sim 5 I think it is.. to see if I could get anywhere near the score I got that day using just the keyboard for controls and on Nightmare skill. Naturally, I couldn't. My horrid performance (I think it was 47 kills) was about even with what I scored at D*C, but it was still a wake up call. I need to practice, and practice I shall until I get nearer my pre-break score.

Or I could just reinstall my joystick.

Having to get to work for 8am hurts. A lot. Having to get there for 7am as I did this morning is agony. It was all because England were playing against Nigeria today and I had to set up a projector rig to display the big match before the kick-off at 7:30am so that the crazy insane football mad staff could scream football related abuse at the wall.

As matches go, it was pretty boring but at least we got through to the next round along with Sweden who were playing Argentina at the same time. Along with Nigeria, Argentina now gets to join the team of the country everyone loves to hate (France) on the plane home.

Now back to the daily chore of trying to get away with doing as little work as possible while still making everyone think I'm wonderful! Though that extra hour this morning is going to mess me up for the rest of the week.

Ghost seems to be under the impression that since his little third world country can beat another third world country at football, it'll also be able to beat the likes of the English team. Oh dear.

Well Ghost, if you're so sure of that, put your money where your mouth is. I did! I now have £10 on England to beat Argentina which is enough money to bribe the Argentinian government in to doing anything.

If I win, I'll be able to buy the whole country!

People called me crazy for ordering $60 of Japanese candy! When the box arrived, I began to think maybe I am crazy. But no, I'll prove everyone wrong! I'll show everyone that they are the crazy ones for not having sampled this stuff!

There it all sat in it's sugary goodness and I've been slowly picking my way through the different types from the "Sushi Gummi" to the weird stuff which seems to consist solely of sugar.

The resulting night of painful stomach pains and trying to force the badness out of my system gave me plenty of time to reflect - the conclusion is thus : Yes, I am crazy.

As TC mentioned we've sort of started on a new project. The problem is that we're not at all organized, and neither of us know what the other is doing. We have no definite plan for the design and content. Also we're never going to be finished by the time we intend to be finished by.

Which makes this project exactly like all others of it's type!

Yay, TC got a LiveJournal. He seems to think that he is getting Episode II from me and he might be. But I haven't really checked properly so it could end up being something entirely different. Also he thinks he'll have it in 12-24 hours but that's really unlikely given that Wildfire and Ghost are also downloading it from me so he'll be lucky to get 9K/sec. 9K/sec in to about 1,300,000K. You do the math.

I haven't updated this thing in forever since there's just nothing happening. I bought a load of candy from Japan for some reason and it shipped today.. now begins the 2-4 week wait for delivery.

I'm at work right now and every day about this time a strange electrical buzzing sound starts in the socket right next to me. The breaker has just tripped which usually means that the circuit this machine is on is about to trip too so I guess I should post this before I end up having to type the whole thing again.

Pretty much everyone is talking about the new Star Wars and related merchandise. However I don't get excited by SW so I wasn't going to follow, but then I saw this:



The Japanese make the most amusing stuff.

The weekend was one long uneventful peroid filled with lots of anime watching and little else. Except for the fact that Joe called. It was great to hear from him after all this time, yet at the same time eery because of the overdose of enthusiasm for everything which seems to jump down the telephone and smack you in the face.

Joe apparently fancies visiting England somewhen so naturally he asked where the best places to visit in my area are. I somehow managed to change the subject. The point is despite living in this grey, wet, miserable country all my life I have no idea what's so interesting about it. It's all just there and anything that I may have found interesting at one point is now just another building.

There are two conclusions that you could come to:

1. I need to go see more of the country.
2. England just sucks.

I know which I'd choose!