Mssv

I’ll be having a brief hiatus from posting here for the next few days, as I’m about a thousand words into an article I’m writing on an interesting new type of multiplayer online game. I’ve been looking forward to writing it for over a month and so far it’s not looking bad, although it’s finished [...]

The Telephone Preference Service and the Mailing Preference Service are the UK web’s best-kept secret. These two websites allow you to opt out of almost all marketing phone calls and junk mail, and despite them having existed for several years, I only discovered them a few days ago.

I arrived back in the UK yesterday morning after a 24 hour journey from Sydney. Predictably, it was raining.
What I tried to do during the flights back home was to time my eating and sleeping so that I could reduce any jetlag I’d have caused by the ten hour time difference. The easiest way to [...]

Four times I’ve tried to go hang-gliding in Australia:
Wednesday: good windspeed, but in the wrong direction
Thursday: too windy
Friday: too windy
Saturday: too windy
The annoying thing is that the weather was perfect when I first got here. The even more annoying thing is that hang-gliding here is almost half the price of that in the UK, and [...]

During dinner yesterday, I mentioned to Andrew Paul and The Official Bear Of The Third Millennium that I’d recently had an MRI scan done of my brain. Someone then said how strange it must be to see the activity of your brain in real time. I was just in the middle of replying that the [...]

For some reason, the term ’shuttle diplomacy’ comes to mind when I think about how I’ve been zipping between different cities on the Australian east/southeast coast, despite the fact that I haven’t been doing any diplomacy. It’s probably because it sounds so cool.
It’s all coming to an end now, unfortunately. I’m leaving Newcastle this afternoon [...]

The woman sitting next to me on the plane was snoring. The roar of the engines drowned most of the noise out, but she was definitely snoring. It was the more common variety of snoring, with a regular rattling sound as air passed through her nose by her epiglottis, not one of the rare snorers [...]

Today was my last full day in Melbourne. In a vain attempt to try and buy some non-tacky souvenirs, we went to Victoria Market in the city. I did actually manage to buy two souvenirs that didn’t fall into the general category of ‘koalas and other Australian miscellaneia’ although it did take some time. To [...]

There was a lot of driving today to go and see the Penguin Parade at Phillips Island, about two hours south of Melbourne. This will hopefully explain all of the exposition on driving that I’ll make later.
On the way to the Penguin Parade, we stopped off at a little wildlife sanctuary to see some of [...]

I did an awful lot of walking today. Whenever I travel to a foreign city, I always end up walking practically everywhere, unless I’m going somewhere over an hour away. It’s not that I have anything against public transport, it’s just that it’s more immediately convenient for me to stroll around, and of course it [...]