Matts Meanderings

Once again, I'm not sure if I want to associate myself with this, but its pretty funny... 

(And no, I'm not that bad).

Just thought that its about time I wrote about some of the recent travels I've done.

Back at the start of may, I headed up to Leeds to visit Amy - a south african girl we met up in Inverness last September or so. It was her birthday (21 again ), and I'd been promising to to go visit her for months.

Quite an interesting weekend - ended up at the pub on the Friday night, and at the table next to us was a small group of guys and girls, all about 18, 19 or so, and a older woman, about 40 or so. They were all drinking and smoking and just talking randomly . Eventually found out that they were a family - and one of the girls was the older woman's daughter; she turned out to be 15! I'm not sure how old her son was. This girl was drinking, smoking, and had quite a few tattoos. It was quite disturbing that this girls mum saw nothing wrong with spending Friday night at the pub with her daughter, and was allowing her to smoke and get drunk. Very scary.

On the Saturday night, we went out to dinner for her birthday celebration, so I got to meet all her friends there. All the people she's friends with are all married couples; all either pregnant or with young kids. So, it made the conversation at the table quite interesting... Waaay too much talk of pregnancy that night. Quite scary.

We also did a bit of random wandering around Leeds - it was annoying: we'd go outside to wander around, and it'd start raining; we'd go inside, and it'd stop. Funny though . It was a good weekend though - nice and relaxing. Was also good to see Amy again - she's a good pal. The good thing is that she's moving down to London soon too - yay .

And other than the 4 hour bus trip up and back, there's not else to tell, really. From what I saw of Leeds, its not that exciting - its just another place. Nice and relaxing though - good place to go occasionally and recharge the batteries :)

Hopefully soon I'll get organised and write about my other weekend away, last bank holiday weekend (read: long weekend), down to Brighton.

Just looking through the referrers on my blog (the list of people who visited my site, via a link (ie, via google or something)), and found that someone had searched for kyleakin + hostel + matt, and which had come back with my blog as the 4th entry.

Spent a bit of time trying to remember who I met in that hostel, then I realised that as they didn't leave me a note, it probably it wasn't me they were trying to find. But, cool anyway

Not entirely sure I want to identify myself with this, but I could resist pointing it out...

From the New York Daily News, via Scoble: Nerds make better lovers.

Went along to the geek dinner the other night, a little worried at how bad it was going to be (who wouldn't be scared at the thought of going to a place where 200 people are voluntarily going to something called a “geek dinner”...)

But, once I got there, it wasn't too bad at all. There were a few scary people there, pocket protectors and all, but all in all, it was remarkably tame. It ended up being more like a random occasion to meet up with random people and talk about random stuff, while eating good food and drinking.

So, managed to meet a few random people - made a few contacts - and ended up pretty much convincing this american college student to start his own business... Didn't get a chance to talk to Scoble (his post), but had a few brief words with Hugh (who's going to send me a nice bottle of wine ). Also managed to talk to the guy behind some fancy stuff at the BBC - aka backstage, and some guys that invited us along to a jazz festival coming up soon. All in all, not too bad.

Here's some random guys post about the night (including a nice précis about how Scoble expects to get sued), and here's a whole bunch of photos that random people took (and had uploaded within about 2 minutes of the night being over). Also a photo of Andrew and me looking suave.

Forgot to grab myself one of the many Channel 9 toys though...

Back in the good old days, I used to absolutely love McGyver. Used to watch it every week, without fail. I used to watch it with as much regularity as my sister and mother used to watch A Country Practice, or as much as they watch Home and Away or Neighbours.

However, the powers that be took away the good TV show, and left the crappy ones... Oh, well, thats life.

But, I've just found out that McGyver is available on DVD! Yay! Cool!

Now, I've just got to figure out if I still think its as cool as it used to be... :)

You know those little error messages you get when a program crashes, and you get the option to send the information to Microsoft?

The ones that you ignore all the time, cos you dont really know what they mean?

Well, I found a good description of why you should send the crash information to Microsoft. Go check it out. And next time you get one of those error messages, send it in!

Got an email the other day from Bulldog, our internet provider.

Just for the hell of it, they're going to up our connection to an 8 meg connection (instead of the current 4 meg). No extra cost, nothing to do.

Damn... How annoying. Not.

Had an interesting Sunday morning last weekend... I'd just had a nice long relaxing shower, dried off, and headed downstairs, back to my room. Now, my room sits directly underneath the shower (perceptive people here are going oh-oh already).

The "interesting" nee "exciting" part of doing this was the discovering the fact that it was raining. In my room.

There was this nice little river of water flowing from the roof, right onto my pillow. Surprisingly enough, I wasn't too happy about this state of affairs.

Got in touch with the landlord, and he had a plumber around within 3 hours to fix it. On a Sunday even. Was fairly impressive. Now, I've just got to find out what he's doing about the hole in my roof (and the mould that's growing in there).

I s'pose I should be grateful that it didn't happen when I was in my bed. That would not have been a good way to wake up...