Haggling

Well we've not mentioned our blue car for a while, and while all is well with it; it is admittedly a little old.

Anyway we sort of decided to take a serious look at replacing it. We found a rather nice Skoda Octavia, all in silver and lovely. The price however was (as with all cars from dealers) rather more than we figured it was worth. We had a bit of a look, and walked away suggesting that we were prepared to buy it, but not at the advertised price.

Anyway, while I was away in London today my husband has completed his haggling with the dealer and we will soon have a shiny new silver car.

Anyone want to buy a 306?

Connected

It always seems to be a challenge to get techy things to work the way you want. For some time now, I've been increasingly annoyed that my contacts on my phone were getting more and more different from the ones on my desktop. Not to mention that somehow the desktop ones weren't being updated correctly.

Recently I tried out ScheduleWorld, and after a certain amount of experimentation I have finally got the two back in sync and receiving updates.

I've got a new shiny google calendar that I haven't yet sync'd to my phone but will (either through ScheduleWorld again, or another service) soon.

And I've just signed up to Twitter for micro blogging fun - and yes, I can do that on my phone too.

Happy Paws!

Drinks Cabinet!

We have a drinks cabinet.

That probably doesn't sound hugely exciting; but for the past ten years we've been storing our (extensive) drinks collection in a huge bookcase.
We have now assembled a rather nice drinks cabinet. Narrower, taller and deeper than the bookcase it replaces, everything is now hidden behind doors, making us look slightly less alcoholic. But the best bit, is the centre section, with its drop down flap enabling easy making of drinks.

I've tested it, making a couple of G&Ts. It works brilliantly!

All praise to Herring, who modded the original cabinet so beautifully, adding the drop down flap, with braking action stays, in a way Ikea never intended!

Finally

Parents finally returned to Heathrow last night, after a week holed up in a luxury five star hotel and becoming media celebrities (BBC Breakfast!). Doesn't seem too bad does it.

We're very glad they're back safely though.

Our Parents in Bangkok

My parents have spent the last month visiting Singapore, Australia and Thailand.

Guess where their last stop was...

Imaginary fruit

So is it wrong to be teaching my daughter about imaginary numbers?

Mind you, the fact that e^iℼ = -1 still blows me away...

Excited Arr!

Conveniently, this Thursday was not only the tenth (gosh!) anniversary of Herring and I getting together it was also the night Jonathan Coulton played in London.

Thus, having arranged for a small girl to stay with Grandma (Thanks!), we went off to London for some fun.

Firstly we managed a briefish look at the new (opened that day!) Westfield shopping centre. Boy, is it big! And then it was off to Shepherd's Bush Empire for our concert. We were very amused while queueing outside. People fell very quickly into two categories. One, the geeks (easily recognisable) who joined the back of the queue. Two the non geeks, who looked at the queue, and then at Jonathan Coulton's name with complete confusion!

JC was supported by Paul & Storm. If you've never heard of either of these - go look at their websites now (ok, read this first!). What a fantastic combination. It started well with a song - 'We are the opening Band'! And really got better and better. There was lots of audience participation, particular highlights being all of the audience being pirates - 'Arr', which became the cry at random points throughout the evening. All geeks being (naturally) pirates.

Jonathan Coulton and Paul & Storm shared the stage at several points, which worked brilliantly. The three of them making a great combination, and playing up to the (extremely!) geeky audience throughout.

Finally a chance to be zombies (All we want to do is eat your braiiins...), and more singing before it was time to go home (or in our case back to our hotel).

Wow! There really was too much great stuff to describe; but it was great to see so many geeks, and have such a good time (and how often do you get to sing about the Mandelbrot set?!).

*sings* 'Take a point called z in the complex plane...' ;-)