My Little B A Baracus

The next one is done! Mr T, hehe..

Bad Attitude, yeah!

Amigos

Amigos
Originally uploaded by kipperfrog.

Fahd not drinking!

Fahd not drinking!
Originally uploaded by kipperfrog.

Tonbridge & The Skimmington Castle

So, today was James' first day on summer holidays, and we decided that a drive to somewhere random was in order! We decided that Tonbridge sounded like an interesting place, lol, and a town with a castle in the middle couldn't be bad! Well, I drove us over there, hrm, tried to drive us over there, and was partaking in a little overtaking practice at James' request, and entirely missed the turnoff, erm, twice. After a little bit of a detour, and lots of queuing in holiday-maker caravan mayhem, we arrived at Tonbridge, the half an hour journey roughly quadrupled, good work! ;P

Anyway, after all that the castle was a little bit of an anti-climax, we had a giggle about the audio tours on offer for five pounds a go, I mean all there really is of the castle is a gatehouse that you can walk through. I can just imagine it being something along the lines of.. "You are now standing in the gatehouse of Tonbridge Castle. Please return your headset to the tourist information office."
Lol, anyway, here it is. It's quite a nice intact one actually as castles go, and has a full moat with boats for hire, which is fairly impressive for this time of year. I hope they're not using their hosepipes to fill it up, tut tut.

The place itself actually reminded me a bit of a seaside town, I'm not sure what it was, maybe there were an abnormal number of people eating Fish 'N Chips today, who knows. In the town there are all the standard Woolworths, WHSmiths, Subway shops, you know the ones. The only funny thing that I did notice was the large number of both bike shops and charity shops, oh and chavs. I'm not sure how that works out. So we spent a nice half an hour looking around Tonbridge, and then headed off home, agh it was just too hot today!

Hmm, oh yeah and today, James got shawn! He now has short hair again, lol, well it was getting very long.

This evening, we headed over to Reigate heath for Tim's birthday drink with Tim and Fahd at the Skimmington Castle, which was very nice! I like that place, they even go to the trouble of putting shamrocks in your Guinness!

Graduation piccies!

My graduation!

There I go! Wow, I met Richard Attenborough, and my hat never fell off!







James & I




















And this is the way the hood should be worn.

Staffhurst Wood photos

Here are a few more photos from Staffhurst Wood..

Godstone, Staffhurst Wood & The Watermill Jazz Club

I've been out a photographing this week! I've given myself the job of redesigning the Godstone Village School website as a little project, (my version's not uploaded yet lol), only really got the template so far, but I'm slowly adding content. We thought it would be quite nice to get the kids to draw a portrait of each member of staff, and write something about them for one of the pages, I've just been adding them today, some of them are pretty funny! I also thought I'd have a wander around the village to try and get some photos of the local area while it's sunny, to put on there too.

This is the pond on Godstone green.















Yesterday evening we headed over to the Royal Oak in Staffhurst Wood, just past Hurst Green, for supper. I really like the beer garden of that place, it is lovely in the summer to sit out there, and it's normally not very crowded as I guess not too many people know it's there, oops! It's really out in the wilds, and very quiet, bar the sheep (sorry).




This is the view from the beer garden













Wandering through the fields..










And finally, this evening we went with Mum & Dad to the Watermill Jazz club over in Dorking. Basically the deal is, every Thursday they get a different group to come in and play, and sometimes it is a gamble as to how melodious it will be. Luckily, today was a good one! The drummer really was talented, he managed to hold the attention of the room for the entirety of his 2 minute solo, I think that's fairly impressive!

My Little Ferengi

My Little Ferengi is now finished! This one was a joint effort.

Superman!

Poor James was off work ill for the end of last week, and completely lost his voice this weekend, too much shouting at children if you ask me. Anyway, on Friday 'Superman Returns' came out in the cinema, so we drove over to Croydon to see it at Vue! The drive over there actually took a little longer than expected; we started to notice after a while that all the signs to Croydon actually take you to Purley Way and then disappear, I think it's some kind of elaborate scheme to keep people out of the town centre, but Purley Way is always mayhem! We ended up driving to the highest vantage point we could find, looking for the tall buildings, and then nipping down a whole load of residential streets until we ended up in town, wierd! I think we must have missed something.

So 'Superman Returns' was excellent. They had put so much effort into getting it to fit in with the genre of the other films, the look was just the same (without coming across dated), and Brandon Routh was able to pull himself off as Christopher Reeeve amazingly well! Even the intro sequence was so well done, the graphics were just beautiful. Although there were a couple of 'with a bound' things that I would have changed with the plot at the end, maybe that would just be giving it the Peter Jackson treatment, it is already around three hours in length. One good thing is, the film has opened up the possibility for even more sequels! I can't remember what James said, but I think it was either another 3 or 5 are planned if this one is a success. Oh yeah, other movie news, another Rocky film is in production which should be good.

Brightingham: 1st stop Oxford

So here are some photos from the first leg of our Brightingham trip..

We passed this monument on our way into town on foot. We managed to find a parking space quite a way out of town after about 3 quarters of an hour of finding spaces and then realising they were temporarily reserved for university loading, and getting stuck in one way streets! Maybe park and ride might be an idea for next time..

When me managed to find our way into the main high street, there were the standard catatonic silver people you seem to find in any big city place with enough tourists, I wonder who started off the craze.. hmm maybeI should do that in Oxted high street for two weeks to get together some holiday money, lol, na I'd probably be taken away!

We bought a nice lunch from Pret, which we ate in the university botanical gardens

Hmm..

Ok, so I haven't been taking any interesting photos in a while as I have been busy looking at graduate recruitment schemes, and reading up about games companies etc., and what they're looking for. I've just bought a fat book on games development in C++ so hopefully that should help me along the way, and I'm still playing with 3ds max, gradually getting better with it!

I headed over to Croydon today and picked myself up an outfit for graduation next week, it was unbelievably difficult to find a suit that was at all vaguely not '80s retro style, lol, I despair! This '80s faded/stretched women's fashion thing has gone on long enough in my opinion, I am starting to have to buy only from surf shops! (hmm.. not so good on suits tho..) Anyway, Oasis saved the day in the end; I didn't fancy being banned from the ceremony for being a scruff!

Oh Mum just asked me to think of a costume for her to wear along the theme of 'water' for an RNLI day they're having at school next week, I kinda thought a 'fish n chips' costume would be quite cool, or a pirate of the Caribbean like Johnny Depp, or, come to think of it.. one of those wierd squid/barnacle people out of the new film, ah but what would you use for the tentacles.. I just don't know.. Any better ideas?

More playing with 3ds max

3ds max is so much fun! I have just been playing around with it doing a few tutorials. The other day I decided to model some 'Fight Club' soap, so here it is! I'm quite pleased with it!

07/07: A year on...

This is a photo of Kings Cross station in London I took on Monday on my way up to York.

A bit of a different scene there today, exactly a year today since the London bombings. For a proper account, from someone who was in the midst of it all working near to King's X on the day of the attacks, see my bro's blog.

Eeeh up..

So yesterday evening I got back from Yorkshire. I went up there for a few days to lend moral support to a scared-result-getting Ruth. I can't believe how mean they have been to the Psych students at York, ever since the strike action they decided to withhold all of their marks, including dissertation grades, until results day! At least it was only the exam marks I had to wait for! Mind you, it is not as bad as this horror story that I heard while I was up there.. apparently when it came to the degree results for the York English students, the office had made some kind of spreadsheet mess up which meant that everyone's results up on the board were out of synch by one, so everyone had someone else's degree classification up against their name! That is so bad! Lots of surprise marks! Apparently, the error was only noticed when one girl stormed into the office, adament that she was a "first class student", and demanded to know what this 2:2 was all about! Lol, I think I would have just shrugged my shoulders and gone home! I actually feel sorry for the people who appeared to have miraculously got 1sts after drinking for 3 years, phoned up all their friends and family, and headed off home before the problem was noticed, only to be greeted at their graduation by 3rds! Hehe..

Anyway, after all Ruth's anxiety, she got a first --hopefully they didn't mess up the spreadsheet this time!
Ruth showed me this cool spaceship on campus, which is apparently where they garduate from! Wow, makes the Corn Exchange seem kinda boring! But at least we get the Attenborough from Jurassic Park as our chancellor!



On the lake there are also a nice selection of mutant ducks, and black swans, experiments of the Biology dept no doubt!

This is York minster. When I arrived from London, we got the best ice cream (2 scoops + choice of flake flavour/choc sauce topping flavour/choc dipped cone flavour, wow!), and sat in the gardens around the back!

There is also amazing choral evensong there, which we went to last time I visited. It is definitely well worth going to!

As Ruth was in the process of moving back home, and no longer had a room on campus, we stayed with her grandma in Upper Dunsforth. Take a look at the aerial photo of this place! I'm not sure if there is even a shop within a 10 mile radius, lol! It's strange how you think you live in the countryside in Surrey, it's only when you visit places like this that you realise how crowded the South really is! I was amazed at how very dark it was at night without the glow of streetlights, and how quiet without occasional people walking past, and cars and trains whirring by.

Ardingly & X-Men

So anyway, this is what I have been up to..
On Saturday we went over to the smallholders show at Ardingly, and so wanted to buy a sheep, a rabbit, a tortoise and a piglet, but they just wouldn't all fit into the car! Ardingly is really cool, but it is just far too tempting to come home with significantly more animals than you arrived with! Lol, anyway, this time we managed to get away safely with only some nice Yorkshire cheese, and a new water feature. Every year there are these people who turn up with all these great Wensleydale cheeses with different things in, like Guinness, pineapple and mango, ginger, cinnamon and raisin, champagne and strawberry.. well needless to say, we kinda ended up with one of each! The novelty will probably wear off a bit tomorrow when I go up to York to stay with Ruth for a couple of days, they will probably be selling it everywhere!

Today we decided to nip over to Crawley to try and find somewhere air conditioned with cold drinks! It was so hot today! Well done Flyingpops btw!! That is seriously impressive running anywhere in this heat! So, we ended up at the cinema, perfect. We also arrived at the perfect time to catch X-Men: The Last Stand, which was really good actually! I enjoyed it very much, except when they killed off Patrick Stewart half way through (oops spoiler, sorry!)! I thought that was a little mean!

Haiku error messages

I once read that in the Japanese version of Windows, the nasty impersonal error messages had been replaced by nice calming haiku poetry. Ok, so it wasn't true, but I think it's a great idea nonetheless, lol. Here are a few examples I found...

A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
To a simple stone.

You step in the stream,
But the water has moved on.
This page is not here.

Out of memory.
We wish to hold the whole sky,
But we never will.

Your file was so big.
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.