Quick heads-up, although most people who this applies to have probably already noticed – Steam are having a huge sale at the moment. It’s basically too big to browse through, so someone else has done the hard work for you.
If you’ve ever wanted to snap up some older games, they start at about £1.50 🙂 I can recommend the Secret of Monkey Island, Braid and Audiosurf. Have fun!
Happy Christmas one and all…
When it snows, do like the Romans. Sit indoors and drink lots of wine. Alternatively, why not go skiing? I did, and it turns out I suck quite a lot but I have slithered my way down a hill in Halifax (yes, skiing in England) all afternoon and now it hurts a lot. Memorable moments include goinig superman over the front when I hit a snowdrift, smashing through a plank when I hit a sapling, and burying myself, my skis and my dignity in a fir tree near the bottom of the run when I had lost control and decided this was better than crashing into the house at the base of the slope. I did eventually manage to link a few turns together though, so some success in the end 🙂
Maybe I should stick to something else, which I last played on our 486 in about 1997.
I’m in Huddersfield visiting Sonya’s parents, and apparently there is now a rule that every time I drive somewhere it has to snow for days. Leaving 4 inches behind in Cambridge we arrived in a relatively snow-free Huddersfield only to get 6 inches this morning, it could be interesting getting out of the street on Tuesday.
On the upside, we did get to go sledging this afternoon which was pretty awesome. Not sure the golf-course owners will be quite so pleased when the snow disappears and they get to see what has happened to their teeing off area – the mound of earth provides the perfect kick-start to a sledging run.
I have some beautiful photographs of the Eiffel Tower, but the internet here is too slow to share them with you.
Christmas lights here in Paris are somewhat more tasteful than their UK counterparts. Each major road has personalised displays hanging across the road, whilst the pedestrian areas are ablaze with lights strung here and there. The highlight is the Tower though, which is a lighting engineer’s dream. Each strut has been wired individually with at least seven colours, each can be switched on and off independently to create pulsing rainbow effects, with colours running up and down the height of the tower. There are also searchlights on top and spotlights which can be set to flicker and sparkle. Each hour the lights change from a simple white illumination to a full-on spectacular for 10-15 minutes, visible from all over Paris.
I guess the question would be, who has to climb up and down the inside of the struts when they need to replace a bulb?
Three days down, two days in the lab, and still just the one merde incident. I feel like keeping a track of the number of times I successfully dance across the pavement, avoiding another well-laid trap. However, keeping score like this is fruitless; if I score a point each time I avoid some, I effectively lose a million points each time I fail.
On a lighter note, the food today has been great. For lunch we had the plat-du-jour at a local Spanish restaurant, a fantastic paella stuffed with chicken, prawns and saffron. Back in the lab the lasers are switching between playing ball and playing up, but data is appearing quickly at least and I will have plenty to keep me busy over the winter. This evening I wandered around the Christmas-lit city centre with Lauren (who is being paid to do a masters here!) but unfortunately it was raining and I’d left my camera at the hotel, so pictures will have to wait until another night.
Anyone who has read Stephen Clarke’s “Merde” series will remember the lengthy description of the author’s battle with Parisian canines in the first of the series, A Year In The Merde. No matter how carefully he trod, their nocturnal faecal distribution network would outsmart his shoes. 4 hours in and I have myfirst merde moment, hooray. Turns out that shoes with nobbly grips on the bottom aren’t the easiest to clean 🙁
Vin rouge is nice though…
Having been back in the UK for three weeks it’s time to rack up some more expenses. This time I am in Paris visiting Olivier Beyssac, who has a shiny lab here with lots of expensive machinery for me to use. Eurostar was great, the check-in and passport-control system managed to get everyone in the right place at the right time, even though the train was really busy. It made me think of early aviation, where you could walk onto your plane with ease rather than the current system of frisking, security announcements, airports miles outside the city requiring a transfer as expensive as the ticket, water-bottle nazis and several miles hiking to get to your gate.
Right then, time to try some french cuisine wine 🙂
Here are the photos from Antalya, our beach holiday
Only 3 months late, here are the first of our Turkey pictures
