Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Some things that made me laugh

1. go to Google
2. click on "maps"
3. click on "get directions"
4. type "New York" in the first box (the "from" box)
5. type "London" in the second box (the "to" box) hit enter
6. scroll down to step #24
(Thanks Strawberry Pip)

And from the Office news groups:
An American woman has found the cause of global warming...

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Giggle loops

From "Coupling," a giggle loop is the reaction when it's a serious occasion and the worst thing you could do would be to laugh. So you supress it and think, "how bad would it have been had I laughed then?" so it gets worse, and worse and worse...
I'm briefing a squadron in about 45 minutes, so this is slightly preying on my mind.
Meh, to quote the Simpsons.
Not much else to say, this is my last shift down here in Leuchars, got some time off now.
That's about all that's happened, except for going mountain biking in the Trossachs and walking in the hills behind T and C's place - both good fun but knackering. I'm going to have to get much fitter and I've only got a short while to do it. Not sure if I should record progress here, it might help motivate me, or it might expose my obsessive optimism.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Si and myself went up a hill, as you can see, Si is in jeans. I could have hit him when he turned up in jeans. Ah well.


The reason I could have killed him is that in the background you can see snow. Snow and jeans is not a good combination. The hill we are on is higher than the one in the background.



Yeah, we were higher than that one.
Fortunately all was good. I was trying out my Buffalo special shirt, which was really warm at the start but had lots of venting on it so it was good, and when we got to the cooler areas it really paid off.
On a sad, weatherman note, the wind really picked up near the level of the weather inversion (where the temperature rises instead of falls as you go higher and traps low cloud and poor visibility) and the snow was pretty much gone above the inversion, showing the increase in temperature quite nicely. Told you it was a sad metman thing.

There was another picture here but I decided that if I know you well enough for you to see it, I'll send it to you personally. Opsec and all that. Besides, burning pianos is just an urban myth, isn't it?

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Tea

I've been drinking quite a lot of it, still having it NATO standard (white and two sugars), although thinking of cutting down to one. There's NATO, Julie (Andrews. With milk and no sugar, after her performance as a "white, nun{none}") and a Whoopi (Goldberg. No milk or sugar, Sister Act, Black Nun) but there's no slang for white and one as far as I can tell.
Anyway, during the second Gulf War the Americans where assigned to provide drinking stuff for the Brits and radically underestimated the British armed forces capacity for drinking tea.
There's an odd website called "nice cup of tea and a sit down" that rates biscuits and sometimes tea and one of my favourite quotes of all time comes from Neil Gaiman's book (and TV script) Neverwhere. The hero, Richard Mayhew, has to face a great ordeal to end up facing the Angel Islington. The ordeal is presided over by the Black Friars of Black Friars in London, but first, "the nice cup of tea."
And that, for me, is the thing; step up and face your challenges, but first - the nice cup of tea.
Lovely.