Music, friends for the creation of.

A couple of my friends make music, me, I tend to just pretend to be able to play instruments.
Rich does his under Alpha Test Pilot, which I think I've linked to before, I certainly should have. Let's get some buzz going shall we?
In addition Julie, one of the guys from Blacks, has been gigging in the Cheltenham area for a while now and sounds pretty great. She's touring as Juey, with the ubiquitous Myspace page. I'd recommend anyone in the area have a listen online and if you like it then pop over and say hi. You could say that I sent you, but I'm not sure how that will really be received.
One thing I do know is that when I left Blacks we had a bit of a do and it ended up with Jon, myself, Julie, Kim, Rach and a slack handfull of others having a whale of a time. Was the best send off I could imagine.

If I've missed anyone else off the list of friends that make music please leave a note in the comments.

Sudden realisation.

Arse.

I'm 29.


I'll write more soon.

Tests, results and things that make you go wow.

Morning all,
I'm not a fan of paying for things, as a general rule, but sometimes it's necessary, and the TV licence is one of these. I'll go through periods of thinking "why pay if I spend most of my time watching advert funded TV?" then I catch something like "Planet Earth" or one of the BBC things that has no obvious market but is done to educate, inform and entertain; and I'll think "OK, it's fair."
Anyway, what's been happening? Possibly the biggest news for myself is that I took and passed my Advanced Driving Test!



I was a bit disappointed with a few bits, mainly my acceleration sense and cornering, but I was really chuffed that to be rated highly on observation and commentary. From what some of the Advanced Driving UK folks have said, it's pretty unusual to get a 1 on commentary so I must have been pretty good. :D
I've also taken the first module of my ECDL, passed that as well. I'd be somewhat embarrassed if I hadn't passed it. I'm going to try to get at least a module done each week, depending on work and when the assessment centre can fit me in.
Still waiting to see if I'll be able to get any money off my car insurance, but I did the course to be a better driver, not to save money.
Aside from that we're still waiting for our pay deal to be approved by the Treasury, this is the deal from July last year and includes our new role profiling, which is also delaying us finding out how we can progress in the job.
Went to see Star Trek last weekend with a mate from the mess and it was FANTASTIC!!!!11!!one!! I went squee and w00t (difficult to pronounce zero but I did it!) and had many geek joy moments (which I call geek-gasms). I'm tempted to use some of my budget to see Angels and Demons, purely for scientific curiousity of course, but I think that can wait.
Made it into the mess on Friday, it was a families happy hour so the rowdy behaviour was delayed until later on in the evening and ended up making sure a mate got back safely to their room before crashing on the sofa. I think there should be a rule that any and all sofas must be comfortable to sleep on, or if not, a sleep-able one must be provided! Woke up with one hell of a crick in my neck.
Chatted to Kev in the US for a bit last night and he told me about a little something he and Beth put together:



Which made I laugh!

The Planet Earth program has just started to feature Ascension Island, and it's a bit weird to think, "I've been there." Not for long, I think I've spent about 4 hours there in total, but even so, it's an odd sort of thought. I'd like to go back, but not for too long, the routine there would probably numb me after a while. Maybe a couple of weeks before heading back south.
If anyone is on Facebook please find me and join my Viking clan! PLEASE! I've only got a few chieftains on it and I'm getting picked on! You don't have to do anything after joining. Wow I sound lame.
Anyway, last night I was watching Eurovision at times, while flicking over to NCIS and a few other channels, and realised that I didn't know where the hash key is on the Mac, turns out I'm not alone, it's alt+3 which gives # but it's not shown on the keyboard and the "easy" way to find out that was suggested involved going through half a dozen menus, none of which was exactly obvious. And yet that still makes it more logical than some of the bits on the new system we're using at work.
I did find myself twittering the contest, reading other tweets, texting a friend in the Lakes, using the interactive services (sing-a-long-a-eurovision, the translations were brilliant!), chatting with a mate in the US and generally being an interactive sort of guy. We're not friendless, it's just most of them are hundreds of miles away.
Well there's a Green Day special about to start on TV so I'm going to slap the surround system on loud and enjoy it!

Friends, girlfriends and driving. Not all at the same time.

Earlier this month my friend Swiral came to visit, which was brilliant, then a couple of weeks later my girlfriend Kate finally made it up to visit, which goes without saying as superb.
While she was visiting we went up Cairngorm - taking the train as there was still too much snow on the ground and Kate didn't have winter kit with her. That and it was blowing about 40 mph and was -2 C in the carpark, let alone 1000 FT higher up the mountain. We did wander outside the doors at the top, but it was gusting around 60 mph and dang cold there, so rather than walking up to the summit we went to have some (somewhat over priced but rather good) food.
Kate told me that she loves castles so I told her that we were going to go for a drive, without telling her where we were heading. Our destination, the most photographed castle in Scotland, Eilean Donan. Featured in Highlander, The World Is Not Enough and almost every other film made in Scotland in the last 50 years. And no, it's not on Loch Ness - that's Urquhart Castle.

Worth a visit if you're up here. Worth a trip if you're not, but I think next time I'm going to either get a bigger car beforehand or hire one for the duration.
It was more wonderful than I can say to see Kate again, and it felt like she went home far too soon, but hopefully she'll be back soon.
Just afterwards there was an IAM (local advanced motoring ground) fun day at the local skid pan and driver training centre. We did a bit of skid pan work (as I'd done some a few months before the instructor skipped the instruction part and went straight to the "I'm not going to tell you what sort of skid I'm going to use, just correct it." part. Great fun actually), a bit of HGV work and driving and reversing a trailer.

As I got my licence after 1997 (about 7 years after 1997..) I can't legally drive with a trailer so I have no experience of driving or reversing one. Turns out, I'm not bad at it. Or at least in the situation we were using I did OK. All I need now is to get someone to cough up the £300 for a trailer licence for me. One of the things that made the day a bit more difficult was the presence of a herd of cattle, wandering all across the driving area and generally licking the other cars.

So, apart from some great cartoons and some "stuff" at work, that's been about it. I might be posting more about what's going on there, but for now let's just say that I'm not a big fan of the government, especially the treasury...
In closing, I'd recommend the New York Times best seller Turn Coat, but do read the rest of the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher first. And listen to Invaders Must Die by the Prodigy. No, I'm not on commission. Yet.

April, fool.

Yesterday being the first of April there was a fair bit of pressure on us to try to do something "funny" at some point. This was a problem. I was trying to think of something that I could do but nothing presented itself.
I was running out of time.
I drove over to give a brief at one of the squadrons, got ready with the usual banter. They asked what April fools joke I'd be doing and I responded with the usual "I would but as a corporation we have no sense of humour" (Men in Black misquote FTW!)
Got to the end of the presentation and on the last slide it came to me.
"For Friday we've got a front moving in from the west; and next week we've got the TV weather girls coming up for their routine defence rotation."

I managed to dead-pan the entire thing and the pure joy on the faces of the guys was beautiful. They started planning to re-arrange time off and asking me details such as which girls, how long they were staying and would they be visiting the mess?

After a few seconds I looked up, smiled and simply said, "Gotcha!"

Much good natured verbal abuse ensued and as I left the briefing room I heard someone (might have been the boss) clearly enunciate, with a hint of begrudging respect, "Bastard!"
(Today the squadron boss admitted he had been hooked nicely.)

Didn't quite work as well with the other squadron, but then again I'm not sure if they realise it was a joke...
I'm not going to say which squadrons were involved but I think it's fair to say that I am pretty dang happy with that one.

Identity

We had another directive at work telling us that we shouldn't put any information on the web that could allow anyone to identify who we are or where we work.
OK, fine, I can see why, but given the work we do, and who we work for, sometimes this rule doesn't make sense.
Take my mate Simon for example, he's on the BBC at times and has a photo profile on the BBC homepage. I've been on "national" radio - admittedly it was Falkland Islands radio but was still broadcast across the Islands. It did result in my being recognised by voice in Stanley (woohoo, I'm famous!!!!) but back here I'm much more anonymous.
I don't think anyone would mistake me for an official viewpoint about anything, in fact I'm pretty sure I said as much in one of the early entries, but I'm not going to blatantly state who I work for. Besides, I'm sure I've been oh-so-subtle and no one could possibly guess... ;)