Sydney, finally

Actually I had no idea how to transit at Istanbul airport either. At Helsinki they gave me boarding passes to Bangkok and checked my bags all the way to Sydney. They also gave me a fast-track exit card for Istanbul, which initially made me worry there was no such thing as transit, and I'd have to pay for a visa to go landside and then go back through. With that in mind, I was initially heartened to see a big "transit passengers this way" sign, pointing at some doors through which was an escalator.

The doors were locked. A Turkish bloke shouted at me, realised I didn't understand, and shouted English at me. I had to walk on down the corridor and then turn right. But of course!

At Bangkok it was a bit easier, though this time around I was wondering how to go about getting my boarding pass for the next flight. First, I went up an escalator and through some security, all without showing any proof that I was actually meant to be in transit. Then I wandered up to a Thai airways desk and handed over my passport. She gave me a boarding pass marked TRANSFER PASSENGER and told me to get to the lounge by going upstairs, to where all the shops were; she also said I'd need to "check-in again later at the lounge".

Upstairs was indeed where all the shops were, but the first sign to the lounge said to go straight back downstairs. I kind of walked in a sphere for a few minutes, up and down between levels while retracing my dazed steps over old ground as I failed dismally to actually find the entrance to any of the 5 or so lounges Thai airways have. Eventually I came to one close to -- and on the same bloody level as -- the transit desk, and sat down with some orange juice. Got my laptop out and couldn't get either to twitter.com nor www.facebook.com, but the mobile URLs both worked. I assumed it was some ham-fisted attempt at censorship. This lounge was tiny, not the one I'd been in before next to the free massages, and with much of the internet I wanted to use being out of action I gave up and went hunting.

As I walked around the airport in a bit of a stupor, I realised one of the reasons I was having so much difficulty compared to last time I was there (when, indeed, I went straight to the lounge I was looking for) was because that time I'd been sober as fuck. This time I was shattered and probably a bit pissed, or at least hungover. Ah well. I did eventually find the right lounge, and after a bit of food and some caffeine, and some electricity for my laptop and phone, I asked if there were showers I could use. No, there weren't, but there were some at the other lounge(s)...including the one I'd been in first. Fucking fail. I buggered off to a different one, showered, and had beer and sausage and pie. Mmm, beer. Then I went and had a "head and neck" massage which actually catered for the entire upper body, preceded by some odd cold green tea that was disgusting, and a huge argument between the reception staff and a group of women which at one point had the former threatening to call airport security on them. Ace.

Post-massage, I went to the main lounge and asked if I had to be issued a new boarding pass, based on what the transit desk woman had said. They said no, my pass was fine, and that I had about half an hour to spare before I should go to the gate since it was quite a way away. So I had a few solids and another beer, then set off.

The gate was at the end of a different concourse, but still really not that far. I was there very early, again, but at least this gave me the opportunity to witness some real reality TV-style chaos. A family trying to go through the secondary security were being told they had too much alcohol in their bags to be allowed through. They were properly kicking off, having a huge shouting match and bringing out the "where's your supervisor? I want to talk to your supervisor!" guns despite being calmly and clearly and repeatedly told that they'd simply gone over their limit. The family's main defence was some small print written on, er, the generic sealed carrier bags the booze was in, and nothing to do with the rules at either end of the journey. At one point the woman was screaming about it having cost over 200 (Aussie) dollars and volunteering to pour half of it away. Nyers.

Immediately after the boarding pass check there was an Australian official asking questions of everyone. "What's your reason for travelling to Sydney today?" "I'm visiting my brother" "OK, does he live in Sydney? Whereabouts?" etc. I was a bit flummoxed and flustered and gave a host of rambling answers that, miraculously, appeared to satisfy him.

The gate was populated by a lot of Australian families heading home. When they announced boarding, they said it was for people travelling with children, plus business and first class passengers and Star Alliance gold card holders. That basically meant everyone. I had a bit of a scramble to get through some of the few people who couldn't yet board, but then general boarding was announced before I'd reached the gate. Basically it was pretty chaotic. Thank fuck I was sitting in the first row of business class seats so got to duck out sharpish.

The flight itself was kind of nondescript. I had a bit of a chinwag with the oilrig worker sat next to me, the food was pretty good, etc. Thai's business seats are good but not as good as Turkish Airlines, especially as they go flat but not at a 180 degree angle (so at full recline you slip forwards). I watched The A-Team movie, slept for a bit, woke up and watched some crap Jennifer Aniston/Gerard Butler film -- oh christ, Butler's American accent was poor -- and then Get Smart. Oh, the meal service finished with Kahlua, which was nice. But in all honesty, films aside, the flight didn't leave much of an impression. It was a shitload better than my last Thai flight, but I was by this point a bit of a frazzled mess.

Sydney's arrivals didn't help. There are a raft of arrivals in the early mornings, most of the flights from Europe and a few from Asia and the USA are all scheduled to get in in the first 2 hours the airport opens. I arrived at 0715 (because my originally picked flight got removed from Thai's schedule, boo!). Thai passengers are not handed fast track immigration stickers, unlike, say, Qantas, BA, or Air New Zealand passengers. Then someone official said the computer systems were down so immigration was being processed "the old fashioned way", which meant big queues.

Baggage reclaim was carnage. My bag was something like 3rd off, but the queues for customs and quarantine were fucking massive, snaking all around the carousels and full of tired, fractious people. One guy was having a huge rant at some security staff, saying how he'd been there since 6am and the queues needed managing because people were just all out for themselves and stuff. I quietly joined the back of a queue.

After moving not very far, I texted my bro telling him what was going on (he was waiting for me landside), and said that despite the fact I was going to be a while, could he get me a diet coke. Just after this, an official appeared about 5 people in front of me and started to do preliminary checks of our queue's declaration forms. If you had zero food, wood, and all that other bad stuff, then he was stamping the card and sending you to a fast track queue at the other end of the hall. That meant me! And hey presto, I was out.

The whole family were there, Kevin, his wife Sal and my niece AJ. Littl'un got her present sharpish, a reindeer I'd bought at Helsinki Airport. Went down a treat. Plus she'd said my name when I appeared. Huzzah!

The weather was fucking shit. We wandered through the car park to their vehicle of heft, a Mitsubishi something or other which you have to climb to get into and which beeps when in reverse. It's basically a bus. It's preposterous. It's awesome. We drove in the pissing rain to their flat. Travelling done, holiday started.

Wide and long

Yeah. Wide and long. I'm talking about the plane from Istanbul to Bangkok (widebody, long-haul). But first, Istanbul airport.

Like most business class lounges the CIP lounge has separate bits for sitting down to eat, chilling on armchairs, PCs and printers for "working", a creche/kids room, a quiet bit, etc. Unlike most lounges, though, in Istanbul all the different sections are of different designs to one another. I didn't find it particularly jarring, but some do. I couldn't get a space in the comfy chair bit so I was in the more kitchen-barry sit-and-eat/drink part. Which was fine, because much like all my waking hours en route to Sydney, I was eating and drinking. A couple of Efes beers, a lot of frustration with the internet connection, a bunch of pastry goods, and I packed up to go explore the terminal. I was a bit drunk and very angry, pointlessly so, and the wander around outside chilled me out as I forced myself to be less of a cock.

Then I went back to the lounge and got more free alcohol. A mint liqueur, to be precise. Mmmmm.

One of the reasons I took such a circuitous route to Sydney was because I wanted to sample a new airline and a couple of new aircraft. What can I say? I like trying out new bits of comfort, and from what I'd read the Turkish Airlines 77w planes (borrowed from Air India) were supposed to be awesome. They are new, have very fancy seats, great service, but only fly the Bangkok route a few times a week -- and even then they sometimes swap to older planes at a moment's notice. So I crossed my fingers and took solace in the fact that at no point was my seat number shifted (a surefire sign that the plane type has changed) whenever my boarding pass was checked.

Got on the plane and had hit paydirt. The 77W with the awesome seats. With the huge screens and the amazing remote controls and the super-comfort and the just general fucking aceness and win. Christ, I had a thirst on me. The daft cocklike mood from the lounge lifted, replaced briefly with a feeling of remorse for having ever been in it, then that went and I was just back in childlike "this is ace!" and humble "how the fuck do I keep managing to travel like this?" bipolarity.

A bloke who looked like a stereotypical Nepalese Everest sherpar, and who spoke no English, showed me his boarding pass. It had the same seat number as mine on it. He was looking very confused. A flight attendant came along and pointed out to him (eventually) that he was showing a boarding pass from a Helsinki-Istanbul flight (spooky coincidence), not this Istanbul-Bangkok one. He was shunted off, and I relaxed back into my seat.

A chef appeared, and he gave me a Godiva chocolate. Then I got some champagne. Then I played with the controls a bit, noticing the reading light was this crazy little orb/probe thing like something out of a sci-fi/horror movie; I scrawled BUY PHANTASM/II on my pad.

People on planes always associate beeps with the seatbelt signs. After take-off, the first beep always seems to cause lots of people to unbelt and stand-up; the same happens after landing. But those beeps are different, they're the single beeps which always -- through observation -- seem to always mean "crew, do your stuff". And they don't coincide with the seatbelt lights going off, an event which does coincide with a different kind of beep. Why doesn't anyone else notice this? Christ, I can be so anal at times.

A flight attendant gave me some slippers and offered me a paper. Also some toiletries and a choice of magazines. I declined the reading material, and started watching a Korean movie called Blades of Blood. I wrote THIS IS AWESOME in my bad, followed closely by CHEESE AND COGNAC. Think I was in quite a good mood at this point. I also wrote "you crazy bloke", because I thought it was quite a funny line from the subtitles in the film, and then "Stop writing" because, er, the film was subtitled and I was missing too much through writing all these notes.

The first offer of drinks was a choice between orange juice or a cocktail, but both looked the same and I picked the OJ. The attendant gave me a real, er, are you sure? look. Guess I seemed to be the kind of person who likes his alcohol. Not sure how I ever give that impression. No siree.

Fuck, the food service was awesome. A menu with my name written on it was presented; I had to order breakfast in advance, like in a hotel room where you tick boxes and shove it on the door handle outside. I had salmon then soup then ravioli then dessert chosen from a trolley wheeled through the cabin by a chef, who prepared and served the dish on my table. I remembered not being as impressed, mind, as I was with the short-haul meal a few hours previous, but as I write this my memory of the long-haul meal is fonder. Perhaps it was the presentation; definitely as an overall experience it was shit-hot. Especially because it finished off with the aforementioned cheese and cognac.

Watched some Simpsons episodes, then fell asleep for 3 hours or so. I woke up from a nightmare, which was slightly influenced by the swordfighting movie I'd watched before, but mostly it was a normal chase nightmare and it was fucking horrible. I was convinced it was a recurring dream, but that feeling went away within a few minutes of waking up -- like I dreamt that emotion. Fucking odd. Perhaps all this travel and alcohol and exhaustion was getting to me.

Breakfast was OK. The Simpsons episodes were new (2010 vintage) and unseen by me. An episode of National Geographic's World's Toughest Fixes was entertaining. I think this was the first time I'd ever been on a long-haul flight and only watched one film. I broke the screen by stowing it at the end, and had no idea how to be a transit passenger at Bangkok airport.

HEL ain't a bad place to be

I didn't eat reindeer. I ate a bowl of peanuts and a chicken+bacon+bbq sauce sandwich (which was, actually, gorgeous). I also didn't have vodka, being too scared to ask how much it was after reading the beer menu.

I know as much about Helsinki and Finland as I do about Seoul and Korea. Which is to say I know what it's like to stay overnight in an airport near the hotel, doing nothing but free shuttle bus / hotel bar / sleep / free shuttle bus. Occasionally I think to myself, Foreman, what the fuck are you playing at? Go and see these places you twat. But then I think, meh, I kinda like doing the in-and-out passport stamp box-tick incursion. Because those are the only reasons I've been to either place, really; that and the expedience (by which I mean cost saving) of flying through each city rather than a more direct route.

So. The Holiday Inn Helsinki-Vantaa. My room was basic, small. The shower is just a slightly dipped part of the floor with a hole and a curtain. It was also massively powerful, and I kind of maybe sort of broke the switch which turns it from normal shower to power painful jet of doom. Perhaps. The TV had more channels on crap quality analog than half-decent digital, and BBC World rolls its news every 30 minutes or so these days. Bah. BBC Entertainment wasn't very entertaining. I fell asleep catching up on videos from vbs.tv (there's a 3rd series of Thumbs Up, in China! Yay!) before going to the hotel bar.

It was €7 for my first beer, 400ml of a Finnish brew whose name I can't recall. Not Lapin Kulta though; that's what some of the Swedes who pitched up to buy beer for their sauna visit got. €7 is about 6 quid; 400ml is 70% of a pint. The Guinness was €8,20 for a 440ml can. The Budvar Dark was the same price for a 500ml bottle. Finland is not a cheap place for the sauce.

Slept for 8 hours or so, which is unlike me. Skipped breakfast, preferring instead to just loiter in my room listening to music until check-out at midday. Before leaving the UK I had thought I would make use of the hotel gym on both Wednesday evening and Thursday morning. Meh. Bothered. I think that was the first hotel room I've ever stayed in which didn't have a clock, either a bedside thing or summat built into the TV.

Back at the airport courtesy of another almost-empty trip on FREE BUS, I checked in immediately for my flight. This despite worrying I'd be stuck landside a while because the website led me to believe check-in might not open 'til 90 minutes before departure. They sent my bags all the way through to Sydney, but I could only get boarding passes to Bangkok. Last leg wasn't yet open for check-in. Directions were given to the lounge, including the warning that it was at the opposite end of the terminal and in the Schengen area, but the flight was leaving from a satellite gate in the non-Schengen bit requiring a bus ride out to the plane.

Had beer. And some kind of salad stuff which claimed to have shrimp in it but didn't. Free wireless worked fine. It always does in airports, right? Oh, no, of course not.

Heeding the check-in girl's warning I set off moderately early to the gate. There was a long queue at passport control between Schengen and non-Schengen, but I realised after a minute or so that it was for the "all passports" line; the EU/EEA line was empty. So I scooted through unhindered. Was at the gate way too early. Bah.

They announced boarding, and said business class and star alliance gold passengers could board at their leisure, in the separate line. But they didn't open up this separate line for 10 minutes or so, and when they did I was the only person to use it. As promised we were bussed to the plane, which was parked out on a stand, nearest the gate the lounge was next to. Bah. Thought for a while I'd be the only person in business, but eventually there were 2 of us. Or 6. I got confused by row 6.

Take-off was delayed by 30 minutes. I had champagne. Food service started pretty promptly once airborne and I can say without hesitation that Turkish Airlines do the best short-haul business class food I've ever had. Not that I've masses of experience with short-haul business class flights (hmm, BA, Qantas, AA, think that's the lot) but really, this spread rivalled some of the long-haul meals I've had. I've got photos which I'll put up soon. Though photos of plane food really is a niche interest...

I realised onboard that Helsinki is the furthest north I've ever been, and on the way home I'm transitting Auckland, the furthest south I've ever been. That and a circumnavigation; I am really putting in a shift on this trip.

With the post-meal beer in hand, I tried to recline my seat. It went with a jolt and I only narrowly escaped full-scale spillage disaster. Twat.

Put my mp3 player on. I'm trying to be good, and not fast forward tracks I don't like in a knee jerk fashion. Open my mind a bit. So far this plan is doing nothing but make me hate wedding dress music even more than before. Ebony Ark and Epica are just dreadful, dreadful bands. Fell asleep with music on; woke up to a Righteous Pigs song about dying in a plane crash. Awesomes. Why am I sleeping so much?

I made a note on my mp3 player that I need to make more notes on my pad, so I can write more that I remember. But now I'm looking at this 'ere post and thinking, shit, if this is how much I write without proper notes, how bored are people going to get reading the rest? Fucking hell.

I took lots of photos of clouds, and experimented with the fake HDR and "commercial" settings. I also have an HDR photo of my face, which may or may not be made public. The Black Sea looked nice, as did the Bosphorus.

Istanbul airport was way more impressive, modern, airy, and large than I remember it being from the last time I was there. I found the CIP lounge and got angry at the wifi. Many many people had iPads, more than I've seen on commutes in London. I guess Angry Birds is a worldwide phenomenon.

Right. I need a shower and a massage and to buy something for t'missus and then to get back on the sauce. Oh, one last thing: you can fly from Helsinki to Tallinn. Yes, there's water in the way, but there's a regular ferry service. A 63 mile flight just seems ridiculous.

the wifi in the Turkish Airlines CIP lounge at Istanbul Airport is fucking useless

I was going to write a blog post, but it has just taken me 15 minutes or so to bring up the "new post" page. I am epically annoyed. The internet access here would be quicker if I wrote URLs on scraps of paper, handed them to a street urchin to go get someone in central Istanbul to bring the page up, print it out, and bring it back to me. I swear I had more reliable and faster access over a mobile phone in 1999-2000. I would rather there was no access than the promise of some, only for it to be frustratingy slow, fluctuating in strength, with periodic complete drops in service. Also it said it would be free, yet there was no "click here to get your username and password" link as promised by the instructions. So I paid. After paying, I got booted off. When I eventually got back online, the link was there. But, of course, I'd already spent my cash by then.

Fucking fail. And Turkish Airlines were doing so well up 'til now.

the road to HEL

Ooh, a bed. I like beds. I slept in one last night, and as I type I'm lying on the one in which I'll sleep tonight. It's Wednesday 29th September 2010, and I'm in the Holiday Inn Helsinki-Vantaa, a hotel close to Vantaa airport which serves Helsinki. I'm sure you could have figured that out from the name.

Tomorrow and Friday night I will not be sleeping in beds.

Well, I guess I will, kind of. Not proper beds, but big fancy seats which kind of turn into beds, in the business class cabins of Turkish Airlines and Thai Airways planes. This is assuming I get the types of plane I'm expecting (and, in fact, deliberately engineered my trip to try out). Unfortunately both of these airlines are moderately notorious for swapping out their planes at late notice, so I'm just keeping my fingers crossed for now.

Aaaaanyway. I'm in Helsinki. This morning I was in Surbiton. This is how I got here.

Last night I booked a cab for 9am today to take me to Heathrow terminal 3. This morning a cab turned up at about 8.43am ready to take me to Gatwick. Score minus one for Mogul Cars, Surbiton.

Cab driver was friendly but boring and didn't really want to talk. Think he thought the same of me, but really I was just finding him sort of hard work. So instead I had conversations over SMS and twitter. Some of the SMSes were keeping up with t'other Darren, who happened to also have a flight from T3 this morning, leaving 35 minutes before me. We'd arranged to meet airside for a pint and some breakfast before making our way to our respective gates.

Check-in was a bit messy. T'other Darren was embroiled in lengthy process grief with a Virgin agent, while I was foiled by BA's policy of only opening bag drop 2 hours before the flight. I'm sure it used to be 3 hours. Sure.

From check-in to sitting down with a pint took 20 minutes. People bitch about security lines at Heathrow all the time, but even the long lines really don't take that long to get through. This without fast-track, on an economy ticket, etc. Meh. The whole place is a fucking zoo though, so so crowded land- and airside.

Guinness. T'other Darren wanted an ale, which looked like it was going to be Bass on tap until at the bar I spotted London Pride on draught. Phew! Also ordered two breakfasts, and sat back down. T'other Darren then consulted his boarding pass, which said he should start boarding at 1015 for an 1130 departure. You what? Even for transatlantic that seems like a huge lead time. Nonetheless, it was already quite beyond 1015 so he cancelled his breakfast, got a refund, and buggered off.

Unfortunately (and through no fault of his own, just misunderstanding with the bar staff) he also cancelled my breakfast. And I couldn't be bothered to order again, so I just finished my pint and started taking notes. Tell you what, my new pen's nice. Not that it's particularly new -- I was presented with it as a gift on my last day of a 2 week work trip to India back in February, and have only now got round to using it. Interesting, huh? Moving on...

Point is, I was now on me own. When I first started travelling around the world by meself, I took incessant notes and wrote loads of blog posts. I lost myself for 90 minutes just reliving my own trip from September 2006 the other day, and am trying to blog this trip (as you can see). It's all a bit different now: lots of the experience isn't new, and I've got someone at home to think about and miss. Will I be more boring, less boring, will I sustain it? Who knows.

On my last foreign trip, the only way to sustain a useful UK plug-adaptor-wall socket relationship was to construct a banana/travel hairbrush contraption on which to balance the various parts. Since I'm travelling solo and thus have no hairbrush, I figured I'd buy a new adaptor. Yes, I could have bought a hairbrush, but I'd have felt a bit daft doing that.

Gate 24 at T3 is more like a bus station than an airport gate. Especially because you can't board planes from it, only buses. Which take you to planes, admittedly, but still.

I left the UK without Marmite.

BA flights within Europe are thoroughly unremarkable. I had an exit row seat which didn't feel particularly legroomy, but I did think it felt wider than usual. Which actually means I feel/am narrower than I used to be.

The food was an egg and ham roll, in a plastic bag which was all blown up and mine made the loudest pop in the cabin when opened. Had a beer and water to wash it down, then there was a second drinks run. "Did you want another beer?" I was asked, to which I (of course) answered "yes". The bloke next to me asked for a coffee; she said "OK, but you'll have to wait. Beer is easier, see". SCORE ONE (more) FOR BEER.

Other than that, I spent most of the journey alternating between reading the Independent/flight magazines, listening to music, dozing off. and dicking around with the note taking stuff on my mp3 player. My phone has no such app, what the fuck? The Cowon one allows for 60 notes of 200 characters each. The on-screen keyboard is nice, but it could do with the word completion and mis-hit detection that the HTC has,

The approach to Helsinki was gorgeous. Loads of lagoony lakey watery bits, loads of trees and fields, very sunny, it was just all lovely. But I have no photos (even if I had my camera out it was "turn yer devices off" time).

At the airport, there was no-one else at immigration when I went through. Don't know how that worked really, I was nothing like first or last off, and neither hurried nor dallied. Anyway, the guy didn't even stop chatting on his mobile as he waved me through. My bag was 3rd on the carousel and I headed out into a very very empty arrivals bit landside. Couldn't find an ATM nor easily spot my hotel shuttle bus stop, so asked about both at tourist information. I'd walked past the (rather large and obvious) ATM twice. There are 2 slots to put cards in and I chose the wrong one first (it told me so). Odd.

The free bus to the hotel is called "Free bus" and has "FREE BUS" written on the side in massive letters. Handy.

I might go eat reindeer. Except it doesn't sound too appetising. But the Finns do do good vodka.

Round and round

Ooh, I'm going on holiday again. Hurrah! Even considering my travel habits of the last 4 years, this is a fairly crazy trip, and the first time I'll have circumnavigated the globe twice in a calendar year. In January/February I flew London to Sydney via LA and Auckland, and came home via Incheon (Seoul). 2 airlines, 3 hotels, one new passport stamp, nigh-on 24,000 miles (great circle distance). This time beats that.

On Wednesday I'm flying to Helsinki. A new country for me, on a paid ticket with BA. Which means no lounge access, 'cos the days of me having a silver or gold card with them are long gone. However, this is what's known in certain frequent flying circles as a positioning flight: I'm heading to Finland not (just) to tick a box, but because that's where my part cash/part miles ticket to Australia starts on Thursday. It was about the same price to do this as to start in the UK, thanks to Air Passenger Duty and a few other taxes, so I thought, why not? I am indulging my flight geekery quite a bit here. It's quite a journey.

First, I fly from Helsinki to Istanbul with Turkish Airlines. Contrary to my brother's eyebrow-raising and smirk, they're actually a top notch airline with real, safe planes and everything. Mind you I've never flown with them before, so can't say much more about their service yet. I'm looking forward to giving 'em a go, not particularly on this leg but on the second leg, which (after 5 hours or so in the lounge) takes me to Bangkok. This is onboard one of the posh new planes they've borrowed from some other airline, which have awesome seats and a bar at the front of the business class cabin. A bar. Apparently their solids are none too shabby 'n all.

Last time I flew through Bangkok I had about 18 hours between flights, so I went off and did a day trip around some temple or other in the city. This time I was meant to have 11 hours, but in fact I only have 6, because the flight I was originally booked on got pulled from the timetable. Bah. Still it's a fairly nice airport to hang around in, especially when there's a free massage available. The problem for me, though, is that I'm now going to arrive in Sydney at 7.15am on Saturday instead of 1pm. Which means I need to try harder than usual to sleep on the plane, and then stay awake all day in the city. Can't even go to the hotel and check-in for 6 or 7 hours! And to top it off, the clocks change in Sydney on Saturday night, giving me an hour's less kip. Not that it makes much odds to me.

That last flight is with Thai Airways, who I've flown with before, but never on this type of plane. Last time I did Bangkok to Sydney it was on a rotten old plane with shit seats and crap entertainment. This time it's on some modern Airbus thing with good versions of both (I hope).

After a week in Sydney, I'm flying to Melbourne with Qantas. Never been there before. And I'm not going solo - all the southern hemisphere Foremans are heading there too, 'cos me bro's running a marathon there on the Sunday. Ace.

Oh, I have dicked around a lot with my return flight. Originally I booked Melbourne to Hong Kong to London, then a few weeks ago I changed it to Melbourne to Hong Kong to Amsterdam to London. Then I cancelled it and instead booked Melbourne to Auckland to LA to London. Hence the circumnavigation. It's a lot more miles this way round, but massively preferable in lots of ways. It's all with Air New Zealand, who are fantastic, and I get back to Heathrow at about 11am, so no rush hour to deal with. This'll be the 3rd time I've flown between Auckland and London and I am proper looking forward to it. Best business class flights in the sky, some would say ... and a huge bargain considering I got it for less than £300 (plus a bunch of BMI miles). That there is full-on win.

All in all, in the space of 15 days I'm taking 8 flights on 5 airlines coming to almost 26,000 miles. I'm staying at 4 hotels, and have 3 or 4 overnight flights. Is NZ2 from Auckland to LA overnight? It takes 12 hours, but lands 8 hours before it takes off. You heard.

North Korean hip-hop

I'm a bit of a Pyongyangophile, by which I mean I'm utterly intrigued and fascinated by the way North Korea operates, projects itself, is based around this massive personality cult, etc etc. I've watched a few documentaries about the DPRK (highly recommend the stuff on vbs.tv), read quite a few articles, and can't wait to see them play in the World Cup.

I particularly love the way their official news agency is at once accusatory, adversarial, delusional, and more eloquent than I could ever hope to be. And most of all I like how they're sneaking hip-hop into their news reports. Here's a paragraph from a recent article, commentating on the ongoing spat about who destroyed that South Korean ship earlier this year.

It is traitor Lee Myung Bak and his puppet conservative group that should be responsible for the said case, apologize for it and face a punishment as it is a tragic product of their despicable sycophantic and treacherous moves and reckless actions for escalating confrontation with fellow countrymen.
-- CPRK Declares Resolute Actions against S. Korea, Korean News Service

A fantastic sentence/paragraph. Beautiful. And properly hip-hop. What leapt out at me when I read this was how Despicable Sycophantic and Treacherous Moves are superb names for rappers; they should make a debut album called Reckless Actions, swiftly followed up by Escalating Confrontation. The latter, perhaps, should be a collaboration with the Fellow Countrymen. I reckon I'll use Despicable Sycophantic as my name if I buy Rapstar.

Hopefully soon they'll issue a statement along these lines:

General Secretary Kim Jong Il today issued a statement regarding traitor Lee Myung Bak and his lapdog supporters in Tokyo and the US, insisting that they could come one at a time or come all at once, and while they might pop strong game, they are in fact nothing but punks. Should these treacherous nefarious and insidious fools keep steppin', the DPRK will not shrink from bustin' caps in they ass. Lastly, the Dear Leader informed party officials that he was close to fulfilling President Kim Il Sung's plans for the reunification of Korea, unveiling a new military strategy document entitled "Pop pop pop goes the nine".

In reality I suspect we'll just get more stories about fruit farms.

(with credit, and apologies, to Grandmaster Melle Mel, EPMD, Das EFX, and, well, just basically everyone I guess)

Mouthy and ethical

I was thinking of starting to write stuff here again. Not for the sake of it; I just need to try and get back into one or two mindsets: that someone might give a crap about something I've written, and/or that I actually do just like writing anyway. It feels like in the last few weeks, allied to a spectacularly busy and productive period at work, my mind is spinning faster than it has for a while; I'm getting all mouthy and opinionated and might as well find an outlet greater than 140 characters every so often.

So, on that note, which twat decided the word "ethical" described a particular way of living? It's a load of bollocks, and it winds me up. Now don't get me wrong, http://ethicsdebate.org/ is actually quite funny (and thus props due to my bro' for sending it in my direction), but I have a problem with the wording. "Ethical" means little more than "living according to a code"; which code is up to the individual, either through choice or belief. Hijacking it so it applies to just one is a load of prescriptive bollocks. See the wikipedia page on ethics for examples of many such codes. I'm particularly fond, on occasion, of a bit of Cyrenaic hedonism:

"Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die." Even fleeting desires should be indulged, for fear the opportunity should be forever lost.

I could easily live by a code of ethics that supports a religion, or that says raping the environment is fine, or whatever. My ethics are subjective to me. And the irony (if it is such) of stealing the word "ethical" to give it a particular set of connotations -- complete with "the opposite is irrational/bad/stupid" overtones -- is that it's as much a load of bullshit as any religious text.

from London to Lisbon

I wanted some time away, a new passport stamp -- not literally, but to notch up another country visited -- and a 5 day weekend. So I booked the Thursday and Friday off before the May Day bank holiday weekend, and fucked off to Lisbon.

The flight was about a hundred quid. The hotel was 36 quid a night. This was not an expensive holiday!

Got a bus to Heathrow. It was quicker, cheaper, and less racist than getting a cab. Generally I'll get a cab if I've got a bag I'm checking in, but for a 48hr trip I was rucksack only and thought paying 25 sheets or so to get to the bloody airport, considering the cost of the trip overall, would be a bit fucking profligate even by my ridiculous standards.

I'd printed out my boarding pass at work the day before, so I pegged it straight through security and into the BMI lounge. This is the lounge I'd dismally failed to sample when I flew with Air New Zealand to Auckland back in January, thinking that the generic "Star Alliance" lounge was good enough. And, I mean, it was, I guess... except I now know the BMI lounge has a bar area called "The Local", which stocks bottled London Pride. BOTTLED LONDON PRIDE, d'you hear? A drink of majesty. So I had me one of those, and a bunch of shitty lounge food, while waiting for me flight.

The BMI lounge is near gate 5 (this is in Terminal 1). My flight was from gate 49. This is, quite literally, the furthest gate there is from gate 5. The complete opposite end of the terminal. I left the lounge in plenty of time, in true-to-form bit-nervous-about-arriving-late fashion, and was just about to tweet from the gate about being too bloody early when boarding started. In fact we were all boarded about 10 minutes before the scheduled take-off time, except for ONE woman. She looked proper sheepish as she got on.

I'd never flown TAP before. Here's my impressions of that first flight (since I'm writing this while waiting for the return). Service, pretty friendly. Legroom, not the best. Plane interior a bit tatty. They made some announcement about a Portuguese law limiting the consumption of alcohol onboard, but they went into no more detail and I've not looked it up yet. They were dishing out booze though, so I guess you're only allowed a certain amount or summat. Either way I didn't have any. The food they served wasn't bad, and they did 2 drinks runs (mind you, it was a 3hr flight near enough).

There are no personal screens for entertainment, but there are dropdown screens every 3 rows or so, much like most of these sorts of planes. The picture looked much better than any I'd seen before though, and the moving map showed not only major towns and cities, but shipwrecks, along with their years! WTF? It cycled through the map, some Portugal tourist board stuff, some hidden camera trick the public skits, and a bunch of Charlie Chaplin shorts. Very odd mixture.

The landing was one of the bumpiest and SLAM THE BRAKES ON style I've ever experienced. Most people were gripping the headrests of the seat in front of them. I was giggling. Heh.

As I was disembarking I let a girl go in front of me. She had a bag.

Landside, I went straight to the tourist information desk and bought a Lisboa card. This is like a travelcard plus entry to loads of museums and shit, plus an awkward size and shape pamphlet thing explaining all what it gives you. I got the 48hr version, and went outside to the Aerobus stop.

The girl I let in front of me was there. Without a bag. She got on the same bus, alone (ie no-one else with her carrying her bag). Odd.

As far as I could remember, my hotel was near Campo Pequeno, and actually the bus stop confirmed this, because it listed nearby hotels for each stop. Campo Pequeno was only 2 stops into the journey. Cool. I had no maps of Lisbon, street or bus or metro or otherwise, but I figured, meh, the hotel must be easy to spot, right? Anyway I knew the name of the road it was on. How hard could it be?

Got off the bus stop right opposite the bullring (that's what Campo Pequeno means) and couldn't see the hotel. In fact I couldn't see any hotels. I was on Avenida da Republica. Without a map. So I just picked a random direction, then turning, and ended up getting to my hotel by the shortest route possible. It was 2 blocks away from the stop and round a blind corner, but score one for mapless, unprepared tourism!

The receptionist at the Holiday Inn seemed to go to great lengths explaining to me the rate I'd already paid, as if there was an undercurrent of "you motherfucker, our economy's in the shit and you scored a 2-nights-for-the-price-of-1 deal, and I'm supposed to be happy to serve you, well FUCK YOU". Oh well.

My room had a view. Of a hospital and a train station and some tower blocks. It also had a TV whose channel guide was kind of sort of vaguely accurate. BBC World was indeed on Channel 44, but BBC Prime was nowhere to be seen and Channel 22, instead of being something Portuguese, was the previously unheard of (by me) "BBC Entertainment". Also there was PPV porn. Of course. It's a Holiday Inn!

I chilled briefly, drank my free water, and went out.

Spit Bridge to Manly

Monday 25th January 2010. Kevin had the day off work. I hadn't suffered any jetlag. Time to go for a walk!

This was my 4th visit to Sydney (or 6th, depending on how you count it -- on two visits I've been on 3 or 4 day side-trips in the middle). But it was only the second time I was staying in a hotel, and the first time I've had to fend for myself. Most importantly, related to what I'm talkin' about 'ere, I had to get some public transport BY MYSELF like a BIG BRAVE BOY. Which wasn't something new, come to think of it; what's new was I was meeting me bro' somewhere I'd never been before, namely the Spit Bridge.

I needed a Diet Coke before the bus, so popped in a newsagent next to where they all start from. While I was in there someone appeared basically from nowhere, in a robe, and asked where the swimming pool is. Turns out there's an entrance directly into the shop from the hotel in the building next door. Freaked me out though.

Monday rush hour traffic in Sydney by the bus terminus is mental. Very unpleasant. But my bus was on time and got me to the Spit nice and quickly. There was nothing remotely difficult about getting off at the right place, and in fact I surprised Kevin by getting there so early. He was playing with AJ, but once I got there he got her sorted, shoved her in the backpack, and off we went.

Spit Bridge to Manly

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The Spit Bridge to Manly walkway is ace. My type of walk: a boardwalk, mostly signed, a feeling of being miles away from the city despite being in the centre of it, water, trees, wildlife, a half-decent climb, and it ends at a Bavarian pub next to a ferry port.

Not much to say about it that other sites can't say better. But I can show you a picture of an Eastern Water Dragon, one of the many that we spotted en route.

AJ was well behaved pretty much the whole way, as I recall. The climb around the head was a bit more than I expected, but that was a good thing. Part of the walk goes past a beach and park which Kevin and Sally had taken Ruth and I to, back in 2008, which was my first Golden Gaytime experience. Yum. But this time I just stuck with water.

The weather was pretty grey, which was actually perfect. It meant I didn't get any decent photos (wildlife notwithstanding), but it also meant I didn't get sunburnt or die of dehydration etc. By the time we finally reached Manly, me bro was more fucked than I was, blaming the fact that he'd carried a backpack with his daughter in it the whole way. I pointed out this only just about made him weigh the same as me, but he legitimately countered with the fact that he's not used to weighing that much. Bah.

I love the Bavarian Bier Cafe at Manly. I think I've been there on every trip to Sydney (when you count them as 4). This is at least in part due to the fact that the Manly Ferry is yet to get boring, what with it being a superb picturesque 30 minute boat ride in Sydney harbour with ace views of, um, everything, and it just being public transport. Nothing special about it. Manly itself is actually not part of Sydney, or something...I could look it up right now but can't be arsed, but my understanding is it's not a suburb like, say, Wimbledon, but actually a separate place like, um, I dunno. Woking? Except it's better than Woking, because it has a ferry and a huge beach on the Pacific Ocean and a Bavarian pub and no fucking pikey-ass Wetherspoons.

The first time I went there because "you've never been here before, the Manly Ferry is a box to tick and there's a Bavarian pub there". The second time was exactly the same reason, but aimed at Ruth instead of me (that was the best visit; there are photos of our crazy drinks and my bro attempting some kind of schnitzel challenge somewhere). The third time was because I wanted somewhere nice to have an angry drink by myself because I was hurting lots -- though the bar staff took my Oktoberfest 2002 t-shirt to mean that I was German and felt homesick. No, not German...

This visit was because we needed some calories after the walk. Of course there are abundant choices in Manly of places to sit and eat/drink, but I wanted to go here because it's a Bavarian pub for fucks sake. AJ was ... less well-behaved than she might have been, but not awful. Most thing stayed on the table most of the time. I showed off my fearsome beer knowledge by recommending we drink Stiegl (it is a great lager), and then we got the ferry back.

I don't recall what the rest of the day consisted of. I suspect I just sat in my hotel room dicking around on the internet, and then watched a load of tennis. Those things happened quite a lot o this holiday.

Birthdays in Sydney

Kevin's birthday was better than mine, even if it, too, didn't go according to plan. See after a couple of beers on his last night as a 39 year old, we were headed for one more when he got a call from Sal (who was already ill herself). AJ had a cough and she was worried. Kevin hot-footed it back, and the party for the following day was called off. The following day being my bro's actual birthday, though the party was really all about the nipper having turned 1 a few days previous.

So, in the absence of a party in the park, there was a gathering in their house. Which turned out to be much the preferable option anyway, as it was 39 degrees celsius outside but air-conditioned inside. Alex had been to the docs in the morning and the cough was diagnosed as, er, just a cough. Pfft! I got to Willoughby about 1130 and immediately started making headway into the huge amount of breaded goods in the kitchen. Sal's folks were there, plus her sisters Mara and Jo; but they all left to go elsewhere at about 1pm. A couple of Kevin's mates came over later in the afternoon and out came the beer. We played with the dogs briefly while fetching more beer from the cellar; toys were assembled or inflated; friends went, family returned; Thai food was ordered (and some of it was HOT); Eddie Izzard DVD was watched; I got a lift back to my hotel.

Sunday went like this: walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, met Kevin who was exercising Rowlf in a park underneath the north end in Kirribilli, walked harbourside past Luna Park and a couple of beaches, wandered through a park and up some steps, found somewhere to eat breakfast, struggled to keep Rowlf under control while we munched. Then we walked back to their house. Littl'un was still coughing, Sal was a bit better. Rest of the day was spent chilling, I got me a bus back to town in the early evening (having forgotten it was Sunday and not looked up the timetable, upshot being I had to wait a fair while).

Monday was much more interesting. So I'll write about it some other time, as right now I need to get my shit together and go get on a plane to London. OZ521 ICN-LHR seat 6k if you're interested.

A long 'un round the wrong 'un

Wow. Did I really used to blog all my travelling? 'cos I'm trying to write about this trip and finding it pretty hard. Everything just seems so fucking dull. So, y'know, I wouldn't really bother reading on if I were you.

My cab to Heathrow turned up 10 minutes early. What kind of cab driver does that? Thankfully I was ready to go. Air New Zealand check-in was great, considering I was being an awkward bastard. I was flying the return portion of a paid (ie, with money) Auckland-London ticket, then immediately starting a miles-bought one way, err, Auckland-London ticket. With a stopover in Sydney. I asked if they could check my bags through to Australia and they did; in fact they went further than that, and checked me in and issued my boarding pass for the flight across the Tasman. Quite surprising, to me, considering it was Wednesday and that flight wasn't until Friday afternoon. "We like to do things properly", she said. She also said that seat 1A was Victoria Beckham's favourite seat, but if she happened to be on NZ119 on Friday I needn't worry about getting kicked out.

The Star Alliance lounge at Heathrow terminal 1 is a pretty fucking pedestrian affair. But of course there's free grog, and I had my first alcohol of 2010 there. 20 days in -- probably the longest I've ever gone without a drink and without being on medication since 1992. I could have gone to the BMI lounge as well, but I couldn't be arsed moving. Some other time.

My flight was from, I swear, the furthest fucking gate possible. Bah. And because it was US-bound, I expected a lot of hassleful secondary security checks since the failed pants-bomber bloke at Christmas caused another round of jerking knees. And indeed there was a secondary security checkpoint there, but I was waved straight past it. Not sure if that's because I was flying business class, or if they were just being selective. Anyway. Took advantage of priority boarding and got on the plane, then changed seat to 5k 'cos a couple wanted to sit in 6k and 7k. Dunno why really -- you can hardly class any of the seats in the nose as "together" apart from 1A/1K. Oh well.

I was at least 10-15 years younger than everyone else in the cabin. I also appeared to be the only one travelling alone, which did fucking wonders for my self-esteem.

Air New Zealand have the in-flight entertainment running on the ground, gate-to-gate. So I started watching Zombieland before take-off. Good film, I liked it. I also wrote "Zombieland needs to be a film" on my pad, which seems a bit fucking stupid. Clearly I meant video game. Public Enemies was my next choice, and I was thoroughly disappointed with it, so didn't even try and struggle against the urge to doze off.

The starter for the meal was the nicest beef I'd ever tasted. Later, when I was looking back at the menu to properly note down what I ate, I saw that it was actually duck. You should all FEAR and RESPECT my appalling, unsophisticated palate. This is why I should never go to fancy restaurants which cost £350 a head.

They dimmed the lights and a bunch of people slept. Why? It was a daytime flight: 3.45pm departure, west-bound, 7.15pm landing. Even for those of us carrying on to Auckland, it made no sense to kip on this flight.

Third film was Whatever Works. Larry David's so full of win. There's a death metal gig scene where the band is called ANAL SPHINCTER. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Inglourious Basterds was, hmm, well it was OK I guess. Better than Public Enemies. I like Brad Pitt. Why did I write "Piers???" in my notebook? I wasn't even drunk.

I gave up on films. Listened to some of the radio channels. HATED the DJ's voice. By fuck I cannot stand strong Kiwi accents. I also watched a bunch of the moving map stuff, 'cos it's a bit fancy, certainly in comparison to the BA one. They didn't turn it off while we were over the USA, again contrary to expectations.

Lots of Simpsons, an entire season! Kept dozing, which was starting to annoy me, as I wanted to save my sleep for the second flight. HELP ME, MAYONNAISE!

At LA I had to go landside in order to go airside so that I could use the business class lounge. Thanks to the huge fail that is US airport security, this took me, er, a total of 35 minutes. From still being on the plane to being in the lounge. Customs, immigration, security, the lot. Why does this stuff get such bad press?

Couldn't get a shower in the lounge, too busy. So instead, I drank vodka. 42below Kiwi fruit flavour. Gorgeous.

The flight left LA at about 9.30pm local time. Still Wednesday 20th January. THE PAST. This leg was taking me to THE FUTURE, from GMT-8 to GMT+13, landing at 0715 on Friday 22nd. Take that, Thursday! I fell asleep before take-off, basically as soon as the security demo was done. One of the attendants woke me up to ask if I wanted to eat; I didn't, but now that I was awake I turned my seat into a bed and laid down. Had about 7 hours kip, possibly the most I've ever had on a single flight (though it wasn't uninterrupted). I was awake when we crossed the international date line: one moment it was 5am on the 21st, then it was 5am on the 22nd. Timezones are so full of win.

At Auckland airport it took 7 minutes from still being on NZ1 to get through transit security and upstairs to the lounge. I had breakfast - fruit and stuff. I also had beer, and took a photo of myself I actually quite like. I would have had vodka but they only had Smirnoff and I'm a snob. Grabbed a shower, another beer, sat in the "no mobiles" section and glowered at the prick who walked into it chatting on his mobile really loudly.

Victoria Beckham didn't kick me out of seat 1A, but a bloke did ask if he could swap. His colleague was in 1C while he was in 1F. I shunted across. No biggie. Man, I put away a LOT of Steinlager on this flight. The attendant just kept bringing me new beer, already opened. "Oh, you're dry!" and "I got a stash of them for you". Definitely pissed by the time I arrived.

It was 35 celsius in Sydney when I landed. The train to the city is not air-conditioned. Nor was the station. Carting my luggage while wearing a long-sleeved hoodie was perhaps not the best plan. I was a sweaty mess by the time I got to my hotel, but that didn't stop them merging my two bookings (6 nights paid for with points, 3 with cash) and upgrading my room. Sydney Opera House view! 42 hours, 4 timezones, 3 flights, all done. Got on the blower to my brother and went for beer. Hello, Sydney!

Friday the 13th and other random musings

As I started this post, it was almost 2am on Saturday 14th November and I was watching Friday 13th Part V: A New Beginning. It's the one after The Final Chapter, an episode so final that subsequently there have been 7 more (not including remakes, but including Freddy vs Jason). I have them all on DVD, and ever since completing the set I've wanted to have a fest of this sort, a back-to-back all-nighter of watching them, on an occurrence of the date. Today I finally took that ball and ran with it.

These are seriously low brow films. I struggle to think of films more formulaic. They take no brain power to watch. Actually, that may not be the case: if you let them, they occupy the brain when you try to figure out what on earth the comically bad endings to part 2 and 3 are all about. They distress the brain when each episode starts with a recap that's way way way too long. They leave you with enough capacity to spend an entire film thinking "fuck, where else have I seen that actor?" without losing track of the action. But mostly, from episodes 2 onwards, they make you -- that is to say, they make me -- laugh. I think they're fantastic. (Actually, such a broad statement isn't strictly true: episodes 1-4 are great, 5-8 considerably less so (though 6 is OK), 9-10 + Freddy vs Jason back on point)

Does anyone know where my Making Friday The 13th book is? I have a feeling it might be in my garage. It's certainly not in my bookshelf, or in my bedroom. Wherever it is, it's probably next to my copy of If Chins Could Kill. I really want to find them both...so I can lend them to others.

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Why can't I find any popular science books, or even introductory academic texts, on writing/script? Well -- actually -- I found one, the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction To Writing And Script, but it was a huge disappointment. Mostly it was about various ancient scripts and when they were in use, when they dropped out of use, what they eventually morphed into, and how decipherment works. All very interesting to other people I'm sure, but not to me: what I'm really interested in is a history or explanation of, literally, why certain shapes came to represent certain sounds. Why individual scripts look like they do, in themselves and relative to one another. But I can't find anything like it. I've plenty of linguistics books about word meanings, about cultural differences in language, about language as an expression of thought (Pinker RULES), and about language development... but nothing about writing in the way I'm interested. Is it simply a case that we just don't know that kind of stuff about scripts?

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I walked 15.3 miles last Saturday.

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I'd never heard of wulffmorgenthaler.com two weeks ago. But in that time I've seen links to their strips from two different sources; one of them reckons this strip says something about me. Maybe it does, but worse than that is how much of a kicking today's XKCD gave me. Ouch. (If you're going to read more of this post, make sure you read that XKCD strip first)

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I've recently bought a parade of ever-fancier toys. Of most immediate relevance is that I upgraded my phone to the Android-powered HTC Hero, after years of being a Sony Ericsson fanboi. I have massively mixed feelings about it so far: there were loads of teething troubles getting it set up with contacts, getting it onto my wireless network at home, the alarm app is a load of shit (sometimes alarms don't go off, and when they do there's no snooze option), battery life is rubbish, ... but oh me oh my it's a fucking fancy shiny toy.

The Cowon S9 is a great mp3 player, I love the interface and the sound quality's superb, but I don't like how there's no way to record a log of what you've listened to and send it up to last.fm (who I continue to use massively, despite the bastards turning me down for a job in the summer ;-) ). Actually there may be a way if I use a more complex way of loading it up with music, but it's a load of hoop-jumping bullshit that I can't be fucked with.

The Squeezebox Radio is my best electronics purchase this year. The sound is amazing and I've loved the squeezebox server software for as long as I've known about it (which is over 2 years now). Access to all my music in my bedroom, when I fall asleep, when I wake up, when I have a lie-in, etc etc, with the most flexible yet simple to use interface I've ever seen, is just fantastic, something I've wanted for years. So in tandem with the ongoing project of re-encoding all my CDs, I now get to listen to them each morning and night, when previously I either couldn't, or had to do some kind of bullshit iTunes fakery and listen through laptop speakers. The Squeezebox Radio is nigh-on perfect.

I have flimsy justifications for getting these toys! Yay me!

• I have always adored music
• my last phone was horribly broken.

The truth is I already have 2 working mp3 players and one perfectly functional old phone, and could have got the broken one fixed. But until someone or something (preferably the former) comes along -- and I am trying to do my bit -- this pale facsimile of fulfillment will likely carry on.

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Since I'm turning this long, rambling post into something which approximates a week or so of tumblr.com-esque snippets, I might as well embed a few song videos. These are tunes I think are incredible, or getting there at least. There's no reason why anyone should agree with me, especially as I listen to an awful lot of music and sometimes have a pretty low quality threshold, but still...these are great songs, and not remotely extreme metal.

Sun is shining, weather is sweet

Huh. I'm in a good mood. Have had a few of these recently. How curious. I blame the fact that, er, things are going a bit better these days. Or are they? Maybe it's all smoke and mirrors, but I'm not going to spend too long dissecting that. Instead I'm just going to ramble in a "fuck it, I fancy writing a blog post for the sake of it" way about how shit's going.

I got a job! In a bizarre twist of fate, while explicitly searching for permanent work and using the search term "no agencies" I stumbled upon an agency advert for a contract. But I recognised the language in the job description, feeling sure I knew who the employer was. So rather than go through the agent, I contacted a few friends who confirmed my suspicions. A few emails and a job interview later and hey presto, I am back at Yahoo!, 17 months after leaving -- an event which itself took place around 17 months after I had first attempted to quit.

Anyone who's known me for a while or has randomly decided to read old posts on here will know what happened in 2006. But fuck it, I'm in the mood for a recap.

I had a pretty fucked up summer that year. My job turned to shit, my missus of almost 7 years left me, I went to my first ever international football matches (in fact, they are to date still the only ones I've seen) which just so happened to be at the World Cup, one of them being England getting knocked out by Portugal. BASTARDS. While in Germany I started this blog! And when I came back, I attempted to quit Yahoo! (a job I'd started in September 1999). I say attempted because I actually got talked into staying, in a completely different role. But as I'd already booked a cheer-myself-up epic round the world fat cat business class holiday, we all agreed I could disappear for 2 months and come back fresh.

That holiday started exactly 3 years ago today. I had a one way ticket to Gibraltar, with the RTW ticket waiting for me at the BA desk at the airport. I'm not going to say too much more about what happened then because I wrote fucking loads about it at the time. Go look at the posts for September and October 2006. I think I'll do so myself, actually, because I really enjoy reliving that holiday (and I enjoyed writing about it as much as doing it). But ANYWAY.

Huh. Lost my flow now. Fucks sake. What was I going to say? Oh, that was it, yes, so, I'm back at Yahoo!. In a Groundhog Day style thing. And it has made life better. I really love working here. Most of the people I worked with when I left are still here, sat round the corner, including my ARCH NEMESIS at table tennis. The Diet Coke may have risen in price by an infinite percentage, being 40p instead of free, and I may have to go all the way to the 3rd floor to get it, but that's OK. I guess. There's no canteen, but that just forces me to go out into the west end at lunch, oh no! And the drinking is as hard as ever. It's not a good thing that I now mean hard as in difficult as well as copious, but I'm sure it's just an extended "welcome back" phase we're all going through. It'll calm down, I'm sure, especially as Christmas approaches. Hmm.

I love the working environment too, specifically (for the sake of this paragraph) the fact that I can listen to music all day every day with very few interruptions. This is a consequence of (a) having a boss in France, so all communication is done over instant messenger/email (b) having very little interaction, for the work itself, with anyone else in this office (c) everyone else doing the same and most conversation being done over IM anyway. Such has been the nature of my job for most of my career, but I did go through a lean couple of years where there were loads of interruptions and meetings, or just a different management/co-worker style, which meant it didn't really happen. Ironically enough I felt most unable to listen to music all day while working at a fucking radio station. GRR. But anyway, now I can listen to music it's all awesome.

Before I went to Australia in June/July I started ripping all my CDs, from scratch, into a new bit of kit I'd bought. With my mood ever-so-bastard-slightly different when I returned from that trip, I never got back into the hang of it, but now that I'm listening all day to my own music (streamed from home) I'm back into "wait, I own [such and such] and want to listen to it, and I've not ripped it yet!" mode so it's all kicked off again. I spent over 7 hours ripping stuff on Sunday, lots of Ps Qs and Rs -- it seems that back in the day I vaguely alphabetised my collection! So behold, it's all Pussy Galore and Repulsion and Public Enemy and Pearl Jam this week.

Actually, no it's not, it's all kinds of stuff, but those are some of the things I'm reacquainted with. And I'm going to, er, acquaint other people to them(!) because my DJing is BACK. Or at least it will be, when me and ex-colleague Mark get our shit together and make a podcast or two full of all kinds of eclectic choices and mindless banter. We've had to almost stop talking to each other on IM or down the pub in case we use up all our jokes and anecdotes which would be better off left in the show, hah.

Christ, this is a ramble and a half, huh. I should probably head out to get some lunch soon. Except I've just had a delightful pop-up reminder that there's a meeting in 3 minutes. Bollocks.

So, just quickly: my new xbox is great. I like the Batman: Arkham Asylum and WET demos. Also Wii Sports Resort, House Of The Dead Overkill, and EA Grand Slam Tennis on the Wii are great. And I still rock so hard at Guitar Hero. At the weekend I played Shortest Straw on Guitar Hero: Metallica, difficulty level 'hard', and only missed 20 notes. TWENTY NOTES.

Not everything's great. Some really good mates of mine are individually having really hard times of it at the moment, and I've not been much use to them. I've bottled out of attending a few bashes here and there due to fairly powerful but hard to articulate feelings of not wanting to turn up. There are people I've been promising to catch up with and/or go visit and not doing so. I'm single, and my ex's cats are still living with me. And Gregg's in Surbiton doesn't stay open until 4am like the two branches in Nottingham city centre. But this paragraph is making me miserable, so I'm going to stop.

My awesome summer of 2009

I'm having a FUCKING GREAT summer. Yeah, really. Or not. I know a bunch of it is pissy little shit that shouldn't matter, that I'm incredibly fortunate to be able to afford the financial side of what's occurred, and that bits are my own fault, some even directly. But fuck me what a fucking soap opera, what a series of varying strength metaphorical kicks in the fucking face I am taking. This sucks.

• I got made redundant (fine, this was my choice, and I got bribed for staying as long as I did. And I had some savings, and a plan for the summer, and didn't know I would be desperate to fill my days with work just to drown out everyfuckingthing else)
• I bought Guitar Hero: Metallica and it was delivered with a broken guitar so I had to send it back
• The light switch in my living room caught fire and I had to fork out for a sparky
• Hellfest ended with a £225 visit to a French hospital, all thanks to a poxy fucking mosquito and an over-zealous first aid doctor. Saw no bands on the 3rd day and had to spend the following week dry
• I went on holiday with my missus who I hadn't seen for 9 weeks or so. And I got dumped, if not actually on my birthday then in essence (I think it was actually on my birthday, though). From a relationship that was NEVER in trouble, to my knowledge, until that fucking day
• My 6 month old niece was thoroughly non-plussed with me
• I spent the entire bribe I got (see: redundancy) on coming home 9 days early from what obviously turned out to be a predominantly fucking awful holiday
• The cats brought in 8 mice and birds, in various states of being, in 7 days
• I'm not 100% crazy about having the cats here, or Ruth's stuff, and I'm not going to get an "I've made a terrible mistake" email no matter how much I (think I) want one. I'm also really fucking miserable about being single, especially having basically been single since March/April WITHOUT EVEN KNOWING IT.
• I've spent the best part of 3 hours, on and off, on the blower to Sky convincing them to send someone round to fix my signal issues. Paid £65 to get an engineer out who not only couldn't do the job, but left me with no signal instead of just a bad one.
• I am being fucked about/ignored (for weeks on end) in the recruitment process of what started off looking like a promising new job
• My fucking xbox 360, the number one time-killer I have left in the house, is fucking fucked. SYSTEM ERROR E71 followed just by a whole lot of buzzing that seems to mean I AM FUCKED SO GO PISS AWAY YET MORE MONEY LIKE WATER ON A NEW ONE WHY DON'T YOU. My 360 is both games console and DVD player.
• Several of my friends are having a shitty time of things too and I'm doing a terrible job of being any use to them

Huh. I'm in a fucking AWESOME mood about life this morning. I could really do with a way of making PORK more popular, or even pay. I could do with getting a job and a woman. I could do with dropping another 15kg. But mostly I could just do WITHOUT ALL THIS SHIT.

Heathrow to Suvarnabhumi

Went to the gate as soon as it was announced. As with the rest of T3, it was a zoo, this time full of teenagers or young twentysomethings all off to, as far as I could tell, Thailand. Not really surprising I guess, given the airline and destination: Thai Airways flight TG917 London Heathrow to Bangkok Suvarnabhumi.

The best thing, in fact the only good thing, about getting to the gate early, is that they did early boarding for Royal First, Royal Silk, and people with gold cards. Business class is Royal Silk, and that's what I was booked in, thanks to having forked out ~£500 and half the miles I'd spent the best part of 3 years accruing with BMI. I always feel privileged and lucky to fly in such comfort, but yesterday this feeling was topped up with a significantly high amount of snobbish fuck-me-glad-I'm-not-in-the-same-cabin-as-those-fuckers. Early boarding gave me the opportunity to stride past them with a huge sense of superiority (or, OK, shuffle past them, a little put out by all the "why's he going up when they've called the posh people only?" stares I was getting). Either way: win.

Upstairs on a 747 is so cosy. Every time I've been there (once with Cathay Pacific, a few times with BA, and now once with Thai) I've loved it. It's kind of better than business class because it's such a private cabin, in which you never see anyone else. I felt out of place. Not in a I-don't-belong-here kind of way -- I got over that ages ago -- but more in an "oh, everyone else is Thai, and the staff are speaking Thai, and in fact the staff and the punters all seem to recognise one another" kind of way. I think there were only 2 non-Thais, me included, amongst the 26 passengers. Eek! So there's no reason why this should really have surprised me at all, it just felt more ... foreign, than, say, Singapore Airlines or Cathay Pacific.

I certainly didn't see what was so funny about the guy dishing out champagne having a Chinese name, but it caused semi-uproar among some passengers.

My bag didn't fit in the overhead compartment. I blame Jeremy Kyle. In fact it almost didn't fit in the one between the seat and the window either, and JK had to come out so I could squash it in. In the compartment behind that one I spotted 3 huge Boeing 747 Schematics manuals. Ace.

Aircon was either off or broken. It was sweltering. I had a couple of orange juices and a very cold hot towel (which also happened at the end of the flight) and settled down to check out the entertainment magazine. Unfortunately mine only had the cover, not the actual pages. Oh well.

The entertainment system -- including the giant projector screen at the front of the cabin -- was stuck in soothing music and map display mode while everyone boarded. Much better map than on BA, including the 3D pilot view of win (though, sadly, not an actual camera out from the cockpit). And while I had to make sure my seat remained upright with my footrest folded yadda yadda yadda for take-off, I availed myself of the in-seat massage button. It lasted AGES. I'm sure someone else I flew with in 2006 has a similar thing. Cathay? Qantas? Someone in that part of the world.

The headphones Thai give out are SHIT. Really really bad. I had to have the volume at maximum to have any chance of hearing all the dialogue in Frost/Nixon; after half hour or so I gave up and plugged my own in, and the difference was astonishing. It's only a pair of £30 noise-isolating JBL things, but bloody hell. I turned the volume down to almost the minimum from then on!

Frost/Nixon itself was preceded by a short video about wellbeing in the air. All that stretch your legs, roll your neck, draw circles with your ankles, etc etc stuff. Presented by a wacky cartoon character called STAN THE EXERCISE MAN. A real "what the fuck?" moment, that -- but not as bad as the laughable dubbing in the film itself, where Kevin Bacon clearly says "fuck" or some other disgraceful curse. What I heard was someone completely different, about an octave higher, say "If you cheat us on the 60 per-cent" before KB took over the rest of the sentence. AWFUL.

Didn't see all the film. Fell asleep. Saw the ending, not sure how much I missed though, I think about half hour. A combination of being really tired, not having had much Diet Coke, and the Thai business class seat being preposterously comfortable meant I actually, for the first time ever, didn't see a complete film on a long-haul flight. I tried to watch Anchorman -- which the system said is 191 minutes long, really!? -- and fell asleep half hour in, waking up as it was finishing... so I started it again, and did exactly the same thing. FAIL. Or alternatively, win, since sleep is actually what you're meant to do.

Ah yes, the seat. It goes flat, but not 180 degrees, so there's a real sliding-forwards danger. I avoided that. It also felt comfortably wider than BA's business class seat. I could look up the actual seat pitch etc, but instead I'm going to go "yay, I'm smaller than I used to be!", or something.

At about 7am UK time, I felt a buzzing in my pocket. It was my phone's alarm going off. Oops. By "my phone", I mean the second handset I've brought with me, having bought a Vodafone SIM just before so I can do texts and calls in Australia for a pittance. At home it had been sitting on the side with its battery out, but now that it's back in it remembered there was an alarm set... and it wasn't on silent mode. Thankfully I caught it before, as far as I could tell, anyone else noticed. Though they may have noticed the fat western bloke flinching like crazy and playing with a mobile phone. The upside of this incident was that, well, it woke me up, around 5 minutes before the crew were going to anyway: it was time to serve the pre-descending-into-Bangkok meal.

I've turned the alarm off now.

The cabin crew were wearing different uniforms when serving breakfast. What the hell? Seems like a lot of effort to go to. Sure you might want to change into something fresh, but something actually different? Nice touch I guess.

When the staff were making an announcement, the monitor said PA IN PROGRESS. Without much of a gap between PA and IN. My leg's fine, ta.

Surbiton to Heathrow

My cab turned up on time. The driver even knocked on the door! Nice bloke, drove a strange route but got me there quickly enough. Heathrow T3 is a fucking ZOO, and strange things were afoot at entrance D -- people just wandering up and going in, but one special queue for one airline in particular, not sure which. Maybe Etihad?

Anyway it's a horrible, shabby terminal. I checked in at the Thai business desks which used to be the Singapore Airlines desks -- I know because Ruth checked in there last year. I'd already done it online, with baggage, all the way to Australia, despite the website telling me last night I hadn't done the second leg.

The first security question I was asked was "have I asked you the security questions?". Nice. Got directed to Lounge B near gate 11 after the formalities were over. She'd said "You know where the lounge is?" to the bloke in front of me, but not to me, just straight out with the directions. Possibly he had status with Thai Airways on his boarding pass, but more likely he looked the part while I don't. BASTARDS.

Up to departures and another scrum. Fast track was merely faster track. In 2006 I had this down pat -- all metal out, shoes off, laptop out, straight through, bingo. These days I'm clumsy and stupid: dropped me laptop, prepared to take shoes off without noticing that no-one else was doing it (ie, we didn't have to), and I left the m2-to-USB-stick adapter in my pocket which set the bloody alarm off. Grr. Tiny little thing had to go through separately again while I was putting my belt back on.

Sent a message to twitter (and therefore Facebook) before I even got the lounge. As if anyone expected anything different.

This lounge has self-service beer -- like all* business lounges. Better yet, this lounge has self-service beer taps. I've been in one like that before, the AAdmirals Club in Tokyo Narita. That was better, in that I was allowed a beer when I was there. But I'm on antibiotics now and being a good boy. Bah.

Cold food. The little potatoes of varying colours in the potato salad are olives. And we have to eat with plastic fucking cutlery! At least there are cheeses. Diet Coke from a tap, not mixer-size cans, is an improvement over many lounges. My laptop still works (for now?). Despite epic extra emergency expense of last few weeks (sparky, health treatment, € exchange rate at Hellfest) a tiny part of me was hoping it was broken, as an excuse to buy a VAT-less new Macbook Pro in Dixons Tax Free. But that would have been financial suicide: I don't have a job, nor the means with which to live without one for longer than a couple of months. Less, if I'd bought one. This thing'll have to do until I get a job offer.

Yesterday the doc said "not ideally" when I asked if I can have a drink while on these thrush pills. That's not an outright refusal, right? And she at least said I could have one or two on my birthday. Would it be really bad if I had one or two between now and then? Possibly. It is, frankly, stupid to chance it. I have shit skin and a skin issue for which I am being medicated. Best carry on being the good boy.

Best go. Laptop says 19 minutes of battery life left, and history tells me it means I WILL DIE ANY SECOND AND YOU WILL LOSE EVERYTHING YOU'VE WRITTEN. Forgot the plane-socket-adapter too, so this is it 'til Bangkok probably. Oh well. Maybe I'll go have a dri...FUCK IT.

Doing shit offline

I was just thinking it was cool that I'm already the 3rd hit, at the time of writing, for "do shit offline" when searching on Google. But then I snapped out of it. Yes, my generation game post yesterday was about websites, but not all software engineering is about the web. The stuff I bang on about needn't spit out HTML or PHP or anything of the sort. I have an mp3-fixer-upper (mentioned below) which spits out a shell script. That's because these are just software engineering techniques (patterns, if you will) for generating lots of similarly structured output from minimal input: lots of unique data, but comparatively few templates.

I work as a software engineer whose career has mostly led him to working with websites; I do not work as a web developer. And despite currently being on the dole, I figured I might as well pimp some software that helps with doing shit offline, huh. These are 2 projects I've been intimately involved with as both developer and user.

r3

Yahoo!'s r3 is ostensibly an internationalisation/localisation tool, but to my mind its real power comes from the fairly complex, at first glance, inheritance path concept. This brings object-oriented techniques to file generation, and there's the key word: r3 is first and foremost a file generation tool. In go templates, out come files.

I was one of the core engineers on the team which developed and maintained r3's predecessors, which were internal CMS tools at Yahoo!. I had fairly heavy involvement in some of the architectural and design discussions and decisions made during r3's genesis, and was the sole internal customer representative at the team's first "next steps" planning etc session 18 months later. I'm quite a fan, even if the public docs aren't quite up to scratch.

pork.py

This is something I knocked up in Python in the last couple of months. I even blogged about it before. So much for "don't repeat yourself", huh? It's a simple script which marries YAML to a template, and creates some output. The output can be STDOUT or a file, and 4 template engines (of sorts) are supported. It's meant to be standalone, but deliberately usable as the central pivot of a get-some-data, produce-some-output, put-it-somewhere pipeline. In fact, when used this way you don't even need YAML - just a couple of python dictionaries. See my mp3-fixer-upper for an example of how.

The Generation Game

Let me tell you a story (or "lie", if you prefer). In 3 acts.

Act 1

I live on a roundabout. Like that bloke who lived on a roundabout, or the fella from Parliament Square. And I'm famous. People come up to the roundabout from one of the 5 roads, and before they make their way round it they ask me my name. But I'm mute, so I have to write it down on a sign for them and hold it up. They read it, and go on their way, so I throw the sign away. But then someone else turns up on another road, and I have to get round to them and do the same thing.

It's really very tiring, writing my name on signs over and over again all day. The worst thing about it is the traffic around this roundabout flows very slowly, and people get annoyed at how long it takes to drive round me. All they want is to know my name, but they have to wait 'til I've told loads of other people before they even get to ask. I've even heard that a lot of people just aren't even bothering to come my way any more.

Act 2

I still live on a roundabout. People still drive up to ask my name. But y'know what? I've got a couple of mates now. No-one's interested in them, which is good, 'cos it means I can just get them to write the signs for me. They write about 25 and then have a rest. Now, when people drive up to ask me my name I just take one of the signs out and show it to them, then throw it away.

It's much better. I get to tell so many people my name now, way more than before. It's still not perfect though -- when one or both of me mates is ill I have to scramble around as before. And once 25 drivers have come and gone, the 26th one has to wait ages while a sign gets written for them. But still. I'm loads more popular!

Too popular.

The council gave me a second roundabout. And a third. I'm a tourist attraction. So now there are people driving up to three roundabouts, and I've had to draft in a lot of introvert mates. And every time 25 people have gone past one of the roundabouts my mates have to draw another 25 signs. They're getting burnt out. I'm going to have to start paying them (more).

Act 3

I haven't got many mates any more. Just one, in fact. Got 10 roundabouts though, and well prepared for any more. I had a bit of a brainwave, see.

Me and my mate made 50 signs. And we attached them to posts, facing the roads at each roundabout. So now, when people come up, they can ask my name but it's already there. Right in front of them. Sometimes there's an accident and I have to replace one, but in general it works a treat.

People don't even need to ask me the question any more, and if I change my name, well, I only need to tell my mate. He can make some new signs. And he doesn't take much looking after.

The analogy explained (in case it wasn't obvious)

I used to be a fully dynamic website. Database queries on every request. I had a bit of traffic. Not much though.

Caches were my friends. They're databases, and I still had to do queries, but smaller and faster ones. But I had to maintain the databases which just duplicated the data I already had. And they kept emptying and coming back to ask the main database the same query as they asked half hour ago. They needed a bit of looking after.

I'm now a damn fast website. I get through a lot of traffic. My one companion is a generator/publisher. It prepares stuff in advance which doesn't change, and just places it there, right in front of all the traffic. And if I get twice the traffic? He can probably cope. Five times the traffic? Maybe then I'll need another one.

The moral

Seriously, just do shit offline. The Q in SQL is for "query". Like question. Why would you want to ask the same question multiple times if you know the answer doesn't change, or changes rarely -- and, crucially, if you know when it changes? Why even use a cache if it's only going to expire, and you need to maintain both the databases and the code which populates them? Moreover, the code and database are there to do nothing but store exactly the same information as you already have. What happened to "don't repeat yourself"? Is that only for code?

The master/controlling source of a website's data (eg a CMS for a media site), knows when data changes, so just push it out. Not to some intermediary - again, why bother? Just push it out all the way to the front. Generate it. Build it. Publish it.

I'm not arguing for no dynamism in websites. I'm just saying look, make the dynamism appropriate. Base it on the user, their behaviour, their request, or whatever -- but not on the things you already control. Changed your name? Don't wait for someone to ask you, get it out there before they even ask.

Want to know a query whose answer rarely changes? "What's the main body of the content at URL /2009/06/fail/?" One which changes regularly? "What's the most recent bit of content on the site?" Just think. about which parts of your site, and which parts of each page, actually change based on some kind of external input, be it the time and date, some facet of the current user, or some other unique facet of the individual request. You can do more of those, and provide more functionality, if you generate/build/publish the stuff that you control.

Do shit offline. Capiche?