Happy New Year!

Here’s a non-comprehensive list of things that made me happy in 2008:

Canada:

A (very) white Christmas and New Year in Canada and the discovery that I “kind of” like skiing (it’s part fun and freedom and part near-death experience).

Regaining full feeling in my big toe about a month after we got back to the UK made me happy.
Top Tip: Don’t go out skiing all morning with ski boots that are too small when it’s -20°C!

New York & Washington:

There were a lot of things from our trip to New York and Washington that made me happy. It was probably one of my favourite holidays ever. These are some:

• The opening sequence of the Lion King on Broadway – putting the “show” in “Broadway show”!
• Eating authentic (and historic) New York cheesecake in New York.
• Ridiculously over-filled deli sandwiches. Deli-cious!
• Brooklyn Bridge
• Watching the Mets (until the storm set in)
• Taking the Staten Island ferry at just the right time to watch the sun setting behind the Statue of Liberty as we passed by. We sat out on the terrace of the ferry terminal eating our sushi dinner watching the sky go dark and Manhattan light up and then took a ferry back to a sparkly night-time NYC. (Note: This was one of the cheapest and best things we did in New York. If you go there, do it!)
• Chilling in Central Park
• Seeing the city from a-top the Rock

A “Relaxing” Stay in the Peak District:
Not queueing at Alton Towers made me happy! Probably my least mature use of a day of holiday but it was worth it. It turns out though that maybe queueing is not so bad though – being accelerated from 0 to 60 in 2 seconds, getting off and then going round and getting straight on again was possibly a bit too intense!
I still can’t choose a favourite between the sensory overload of riding in the front seats of Nemesis and that moment of panic just after Oblivion starts to drop when your body tells you you’re in free fall but there’s nothing to grab on to and no way to stop it.

One Bumper Weekend of Fun:
Seeing my favourite stand-up and my favourite piano-playing song-writer live (on separate stages) in one extended weekend, then topping it all off with some Christmassy ice-skating at Somerset House with my favourite girl! Discovering the sneaky side seats in the Shepherd’s Bush Empire which gave us an excellent view for Ben Folds made it a double win!

Christmas at home with the family
Having missed out on the family Christmas last year by being in Canada, I enjoyed this one all the more. The traditional jigsaw was missing 2 pieces though! I’m sure we returned one from the same manufacturer 2 years ago because it was missing a piece. I’ve never had a jigsaw with extra pieces – where do the missing pieces go?

Weddings: 4

• Steve and Laura
• Dave and Liz
• Matt and Becs
• Nick and Rhiannon

Celebrities spotted: 2 (not including Eddie and Ben)

• Lily Cole – coming out of a bookshop in “trendy” Greenwich Village, NYC, wearing a controversial kaftan! The paparazzi caught her the same day.
• Justin Lee Collins – In Caffe Nero, Sevendials, Covent Garden making some plans with a film crew. He high-fives when he’s not on TV too.

Films I’ve Liked:

• There Will Be Blood
• Be Kind Rewind
• The Dark Knight (Points deducted for Christian Bale’s ridiculously low voice when Batman and the fact that the film seemed to almost end about 3 times before it actually did but Heath Ledger really was excellent.) Special treat: an article on game theory as applied to the (excellent) opening sequence!

Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull

It wasn’t really surprising that it was bad – it was always going to be hard to recapture the magic of Last Crusade – but it was disappointing that it was quite so bad considering how long they’d had to think about it!

I think my problems with the film can be boiled down to these two facts:

1. Early on in the film Indy survives a nuclear test by HIDING IN A FRIDGE!
2. The Crystal Skull turns out to be an alien head and everything goes a bit X-Files after that. I always thought the “magical” bits in the other films (the opening of the ark in Raiders, the bit where the guy drinks from the wrong grail in Last Crusade and large chunks of Temple of Doom) were weak points of the films. Aliens and Indy just don’t fit together.

I really wanted it to be good. I now hope they don’t make Back To The Future 4 or Ghostbusters 3!

Helen and I went ice skating at Somerset House at the weekend which was very Christmassy. I took the opportunity to test out the video on my phone. Turn on the sound and watch out for the little boy zooming across the front and the kid in the middle of the ice rink trying to get up!

Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, I’m an idiot.

I went to Beijing recently for work. Having seen this site and this site, I’d hoped to find some dodgy English translations of my own. I was a little disappointed (but also relieved) to find that where English translations were provided, they generally made pretty good sense. I suspect this is mostly because I didn’t venture far from the tourist trail. Fortunately I didn’t leave completely empty-handed and I hit the jackpot in the park around the Temple of Heaven with this sign which contains a multitude of comical mis-translation (click to go bigger):

No leaking!

Most people are familiar with Isaac Asimov‘s Three Laws of Robotics but today I discovered he’s not the only science fiction writer creating laws in threes. Here are Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws of prediction:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

For more “laws”, some insightful, take a look here (scroll down past the blue boxes).

I’ve just got a new phone. It’s a Samsung Omnia (i900) and it looks like this. I’ve been working Vodafone down in price for a few years now so I’ve ended up keeping my current price plan but getting a phone that is usually only available on much more expensive contracts. The only concession I had to make was that I would sign up for 2 years which means if I end up not liking the Omnia, I’ve got a long wait for an upgrade. Fortunately I quite liked my old phone (the ubiquitous Nokia 6300) so I can go back to that if I have to.

So far though it’s pretty good. It runs Windows Mobile 6 with a special Samsung interface on top which essentially attempts to make it feel more like the iPhone interface (as you can see from the picture). It comes with Opera Mobile, which does a pretty good job of emulating the Safari web browser, the camera is pretty good (for a phone), email is easy to set up, the on-screen keyboard works about as well as the iPhone’s, Google Maps works with the GPS (a search for pizza will show the 10 nearest Dominos, etc which is pretty swish), the video player works at both streaming from the internet (but it’s only watchable when you’ve got 3G coverage) and from files stored on the 8GB memory (as long as you encode them into wmv files).

All in all, at the end of week 1 of usage, I’m pretty happy with it. It’s not as slick and flashy as the iPhone but it can do pretty much everything the iPhone can do and it’s worked out a few hundred pounds cheaper for me.