Eriq’s Blag

Stayed up late watching Farscape. Slept late, watched some more.

I went to bed at four and was woken up at eight on the dot by screaming children outside my room. The dining room is the next door over. After giving up on going back to sleep. I got up and went to breakfast. I made the mistake of saying I wanted tea. I don’t like tea. Then I noticed the orange juice. My mom said she’d be back later and we’d go to the camera obscura that overlooks the Avon Gorge, but that didn’t happen. I played TFTwo until Trung went to sleep. Then sat around for a while before looking for a towel so that I cold take a shower. I got in the shower and tried to close the door, but it decided to fall off its rail so I tried to put it back on, but it didn’t work. I ended up closing it and hoping it would fall on me. Then I sat around some more. Eventually, I went looking for my mom, who decided to come looking for me as well. We went to lunch at a cafe. I got a tuna melt and a ginger beer. Again, ginger ale is nothing like ginger beer. I came back to the hotel and started working on a model that I’ll likely never finish. Around six my mom came back we set out to meet my dad somewhere for dinner. That’s what I thought. Turns out we were meeting him at a reception after his conference. This put me in a foul mood because I didn’t want to stand around and wait for him; I had been working. We eventually got dinner at a posh restaurant called The Shed. The burger was meh, but the chips were good. Still pissed, we walked along the harbor to find some ships my mom wanted to see. We eventually found them. They weren’t all that exciting. Though the replica sailing ship was tooling around the harbor with people on it. On the way to catch the bus back a group of teenagers passed us. One of them attempted to engage me by saying he liked my glasses. Maybe that’s some English insult, maybe they were just stupid. I ignored them. I found out that Fringe is back, but to watch it on Huku I had to install an automatic proxy finder cause it’s only available in the US and the proxies I tried didn’t work. That’s something to look forward to.

Watched more Farscape. Played more TFTwo. Both were good.
P.S. PK Tech Girl is an episode of Farscape. Where they meet a cute Peacekeeper technician and fight frog people.

John and Gilina

Cute, eh?

Stayed up late again and slept in. Didn’t go with my dad to drop off my application for a tech internship, but apparently it’s a chopshop where they take recycled computers and rebuild them for non-profits. Dismantling and rebuilding computers? Hey that’s what I’ve been dong since I was six…at least the dismantling part. Our landlord finally gave me the DSL info so I fucked around with the routers and managed to get the newer one working. Yay! My dad also got a wireless printer, which was unnecessary because the router has a networked printer server setup thingy. It was easy to set up on my laptop, but I wasn’t able to just pick it up on my dad’s netbook so after fifteen minutes of fucking around I had to share my DVD drive and then fuck around some more because I had to turn off password protection on shared folders. Got that working and then tried my mom’s laptop. Unfortunately there’s no Linux driver for the printer and no substitute, so she’ll have to use the netbook if she wants to print. Then I finished off Batman:TAS. I started watching episode eighty-six and realized something was wrong. Right off the character art style looked different and not in a good way. Something was missing, maybe they were less detailed. Whatever the case it was wrong. I looked it up on Wikipedia. After eighty-five episodes they stopped. They went on to other projects like Superman:TAS. Then a while later they came back and made twentish new episodes, but this was The New Batman Adventures. It really was new. So I stopped. Wasn’t worth watching a cheap knockoff even if it was by the same people. On to the next series: Farscape.

My alarm didn’t work and I got pissed at my dad for waking me up. I promptly fell back asleep. My mom woke me up again at three to yell at me for not changing my sleeping habits. I took a shower and when I came back found my window and window shade open. She did this back home too, I fucking hate it. I grunted and attempted to close them. I couldn’t unwind the shade cord due to my anger and shouted at it. My mom came in and I got pissed at her. We got mad at each other and I told her to get out and she said that if I was going to sleep in late and be grumpy that she would find somewhere for me back in the States. She then left and lashed out at my dad, asking why I had even come if I didn’t want to be here, as if I couldn’t hear through the walls without trying. I then had a mental breakdown standing in my towel trying to figure out what the fuck I was doing here and with my life in general. I didn’t come to any conclusions. I eventually calmed down somewhat and got dressed as it was six and we were going to see a play at eight. I was still pissed. The play was a farce by Hitchcock of a spy novel (something like that). Performed by only four actors it was centered around that “for another character to come on, one must go off” style of comedy. It was very funny. When we got home I started to watch Alien, but it wasn’t really the kind of SciFi that I like, not that I was scared of it, it just wasn’t techie enough or actiony or westerny. Then I played some TFTwo with Trung.

I meant to wake up at ten in the morning. I woke up at seven. I went to bed  at two. After finally figuring out where to put my laptop so as to not burn/melt/crack anything I played TFTwo for about an hour completing an entire game (getting two hundred and eighty nine points) without the internet cutting out. Although my ping was at a near constant one eighty to one ninety, it played smoothly. I’ve now determined that the router resets whenever a computer connects…or when it feels like it. I had planned on going out, but I had no money and by the time I was done with the game, my mother had fallen asleep. When she did wake up I helped her with her laptop and we eventually went shopping. The city does not smell very nice. I took some pictures on our journey to Marks and Spencer. The first thing I wanted a shot of is what is called the gurken, a large, pickle-shaped office building:

Giant Pickle

We walked through the place where (according to my mother) the Diagon Alley scenes of Harry Potter were filmed. I couldn’t give a shit, but I figured Emma would be mad if I didn’t take any pictures:

This is for you, Emma.

When we got to Marks and Spencer I found this:

Might have to get this for my birthday.

Then there was Lloyd’s Tower which looks like something from a dystopian mining facility, but whose picture is currently sideways. When we got home I fiddled around on the computer for a while and then Princess Mononoke was on and having never seen it I felt I should watch it. I did. It was of course very good and trippy. Then I fiddled on the computer some more. We’ll see how sleeping goes tonight.

I’m on my tablet because I don’t have a cable or adapter for my laptop yet so I’m going to keep this brief. The flight from SF to Atlanta was uneventful. From there to London was also uneventful except for the old guy who couldn’t breath for a bit causing mild panic among the flight attendants. When we got to customs it turned out my dad fucked up and we couldn’t legally stay until the date we has planned because my mom and I weren’t on the visa and guest visas are only six months (we would be going two weeks over). The woman kept telling us how fucked up and that the British were very disappointed with us. I can’t legally get a job. We’ll see what happens in terms of deportation. The internet here is a bit fucked. There’s a modem and a wireless router, but the modem is also a router which I think prevents the wireless from assigning more than one IP address so only one device can use it at a time (others have to use an ethernet cable). Possibly three times daily Jack the Ripper tour groups of fifty plus people go by outside. There’s a group down there now with a rather loud guide. I haven’t gone out yet as I hadn’t slept much in the past twenty-four hours. I took a nap. Oh yeah, there’s an HDTV; it’s shiny.

Holy crap! That was awesome. Ok actually, I don’t really feel like talking about it all that much, but I totally called the Island anchor, Keemi obviously wasn’t dead because th boat would have gone up, and Jin went boom. Also, in the last scene, I first said that it was going to be Ben, and that ha might be all “hello Jack” (which he was incidentally), then I thought it might be empty, but then after what Ben says to Jack I realised that it was Lock. Harlan and I went over to Alex’s house to watch it, so we were discussing it the whole way through, bouncing ideas during the show is more fun than the next day at school.

Plus, I have no schoo, today because finals started and I have no finals 1st or 2nd period…SCEE-ORE!

You know what the advantage of going to a dance with a date is? You never find yourself alone on the edge of the larger mass of people…you find yourself with your date on the edge of the larger mass of people, which is perfectly fine. Ignoring the fact that Bailey drove herself and got hopelessly lost on the way, it ended up being really fun. Although, thinking aobut it makes me more sure that my life is in fact the Truman Show, standing alone waiting for my date just seems like such a cliche, but she didn’t stand me up so, not quite. I’m just paranoid that’s all.

I missed the pilot and second episode of “TERMINATOR: The Sarah Conner Chronicles” (quite a mouthful), so I watched them instead of studying for Bio. It wasn’t half bad, the writing didn’t completely suck and the acting, well it wasn’t bad, but it is a shame that Glau (Firefly’s River) plays an emotionally and physically cold killing machine (which Harlan points out isn’t much different from River). If you don’t know who I’m talking about, then you fail and need to see Serenity, at least; it will blow you’re mind.