More photos, a little belated.
Therein lies the new addittion to our household (Alfie), the lime cheesecake with pineapple and passionfruit that I slaved over and we only ate HALF of, Edd and Sandra and their uni-antics at Haydens little birthday bash, Dan being very persistent with the Yike, Haydenfighting for some cause or other and the beautiful, now empty jelly belly candy-ball machine from Mike and Soph!

Oh, and our take on the Underground Nation's rock-star from Jackson Jackson (bottom clip).

A new movement has spawned. I've dubbed it the 'online revelation'.
In this age of complex technology and life moving at an impossible pace, people are drawn to the new breed of online appliances where you can express exactly who you want to be (or be seen as). Hell, you can even get the internet to tell you who you really are. On facebook you can be as popular as you have ever wanted to be if you can click a few buttons. My latest venture - Last.FM - claims to foretell your music tastes, and becomes more intelligent with age. Somehow I find this offensive and part of some grand online dictatorship, but it appeals to my ego too much for me to care.
The interesting thing is that all of these revelation-applicances seem to be created by skint university students who develop their ideas obsessively while surviving on a diet of rice and chickpeas and living in tents, before being bought out by giant companies for trillions.
Something bad will come of this.

I'm going to Canada!
With some good news on the funding front, I'm off to Banff in July. In the handbook for the course, they advise us that it is common to see elk, deer and coyotes as well as grizzly or black bears, wolves or even cougars! Apparently elk are dangerous during mating / calving seasons, and there's a special number to call if you see one on campus. hawhaw

The other night we went to a shisha bar with some college friends, and had a go at inhaling the apple and strawberry stuff. It was quite fun and the night became more interesting when we were called into the back room where a variety of dark-skinned girls were shakin' their asses like I've never seen before, and even gave a lesson to the white college musicians I was with, who didn't really have arses anyway. It was lovely and atmospheric, and I'm somewhat outraged that shisha bars will become illegal when the smoking laws take effect on July 1st. It's such a peaceful passtime and so rich in culture..
Once again, stupid country.

In case you haven't heard, Starcraft 2 has been announced by Blizzard. Gods only know when it will come out, but it looks cool. Penny Arcade have their own theory on how they managed to keep the imminent economic collapse of South Korea a secret for so long.

In any event, if I thought I was going to be near the same store until the release (not likely given Blizzard's previous history of (not) keeping release dates), I would have attempted to pre-order a copy already.

I was buying my fruit this morning - there's a great fruit stall at the south end of Blackfriars Bridge, right on my way to work - and there was one of those £1 bowls with a couple of bananas and a mango in it. Since the mango looked far nicer than any I've seen in a long time (living in England and all) I figured I'd buy it. Now I just have to work out what to do with it - don't tell Elisse, it's a surprise.

Just returned from a week's residency at a school in Worcester with the fabulous trio. We spent the week working with the languages department in the high school, and did a project with the dancers. So we were rapping in french, scaring the kids with lots of extended techniques, and inspiring an entire primary school to go home and ask their parents if they can buy a harp.
We had a great time together and learned oodles about teaching, learning, the education system and why people are so damn happy outside London. 8am on Monday morning and the staffroom was full of happy chattery teachers! Amazing..

We also had the opportunity to perform in the gorgeous Worcester Cathedral, Hereford Duke's Palace and the school itself, where we played a piece that the dancers had worked with us on. It was an inspiring week that has made me think a lot about education and how important music is in it.
We asked the students to come up with a suitable name for the trio, as we're still going by the working title of "Kleiner trio" which I find perpetually boring. The kids were creative and came up with the likes of "The Metallic Widows", but the winner so far was from the French department, who suggested "Bow-Blow-Pluck".

Elisse is away this week and so I've been geeking out in a variety of ways. One thing I haven't done in a while is reinstall my laptop, and since Elisse has a Mac as well now, I've cleared all our music on to there and have a bit more free space on gretchen.

I've also wanted to get a linux install back on my laptop, so to that end I'm spending the whole night installing OS X and downloading Linux. Since I don't want to loose the contents of my laptop I'm imaging it to a Lacie drive I've got. To do that I installed an OS on the drive first and used a great little piece of software called Carbon Copy Cloner to image my laptop into a sparse image on the external drive.

Once I've done that I've just got to re-partition my harddrive, install OS X back on one partition and then install Ubuntu on the other.

Meanwhile I've created a package installer for Emil's darkstat for OS X with a universal binary. I've got a few more things to patch up so that it's complete, then I might even let Emil know...

I love Alfie because Alfie loves me. He appeals to my vanity and lets me take as many photos of myself as I like with lots of cool settings. He's beautiful and when i press a little button on the tiny controls, he plays music and movies soooo nicely. It only takes him 20 seconds to wake up.

It was my birthday last Friday, so I made a couple of cakes for work and went out for a few drinks afterwards. Poor Elisse was stuck on a table in the pub with the IT department.

Having a few people round today for a good ol' Aussie bbq and another couple of cakes - between Elisse and I we've baked four cakes in three days.

One of the things the family sent was a stack of new music - and Elisse and I are hooked on Jackson Jackson, which is Harry Angus and Jan Skubiszewski.

I have a new theory about the extinction of the dinosaurs. It's wasn't meteors or an ice age or volcanos. It was World of Warcraft. They all stopped eating because they spent all their time in Azeroth.

Elisse and I have just started new characters - Elisse has a trial account, so basically that's it, we're soon to be outside normal functioning society.