Yes, wow, there's photos up there.

They would be of..

Us in sunny Torquay
Some forks
Sheree's "school uniform" dress-up 50th
Haydenlearning the secrets of a paella at Carla's with her family
Flowers

Groningen
Apparently Australians are famous for making chocolate and ice-creams in Holland.. complete with quasi aboriginal designs. hrm..
Bike-park
Amsterdam: leaning houses, Rij-museum, Concertgebouw
Cubic houses in Rotterdam
Zulaima
Pancakes for breakfast
Another interesting Aussie contribution
Flowers

It's 1am and Haydenis sleeping quietly and I'm afraid to go to sleep because he's got me hooked on this bloody DS game called puzzle quest, and every time I close my eyes I'm matching rows and columns of red, green, yellow and blue gems, skulls and purple stars. Dammit.

Last week we had a relaxing holiday in Holland. We visited Mel in Groningen and had a very Australian-style BBQ for all her international friends. She went all out and bought "steaks" (processed meat in the shape of steaks), sourced out pineapple rings and tomato sauce, and did the whole thing on two disposable bbqs ((Haydensat on the ground to cook everything). We also saw Rotterdam by night and the cool Cubic Houses, and stayed a few nights in Amsterdam.

We were in a youth hostel, and the website review called this particular one a "glorified refugee camp". That was quite true, except we were lucky to share our room with about 15 other Americans, something I would hope even refugees never get submitted to. We didn't spend much time in there though - more time walking through the nicer streets of Amsterdam, eating gouda kaas (cheese), pancakes and poffertjes, marvelling at some Van Gough, multi-storey bicycle-parks and hidden Nunneries, eating chips with satay sauce or mayonaise, and embarking on our fruitless search to find a Dutch restaurant. We returned relaxed, and belive it or not, with a bit of sun-colour.

For Elisse's birthday I bought her the two Daria movies, Is It Fall Yet? [translate: autumn] and Is It College Yet?. We've been watching through all the Daria episodes (for the second time), but the copy I had of Is It Fall Yet? didn't work. The ending to the whole thing was great.

For anyone who we haven't spoken too - Elisse and I have some news (not of either the marriage or offspring type). All things going well we're moving to Barcelona in August. I think we'd both like to live somewhere with a little more sunshine than London and I really want to live near the beach - even if it isn't surfable.

Elisse has got some teaching lined up for a few months when we get there and my plan is to go back to university. I'd like to take up a Bachelor of Mathematics - with a mind to going on to study pure maths / cryptography. We're still working out the minor details like visas, accomodation and universities - but I'm sure it will all work out.

I finished reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle yesterday. It's a fantastic trilogy set around the late 17th century to the early 18th century (yep, that's the baroque era). It was based around a number of characters moving through all of europe and the a fair portion of the rest of the known world. A lot of the first book was set around the great fire of London and the subsequent rebuilding, so I've been looking at some London land-marks in a new light recently.

We woke up especially early this morning to ring in for Glastonbury tickets. From 9am sharp we were pressing redial on two phones and reload on the webpage, all of which wouldn't connect. Despite the fact that we were one of 400,000 that pre-registered, and there were 170,000 tickets on the go, we DIDN't EVEN GET THROUGH to speak to any human or machine. The odds weren't that bad. And we were in the percentile that cared.

I'm certain there's some big conspiracy about the whole thing. There's GOT to be a secret - a Glastonbury in the know that only people who have done it before have the key to.

We have a tent, dammit!

Well, it's the big day. Elisse's final recital is in a bit under two hours. It's also her birthday for those of you not keeping track of the date. I've just folded something over 50 programmes and now I'm off to college. Best of luck!

Well it's been a while since I posted anything - sorry to anyone who's actually been reading.

I've been really busy at work, last weekend we put in a new email server, which had been basically my project. We've switched from a Mac Mini (previously a 800MHz PowerMac G4) running QuickMail to a Quad Xeon XServe running the standard Apple set up (Postfix & Cyrus). The new server is much faster - about double speed to send out ezines through Mailings. There's really no interface at the moment, which is a problem as no one else really works on the command line. My main issue with the set up is the lack of easy forwarding to multiple accounts. I'll have to find a program or something to do that, at the moment I'm setting up forwards in sieve scripts through squirrelmail, but that doesn't give any way to sort through the forwards all together.

I learnt how to write FileMaker plugins last week, which was something new as I had to work out some C++ (which I've practically never even seen before) to do so. I've written a Regular Expression plugin. Just two fairly simple functions, a match and a replace. I used the PCRE library as what I really wanted was Perl regexp - and now I've got it. Johan (our resident FileMaker developer) literally swore when I showed him what regular expression can do - which was a nice compliment.

Enough work - Elisse's final recital is this Monday, 12:20pm at the Royal College of Music. I've taken Monday and Tuesday off which will be a nice break, and we're already madly catching up with all the people who have come to see the recital. We took Elisse's parents and french 'cousins' to Flat White today which was great - I really miss Australian coffee.

That's all from me, if work slows down a bit I will hopefully remember to post a bit more regularly - that way I'll be doing better than Mike.

Right now it's hailing, snowing and sleeting all at once. And this big frozen mush that looks like see-through bird poo is covering the cars and the pavement. Seriously, this place is so damn charming.

So Saturday saw a 50th 'school uniform' party of one of my cousins in Chav(wog)-central: Southend. No need to elaborate.
Sunday we went to my jmwo friend Carla's new house, which as it turns out is so close to our old place in Greenwich, that we used to walk past it almost every weekend. Her parents were there from Spain and we were privvy to a bona fide Valencian paella, made in the traditional enormous pan. It was a great afternoon with a very continental feel - food, food and rolling around whilst eating more food.

Today I saw a bumble bee. Which according to the BBC means that it's spring.

I don't really get the idea of weekends here. Firstly I work from so early and so intensely on Saturday that I'm shattered for the rest of the day, like this week when I slept from 4-7pm while Haydencooked up a chocolate storm (hint taken). And then Sunday comes round and the weather's always so damn miserable that if you've managed to rip yourself away from the couch to go outside, all you can do without spending a truckload of money is go for a walk and revel in the misery. And then you still get a Sunday headache.

So this week I have an interesting gig. It's a funeral. Not sure if it's right to call it a 'funeral gig'.. It's a reminder that musicians are whores and if we want to earn money we have to be prepared to do everything.

The doctor told me to take a cocktail of Paracetamol and Ibuprofen, up to the maximum daily amount in order to kick this thing. She asked me a series of questions - am I under more stress than usual, have I changed my surroundings recently, is there anything I can remember that could have triggered this off?
The only thing I could come up with is that I may be allergic to teaching, as I seem to get a headache often when I return home from work.

Do you think that's just wishful thinking?