Neil Hopcroft

How I wish that were so, six months in and the project is hotting up. I’ve been moved onto the critical path component now and the pressure is on – there seems to have been a little bit of a misunderstanding which is only now being examined in more detail. Obviously I can’t go into such details here, but suffice to say that the likelihood is that someone from my team, perhaps two or three of us, will have to go to Helsinki early next year. bart666, you got any more info on that job out there yet?

So, six months in…now the end is closer than the beginning, I’ll be back soon. There are a couple of open issues currently – whether they’ll invite me to stay here, to which the answer is almost certainly no (unless they have some sensible looking offer for me), and what my actual end date is anyway, I signed the contract with the agent on around May 18th (iirc) but didn’t actually start until 25th June. I have a years visa so cannot work beyond the 22nd June without renewing that, that is a hard deadline. I guess I should consider my final day to be one year from contract signing day, which would see me coming home mid May.

What do I do with the rest of my time here? I was planning on visiting a few more places than I have so far, I’ve only recently gotten my finances under enough control to be able to afford to go anywhere (there is a lag of up to 12 weeks from working to getting the money here, irritating at the beginning but it will be quite handy when I finish). But where do I want to go anyway? And when? Australia was on the list, but thats dead expensive, Vancouver was also tempting, thats a good deal cheaper and has better hills.

When do I go? That depends a little on you lot – who is going to come and visit me? And when are you going to be here? Comment here or mail me with as much of a plan as you have.

Time to get ready for another Tokyo Dark Castle, which should be interesting if the last one is anything to go by….and the scary smiley dj is playing again, I wonder if she’ll remember me? ‘cos I won’t recognise her without the scary smile.

Some more of the Meiji-dori today, this time the stretch from here to Ikebukuro again, but this time with my camera…

I popped in to 01010 on the way, I’d not noticed before but that one has a bunch of alternative clothing stores, and a CD shop right at the top. After browsing through their CD & DVD selection I picked out something by Moi Dix Mois, more because they look cool than anything else. That entitled me to a ‘present’ too, which I failed to understand and nearly refused, but they insisted and gave me a CDR wrapped in a paper bag. I’m a bit fearful of what I might find on it, but I’ll give it a listen later.

Onward, past the road eating machinery and trams, finding as much street art as possible to photograph, theres really quite a lot once you start looking for it, I wonder if London has so much and I was always so determined to avoid looking at other people that I also failed to notice the beautiful things.

By the time I got to Ikebukuro I’d run out of memory in the camera, so had to call it a day, I took a quick wander around Bic Camera but the queues there were so long that any thought of buying another card was unrealistic. I did take a look at some video cameras, though, wondering if I should get myself one for Christmas. Pricewise they seem to cluster around 60000Yen (~300 pounds), with some very professional looking ones if you’re prepared to pay twice that. Of course, I’ve no idea what I’m looking for, so it comes down to how much I’m prepared to pay more than anything else. Small, I guess, would be important, but I don’t think I’ll be able to explain anything else I’d like from it…There was a nice Sony which records megapixel video, which is beyond the MPEG1 spec, but could that be a valid MPEG2 stream? Theres not much point spending the extra 20k if the stream it produces has to be resized down later anyway. Pretty much anything I’ll get here will be ‘NTSC’ (60Hz, 30fps, but no actual NTSC coding, so theres no colour loss) – but thats not important since mostly it’ll be viewed on computers anyway.

Back home via Tower in Shibuya where I got a pile of JPsychobilly covers albums, reviews later, once I’ve gotten them ripped and transferred onto the mp3 player.

Then, just to finish off the day nicely I managed to spray curry all over everything – normally the packets are quite well behaved but todays gave way with a huge splash of bright red curry all over my nice clean pile of washing. Dammit.

Top five desired properties in ideal partner
* female
* able to put up with me
* not scary
* mostly sane
* dynamic

Top 5 days ever… and, of course, why…
* The Horatii, Manuskript & Emma Conquest gig in London – a stunning gig at the Borderline, full to capacity, loads of great music. Nearly spoiled by having a girlfriend dying of asthma but I wasn’t going to let that distract me from enjoying it.
* The day I first hired a car – there was something that just clicked in me that day, that I could do it myself, I was independent at last. There is a corner on the A11 heading from Norwich toward London, just before it meets the A14, which always brings back that feeling.
* The day I had the interview for my first tech job – again I’d hired a car from Norwich, but I had headed over to stay with Paul in Nottingham. We’d been out to some club in Sheffield the night before so I was a bit hazy getting up early enough to get to Northampton for 10am and didn’t really care that much about the interview. I drove back to Nottingham afterward to pick up the boys and head back to Northampton for a Manuskript gig.
* Seeing the Sisters of Mercy at Taubertal – this was really more of a weekend than a single day, but the Sisters were probably the highlight. Four of us (minusbat, godgirl, charlie_mouse and me) piled into minusbats cute but small NX to hare across Germany to a festival in a small Bavarian valley. There were bifurcated butterkeks, standing on the car sending email, popping in to see Eileen since we were just passing, and, of course, some top bands. The sound was wonderful, the setting beautiful, the company exquisite, the locals German and the weather gorgeous. Such a good weekend that even being punched in the kidneys by a mad drunk Belgian (or maybe German, I don’t know) didn’t put a damper on it.
* The day I got my (our) first computer – a ZX spectrum, way back in the early 80s, I remember the day, it was a hot sunny day and we got the machine in Tunbridge Wells, we went for a drink in the park cafe afterwards and I had a can of cola that fizzed everywhere. I remember being very excited but there was no way at the time that I would have expected to be doing what I’m doing now but without that computer I wouldn’t be /here/ now.

A question from evilmattikinz after the movies post – top five movies of all time:

1. Pi
2. Brazil
3. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
4. Natural Born Killers
5. High Fidelity

…which reminds me I was going to do some more ‘top five’s, anyone got any ideas?

Best and worst films meme – 33/100 best, 3/100 worst

There is something surreal about sitting in an Indian Restaurant in Japan listening to Christmas carols.

Accept nothing, question everything

Waiting in line at the fortune tellers…

Live life live