The plan, such as it is, looks like:
Sat 25th – arrive Heathrow, 1730ish, head to Camberley
Sun 26th – sunday roast in Luton, to Kent
Wed 29th – head to Whitby
Mon 3rd – to Oxford
Wed 5th – back to Kent
Fri 7th – Fly from Heathrow
Theres a few bits I’ll make up as I go along, but thats the basics of it. Let me know if you’d like to meet up anywhere on these travels – my old UK mobile number should still work.
An addendum. I want to go on a cruise which arrives at big cities at night. And I want to make one of those bizarre clocks where balls run around on little tracks taking different paths and making different music as they go – like the one in Roppongi, or the less three dimensional ones I found in Asakusa (which, sadly, were surrounded by tramps). Guess I’ll have to learn to weld.
(How do I say, in polite Japanese, “I’m not a damned American”?)
The Japanese don’t understand ceilings. Todays cafe had a lone bicycle chained to theirs.
On the next table sat an irritatingly upper middle class father/son reunion. They were difficult enough to ignore with their holiday homes in France and hatred of the Welsh working class, but then “You don’t know how difficult it was when you went to Tonbridge”.
EXTREME LJ – WHAT A GOOD IDEA, SHAME ABOUT THE UI ON THIS THING
While I’m at it, anyone heard of Dekoy? Somewhere along the way I picked up a promo for (or of) Heartwork, which contains five absolutely stonking EBM tracks (and one dodgy intro). They don’t sound particularly Japanese so I’m guessing they’re a German or US import of some kind.
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=59722
Cute, but theres no instructions to make your own….
Hands up who knows about The 69 Eyes? Why didn’t you tell me? Have you got any more bands like them that you have also forgotten to tell me about? And, while I’m at it, how come these guys are in the top 10 in Finland? I mean they’re good, that normally disqualifies you from chart success, doesn’t it? Or maybe Finland should move a little higher up the list of places I’d like to live…
Tonight I failed to find Paranoia[0] so I strolled up the hill to the biggest spectrum analyser I’ve ever seen[1] and went inside for a pizza. Of course, this is back to Roppongi Hills, a place I’ve likened to Paradise Towers in the past. This time its scarier, there is an art exhibition going on which involves the word ‘happiness’ being plastered everywhere in big pink letters on a red background.
I got some more USB gadgets today, a handy battery charger and a phone charger, both just use the USB power line and don’t identify as devices. Its an interesting idea using USB as a universal power supply, I’d been thinking there must be some way of doing something like that, and was wondering about having a whapping great stepdown transformer in the corner pushing out well regulated 12v DC (or maybe 5V) and having everything run from that, it would save having to buy a transformer with *everything*. Maybe this is the answer, perhaps there is a market in massively multiway USB hubs? I’ve already collected 10 devices here (11 if you count the ugly one) and I’m not even trying.
[0] the cafe, its in all the guidebooks and websites, with pictures and maps and addresses, it just isn’t there, shame, it sounded quite good
[1] it doubles as an office block – the graph of the analyser itself is around six stories tall, but I don’t know what its analysing