Neil Hopcroft

Today I’m contemplative, not worth reading

Today, my first quake with other people in sight, 430pm, watching their reactions – most of us just paused at the terminal, little yelps from the corner of the office, my boss wandered past asking what was going on. No ducking, no panicking, no running, just standing or sitting still waiting for the rattling to finish. An odd nervous excitment after it was over. Then back to normal. 5.0 this time.

Everythings lagging:

– jet
– email
– cashflow

Need to get back to realtime….

Album mini-review: “Deep shadows and brilliant highlights” by Him rocks. Admittedly I’ve only listened to one track so far but that track rocks.

Incidentally, anyone know anything about the copy protection it claims to have, ‘cos my ripper seems to be behaving perfectly normally.

I blame the jetlag

Everything is looking hectic here at the moment and I’m not getting much of a chance to look around Tampere except for the inevitable getting lost while driving back to the hotel. Have just put the finishing touches to a script to run over night and its time to go home. More later….

…blaring from the stereo.

And now i’m in jetlag city stuck with a hotel internet system that has an appalling keyboard that makes double keying an art form and has limits on its html form entry sizes. No matter, the sun will be rising soon giving me a good view of the paper factory over the other side of the lake – this is *real* industry.

The flight to Helsinki was dull and uneventful. The inflight entertainment was a good deal poorer than the Virgin flight from Heathrow to Tokyo – though I doubt I’ll be flying by FInnair much so it probably doesn’t matter. The inflight movie was Anger Management which turned out to be about at boring as I had expected but in a different way.

There were some Japanese people causing trouble in immigration (I think they were just being confused) so it took Ishikura-san a while to get through. Neither of our Japanese UIMs were working with the GSM networks (my UK phone is still working as expected so its not too much of a problem for me) here so I just had to wait until he turned up.

Getting the hire car was interesting – they’ve put the steering wheel in the wrong place, and the gearstick. So after much overrevving and wobbly lane changes we stopped at a service station where Ishikura-san took over the controls while I wondered at the beautiful trees. There seems to be a 50-50 mix of silver birch and fern, with all the birches taking various shades of brown.

We passed a few little lakes and an upside down tree (which I can only assume was art) on the way Tampere.

As we were deciding what to do about food Ishikura-san spotted a Japanese person in the hotel lobby, which could only mean one thing, someone else from the Tokyo office. They were just going out to get some food so we joined them for a cozy taxi ride across town to the theme park. Passing the ‘Big Tits Erotic Restaurant’, a name which I think sums up quite a lot of the cultural differences between the FInns and the Brits.

Of course, what I needed after spending all day travelling was to eat in a revolving restaurant. Ooops. Still it was high up and with nice views across the lights of the town. The taxi ride back to the hotel was in a lurve wagon Elvira would have been proud to drive, a seven seater taxi set up with a constellation of sparkling blue LEDs in the ceiling and \m/ rock music…

Again, not a lot to report today, I went for another wander around my local park – it was far busier today since the weather was a little more friendly. On the way around I discovered a French rose garden, an English landscaped garden and a greenhouse.

The greenhouse was great, kind like some of those at Kew, but with a much more ordered route around it, it looked like it had some major alterations in the early 80s, with some concrete walkways at mezzanine(sp?) level around the plants on the floor, sunken into the ground (if you see what I mean?). I was a little worried when I was passed by what appeared to be a crew for a low budget porn photo session heading the wrong way around the route – I’m just glad I missed their actual shoot, there were two dreadful giggly tall skinny European (western, at least) blondes and a sleazy photographer guiding them in broken English.

And next I pack, I leave for the airport at 7 tomorrow morning for a 10 hour flight – I just hope I’m still together enough to drive when I get to Helsinki, we’re got a ‘van’ (which is actually a peoplemover not a transit) for the week, but quite why we’ve ordered one with air conditioning at this time of year is still a bit of a mystery, maybe its necessary. No idea yet what my network access is going to be like so I may be a little quiet for the next week or so…

Looking at some of my recent CD acquisitions, I now own tracks by the following (romajised where necessary):

– Mirakuru obu raifu (Miracle of life?)
– Cune
– Kelberos
– The Shakalabbits
– ZZ featuring Ken
– Black Bottom Brass Band
– Coke Screw (I particularly like this name)
– Spoony
– Sturdy Stamp
– Urchin Farm

I hope to obtain some more over the coming months – I’m curious about Hatch Hatchells ‘All That Spagetti’, but not curious enough to buy it.