Tonight I went to see The Matrix Reloaded.

It was a rather expensive showing as I accidently bought 6 tickets instead of three on the web ordering thingy. Still, with the help of the box office staff I managed to sell two of the tickets.

Anyway, the film itself was fun. Though, there was, to my mind, a gratuitous sex and wet tee-shirt with gigglinh up and down scene which lasted about 5 minutes. (I’m sure those who’ve seen the film will know what I’m talking about.) I guess it’s there to please the teenage demographic in the USA who are supposed to be the biggest spending audience over there.

I don’t really want to spoil things for anyone who’s not seen it yet but I will ask one question… Is The Matrix actually recursive?

It won’t play Shrek properly.. It doesn’t play the voice channel when you play the film itself.

Well, it was a busy end to last week followed by a busy weekend.

My parents arrived Thursday afternoon. This was fine. Their car didn’t break down this time which was good.

Friday, I can’t remember what I did.

Saturday morning started with a trip down to Richer Sounds to see about updating
my DVD player. The first one I bought, nearly 18 months ago, was basically
a test to see if I liked the format. The one I chose on Saturday I thought
would last me a while as it could handle DVD-Audio and a variety of other
formats plus progressive scan. Anyway, the upshot is that although it does
have all the features and does have a very nice display, the audio output
is a bit on the horrid side. It’s slightly clipped, lacks bass and is a lot
worse than the quality of the DVD player I had before, which was £30
cheaper. The DVD player in question is the Limit DVD9900SE. I s’pose that
if I had an external Dolby Digitial/DTS decoder it would be fine, but that
would defeat the point of having one internally. I think I may take the machine
back to Richer Sounds on Saturday to get an exchange under their 14 day satisfaction
guarantee.

Saturday afternoon saw my aunt and uncle from Enfield, north London, visiting.

Sunday involved a 125 mile trip up to Derbyshire to see my nan and uncle,
a number of hours being blasted by their telly as they are pretty deaf (who
said that it was only young people who made a lot of noise) followed by the
journey home. By the end of the day I was shattered.

Monday was spent buying Nipon ant destroyer and laying traps for the ants…
who then totally ignored the stuff and build a sand tunnel around it. These
are intelligent ants, not fooled by sweet poisons.

So you see, not much excitement, really

Well, just now I got a bit of an eyeful I wasn’t expecting.

Think woman wearing tightish jeans bending over displaying a builder’s bum, showing pretty well everything and especially that there’s no point in any boyfriends buying her knickers.

Well, if male builders can do it I suppose it’s fine for female geologists.

Well, about 6 months ago Oxford City Council resurfaced the Watlington Road with chippings and tar even though the road surface needed no repair. Chippings and tar are well known not to last very long. Indeed, they were almost worn off the surface by now. Well, they’ve done it AGAIN. Yes, 6 months after the first round of tar and chippings they’ve resurfaced it again with the same stuff. Not only this, they’ve done it on a day when the road was wet so the chippings will have even less chance of sticking to the road surface!

As a cyclist, the tar and chippings resurfacing is a real menace and a safety hazard. The chippings act as marbles making it dangerous to ride and cars and lorries throw them up into the cyclist’s face. I wish some councilors would cycle and not make such stupid, money wasting decisions. But I should merely look at the Oxford Transport Tragedy and the stupid way they’ve implemented useless and dangerous “cycle paths” to see how awful they are.

I
nearly got blown off my bike twice this morning, plus it started to rain
about a thrid of the way through my journey so I had to stop and wrestle
with my waterproofs in the howling wind.

It seems more like November than May.

Well, my repaired rear tyre on my bike is a little lumpy, I have no idea why. I will have to look into it when it’s not raining.

I spent the weekend over at the Hartlands’ place just chilling out, playing
with Christopher, taking some photos and eating a rather nice venison dinner.

Tonight’s excitement entails cycling home without getting wet (hopefully),
doing some shopping at Sainsbury’s, washing the towels and possibly watching
some telly. Spiffing, eh?

Lots of householdy things to do before my parents arrive on Thursday afternoon.

My bike got a puncture on the way into work. I’m not happy.

First of all, my parents got home OK on Monday despite a few close calls with a potentially overheating engine. The local garage fixed up the car the next day.

Not a great deal has happened since Monday morning otherwise other than “fun” when one of the 4th year undergrads pulled the wrong plug in one of the computer labs which switched off a server which then proceeded to have a disk failure. Of course, this disk was the one which held all the 4th year’s projects and most of the stuff used by the postgrads too. This person is not the most loved person at this moment.

So, today’s been a case of finding space somewhere else for the data and then initiating the restore of the back-up from the computing services’ central back-up system. It’s a pitty that the aggrigate transfer rate from this is about 200K per second, so it’s going to take a couple of days to get the 30GB back!

The other highlight of the day was feeding ducks with mouldy bread with Kat, Rachel and her boyfriend, Alex at lunchtime.

Oh, and I’ve made an appointment with the dentist to see him at 9:30am on Friday.

Thurday evening part of one of the fillings the dentist did the last time I went to see him broke off and fell out.

Saturday evening, the bit of tooth which was left on the outside of the tooth broke off from the same tooth.

Time to make a dental appointment, I guess.