Category: Life
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All good character-building stuff
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about where I am in life (probably a mid-life crisis thing) and about my schooldays (probably because I’ve been in touch with a few of my old ‘schoolchums’, recently), but mainly about the correlation between the two. I’ve aways credited my school – the Duke of York’s Royal Military School – with helping me get to where I am, but the more I think about it, maybe I should credit my school with hampering me from getting to where I could have been. It could have all turned out so differently, if only I’d had a… Read more
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Gimme a T for Texas, a T for Trampoline
Last weekend Freya continued her path to Olympic Gold by competing in the Texas State Trampolining and Tumbling championships. For reasons best known to the organizers, this was in Lubbock, which is on the far North edge of Texas, so not really a convenient location for anyone apart from people who live in Lubbock – although if they live in Lubbock they have my sympathy and deserve every break they can get. Anyway, owing to my general aversion to air travel (and a $250 per person flight cost because I didn’t get round to booking anything up until the week of… Read more
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Got them ol’ Blu Ray blues
A couple of weeks ago, Twilight came out on video. Not that the I was eagerly awaiting its release or anything, but the wife was, which meant that I was facing a couple of hours watching a chick-flick if I expected to fulfil my ‘conjugal rights’ later that night. Still, I reasoned, it could be worse – it was a ‘vampire movie’, right? That’s basically horror. (Although Shaun of the Dead, is a zombie movie, so also horror, and that didn’t exactly strike a romantic chord…). I’ve spent the past couple of years gradually ‘training’ the wife in the art of high definition. After much cajoling, she’ll… Read more
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Who’s gonna ‘drive your home?
Just before Christmas my eldest managed to frag the hard drive on his laptop. I’m not sure how he managed it (probably deliberately, to get out of doing his homework), but when you tried booting it up you’d just get an “Operating System not found” message. Freya has an identical laptop (to avoid sibling rivalry) so I swapped her drive into Finn’s laptop and confirmed that everything else was fine – just a blank hard drive. It could have been that he’d just deleted everything, but that’s pretty hard to do by accident, so I’m guessing he dropped the laptop and crashed… Read more
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Turning Japanese #1: Food
My current project is implementing a new SAP system at some of our warehouses in the U.S, Japan, and Europe. When I joined the project I relished the possibility of going to Japan – I’d only been here once before, for a mere 24 hours, in transit from Singapore to Houston, so the possibility of a longer stay was enticing. Six months into the project I managed to wrangle my first trip. I’d originally conceived of this as a Change Management dog and pony show for myself and my immediate supervisor, but by the time I’d floated it past management, several other members… Read more