10.30.04
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:11 am by GaZ
Blargh… body clocks are crap! Now I can’t help waking up at 7am, even on a Saturday after a night out. gah!
Anyway… so Hanne had a couple of interviews this week for sales positions, but she didn’t get the jobs 
From what she told me the interviewers were real wankers anyway, so I’d say she’s better off without those jobs. Hopefully she’ll add her side of the story soon.
The “Birmingham Eye” is back for its annual visit, set up just around the corner from Brindley Place (where I work), in Centenary square. They’ve corrected the audio problems from last year (“… and on your left you can see ze Eiffel tower!”) but when Hanne and I went on Thursday the speakers weren’t working anyway. Bleh. We forgot our cameras, but I had my phone, so i’ve uploaded a few pictures from that.
Yesterday I received my first pay check! woohoo!! So last night we went out for tapas and wine at La Tasca, followed by a few drinks in one of the (at least) SEVEN Wetherspoons in our area… a new one seems to pop up every week! They’re getting almost as bad as the coffee places around the Bullring.
There are no plans for the rest of this weekend, so I guess we’ll just take it easy and vegitate in front of the gogglebox. Have a good one, y’all.
PS Oh yeah… I recorded Dave on the radio last week. The recording is split into two parts:
- The introduction followed by Dave playing guitar with his friend, Elise, dancing (yes, dancing on the radio)
and
- Dave speaking of his experience playing appalachian music
.
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10.25.04
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:29 pm by GaZ
Having just reformatted a hard disk i’m gradually going through the process of reinstalling everything and updating to the latest versions, and I just noticed a nice little addition to Winamp: in the media library (alt+L), underneath the “streaming media” links Nullsoft have added a couple of links to the catalogue of audio and video clips that they store on their servers! Woohoo! Now anyone with a broadband connection has instant access to a fairly sizeable media collection. Although the high-bandwidth audio clips are “only” sampled at 64kbps they’re still not that bad, and the 350kbps video clips stream brilliantly over our measely 1Mbit connection. Anyway… this discovery cheered me up a fair bit on what has otherwise been a very mondayne (get it? “mundane” + “monday”…. hah!).
PS Don’t forget to listen to Resonance FM tomorrow at 0930 GMT!
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10.24.04
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:15 pm by GaZ
…why football is the greatest sport ever:
Manchester United: 2
Arseanal (sic): 0!
MWAHAHHAHAHAA THEIR REIGN OF TERROR IS OVER!
49 non-losses is still an amazing run though. May it never happen to them again, those dirty gooners.
All hail kings Ruud and Rooney!
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Posted in Uncategorized at 1:19 pm by GaZ
I’m starting to be really glad I decided not to progress with joining the Royal Signals. Recent events in Iraq indicate that being over there is increasingly harmful to ones health.
Anyway….
The Navy is going to hell in a handbasket.
I still don’t know what the truth is. (found via Dave Koppel)
Finally, to cheer myself up, I revisited the home of the one, the only, JAMES PATEY!… the Patey stories are all 100% true! 
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10.20.04
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:58 pm by GaZ
Last weekend Bob and Ben had a four-day weekend and came up to Brummieham to go to the Katie Melua concert with Hanne and me. They’d been in our apartment for no longer than a couple of hours before they figured out how to set off our VERY noisy burgler alarm (though quite WHY we have a burgler alarm when you need to get past two security gates and the conceirge before you can even get to the apartment i’m not quite sure)…. so Hanne and I now know NOT to press the big red buttons by the front door! Other weekend events include bowling and watching Shark Tale (which was surprisingly funny!).
Monday featured the concert, which was amazing! Her voice was so crisp and clear it was like listening to a CD in your living room. The venue (a cordoned off half of the NIA) only held a couple of thousand people, so it was a very intimate affair (although she still appeared quite tiny from our seats up in the nosebleed section). But it was the music that we came to hear, and it was brilliant. She sang all the songs from “Call Off The Search” and a couple (“Spiders Web” and “Thank You Stars”) from her upcoming album, which is definitely on my to-buy list!
Speaking of buying CDs, i’ve started to get back into the habit lately. More and more of them are being packaged with “bonus DVDs” (to entice people into buying them as opposed to just downloading, and I think it’s a great idea! Today I received “The Very Best of MTV Unplugged 3″ (a brilliant series! This latest one has an unplugged version of REM – End of the World As We Know It, which i’ve always wanted to have on CD), “The Best of Groove Armada,” and “Red Hot Chilli Peppers Greatest Hits and Videos,” all of which came with Bonus DVDs featuring videos of all the tracks found on the audio CDs (and more!)…. yay!
Anyway…. time for bed now. I still haven’t gotten used to waking up so early for work every morning 
PS Oh yeah… i forgot to mention: tune in to Resonance FM next Tuesday (26/10/2004) @ 9am GMT. Dave (my brother, who i’ve known for almost 20 years) will be playing some folky music or summin. Rah!
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10.10.04
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:48 pm by GaZ
The moment I know you’ve all been waiting for… pictures of the new apartment (plus a couple from the room we stayed in in Bobs house)! I missed out a couple of pictures of a few things, like the second double bedroom, the balcony, and the oh-so-exciting storage cupboards… I guess we’ll save those pictures for a rainy day. 
So yeah…. the apartment is great! We’re smack-dab in the middle of everything… work, gyms, cinemas, theatres, shops, clubs, pub, bars, restaurants, convention centre, indoor arena, sea-life centre, old-school ghettos… it’s all within 10 minutes easy walking distance! 
We’ve also signed up at one of the local gyms, and a trainer has even worked out a nice schedule of death for me. How handy.
I’ve just finished my second week at work, and so far things are going swimmingly. I haven’t broken anything (well… nothing big 
), and everyone else there is really helpful and friendly. Hanne is now looking for work, and she’s already been invited to an assessment centre on the 28th! Although i’ll miss having someone to cook and clean for me and be at my every beck and call, I think it would be better for her to start a different job to keep her from going insane. Besides… there’s always the weekends!
So far life here in Brummingham has been pretty hectic, and this weekend was the first chance we’ve had to just sit back and relax. We only moved in two weeks ago, at which point Hanne’s parents came over to help move the rest of her stuff (driving all the way over from Norway!), then the following weekend Bob and Ben invited Jim and I to IPL’s (that’s the company they work for) all-expenses-paid 25th birthday party! And, of course, all the time in between I spent working. Oh yeah… Amit popped by this evening on the way up to Cheshire, where’s he’s having 3 cushy weeks of training (while staying in a hotel, all paid for by his employer of course!), so we went out to Pizza Express (in the words of Hanne: nam nam nam!!)
Anyway… that’s about it for now. I can’t think of any interesting stories of anything that’s happened to us since we’ve moved, but i’ll try to make something happen for next time. I’ve also gotta start carrying my camera around with me more so I can add more pictures to the gallery, coz a picture speaks a thousand words, which saves me lots of writing time! So, until next time, adieu!
PS Still looking for bloggers in Birmingham to start a new Metblog city!
PPS He’s a cheat!
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10.05.04
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:53 pm by GaZ
Yaaaaaaaaaaaayyy! We’ve (Hanne and I) FINALLY got Internet access in our new pad!!
Too tired to write much now…. pics and news coming soon!
For a brief news update check out Hanne’s page
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