26 Mar 05 England: 4 - N. Ireland: 0

Woohoo! We’ve just watched England thrash Northern Ireland 4 - 0 in one of the qualifying matches for the World Cup next year! This means England is firmly established as the leaders in their group at 13 points, with Poland trailing by 4, but with a game extra to play. Unfortunately Wales weren’t so fortunate this afternoon and were beaten 0 - 2 by Austria But they already won the grand slam in the recent Six Nations rugby tournament, so they’ve got some consolation with that.

Speaking of football, those of you who went to Awty might remember Stuart Holden (AKA “Shtuuuuu” by Brian, Bernardo, et al.). He recently came over to England to follow his dreams of becoming a professional footballer, and managed to get signed by Sunderland! He was up in Newcastle recently when he was attacked by a group of men, but the article doesn’t mention any particular motive for the attack. I’ve heard through the grapevine that Stu’s recovering from the attack, and should be back to playing football soon.

Hanne and I are still looking for an apartment, but we haven’t seen anything that particularly grabs our fancy, yet. T-minus 3 weeks until we’re out on the street! Bleh… I think we spoiled ourselves with this apartment, and now everything else just looks shabby. Is it that much to ask for an apartment that’s just as nice as this but costs less? What’s the world coming to?! Oh yeah, and we also saw an advert for this apartment in the local letting-agent’s paper, except now the rent has gone up to £850/month! I guess there’s no turning back now…

21 Mar 05 From Brum To Big Smoke

yeah yeah, it’s been a while, but there hasn’t really been much happening around here. Hanne wrote her own mini-update so I didn’t bother regurtitating the same info.

This past weekend we escaped the hectic city life by going down to London to visit Nikolai… it’s such a quiet little town. On Saturday we went over to visit my brother as he and his housemates were having a big houseparty! W00t!! Amit also made an appearance before having to retire early, making some excuse about going to the airport to pick up relatives, early in the morning… pah I also managed to take a few pictures before the vodka took over. By the way, is it just me or is this Jacque’s long-lost English twin (the one in the middle)?

On Friday night, while relaxing in front of the tv with a hooka in one hand and a fat slice of pizza in the other (one of the best pizzas i’ve ever tasted, btw!), Nikolai introduced us to the funniest gameshow ever: Takeshi’s Castle. 100 contestants have to get through a series of challenges in order to storm the castle. One of my favourite challenges has to be Sumo Rings, in which each player picks a ball at random out of a box they can’t see into. The colour corresponds to which wrestler they fight and try to knock out of the ring. For instance, pick a purple ball and the contestant has to don a costume of a giant plum making it ridiculously easy for the opponent to push over, and laugh as he rolls off down the hill. A brown ball means the contestant has to fight a professional sumo wrestler, a yellow ball means a short skinny guy, etc. There are descriptions of all the tasks on the website. Now if only I could find some torrent files of the show…

Update: You can’t post images into comments, but I’ll list all the pictures from the results of the “Who Am I” quiz here.

Gaz

Jacques

06 Mar 05 Fun and Games

I’m back from the week of training. The first couple of days were a little boring, since I had already covered the material when doing my dissertation, but it soon got more interesting when we started learning the details behind JSPs, Tag libraries, JDBC, and other tidbits of geekery with which I was not so familiar. Although the apartment was a tip when I got back (I thought women were supposed to be clean?!? ;-)) it was great to see Hanne again and find that she has recovered from her cold.

Not much else going on around here really… just the usual weekend of cleaning, shopping, and relaxing. We’re off to see The Life Aquatic tonight. We saw Girl With A Pearl Earring last night, and all I have to say about that is “what the hell!”… I’m clearly not in tune with these films featuring Scarlett Johansson (we saw Lost In Translation a few nights ago… again: what the hell!). Both films are a little too arty-farty for my liking. I guess they’re a little like marmite: either you love it, or you hate it (mmm… marmite!).

Here are some more games similar to that Hapland puzzle a few posts back. Cheers to Nikolai for the link!

Right… i’d better go do some cleaning before Hanne beats me with the mop (… again…). Oh yeah, one last note: my cousin now has her own website!