joshwaller (baboba)

I've been to Koln Cologne / Dusseldorf Germany thanks to Easyjet. It was okay. The unwritten rules of travelling: 1 - if backpacking, make sure your stuff is blatantly on your bed otherwise someone else will claim your bed and then have a go at you for sleeping in their bed! 2 - when driving along a single track road, and meeting another car, the car that has the least distance to reverse, should reverse, however, normally the most arrogant person will force the other person to reverse, which is nice. Needless to say I've had enough travelling for now, and seriously can't be bothered unless absolutely neccessary or if the roads are free of other traffic!

We went to Alton Towers yesturday, unfortunately, Heather had the car so I wasn't able to drive down in it. I went with Tony, in his car. He wasn't so keen on the second ride we went on: Rita Queen of Speed, as you can probably tell from the picture! It is VERY fast, and very scary. Later I went on Nemesis and it felt quite tame in comparison. For some reason it didn't take a photo of me! Hex was good but confusing, definitely worth going on, but I felt it could have been better. The Haunted House was a good adaption of the usual haunted house with guns, but nothing spectacular. Tony's favourite ride was the rapids, even if it did involve getting wet. I like it a lot too, the big rotating platform used to board is very cool. They had a new ride called Peugeot Driving School - unfortunately it was for kids! We wondered whether it was sponsored by Peugeot, I thought it might be, however it might just be a really weird coincidence, what with all the Peugeot 207's dotte...

We have our new car ! Hooray! The journey took a bit longer than expected due to a crash on the motorway, and roadworks on the only other road. The car drives well, the brakes work well and the heating and air conditioning work very well. The car shares a lot of components with the Skoda Fabia but the cars little extras, and big extras, make the car noticably better. The little extras worth mentioning: the stereo volume increasing when the engine noise increases, the small lights above the vanity mirrors, lights in the back for passengers, the emergency triangle in the boot, purple and red dials etc. The big extras worth mentioning: the much better 1.9 TDI engine in the VW Passat, a very nice improvement compared to the 68bhp 1.4 in the Fabia, the bigger, better seats, the increased space inside. There are some downsides, it seems to roll a bit more than the Fabia, maybe it could do with it's suspension stiffening? Plus parking will be much more difficult as it wont be possible to...

Small box, containing an even smaller box. Steve Jobs loves Pirates of the Carribean 2, but he doesn't like it when you steal music. The simple but ESSENTIAL instructions: To switch on, press center button. To switch off hold PLAY/PAUSE. To reset hold Center and Menu. If you don't get to grips with switching on / off using this method then you're buggered and you're best off without an ipod - why they couldn't just use an on / off button, I'll never know, perhaps it's un-cool. (Remember Apple prioritises cool, over easy to use). The stuff you get with it: Dock adapter, earphones, packet of instructions (no CD, no manual), some white apple stickers for the teenage audience, USB cable, frabric case (hoorah!) The switch on experience: Choose your language. Use the menus... Look for the new games, only to find, you have to buy the new games for $5 each. New quick-scroll feature lets you go to the first letter of the Artist. Neat. New feature: Search f...

I'm really looking forward to this - ever since test driving a Skoda Fabia VRS - I've wanted a (VW/Audi/Skoda/Seat) Diesel TDI car. We spent a good few weeks looking for a cheap Skoda Octavia TDI, but all of the cheap ones ( Mitchell Group (highly recommended!) which was very helpful as we knew what to expect when driving other TDIs. We figured that we'd have to spend more money than we had hoped to get a low mileage car, but unfortunately the 02 Octavia was outside our budget so we tried a number of other cars from AutoTrader, and spent most of this weekend looking at: a VW Bora TDI that didn't feel like it had a turbo, a high mileage Seat Leon that had some kind of over-revving problem (and a high mileage), and finally a low-mileage VW Passat 1.9 TDI S 100bhp (pictured). It's bigger than we were intending (and heavier), but has plenty of space, and the only main drawback is the saloon style boot - we'd have preferred a hatchback so you can fit a dishwasher sh...

We went to Brittany, France this week via Ryanair, the East Midland's Airport, and Dinard airport. We ate lots of crepes, swam in the sea and in a pool, and watched lots of TV that was dubbed over in French. TV highlights were: T.J. Hooker, a cop show featuring William Shatner. German show ( Alarm für Cobra 11 ) featuring Autobahn Police where every 5 minutes there was some form of police chase involving a vehicle of some kind (such as a Hover craft, Bulldozer, Range Rover, VW Golf, Fiat Panda, BMW 5 Series, Large Trucks) most shows would feature several large explosions - it was EXCELLENT and should definitely be on UK TV. Malcolm in the Middle was also very funny in French. Photos now in the gallery . East Midland's Airport claim have won an award as the "Best airport in the UK" - I personally find this claim award highly questionable for the following reasons: 1 - The layout of the airport is extremely poor meaning that queues (in check-in) end up blocking ALL w...

I travelled to London and Hamburg yesturday. It was raining. A lot. Lufthansa prefer it if you don't walk on the aeroplane's wings! In Hamburg only men wearing hats can use the pedestrian crossings. The plane we boarded was called a Wupper, which is short for "Wupper-Sieg AG Leverkusen (Wupsi)" - Thankfully they didn't have any "Wupsi"'s on the flight - just tiny sandwiches about 1/3rd the size of normal sandwiches.

Nestle Caramacs , they're (in my opinion) like butter and dust mixed together and flattened into a milkybar sized shape, wrapped inside some plastic and sold in corner shops all over Britain in the chocolate bars section, they've been developed so that they don't melt, as general confusion means they are left next to chocolate bars, and sold as some kind of "Chocolate" bar when in fact they are made from (in my opinion) old melted butter and dust from local wood factories. Originally released as an easy way to serve and store butter without having to own a fridge, critics screamed foul at the hideous dusty taste and difficulty in spreading the hard substance on bread.

View it here - the picture above / left shows the mini floating Great Britain that was used on the Good Morning (Richard and Judy) show with Weatherman Fred? - He would run around on it telling us the weather. It's not there anymore but Google Maps is slightly out of date by several years so you can still see it. Hooray!

There was a Vietnam film type soundtrack that featured: Jennifer Juniper (Donovan), and Paint it Black by the Rolling Stones, as well as a number of other excellent songs. Unfortunately I can't find the album anymore, nor do I remember all the songs on the album. An internet search has proved fruitless. Does anybody have any ideas? All I can find are "Tour of Duty" but it's not got the right songs on it...? Born to be Wild - Steppenwolf Paint it Black - Rolling Stone Jennifer Juniper - Donovan Update: Thanks to an anonymous comment - the full track listing can be found in the comments! It looks like it was Tour of Duty Volume 2!! :)

March of the Penguins - it's flipping awesome. Not awesome like the Matrix, but like a David Attenborough documentary on steroids, with Morgan Freeman as the voiceover. The DVD contains two extra documentaries about how they filmed it, both very interesting / entertaining. I managed to watch the film a second time and still really enjoyed watching it. It's fairly short for a film at 1hour 15minutes but slightly longer than the average animal documentary. Some of the extra documentaries contain footage of the pengiuns from different colonies, and you wonder why they didn't contain it in the film. A Cock and Bull Story Starring Steve Coogan - has some very funny moments where they take the mickey out of Alan Partridge. Most of the people I was watching it with didn't really get the parallels between the film inside the film, and the "real world" modern day version of it, but did after explaining it. I think it's one of those films where a brief familiarity...

We went to Brighton this week to visit Vanessa and Paul - it was a long way to drive taking well over 5 hours on the way down. Pictures are in the gallery . PS - Visit Health Unlimited.org - they provide health care for people for free. They also employ door-to-door canvassers who try and get you to give them money. One thing I find confusing is that these door-to-door people aren't volunteers, but they get paid (presumably by the charity) to go door-to-door... hmmm...

Email sent to Bic : "You could invent a Bic biro with sellotape wrapped around the pen, this way it is a sellotape dispenser as well as a pen, and then by the time the pen has run out, the sellotape would run out at the same time. You would always have handy sellotape with you, plus everytime you took the sellotape off the pen you would have a clean pen again." Related Bic Pen Articles: Bendy Bic Pen Invented

The Break Up is "alright", some people even said that it's "good" (the majority of people I was with). It is somewhat of the opposite to the general feel good romantic comedy in that it's about the break up of a couple instead of the joining of a couple. It makes for generally unpleasant watching while they have domestic arguments with guests, and a lot of the jokes are already on the trailer. There were some laugh out loud moments, but not enough in my opinion. Ladies in Lavender is so boring. It feels like it isn't about anything at all. It is fairly short compared to overly long films like Superman, and Pirates of the Carribean 2, but it still had the female contingent checking how much time was left on the DVD display. It is slightly more appealing to women, but the majority of them thought it was awful.

What's with Cadbury's "The big bite Moro" in the UK (Made in Ireland), it's exactly the same as a "Boost charged with Glucose". In other countries a Cadbury's Moro is the same as a Mars bar. Contents and ingredients of a Moro and a Boost: 60.5g, Milk Chocolate with Caramel and Biscuit Filling, 310kcal per bar, 17.8g fat, ingredientsL glucose solids 23%, veg oil, skimmed milk, biscuits (5%), sugar, cocoa, glycerol, whey, e471, e442, milk chocolate, etc. Perhaps the flavouring is slightly different, but the ingredients are identical. I want answers! Cadburys say that it's made in Ireland with a different choclate recipe. Update: I contacted Cadburys, who said that the Moro bar is sold in Ireland, and they have no plans of introducing it into the UK, as the UK have the Boost bar. I spoke to a friend who worked in the industry, and he says that distribution warehouses simply buy from the cheapest suppliers available and often that means buying from...

"Great Coke Taste Zero Sugar" - You can't make this stuff up, it's Coca Cola's new zero fat / zero sugar coke for men who think drinking Diet Coke makes them a girl. Each 330ml can contains 2 calories - which is great if you normally drink water - I mean what is the point in even drinking it if it doesn't offer you any kind of food or nutritional value? It's full of Aspartame and Acesulfame K as alternatives to sugar, which Coca Cola promise won't give you cancer. Anyway, if you're keen on rotting your teeth, giving yourself cancer, and wasting money then Coca Cola Zero certainly tastes quite nice, contains caffiene, and the can looks pretty cool.

...according to my mobile phone digital camera. I've had the Samsung E800 for over a year now, and it's finally time to send it off to the ebay pie in the sky . The Samsung E800 was a pretty great phone apart from the stupid-ness of it, such as have no means of sending a phone number to another phone (The feature was completely missing), and have no means of sending your photos to other phones or computers without and optional and expensive data cable (it doesn't let you send photos via bluetooth for example, the only way was to pay stupid amounts to send it as an email). Well I've finally got a working data cable - an old-style COM port cable. So basically I thought I'd share with you some of the cake photos (and other photos) from the phone, taken over the last year... the first one, an awesome cream banoffee pie from coffee n nosh. the second is fairly self-explanatory - featured in a mobile phone shop - the chaps from the fast show possibly the oldest novell se...

So I've installed Windows Vista Beta * (Peter) 2 - Build 5384 - The system has a C3 / Nehemiah CPU at 1.2ghz, 512mb ram (DDR, Laptop RAM), 120gb Maxtor Drive and Pioneer 16x DVDRW. Updating the VGA driver seems to have found the correct VIA graphics driver from Microsoft. * Please bear in mind that all that I post is related to the beta version, so Vista could be drastically different (better?) when finalised. It's almost like running some alien or Linux operating system because it looks so strange compared to Windows, they've lost the Start button, and replaced it with the windows logo in a circle, which will be great (not) for tech. support, instead of saying, "Click the Start button...", they can now say "Click symbol formerly known as the start button", or "Click the round blob with the windows logo in the bottom left corner..." "... no, not that one." "...no bottom left "... ad infinitum. Stupid basically. The Start but...

Boiler Room (2000) DVD. Really good, really entertaining, gripping, slightly disappointing end, but I wont go into details other than to say it would be nice if there was an extra couple of minutes tying loose ends. And how do they manage to copy the C: drive onto 1 floppy disk? When they are running Windows 95? Well worth watching though!

We've been in Portugal for a week! It was all very last minute, but it was amazing! Now we have over 500 photos to sort through to find the best ones to share! I've put some of the best one's that stood out the most in the gallery . These ones were taken with the new Canon Powershot A700. It's always slightly annoying when I go places with H with a camera, as she always tends to take the better photo! :) Update: A second set of photos has been added! Wahey!