On the 7th of July 2004. I visited Munich’s Olympiazentrum. At the site is a 200 metre high tower from which I took this photo of the BMW building just accross the road. It is quite an impressive building with the BMW logo emblazened on the roof. Now thanks to Google Maps you can see the tower and the BMW building. Isn’t that exciting? 
Maybe I’ll find some more exciting things on European Goodle Maps to add here in the near future, until then here are some to get you started.
This is probably old news to most devoted Hunter S. Thompson or Johnny Depp fans, but I only just found this out.
Hunter S. Thompson, who died at 67 in February this year of a self-inflicted gun shot wound to his head, wrote The Rum Diary in 1959 although it wasn’t published until 1998. Next year a film version of The Rum Diary is due to be released in America, currently there is no date for release anywhere else in the world. It seems Johnny Depp will being playing Hunter S Thompson again starring alongside Benicio Del Torro (The Usual Suspects, 21 Grams) who was originally going to direct the film. After Del Torro withdrew in 2004 the role of director went to Bruce Robinson, writer/director of Withnail & I. I haven’t yet read The Rum Diary, but I shall make sure I do before the film is released.
Johnny Depp certainly likes to keep busy, he’s working on 3 other films at the moment, a computer game and the film of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which he plays Willy Wonka. It is coming out next month (UK release: 29th of July).
Yesterday, as it was the longest day of the year, my parents decided we should drive out to an area just north of Lincoln known as ‘Burton Cliffs’. These are pretty much the only bits of hill around Lincoln, the name cliff is quite misleading, but given the competition it’s understandable.
We all took photographs of the sunset, the ones that immediately struck me as fairly good I have uploaded to my Lincolnshire Gallery on Ivixor.net. My current favourite is this one
Currently I am aware of only three companies offering online DVD rental: Amazon, Blockbuster & FilmFour. Each offers to post you DVDs you want to watch, you get to keep them as long as you want then just post them back. None of them seem to offer you the latest DVDs, just some off a list you would like to see.
| Company | Cost per month | Max. DVDs per month | No. at once | No. to choose from |
| Amazon | £7.99 | 4 | 2 | “Tens of thousands” |
| Amazon | £9.99 | 6 | 3 | “Tens of thousands” |
| FilmFour DVD | £12.99 | Unlimited | 2 | 32,500+ |
| Blockbuster | £14.99 | Unlimited | 3 | 27,000+ |
Personally I think I’ll stick with paying between £2 and £3 per film from the local video shop to make sure I get what I’m in the mood to watch. I’d need to be sure I’d watch 4 DVDs a month to make it worth while, I probably wouldn’t, so I’ll leave it for now.
Today I wandered a long way through Lincoln in order to have a look at the three places I was thinking of yesterday. The two roundabouts would be too difficult unfortunatly, one is too big to frame well and the other has no good vantage point unobscured by trees. So I’ve decided I’ll do one from the footbridge over Melville Street this will allow me to see the cars going up and down Broadgate in the foreground and Lincoln cathedral will be lit up off in the background. I took a daytime shot today in order to help visualise it.
During my walk I took a few other photos which I’ve added to my Lincolnshire gallery on Ivixor.Net.
Today my wireless card came, which means I can now use my Ubuntu Linux computer online in my room rather than my parents Windows XP computer. I was please with the ease I managed to get it working, it’s just a generic 802.11b card with RaLink’s RT2460 chipset. The driver from http://rt2×00.serialmonkey.com/ worked fine using this guide. While it was a little harder than in windows it certainly wasn’t difficult to figure out how to do and I think Linux should be competing with windows within a couple of years provided people can get over the fear of change.
Also today I’ve been planning a photo of traffic on a roundabout at night, with a long exposure hoping to capture the trail of lights. I was encouraged to do this after seeing this photo. I currently have 2 roundabouts in the south of Lincoln in mind, and I’m also thinking about doing one from a bridge over a fairly busy road. (Google maps links: 1, 2, 3). It’s perhaps not the right time of year to do this yet as it’s light until quite late when there is less traffic. I may have to leave it until September, shortly before I go back to Aberystwyth, when the earlier darkness should give more traffic to photograph. This is fine anyway as I need to purchase a new tripod because ‘Braingrind‘ broke my old one.
I have nearly finished doing all the bits and pieces required to finish this version of the site. Thanks to Lisa, who goes by the name of ‘gloomcookie‘ on AFNet and ‘xxkilledxcore‘ on DeviantArt, I now have a less boring Newspeak logo.
I know alot of my friends are “ZUH BLOGS!?!” and will probably have an unconcious urge to make annoying comments, to them I say firstly blogs are actually a pretty cool way of putting some actual content on your vanity website and secondly that now I’ve moved away from uni I’m not prepared to sit on IRC all day to talk and I’m not going to give an individual run-down of what I did each day to each person that asks “what’s up?” (or more commonly just “sup?”) besides the question being nonsensical I don’t have the energy to tell each person. Other reasons are that I would like to be able to put some of my photos on here with a little commentary. So I’m going to try having a blog until September when I’ll be back in Aberystwyth to study.
With that out the way…
Today I visited my grandmother, who is suffering from memory loss, what specific kind I don’t know, I suspect if I ask she’ll have forgotten already. I’m always suprised that I don’t feel worse when I see her with her condition, but the fact is she’s quite happy and is coping fairly well if you are willing to accept that stories will be repeated, each time gaining exagerations and embellishments.
I also finally got a microphone so I can use Skype. The general Skype fad seems to be over now, but there are still plenty of people using skype to learn and practice foreign languages. I already spent an hour or so talking with a German girl who contacted me after finding my details on Jyve. Jyve is a Skype community one of the uses of it is to be able to find other language learners, pairing up allows each person to develop their language skills for no cost and gaining a friend at the same time.
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