Nick Gibbins

One for : The Travellers

Had a good night in London yesterday with , , , , , and , the occasion being the celebration of and ‘s impending nuptials. Food at Papageno’s near Covent Garden was slightly uninspired pan-Ottoman fare; I’ve had better Greek/Turkish food elsewhere, and the service left something to be desired, as did the 12.5% service charge automatically added to the bill. Looking at customer reviews here, it seems that I’m not alone. That said, this didn’t dampen our spirits; I certainly think that we’d have been hard-pushed to find anything better in central London on a Saturday night at short… Read More »One for : The Travellers

Shall we play a game?

How about Global Thermonuclear War? About eighteen months ago, I mentioned a game called Darwinia from a small UK software company called Introversion Software. Not content with their success (Darwinia won some awards), they’ve now released their latest offering, a Wargames-esque game of nuclear armageddon called Defcon. Rather good, and very, very pretty, though with less humour than the Nuclear War card game from Flying Buffalo.

So very tired

The insomnia kicked in with a vengeance last night – I was wide awake at 0330, and didn’t manage to get back to sleep. What are the chances of me remaining awake during this afternoon’s committee meeting?

A close shave

As mentioned in previous posts, we’re putting up a shed this weekend. Believe it or not, this is actually on the critical path to getting the nursery sorted out before the garklet arrives (erect shed, move paint tins from library cupboard to shed, move computer into library cupboard, turn former computer room into nursery). The shed got delivered this afternoon, slightly later than I’d hoped, and I can now breath a huge sigh of relief. You see, when we took down the previous shed, and I measured the plot and realised that we had enough space to fit a 7’x7′… Read More »A close shave

Shed raising/razing

Was lego your favourite childhood toy? Did you enjoy building forts and dens when younger? Are you handy with a hammer? We’re going to be putting up a new shed in our garden at Gark Villa next weekend (7-8th October), and if conditions are favourable, take down the old shed as well. Given Isobel’s increasingly ‘delicate condition’, this is a thinly-veiled call for volunteers. In return, we’ll feed you and ply you with good beer. Anyone interested? ps: apologies for the late notice – I only got a delivery date from the shed company yesterday afternoon!

Making links

Some years ago, back when I was in sixth form and trying to decide what I wanted to study at University, the BBC broadcast a Horizon documentary on novel interfaces for computers, which was presented by Douglas Adams and Tom Baker. The documentary presented a future information system in which you could follow links between documents, images and videos, with software “agents” that helped you find things. More than anything else, it was a novel documentary by itself; how better to show what a new information system might be like, than to film the documentary as if it were being… Read More »Making links

(Not) in glorious Supermarionation

Thanks to , I’ve now seen SuperThunderStingCar, the rather affectionate Pete and Dud parody of all things Gerry Anderson from Not Only…But Also, for the second time in fifteen years. For the UWSF&FS folk, this was shown at a couple of the video weekends back when Mike was running them in the early 90s.

A deplorable drop in standards

I’m not the only person to have posted about this recently (Charlie has, for a start), but I think that this is a matter that affects us all. While it’s understandable that the powers that be should want to see a continuous improvement in standards, this latest proposal is nothing short of ridiculous. If we take an cumulative average over the last couple of centuries, the rate of increase in the pass rate lies somewhere below 2% per year, but all of a sudden we’re being asked to accept a sudden increase of over 30%. No doubt we’ll see the… Read More »A deplorable drop in standards

Shed razing/raising

Fancy a weekend of destruction? Handy with a wrecking bar, a hammer, or a screwdriver? We’ve got two sheds in our garden at Gark Villa, both of which have seen better days and at least one of which is surplus to requirements, so we’re planning a orgy of mayhem and chaos over the August bank holiday weekend (that’s the 26th-27th August for the calendrically challenged like myself) in which we’re hoping to demolish both sheds and put up a replacement that’s more secure and less likely to collapse. Given ‘s, ahem, ‘delicate condition’, we could do with a bit of… Read More »Shed razing/raising