I’ve had another great weekend in Sheffield, seeing people that I don’t see often enough and enjoying the (largely) slower pace of life. Having said that, given that my weekends in London often consist of me spending hours reading web-comics, drinking lots of Pepsi Max and replying to emails it’s not like my time away from work is usually too frenetic. Still, driving through the countryside to have lunch with my parents and sisters reminded me how lucky I was to live with the Peak District on my doorstep for fifteen years.

It was great to catch up with my friend Andrew on Friday. He, like me, is currently enjoying the delights of a tiny market town (Boston in his case, Northallerton in mine). We compared notes (Northallerton wins for curry houses but Boston has a cinema) and I even lifted my informal no alcohol policy of the past few months to enjoy a few pints of Black Sheep and Landlord. Andrew has had his first week on wards as a trainee doctor. Apparently it’s not very much like hit TV show Scrubs, which I am disappointed about. If anybody is good at fixing things and mopping floors and is looking for a nemesis then let me know.

Saturday was the usual homecoming treat of a meal out at the wonderful San Lorenzo (much busier than usual so we got to see what the upstairs is like) with Stephen, followed by him thrashing me at snooker and pool. We ate jelly beans and discussed economics, music and creativity. I think the seed of an idea for a new project was well and truly sown in my mind. Today I put it to the person who would end up doing the bulk of the work and they had been thinking along the same lines. This could be exciting! More details if/when we get round to doing something.

Anyway, back to Sheffield. There’s something about its size, the people, the locations, the surroundings. A lot of it, to be sure, is familiarity. But I think there’s more to it than that and I think there’s more Sheffield in my future than just the occasional visit.

Somehow, the awesome preview of Spore from last year completely passed me by.  I watched it today.  It looks, well, pretty extraordinary.  Of course, it would be quite easy to make a fairly limited game and make it look like it had infinite possibilities with a fairly carefully constructed demo.  But, somehow, I don’t think this is the case here.  Spore looks like it could easily absorb days of my time.  Good job it hasn’t been released just yet!  The video is here.

Via Lifehacker, I came across Scott Berkun’s idea of Scolidays. Basically, he’s come up with twelve personal themed holiday days for 2006 with things to try and achieve or think about for each one. Some of them (silly hat day) are a bit random but I really, really like the idea of setting aside time to do things that are important and it’s a nice excuse to have a holiday day in the middle of a bank holiday-free month. I always give up part of my salary to buy five extra days of annual leave each year so I figure that it makes sense for me to designate these as my personal themed holiday days. And, yes, I’m actually planning to book these off work:

• June 23rd – Communication day. Catch up on all my non-urgent letters, write letters to my more technophobic friends and call those I haven’t spoken to in far too long.
• July 24th – Day of insane cooking. Try any kind of weird recipes that I’ve seen on the web and thought looked “interesting”. First on the list is carrot cake and milk soup. OK, that’s not exactly a recipe but it’ll be nice. Probably.
• September 18th – Favour day. A day entirely devoted to helping my friends with stuff they’re doing, be it designing leaflets, shifting gravel, whatever. Get your requests in early!
• October 20th – Day of reflection. What am I doing? Where am I going? Am I happy? What should I do more or less of? All that and more to be pondered on this exciting non-stop rollercoaster of introspection.
• November 24th – Creativity day. The aim: to explore one creative urge and produce something complete by the end of the day, be it a short story, a piece of music or something else entirely.

I’ll see how they go and figure out the 2007 calendar at the end of the year. Maybe a bit sadly, I’m actually very excited by this whole idea!

Yes, that is really where I’m staying at the moment. If only I’d brought some kind of turntable then I could have a funky discoball effect going on.

Anyway, today hasn’t been a very exciting day all in all. I think, on balance, that my to-do list actually went down a bit (it’s been increasing steadily for at least the past week) as I got a good solid run at things (i.e. everyone else was in a workshop all morning and couldn’t ask me to do more stuff). I’m back on the healthy eating regime (and, boy, is that easier when I slope off to my hotel room in the evening rather than going out for dinner) and feeling rather sharper for it already.

This evening I plan to put my toe back in the water of gaming with an hour or two of Max Payne on my laptop (can you believe it – I’ve never actually played it before). I hope it’s up to it…

It was about this time last year that I was about to be thrust headlong into a battle with Adobe’s customer service department in an effort to get my Photoshop Elements 3 upgrade delivered. The exchange included this memorable line:

It has been reshipped for you, so it will come within an amount of days.

Anyway, Photoshop Elements 4 is out now so time to do the whole thing over again. It hasn’t got off to a promising start, though. Apparently my address didn’t conform to Adobe’s address standards which prompted it to remove my flat number and change the last line to “London, London”. Mmmm… standards.

That finally resolved (by changing the order of my address – I hope the Royal Mail will figure it out) I purchased the thing, using my free delivery coupon. Except that doesn’t appear to have worked (it told me it had, though!). So already an email is zooming its way towards customer support. Way to go.

Seriously, I’m learning to dread the Adobe online store :-(

I’m not saying that my hotel room is odd. Well, yes, I am. I’ve been staying in this hotel most weeks for the past five months. I hadn’t stayed in room 3. Until tonight. They’ve gone a bit mad with the wicker. There’s a wicker mirror. There are wicker hats. On the walls. I’ll post photos tomorrow.

Oh, also, my boss told me that he googled my name this weekend and came across some old student radio sketches. I don’t know if he found this blog but, on the off chance, hello Chris!

Note to self about making scrambled egg when you have run out of milk: Paul, do not attempt to make scrambled egg when you have run out of milk.

I think this has been the slobbiest weekend I’ve had in a long, long time. It’s been great though! I played a tonne (yes, specifically a *metric* tonne) of poker on Friday night and Saturday afternoon (not much to show for my time but a much, much greater appreciation of how to play a truly massive multi-table tournament) and I spent yesterday evening and this morning reading *all* of Ctrl-Alt-Del. (The sad thing is, I read the episode from Feb 14th this year and thought it was a genuinely good idea.)

Actually, this shows an interesting facet of my personality. When I find something new that I like a lot, I aboslutely *must* start from the very beginning. I do it with cartoons (Userfriendly took me about a week, I think), TV shows (hence why I still have outstanding Buffy, Angel, B5, Firefly and Lost to watch), computer games (I love the look of Zelda but could I play Zelda XV or whatever they’re up to now without having played all the early NES games; I need to understand the story arc, damnit!) and, hell, even with music (I tend to go a bit anal on the back-catalogue purchasing). Oh and books too (hello Riftwar saga).

Anyway, there’s no real point to this (other than to say please don’t look back at the punctuation of that last paragraph to check if you saw what you think you just did). Oh, except that I think it might be time for me to buy a games console. My last one was a Megadrive. I hear things have come on a bit since then. Advice please?

Robert X. Cringely has written another fascinating column, this time about the future of content distribution.  I have to admit that I’ve always been a little sceptical about the ability for carriers to keep up with bandwidth demands, even without the idea of getting the internet to shoulder the burden of almost all media distribution.  Robert’s case for P2P distribution is pretty strong, and I have to say that the business model of Peer Impact looks fascinating (though, ugh, Microsoft DRM and Windows-only for now).  It will be interesting to see if the penny begins to drop…

I’m a little behind on my blog-reading, but over at Writers Block Live, Mike Evangelist has posted a video of possibly the cheesiest Apple keynote moment ever… the mock funeral for Mac OS 9.  I’m still struggling to come to terms with the fact that, yes, they actually did this.  Wow.