Abstract thought for the day – it’s actually really hard to do exactly 70 on the motorway. I think there are three main reasons for this:

1. Physically it seems hard to maintain exactly the right pressure on the throttle. I’m not sure why this should be, when I don’t have a problem nailing 30 without looking, perhaps it’s just the gear ratios of the car!
2. Practically, motorways often go up hill and down dale, and it’s easy to slip up or down 5mph before you’ve really realised. Then of course when you come across a slower vehicle, you often have to back off until you can pull out.
3. Psychologically, if you’re overtaking, especially with a car 6 inches from your boot, or rapidly bearing down, it’s oh so easy just to put on a little spurt to get past the other car more quickly.

But I did notice some interesting effects:
Firstly, you get overtaken. A lot. And often pretty convincingly. You think the speed limit was nearer 80 if you didn’t know better.
Secondly, you hardly ever overtake anyone else, and even they are normally lorries or coaches doing 65 or so. Oh yes, there’s the occasional driver who feel most comfortable down in the 50s, but they are a dying breed, I think.
Finally, I often found myself in an empty patch of road – because I was never really catching anyone, and everyone passing me did so pretty quickly, there were several occasions where the nearest cars where a good 100m in front or behind me. This was often a large group of cars all moving together, but not a single one immediately around me.

For obvious reasons I am not going to talk about the speed I often travel on the motorways, but nailing the speedo at exactly 70 was quite an interesting experience.

Ben’s getting really good at sleeping now – he has only needed feeding in the middle of the night once in the last couple of weeks!
He does tend to wake up and give a couple of squawks in the night, but then he gets himself back off to sleep, and we don’t even have to get out of bed. Hopefully as he gets older he’ll stop waking up at all overnight!

Must give a quick mention to The street bible by Rob Lacey. It’s a complete reworking/summary of the Holy Bible in modern (street) language for those who “have never read the Bible, or have read it too much“.
I have personally found it quite inspiring, particularly how he works the four gospels into a single narrative (although the disciples being called “Drew”, “Jim”, “Jonno”, etc was a litle disconcerting at first!!)

Is it still called writer’s block when it’s not something you have to do? I mean, there was all the to-do over J K Rowling’s alleged writer’s block with Harry Potter V, and I certainly stared blankly at a screen for hours when trying to dream up phrases for my thesis. Actually, that’s not entirely true – the main problem with writing my thesis was never quite getting around to it (too many websites to visit, y’see), rather than not knowing what to write when I actually did (although this was still occasionally a problem).

But if you’re doing something entirely voluntarily, and which nobody is going to read anyway, is it still writer’s block, or can you simply think of nothing to say?

In any case, I’ve decided that blogs are really just modern day diaries/journals, which also happen to be publically accessible anywhere in the world. I, of course, operate a self-censorship policy as people I know might well read this, which could mean
a) I’d get in trouble (or at least embarrased), or
b) they might.
Neither of which are particularly favourible outcomes, I think you’d agree. That said, some blogs I’ve read (and not necessarily anonymous ones) seemingly don’t operate this very simple policy.

Nothing particularly to say (although this is nothing new), but a silly amount of time to kill while A feeds the little ‘un. Food this evening is curry, but one which we’d cooked up in a batch and frozen, so ‘cooking’ it actually just means dumping it in a saucepan and heating it ’till it bubbles lots. Most easy.

Did actually have fun yesterday – it was the centinary celebration of the University of Leeds, and loads of the alumni can back to pay their respects (and get free alcohol), including Nicholas Witchell (although I didn’t see him – but why couldn’t Cat Deeley be a Leeds graduate, eh?). Young Ben came in with us, and met my work colleagues and friends for this first time, which I think he enjoyed (hard to tell with a 15 week old, although he wasn’t crying which means he didn’t mind too much).

Otherwise life goes on. Was a little disappointed that Jenson Button didn’t really get a look in this afternoon after securing pole. I thought he was in with with a chance for the first 8 or 9 laps, but then it was all over (well, ok, so he came second – but 30 seconds behind Schumacher?). Was nice to see Louise on the box again though.

Really catching up on my (long) back catalg of films I’ve been meaning to see but never quite got around to. Have now chalked up both High Fidelity (which was fine – nothing special, but nothing bad either) and This is Spinal Tap, which was absolutely fantastic, and about ten times better than I was expecting!

Any, as usual no time to write properly, baby to feed, courseworks to mark, that kind of thing..

Well, no Empire Records review, but I have done lots of other exciting things…

First of all, I’ve finally made this website dynamic, which means what you’re reading is a page generated on the fly from my database! You may well wonder what the advantage of this is, and that would be a good question – the two that spring to mind is that I can now put in some sort of search facility, should any crazy fool decide to search my blog or reviews. The second is that you can choose to view only the review you’re interested in, rather than having to download the whole lot, which should be faster.

This did entail me moving my webhost away from hostcolor (who I’m afraid to say were most unhelpful when I was trying to sort out my update strategy) to 34sp.com (who I’ve delighted to say have been wonderful). The setup was extremely fast, and the small DNS hiccup was very quickly resolve by support team responded almost instantly! Anyway, 34sp.com can be found over to the left, down at the bottom of the links section. And their basic hosting (which include CGI and MYSQL) is just 15 squids a year. Bargain!

And, I’ve finally seen Pulp Fiction. Yup – it’s taken me 10 years, but that one chalked up. Interesting film – again need to do a review with my thoughts. Anyway, quite enough for one day – better go feed Ben.

Just a note to say that I finally got around to watching Empire Records – what a great film. It definitely deserves a review in it’s own right, so I’ll aim to do that maybe later on today.

Ben status – about 5.10am wake up, which isn’t too bad (and is a lot better than 2am!)

Horrah – Ben slept through the night again. If he does it again tonight then it’s time to crack open the bubbly, me thinks.
Also, watched Bruce Almighty last night, and really enjoyed it actually. Morgan Freeman did a great job as God, even if Jim Carrey’s character was a little unbelievable.

Apparantly no danger of little ‘un sleeping through the night – back to good ‘ol 3am and 4am wake up calls. The only benefit is that he does happily keep going until 7 or 7.15, whereas when he sleeps through the night it’s nearer 6 or 6.15.

Anyway, submitted the final final copy of my thesis yesterday, so now all I have to do is wait to be handed the bit of paper come July. It’s a good feeling.