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Monday, 12 July 2004

post-weekend

OK, I have to confess... it's happened again. A little while ago, Beth bought me a computer game - one of her friends had been playing it, and recommended it to her. If I could be said to have any weakness (no... please don't start making a list!) it would be my inability to stop thinking about something like that until it's finished.

It's been a fine family weekend, nevertheless. We attended the Raynham Way Community Centre's Summmer Fayre on Saturday afternoon, at the beginning of which Christopher, with the rest of his pre-school, sang some songs (short and low-quality mp3 excerpts here [218kB MP3] and here [134kB MP3])

A few photos of this event are in the gallery.

Apart from that, we ended up staying in a fair bit, because of the rain - we watched more Discovery Channel on Sunday - our favourite programme is currently Scrapheap Challenge, which contains plenty of light-hearted ingenuity.

The only other activity of note was Saturday evening, when Beth and I drove up to Stratford to see some of her friends, who'd arranged a get-together up there. Although we'd been invited, we werent intending to go, but on a whim (and Christopher's request to stay at Nana and Grandad's) we set off at about six, and arrived just before half-past seven.

It was a pleasant surprise for them to see Beth, but these things never go as planned - a fair percentage of the evening that we had was spent in the company of a recently immigrated Cuban lady who was clearly desparate to enroll us on one of those motivational schemes, as a young, intelligent (and presumably naive) couple. I wasn't, unfortunately, going to make it easy for her, and between us Beth and I (well, OK, me, really, using my standard technique of apparent stupidity and tangential questioning) managed to grind her down to the bare facts - who she was working for, what exactly she was trying to do, and who had put her up for this (her rather suspicious husband-to-be, it would appear - a weasly, unsettled-looking man with whom I immediately formed a close mistrust).

Here's a long yet informative article by someone who's been 'bitten' by this company - my knowledge of the technicalities is very limited, but it's interesting to discover how they work... hopefully I can pass on these 'caveats' about making such a decision.

Well... I've been writing this blog entry (on and off) for about four days, so I'd better get on and post it!

Before I do, though, here - as ever - are my personal favourite web distractions from the past few days:

• http://www.smalltime.com/dictator.html - Computers are getting smarter all the time... they can even guess what dictator or sit-com character (eh?) you're thinking of! How handy.
• http://www.inmemoriam-thegame.com/gb/gam1.htm - In Memoriam: the computer game I've been playing (which, thankfully, I have now completed!). It's an ingenious and - at the moment - unique experience, involving emails, internet searchs (which often, irritatingly, return 'spoiler' pages among the results!) and fiddling around with a PC for hours on end. Just my kind of tea, then! If you'd like to borrow the game, please let me know!

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Posted by james at July 12, 2004 8:45 AM

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Posted by: Joe at February 4, 2005 4:45 PM

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