Kew was packed today, but fun anyway. I took an interesting shot of some airplane flying overhead, framed by a canopy of leaves with a hole in the middle :-) Our feet hurt now, which probably serves us right for walking around bearfoot all day... though what the hell, the grass felt pretty good :-)

There's a scene in the last episode of the second DVD of The West Wing, where it has become evident that the president has become too concerned with getting re-elected next time around, and lost his political fire. Leo and Jed argue about this and Leo shows the president what is going on. Then they decide to get back in the game and stop being so middle-of-the-road. It rocks. John Spencer and Martin Sheen have a magic between them that I haven't seen on screen for a long time. I saw this at about 3 this morning, and was wrecked, and therefore susceptible to being sucked in to the feeling of the moment. I had to see, so I just looked at it again. And again. And I'm going to watch it now.

The West Wing rocks. I'm very tired, and I'm going to be cranky in the morning. Again.

OK, so I haven't updated here for a while. AOL has been getting a serious thrashing in the news this week. Out COO is resigning (though implications in the news are that he was ousted), our stock price is even lower than ever, and the merger with Time Warner has been viewed a huge mistake. Just to re-inforce that, Anna has just made me coffee and given me some sections of the Sunday Times (the ones she doesn't want to read), and the business section has a picture of Bugs Bunny and Connie together, with the caption "That's all folks. The merger that became the worst deal in history". My understanding of it though is that we're doing pretty well. Yeah, revenues are down from advertising, and yes, its true that there isn't yet the kind of leveraging of synergies we were talking about before the merger. But numbers are up, and although we under-performed on our expectations, it was because of a once off payment to adjust to new accounting rules.
Enough about that. There's fuck all else going on really. We're going to see the Lambeth Country Fair today, which might be fun. Oh, and there's an article in the Sunday Times magasine which says that milk is actually bad for you. It may help to cause some of the following : Breast cancer, heart disease, prostate cancer, allergies and the continuing development of type-1 diabetes. Just to help things get better, stopping drinking milk can cause a calcium deficiency resulting in osteoperosis and the easy breakage of bones. Schweet :-) More info at www.notmilk.com.

Tired. We went out for a couple of drinks last night with Scally, Max and Andrew. Going to the V&A with them today. Looks like my new zoom lens is going to get its first outing :-)
Its an interesting time in work at the moment. I've been getting some technical work done, which I hadn't really done in a while. I hate to say it, but OS/X rocks! Strange happenings and movements are imminent also, more about that at the appropriate time...

Went to the dentist for a checkup this morning. She's going to fit a crown on the root canal I had done a few months ago, as the outer wall had shattered recently. Lovely. Work is mad at the moment, one of my team is on holidays, so I'mpicking up his development work. Its more fun than I thought, but I need more time than I have. There are too many conference calls... as usual.

The music running through my head : The Miracle by Queen. Specifically the last repeated line..."The time will come one day you'll see when we can all be friends"

::sigh:: I'm tired. Work was frustating today, as a couple of things I wanted to happen didn't actually happen. It fucks me off how badly some parts of the organisation can treat other parts of the same organisation with such disdain and lack of respect, particularly when they keep on saying that the badly treated one is their most important priority.* I'm not a xenophobe... really, I'm not... but Americans fuck me off. I won another eBay auction today, for a remote release for my camera. My UV filter arrived yesterday, the polarising filter the day before, and I should be getting a new set of colour filters tomorrow. eBay is just fantastic.
We went to see Murder by Numbers yesterday, and it turned out to be a better movie than I expected. Michael Pitt is fantastic. He projects menace convincingly, while tempering it with a massive amount of self-uncertainty. Sandra Bullock rocks too, in that way that she always does. I think she's a really underrated actress, who should be given more serious roles than those she has had before. This movie goes a little way twoards dealing with that.
There's not much else happening at the moment really. Anna is getting her final submission ready for college, and it looks like its going to be pretty good. But then, we knew that would happen :-)
*Thats what they say to analysts anyway.