I had Anna wait at the end of the longest runway at the climbing park last weekend. It wasn't 60m (typo), but 60" high, and probably 200m long. The landing at the end was hard and fast, but the view from the top as you step off into the air above the trees...

Spotted earlier from on the B3TA board, this is one of the funniest things I have ever seen.

Awesome

Hey Dave, I have no idea if you've ever played it, but I want to share with you something that has kept me going through many many nights over the last... erm... twenty years.  Its a card game called Shithead (I've heard Ozzies call it President though I've just Googled and found something completely different.  Shithead Googles with the wrong rules too.*) and its one of the top three or four games I've ever played.  It goes like this.

Two to many players can play. You need two decks, from which jokers must be stripped. Shuffle the decks together.  Dealer deals clockwise : four cards face down which players cannot look at, then four cards face up for everyone, and then another four cards face down for all, and one card in the middle which stares the discard pile.  You are allowed to pick up and sort the eight cards you have access to.  You can sort the cards and place your top four cards face UP on the four cards you have face down.

The order of play is to lay a suitable card or cards to the discard pile and then pick up from the deck.  You must hold at least four cards in your hand where possible.  You must play higher or equal to the card last played except on a seven (you must play seven or lower on a seven).  Ace is the highest, two is a wildcard which can play on and be played on by anything, and ten reverses the order of play.  You can play multiples of cards up to a maximum of four on the discard pile.  When four of the same cards have been played, then they and the rest of the discard pile are put away for the duration of the game.  The person who puts away the discard pile with "four of those" gets to play again, after picking up if necessary. If you are unable to match or beat the last card played, then you have to pick up ALL the cards on the discard pile.

Once the last card is played from your hand, you can play your face up cards in any order you like.  Once they are gone, you are forced to play your cafe down cards blind. The one who is left with cards remaining is the Shithead, and can sometimes be required to forfeit something (go make the coffee etc).

* If you google Shithead there are a myriad of variations on the net.  There seems to be a very popular variation with three cards played at the start and requiring only one deck of cards.  It might be worthwhile looking into that too. Enjoy :-)

Good party last night :-) Katrina from the office was 30, and she hired a little restaurant called Charcos, off Kings Street. The usual suspects were there, though there was less of a turn-out than I had expected. They seem to have great food though... I'm going to check it out soon I think. Now, on to the serious question... what the fuck are we going to do for our wedding anniversary???

Came home from the match this evening a little worse for the wear. I think I have a slight hangover. Ireland lost on penalties, but you didn't want to be reminded of that. The athmosphere in the pub was incredible :-) Anyway, while I was fucking around here, I designed a graphically lighter version of the site which can be saved as a preference. Check this out <old deprecated link>... when you come back the next time it'll know how you want the site to look. Click it again to switch back to the previous look. The thing here is not to dwell on how the lite version looks, rather how the mechanism works. Sometimes I amaze even me ;-)

Hmmm, I haven't posted anything here in quite a while, for which I apologise. I've been pretty busy for the last couple of weeks, and not had much chance to play. We were in Germany last week, and it was fantastic :-) The weather was really nice while we were there, staying mostly in the mid twenties, though there was a thunder storm one evening to clear the air. We were over for Sibel and Michi's wedding, which went apparently without a hitch, and now Sibel & Michi are married, and probably still in Bali on their honeymoon. The wedding was pretty cool, and in some ways like ours. Sibel is of Turkish descent, and Michi is German, so there was a lot of each culture there. All the usual crowd were at the wedding (with the exception of Kerstin who is in New York), and it was good to catch up. Anna looked stunning, and we got seriously drunk :-) I took a great picture of Flo being really stoned, which I have to show to him :-) I'll get some photos scanned and uploaded soon. Actually, I probably won't, its such a drag scanning photos. I have to check out getting a negative scanner sometime. Speaking of cameras, this is my birthday present :-)))
Did I mention that it was my birthday on Wednesday? Well, now I'm 31. This is my fourth decade. I've been wondering over the last few weeks if I'd have a problem with being 31. Thirty was kind of cool, but 31 seems to be a more established "old" age, which isn't cool at all. But fuck it, I don't feel any different, and I'm certainly not going to go around acting differently, so I guess it isn't a problem for me :-)
I've been watching Ireland in the World Cup again. My long-time dislike of soccer gets dampened around this time every four years, and I can be seen in crowds cheering at men in green shirts kicking a ball around a field somewhere. The match against Germany was brilliant - I was in Germany ;-) Anyway, we're probably not going to last longer than tomorrow's match, so I have to make the most of it. I can't remember what else is happening, it seems that I need more coffee.

Tired :-) We went to Herrenchiemsee today, which is a fantastic old castle built by the mad King Ludwig II. Its modelled on Louis' palace at Versailles, and has many tributes to Louis... MANY - it comes across pretty strongly that Ludwig was a little obsessed by Louis. Anyway, have to go, beer is getting warm ;-)

I'm listening to Music of the Millennium at the moment, and its all nostalgia :-) Songs like Phil Collins' In the Air Tonight, Beautiful South's A Little Time, and Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights... I have to get home so I can play soon :-)

Speaking of the internet ruling... have a look at Broken Saints - for the first time in a very long while, I've come across something that makes the web be interesting. You know how it all gets the same? You look at some site and think "thats nice, looks like {insert one from a myriad of similar sites here} but with a different colour". I hate that. I've been looking for something new and great for a while now, and this is it. Of course, its ephemeral; once you've seen it, there's no more, but hell... the novelty value alone is worth the download time (for those of you without DSL ;-)

At last... it works again. It works in Internet Explorer, it works in Mozilla, it works in Netscape, and its W3C standards compliant :-)
Today was pretty cool - we went out to Kew again, and took the kite with us. Unfortunately the wind was too strong for us to fly it (and fucking bizarre too - it was going around in circles, then dying, then going straight, backwards, forwards, all over the place), so we didn't get much chance to play. The damn thing broke too, at the point where the vertical strut is held into the top of the kite, the canvas ripped slightly and the strut popped out. Have to fix that soon. We'll try again when the wind is better :-)