Happy New Year one and all.

Had a very pleasant few days away from a computer (and with the lovely lilitufire), both at her mother's outside Cardiff, then at her house in Edinburgh and then mose recently with tobyaw, kateaw, qidane and others in St Andrews.

My flight from Edinburgh to London is now boarding - will probably post again from Heathrow tomorrow en route to Tokyo

First up, and thanks both to haggisthesecond and ljwin32_sema for the reminders it's:

Happy Birthday papijo

Hope you are having a good day!

In other news, life continues to be reasonably manic here - averaging 14 hour days (including some work on at least one (and often two) day(s) at the weekend), 70-90 emails a day (usually checked around 0630 for the first time and near ( Read more... )

Courtesy of pisica the news of another sad loss to the British airwaves (and the Internet, more recently) comes in the shape of the passing of John Peel while on holiday in Peru.

As someone commented on pisica's journal he managed to combine being a great DJ (with very broad musical tastes) and our favourite uncle at the same time. I cannot put it better.

"Strong Earthquake Shakes Northern Japan"

Well, that was entertaining... 27 floors up in my office, a 6.8 on the Japanese 7 point scale for earthquakes, fortunately centred a reasonable distance (200km) away in Niigata prefecture.

EDIT: That's now the third big aftershock (one, two, three). Had they not turned the elevators off, I might be ( Read more... )

( Common interests meme... )

I thought this one might be interesting - since it does at least tell you something more about me - albeit tangentially.

( The Unique Things meme... )

You can watch a nice animation of this large typhoon (number 22) that is currently depositing vast amounts of rain on us (courtesy of the Japan Meteorological Association). Apparently it is the largest in a decade to hit Tokyo.

Its path up to Tokyo can be seen here together with it's projected path for the next few hours ( Read more... )

We've just taken the move of implementing a standard 50 hour week from October to December and April to June. Anyone care to swap for my job ( Read more... )

( Not at all biased... )

Lisa and I are now in Nagasaki on Japan's southern island of Kyushu.  Tokyo's Haneda airport was a zoo as ever - separate lines to check-in and then again to check in your baggage do not help, but nor did only a couple of hours sleep (due only in part to my slightly out of kilter body clock ( Read more... )