i went with loic (the frenchman flatmate), his co-worker yannis (swedish) and 2 of his swedish friends to some mediterranean restaurant last night. it was decent. it had a family run sort of feel. it was also apparently some girl’s birthday (turns out 3 girls) so the staff organized a singing of “happy birthday”. i wonder if they got performance rights clearance for that? of course, after singing, he turned on the music and coerced them to dance. the original girl even got up on her chair. she clearly didn’t have a problem with the situation. it was marginally entertaining. i should have taken my camera.
after eating, we went down to meet another of yannis’ swedish friends (some girl who has apparently just moved here.) and went to o’neill’s. it’s an irish chain pub. there was a decent amount of people in there even with it costing p4 to get in. that’s a little unusual since i haven’t seen any other pubs charging for entry. of course, this was more a bar than a pub since there was a dance floor and incredibly loud music (mostly older american pop crap). they did have a techo-remix of “hey baby” (the original was by bruce channel. . it’s interesting that none of the pages listing the lyrics for the “new” version reference the original author.)
yannis’ 2 swedish friends are in town to see covenant. a swedish electro-pop band apparently similar to kraftwerk. how can you not check out a band reviewed by a site called “vampire magazine”? surely it won’t be sold out on a sunday?
it wasn’t terribly exciting. the area around upper street in islington is fairly busy on the weekends. it’s also been good weather (i think the high over that past 2 days was 73f) the past couple of days so all the restaurants have the fronts open and seats outside. today it’s raining. hopefully, it will be a nice day tomorrow for the final premier league matches.
here’s 2 interesting links that were posted to slashdot.
improv everywhere at best buy. a bunch of people got similar looking clothes to the best buy employees and then filled the store. of course, the real best buy managers start freaking out.
babybot: a one armed robot that learns to interact with objects on the table in front of it. it does seem like the best way forward towards better robots would be simple systems that can learn. the advantage over a human is that once you’ve taught one, you can easily duplicate it.
i have setup liferea, a rss feed reader for linux. it seems like a better way to interact with the daily news sites and blogs. i know this isn’t anything earth shattering since these types of apps have been around for quite some time now. it’s really only good if they post the text of the articles in the feed. maybe this will actually lead to me reading joe’s blog more consistently. there’s obviously feed readers for other platforms, but i wouldn’t know.
i’m sure it’s bad form to slam a bunch of non-related things into a single blog post, but i really don’t care.
maybe i should take the opportunity of this gloomy day to fill in some of the tech posts i’ve been queueing. still haven’t sorted out where to stay in manchester. i did find this “helpful” site. it’s not looking good. maybe i should just go to liverpool and take a short train ride for the match. it probably would have been a good idea to find that site right after i got the ticket. oh well.
update: great, 25,000 celtic fans traveling to the match isn’t a good sign. i guess that’s why all the hotels seem to be booked. looks like it’s near by city or winging it and hope for some crap hotel that doesn’t do internet reservations.