Fun on the Sand

We arrived in Porthtowan earlier today and had dinner in the Blue Bar. The food was pretty good, with very generous portions, but the highlight of the evening was the local who drove a short-wheelbase Shogun onto the beach and became stuck in the dry sand. 

The Blue Bar affords a view across the bay so we had ring-side seats for the entertainment. Realising he was stuck, he tried a bit of brute force and successfully buried his rear axle in the sand. Ten minutes of pushing, jumping and generally inept attempts to free the stricken vehicle by the driver and his two mates failed utterly, but eventually a dozen people strolled over and pushed him clear, then pushed him out again when he got stuck fifteen feet further down the beach, then again as he failed to get up the ramp to solid land.

All in all a good night's entertainment, especially when viewed from a warm bar with food and beer to hand.

A Tonic for Tallinn

Returning from Tallinn for a short break, I have found that the perfect way to recover is a quiet pub and a large plate of Toad-in-the-Hole with mashed potato, green beans and onion gravy. Very nice.

Exeter's Working Environment

This morning I am working from various coffee shops in Exeter (holiday starts tomorrow). Costa is quiet and has free Wifi (albeit limited to 60 minutes a day) so I'm taking advantage and enjoying a rather nice Earl Grey tea. 

This branch of Costa is located within a branch of Waterstones, combining at a stroke two brilliant elements of our cultural landscape; tea and books. Excellent. If only my battery was longer-lasting and my laptop screen was fully functional (it is flickering badly and, occasionally, cutting out altogether). Bring on the new laptop!

The AA

Cars are a burden. If they aren't drinking petrol and oil they're wearing out or breaking, often at the most inconvenient times or when they can cause maximum expense. In many ways, they're like computers - absolutely vital to modern life and enormously useful, but capricious and determined to cause problems wherever they can.

Today mine refused to start and it took the AA, a new battery and £64 to get it going again. The AA were superb - they're far more reliable than my car - arriving only 20 minutes after I called them and fixing the problem promptly.

Early Morning, Tallinn

Tallinn at 6am is fairly quiet, but not much quieter than it is at midnight. The clubs, including the one in the basement of the apartment building where our company maintains a flat, were still open and there were punters milling around the entrance. The only cars moving at 6am are cabs but they still have to dodge the trams, which seem intent on picking up early morning victims amongst the less cautious taxi drivers. Survival of the fastest?

Friday Night in Tallinn ...

... and the pubs are filling, mostly with ex-pats. And the golf is on the TV and the smelly Russian is back. I think I'll head back to the apartment...

Muslims Against Mickey

The Telegraph is carrying a story about another mad Saudi Arabian cleric, Sheikh Muhammad Munajid, calling for the death of corrupt westerners. Munajid, however, is clearly finding it difficult to distinguish between fiction and reality  (a side effect of reading dodgy religious texts, maybe?) - his target is Mickey Mouse (link). 

I wonder if there are other fictional characters he'd like to dispose of? Should we be putting bodyguards on Sherlock Holmes (drug-crazed detective), Billy Bunter (jam-eating hedonist of Greyfriars) or Moby Dick (dangerous albino whale)? What about Dracula - he is pretty nasty - does Munajid want to do away with him? Or that God bloke from the Bible who wipes out whole cities in some stories? All very dangerous, I'm sure you'll agree.

Basketball

I'm in Hell Hunt for a quiet dinner and, having stuck to the snacks, it wasn't too bad. Unfortunately Estonia are playing Latvia (Basketball) and they've put the match on the projector making the place rather noisy and unpleasant. If it weren't for the fact that Molly's is likely to be infested with drunk football fans I'd move pubs.

Sky Broadband - No Download Limit!

SkyBroadband have dropped their fair usage policy (news article) on their 16Mb service which is bound to be of interest to Sky TV subscribers who use another ISP (although, confusingly, their website small-print still says "Max - Unlimited subject to Fair Use Policy"). 

Smelly Drinkers

I am trying to eat my dinner, here in Tallinn, and the guy at the next table is disturbing me by allowing his dreadful body odour to waft in my general direction. It is pretty disgusting and I will have to leave soon before I am infected.

Basso

Lunch today at Basso, a cafe/cocktail bar where I've previously only been for drinks. Not bad - penne with chicken and sundried tomatoes was very nice, and the creme brulee was also pretty good. 

I am not sure where to go for dinner - I think it is too soon to return to Texas Honky Tonk, so maybe one of the pubs, if my stomach can stand it.

Blogging for Glory

Back in the old days (early 2002) when I first started blogging I spent quite a lot of time ranting about various things. More recently this blog has tended to be a running commentary on my day-to-day experiences with occasional rant-ettes when something particularly annoys me and this is fine (although I suspect that it becomes rather boring for my reader) but it means I don't get to vent very often and I think this is probably bad for my health (well, not really, but I have to find a justification somewhere). 

So here we go again. I have added another blog to my list (link - I suggest you use an RSS reader to pick up new entries because they will probably not be regular enough to justify daily visits) where I can post longer, more considered, but still (hopefully) moderately entertaining rants about life's little problems. The first post is up (link) and I hope you will do me the honour of mooching on over for a look when you have time.

Downgrading to Upgrade

iPhone misery continues - I have found that with 2.10 software I can no longer attach photos to email messages, removing one of my principal sources of entertainment. This is the straw, I'm afraid, and with the camel's back completely buggered I will now revert to 2.0.2 and await 2.10.1 before upgrading again.

Happy in Texas

Texas Honky Tonk turned out to be pretty good, falling into the category of "good food, reasonably priced". A modest venue, the main course of chicken with spicy rice was tasty and robust, although the New York cheesecake was rather disappointing. Overall more hit than miss, and I will probably return.

On a side note, though, I am still searching for a decent dessert at a reasonable price. Bocca's creme brulee is very good (and not unreasonably expensive) but it's a fairly serious restaurant and I do not really want to visit it on my own. The pubs do not do desserts in any meaningful way so tomorrow I will try one of the restaurants on Rataskaevu in my continuing quest for a hot pudding.

Dinner

For this evening's culinary experiment, I will try the Texas Honky Tonk Cantina. As long as the food is less ridiculous than the name, it should be ok.

Dangers of the Bleeding Edge

My foray into version 2.10 of the iPhone OS has not been entirely successful. Yesterday's post about the stability of the email client and the speed of the contact list was broadly correct, but two fairly major bugs have since reared their heads:

1. The contact list loads quickly but is desperately and completely unstable if opened from the Home page, crashing every time within a few seconds and bombing completely after 9-12 seconds. Opening the contact list from an application (such as TruPhone) works perfectly well.
2. The Mail, Contacts and Calendar page in Settings is unavailable; it turns blue as normal when selected but then does nothing for a few seconds before bombing back to the Home page.

I have now two options:

1. Live with it and hope for an update that fixes the issues, or
2. Revert to a previous version of the OS.

Neither option is very appealing, but I think I'll see how it goes for a couple of days and, if I appear to be experiencing "unique" problems, I will roll back to 2.0.2. If there are loads of people reporting these problems then I think I will wait for an update on the assumption that it will arrive reasonably quickly...

iPhone Software Update 3

Downloaded and installed. Everything seems still to be working. Two things I have noticed so far:

1. The mail client is still not completely stable but it has definitely improved, and
2. The contact list is much, much faster to load and browse - big improvement.

Battery life is also supposed to have improved - more on that later. 

So should you upgrade to 2.10? Yes, because you own an iPhone and there's no point being at the bleeding edge of technology and style if you're running last week's software.

iPhone Software Update 2

Version 2.10 is available - downloading now...

iPhone Software Update

The next version of the iPhone software is due today and hopefully it will address some of the more obvious shortcomings (a stable email client would be nice). It isn't available yet, of course, because the lazy swines in California aren't up yet. More comment later...

Winter Draws Near

The weather might be a little unseasonal in the UK but at least the temperature is holding up; here in Tallinn it looks like 13 degrees might be as warm as it gets this month, and I can't see October being any better. If you're thinking of visiting, heavy coats are advisable because the autumn winds are starting to make things just a little too cold for comfort; you might wander around London in shirt sleaves but you probably would not want to do that in Tallinn.

Adventures in Airport Architecture

The new departure lounge at the South Terminal of Gatwick Airport is, I think, almost finished, which is just as well because the airport has only been open 50 years and I wouldn't want visitors to think that British construction projects were always late and over-budget. The new lounge is not too bad, as airport lounges go; it is air-conditioned, it has monitors to tell you how late your plane is, it has a horrible pub, it has shops and it has a games room where mindless cretins play banal video games with mind-numbingly annoying sounds that spill over into the otherwise quiet seating area. It is just as well that I have these entertainments to distract me because my plane is delayed by at least an hour and without something to occupy my time I might well go mad. 

Actually, madness has a certain appeal...

Beginner's Guide to Tallinn

I've been living in Tallinn, on and off, for about 4 months so I think I have a reasonable idea about what goes on in the city, what makes it tick. I have now published a collection of my more superficial impressions (link) which may, or may not, be of interest to potential visitors.

Rain

It has rained quite a lot in the last few days. Our garden, which is normally bone dry and dying in the summer, has been sodden all year and is now aiming for "lake" status. I think I'll buy a canoe...

Breakfast Update

We made it to Alresford only to find that the Agricultural Show had been abandoned because of the rain and the centre of town was completely full of disgruntled rural types. Caracoli (link) was packed but we managed to squeeze onto a table and grab croissants and coffee so the trip wasn't a complete loss. Back home soon for an afternoon on the sofa with a book, watching the rain and drinking hot tea.

Breakfast

I am at the gym in Southampton after an early morning workout and thoughts have now turned to breakfast. Choices are limited to traditional English breakfast fodder, none of which will be of a particularly high standard...

Excellent! Susie wants to go to the coffee shop (Caracoli) in Alresford - much better.

Posted with LifeCast

Natural History Museum, London

The Natural History Museum in London is only a year away from the opening of their new Darwin Centre 2 (link). I want to go and I have already made a note in the calendar. 

Economic Evolution

The Economist is one of my favourite news sources because their articles are well-written, sensible and thoughtful. Here is an example from this week's issue: Beetle Drive.

Google Chrome

I'm a sucker for new technology - phones, TVs, gadgets, email clients - but I'm particularly keen on new technology that's free, which is why Google's announcement yesterday of Chrome, their new browser, is of such interest.

I had a quick flick through their explanatory comic to see what they were aiming to deliver, and it looks really good. If they've really done what they say they've done then the browser market is in for a rough ride. It will be interesting to compare it to the new IE8 Beta (which I recently installed).

Quote of the Day

Two, today, both from General Sir Charles James Napier, who put down insurgencies in India and conquered various tribal territories in Pakistan.

You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.

He also offers advice about the pacification of a hostile population.

The best way to quiet a country is a good thrashing, followed by great kindness afterwards. Even the wildest chaps are thus tamed.

Free Wifi and Peer-to-Peer Downloading

Is it reasonable to use a pub's free wifi connection to download part of a 12Gb (yes, that's "12Gb", not a typo) online game client, or is that pushing the bounds of polite behaviour? I am not sure what the rules of etiquette are in this situation but I think I shall assume that a 12Gb download probably falls outside the bounds. I can, at least, enjoy the atmosphere and the food.