Matt’s Journal

Road Skating In Saudi Arabia

Posted by Matt under Videos

Anyone fancy doing this on the A127 in Essex?!

Oddness

Posted by Matt under Gaming

It’s been crappy weather the last few days, Saturday was scorching and since then it has been rainy and miserable.

Anyway, I digress.

This morning I come into work and find I have seven emails in my Gmail account waiting for me, for the first time I thought, could they all be Spam? I had two or three pointless emails there that I deleted and then I spied an email with the following subject:

Strange I thought as I had already pre-ordered the game with a rival company called Gameplay (£5 cheaper I hasten to add!), the order should be waiting for me at home when I return this afternoon!

The email also contains codes for free Gamerpics and Xbox Live points, should I spend them? There’s a moral dilemma for you first thing in the morning!

Summer Here At Last?

Posted by Matt under Niceness, Wedding

Waking up stiff legged early Saturday morning, myself and Katie were in the mood to make as much use as the proposed good weather as possible. Woburn Safari Park was touted but I didn’t fancy spending the day in a car having monkeys pull off my wing mirror, we also thought about visiting Mountfitchet Castle but the response to that suggestion didn’t really have us literally jumping in the car to get there.

Then Katie suggested Margate, a place close to home but a place I had never been before. “Excellent” I pronounced and we set sail (in a Toyota Auris) for the sunny shores of Margate.

It took us roughly an hour and a half from Southend, driving slightly over the speed limit to get there before 11am. From what I had heard of Margate talking to people, it was a seaside town with lots of ice cream and sand, I was not surprised. Margate seems to have lost the attraction it once had, the amusements slowly being redeveloped into nightclubs, the seafront becoming home to more restaurants and bistro’s as the popularity of the slot machines wanes.

They still have their lovely beach, the raggedy donkeys taking the little’uns up and down the front. Margate still has it’s ice creams and it’s lovely gardens, things that I think myself and Katie appreciated more than the hundreds of local hoodlums in their tracksuits and faux Ugg boots.

We stayed until the early afternoon and then decided to head home, it was a lovely day and a nice chance to get more photos for the photo album.

On a wedding related note, we attended again yesterday and took communion. It looks as if the male vicar of our church may not be able to do our wedding as he is off sick with stress, so it looks as if his wife will be stepping into the bridge to marry us. This isn’t a bad thing, she is a lot more professional but her husband has the added humour factor of being the most tone deaf vicar I have ever heard. It’s not long now, I am so excited it’s untrue.

Wii Fit

Posted by Matt under Gaming

You may have seen the adverts, Wii Fit has finally hit our shores. After reading Hotukdeals where they suggested Sainsbury’s may be the best place to buy Wii Fit, myself and Katie ventured to that very supermarket on the Friday night.

With the added bonus that if you spend over £50 you get a coupon for money off petrol, we purchased Wii Fit and also I am Legend and headed home in order to bust out and get Wii “fit”.

It was a good night, we hulaed, we skied, we ran and we did press ups, we were very hot by the end of the night! I recommend getting it, the Wii Board knows when you give up, it calculates your weight and BMI and helps chart your progress as you bust out the moves. It even knows when you hold your breath, that’s a tad freaky!

GM-TV and the like…

Posted by Matt under Rant, TV

Every weekday morning, as the clock strikes 7am, myself and Katie wake and start getting ready for the day of work ahead. The usual ritual is to snooze for fifteen minutes, Katie then rises and gets into the shower and I power up the laptop and read some early morning feeds. As Katie comes out the shower, she requests that I put the TV on, nine times out of ten it’s straight to channel three, GM-TV.

GM-TV as it goes isn’t too bad, it is a little more varied than your straight up BBC News and it helps get the news, weather and odd reports in before you leave for work.

The one thing that really gets to me is the sensationalist reporting. Two days ago it centred on a piece of council-estate scum who had “been given a criminal record” for overfilling his outside bin. I could imagine, as they said this, millions of viewers were shocked at council bureaucracy gone mad.

What we weren’t shown was that the council had merely fined the man for overfilling his bin, something that he would no doubt have received correspondence through the post when the action came into place. He proceeded to ignore the letter, letting the courts issue a court order against him and charging him for the whole thing. In my house, if there is not enough room for something, you have a council recycling plant probably two or three miles from any house that you can deposit your rubbish in. This man was just lazy. GM-TV made the viewer think that the man was unfairly punished for something I think he could have stopped dead in it’s tracks.

Yesterday was even better. They told viewers a million times that an American woman had come home and heard noises in her kitchen, only to find an 8 foot crocodile! (zOMG!). They proceeded to interview the woman, asking silly questions like “Will you leave your back door open now?!” and stating things like “You must have been very scared!”.

Granted it’s background TV, some of the crap that TV stations are allowed to get away with now is just plan wrong. At least GM-TV arent hurting anyone.

Not Long Now

Posted by Matt under Wedding, Work

The wedding is fast approaching and it’s all hands to the pump to get it sorted. Invitations have finally landed after some hanging back on the order from the supplier, loads of RSVP’s coming back which bodes well attendance wise!

We have to make payments on the honeymoon, the photographer, the video guy who is doing a DVD of the wedding, the wedding cars, the food and venue. We still haven’t sorted what we will be doing on the wedding night accommodation wise, perhaps staying in a local hotel will be an idea.

Katie has been going great guns in her new job, securing a £6,800,000 contract in her second week (yes that’s million!), meaning she is the golden girl at the moment. Our house expectations have picked up with both of us earning a decent wage now, we are looking to get a three or four bed house instead of a pokey two bed flat we looked at the start of the year.

I can’t wait for the day of the wedding, I’m sure Katie is different but there are no nerves and there certainly won’t be on the day.

Shall I invite freaks and geeks from the internet? No chance!