Dr John Hawkins

Welcome to my bit of the Maison de Stuff, home to a huge load of pictures, and my daily blog.

My email address is as above - I've put it in an image in a vein attempt to reduce the amount of spam I get.

John's Journal / Blog

Main Index
Archives
RSS

John's Pictures

Main Index
Main Index (text only)
Categories
Recent Updates
RSS

John's Travel

Main Index
Places
Map
RSS

Other Related Sites:

Maison de Stuff
Stuffware
Exif.org
Chiesan
Celtlands

Recent Entries:

Fight Club
Bare Cupboards
Living Cheaply
Look Around You
Is this broken now?
Transglobal Communication
Yet Another Weblog...

Fight Club

Wednesday night I went for a beer or two with a couple of people from work. I don't know how we got onto the subject, but towards the end of the evening we were talking about wrestling, and before I knew it I was round at one of the manager's flats, confused, drunk, and preparing to wrestle him in an impromptu arena constructed in his lounge. It didn't seem too bad at the time, I was floored twice, and therefore utterly lost. In my defence though, he's about twice my size so I wasn't too worried. Later on that evening I wandered home and fell asleep. The next day (yesterday as I write) I really began to regret it. The little finger on my right hand is all swollen, I'm wondering if it might be broken (although it doesn't hurt that much). Perhaps worse than that though, I have this pain in my chest. It's fine when I don't move, but trying to get out of bed in the morning is now a lot less pleasant than it used to be. Sneezing also seems to have become a really unpleasant pastime. Anyway, my advice to you is simple; five pints of Guinness, plus a few glasses of red wine and a wrestling match with someone bigger than yourself is not a good combination.
[3 comments]

Bare Cupboards

I was determined to make it through another day without spending anything, and not to give in and go to the supermarket last night. I searched through the odds and ends in my fridge and food cupboards for about an hour, and convinced myself I couldn't possibly make a meal out of it. But I wasn't trying hard enough. Eventually I realised I'd been staring at a packet of dried mushrooms, I had plenty of sushi rice, and even a solitary shallot. From this, with a few other odd bits and pieces of flavouring, I made one of the nicest mushroom risotto dishes I've ever had. It just goes to show what you can do with very few ingredients but a lot of determination. It even did me for lunch today as well. Perhaps I'll upload the recipe at some point.
[No comments]

Living Cheaply

I'm incredibly short of money this month, which is very annoying. Still, I'm not going to dwell on the negative side of that, instead, I'm going to look at it as an exercise in seeing how cheaply I can live. Take last weekend for example. Weekends have a notoriously bad reputation for consuming money like there's no tomorrow (or indeed no week following them), especially where alcohol is involved. I had a feeling that the remaining weekends of this month would be very dreary indeed given that I had no money to spend. Not so. Thanks to my friends, I managed to have a great weekend and not spend anything at all. In fact, not a single penny has left my stingy hands four over for days now. Saturday, I went for a long walk with Tom, Sarah, and their lovely greyhounds. After that, I spent the evening at Tom's house, eating, chatting and listening to jazz. Sunday I spent mainly at Rob's house, composing some slightly suspect music and watching a film. Ok, so obviously I still had to eat, and very kindly both Rob and Tom provided me with dinner at their respective houses, but the point is, other than that, no money was spent. Certainly not the kinds of hideous three figure sums previous weekends have amounted to. And I had a great weekend. So I am left wondering why previously I always had to spend so much money to be reassured I was enjoying myself...
[No comments]

Look Around You

Has anyone else seen Look Around You on BBC Two? It's on Thursdays at 21:50, and I love it. It is subtle, understated, but absolutely brilliant - the sort of comedy the BBC seems to do really well. For those who haven't heard of it, it's a kind of spoof 1970s/1980s schools program. Having complained in another article about how TV is aimed at a completely different sector of the population to me, I seem to have stumbled across a program, all be it very short, that must have been made very specifically for my age group and my sense of humour. Last night was only the second time I've seen it, but already it's a firm favourite.
Bits I particularly enjoyed included the opening sequence - A BBC Micro with someone typing in that immortal program: 10 print "Look Around You" 20 goto 10 - how that takes me back! Also bits like "Here's some schoolchildren from St. Heathen's School in Grantham", and particularly the box on the side of the piano containing the additional notes that must never be heard - the "Boite Diabolique". (Write that down in your copy books). Congratulations to whoever came up with the concept for this program - it is marvellous.
[No comments]

Is this broken now?

I'm wondering if having two instllations of greymatter on the same site was such a good idea... They seem to be conflicting with each other!
[No comments]

Transglobal Communication

Late last night whilst waiting for a train at the station, Chie phoned me on her mobile. What ought to have been a really normal phone conversation was, to me, this kind of wonderful revelation about how amazing the world, and the technology within it, is. It turned out she too was on her mobile, and she too was at a station. As I was leaving London for the night at the end of a day's work, she, the other side of the world, was heading into Tokyo to start her day's work. The other end of that virtual phone line, it was already tomorrow.
I could hear the bustle of Japanese commuters in the background on their way to work, and she could hear the weary trudge of the lateshift of English commuters on their way home. The announcements in one of my ears about delayed trains in English merged with the announcements in the other ear about how well the trains were doing in Japanese. To passers by in Japan, tiny bits of an automated train announcement system the other side of the world, in another language, were filtering into their subconcious. Digital signals with this mixture of messages, this ebb and flow of multilingual information floated off into the night sky and scattered through the EM spectrum. Maybe it's just me, but I thought this was pretty amazing.
[1 comment]

Yet Another Weblog...

Yes, I hear you, the 'maison already has one of these. Well, yes it does, but I thought it might be nice to have a kind of more personal journal type of thing, inspired by Tom's and Russ's, and save the main 'maison blog for more magazine style longer articles. This blog may not be of interest to anyone in particular, but I just liked the idea of keeping a record of what I get up to. I'll try and post fairly regularly...
[2 comments]