Work While Drunk

I’m neither good nor evil… I’m a Neutral Genius… And its not just for me, I’m a very generous Neutral Genius.

Step one:

Step two:

I think it just might work…

My partner, Emma, my brother, Grant and I went out to cycle around the lakes yesterday. It seemed a shame to waste another sunny gorgeous day. It was really nice to get out, and twice in one week – fantastic.

I used to MTB every weekend, so am reasonably confident, plus I occasionally go to the expert trails at Bracknell Forest with a few friends. Emma is a bit unsteady on a bike so takes it pretty easy. Grant hasn’t really cycled much since he was a kid, but is generally very sporty. He’s also pretty cocky. This is what happens when you mix a steep hill with inexperienced daredevil cockiness:

(There should be a video here, from YouTube – if there’s not YouTube is being pants again… )

And this is the aftermath. One banged up knee…

One grazed shoulder…

And a set of tyre prints on his back.

He also has what appears to be grass-burns across most of his lower right arm, he had a bloody nose and his upper front teeth hurt too. Silly boy.

I told him to wear a helmet…

It has clearly highlighted something to me though… I need a better camera phone! The quality is awful.

Yesterday I started my crop of chile peppers. I have seven varieties of chile peppers currently sitting in some John Innes #1 seeding compost, in separate seed propagation chambers on an electric propagator. I’m growing:

• Anaheim
• Guajillo
• Jalapeno
• Numex Big Jim
• Serrano
• Tabasco
• Tepin

The Tabasco and Tepin chile seeds were a gift from my boss, who grew me a great crop of Scotch Bonnet Habanero chile peppers last summer, which I’m still using up. The Anaheim, Guajillo, Jalapeno and Serrano are specifically for my Mexican cooking. And lastly the Numex Big Jim seeds are for the Guinness World Record attempt competition over at TheChileMan.org.

Here’s a full detailed list of what I’m growing:

• http://www.thechileman.org/growing_list.php?list=1874,1517,3184,154,1318,3340,3312

And, if you know where to look, you can find me on the map:

• http://www.thechileman.org/worldmap.php

It should be a good year for growing chile peppers this year, if the predicted El Nino weather system comes to fruition, as chile peppers apparently love the sun. Fingers crossed. I still have to build the mini-greenhouse I have planned though. That’s assuming my seeds germinate. Someone pointed out today I might have planted too many. I planted about 15-20 seeds of 7 varieties. If they all germinate that’s about 100 seedlings. Each which may give 10-30 chile peppers depending on variety. That means a whole big harvest of chile peppers. Shocking, but potentially fantastic.

Only thing now is, that I’m completely impatient. Hurry up and grow already!

It has snowed. I knew it was going to snow, in fact I’d be surprised if anyone in the south east of England didn’t know. I got up early to check out the scene outside and to check the travel news. Outside it was all white. Beautiful.

The travel report was OK. My train operator said it had run trains all night and was doing its best this morning to minimise disruptions caused by the weather. The National Rail website was taking a hammering, but when it finally loaded the prognosis was fair, so off I set.

It was cold but beautiful. I eventually arrived at the station, covered in snow, to be presented with a board of unspecified delays. The announcements progressed something like this:

• “We are sorry to report that you train has been delayed, more information when we get it.”
• “An update for you, your train is running approx 5 minutes late. This is due to, well… obviously, snow.”
• “I’m very sorry to report that your train is running 15 minutes late… due to that pesky snow stuff.”
• “Sorry about this, but your train is running approx 29 minutes late. I’m not sure why, but… and this is only a guess… it might have something to do with the snow.”
• “Erm, right, Really sorry about this but I don’t know when its going to be here. The Phones have gone down. All I know is that its very delayed, and at last report it was last seen in the Hitchin area (miles away), and was in a queue with 4 other trains. If you can go home, I’d do that. Obviously I personally can’t, unfortunately. More news… if we get any. Umm, sorry.”

Well, at least they were trying. The few people who bothered to try to get to work were in quite high spirits. Its probably the most smiles I’ve had in one morning. I decided to head home. There were a lot of families out playing in the snow which was quite touching. Seems like a lot of people abstained from work today. Very sensible. I did encounter one industrious kid on the way home who was playing in the snow with his sister.

God knows how he’s going to throw that snowball, but its impressive none the less.

I’ve always been fond of the Bomberman games, right back to my first encounter with Dynablaster on my Amiga. When Atomic Bomberman was released on the PC, a bunch of us got together for mini-LANparty just to play it in its 10 player glory (with 5 players per PC). I recently purchased Bomberman DS for the Nintendo DS which I’m finding merely ‘ok’ in single player mode, and it doesn’t make very strong use of the touch screen on the DS. I’m assured that the multi-player battle mode is where it shines, but I have yet to try it.

This morning I came across Bomberman Evolved. It’s a project by the students of the University of Aalborg in Copenhagen, whereby an imaging system is used to generate 2D positions of the human players in the room, which is then used to control the players. It looks clever and fun.

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Its also got me thinking about the potential for Bomberman games on the Nintendo Wii. Currently I can find info on Bomberman Land, but appear to be to Bomberman what Pacland was to Pacman – a platform game simply based on the same characters. I have high hopes that Hudsonsoft will make a Bomberman game that makes good use of the Wiimote’s. I look forward to being able to punch bombs, almost literally.