A new trip

We were supposed to be in Thailand by now, on a two week holiday. Unfortunately, that’s been thoroughly scuppered by protests closing both Bangkok airports. It’s a big disappointment, because my parents and several brothers were also due to fly in, and we were really looking forward to spending time with them all.

Fortunately though, KLM gave us a full refund on our long haul flights, and the rest of the things we’d booked were fully cancellable, so we’ve hardly lost any money. We still have 2 weeks of annual leave stretched in front of us though, so we spent yesterday rearranging plans.

Instead of a trip to Bangkok and Krabi, we’re now doing a trip to Cairo, Hurghada and Paris starting tomorrow. Pyramids and sunshine, here we come!

Weekend in London


We took a trip to London this weekend. It started with some cheap BA tickets and a desire to see the musical Wicked – which was wonderfully done.

We were introduced to Wicked after reading Gregory Macguire’s book of the same name. I really enjoyed the idea of taking a story that everyone knows inside out (The Wizard of Oz) and creating an entire other story within and around it. I’m obviously not alone, since both the book, the sequel and the musical have been smash hits all over the world.

While we were in London, we took the opportunity to visit Zaheer and Alia and see their lovely new-to-us house. We also did some unsuccessful hunting for a copy of Starfarers of Catan.

On Sunday, since the skies were clear, we decided to brave the queues and went on the London Eye. Afterward, we visited Madame Tussauds, which was fun.

Mr T pities the foo'
I pity the foo’ that’s never visited a Madame Tussauds.

On an unrelated note from the Serendipitous Amusements department, a curious moment as I was in Hamburg for work a few weeks ago. One night, as we were looking for a restaurant in town we tried to print a map from Google maps. When I got around to the printer, it was blocked with a paper jam from earlier in the day. After unclogging the paper, the printer proceeded to divest itself of other peoples’ spooled jobs.

The first print job seemed to be a printout of someone’s computer magazine subscription, and the very first page that emerged was this one:

Klocwork code analysis ad
Klocwork code analysis ad

As I waited for my page, I was reading the Klocwork advertisement, and then was amused to note that amongst the source code at the bottom, I could discern lines that are clearly from GStreamer:

I recognise some of the lines from other open source projects, so hopefully someone else is as amused as I was to spot code from something they’ve contributed to 🙂