Blog back up, I’m traveling
At the moment, I’m sitting at EasyInternet in Manchester.
The blog went down for a few days, due to the server being cut off. This server is being payed monthly, and apparently it’s not automatically charged on the credit card, but you need to by hand log into an administrative web interface, and renew the subscription, every month!?
This last outage has prompted my friend Henry to rent a server of his own, well really I think it was just another weight on the scales, since not having your own server on the internet nowadays is sort of crippling, isn’t it? Later we’ll be transferring his blog over to his new server 
Here in the uk, there’s loads of cool cars around, and for example I’ve seen BMW E46 compacts! Something I thought just didn’t exist, I had hoped the dreadful compact would die with the E36. I’m sure with the advent of the 1 series, there won’t be another 3 series compact ever. Lets hope shall we?
I haven’t posted in a while, mainly because there have been problems around, this weekend I had a big problem, it’s twofold and it’s main parts are alcohol and friends, mix these two things in enough quantities, and you won’t remember what you said to whom when or where, or why this person or that hates you now — quite great.
Then on monday we discovered a hard drive had failed in our main server, and we’re still reeling from that blow, although we’ve managed to get most things up and running using backups from May — :’(
I’m hopeful there will be some data recovered, but at the moment the two technical guys at ODG, me and my friend Halli, are both abroad — Halli will return on tuesday, and hopefully have some luck restoring data then. I myself will be back on the 8th of august.
So basically, now I’m in Manchester, arrived yesterday quite tired after being on the road for 14 hours or so, not sleeping for 36 or so, and when I went to sleep last night I had just done a 72 hour stretch with around 6-7 hours of sleep total, all thanks to my best friend, caffeine. Last night I slept soundly for 11 hours or so at the Old Rectory Hotel, in Haughton Green, which is in Denton — and apparently Denton is impossible to get to by car, since all the motorways, etc seemed to be blocked. After an hour or so driving in circles, and getting everywhere except Denton, we finally found a way in, and find the hotel, whilst enjoying classic british pouring rain.
The people at the hotel are very nice, and in general everyone here is very friendly, I was told by Gavin and Rachel, friends of mine who picked me up here in Manchester, that Denton was a bit rough, so after tonight’s partying I guess I’ll take a taxi back to the hotel.
—- Here ends what I managed to write at the internet café in Manchester, three things cut me off; chatting on msn, the computer time being up and the computer abruptly rebooting, and then Rachel arrived.
Now I’m in France, I think I’m still in Aix-en-Provence, though me and Henrý did travel for about 20 minutes on the bus to get to his place of work, and many of those minutes were spent on the motorway. To end the story of friday night, what happened was that we went to see Batman the beginning on the IMAX screen, which is the largest movie screen in the world or something, in fact so large that you couldn’t quite watch all of it at once, and that could become a bit uncomfortable.
Then we drove around for a bit, and chatted, and ways parted at my hotel at 23:00 or so hours. Not a lot of partying then. However there was a party going on at the Hotel, and I had some fun that night, mostly talking to the bartenders which were giving me different sorts of beer to try, as well as I taught them how to mix at least one drink. The drink I taught them is a simple one, and I’m sure others have mixed it, I call it “suntanned swiss”, and it’s made up of 1 part vodka, 1 part orange juice, 1 part red bull. Poor vodka over ice, then orance juice into vodka, and finally red bull.
This drink is actually a modified version of the drink “suntanned swede”, which is mixed in exactly the same way, with exactly the same ingredients, but using the swedish energy drink Magic (which is popular in iceland) instead of red bull.
On saturday I went to York, met up with my friend Baldur, who was in from Dublin to see TOTB, and we had some beer and ate some food, of which mine was “Cajun Blackened Chicken Salad” … and the chicken really was cajun blackened, and hardly edible. On sunday we went to Elvington airstrip to see TOTB, and it was a great event, the Roger Clark tuned, icelandic run Team ICE Subaru Impreza made the history books by running a 9.93 second quarter mile, which is not just the fastest Impreza in the UK, but the fastest manual gearbox Impreza in the world! Due to time constraints the Impreza only managed one actual run on the track, and for a first run it was pretty good 35 seconds or something, however Gulli did not get the car completely stopped in the stop-box, so the time was disqualified, and no time to do more runs. The most amazing thing is that they’ve only had the car ready in this state of tune for a week or so. As far as I know, the car is not 730bhp before nitro, and depending on the nozzle used the nitro shot can be up to 150bhp?
The rest of sunday was spent finding out that York has a desperate shortage of ATM machines, and me and Baldur had to walk for half an hour from our hotel to find one, and that one was a bit crowded, so I’m sure there is a shortage.
On monday morning I traveled from York to London Gatwick Airport in about 4 hours, and it was a rather stressful journey, since I could not be delayed once for even 30 minutes, or I’d very possibly miss my flight. I got to Marseille alright, although EasyJet wouldn’t let me take my bag as hand luggage and I had to wait by the baggage claim conveyor belt for 20 minutes when I arrived, besides that the trip was fine.
Last night me and Henrý went to La Belle Epoque and had a nice beef tartar meal, with some rose wine and creme brulée for dessert. Afterwhich we went to the Orienthe and I tried a shish for the first time, as well as a couple of different kinds of tea, and some very good freshly made milk shake. I think the Shish is very special, the smoke was very fresh and had a light uplifting flavor.
So, this has been a fairly short recap of recent events, but truth be told, I’m just exhausted by all this writing, so so long for now 
