Top Gear live was bloody brilliant, as you would probably have guessed. That was two days ago…

(Quick edit… to the person who searched for “top gear live will it be recorded”, and found this site… um… I think the clue is in the name, especially the word “live”. I’m probably wrong. And to the persion who searched for “top gear live is shit”… well, I disagree, but you can’t please everyone I suppose.

As mentioned previously, Chris’s brother Jonathan had secured three tickets to go and see Top Gear Live. Now, some of you have thought I meant I was going to see the TV show being recorded. No, that’s recorded in Dunsfold Park, Guildford. This particular one I went to see was in Earls Court.

The day, as you can imagine for this time of year started off cold and rainy. You may remember in the previous “long” post, that I mentioned I’d been at a halloween do the night before… needless to say I was still feeling the effects of this. Anyway, after typing up that particular blog, I went for a shit. This particular fact has no relevance to the story at all, but it seems like an age since I’ve mentioned a bowel movement in this blog, and we can’t let a tradition die after 7 years and 365 days (leap year, anniversary tomorrow)…

Erm, moving swiftly on. We went down to Chris’s house, to pick him up. Our original plan of getting the train directly from Hartlepool was scuppered by the fact it was at about 7AM, so we were getting the 11:27 from Darlington down to Kings Cross.

The journey down to the station was unentertaining. Daddykins was playing one of the CDs he’d picked up while on Holiday, from some guy who may, or may not have appeared on the X Factor. He can do Ronan Keating spot on, but his Neil Diamond sounded worse than me on karaoke ^{[citation needed]}

So, we arrived in good time to catch the train, and had about an hour to spare.

Darlington station is very, very boring. There are a few shops there, including an anti-Tardis WH Smith. And by that, I mean, fron the outside, it looks huge, but when you get in there, it’s tiny.

Chris had booked the train tickets online, so all we had to do was visit a machine to collect them. Strange that these machines were called something like “Fast Track”, yet there was still a queue.

After collecting our tickets, the walk to WH Smith was halted by frantic banging on the window, and a little kid running after us. Turns out Chris had left one of the seat confirmation things in the machine. Ooooooo. Lucky.

Off we went to browse both of the shops.In the end, I bought a bottle of water (to take my sodding tablets with later on), a packet of Quavers, and a copy of The Sun. Chris bought a coffee and a copy of Private Eye. It’s the first time I’d ever seen one of those “in the flesh”. A bit above my intelligence level, I’m afraid. Imagine that episode of Family Guy, where Peter’s staring at a comic outside a newsagent for several days, before saying “Aaaaah, now I get it…. yeah, can I have a copy of Jugs?” Unsurprisingly, I can’t find the clip of that on Youtube, so if you haven’t seen it, that’s tough.

On the subject of Jugs, after buying our merchandise, I noticed that someone had left a copy of the Saturday Sport in the waiting lounge. So, yes, I had a look through, but decided against keeping hold of it, for obvious reasons.

Eventually, after what seemed like an age, the train arrived. We located our seats, and found that we were, once again, facing somebody, just like that trip with Coatesy to York. These two people were clearly twins, which made it harder to even look in their general direction.

Shortly after the train set off, Chris went to the bog, and I didn’t see him again until we arrived in York Station. Amusingly, he got stuck behind the food trolley.

The rest of the journey wasn’t just mind numbing, it was arse numbing too. The only piece of excitement was the recogntionof somewhere I’d been before - Stevenage. On Boxing day last year, I went down to Stevenage with Daddykins and a few other people. I remember as we entered the estate one of the people lived on, we went under a narrow railway bridge, and the estate had particularly old, probably still mecury vapour, streetlighting. So, after a bit of a rummage through the archives, I’ve found the bridge, in Stevenage, where I have now been over, and under…

See, who said it’s pointless taking a photo of absolutely everything?

We arrived in Kings Cross at approximately 13:57. Everything was how I remembered it. Busy, mainly. The old mechanical destination boards, however, had been replaced with the now standard orange LED display. The announcements are also done by the same guy who does the announcements on the Weakest Link.

We were going to meet Jonathan at Waterloo station, as he already lives down south and so got a separate train down.

Chris’s pigeon-like sense of direction made sure that we didn’t get lost. Now, remember the tapdancing busker that we saw in Paris? The one that was actually quite good? Well, on the tube down to Waterloo, there was one that was really, really bad. And still, some people gave him money.

That’s it. I’m quitting my job and becoming a busker.

Eventually, we made it to Waterloo. It took longer than usual, as one of the lines (I forget which) was closed for maintenace, or as they like to call it, “service improvement. Most of the afore-mentioned orange LED signs were out of order, thanks to some type of software error. I’d have gotten a picture, but we were in a rush, and couldn’t get the camera out in time. It was only a generic preset message anyway.

Off we go to Earls Court. It was a number of stops away, so we braved the underground again. I say braved, because I really, really dislike it.

After what seemed like an age, we ended up at the Earls Court tube station. In my previous two trips down to the big city, the weather was acceptable. Today, it wasn’t. It was absolutely tipping it down. In the 100 yards from the tube station to Earls Court, all I could think of was “London Rain” by Heather Nova. I really like that song.

So, we entered through the huge doors and into the foyer. The tickets were scrutinised, and we entered into the huge display area. And I mean huge.

That photo doesn’t really do it justice, but unfortunately, none of the photos do the place justice! I only took my little Acer, as I wasn’t too sure whether cameras would even be allowed or not, It seems they were and I really wish I’d taken my Canon now, as I didn’t take one good photo of the show itself. Bah!

After a very quick look around the display area, we made our way to the entrance to the main “theatre”. I use quotes, as technically it isn’t a theatre. It’s a big building with temporary seating and a stage. We made our way through what was quite literally, the biggest queue I’ve ever been in. It was massive. Remember the one for the Eiffel Tower? Forget it. This one seemed to go on for ever.

Turns out we had really good seats. High up, and dead centre. Perfect.

A few pre-recorded car adverts looped through for about 20 minutes. One of them even broke down, turning the two huge LED displays random colours, and emitting ear piercing squeals. We thought that was part of the act, but no, it just appeared to be a technical glitch as the adverts looped through for another 10 minutes or so.

Then, the lights faded…

More adverts, but this time in the shape of live adverts on the stage.

Then, we got the introduction. On came Clarkson, May and Hammond. Now, I’m guessing that most of the shows are going to be very similar, so if you’ve found this via Google, and are planning to go and see it, then I suggest you click the back button, or something… In fact, I won’t go into too much detail, just in case.

It contained all of the things that make Top Gear great…

First off there’s the challenges…

Then there’s the whole interaction with the audience…

You know when I said the photos turned out really, really bad? I clearly wasn’t lying.

Er, anyway. There was also the Cool Wall. An interactive version of it. You all get cards given when you enter. Red on one side, green on the other. A computer monitors the input from the camera, and can calculate the amount of red or green in the picture. Green = cool, red = not.

There’s also stunts and stupidly impressive car displays, as you’d expect.

You’d thinka stage of that size would also not be able to handle a game of Smart Car Soccer. and you’d be wrong.

The Stig finishes the show in another impressive display.

That’s all I’ll say for now. I’ve still got a load of pictures which have yet to be uploaded, these will get done today. This particular one is also a highlight for me, personally.

How cool is that? I managed to get my photo taken With Jeremy Clarkson……………..’s cardboard cutout! The rest of the photos need to be uploaded, so I shall do that and return with Part 2…

Technorati Tags: darlington, earls court, england, james may, jeremy clarkson, london, mph, part one, quavers, richard hammond, top gear live, train journey, twins, wh smith

Well, let me just start off by saying “Ow.”

I’m currently in considerable pain both because of the halloween party,and my infected finger. It OFFICIALLY can’t have came at a worse moment. See, I’m off work for a week.

Yesterday, after finishing a diabolically unimpressive shift at Employment Palace, I started examining the infection in the finger. It was getting bigger by the minute. “Oh, I’ll just stab it with a pin again, release some of that pus.

Great idea. In went the pin. Out came nothing but blood, and a string of expletives as I let out the loudestscream of pain I’ve ever done. Something wasn’t right.

So, off I go to the qucks. After sitting in the quacks waiting room for 45 minutes, I get seento. It took no more than 4 seconds for the doctor to prescribe me some antibiotics and some cream to rub into it. What wasn’t awesome is the price the medication came to… £14.20. I have a job, what a mug I am.

I’ve just taken the first tablet. If there’s no change to it by Monday, I have to go to the hospital. Therefore, it means a week off work without any drink. LOOOOOL. What good timing. Apparently, one of the side effects of these particular tablets is fits. Things just get better and better. I just hope that they don’t turn my piss pink like the last ones did.

Last night, I attended a Halloween party, which is the reason for the bad head. I went in fancy dress as a Roman. Unfortunately, some idiot managed to delete all of the images I took from the camera. It was probably me and my big fat faulty finger.

What was even worse was actually getting to the party.

I’d arranged to meet at MS’s house. Now I’ve never been there before, so I didn’t know where he lived, so I got the address, and got Daddykins to drop me off. MS sent me a text…

“When you get here, just come in, the door is open”

So, I arrived, and entered through the front door. I was confronted with a woman, who had just got out of the bath, wrapped in a dressing gown.

My jaw dropped, and so did my arse. Turns out MS lived a couple of doors away.

The party was good, from what I can remember of it. Normally, I have my photos to look back on, but the only ones that survived appear to have been taken by someone else. I think it was when I accidentally downed 7 different varieties of schnapps, that things went hazy.

No, really. Accidentally.

I thought I was trying different varieties of alcopop, as I’d never had schnapps before, I didn’t know what it tasted like. Upon my realisation of this fact, I could almost hear Scott Bakula saying “Oh boy…” before the quantum leap credits rolled.

At some point I remember losing my bag containing my shoes and camera.

I honestly didn’t intend to get drunk, for today I’m off to London. Earls court to be precise, as Chris, via his brother Jonathan, has managed to secure tickets for Top Gear Live. Awesome.

Unfortunately, Chris has something planned tomorrow, so the original plan of getting down there, watching the show, then getting the train back the following day has been condensed into one day, meaning that I’m going to spend a hell of a lot of time on the train today. I guess it saves the cost of a hotel room for the night though.

Needless to say, I’m taking my camera. I shall return with photos tomorrow, presuming I don’t delete them all…

Technorati Tags: chris, drank, drink, drunk, embarrasing, halloween, london, ms, party, roman, schnapps, wrong house

You know, it’s always the same, I have a big long spell of blogging, and then I don’t do anything for two weeks. Oops. This wasn’t intended, but it seems I did the same last year, after the dizzying heights of the Berlin trip. Oh well.

Even for a British summer, the weather has been truly appaling. There hasn’t a day gone by where it’s not absolutely hoyed down at some point, or been so dull that it’s not even worth sticking your foot out of the door, never mind going around and doing stuff. Ever since I’ve came back from Paris, I have had absolutely nothing to look forward to… I tried to change this by arranging a trip to Countdown for me and Chris, but seeing as he has no holidays left, this has fallen through, leaving me once again, staring to the inky void, where the only light at the end of the tunnel is the reflection from the bottom of a beer glass. Even worse, is that it would have been my last chance to see it under its current guise.

On a lighter, and much happier note, Wayne has finally got back in touch after 18 months of being silent!! Unfortunately, he missed all of the email I’d sent to him in this time, thanks to NTL/Virgin’s policy of only keeping email on their servers for 90 days, but at least he’s still alive! Coatesy, however, is still radio-silent, and it’s looking less likely that he’ll ever get back in touch.

Christ, this is an amusing entry isn’t it? Laugh-a-bloody-minute.

To make things worse, morale at Employment Palace has hit an all time low. Once again, I can’t go into details, mainly because I’ll end up putting my fist through the monitor. This has depressed me more than anything, I think.

On another note, I’m an organ donor. Or rather, I’ve been for months, but I never bothered mentioning it before. I’m only metioning it now, because I’ve just found an old registration form I meant to send off, but never did. On the back of it, it states “Discuss your wishes with those closest to you, so they know your wishes should the time ever come… I’m sorry, I know whatthey mean, but surely that’s the worst way of putting it, ever? What do they mean by “should”? Do they suddently think I’m immortal, or something?

Ahem. On the subject of death, another reason I’ve not been updating much is the “dying” of Beastbits, my main machine… You may remember a few months ago, the 250Gb drive I had, started clicking, going all weird and just not working in general? Well, I replaced it with a 500Gb drive. And that’s on the way out too. It began with The Click of Death.

Eventually, strange things started happening The drive would disappear from Windows completely, and today, during the reboot, in the BIOS detection it wouldn’t reappear. Nasty. I decided the drive was duff. My curiousity got the better of me, and after a physical power-off, it reappeared.

Now, something was up, and I decided to back everything up to an external HDD. During ther copying process, it halted with a CRC error. Not good. Files were on the bad sectors! Oooooo!

I happened to note the name mentally of the corrupt file. Thankfully, it was just an outdated SQL dump I’ve done from my website, and wasn’t of much use anyway. The rest of the backup passed without a hitch. Everything else copied. For a bit of mirth, I decided to copy the original file I’d had a problem with. It copied first time. To me, this began to sound like something more “logical” than physical.

Soooo, I powered up “Darik’s Boot And Nuke”. I had used this in the past to “fix” the bad sectors on the earlier faulty drive I mentioned. Anyway. I started it on this drive, and it failed. It quit with an error saying that the drive may have bad sectors. Duh.

Fair enough, this wasn’t playing ball, so I grabbed the diagnostic software from the Samsung website. I wasn’t expecting miracles. Still, I ran it, and there they were, the bad sectors…

Fair enough, at least they were official.

I wasted at least 3 hours of my finite time on this planet allowing the disk check to finish. It prompted me to perform a disk erase. Meh. All backed up. It can’t do any harm. After all, these sectors were goosed, so another few hours later, the entire hard drive was erased, and I ran another diagnostic check Now, thanks to that photo, I had the exact location the bad blocks. Imagine my surprise as it skipped over them without a single bit of hesitation.

OK, so unbelievably, the drive was back to its normal self. All of this took place on Monday night, so I formatted the drive while I was at work on Tuesday. I returned home, and copied all of the stuff from the external backup drive onto it. And, tonight (Friday), it has gone back to the original problem of the click of death. Joy!

In a thread on Glens’ forum, I mentioned my problems, and although Crag has a very valid point, it’s still a 100% failure rate. And, I can’t even send it back either, because the only way it will detect bad sectors is obviously after the disk has been in use for a few days after an erase, which means there has to be data on it. And, seeing as I know the sort of ahem… “data” I keep on it, I’d rather not let it out of my sight!

Technorati Tags: bad sectors, broken, countdown, Death, Depressed, faulty, hard drive, organ donor, samsung, work

Following on from my awesomely long walk on Sunday, I thought I would add to it with another marathon walk to Crimdon, along with a bit of a detour to Northgate…

I got in from work at my usual time, pretty much ready for bed, but I thought I’d stay up as it felt a bit of a waste going straight to bed when I got in. After all, I’d just witnessed the dizzying excitement of watching two squirrels having a fight in the car park.

I thought I’d work on my music database for a bit, and also start getting my CD collection catalogued in some kind of orderly fashion. You might remember I started this here , but it’s a bit haphazard now, and also a little out of date.

During this time, Chris rang me on the house phone, but I didn’t hear it. Daddykins answered. he thought I was asleep, so didn’t inform me of this until half an hour later.

I rang him back, and he asked… “So, are we doing something today, then”?

BALLS! It had, for once, totally slipped my mind that I’d arranged to do something on this day. I guess the thoughts I’d had about work had overtaken it. Well, seeing as I wasn’t doing anything important, and the weather was stunning, I thought it was a great idea.

Chris said “Give me an hour, as I’ve got stuff to do.”

My reply… “Oh, tell you what then, I’ll make my way down yours, I’ll have a walk about and take some photos with my camera, or something. Give me a ring on my mobile when you’re ready, and I’ll make my way over”. This was at about 10:30.

At approximately 11, I set off, and made my way to Chris’s. There was no phone call, so I assumed he was still busy.

By 12PM (or, if you want to be anal about it, 11:57AM), I was on the beach, taking photos. I’d never seen the tide out so far, and the beach was completely deserted.

It made for some awesome photos.

It started getting on, and I was getting peckish. I walked along to Northgate shops, and got a bag of chips. The woman behind the counter seemed vaguely familiar, as if she’d served me before somewhere. No sooner had I collected my pommes frites, my phone rang. It was Chris, but he was calling from my dad’s mobile. WHAT?

Yes, he had totally misunderstood what I’d said. I was now in Northgate, he was in my house. This was the oddest of situations. We both set off from our destinations, and arranged to meet in the middle.

Somehow, this worked. Neither of us got lost. Neither of us fell down a manhole cover. Neither of us got abducted by aliens. The next step was deciding to do for the day. Neither of us had a great deal of money, and I didn’t really fancy a long journey.

Hart was the first suggestion. It’s a nice long walk, and there’s ample opportunities for photography there, despite it only being a small village. We began walking that way along West View Road, and eventually got sidetracked by the gaping mouth of The Brus Tunnel, which measures in at approximately 75m 45cm in length. It leads into the Steetley site, and also to the large beach, leading all the way to Crimdon.

As we were making our way through the Steetley complex, some old guy asked us questions about it. Awesome! I think this was the first time in my entire life I’ve been approached by a stranger, been able to give an accurate description of the location AND give him directions of where he wanted to be. He described it as an eyesore.

This is the view he was referring to…

I didn’t really agree. I’ve always been able to admire the gritty industrial charm of the place, and will be sorry to see it all go, if that ever happens.

The walk along the beach consisted of general nonsense, mainly me throwing stones into the sea, and trying to pick the best “skimmy stone”, or whatever they’re called, in order to get the most amount of hops across the water. It also granted some photo opportunities.

Can’t really see me? Good.

Eventually, we reached Crimdon, after avoiding the little tern nest site which has been setup on the beach. Apparently, each year they return here from West Africa to nest on the sandy Crimdon beach… idiots. From West Africa To Hartlepool… now that must be one hell of a disappointing journey! Saying that, there were a lot of them about, which I can only guess it’s a good thing. And no, I didn’t get close enough to get a photo.

So, onto Crimdon, then. My original trip in February made it look an awful place. Desolate, cold, full of molehills. Thankfully, this has all changed with the onslaught of the beautiful spring weather, and I was able to appreciate the views…

OK, I promise there will be no more terrible photos of me.

In the early afternoon spring sunshine, the Crimdon Viaduct just looks absolutely amazing, and I can’t resist posting a photo…

After that, I had to walk up the worst bank in the world, the one leading from Crimdon Dene to the road. It’s a nightmare. OK, for anyone who is in the least bit fit, there’d be nothing to it at all, but for me, it felt like I was climbing Everest. Not good.

There was then the short and trifling matter of walking home. Well, I say short and trifling, it’s not exactly far, but after spending three hours walking, these extra few thousand yards seemed like an eternity. I did make a new friend, however…

I think I’ll name him Gilbert.

On the way home, we popped into King Oswy shops, in order to pick up much needed fluids. Thanks to the sun and the length of the walk, we were both parched. We also went to the bakers. I picked up two sausage rolls and Chris got a steak bake, or at least the “Three Cooks” equivalent.

We both returned to Mercuryvapour Towers, munching on our respective snacks. Chris left shortly after, as he had “things” to attend to, and after 22 hours awake, I went to bed for a much needed sleep.

Unfortunately, I have awoken completely and utterly sunburned. My arms are red, my face makes me look like Dr Zoidberg from Futurama, and my neck feels like it’s been whipped with a flaming rope.

The full set of 93 photos is er… located at that underlined section.

Technorati Tags: beach, crimdon, donkey, hartlepool, ouch, sand, sea, spring, sunburned, walk, water

Well, I went to Seaham. Daddykins was nice enough to take me, instead of me having to find out where it was on my own. Apparently, it was on the “Seaham Cast Road”. Nice enough, easy to find, I suppose…

We hurtled along the coast road, hoping to see a pile of parked cars, and shit being sold.

On one empty field, a sign over the gate read “CAR BO-” and that’s all I got to read. So, we had found its location, supposedly. We turned around, and the sign read “CAR BOOT SALE CANCELLED DUE TO WATERLOGGED FIELD”.

Classic. It’s been completely dry the past 2 weeks, except for today, and even then, the rain didn’t start until about 11AM, and IT WASN’T A TROPICAL STORM.

Never fear, as there was rumour of one at Peterlee, on the big industrial estate. Guess what? Half an hour of twirling around the pissing thing revealed absoutely SHIT ALL.

So, I’ve returned home, vinyl-less. And, to top it all off, my little pocket MP3 player’s completely died, and is now in bits on my desk.

I would like to know how today can get any worse.

Technorati Tags: bollocks, car boot sale, dead, mp3 player, msi, none, seaham, sigh, smashed, waterlogged