andrea's internet bits

Today is a day I’ve been looking forward to for a while. Yes there’s Daft Punk’s new single that I’m not 100% sold on. What I am sold on though is Fire Emblem Awakening for the Nintendo 3DS. Pat had been raving about how great it is and how much he reckoned I would enjoy it. Once the demo was available in the UK Nintendo eShop I grabbed it. He was right, I did really like it.

From then on my sights were set on April 19th; the European release date. I’m a bit funny in that when something comes out, I want to go to a shop and have it in my hands rather than ordering online and waiting on the post. I pre-ordered Paper Mario Sticker Star for the 3DS through Game’s website and didn’t have a fun time. The game came several days after the release date and the pre-order bonus of a Paper Mario poster took several emails and a couple of months to arrive.

Now here’s the tricky bit. If you know anything about the retail world of the UK you’ll know it’s in a bit of a slump. The two main shops for games in central London are both in rough shape with many stores shut. That would be HMV and Game. In around the west end, there is one HMV left on Oxford Street and a Game taking up a corner of the lower level of Hamley’s toy shop.

At lunch time today I was on my merry way thinking that surely at one of these two big stores I would find my sought after game. How very wrong I was.

HMV was up first. Had a look around, no Fire Emblem. Asked an employee – nope, sorry. We didn’t get any in.

Ok, let’s try Game at Hamleys. Looked around, nothing. I didn’t recall seeing many recent releases but they did have ‘coming soon!’ boxes out for Pokemon, Animal Crossing and the new Donkey Kong 3DS games. That doesn’t help me. There was nobody to ask and just two staff members at the rather busy tills. I took another look around just to be sure that Fire Emblem wasn’t there.

Walking back to work I tried to think of any other place around Oxford Street / Regent Street for games. There’s HMV in Selfridges, but they are always lack on stock. If the flagship HMV didn’t have it, that one would be a waste of time. Got back to my desk and checked the websites for John Lewis, nope. Pat suggested Harrods as a stab in the dark. A search for ‘Nintendo’ on their site comes back with a perfume called Intenso. Oh man.

What about Tesco or Argos. I could pick it up in store couldn’t I? Argos was a big nope. Tesco has it, but you can only buy it online and have it shipped to you. There was no option to collect in store.

The next closest Game location was in Camden Town. I tried ringing them several times throughout the day with no answer. I started to wonder if they had shut down as well, but thankfully their Twitter account was still active. I headed north after work to have a look. I walked in and oh my heart skipped a beat – there was a big display of Fire Emblem: Awakening cases!

I grabbed one and took it up to the till. The guy at the counter looked at it, looked up and said ‘sorry, we’re all sold out’. I would have loved to have seen the look on my face at that point. “Really?! Buying this game is proving really difficult today” I said. Turns out they only got 8 copies and they all sold. EIGHT COPIES.

In the off chance someone bought a copy and hawked it at the two trade in shops up the street I checked both of them as well. No dice.

At this point there was nothing for it. I decided to try another Game location that I know is still in operation; at Westfield Stratford. I want that game bad enough that I’ll go to Westfield for it. That’s pretty telling. I did actually try calling them during the day, but like Camden there was no answer. Maybe Games’s phones have been cut off.

I make it to Stratford and survive the long dark walk from the station to the shopping centre. Step into Game with a faint glimmer of hope. Dashed. It is nowhere to be seen. The same ‘coming soon’ boxes that the one at Hamley’s had, but no Fire Emblem. And again, no staff to ask. Guess that’s what happens when your company has to be saved from going down the tubes. Another sweep of the store to be certain. Take a closer look at that ‘New Release’ section at the front of the store. What’s this, lots of copies of new X-Box games and beneath it… sodding voucher cards for the latest 3DS games.

UGH. I’m at a shop, I don’t want to buy a voucher to download a game over the internet. This is the biggest shopping centre in Europe, and that’s how you buy 3DS games at it.

There is another Game location in Hammersmith I didn’t make it to, but let’s be realistic. If they had any, they probably sold both copies already. For the day that 8 confirmed copies in existence  That’s 1 physical copy for every 1 million Londoners. That’s kind of crazy and kind of sad.

I’m not sure if this is something like what happened with the U.S. release of Fire Emblem where stocks were hard to come by. Even if it isn’t, it’s still a sad thought that buying a physical format of something in a city this big is this difficult. I had a realisation at Westfield that in all these clothes and phone and cosmetic shops, there is nowhere at all to buy music.  Maybe video games are going to get to that point as well. Can’t say I much look forward to it. Now, let’s open up a new tab and buy this thing on Amazon like everybody else and wait.

Not a lot a of people know this, but if you book ahead you can go on a tour of the St. Paul’s Cathedral Triforium. What is the triforium? Well it isn’t anything in particular; just the out of sight parts of the cathedral like the library and where they keep ‘spare parts’ like pervious pulpits.

One of my colleagues on the City Guides course was kind enough to put together a couple of bookings for us to take a field trip as it were. You usually have to pay for the tour, but the cathedral was feeling generous and said they would let us in for free, nice one!

We got there at 2pm last Friday and met our guide, Chris. He said that the tour usually lasts about 45 minutes, but he was at our group’s disposal for the afternoon and would show us anything we wanted. We all grinned.

Up we went the first set of steps that lead up to the whispering gallery, but stopped just short of it and went off into a little door. This brought us into a small room where we could just about see into the whispering gallery:

From here we moved into a long corridor where we could see a couple of the buttresses of the cathedral. Structurally important, but completely out of public view. A. W. N. Pugin would have hated it.

Along this space there were various prints of the cathedral printed during various stages of the building work. This one is the first ever official print of it, and you can see it was far from what the finished product looked like, especially the dome and the towers:

Further along were bits of stone work from the early Romanesque cathedral, and the better known, later medieval cathedral. They are labelled up as ‘Norman’ and ‘Gothic’ respectively. Though the medieval cathedral was badly damaged in the Great Fire of 1666 it was still standing when Wren started his work on the present one. The old structure was torn down and some of it used as filler for the new cathedral.

Next stop was the library, which is housed in south transept (the cross bit of the cathedral). It mostly focusses on works about St.Paul’s and any books published by people related to it such as the deans. When we popped in there were two people in doing some research, one on the history of the organs (the musical variety rather than the medical kind) and another doing some research I can’t recall. We had a nice little blurb from the librarian about the space as well.

We did a little detour to have a look at the Geometric Staircase. This is featured in Harry Potter: Prisoner of Azkaban, but it’s not this exact one. The cathedral wouldn’t allow the crew to film here but did let them take lots of photos to recreate the staircase on set. It was also used in one of my favourite films, The Madness of King George.

The steps look like they are driven into the wall to be held up, but that’s not the case. They are holding each other up. The top on step rests on a small niche in the one below it, all the way down to the 88th step.

Originally, Wren and his buddy in all things scientific, Robert Hooke, where going to use this space as a telescope. Anyone familiar with the Monument will know they did the same there. Unfortunately they never got around to getting the lens installed into the top of the staircase and it was never used for gazing at the stars.

Crossing over from the south side of the building to the north was great. In involved this view of the nave:

One of our colleagues isn’t so great with heights, so she rushed past. But the rest of us probably could have spent an age here. We were directly behind the great west window as well and could look out onto Ludgate Hill and Fleet Street.

To give you an idea where we were, that box is where the Christmas tree is each year:

We went around to the north transept, a mirror of where we were for the library. This is where the trophy room is, and the trophy room is where The Great Model is kept. It was what we were all waiting for, the show piece of the tour:

This is the oak model Sir Christopher Wren had built in 1673 of his first design for St. Paul’s Cathedral. It cost him a cool £500. The idea was that it would be big enough that when he showed it to King Charles II, the king could walk into the model (it being up on a plinth a bit higher than this one) and actually see from the inside how the new cathedral would be laid out. Of course this design was turned down and Wren would have to go somewhat back to the drawing board. Once he did get a design ok’d by the crown and the government he was given permission to alter it as he saw fit. Jackpot. He got the foundation and the walls built up to the design of his liking. By that point, it would have been too expensive to get him to start over again and so Wren made St. Paul’s Cathedral as he wished.

To give it some scale, here’s me beside the Great Model:

Shame that we couldn’t get inside it. Ah well, can’t win them all. At that point, it was the end of the official tour. Our guide said if we wanted though we could go have a look at the choir and the crypt. And so we merrily did. We got to sit in the seats of the choir and here all about the changing decor of it, how it was fairly light in the early days. The Victorians thought it drab and Victorianised it. After damage to the choir in WW2, the rebuilding work was a bit more toned down and is what we see today.

We also learned that the organs dotted around the cathedral are controlled by pneumatic pipes. This allows more than one organ to be used, and the keyboard console controlling them to be moved about. When we were crossing the top of the nave we could see one such organ that was installed in 1977 for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. Apparently this one is super loud and Her Majesty had actually asked for the volume of it to be lowered. To be on the safe side, they simply don’t use it when she’s in the cathedral. Fair play.

We then went down to the crypt and had a look at Wren and his family, and of course Nelson and Wellington. Something that I proudly already knew was that Nelson’s sarcophogus that is atop his monument was originally intended for Cardinal Wolsley way back in the 16th century. It was acquired by Henry VIII when he took posession of the Cardinals goods and it was moved to Windsor to be put in storage. There it stayed until 1805 when something was needed for Nelson. What luck we had this knocking about Windsor Castle completely un-used.

Something I didn’t know that was that during the funeral service, Nelson’s coffin was set upon a platform which made it look like it was on the floor of the cathedral (right under the center of the dome). At the end of the service, the platform was cranked down, and with it Nelson’s coffin seemingly sank into the floor, down into the crypt. Nobody was expecting that and it was quite the spectacle.

At this point the cathedral was closing and we were being reminded we had to get out. We thanked our guide profusely. What was meant to be a 45 minute tour, turned into about 3 hours of top notch guiding. You may not get that when you book, but still take a look at going on a Triforium Tour. It’s worth it.

For more photos, head on over to my Flickr page.

For the first time in ages I went further east than the Peninsula retail park and headed for Woolwich. Namely to go to Wilkinsons there because they are great for cheap home-DIY stuffs. Anyhoo.

Wandering the shop and I come around the corner to a couple with one kid in a pram and another, slightly larger kid in tow. I grab my adhesive hooks and poster frame I’m looking for and move along.

While in the stationary area they encroach on me again. And now the upright kid has a whistle. And it is possible the world’s loudest, shrillest whistle. And she is giving her all. And her parents seem utterly indifferent to it. Meanwhile me and all the other punters are grimacing at the piercing of our ears.

Everywhere I go in the shop, this family follow me. Right up to the tills. A breakthrough happens when another till is opened and I high tail it, hoping to leave the Whistler behind. No dice. I make it out side and start hearing that distinctive, drilling sound coming up behind me.

Quick! To the Tesco across the street! Blast, the crossing light goes red. And oh god they’re beside me now, kid still playing the hell out of that thing. A break in the traffic and I nip across the street. Yes! Looks like they are going another way.

I (somewhat happily) have a look around the new, massive Tesco. I think it’s the noisiest one I’ve ever been in. However, it is big enough that it will probably have perogies so I make for the refrigerated section.

No. No, what is that sound? Hells bells, that kid is in here somewhere, and has clearly not run out of wind or interest in blowing that damn whistle. Come around a corner and there they are. Run. Run for the tills.

I made it out without them following me. And I got perogies, so win win. But what a terrible day to not have any headphones on, let alone ones that keep the outside outside. Maybe this is the sort of stuff I’m missing out on all the time.

Yesterday was the Group IT Away Day for work. For it we hiked out to Wotton House Hotel in Surrey which is where John Evelyn was born in 1620. I’m not sure it looks much like it did then. Mostly boring hotel interior with flashes of old bits of architecture that I could spot.

At any rate. There was a note pad in my room that said ‘Pen Your Thoughts’ across the top of it. I couldn’t resist doing something to maybe give the cleaning staff a chortle.

It’s no secret that I have a soft, smushy spot for burritos. I had my first one only 2-some years ago and oddly enough can’t recall from where. But since then loads of places have popped up in London serving up rice, beans, meat, and topping concoctions.

I’ve been to most so I thought, hey I should do some reviews. My usual haunt hasn’t been up to standards so I’m going to mix it up a bit. I had the most unpleasant burrito I’ve ever had this past week and really at that point I thought I’d share my experiences. Not sure if I can go back to that one for the sake of a review though.

We start off this week with the newest spot to open up near work: Tortilla Mexican Grill in the Strand. Like most Mexican places, Tortilla is a local chain and this spot is their newest. I knew about a few of them but upon checking their website it turns out they have about double the locations I thought they did.

Anyhoo, on to the noms. Tortilla are unique in that they have a medium and a large burritos on offer. The mediums go for £4.95 and the large for £5.95. Pretty standard price there on the large, though a pence cheaper than most. Thing is though, they cram so much into a medium size that I wouldn’t even bother with the large one. Their drinks are also a bit cheaper than most other places. A bottle of water is £1 and drinks, both soft and not so soft, go up from there.

Here’s what I ordered:

• Tortilla (steamed – this is important)
• Coriander rice (this is also important)
• Black beans
• Chicken
• Cheese
• Sour cream
• Half a scoop of mild salsa
• Medium salsa
• Lettuce

Why only half a scoop of mild salsa? Well for starters I’m not a huge tomato fan, just a lil bit goes a long way. Also a lot of water comes up in that scoop and a watery burrito isn’t nice.

The chicken here is tasty, but not the tastiest out there. Though it doesn’t have as many charred bit as other places. So a nice happy medium. Steaming the tortilla makes all the difference. A dry one just isn’t as nice and doesn’t fold over very well. My pro-tip is to avoid the Mexican/tomato rice and go for the coriander stuff. The flavour from the other totally overpowers all the other ingredients in there. They were a bit too heavy on the rice with this one but there are worse things that could happen.

Remember what I mentioned about not wanting a watery burrito? Well despite my best ordering efforts this happened about half way through:

Oooh boy. Look at that trail of watery mess. One of the downsides of them stuffing a medium burrito so well is that it isn’t as folded over as it should be and leaks like this are common ’round Tortilla. I soildered on but once I got near the bottom things weren’t looking good:

Now had I been hungrier I may have keep plwoing through the soggyness, but I just didn’t have it in me and gave up shortly after the reveal. Your mileage my vary depending on your tolerance levels. This is not to say I didn’t enjoy it though. Overall it was pretty good. Here’s a handy little break down:

Pros:

• Was tasty
• Chicken was nicely grilled
• Good value
• Not padded out with lettuce (as some places do)

And a few cons for this visit:

• Was charged for a large when I ordered a medium burrito
• Bit heavy on the rice
• Sprung a leak half-way through eating

All in all, not too shabby. Initially I didn’t really care for Tortilla at all. Mainly I was going wrong with the rice but also some of their other locations don’t get the steaming of the tortilla quite right and it ends up being sort of sticky. These guys are doing alright with it.

Overall – 3 sombreros out of 5, would burrito again.

Well well, much to write about about the past month and a bit. Summer in London in 2012 has proved to be as fantastic as it was billed to be with the Jubilee, a visit from m’colleague, a trip to the South West, and now the biggest logistical exercise in the capital since the Second World War. I really need to get around to that.

In the meantime, I haven’t seen anything else online about this guy trying to get a photo on his phone of him with the kid singing solo behind him. It was a pretty precious moment.

Five years ago last night m’colleague Patrick and I were going a bit silly with boredom in the Hamilton ‘International’ Airport. Sure there are flights to and from international destinations there, but the place itself isn’t much to write home about. I think there may have been a tiny Tim Horton’s that wasn’t open if it was there at the time and a cafe area that did close fairly early in the evening. That left us with a waiting area by the baggage claim that we sort of took over as our patch.

The one thing we found to entertain ourselves with was a wheelchair that was stashed away in a corner. Here’s Pat looking a bit dead. This photo makes me giggle every time I dig it out.

The other thing that gets me about this photo is that I moved here with just the three bags on the left side of the photo. That’s what I started out with. Holy moly, how did I do it? I remember I had my laptop, camera and a few hand held game consoles in my rucksack, clothes and a Nintendo Wii wrapped in clothes in the big red bag (that ever since that trip has been known as Big Red) and misc. bits I don’t recall in the black hand luggage. Insane.

By the time we landed at Stanstead and got the train to my new work place I think we had been awake well over 30 hours and were smelly and slightly mad. We were put up in a tiny room in a tiny hotel in Newmarket for the first couple of nights until our flat was ready. Here’s Pat trying to repair the ’3′ key that and broken off his Powerbook G3 Pismo the first night.

On the window sill is a pizza box which contained possibly the worst pizza either of us had ever eaten. I don’t recall the name of the place we got it from, but there was a cartoon horse on the sign. The next night we tried a pub for dinner instead. We sat at our table for some time before thinking that maybe we need to go up to order our food. Oh silly Canadians.

Our flat was supposed to be ‘partially furnished’, which ended up being quite a liberal use of the word ‘partially’. In the lounge there was a heater, a lamp, a clothes drying rack, and a vase with fake/dried flowers.

Pat’s room had a single bed and mine had nothing. We used an inflatable bed as our sofa for a while before we got some sofas in (more on them in a bit).

The one bit of decoration we immediately added was this:

Which I’m sure makes zero sense to anyone other than Pat and I. When we finally got to the departure area for our flight from Hamilton, there was this English chap there who very loudly would say ‘yeah right’ in response to anything and everything anybody else would say to him. And it wasn’t ‘yeeeeah riiiight’ in that North American way, but a clipped ‘yeah roight’ in that English way. It drove us batty and made us laugh all at once. So Pat sketched him to have as something to look at in our barren flat.

One thing the place did have was this:

A dazzling array of electrical bits that sort of perplexed us. We thought all was go, but lo and behold the shower wouldn’t work. We found this out after the first evening spent in our new home and were prepping to head into Cambridge for a Saturday adventure. Not being able to work it out, we decided to just carry on and figure it out when we got home. I don’t remember which of us worked it out, but one of these many switches was actually in the off position, and that’s what controlled the power for the shower. Utilities 0 Canadians 1.

As we took the train into Cambridge, our first glimpse of the place was outside the rail station where we came face to face with the most bikes we had ever seen. Ever. Just look at it:

We stopped and laughed and photographed and shook our heads. Several years later I’d have the joy of trying to find a place to lock my own bike in that mess a couple times a week.

By this point in our first week I was getting pretty well exhausted. So much so that I think it was after getting home from this trip that when I sat down on the inflatable bed in the lounge to take off my shoes I just sort of passed out. Pat has a photo of this and it’s pretty awesome.

Fast forward a few weeks. I know it’s not in the spirit of telling the tale of first moving to the U.K. but it’s still pretty good. Pat found a couple of sofas on eBay for a really good price. We just had to collect them. We got the help of a couple of people from work, one of which was the accountant who had a horse trailer. We arrived at the collection point, made our payment and found out that these sofas were incredibly large and very much in charge. They sort of fitted standing up in the trailer. Getting them up the narrow stairs and tight corners to our second floor flat was a an impressive feat of engineering.

Once the sofas were in, Pat and I each unofficially claimed one as our own. And my word were they comfy. So much so I had a bad habit of falling asleep on my sofa. We’d be watching something or playing a game and I’d just be so comfy I’d drift off. It was always bad news when I’d go grab my blanket / duvet. Pat would exclaim ‘Nooo! Not the blanket, you know what will happen’. Well maybe not in those exact words, but that was the gist. If I got too comfy, boom, lights out. When I moved out of Newmarket in 2008 I had to sell the sofas as the land lord didn’t want any furniture left (to keep it partially furnished I guess). Getting those hefty, amazing things out was even more trickier than getting them in.

Anyways, enough about sofas. It’s quite hard to believe that it’s now 2012. And my work permit expires today. And that it doesn’t matter because I am now allowed to stay in the U.K. indefinitely. That first week five years ago, 2012 seems like this crazy far off time. It has flown by really quickly.

There’s been ups, there’s certainly been downs. There’s been far too much moving house for my liking, but each move was a new era. There was moving from Newmarket to Cambridge in 2008. Moving from my own studio flat to a shared house in 2009. The move I was dreaming of to London in 2010. And the move down the road from my original London digs in 2012.

There’s been a lot of train journeys to London and back. Sometimes on both a Saturday and a Sunday and the odd lucky day I would get to go to London for work. And there’s been changes at work. From starting out at a horse vets of all places, to helpdesk work outside of Cambridge, to now being based in London and working with some really great clients.

I guess the big thing at the end of my first five years is that if anything, I’m enjoying London even more. I’m still exploring and learning about it and I can’t imagine living anywhere else.

I was having a poke around the internet last week for interesting bits around Covent Garden. One that caught my eye was the police hook in Great Newport Street. Mainly as it is around the corner from where I work three days out of the week. I know I’ve walked by it countless times and never even saw it.

What the heck is a police hook? It’s this thing:

Any guesses at what it was used for? The junction of Great Newport Street, Upper St. Martin’s Lane, Long Acre, Garrick Street, Cranbourne Street and St. Martin’s Lane is, needless to say, a busy one and used to be manned by a member of the Metropolitan Police to direct the traffic. This hook was here for them to hang up their coats and capes while on traffic duty. Neat huh!

Here it is in situ on the building that used to be the Photographer’s Gallery:

Does anyone know of any other police hooks around the capital?

Remember not that long ago when there was a bit of a ding dong about the prospects of introducing a fee to go up the clock tower at Westminster Palace and see Big Ben and the quarter bells? When that hit the news it was the first time I had even heard about being able to do such a thing, let alone the fact it was free. Thankfully, the idea was thrown out and it still is free.

I was reminded about it when someone I was on a tour of the Parliamentary archives with told me to go for it and to do so I just had to email my MP to have it arranged. I got in touch with my MP via the futuristic medium of email and asked when the next tour was, hoping there might be one sometime in June for when m’colleague is visiting the motherland. Sadly that wasn’t meant to be, but I did get myself booked in for a tour in September. Fantastic. I got the paperwork email through a few days ago and it mainly stresses that there are 334 steps up to the top of the Tower to be sure you can make it up that long old haul on a spiral staircase.

That got me thinking about doing some ‘training’ as it were for the climb. I have done the Monument before with its 311 steps, though not for a while and last time I did it I was rather out of puff. I was talking about this with a mate at work and he suggested I give taking the stairs to the top of the building to see how I fair. This is at 338 Euston Road, also known as the tallest building I get to work in. He checked today and up one level is 18 steps. 18 steps up 16 levels brings us up to 288 steps. I was a bit amazed that despite how tall this shiny glass building is, it still has a way to go to beat the Westminster clock tower and even the Monument. Sort of makes it hit home just how amazing some of these old and lovely structures are. Like I need an excuse to think on such a thing, but there we go.

Blimey the weeks are starting to whiz past now that we’re in the grand old month of February. I was quite active with my camera this past week including a few shots related to some aniversaries.

Sunday: going for a walk along the Thames in Rotherhithe after finishing up my volunteering gig for the day at the Brunel Museum. (iPhone)

Monday: The back portico of St. Paul’s Church in Covent Garden. I wanted to get a shot of this for my dad as it’s a key location in a book we both read recently (a re-read for me). (iPhone)

Tuesday: Someone’s attached this black rose to a pillar by one of the pedestrian crossings at Euston circus. I’m not sure what it was made of but the detail was far better than what my iPhone picked up. (iPhone)

Wednesday: Dusk at Waterloo East Station. The evenings are starting to get brighter and brighter. (iPhone)

Thursday: The first aniversary + photo this week. This one marks the opening of Liverpool Street Station on February 2nd, 1874. Though the station looked a lot different then. (camera)

Friday: The Theatre Royal Haymarket, where on February 3rd 1794 20 people were killed in a crowd to see King George III. (camera)

Saturday: Some curiosity at Westferry DLR station. Oh yes, I scored the front seat

Bonus Photo! It snowed Saturday evening! Exclamation!