a-cubed.info

Addictive (but relatively short) online game. Wonderfully simple idea with nice execution. Having spotted this a few days ago I spent (wasted?) four hours or so completing all 33 levels.

So, as part of my preparations for moving home, I went into the bank today to close down my account. It turns out that I really should have sorted this out a week or two ago. After I’d filled in the forms for:

• change of address to the UK
• account closure (you don’t leave a bank without an address to contact for problems even when closing the account)
• international transfer of the closing balance to my UK account,

the lady who was dealing with me went off to check up on things and came back to say that they couldn’t do an international transfer from a closing account. She suggesteed that I should transfer today’s balance and then write to them from the UK to close the account once I was sure that the transfer had gone through. I’ve dealt with banks before and that would almsot certainly leave me with a few odd yen in there and that they’d want to do something with it before closing the account. Besides, this account has a charge if it drops below a certain value and hasn’t had a sufficient payment in this month, so I really didn’t want to end up in debt in it. (more…)

I’ve installed the reCaptcha comment filter on my blog. Sorry folks, but you’ll need to jump through the “type this word” hoop from now on. Too much spam, even with Akismet blocking.

Well, I just finished proofreading the galleys for Pandora’s Box. It’s currently listed on Amazon as published 7th December.
Now I’ve got to produce the index (sigh).

Yesterday I introduced my friend Trevor Knudsen, an American living in Japan, to the Carry On movies. He’d never even heard of them. Well, I’m not a fan of them all, but I do think the specific parody ones (Spying, Cleo, Screaming, Follow that Camel, Don’t Lose Your Head, Up the Khyber) remain very funny. So, Trevor and I watched Screaming, Cleo and Spying yesterday. It’s been a while since I watched Spying and I was pleasantly surprised to discover how good a parody of the early Bond movies it was, and how well it stands the test of time. Carry on Screaming, however, remains my favourite of these movies, although Cleo has my favourite line (Infamy…).

My flight back to the UK will be on Friday 28th September. I’ll be at a hotel at Narita for the Thursday night (only just over a week away now). I’ve officially started to move home now, in that I’ve been packing up boxes of books for shipping back. I’ve got three boxes of books packed, with another box ready, which should take the remainder of the ones I want to ship. I’ll keep a few out of the boxes and bring them back in my luggage – reading material for between now and the flight and for the flight itself.

It’s been a wonderful adventure, which I don’t really want to end, but time marches on etc. etc. etc. This particular journey is just about at an end. More later maybe about how I feel about this sojourn, but in two words: productive, enjoyable.

Someone just linked to the Lolthulhu site from User Friendly comment board. I’d not come across this one before. Great fun.