I love my new phone. It has a kick-ass 2 megapixel camera, excellent interface, lovely key action, half a gig of storage, looks great, and its PIM functionality integrates perfectly with my Mac.

All of this, however, doesn't stop you leaving it in a taxi.

Arse.

I sent a text from the wife's phone, though, and the kind cabbie rang back half an hour later* offering to send it Special Delivery. I didn't think it was possible to love black cabs any more, but now I do. Suggestions on gifts for the nice taxi driver (as well as reimbursement for the postage, plus maybe a tenner) as a thank you solicited via the comments.


* ...just as I was on the phone to Vodafone to cancel it. I was alarmed to note that my call credit limit has been surreptitiously upped to £210, which means that if I lose my phone, or it's stolen, either without me noticing, any n'er-do-wells could spend £210 of my money and I'd have no come-back. It's a practice Nik keeps noticing with his provider too (coincidentally Vodafone too, I think), and he apparently rings them quite regularly to get them to lower the call limit back down to £50. Looks like I might have to ask him to put in a word for me at the same time.

A couple of nights ago, after a very dull, overcast day, and without any warning, the sky over London flashed from slate grey to a very unnatural and saturated orange for a few minutes before dying back to darkness. It was really odd, and put me in mind of Richard Burton's narration in Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds, where he talks of 'the weird and lurid landscape' of Earth as it's being suffocated under the red weed. The quality of the light as well as its colour was otherworldly - it filled our front room with bright, flat, gold light for minutes - and I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that there was a huge fire raging nearby, or that we actually were under attack from Martian forces. I thought we were the only ones really to see it - a foolishly self-important thought in a city of almost 7.5m people - but a comment on the only photo I got of the event led me to find loads of other people on Flickr who had managed to capture much more convincing shots that I.

The picture above is from this guy, but there were also some great shots to be had here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Gotta love Flickr.



In other news, we had a fire drill today at work, but since it was such a nice day, standing around outside for a quarter of an hour was actually most pleasant. At lunchtime I wandered around Fitzrovia taking pictures for my photoblog; if I don't spot anything else good over the next few days, I have a surplus from today that I can continue to post.

I received today in my email this utterly adorable certificate which congratulates me on attaining a feedback rating of 100 on eBay. It's quite sweet to think that there may be people the world over who would actually print out, and proudly display the PDF certificate. Bless them.

Eeek! Much has happened and I haven't written about it. OK, so, the wedding all went without a hitch (apart from us getting hitched) and we had a lovely London honeymoon.

One of the things we did was visit London Zoo (a first for me) ostensibly to do some sketching for one of Jenny's projects for the new term, but, mostly thanks to my childlike enthusiasm for the animals, we ended up just wandering around. I got heartily fucked off by a lot of the parents, though. In one area, you basically enter a huge cage that the little monkeys, above, scamper about in. There are a lot of gentle, firm and very clear signs everywhere telling you not to have food visible and not to get too close. And yet there were toddlers reaching out their grubby paws to the monkeys as they were fed on wedges of watermelon as tall as they were*. The staff kept having to ask the parents to keep them back, but they took no notice. I have little doubt that the parents would have been the first to sue ZSL had one of the ostensibly wild animals had deftly hooked little Liam's eye out. (What, incidentally, would you call partly tamed animals? 'Feral' refers to domesticated animals gone wild, but I can't think of a word which describes the process working in the opposite direction.)

It was even worse in the aquarium - surely one of the oldest parts of the zoo; it looked very Victorian, and made my ever see-sawing opinions about zoos take a sharp turn for the negative - with kids and adults alike banging on the glass despite clear signage telling you that this can cause distress to or even kill the fish.

With a very few exceptions, the kids all ran around the zoo like they were on some sort of amphetamine- (in reality, I know, more likely sugar-) induced high, screaming and demanding attention and just generally operating at 90%. I am positive I was much better behaved as a child; yes, it's the old 'kids these days' line, but the logical conclusion is that I was probably as much of a tearaway to the preceding generation as the current one is to me.

Sorry, zoo-tastic rant there. Let's change the subject.

I today took possession of my new mobile phone. I only wanted to change the tariff (down, as it happens, to the very cheapest on offer), but Carphone Warehouse gave me the just-last-week-released Sony Ericsson W800i for free. I will another time wax lyrical about why this is a fantastic phone in many ways, and why Carphone Warehouse demonstrate impeccable customer service, but of interest to us here is its build-in 2 megapixel camera. Hiterto, the cameras on phones have been there as an interesting toy, and have been included as a kind of technological willy-waving on the part of the manufacturers. But 2 megapixel is good. As good as my first camera which cost me £250 only two years ago. OK, so the images aren't quite as crisp and are a little more noisy at 100%, but for 6x4 snaps, the W800i is more than good enough.

The upshot of this is that I've started a photoblog; there are links to subscribe to an RSS or Atom feed at the bottom of the page. I'll try to post one a day.

Onwards and upwards. I think I'll take this opportunity to do a link dump - some horribly out of date by now - so in this post, you'll learn about bacon plasters, optical illusions which will make you question your sanity, Leslie Phillips, and the music mixing concept Audiopad.

You'll watch a video about the differences between real life and the internet (one for the young lady especially, there), be amazed by the world's largest container ship, be educated by this very useful page on the great Wikipedia, and feel conflicting emotions of pity and lust for this toy UFO (be sure to watch the video).

There's also the opportunity to be worried about babies (Do they really not have the imagination? Must we spoon-feed them everything...?) and worried about adults, though I'm not sure if I'm more concerned about the people who make these last products or those who buy them.

There is more, but it's late and I have the new Iain M Banks novel to finish. Toodle-pip.


* I should perhaps clarify: the monkeys were being fed watermelon, not the kids. And the watermelon was as big as the monkeys were long; the zoo wasn't breeding mutant, toddler-sized watermelons or anything...

Hurrah, we're now joined as man and wife. We're safely back in London, and keenly looking into ways to loll around eating and drinking for the rest of this week and next. Blogging may be of an increased frequency during this time ('not at work'), or may be more infrequent ('better things to do with my time'), but you can see photos of the happy occasion here.

More photos will be added as guests send us their pictures.

Right, I'm off to do married things* now.



* Without the requisite bickering, natch.

The cases are packed, the last-minute panics have been had, the presence of the passports-tickets-money-rings-clothes-etc has been verified so often that the number doesn't actually exist in real space, the three day-old half melon has been forcibly ejected from the fridge, and we've had that "Ohshitohshitohshit, we're getting married tomorrow" moment. In other words, we're all set. We leave in half an hour.

My next post will be as a married man! See you all on the other side...

According to my little weather widget, it's going to be sunny but overcast for the wedding on Monday. I'm really excited. The young lady has spent the last week putting the final touches on preparations (if it takes this much work for the very low-key affair we're having, how much more stress must yer generic white wedding entail?), and we're pretty much sorted now thanks to her.

Admittedly I haven't bought anything to wear yet, but, hey, there's a day to spare still, no?