Can I just start by saying I love and adore the two travel programmes Stephen Fry in America and Paul Merton in India at the moment? Yes! I said it! I actually enjoy watching Paul Merton! Oh my.

Anyway. On Friday we went on a lazy, unintentional pub crawl. I had the Saturday off and so did my flatmate, so we'd decided to have a bit of a night out, without going overboard. So we went to the pub. The local. Unfortunately the local turned out to be rather noisy and then they started rigging the karaoke machine, which was when we hurriedly finished our drinks and left. We then did something horrible, out of sheer desperation. The only other pub we'd been to around here turned out to have been closed down, but we didn't want to go home at 8.30, so we strode down to The Pub With All The Obnoxious Clientele Who All Seem To Magically Gather Outside For A Fight At Midnight Every Night, and it wasn't as bad as we had pictured it. They even showed some old music videos (well, courtesy of VH1 Classics). Unfortunately it didn't last long until they switched to the rugby, and once again we finished our drinks and left. The last pub on the list was the local branch of Wetherspoons. Now, apparently, for reasons I still haven't quite been able to figure out, Wetherspoons is a daft place to go. It's the butt of all the pub jokes. So we went there with very few hopes of having any fun, and possibly also be hit on by some drunk, old geezer. Yes, we were that desperate. However, it turned out to be a nice place! It was crowded, but had all sorts of people in there, of both classes (upper class twits people don't go to pubs), all cultural backgrounds, all sorts of jobs (well, perhaps not all sorts, but many different ones) etc. And the prices were nice. My flatmate was taken aback by the fact they had wine on tap (so I guess I get the idea where the Wetherspoons harrassment comes from), but apparently it wasn't too bad and we might actually go back in the near future. After all, it felt much more like going out on the town than when we go to the local, which is usually a much more quiet affair (apart from when resident drunk Kate starts messing around with the jukebox). Nice to get to know the neighbourhood. We've only lived here for three and a half years; don't expect too much!

I would also like to send a lot of curses to Cliff Harris, the maker of Kudos 2, for managing to waste two out of my three very precious days off. Pooh on you.

Ooh, and the Blu-Ray version of The Incredible Hulk came with some big and wonderful news; the U-Control, which really should be the way forward for Blu-Ray. We're getting close to the ultimate way of viewing the bonus material, for sure! Does anyone remember these programs on early DVDs, PCFriendly (my arse) and later Interactual, where you had to install some annoying application on your computer in order to view "the extras", which was more often than not just a couple of pictures, a link to the official website and maybe, if you were lucky, the trailer? Total crap from start to finish.

Yesterday I tried installing Windows 98 on my computer, via Microsoft's probably excellent (and free) software Virtual PC 2007, but as I have an upgrade version of Win98 for my original Win95 one, I had to install Win95 first, which caused problems. For some bizarre reason the last bit of the installation doesn't work, and since it contains rather essential files, I can't upgrade it to the Win98 version, which I need for many of my old games. Grrr. Still, it was lovely, in a geeky kind of way, to hear the intro music to Windows 95 again. Aaaah.

Labels: film, gaming, personal, technology, TV