a rehash of the past two weeks…

i got back from the usa in my traditional daze, and suffered getting-on for 10 days worth of return jet lag for a trivial investment of five days away. this is one reason why it is increasingly uneconomic for work to send me to the usa, because as i get older i cannot cope with:

• 24 hours awake getting there
• four nights of six hours sleep max
• 24 hours awake getting home
• sleeping 18 hours straight on arrival
• over 1 week of disrupted sleep patterns, failing to drop-off before 0100h, sleeping until 0930h.

…and thus i am planning to experiment even more with webcams and the like, to save the pain of actually travelling. even late-night confcalls are preferable to this.

the house looks like a dump (to my eyes) although the exterior is better than the interior. peter stopped by last sunday to help me extract treestumps and play with chainsaws, and little by little that war is being won. hopefully the garage will be installed by september.

buffy‘s over. i wasn’t as upset at the ending as some, but then i don’t invest as much in tv programmes as some friends of mine. i suspect that joss’s choice of ending was quite wise, and a nod to the younger, “aspirational” audience who might want to be like buffy and are now free to be so.

i watched memento last night, a long time after it being recommended by a friend; it’s a very good, but not superb movie in my estimation – but it did provide me with an enormous surprise at the start of the movie.

as the opening credits rolled, the name david julyan went past, and it struck me that i knew someone of that name at college – another astronomer, in my year, quite a geek and local chapter president of zz9 plural z alpha. he was also a big filmsoc buff, and a projectionist…

… [clunk whirr brain kicks into gear] …

a quick google, and lo and behold it is he, with rather shorter hair: [www.cinemusic.de]

if he doesn’t know already, ray.riggs will have kittens when he reads this.