neilwill » personal

Review: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

Neil — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:39:32 +0000

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An interesting approach to the zombie apocalypse, written as a documentary interviewing the survivors of the zombie war. While I’d heard the book was pretty gruesome it is more about the human story than the zombie story, zombie fanaticism is not a necessary to enjoy this book.

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Somewhere new to spend your evenings

Neil — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 04:12:02 +0000

I have been away from here for some time while I’ve been concentrating on another website I’ve been working on. I decided it was time to brush off the cobwebs, or whatever web pages accumulate over time (perhaps instead of finding dead flies on an unvisited website you’d come across tiny dead google bots?) .

Fit Pig Recipes is the name of the site and can be found at the eponymous dot com address (or the link at the start of this sentence). The idea is it’s a place to go and find recipes for dinner, snacks etc. The recipes are user submitted so if you have one you like then you can submit it on the site and it will be posted along with all the others for people all over the world to enjoy. Traffic is going to take a long time to build up, so far I got quite a few visitors from stumbleupon.com and a few from the recent announcement on Facebook. Thanks to Paul for his inspiration in getting into the blogging (outside of this one) game. It took some time but I got there!

I’m going to be trying a few more sites, still considering which topic to go with next – I have a few I’m considering but will be updating here more often too. Something that has been said far too many times already on this site but this time will be different….

Out of England

Neil — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 19:09:49 +0000

I went to see Ricky Gervais doing standup in Hollywood on Saturday. It was in the Kodak Theatre where they host The Oscars each year. Its a very nice place, and was a sellout (3,401 seats there according to wikipedia). I was a little surprised to see how popular he is out here but hopefully that will mean more of his stuff comes our way, at the moment I’m having to import DVDs from the UK. He got a good write up (this one is for the first show on the Friday) and the crowd loved it, every joke got a huge laugh and Gervais got a standing ovation at the end of the show.

Overall he was hilarious as always, but I was a little disappointed at the lack of original material. Sure, most of the audience will only have seen The Office and Extras and none of his standup is out here, but with a new tour name I was expecting some new material targeted at the American audience, but what we got was a ‘best of’ compilation from Politics and Fame.

Sushi | Culinária

Originally uploaded by Alexandre Chang

It was still a very enjoyable evening which was started off by some of the best sushi I’ve had at Shintaro, just up the road from the theatre. In researching the restaurant’s name just now I came across their website, another example of why I don’t think I’m going to be putting much effort into learning Flash right now for web design. It looks pretty, but why can’t I click on things??? The pictures and text look like they should be links, but you have to use the small at the bottom of the page. I get frustrated with difficult to navigate Flash designs. Oh and there’s no option to stop playing their background music. Arrrggg (that didn’t sound so much like a pirate in my head). Anyway, their food was delicious.

Have a Happy 4th!!!

Neil — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 19:53:03 +0000

Today I’m celebrating independence from the monarchy and tyranny of the non-scurvy ridden British. Without having grown up here I don’t know if its just a recent thing but people seem to not want to call holidays by their ‘official’ name. For example, Merry Christmas is now Happy Holidays and Independence Day, while ‘also known as’ 4th of July is now generally shortened to “Have a Happy 4th”. I wonder if this is trying to break away from the orignal meaning of the celebration as with changing Christmas to the secular Holidays. So maybe its peoples trying to make me feel more welcome, or perhaps its more laziness – moving speech more towards the brevity of emails and text messages.

Start your engines!

Neil — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 07:01:45 +0000

Mario Kart Wii

Originally uploaded by Neilwill

I never really got into any of the previous Mario Kart games on the SNES or N64, etc. but this one has really got me into it. It’s pretty good as one player but the multi-player is great – I’ve had 4 players on the one Wii and today I had my first inter-continental race. I played against my family back in England and it’s great fun! I did add in a webcam so it gives more of a feeling of playing against other people, we had that running on laptops alongside the Wii.

New apartment

Neil — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 16:54:00 +0000

We finally found a place to live! We move in to Tustin on July 13th. Its only a 1 bedroom apartment but it has a balcony which will come in handy for a barbecue, a pool and fitness center. The plan is to save up money for a year and then buy a house. Its only 10 minutes from work so I won’t be spending 60 hours a month on the road! Got a lot of furnishing to get done so buying an SLR camera will have to be put on the back burner (for a month at least).

Speedball 2

Neil — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 17:45:00 +0000

I don’t know how it will match up to the Amiga version but Speedball 2 is being released later this year. There is a trailer here. For those of you who don’t remember it was a kind of football/American football game where you had to score in the 2 goals either end of the pitch by throwing the ball between players and punching/smashing the other players. It was a good fast paced action/sports game.

Hopefully they won’t sacrifice the gameplay just to enhance the graphics.

San Andreas Fault

Neil — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 22:47:00 +0000

I didn’t realise how close the San Andreas fault is to San Bernardino, it passes just through to the north so any major quake would have a massive impact here. According to this article, which itself is over a year old, it’s overdue for an erruption which could be similar to the magnitude 7.6 in Pakistan a year ago. Liquefaction could occur because of the underground aquifers and so the houses would all collapse. I thought I was safer this far from San Francisco!

Knackered Knee

Neil — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 05:39:00 +0000

Its been 2 weeks and my knee has been gradually getting better, still wouldn’t pass any fitness tests though. I’ve been on the 800mg ibuprofen and for the last few days been cutting down on it but it’s just meant that since I cut back there’s more soreness. Still nowhere near playing sports again, not decided yet whether or not to go back for more scans.

Job hunt is still ongoing, I think everyone is biding their time and will all call to offer me an interview at the same time.