Yikes, I just came across this funny street view image:
http://local.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=…
I feel like I’m in Jail! I’m not sure if it appears the same for you as it does for me, but here’s what I get:
Remind me not to go to Calvada Springs in California.
Despite saying to myself “nobody’s going to trick me today” several times on the walk to work today, I still got caught out by some April Fool’s day jokes.
I said that I wouldn’t get caught again after last year, when my team circulated a memo saying “management have asked us to do a code review – we need to look through all the code in our application and remove all the swear words”. I fell for it.
But today, when the team said that we need to get our Russian new joiner a Russian keyboard or else he couldn’t do any work, I believed that too.
And when I saw this article on my favourite money-saving website about a batch of 50p coins produced with an error that makes them worth £1,000, I was rushing to my wallet to see if I had one. (Note that at the time, the disclaimer in blue at the top of the article wasn’t there!)
At least I didn’t believe the Guardian story on Labour’s election campaign posters! They are a fake response to the Conservative party’s real billboards, one of which I saw while I was out running last night. I think all these posters are quite cool.
On a side note, I will be so depressed if Gordon Brown wins the election.
Woohoo! As of today, 10 days of work left, and 10 shirts ironed last night! They’re all hanging up there nicely, and I’ve shoved the iron and ironing board away, never to be seen again!
Man I hate ironing. If only the dishes would do themselves for the next 10 working days.
I’m spending 5 weeks in Costa Rica, in a beach town called Samara in the Guanacaste province.
Google Maps Link
The Samara Beach website
Samara was essentially a place I picked at random out of a bunch of places in Costa Rica with Spanish schools. It’s apparently got about 1,000 people. I chose Costa Rica because my Spanish isn’t very good, and I hear there’s a lot of American tourists there – it will nice to be around other people that speak some English at first! It’s very warm (30-35 degrees at the moment).
I’m enrolled on a Spanish course which is 20 hours a week for each of the five weeks, and I’m staying in a homestay. Here’s what I know about my host family:
Norma lives with her husband and her daughter (born in 1994) and is an enthusiastic, talkative person who greatly enjoys her contact with foreigners. Her large, comfortable house has two student rooms, each with double beds, one with private bath, one shared. She has two dogs outside, one cat, and offers bikes for rent to those interested– she lives a little under a mile from the school.
It was exciting when I first booked it, but I’m getting nervous as it approaches because it’s going to put me way out of my comfort zone, mainly because I speak very little Spanish! But hey, I’ve thought about doing it for the last 18 months or so, and if I don’t do it I think I’d spend the next few years wondering what it would have been like.
I wonder if they don’t have street addresses in Costa Rica – the address of the school is listed as:
Del Banco Nacional de Costa Rica 50 mts oeste y 150 sur, frente al mar. Edificio de 2 plantas color amarillo – translated that means something like The National Bank of Costa Rica 50 meters west and 150 south, in front of the sea. A two-storey yellow building.
and the address of my homestay is given as:
De Pablitos Bar 500 metros al oeste en el Barrio Cantarrana, segunda entrada primera casa a la derecha. – roughly translated as Pablito’s Bar 500 meters to the west in the Cantarrana neighbourhood, second entrance first house on the right.
I hope I’ll be able to find them!
After five weeks in Costa Rica I’m going to Peru, and maybe Mexico.
I think that 10 weeks away from London means that I need to change the name of my blog! It was “My life, 11,473 miles from home – The life of me, living in London far away from my family and friends in New Zealand”, now I’m going to think of something else.
Useless piece of crap web browser! It crashed three times while I was writing that last blog post about Karen.
And it’s also annoying because it automatically updates the browser to the latest version, using up my valuable mobile broadband bandwidth and introducing potential new bugs.
The updates install new features which I neither need nor want, like the Google Translate toolbar, and provides no way of turning them off. Back to Firefox I think – Google, I’m ashamed of you, I thought you knew better.
Karen came to visit last week. We went on the London Eye and did some shopping during the day, and we met up with Hannah in the evening. I’ve put all the photos on facebook, you can see them by clicking here. I’ve put some here as well.
Me and Karen on the London Eye!
An American tourist asked me if this structure in the distance that we could see from the top of the London Eye was the Eiffel Tower. I instinctively started laughing, until I realised he was deadly serious. And then I felt really bad!
It’s actually the Crystal Palace Transmitting Tower in South London, which gives most of London its TV signal.
Then we met up with Hannah, and the odd photos started:
FOR MORE PHOTOS, SEE FACEBOOK.
There was a big fire at the other end of the street from my work this morning, apparently it started at 4am in a restaurant in the bottom of the building. Here’s the news story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8561386.stm
I didn’t see the fire itself until lunchtime, but it was still smoking a lot by then:
Not very exciting, since that’s as close as we were allowed to get, but I thought I’d post it anyway!
Well, I’ve been planning this for a year or so, but wanted to wait until unemployment figures were better and my pay review was over – I’ve quit my programming job at UBS. If you’re interested in knowing exactly why I ended up quitting, send me an email 
But I don’t even have another job lined up, instead I have booked plane tickets to Las Vegas in April, Costa Rica in May and Peru in June. I’m also going to be doing the Inca Trail in Peru at the end of June with a couple of friends, and I can’t wait.
In Costa Rica I’ll be learning spanish for four weeks in a school located beside the beach. That sounds great, but I better practice what spanish I do know so that I’m not completely hopeless when I get there. Here’s where I’m going: Samara Beach.
When I get back in July I’m hoping to get back into contracting – because when I was a contractor in 2006 I got paid a lot more than when I was a full-time employee. Hopefully it will be easy to get a contracting job since I spent four years in the investment bank at UBS and have some decent experience now.
I’ve just put 70-something photos up on facebook, and I don’t want to put them all here as well… but if you click the following links you can see all the photos! You don’t even have to be a member of facebook – anyone can see them!
A bit of a quick blog post, but then a picture tells a thousand words!
Pictures from my trip to New Zealand 2010:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=191964&id=609426517&l=ba5a3fd5cd
Pictures from my weekend trip to Switzerland
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=191963&id=609426517&l=508332ceb5
My friend Ian and his new house and puppy
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=191953&id=609426517&l=61ddd58754
Dave and Kelly Anso’s wedding
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=191943&id=609426517&l=375569cfb4
It’s the first post in a couple of months
One of the reasons I didn’t update the blog more often was because it was such a lot of effort uploading photos, but I’ve written for myself a whizzy little app which, when given a photo, automatically resize it and put it in the right place so hopefully I now have no more excuses!
Here’s an example:
 HANNAH AND THE SQUID |
This is my sister when she was recently in the audience for a cookery show in the UK. Nice one Hannah!!! 
Woo, my app worked. I just clicked on the photo on my computer and it formatted it and put everything in the right place.
