Wake up stupidly early; check, finish packing; check, drive to Heathrow; fail, work; fail. Awesome! So instead flying from Gatwick to Orlando for a holiday and my cous’s wedding.

Security at Gatwick seems a little tighter than Heathrow, an extra set of ticket authorisation was required, simple a card check, maybe this was because the ticket was booked on a personal card instead of the travel agents one I’m used to.

Flight was fine, different type of plane, 777 instead of 747. Rubbish in comparison, entertainment system wasn’t good, basically everything started at the same time on every channel, which of course we got no warning of. Food was ok though, chocolate profiteroles for pudding, yum yum yum. Landed, picked up rental car and met my uncle, drove over to his new place. Lovely house, less than a year old, I will take some pics of it when I get chance.

Most importantly I got one of these:

The rest of the night was spent drinking these, cousin and hubby to be showed up around 10 and we drank for a few further hours catching up. Fun for all. Lets see what tomorrow brings.

This is just a test thing to show Siobhan how it works.

I know it really isn’t a big deal, but I’m excited…

Total views: 1,999.

Who will be my 2000th?

Now day 4, no one likes the return home day, yet everyone loves getting home. Again won’t bore with the details, breakfast, however I did have a very nice view of Alcatraz, and work in the morning, check out at 12, some more work in the upstairs bar. By upstairs I mean 36th floor.

Me and Cookie decided that as we had a couple of hours to kill before we had to head to the airport we would head beachwards. after struggling to persuade the taxi man there must be a beach within an hours drive we finished up at the harbour by the Golden Gate bridge. Was so nice to walk along the sand, paddling a bit (a lot) and wondered all the way to the bottom of the Golden Gate bridge. Loads of kodak moments (shot on a Nokia, go figure). We saw the protected albatrosses fly past us in a group. They basically patrol Alcatraz now, and anyone caught touching them can be jailed. So yes if they attach you, all you can do is run the hell away. So the rumour says anyway.

After walking around for around 30 mins we finally found a taxi, back to hotel for bags then straight back into taxi for the airport. Bought some gin then got on the plane, which is where I am now sitting writing this with Cookie asleep next to me. I’m gunna pop off for a nap any second now too, G&T and a bottle of wine will help with that.

Big love and will probably have seen most of you before I get around to posting this.

I shall skip the boring parts of day 3, breakfast and morning work were boring as you can expect. Lunch picked up, we went to meet up with Eddie from www.eddie.com, he’s one of the assistant directors of the Spike Lee collaboration film called Nokia Productions (good name hey?!?), and more importantly, he is a thoroughly nice chap. He’d recommended that we go to this little French bistro in South Park. And very nice it was too, I was still bulging from breakfast and the site of the massive baguette was exactly what I needed. As we left Eddie took us on a brief tour of the landmarks, the building opposite was the Twitter HQ. I resisted twittering saying I was outside (just), now I kinda wish I had photo’ed, but to be honest it would have been a boring picture. The office looks more like a little secluded house, there was no forms of branding etc. The next place on the web 2.0 tour was the Organic building, where Wired is/was based and where Yahoo do a load of stuff. Uber interesting to see how unglamorous these places are.

Hotel, work, boring, prep for the event in the evening. The event went really well and everyone seemed to have a good time. I wont go into detail.

Afterwards we popped for another drink with Eddie, I don’t know where this bar was because Eddie drove, all I remember is an extensive list of whiskeys/gins on a chalk board. Sehr cool.

That’s day 3 done and dusted.

With day one out of the way, we can focus on day two. My first full day in San Francisco. Full day is an accurate way to describe it. Awake at 3 (stupid jetlag), I did a few hours work before heading down for breakfast with the no longer drunk Galbo. Buffet is the best way to do breakfast, two massive platefuls of bacon, sausage, egg and potatoes later I felt quite ill. Will have to have a lie down before I get onto anymore work me thinks.

Popped over to check out the venue for the event on Tues night (today is Monday), was weirded out by the total change in social class on the drive over. Went from Union square, which is an up market shopping district, through an area that looked like absolutely everyone was a scag head. My suspicions proven by a couple of people seemingly openingly doing some stuff I’m sure they shouldn’t be doing on the streets. Passing through this area we got to City Hall, the opera house and the symphony building. How can all this be within a minutes taxi ride from such poverty? I think it was Mr Galbo who was telling me that there is a serious problem in San Fran with poverty, that there really is a divide between the have and the have nots. (A point which I will pick up on more in a later article about a book I’ve just finished).

City Hall was awash with TV crews, because of this I decided that after checking out the venue I would walk the half mile or so back there and have a whack about. The TV crews were all around due to the San Francisco politicians deciding that it was time to allow gay marriages, and that the first one was going to be legalized at 5:01. There is a real back story to this, which I semi picked up watching hours of repeated news in the hotel. Something along the lines of gay marriages previously being legalized, then they changed their minds and cancelled all the marriage (anyone know more on this?). Wondering through I happy snapped pictures on my n95 8gb to my hearts content. Then noticed a guy with a better camera (TV dude) so had a quick natter with him. Later to be quite surprised to see he had donned a tie and was presenting the report for a local news service.

After all this excitement I went back to the hotel to do some more work.

That evening we all decided to pop out for dinner, all being me, Galbo and Cookie Monster aka Pete. We ended up wondering all the way to Polk, around 20 blocks or so up Sutter. We found this little Chinese place, through desperation rather than desire we went in. The food really wasn’t that great, but they had Cobra so pleasure/pain yoghurt advert I guess. After the quick munch we headed over the road to the Blur bar, a wannabee trendy bar which seemed just dark and depressive. Always funny for the bargirl to try and sell you cheap fags too.

Next we popped next door to a bar I don’t remember the name of, something Tavern, you’d think I’d Google research it, but no. A cool upbeat rocky bar with a dj and a pool table. We jumped onto the pool table (to play, not literally jumped on) and stayed there for an hour or so. I dominated Galbo and Cookie, but got beat by a Texan guy who was taking it extremely seriously. Poor Chap, he really was rubbish and if I’d been playing properly, or had played American tables at all recently, I’d of kicked his arse too. He did however get a bit grumpy when I had 2 shots after he potted the white (scratched). Stupid American rules!

Left the Tavern, walked back, and bed, night night and onto day 3.

What a day! All that was required was a simple flight over to the States on Sunday 16th, for a few days work trip to San Francisco. Was it that easy/straight forward? Of course not.

Getting to Terminal 5 was easy, quick and quiet drive, plenty room in car park and no wait for a bus to the terminal. All sounding easy so far. After checking my bag in I wondered off and ridiculously randomly bumped into Dan M and his lady, a school friend who was popping over to New York for a week holiday.

Second weird thing I noticed was a group of Americans, who had loads of music gear to check in. From a closer inspection they had clearly just played at Download festival and were heading back to the states. Still haven’t been able to work out how they were though, best guesses from pictures on Download website suggests either A Day To Remember or Alesana. Unfortunately neither have a blog which I can link to and see if it was them.

Once my flight gate popped up it was time to stop stalking the emo band and move on. Whilst walking to the gate an Irish chap started chatting at me, so ended up wondering down to the gate with him. Before being interrupted by the Duty Free guy offering us a free cocktail, its 10am, who wants a cocktail at this time? Me! He whipped up some lemon thing with fancy vodka, as you can see his sales pitch worked well on me, I’ve remembered everything about his product. Woops. Strange incident number two, this Irish chap happened to be called Colin too and was seated a row behind me on the plane (admittedly on the other side).

Boarded plane, sat next to a 60 year old Indian lady who didn’t move other than to let the guy by the window out. The guy I’m sure is some form of social media geezer, he had a Firefox Tshirt on and read “The Google Story” book. So it that was you in seat 49J of flight BA285 get in touch.

Landed (yay) as per usual, and got off quick fast to try and get through security nice and quickly. A few more questions than normal and I was through, I blame the flip flops and shorts, now onto luggage claim. As normal, gotta wait around for a few minutes before the bags start flowing around on the conveyor belt. As they started flowing through I started watching out for mine, and watching and watching and watching. After 30 mins and there only being one bag left on the conveyor I gave up. Walked over to the luggage complaints/enquiries desk where a very slow BA employee had been lumbered with everything to deal with. She was very helpful and tracked my luggage, apparently it was on the plane. Not like everyone else’s which had been moved to the flight later that day. After another hour or so they finally found my luggage somewhere out the back, no idea where or why it wasn’t just put on the conveyor but I don’t care. There was nothing missing so I just left the airport for the easy trip to the hotel.

A short limo ride later, yes limo, well normal car with sweets and drinks, I was at the hotel. Quickly checked in and Galbo came down to meet me, this was the extent of his exercise for the day.

Got upstairs to my room on the 29th floor, walk in, and there is some luggage in the room. WTF? Why is there luggage in my room which isn’t mine? Rang reception who explained that the room had already been setup for a guest arriving later that day and that I would have to move. No real big deal, hopped down to the 14th floor which is where I now came to rest. Here’s the view from my window below. I think that pretty much wraps up the day, I am going to do a separate post about the dinner I had in a minute.

Here is the customary post, apologising for the lack of content recently and promising to post more soon. There, done!

Oh yes, me, fun!

Tuesday night sent myself, Cookie Monster and Horsy to London town to meet up with MsJen, a fandabidozi blogger and friend. Check her out here, but more importantly check me out on her site here. Proving I’m fun and a laugh a minute kinda chap!

This time I am not going to talk about the practicality of being in New York, hopefully you all read my past summary of being in New York for a few days. Instead I want to pick briefly on a few specifics I have come across today. Infact, at the time of typing this the list is 4 things.

1) Slate Bar barman: what a nice chap. I had to wait around to talk to their boss, so went for a pint at the bar. Within a few minutes of sitting there, at an empty bar on my tod the chap came over and asked where in England I was from. We started chatting about the cliche English things, London, Oxford university, Radiohead etc. My favourite bit was when he said it was now happy hour and the Stella was now only $4. We talked tourist stuff, he recommended a Mexican place for me to go for lunch/dinner just around the corner and also wrote down a cool bar to go to. The Mexican was awesome (Chipotle), the bar, hopefully see it tomorrow night. I left, hopefully the guy will be working on Thurs too.

2) After returning to the hotel I fancied some dinner, so popped down to the bar. A quick glance at my laptop clock shows me it is 2.30am my time and after only getting an hours kip before the flight I kinda think I’m doing ok. In the bar I order myself a G & T and sit back and enjoy, a bit of Jaiku and Twitter and emails. Wings, I want WINGS, so I order Wings, out of stock, as are the chips and wedges. Hmmmm only other thing on the menu I can face is the Pizza. It shows up, by Pizza they mean cheese on burnt toast, rip off!

3) Sitting in bar waiting for food there is a very weird situation building next to me. A 50 yr old chap has met with a mid 20s girl. They start talking fashion, clearly its a business meeting. Nothing too weird, other than the age difference. The bloke’s fashion business is basically to buy shit clothes and modify them, add frills and embroidery. Fruit of the Loom? However, see this Tweet and the situation gets a lot more interesting. The latest thing to happen is that the girl had ordered a diet coke, she has just walked out without taking a single sip. Blokey is still sitting here nursing his finished whiskey. Just heard him on the phone say “I just wanted to touch base with you” and “you’ll know me when you see me” also “we’ll have a good time” I think this guy is some sort of throw back and someone needs to tell him to leave it!… hero!

4) Couple at the bar selected fish and chips from the menu. It has just arrived… the English will know what I mean by a Sundae, it looks like that, but its the newspaper that its served in thats shaped in that way. Genius. How stereotypical!

5) I didn’t want to go this far, but a new amazing one just walked in… two cute girls sitting next to me, bloke walks in and gets introduced to one of them. Clearly this is some sort of setup for the other. The guy basically seems like a social recluse, not comfortable in anyway etc. His first story involved a high school prank, bad start. Now talking work and how they have a car showroom at the bottom of their office block. Ladies, is that sexy? He better not get lucky!