Hello
Posted by: Sonya on: February 28, 2010
- In: cool| nerdy
- Leave a Comment
Hello. Haven’t written anything in ages have I? I haven’t had much free time, and when I have I couldn’t be bothered. 
A colleague a work sent me this link a couple of days ago (below). It works in the same way as those service such as shorturl.com and bit.ly that shorten web page addresses to make them more useable, but this one generates a new address that looks super dodgy. My website address, for example, is http://5z8.info/begin-bank-account-xfer_i9a1r_molotovcocktail
The link is http://www.shadyurl.com
Hey, it’s 2010!
Posted by: Sonya on: January 5, 2010
First post of the new decade, just for the heck of it. Christmas was fabulous, Charlotte bought me a keyboard(!) and a snoring puppy. I’ll have to make a video of the puppy at some point to share with y’all because it’s so cool.
Hogmany could have gone better, it just never seems to work out for Charlotte and I… This year the first hitch was that we couldn’ make it down to Blackpool as planned because the country has decided to go all Arctic on us for some reason and I didn’t fancy getting stuck in a blizzard somewhere in the Pennines. So, we made alternative plans. Half past eight we had started to get ready, I plugged in the iron to do a top for me, turned up the dial and BANG! Damn thing shorted out and blew up in my hand burning me from thumb to wrist. The burns weren’t too bad, although I did spend a day covered in burn plasters, but the shock scared the shit out of me. So we ended up seeing in the new year cuddling on the sofa watching Aliens, me trying not to touch, move or bend my hand in any way. Oh dear. Here’s hoping for a better year…
Exam Results
Posted by: Sonya on: December 19, 2009
- In: cake| cool| open university| work
- Leave a Comment
I got my exam results at the beginning of the week – a grade 2 pass and an improvement on my actual score from last year! But the coolest thing is that everyone in my office got me a wee card and a cupcake as a congratulations. I’ve never worked in an office like this before, I have such a freakin’ great job.
Sunday Funny
Posted by: Sonya on: December 13, 2009
I just logged on to update a couple of my links and I was checking out my stats and discovered that I can see what people who have come here from Google have searched for…
- 4 people searched for ‘chocolate birthday cake for ladies’;
- 3 people searched for ‘capybaras’;
- 2 people searched for ‘hairy Japanese’;
- 2 other people searched for ’sexy banna’ – which Charlotte and I initially misread as ’sexy banana’ which would have been way funnier. What’s a sexy banna?;
- and one person searched for ‘high five lesbian’.
Interesting.
In a more boring note, most of my visitors have been searching for information about Sony eBook Readers but I am also getting lots of hits from people looking for info about SRS and Dr. Chettawut which I feel really good about as it means that page is serving it’s purpose very well.
Extra Special Bonus Christmas Post!
Posted by: Sonya on: December 5, 2009
- In: christmas| funny| pretty
- Leave a Comment
Take a close look at the tree on the left. This is the Christmas tree in a very well-known local shopping centre that shall remain nameless. Remind you of anything? 
The second tree is ours. Much more tasteful isn’t it? It is very small, only about a foot high, but I do think it makes up for it in beauty. As on so many occasions the photo fails to do it justice. The tree and all of the little ornaments are all handcrafted in wood, and I think it’s just brilliant.
All Rise for the Queen!
Posted by: Sonya on: December 5, 2009
- In: cool| royalty
- Leave a Comment
Finally, coming home from Lishi one evening I noticed all the bins in Northumberland Street had been removed and all the police swarming around with machine guns that day hadn’t gone unnoticed either. Charlotte and I were talking about it later and I said to her, ‘Do you think the Queen’s coming to visit her granddaughter?’.
Well, I’m good me. I came in to work on the Friday morning and all the talk was of a secret royal visit. One of my well networked colleagues had heard on the grapevine that if you happened to be in and around Northumberland Street mid-morning you might well get to meet the Queen. So at 11am almost the entire office all headed out in the freezing cold and I got to stand around six feet from the Queen for, probably less than a second, as she sped past me in her big posh car. Officially she was here to open the new City Library and the refurbished Hancock Museum.
I’m by no means a Royalist, but how often in your life do you get to see the Queen? It was very cool, and the coolest thing of all was that her big posh car has exactly the same interior as my Rover!
And yes, the photos are rubbish. I’m no photographer, and they were taken on my humble wittle iPhone.
Goat Staring
Posted by: Sonya on: December 5, 2009
What seems way back now, in the beginning of November, Charlotte and I were privileged enough to attend the premiere of The Men Who Stare at Goats at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle. Well, there were actually two premiers. The other one was in New York and had George Clooney and Ewan McGregor. Newcastle’s not good enough for them apparently. But we got the screenwriter, Peter Straughan who’s from Gateshead, the producer, Paul Lister, and the author of the book, Jon Ronson. It was a cracking evening, the guys gave a group interview before the movie (which is fabulous by the way, kind of Coen brothers style) and a question and answer session after. Then Jon hung around signing copies of the book – he even signed my goat poster! – and I gave him a pen advertising my department at the university because the one he had been given by the cinema was rubbish for signing, apparently.
My Exams
Posted by: Sonya on: December 5, 2009
I’ve been rather remiss in my blogging of late, so let’s put that right today with the first of three that I’ve had in my head to write for a while…
It’s hard to believe that my exams are now over and done for the year, and I’m actually already starting to prepare for 2010. I spent the first half of October frantically revising and the second half, post-exam, mentally drained and good for nothing. The exam itself I think, I hope, has gone okay. I was able to give complete answers to all three questions and I don’t believe any of them were complete crap, but I’ll find out the week before Christmas how well I have actually done.
The first question I answered was on the theme of ‘freedom’ and this was my best and most complete answer, contrasting the idea of negative liberty as advocated by Mill with Marx’s conception of positive liberty and throwing in some Rousseau for good measure. My second essay was on the ‘dirty hands’ problem of politics with reference to Machiavelli which was okay – it was a good three page essay but it wasn’t ordered properly. I got through a couple of paragraphs before I realised that I really needed to have given some exposition first so I had to interweave it a little. My third essay was on Mill and whether or not it could ever be right for a state to restrict freedom of expression. This was easily the weakest of the three because I was starting to run out of time and had to rush it a little, but I still managed two pages. Also, unlike my first two essays, I was able to think of a different, possibly better way to answer the question after the exam.
Oh well. December 18th is the provisional date for my results.
The End of Summer…
Posted by: Sonya on: November 10, 2009
- In: cool| pretty| wildlife
- Leave a Comment
Just a quicke because this happened ages ago, but I didn’t have the time to post about it then because I was busy revising and I’ve only just now found the photo again. One Saturday, when it was still warm enough to keep your windows open, Charlotte was sitting at her desk working on a model when a wee ladybug flew in and landed in her box. Can you spot it?
An Out Of This World Experience
Posted by: Sonya on: October 10, 2009
If you happened to catch the local North East news on Tuesday evening you may have seen a feature on the opening of the new Planetarium in Newcastle’s Centre for Life, the largest of its kind in the North. Well, Charlotte and I were there.
Actually, it’s not so much a new planetarium, I know, because we’ve been too it before! But it has been enlarged and the projection system upgraded. Before the grand opening we were treated to an excellent lecture on the origins and nature of the universe by one of the country’s leading cosmologists, Professor Carlos Frenk. I know it was good because I enjoyed it and learned a few things, and because it made my head hurt. Hard science always has the tendency to make my head hurt.
After the lecture we got to spend some time in the centre’s exhibition space playing with the dinosaurs while enjoying some specially commissioned ‘space’ cocktails – they made my head feel light and fluffy – before the opening of the planetarium itself and a thirty minute compilation of some of the centre’s best planetarium shows, one of which was in 3D. That made my eyes hurt, but it was very impressive none the less. There’s nothing quite like the experience, it’s so much more than what you can ever get at a cinema or anywhere else because it’s a total immersion experience. The new planetarium is a dome 10 meters in diameter which provides a full 180 degree immersion experience. The 3D animation sequences made me feel like a goddess in my chair, floating through my creation to admire it and the visual experience is complimented by an equally impressive sound system powerful enough to make your chair shake and vibrate at all the right places.
The planetarium show didn’t make my head hurt, or go light and fluffy, but it did make my legs wobbly.
Mini Profile
Myself and Charlotte, my love.
I'm 29, Scottish, but live in Newcastle, and I work as a learning technologist.
Click here if you want to learn more about me.
