[{"_1":2,"_30":-5,"_31":-5},"loaderData",{"_3":4},"routes/__layout/tag.$name",{"_5":6,"_7":8},"tagName","london life","posts",[9],{"_10":11,"_12":13,"_14":15,"_16":17,"_18":19,"_20":21,"_22":23,"_24":25,"_26":27,"_28":29},"id",116,"title","Big Weekend","excerpt","First proper free weekend in months. Highlights: Yahoo! UK's inaugural Hack Day, Popstarz, a spontaneous Cartoon Museum visit, funky dancing at Buttoned Down Disco, and a birthday pub lunch. My aching muscles confirm I'm no longer a teenager, but it was a great weekend.","body","\r\n\r\n

This is the first weekend that has not been dampened by some external factor like moving or illness or homelessness for a couple of months. Quite a lot of fun was had.\r\n\r\n

Friday started with Yahoo!'s first UK Hack Day. A brilliant concept: get paid to learn new stuff and build a pet project! The hack we decided on was an internal-only map application to find desks and meeting rooms in the byzantine recesses of the London office. As it was the first UK hack day ever, there were some teething troubles -- like not having sorted out development boxes ahead of time -- but in general I met some cool people, and while we didn't finish our hack, we got all the important bits working, and going from nothing through design to implementation in 8 hours despite quite a lot of infrastructure issues is a pretty impressive feat.\r\n\r\n

I capped out Friday with a return to Popstarz, at 5 weeks the longest gap between visits in ages. The horror that was their Funfair-themed evening had faded, and I had a great time, though I am very out of shape for dancing at the moment -- I am extremely sore today, as one tends to be on the 2nd day after returning to exercise.\r\n\r\n

Saturday started with brunch at the World Cafe in Crouch End -- originally intended to be at Banner's, organized by O, but he was overwhelmed by his own popularity and too many people turned up, so we overflowed, but hey, I had pancakes with bacon, so I'm not going to complain.\r\n\r\n

We then made a spontaneous visit to the newly opened Cartoon Museum -- like a gallery, only the paintings make you giggle -- which was very entertaining and well worth the very reasonable £2.50 admission.\r\n\r\n

Saturday evening was Buttoned Down Disco with MK, MH, Cat Lady K and SS. The music was inspiredly funky with occasional breaks for totally random -- I made quite a lot of use of Shazam but a lot of the tracks were too obscure for it to recognize. The new venue (Purple Turtle at Mornington Crescent) was excellent, even if I did wimp out and head home on the last tube, what with having had 6 hours of sleep and aching muscles from Popstarz. I'm not a teenager any more, folks :-(\r\n\r\n

Today was a late start, then birthday pub lunch for sister-in-law-to-be E, which was excellent: I can heartily recommend the food at the Blue Pumpkin if you're ever in the Balham/Tooting area.\r\n\r\n

And now I'm home, and chilling out. A good weekend.\r\n\r\n

Reading: The Algebraist, by Iain M. Banks
\r\n
Listening to: a somewhat eclectic mix of Adam Ant (the 80s live on at Albert Square!) and Panic! at the disco, while desperate for Orson to release an album so I can stop listening to No Tomorrow on repeat.
\r\n
Watching: the dying days of West Wing (season 7 sucks!) and Planet Earth (the BBC earns a whole decade's worth of licence fees, all at once).\r\n

","updated",["D",1143379805000],"created",["D",1143379805000],"codename","big_weekend","legacy_id","3440","published",["D",1143379805000],"draft",false,"actionData","errors"]

Posts tagged “london life”