Not sure really if anyone reads this anymore, or if those people, my true hardcore, play Eve online, nor if those true hardcore Eve playing fans have iphones...

But if you are and do, then you should know that Capsuleer is going down the drain in a few weeks. Good ol Nashh Kadavr has started a pettition to help it survive. Not sure it'll make any difference, but the community has to respond somehow, and signing a blog is pretty easy and quick, and at least it makes it feel like you didn;t just stand by and let a great app slide away.

You can find the info's you need here.

Hey everyone, I back again.

Hope ya'll didn't forget about me, like you forgot about Dre...

Gah, I hate times like this, unable to get to sleep. I've worked a mad 78hrs in 8days, and now I can finally have a rest my body seems like it doesn't want to take it. So here I am again, for the second night in a row, unable to sleep and at a loss as to what to do.

At least I've found my headphones, so I can listen to some chilled electronica that Fat Roland linked a few weeks back. Cheers dude, forgot I had it, and I'm rather enjoying it now. Guess stuff always works out in the long run.

In other news, the electricians finally put the finishing touches on the house, and got the bathroom fan working again. Now I've just got to wait for the plaster to finish drying and get out the painting clothes - again.

Warcraft is down for a long maintenance too, bad timing eh, but at least it gives me a chance to read blogs and catch up with stuff I should already be up to speed with.

It's a bit late, but after chatting to Pete and Sheepy about not doing any blogging for ages, I've decided to put a little more effort into finding out what other folks are up to.

Who knows how long this new endeavour will last for, maybe till the weekend if I'm lucky!

Well, it's our last day here. :(

Got some good souvenirs, bizarrely including a 32 piece dinner set. Well, it was only £7.50 and looked really good. The shop was a little odd to say the least, you kind of had to rummage around in piles of plates to find a matching set!

Shopping here is about the most frustrating thing in the world. In a department store it goes a bit like this....

1. Get something off a shelf you want to buy.
2. Take it to a shop assistant.
3. Follow them to a till, where they take it off you and ignoring the pc next to them, slowly write out a receipt for each item in long hand, including barcodes prices and random shop references.
4. Leave the item there and take the receipt to a different till at the other side of the building.
5. Get in the scrum to pay for the item.
6. Pay.
7. Wait for someone to bring the item you wanted to this 2nd till.
8. Wait for another person to wander up and wrap said item and pass it to another person.
9. Wait for person 5 to put it in a bag and staple the receipt to the bag sealing it shut, then pass it to person 3.
10. Finally get item from person 3.

Now the stupid thing is, if you want more than 1 item they may all end up going to different tills on different floors, or randomly you'll just pay the 1st dude for the item without needed to go through any of the process.

After our stay, I've come to see that this was not an isolated incident, but how shopping is done here. I couldn't find a more inefficient way. So frustrating and pointless. But hey, the prices are very low, so I guess it's ok. Not often you get all that crockery so cheap or a pair of Oakley shades for £2.25!!

At least the stores don't charge 'white man prices' and you can't haggle. So what you see is what everyone pays. Though sometimes you'll be haggling over a few thousand indonesian rupiah, so you have to ask yourself, is saving 10pence worth it? Well punk, is it?

Just waiting for the car to take us on our last journey to the airport, then it's 24hours of traveling for us. But for some reason the flights are shorter coming back home, and no, it's not just the time zones! Hopefully we'll not have to land twice at random places on the way home, and just stay on the short route!

See ya'll soon.

Just got back from our 4 days at the seaside.

The 5 hour drive was harrowing to say the least, only saw 1 acident on the way there. A lady had fallen off the back of a bike coming down the steepest bendyest mountain road I've ever seen.

The beach was amazing, with good easy surf for bodyboarding. The 'hotel' was less amazing with a small room, seating outside, and no drinking water. At least they had a normal loo. So far I've managed to avoid squatting. We did nothing really at the beach, just spent a few days swimming and surfing* in the Indian Ocean. Reading my book on the beach and just relaxing.

Again as the 'white people' on the beach we were catapulted to celebrity status with random people coming up to photo us or trying to position themselves or family for a photo so we'd be in the background. It did get really annoying as we'd get a very quiet spot of beach, then suddenly we'd be surrounded by 20 people all chosing to sit and play near us and the rest of the mile long beach would be empty. F'off!

On the last day we woke to the military having occupied the beach for some sort of parade/ceremony. Very odd. So we didn't go down to the beach then, which turned out to be a good thing as they'd buried a ton of explosives and promptly, much to our suprise, detonated them. That was just a little scary... Then they all left. About 500 troops all crammed into a few coaches and trucks. Poor fellas, must have been boiling.

Only a few days left for us now :( so we're gonna head into town and get some souvenirs for us, and sweeties for you folks back home. Tomorrow will be another day at the pool, without a massage, and then it's back to a massive set of flights. Think we get back to Manchester around 1pm on Friday if anyone might be around to pick us up? If ya can't it's ok, we may have an ace in our sleeve, but any offer would be grand. (as always, a well planned trip)

Also I must appologise for my lousy typing. It'sa weird laptop keyboard I'm using with tiny keys :(

*Well body boarding really, and even then not very well, but it was a ton of fun.

Who would haVae thought such a tiny Javanese girl could hurt me so much. My poor legs.

Had the massage today at the paradise pool, which I've also found out is a hotel charging a local futune if you wanted to stay a night. That translates to about 22pounds per room per night. Insane. I managed to not let a sound out as I was well and truly ground into submission. who knew pressing on my legs could hurt so much. All the way through I was tring to hold off a big fart too. The she starts to pummel my ass! Bad move, but I managed to retain my dignity and clenched.

I also remember a moment of panic I had yesterday at the temple in the loos. I went to what I thought werethe urinals, but they looked a big weird, just a slope with a tap hanging above them. Then to my horror a thought crept into my mind that they were actually the sinks and there were no urinals, just the squatty type cubicles. As I was the only one using the 'urinals' I had no idea. Then some chap came and stood next to me and thankfully started to piss too, so either I was right, or I just made some more tourists piss in the sinks. I left soon after and used the alco gel on my hands and didn't look at anyone for a while.

Think I may have got a little bit of sunburn on my balding head after all the pooltime today, but the rest of me still remains a milky white. Hope I don't get fried at the beach.

If you didn't know, it's Sarah's birthday today. So she's had a special lotions and potions masage and hair pampering type thang, which seemed to go down well. She got some good pressies from Em, Paul, Luke and Isaac including various local sweets and delicacies. But without a doubt the star gift was 'Placenta', the moisturising cream made with....cows placenta. Helps keep the skin nice and white apparently!

Tomorrow we're off on a 5hour drive across some mad roads to get to the beach we're staying at. Not quite sure what to expect. Apparently it's a bit like camping, but with walls, and we have to take all our own drinking water with us, but all the Ex-pats reccomend it highly, so hopefully it'll turn out to be a tourist free paradise. Gonna have a good relaxing time anyway, and I'll just close my eyes on the roads.

We'll be at the beach for 4 days, so don't panis if I don't post for a while! At least I'll have time to read up on my new 4th ed Ad&d rulebooks, and work on my 'tan'.

Went to bombadur today, a really cool 1300yr old buddist temple (older than Ankor Wat I think) made from black 'lava stone', as our tour guide told us. It was awesome.

Also as the big scary white man, I was somewhat of a local phenomenon, and had hordes of school children on a trip out wanting to take my photo - wierd. The awesomeness of that soon wore thin and the rest were diligently herded away by our tour guide.

We were allowed to go right up to the top of the temple, and it was huge. Though they had cheated when they made it and built it over a hill, so it's all solid underneath. Made with interlocking blocks of cut black lava rock (so we went early in the day before the sun heats the temple up too much) At the top there are lattice style bell shaped monuments about 10ft tall with a Budda statue inside. Apparently it is good luck to be able to reach in and touch the Budda's ring (finger), which is just a dream for those small armed Indonesians, but I got a firm grasp, much to my delight. So that means I'm now a lucky man!

After that we went for a short ride on a large elephant, which was pretty cool, though the tour guide couldn't figure out how to photo it with our camera, so we had a shakey video of the trees, sky, his feet, and sometimes us, as he pressed the wrong buttons. Oh well.

We then went off to the local tourist mall thing, which was a long dirty street with a million people selling strange stuff, even meat (rat?) on a stick. Got some touristy large mask things, didn't buy the giant wooden willies, and then went back over the mountains to get to where we're staying.

We hire a driver for these excursions who charges about 30 quid a day to drive us about in his big 4x4. A total bargain as driving around here would really be suicidal. There are no real rules. You can drive through red lights if you turn left, or go straight on if there is no left turn. You overtake/undertake as you like, sometimes both. Got to love a bus overtaking us as we overtook another vehicle on a blind bend on the crest of a hill. The record for most people on a moped is 4, though one had a helmet on so that's ok. The main problem at night is that people don't know where their headlights are, and with no street lights, night driving is also 'fun'.

Gonna get a massage tomorrow at that nice pool place. So that should be really good. then it's off to the beach for a few days.

Thought that rather than using the Apathy forums for my holiday updates, I'd just post them to my oft ignored journal instead.

Today we went to visit a train museum as we don't have that sort of thing in the UK. It was a little less polished than our museums, but we got to clamber around on several less than pristine steam engines. The real purpose of the trip was to see the paddy fields and surrounding villages on a short train ride out into the countryside.

After missing the first train and waiting about 90 mins for it to complete it's 40min round trip we decided to skip it and go swimming instead, figuring the train must have either broken down or run someone over on one of the train crossings. These involve a guy jumping off the train and waving at people to stop as the train crosses the road. Good job huh!

So we headed off to paradise! An amazing pool amongst several palm trees where we listened to soft music, drank fresh melon juice and swam and played in the pool with our godchildren. It was so nice we're going back there in a few days for some good Javanese massages, they can get quite firm apparently. I need to learn the indonesian for 'please don't hurt me' and 'not so hard, my arm it's snapped in half' etc. Did I mention we had the pool to ourselves, even better. and it cost about 12pounds for the pool, drinks and food for 6 of us, total that is. An expensive day out by local standards!

Tomorrow we're off to the nearby big old temple Yogyakarta, I think. Can't wait. We've got some good photos already. I'll have to get Sarah to pop them up on facebook or something.

Today for the first time I managed to boot someones door in!

It was a medical emergency after all, well, sort of... But I did feel all macho doing it.

Was a tough door though, took a fair number of size 11's and some cunning handle action from my mate to get through it.