Wednesday 28 December 2011

Another Xmas tree

I just realised, I never got round to putting up the picture of the Minecraft Xmas tree!


It was actually half destroyed by someone (on accident?) so this is the repaired version, but doesn't it look cool?! :D The lights even blink on it too!

Tuesday 27 December 2011

My Xmas

As usual I went round my parents house on both the 25th and 26th and each year mum has a colour scheme and this year's was purple:

Main tree with presents!

2nd smaller tree

3rd even smaller tree!

We tried setting up a tripod so that for once we could try and get a picture with everyone in it, but I think it didn't come out so well so I've used a different picture instead:

Ready to eat dinner, my mother is taking the photo though

After dinner we sat down to open presents and I was lucky and got loads of great things! Sonic Generations on 3DS, Labryrinth Duel, Harry Potter and Heroica board games, No Strings Attached, Just go with it, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Gamer and Indiana Jones 4 on Blu-ray, Robot Chicken Seasons 1-4 on DVD, TinTin volume 5, Ready Player One book, The Inbetweeners Yearbook, Meccano robot, Balloon copter, Bart Simpson socks, Xmas flashing tie, comfy gloves, pocket tape measure, car window cleaners, mini build it yourself sports car, super bouncy ball, Doctor Who themed goop, personalised bar mats, pocket microscope, Rubik's slide game, shocking liar game, Lego Batman t-shirt, Mensa calendar/puzzles, gaming mug, grow your own chilli plants, magic dragon fish, make your own snow, Strawberry Milkshake poptarts, Chocolate Santas, Transformers candy sticks and tons of other sweets :) Wow!

All of the cool presents I was given!

But the time we'd opened everything it was pretty late so I headed off home, but I came back the next day for more yummy food and an afternoon of board games which included:

Mapominoes

Name Train

Even though the last game did drag on a bit, it's been a fantastic two days. I hope everyone else had a great Xmas too!! :D

Sunday 25 December 2011

Merry Christmas!

I just want to wish everyone a merry Christmas and here's a look at the personalised cards that I was sending out this year.


Hopefully that's still big enough to read if you want to try and work out the code... :)

Have a great day!

Saturday 24 December 2011

Santa Yoda

Today I opened the final door on my advent calendar and it wasn't really a surprise because it says about this in a big section on the front of the box... :)


Santa Yoda!! Even though it wasn't much of a surprise, I still think that is pretty cool :) He even has presents in his bag! :D

Friday 23 December 2011

Pre-Christmas celebrations

Last night I went over Lucy and Andy's for our usual pre-Christmas celebrations and present exchanging! As usual it was an epic time and not just because they cooked nachos AND fajitas! (how awesome is that?!) :D Instead of a bigger presents this year I got them both lots of little things and they seemed to like them all so that's an epic win!! Every year I have to buy Lucy an obligatory Hello Kitty present so this year I got her Top Trumps:


I think it's a tradition that she'd probably rather forget, but I'm annoying like that! The game itself works like Top Trumps always does, but they're actually all places and not really related to Hello Kitty at all. The categories are fashion factor, things to do, natural beauty, glamour and miles from London (of which the Moon wins with 240,000!) :D

They got me this cool bouncy ball that bounces a whopping 75 feet in the air (no really!) and this awesome goo stuff:



You've probably all seen this goo before, but this one was a new spin because it was Doctor Who themed as in that it was the "Flesh" (one of the episodes of the last season) and there are some bits of the Doctor floating in it! Nice :P They also got me what looks like a rather cool Lego game:


I haven't played (or built) it yet, but I'll take it over my parents on the 25th/26th and we'll probably play it then :)

Talking of Lego, the advent calendar is nearly finished as there's only 1 day left (and I know what that is, because it's on the box boasting about how it's in there!). I have quite a few days to put up though, so here's a Lego calendar photo flood!

December 15 - Republic Gunship

December 16 - Clone Trooper

December 17 - Weapons rack

December 18 - Y-wing

December 19 - TIE pilot

December 20 - TIE Figher

December 21 - Millennium Falcon

December 22 - A-wing

December 23 - Xmas tree

Not sure about that last one... sure it looks cute, but I don't remember ever seeing an Xmas tree in the Jedi Temple, but maybe Darth Vader has one in his living room? :P

Wednesday 14 December 2011

Xmas came early!

This morning I was in the petrol station buying fuel (as you do!) and what do I see out of the corner of my eye...? NEW ENERGY DRINKS THAT I HAVEN'T TRIED! But not one... FOUR! FOUR! Now you can see why I think Xmas came early!


Naturally I bought all 4 and the first two are WEIRD! Energy drink espressos! They taste like cold coffee, but BETTER! I really liked them in fact! :D The lemonade flavoured one (yellow), tasted literally like lemonade so a bit boring there and I haven't tried the orange one yet, I have to leave something for tomorrow! :)

On to the Lego advent calendar and yesterday was R2-Q5:


Cool... but I wish it had been R2-D2 instead! Today's advent calendar called a bit of confusion because initially I thought it was a slightly weird looking Sandcrawler, but after some research I realised it's a Mouse Droid:


Well it looks pretty similar? :)

Monday 12 December 2011

The coolest headset you've (probably) ever seen!

I already have a nice Logitech headset that I bought back in 2007,but after an hour or so my ears feel like they might drop off. Unfortunately this happens on all over-ear headsets so you can imagine my delight when I found a headset that doesn't go over your ears... The Plantronics Audio 480 and it arrived today! I'm going to use the promo photo because there's no way I can get a photo to look anywhere near this good (believe me I tried!) and it just wouldn't do it justice!


How cool is that?! the boom microphone is actually flexible so you can angle/turn it and the little plastic clip thing points into your upper ear to keep the entire thing steady. It works really well and comes with lots of different size attachments including memory foam if you want to block out all outside sound! I'm just using the default medium for everything and it's working great!

The only possible problem that I can see is that it is obviously very geared up for speaking/voices as the bass is pretty much non-existant. That doesn't bother me as I bought it for chatting, but it might worry someone else if they were thinking of using it for music as well as chatting.

Now on to my Lego advent calendar and I have three days to show you! In order they're a Imperial Shuttle, a B1 battle droid and a a T-47 airspeeder (Snowspeeder) :)




I love how accurate these are considering the tiny size of them all. That's someone's JOB to design these... what a brilliant job! :)

Friday 9 December 2011

I think we're going to need a bigger kitchen

Carrie's come over for the weekend and although we're off to a house warming on Saturday, the rest of the time will be spent doing important things like video games and watching tv :) I was a bit worried we wouldn't have enough food though so I had Tesco deliver some and yes it's another Tesco entry, because they amuse me! :)





Hopefully that'll get us through the weekend? :) But just in case we decided to order some takeaway food and I had a quarter pounder burger as a 12" meat feast pizza and Carrie had a chicken burger, chicken shish kebab, 9" meat feast pizza, a portion of chips and we both shared a 9" garlic bread with cheese :)



No we didn't eat it all and the majority of both pizzas are in the fridge (hence the gap in the fridge photo ready for us to put the pizzas in!), but we did eat everything else! :D I feel so sick right now, but it tasted sooooo good! :) Pizza for breakfast too, yay! :D

Moving on to the advent calendar, the one from yesterday and today go quite well, a rebel pilot and an X-wing!



The X-wing was quite a lot of pieces so I was fairly impressed with it, but I haven't bothered putting it next to reference photo because everyone knows what an X-wing looks like, right? :)

Wednesday 7 December 2011

The Thing

I went to see "The Thing" tonight and I'm glad I did, it was great! I originally thought it was a remake of the 1982 film (which is remake of an earlier film/story), but it's actually a prequel of the events leading UP to the 1982 film! It's been a long time since I saw the 1982 film, but I'm watching it again right now and the two work really well back to back! It's not really a spoiler, but the new prequel ends where the 1982 film starts :)

If you didn't know, essentially the films are about an alien virus/lifeform that could look like anyone so not just the threat of being eaten alive, but also that it could be your friend there who does it. There were lots of bits that made me jump as well as it wasn't always the person I expected it to be so that was really refreshing as well.

Very good film with some pretty epic visual effects as well! :D

Onto the advent calendar and here's the updates from yesterday and today (they go together quite nicely!):



That's Chewbacca and a weapon/tool rack for him, but rather bizarrely, that wasn't the only thing in there because today I also found a plastic lion!


Erm?! It's made up of multiple pieces, like something you find in a Kinger Egg, but it was already assembled. Very weird... don't get that at all! Wrong calendar/someone at the factory having a joke?

Monday 5 December 2011

Oh look, more Lego!

Mark at work was kind enough to give me a small Lego Harry Potter figure and it's being proudly displayed on my desk!


I can't remember exactly what the reason was that he had it, but it was something like his girlfriends' cousins' son had insisted Mark take it and as he doesn't really have any use for it, he kindly offered it to me! Sweet!

Also on the same topic, my Lego advent calendar today offered a nice easy one:


It's Slave 1 used by Jango and Boba Fett. Impressively the side "wings" even rotate like on the actual ship!

Sunday 4 December 2011

Holidays are most definitely coming!

I'm not finished yet, but hopefully within a few hours *all* my postal Xmas cards will be ready to go in the post. I've got all the address labels and postage printed out (just over 100) so now I just need to finish sticking them all to envelopes, write/include the card and done!

However, it was made way more complicated than it should have been by the Royal Mail website having problem after problem. I've actually sent them an email complaining in fact. For example if you sent to an address containing an umlaut (the dots above some letters), it removed that entire line AFTER charging you... helpful! If you selected "Mr & Mrs" it would display the HTML entity on the label, not the & sign (making me look like a fool!), it would continually clear my shopping basket forcing me to do smaller batches, it would continually log me out, it would actually LOSE email receipts, if you do a big batch you have to wait up to 30 minutes to print the labels... the list goes on... :S

This isn't isolated though, they've having tons of systems problems at the moment (it's in the news), but it's not new either, my brother has to deal with the Royal Mail business site at work for our mailings and is constantly complaining about how rubbish/buggy it is and they just don't seem to care, or seem unable to sort them out :(

Anyway, postal cards will at least be mostly done today, then just the work ones to do! :D

Next topic and yes it's more Minecraft pictures, but look!!!! I was very surprised to log in and find a pretty tree outside my house (that was just a coincidence because the area there was free) and even a present under it for me too!



Awesome! And then finally I wasn't sure about posting this or not because I didn't want to sound too bigheaded, but I felt pretty chuffed with this:


The board has started over as it's a new server hence no other signs, but the number underneath is how many requests were handled in the week and the person with most requests wins that week. Not bad for my first two weeks? :) It won't be three though, I haven't logged in anywhere near enough for that, but I think I've done an adequate amount so I don't mind who wins it :)

Moving on, day 4 of the Star Wars calendar has been opened and inside was:


Once again my Star Wars guru (and his son) were able to work it out what it's supposed to be and it's a "Dwarf Spider Droid.

If only they made a "Lego Star Trek" calendar, I'd have been fine! :D

Saturday 3 December 2011

Breaking Dawn

Last night I went to the cinema with Helen and finally got to see Breaking Dawn! Okay so minor spoilers here, but if you don't know what the story is then you probably don't really care anyway :)

I really liked that the story didn't drag at any point and the wedding speeches were the funniest thing ever, especially Bella's dad! I also really liked that Jacob's roll wasn't played down and this matches the book because the entire 2nd part is written from his perspective which was unusual because, with the exception of the Bree Tanner novella, the Twilight books are written from Bella's perspective.

The effects of the Quileute wolves were even better than in Eclipse, although they never get enough screen time for my liking. Still, there's part 2 to look forward to, even if they might not do a heck of a lot... I should also add though that the visible effect of the pregnancy on Bella was actually quite disturbing and the birth scene was a lot more gory than I expected. To be fair that's very much the same as the book which was incredibly graphic. This doesn't so much bother me, but I just assumed they'd tone it down way more for a 12A movie!

I also felt quite smug because it ended exactly where I thought it would end, but not just the position in the story, the exact scene! :) I think New Moon is probably still my favourite of the movies, but I think Breaking Dawn - Part 1 just moved into second place :) I can't wait for next year now!

On to the advent calendar and yes I'm really going to post an entry every day just to show it off! :) Day number 3 was:


Now we think that's a Droideka, but it seems to be missing the top half... perhaps that's tomorrow?

Friday 2 December 2011

The big McDonalds mess up!

As you probably saw from yesterdays entry, everything was going really well all day so I decided to "celebrate" and have a McDonalds (because unhealthy as it is... it's so yummy!) so I went to the McDonalds drive-through near closing time and waited patiently for them to cook my order. I then drove back home... opened my bags... and found it was nothing like what I ordered! (and yes the receipt was correct!)

No this wasn't all for one sitting (good grief!) and I was planning on putting some in the fridge for breakfast tomorrow (classy eh?) and so I ordered:
  • 2 large Quarter Pounder meals (includes fries)
  • 1 large Chicken Fiesta meal (includes fries)
  • Cheese melts
  • 3 large milkshakes (banana, strawberry and chocolate)
What I actually got was:
  • 6 large portions of fries
  • 3 large milkshakes (2 banana, 1 strawberry)
Erm...? To say I was disappointed was putting it mildly and the chips don't really reheat so there was nothing I could put in the fridge either. I probably should have gone back, but it was so close to closing time they wouldn't have been able to cook me new food anyway, so I ate about 3 portions of large fries and binned the rest :( Boo :( Oh and if you wondered what 6 portions of large fries looks like:


Wow.

Anyway, onto more Lego Star Wars advert calendar related fun and I opened door number 2 today (probably not a huge surprise really!) and behind it was "Nute Gunray":


No I haven't heard of him either, but Chris at work knew him straight away. :D

Thursday 1 December 2011

Harry Potter, Graze and Lego!

ZOMG so much stuff surprised me today, it was awesome!!! First of all I got to my work desk and found a parcel which I quickly unwrapped and it was:


Sorry for the bad picture, but that's the complete Harry Potter collection on Blu-ray which gets released TOMORROW. I love it when things accidentally turn up a day earlier than they're supposed to! :D

Next I opened my Graze box and although I had the usual yummy food there were some extra things, namely 2 envelopes, each containing 2 free boxes to give to someone! Also there was a snowman figure to make!




How cool is that?! :D

Changing subject, I've decided that like last year I'm going to bore everyone with what I get in my advent calendar :) Last year I had a Lego City (2824) calendar and this year I decided that was so much fun I'd get another one so I ended up buying Lego Star Wars (7958) and here's what was behind door 1!


I did some searching on Google and apparently it's a Consular-class crusier so I've pictured it next to a real one so you can see that it's fairly similar (especially since it's less than 20 pieces!). What will tomorrow bring... :)