Back!

London was... actually, pretty much as planned! Collected jenova_red on Friday, having assumed the worst from the weather and left with plenty of time, was able to relax and the snow wasn't an issue. Birmingham was quite bad - side streets were slushy/slippery - but the RX8 behaved itself. mr_pete later reported very slippery roads and bad weather, but we rushed out and managed to miss it.

Worst stretch was on the M1 near Watford Gap - we stopped there for an hour almost, and by the time we'd had food/coffee, the snow had cleared. Driving into Belsize Park was utterly painless - North Circular was clear, satnav was accurate, and we got there in good time, but not early enough to try to make it into Camden for the market. Instead, went out to the Dev, and met Epistaxis and a nice bloke from NZ who is presently un-named due to the high levels of sound in the Dev making it almost impossible to hear names; flavius_m and arachne also showed up, and of course we chatted to Fox. I demanded his nuts, which were bacon flavour.

Saturday we departed on many tube trains to get to the Science Museum; some confusion from closed routes and lack of experience with subterranean mass-transit systems aside, it was quite efficient. Met merlinc at the museum, and went up to Game On - which is quite a mixture.

On the one hand, it has a GOOD history of home computing and gaming - the ST didn't seem represented, but the Amiga was, the PC Engine, a Japanese NES (Famicom), accurately-described Spectravideo SV318. No Enterprise 128, no real information on the Atari Lynx... but mostly a very comprehensive collection from that perspective. What saddened me was the lack of information charting how games development/computer technology split - I'd like to have seen "1983 - 16 colours, 4 channels - this computer then broke that boundary with /THIS/ enhancement" and then how that played out in the marketplace, and perhaps more British content - showing, for example, how the 1983/4 Amstrad CPC was updated to compete against consoles with the CPC+/GX4000 models (the GX4000 being one of the few compelling "8-bit era dying out" consoles).

However, getting to play a Vectrex, see a PDP-1 (I'm told this may have been fired up on a previous showing?), 1971 video game cabinets that looked all swoopy and spangly, playing Galaxians/Galaga again (and hearing Beserk!) - and the pseudo-3D Tron game which I was spectacularly crap at - was all great fun. I could spend days in there.

The history of computing section seemed small to me, but there was a Pegasus computer - not running - I was somewhat dismayed by the modern terminal hooked up to it, but that's presumably because it is in fact a working valve-based computer and it's easiest to use a modern terminal - or perhaps the modern hardware was unrelated to actually operating the computer.

(And if I don't get carried away on rants about the expectations of exhibitions... I might get this is order!) - after looking around, ninjagirl and samoth arrived in time for a late lunch in the museum, and to see Game On (for a second time) - we braved the invasion of scouts to try and eat at the museum, and I was childish and ate jelly with a gummi worm in it! We were getting quite tired at this stage, so moved very slowly through the mathematics section and the nautical technology. We abandoned ninjagirl lurking outside the bathrooms in a suspicious fashion, before heading tube-wards again!

In the evening - which was surprisingly quick to pass by - we ended up with slow tubes to get back to the hotel, had NO time to change, ran late for dinner, didn't managed to send SMS responses due to the SPV not having a signal for some reason (okay, the tube is understandable, but I think the signal drops out as the battery dies - is this common on WM Smartphones?) Sorry I didn't manage to get a response to you, poggs - we already had dinner plans, but in the end by the time that was done it was quite late anyway. Not sure what else is near Earl's Court in terms of socialising! Need to learn how to get around London.

Nice evening with live music, we were complimented on our outfits, good food, and then the dreaded tube again. Managed to go 1/2 hour in the wrong direction. I'm going to download a utility for the SPV which maps London to the Tube and does point A to point B planning out!

Sunday we got up, packed, and by the time we'd had breakfast and loaded the car, the day was already well advanced - but that meant that deathboy was awake, so we went to visit him & Liz (who is lovely) - unfortunately we had to get away to get back up North, and made slow progress in heavy M1 traffic.

As a footnote, Enola decided that 17,000 miles was enough reliability, and the CEL came on (Check Engine Light) as I passed Knutsford. Didn't seem to affect the car, so Mazda said it would probably be fine to drive it home, but I need to take it to the garage tomorrow to get it checked out. ( Pictures under cut )