OMG it's here, it's here! The laptop of joy and happiness has arrived! (I love UPS, they got it here so quickly!) You can see how happy I am; I'm full of exclamation marks! ;) I just really didn't believe it would get here today until it did.
The box arrived with a little rip and a few dints so I was given permission to open it up and peek at it to make sure everything was okay. It was (thankfully) so my mother took custody of it and hid it away :( She has her hands on it in the second of these two pictures because I was trying to take it back, heh.
Best Christmas gift ever! :)
I've recently concluded that nothing forces you to trust in the goodness of other people faster than being lost on your own in a city you don't know. Wandering around London in the dark, admittedly busy staring at everything around me, I didn't realise I'd oriented myself incorrectly on the map until I stopped to ask someone exactly where I was… and learnt I was supposed to be walking in the other direction.
Without the people who willingly helped me figure out exactly where I needed to go, I'd probably have missed the LoVox meet (or, at the very least, arrived much later than I did!) The bar staff in the Ochre, once I found my way there, were amazing and friendly and made of awesome, especially considering my hello consisted of,
"Um, hi! I'm looking for some people but I don't know who they are!"
"Vox?"
"Yes!"
"Just downstairs."
"Thank you!"
Navigating the tube, the part I thought would be hardest, actually wasn't too bad -- the maps for the tube lines are pretty clear if you stop and read them, and I had a copy of the tube map with me in my bag so it was unlikely (but not impossible, heh) that I'd end up on the wrong side of London. Finding my way once I'd left the confines of the tube station however? Harder than I thought.
I'm terribly bad at navigating myself because I have trouble relating what I'm looking at on the map to what I see around me. I've always had a mental block when it comes to reading maps, although given enough time I can usually pinpoint whereabouts I am, and my dad threw me off when he said it looked like a fifteen to twenty minute walk -- it was actually shorter than that.
Once I'd managed to find the Ochre (pictures of it here and here at Iain's Vox) and been directed towards the room Cate had organised for us, I started feeling a little bit nervous. I get very self-conscious when I'm in a room of people I don't know very well and very afraid I'll come across as a complete moron (my friends who know me well swear I'm lovely! No... really! ;P) and I'll attempt 'outgoing and fun' and end up somewhere in the realm of 'slightly crazy and dorky.' Ah, well.
Everything about the evening was fun and friendly and I can't wait to go to the next LoVox, when hopefully I won't be nervous or get lost along the way, heh. I was still wide-awake when I got back to my hotel and very tempted to go wandering around outside for a while with my camera, but common sense won out [for once] and I stayed put. I did wander around London the following day but I'll save that for a separate, mostly picture, post :)
On the left, as Scott is demonstrating, you can see that Christmas crackers are about silly paper hats and useless plastic toys! And also really bad jokes but those aren't pictured, heh. On the right, you've got Cate, Andrew and Mena wearing them with style too :)
One thing I noticed the meet did for me was increase my enthusiasm for Vox. It was already pretty high thanks to Vox bringing the 'fun factor' back to blogging for me, but now I'm super-excited to see what new developments we'll be gifted with next year! (And, you know... it's nice to feel like I want to blog again but, at the same time, a little part of me knows this is just the excuse I didn't need to leave my own website idling in a pile of code on my laptop. Damn.)
Mena, Andrew and Scott were great to talk to about Vox because their own enthusiasm for Vox is so clear. The web-things I love the most tend to be the ones created by people who love them as much as their users do, so it can can only mean good things for Vox :)
When I got home I pulled out my other mobile phone to download the Vox client for moblogging because I wanted to play after seeing it in action! Sadly it doesn't work on my Samsung E900 -- I can and do run various programs on that phone (Gmail, Sudoku) and those are written in Java. I'm not sure what Vox's clients are written in, I never asked (naturally, I now want to know, heh) but maybe there will eventually be a version that my phone likes. I can still moblog via email, but it's not quite the same.
At the moment I'm choosing between running the Sudoku program I like best on my Samsung and the Vox client (along with Solitaire -- yay) on my XDA and… that's a hard choice, yo! Vox is winning out right now, but the lure of Sudoku is great!
…I predict much phone-swapping in my future ;)
I should have taken more care with the number of drinks I ordered last night! Alice suggested tequila and orange juice and I, forgetting the damage it does to my memory, said yes straight away. I didn't feel particularly great this morning, but I did manage to recover enough to play on the Wii for a couple of hours this afternoon! Sleep would still be good but I have Sudoku and CSI's on, so I'll stay awake a little longer :)
I do have a couple that I'll post tomorrow -- some from LoVox and some from my wanderings -- along with a better post about the whole trip, but today I'll just say that everyone I met was so lovely! I enjoyed talking to everyone I had the chance to talk to; I just wish I could have talked to everyone! The evening felt like it went by so quickly and there were people I didn't get the chance to meet properly which is very sad :(
If (or when) we hold another LoVox meet, I'll hopefully get chance to meet everyone again and next time I'll make sure I talk to everyone! And I won't be nervous next time. I was a teensy bit nervous this time and being nervous sometimes makes me a bit hyper and babbly, heh.
There were Vox goodies at the meet, which are pictured at the top of this post, and I actually had chance to give out some stickers while I was waiting at Euston to catch my train home! I was sitting outside the station, smoking while I killed half an hour, and I got into a conversation with a couple of people who saw my Vox [this is good] badge. I chatted to them about Vox and gave them a sticker each and one of the little badges -- as I walked away to get my train they were repeating "See it. Hear it. Vox it" to each other, which was kind of cute.
I hope everyone else had a good time at the meet too! And also that the US Voxers had a safe flight home :)
My wandering has taken me to the All Souls Church end of Regent Street. I've been to the Apple store, bought a bag from Kipling, walked a lot, and stopped at numerous Starbucks! I'm going to navigate back towards Euston soon and find somewhere to sit and have a snack. I haven't done any of the things I intended to do(!), but wandering around has still been fun :)
I intended to sightsee all over the place today, but lugging all my stuff around made me think twice about that plan! I decided to go to Piccadily (which you may or may not be able to tell from the bad phone pic!) as it was relatively close, and somehow my wandering has landed me in Leicester Square. I need an internet cafe, heh, I have withdrawal ;)
I made it to London successfully and took a picture to prove it! I still have to get to the meet, heh, but that's not a worry just yet. I'll have better pictures when I get home and download my camera :)
I'm heading to London tomorrow morning for the LoVox Meet and I'm kind of excited :)
Unfortunately it's been a while since I last went to London (and last time I went I had company) so I'm almost certainly going to get lost by myself! I tend to get lost often, even in places I know semi-know, so I'm not overly worried. If I get lost, I'll just have to get un-lost! I have maps printed of the relevant streets (to get me to the hotel) and also for the underground, so hopefully it'll all work out.
My train tickets arrived yesterday, I have a lift to the train station in the morning, I've organised my car to have its MOT while I'm away and now all I have to do is... go to sleep, heh.
Hopefully I'll have plenty of pictures to share when I get back!
I feel like I've been taking a lot of photographs lately; it's a shame they all seem to be similar. I guess I've just been stuck in the same places the last few weeks. I'm looking forward to going to London for the Vox Meet next week and I'll definitely be taking my camera! Hopefully I'll get some good shots at the meet and then I can use it to take random pictures around the city the following day :)
