Saturday, June 21, 2003
Countdown status is as such: 10 days left until the move, and eight hours (!) until my Harry Potter arrives. It's actually out as I type this; all over town kids are at midnight launch parties buying and reading the book. Amazon.co.uk sent the dispatch notice out last night, so it should DEFINITELY be here tomorrow morning. One potential hitch though is that unless Royal Mail lay on more postmen tomorrow, I might be unlucky and not get it at all. You see, health and safety regulations say that postmen are not allowed to carry more than 16kg in their bags... and with the hardcover book weighing in at over 600 pages...
There was actually football on TV today. Live football. And a decent match at that. Although it's the Confederations Cup -- a tournament none of the big teams really care about anyway -- it's still football of sorts, and the France - Japan match was fun to watch. France won 2-1, though Japan played really well and had enough chances to win. It's wonderful to see how the team I've been watching ever since professional football began in Japan has progressed to the stage where they can give a decent game to one of the best teams in the world (not a full strength one, of course, but not weak by any means), with Nakamura and Nakata excelling. And there's no shame in losing to the European Champions in their home ground.
Also been playing a lot of Midtown Madness 3 online via Microsoft's Xbox Live service. It's a fun game that (as the name implies) is not a serious racer, but rather an arcade-styled irreverent free-for-all set in open-plan cities (ie, no set tracks -- you go where you want to go!). It's a great multiplayer game and playing with 8 people online is fantastic. I've been dying to play a good game on Xbox Live; the service is easy to use and offers a ton of features (like keeping track of your friends via an MSN-style Buddy List, voice chat, etc) but there really hasn't been a good online game that I've WANTED to play on it. Until now, of course. Typically though, I'm only going to get this weekend to play it, because my Xbox has to be packed by Monday at the latest.
I'll no doubt be back tomorrow with Harry Potter talk -- no spoilers!
Posted at 7:59 AM
