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Below is a scattershot list of things I did and didn't do, some of which paid off and some of which were incredibly stupid. It's not a complete list, but it's a decent slice of things I've discovered from bouncing around the place. Some of it may be useful to you; if none of it is, then I am a terrible human being but I still won't be all sweaty when I get off the second plane after eighteen hours. So there's that. 1)  Getting where I need to be the day before. If a company is sending you somewhere for something, acknowledge the fact that you're no use to anybody looking a mess and smelling of aeroplane sweat. Turn up a couple of days before whatever it is you need to do. If someone is paying for the flight, it's going to cost the same whether you're there for two days or twenty. By the same token... 2)  When whatever it is that you went there for is done, leave. Abandon ship. Get out of town. You don't need a few days to wind down or see...

Below is a scattershot list of things I did and didn't do, some of which paid off and some of which were incredibly stupid. It's not a complete list, but it's a decent slice of things I've discovered from bouncing around the place. Some of it may be useful to you; if none of it is, then I am a terrible human being but I still won't be all sweaty when I get off the second plane after eighteen hours. So there's that. 1) Getting where I need to be the day before. If a company is sending you somewhere for something, acknowledge the fact that you're no use to anybody looking a mess and smelling of aeroplane sweat. Turn up a couple of days before whatever it is you need to do. If someone is paying for the flight, it's going to cost the same whether you're there for two days or twenty. By the same token... 2) When whatever it is that you went there for is done, leave. Abandon ship. Get out of town. You don't need a few days to wind down or see t...

Watching a movie together when you're 7,000 miles away is tricky, but not impossible. Step 1 : Syncronise watches. That kinda helps. Step 2 : Find places that are a) showing the movie you both want to watch at the same time despite the difference in timezones, and b) are likely to play roughly the same amount of adverts and other junk before the movie. This can actually be somewhat problematic - if one of you is watching a regular screen and the other is in IMAX, the IMAX pre-movie garbage is likely to be twice as long as they spend about 40 minutes beating you over the head with how awesome everything is (and even then, some IMAX screens will vary drastically depending on the cinema chain). The most we've been out was about twenty minutes or so for Spider-Man (look ma! A hyphen!) and something like 2 minutes difference for The Dark Knight Rises WHICH I AM PRETTY IMPRESSED WITH, BY THE WAY. The seven (and, sometimes, eight) hour time difference requires a bit...

Outside: a calm, sedate and vaguely lifeless metal building. Click to Enlarge Inside: TOTAL CHAOS AND POORLY LIT PHOTOGRAPHY. Click to Enlarge Click to Enlarge My first comic convention in the Philippines (actually, my first comic convention anywhere if we discount all the times I complained about comics on the internet with strangers). There was some Marvel and DC stuff lurking in the longboxes: Click to Enlarge Mainly though, it was all about the local talent in the form of standalone sketches, paintings, comics (in "regular" format and ones that look like folded paper that's been drawn on directly) along with a bunch of live demos and artists signing things. Click to Enlarge Here's a few of those folded paper comic displays. Click to Enlarge Here's a local zombie comic, looked pretty good: Click to Enlarge These were amazing : comic characters painted in the style of Alex Ross on polystyrene. Click to En...

Well hey, I'm back in Manila so that must mean randomly turning up at company events and taking pictures of things. I tagged along for a teambuilding weekend held in Loreland . Click to Enlarge Click to Enlarge Click to Enlarge I can't really describe how to get there, except that it involved a people carrier with about fifty people in it and a bunch of hills and stuff. Click to Enlarge Click to Enlarge Click to Enlarge The main function hall had an amazing karaoke machine inside, which played videos with no relevance whatsoever to the song at hand. Highlights included a female diver who kept putting a crab - or something - into her mouth while the Rolling Stones belted out Paint it Black and some sort of folky lovesong warbling "Hold me once more, darling" while a T-Rex mauled two other dinos. Unfortunately I didn't get a shot of that, but here's a picture of some fish. Click to Enlarge Of course the room wasn...

I recently flew on an Emirates A380, which comes with inflight wifi for the entire 7 or 8 hour trip. The cost is $20 for 100MB (about £12). Before anyone freaks out at the "cost", consider that there are hotels in the UK alone that charge £5 for an HOUR of net use (how does that even happen, anyway?) Don't even get me started on those standard "inflight email services" where it costs a small fortune to send a solitary email. The connection was fast and from what I can recall, only went down once and quickly reconnected. They do give you a warning that there may be some countries you fly over where wifi isn't available, but considering we were flying over Iraq with a perfectly fine signal I can't think where this would actually flatline. Having said all of that, 100MB over 7 or 8 hours could still be a stretch for some people, so: 1) Make use of the (realtime) monitor that shows you how much you've used. 2) Skype generated a steady stream o...

Oh hey, it's looking at pictures of food time. Read this blog entry when starving for maximum annoyance. There's no real way to take a picture of this without making it look like "some stuff on some chicken", but the KFC Ala King Supreme bowl is amazing. A ton of rice, two decent slabs of chicken and THIS SAUCE, MAN. Next up, I've been munching on this frozen yoghurt stuff from Red Mango. I don't get to eat this very often, so it's always fun to over indulge and rub it all over my face and limbs until I'm a big frozen yoghurt monster belching frogurt all over your kitchen or whatever. Beware: this can cause brain freeze like nothing else I've eaten. And I lick frozen pipes in the winter. I went to TGIF Fridays for takeout, but I was somewhat terrified by the staff breaking into dance routines both inside and outside the building - to the extent you couldn't even get out properly due to ten of them doing a weird Michael Jackson dan...