In the olden days when the human lifespan was estimated as around 70 years, it was a common metaphor to map each decade to a day of the week. Using that analogy, last Thursday I entered the Thursday of my life. Birthdays get increasingly less exciting after around 35, and this particular milestone was filling me with dread. Rationally there’s nothing special about the number 40. If humans had 8 fingers instead of 10, I’d have been worrying about turning 40, 8 years ago. But that 4 at the front is going to take some getting used to. So in preparation I took Thursday and Friday off work thus giving myself a 4 day weekend in which to hide away at home and pretend it wasn’t happening. It turned out to be an excellent plan. Michele had ordered some British (well, Irish in fact) bacon, beans and other delicacies which meant I got a couple of proper bacon rolls for my birthday breakfast. I spent the day lounging around, watching some films, writing stupid code and hanging out with the parrots. In the evening we ordered a curry. If I had to design the perfect birthday it would have been something like that. Friday evening ended up being a pretty packed and enjoyable time. It started at a
Royal Wedding party
held in the beautiful home of Michele’s British friend Helen in a really lovely part of Center City Philadelphia. As we were leaving and heading back to the bus stop, I got a call from T. T is a friend of a friend from England who had flown into the U.S. with her dad that day – we had intended to meet up for a drink on her one night in Philly and she had made it to 30th st station. After negotiating with them and the Station Information lady who was helping them call me, I jogged over to meet them. I would have walked over, but the formidable lady at Station Information had made it quite clear that I should get there NOW! It’s good to know that they were acting as such firm advocates for the travelers under their purview – but she was quite scary. They only had an hour or so before they had to get back to the hotel so I took them over to Rum Bar, where Michele was waiting for us along with Tom who had come along to help us out with ordering the right drinks. It turned out to be a really good couple of hours in which we sampled a variety of exotic beverages including a pepper-coriander cocktail which tastes like it sounds – only in a good way. Wow. While this was going on, unbeknownst to me, our friends from across the road had decided that I hadn’t celebrated my birthday enough and so were inflating balloons by the ton and getting lubricated with Carlo Rossi. By the time we had battled with Septa and made it home I was being enticed to go over the road where they were all “making merry”. There were a bunch of balloons tied to our front door, together with a big jug of Paisano! So, taking the jug firmly under my arm, I went over to see how they were all doing. Several hours later later I staggered back home – feeling very “refreshed”. And after all that, the weekend has only just started. Other stuff:

• My dad scanned in a 1925 pamphlet on
  Strike Breaking Organisations
  . I OCR’d the text and my colleague Mr Fritz proof read it – the
  result is here
  .
• After getting bored with Android 2.1 on my phone I decided to switch to
  CyanogenMod
  . So far so good – although beyond a flashier interface I haven’t noticed much difference so far. But it’s nice to have a rom that is designed to be messed around with – and feels more firmly supported than the original one. We’ll see.
• er…that’s it