Notes To Myself

Epic Murray Match

Centre Court Tickets

When my colleague told me that there were Wimbledon tickets for sale online I was very sceptical - but it was true! The extra seats added at the top of Centre Court along with the new roof are being sold on Ticket Master the night before each day’s play.

Tickets were sold out almost instantly but I managed to secure two Centre Court tickets for yesterday’s play! Including booking fee it cost £77 a ticket but it was worth it to see an outstanding 4th round line-up… Federer and Murray on the same day?!

Roger Federer(SUI)[2] vs Robin Soderling(SWE)[13]
Dinara Safina(RUS)[1] vs Amelie Mauresmo(FRA)[17]
Andy Murray(GBR)[3] vs Stanislas Wawrinka(SUI)[19]

I can’t fully describe what a fantastic day of tennis it was. For me and my friend it started out on court 6 in the blazing hot sunshine watching Akiko Omae from Japan in the girls singles. Damn, she hits the ball well!

Federer vs Soderling

Of course, the main action was on Centre Court where Roger Federer kicked off proceedings at 1pm. In a repeat of this year’s French Open final his opponent was Robin Soderling.

Soderling got off to the better start but had one loose service game which was all Federer needed.

On the way back from the loo who should walk up the stairs but victorious Akiko-chan from earlier on! Everybody wants to see Federer, even the players.

Anyway, the following two sets were also serving shoot outs with both men serving a little too well for too many decent rallies.

Federer didn’t seem to need his A-game and largely played pretty defensively and yet still appeared to win easily in the end. Although he was impressive I guess I’ll have to wait till I get to see him in a final to see him at his best.

Safina vs Mauresmo

The Safina vs Mauresmo match was very entertaining, a real battle with Safina’s brutal ground strokes against Mauresmo’s old school grass court knowhow.

All of a sudden, half way through the match young lads in green stormed the court and in a matter of seconds the famous covers were protecting the grass from the rain which had started to fall.

This meant I was there for something historic - the first time the roof was closed for a real match! In total it took somewhere in the region of half an hour to close the roof and for the air circulation system to get going. The players came on again and you could see small shadows around them in different directions: floodlights!

As for the match, it really looked like Mauresmo was getting the upper hand but all credit to Safina for coming back so strongly.

Murray vs Wawrinka

The decision was made to keep the roof closed for the following match - what a blessing that turned out to be.

Wawrinka came out blazing and really blitzed Murray in the first set. His single handed backhand really is a thing of beauty and he really rips it with pace and spin. He was going after it with seemingly more conviction and confidence than even the mighty Federer.

Being on Centre Court at Wimbledon you can imagine the support Murray got and the atmosphere kept on increasing in both tenseness and volume.

When Murray was up two sets to one it felt like he could have put Wawrinka away in the 4th set, but it wasn’t to be. The crowd was stunned when Wawrinka snatched the set and forced a deciding 5th set.

By now it must have been close to 10pm and it was thanks to the earlier rain that the roof had been closed and that the match would be played to the finish.

Murray got the dream start and went up a break but was it too soon? My heart was beating fast and the almost inevitable happened: Murray was broken back.

Grabbing the vital 2nd break sent the crowd wild and the it felt like everyone must have been nearly as exhausted as the two players who’d been slogging it out for 4 hours when Murray fell onto all fours after striking a clean winner to win an epic and history making match.

Hard Luck

One of my Samsung Spinpoint hard drives has started to fail big time. Two of the four NTFS partitions on it suddenly became unrecognizable to Windows and Explorer came grinding to a halt.

One of these ‘bad’ partitons held my Vista installation. Booting into Vista is now not possible and trying to run a disk check in XP fixes numerous issues before failing with an ‘unknown error.’

Amongst other uses I use this disk for backups of the data on my main drive. Now that my backup drive is no longer working I’m starting to panic about all my photos and other data.

The irony is that the failing drive is the newer of the two Spinpoint drives in my PC. It goes to show that backups are essential no matter how new your drive is - take action!

I’m now wondering whether to replace the drive with a similar one or go with an external drive for backups. Do you think external RAID setup is overkill? I could go for an internal RAID 1 setup but then I’d need to buy two new drives as I need more space than my main drive currently provides.

Wimbledon 2009 Week One

I know the whole first week of Wimbledon 2009 isn’t over yet but in terms of my visits it is I went on the first day, Monday, then again yesterday which was the third day.

Actually, Wimbledon is one of the reasons I’ve been so busy and I simply haven’t had time to blog. I’ll be uploading some photo galleries over the next week or so.

Akihabara Maids

If you visit Akihabara in Tokyo then you are sure to come across some girls in maid costumes adverstising maid cafes.

When I was trying to recall the train stations around Akihabara after returning from Japan I found this Akihabara Map. I was surprised to find that there were loads of maid cafes pin-pointed on the map (though surely there must be more?). It might be useful to some of you Before you ask, no I haven’t ever been to a maid cafe.

Ruler of Japan

I came across this bizarre scene near in Akihabara. Now that is what I call a ruler!

Whity

Is it just me or do you think there could have been a better name for a box of tissues?

Working at Home

After just two days of working at home due to the London Underground strike I’m almost going clean out of my mind.

Part of the frustration came about because I was initially having issues connecting to the company’s remote login machine. But even once that was fixed I found the whole experience a little too solitary for my liking. If I am going to work then I’d rather be at work.

The strike has now officially ended but I am still doubtful whether there’ll be a full service running at rush hour tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed.

Warning

There are just so many things I like about this Japanese sign about the dangers associated with using a fold down baby changer.

From the English wording to the graphic pictures it’s just pure genius.

Strike Starts

Another year, another London Tube strike. Sigh.

The strike officially started around 7pm this evening and most lines are now either suspended or experiencing severe delays due to the ‘industrial action.’

Nothing was said at work so at 6 it was a dash for the station to make sure I could get home. The train seemed less empty than normal so I wondered how many people left work early to avoid an problems.

With a normal service not expected to resume until Friday morning it will be an interesting if not frustrating couple of days trying to get to work.

Maiko-san

On my trip to Kyoto in April a friend took me to an ‘ochaya’ to eat and drink whilst being graced with the presence of a maiko-san. You can’t just turn up to an ocha-ya, you have to be invited by a member, a custom known as ichigen-kotowari. As such, many Japanese people never get to experience such an evening so I feel very privileged. We were served with a multi-course meal known as kai-seki. It seemed never ending due to my trouble eating seafood and other traditional dishes. Still, I was grateful as my host had kindly asked for some dishes to be changed on my behalf.

My friend is a professor at a Kyoto university and as it turned out he had taught the ochaya’s young ‘mama-san’ so the atmosphere was perhaps more relaxed than normal. It turned out that she had actually spent some time in America after graduating which just seemed like such a world away from her current job and appearance. She claimed not to remember much English but I wasn’t 100% convinced.

Of course, there was our Maiko-san as well. She was very polite and interestingly she ended her sentences with ‘dosu’ instead of the standard ‘desu’. I have to admit that it felt a little odd chatting to and being served by a seventeen-year-old, not to mention all the make-up! As was explained, most of the customers at ochaya are men so Maiko are used to men’s talk and it’s not uncommon for them to be surrounded by conversations involving ’shimo-neta’ (talk of sex, etc.). I guess Maiko have to grow up pretty quickly. Being underaged our Maiko-san wasn’t really allowed to drink but on occasion she’d take the tiniest sip, presumably for our benefit. In contrast she kept pouring my glass full of beer so as usual in these situations I had no idea exactly how much I was drinking. There were only ever two large bottles of beer on the table but they were quickly replaced if either became empty.

We saw a traditional Maiko dance as well. All I can say is that is was extremely elegant. Apparently, it was one of the performances she had to do as part of her Maiko test.

One of the most incredible parts of the evening was when I came back from the toilet. Our lovely Maiko-san was kneeling outside the large (20 or so tatami mats) room awaiting my return. As I approached she slid the door open for me to enter. Now that is service!

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