I am Patrick Perdue! I am bad for you!

Hi, and welcome to a hotel in Shepherd's Bush, where seather12 and myself will be staying until early Tuesday morning, at which point we will shove off to Canada and the United States, respectively.
Yeah, great way to start off a post, informing the reader that we will soon be leaving, isn't it? Right, I thought so!

The last few days have been an absolute blast. Naturally, I have audio to show for it, though not as much as I would have liked. As events go, some of the most interesting things never get recorded. As dgl1984 pointed out, to insure a really boring vacation, be sure to record everything at all times, and nothing fun will happen to you. Don't record anything, and you'll have a great time.
I've managed a bit of a compromise, and, for the most part, except for a few stupid things, it's worked out rather well.
So, let's get to the audio then, shall we?

Before anything happens, we must first get to the United Kingdom. So, get on that plane and shove off! This file was recorded between Monday and Tuesday afternoon, and takes you from the trip to Greensboro, to Philadelphia (where I meet up with brandon), to Gatwick, to the Gatwick Express train to Victoria station, to a taxy that takes us to Andre's flat, all in about 80 minutes. It's amazing how fast things go when they're edited, don't ya know?
This file includes heavily abridged versions of both of my flights, including take-off, landing, announcements, etc. and announcements from the Gatwick Express and Victoria station itself. Unfortunately, I broke something, and you don't get to hear the first interactions between myself, Brandon, and Andre. Sorry 'bout that, but there are things to make up for it.

On Wednesday, we met up with Pam and David, two of Andre's long-time friends from Charlotte, originally from Chicago. In this recording, Andre is the odd one out, being surrounded by people from two other countries, with no fellow brits to back him up, all in his own home.
Apparently, Pam used to work with Andre when he was a very small person.
Later the same day, Brandon, Andre and myself were just hanging around and being stupid with microphones on. This file includes a very dumb Fender Rhodes duet with Andre and myself near the end, as well as other dumb and random things.

Thursday was a really lazy day, and thus, I didn't record anything.

On Friday, Brandon got his Nokia n82, which was ordered from a UK Ebay seller. Just for the fun of it, Andre and Brandon recorded with both of their phones on opposite sides of the room, and I patched it together in Sound Forge, with Andre's phone on the left, and Brandon's on the right. For whatever reason, the mics on these phones sound quite different, and the audio on Andre's end had some drop-outs, which I fixed (sort of). Now, for your enjoyment, have a fake stereo recording done with two Nokia n82 video cameras. It's rather short and to the point, as well as being rather pointless. Hmm, is that a contradiction? Maybe!

On Friday night, Brandon and I checked in to this here hotel. That was recorded, but relatively boring, so it won't be posted. For a while, we didn't think there was wireless access, as they seem to be using a residential BT home hub with WPA encryption. Yeah, residential stuff in a hotel, how cheap! Anyway, Brandon got the nice hotel staff to give us a password, as it is a free connection, and from that point, we were good.
This room is pretty small, but not bad otherwise.

Now, for the big event -- the Louis wedding itself, which occured yesterday. This was streamed live on TBRN with some issues, since the network we were using wasn't exactly optimal. In fact, it broke up and died just before Andre and Kirsten were to give their vows (yeah, only the most critical point of the whole thing). However, there is an unbroken archive of the entire ceremony, including lots of ambients, a late start, the incredibly quiet PA system, babies, and loud cameras, all brought to you by my Cad M179's and a Jecklin disk on a table. Enjoy the end of TBRN... except not.
Now, let's all watch things change... or something.

After the wedding, everyone, except the couple, walked to Kirsten's parents house for the reception. Brandon and I went with Duane, Andre's incredibly cool half-brother. That place is massive! I met lots of people, including several drunk brits, and James Bowden, who is even more subtly scary in person than on the phone. "Yeah, I wanted some samples from my Roland Phantom X, so I just de-compiled the samples from rom, shoved it all onto a compact flash card, and wrote a program to convert them to something useful. Easy!" Yeah... Sure, whatever, man.
I don't have much audio from the reception itself, unfortunately. I would have particularly liked to have had the speeches several of us made. Brandon has them on his phone in a decent quality mono, but I think that's it.
I did, however, manage to get a few minutes of the mini-concert held outside by Andre's father on steal pan, a drummer who's name I can't remember, and Danny, a bass guitar player, until my h4 batteries died. This also includes conversation between myself an Andre's grandparents from Barbados. It's all quite interesting, really, and is available here.

So, that's all I have for proper audio at the moment... No, we're not done yet. I still have toilets!
In fact, there are three varients of Andre's toilet. First, a half flush, obtained by holding the handle down for too long.
Now, a long flush, where the handle was held down for a bit less time. This, for some reason, makes things go really slowly.
Last, but not least, we have the full flush as it was meant to be.
The first two recordings were made with the Cad M179's, the last with the Audio Technica AT822, after I realized I did it wrong, and couldn't be bothered to drag the Cads back in there again.

Of course, I had to record the toilet from the Abbey Hotel as well, because it's just something to do.
First, I recorded from the bowl as normal. However, after listening to that, I decided it might be interesting to pop the tank lid off, and record from the tank perspective as well, since it sounds incredibly different from your standard American toilet. I am amused by stuff like this for some unknown reason.
Looking at the pipelines behind these things, I am convinced you could shove a small child through the plumming system pretty easily, until it comes to a turn. They use lots more water at a time than ours do (I think it's something like 5 gallons to a flush).
Just to be different, I also recorded the full fill-up and drain of the sink in our room, since it's incredibly fast both ways. Where'd all the water go, anyway? I wish the Perdue family sink would do that!

OK, that's it for now. Time to enjoy the rest of my stay here, as there are now less than 48 hours of it left. Tomorrow, we'll be headed back to Andre's to say goodbye and hang out for a bit, then we're off to Gatwick again at some stupidly early time on Tuesday morning. The flight leaves at 9:20 (or is it 9_50) local time, but due to check-in things, we probabl should be there by 6:00 AM or so at the latest. That should be fun.
Enjoy all the randomness that is the universe at large.

Hello from a restless person, currently residing on a bed, typing on a laptop rather than doing anything useful.

It's nearly time for my second ever international trip, as I'll be headed to London Monday afternoon, arriving Tuesday morning at 6:55 BST.
To put it mildly, the anticipation is killing me... or would that be the tension, or perhaps my mother? In either case, I'm ready to get out of here for a while... At least, I'm pretty sure I am.

I've found my passport, which was in a really stupid place, acquired some handy UK pounds for cab, bus, train fare, etc. found presentable clothes for the occasion, and have mostly gotten all the portable technology together for the journey.
Naturally, something had to break, and yesterday, not today, this being Thursday, something did.

The battery on my Iriver H320 hasn't been too great for a while, but was still usable to a point. Yesterday, however, I noticed it was flat after an over-night charge. Thinking that perhaps my charger had become unplugged, which has happened several times, I checked to make sure that this was the case. Of course, it wasn't. I then used my handy dandy volt meter, I.E. my tongue, to get a reading from the charger... and, there wasn't one. You should notice something at 4.5 volts with 2 amps behind it, right?
"OK, fine," I said to myself, "I'll charge it over USB instead."
And now, ladies and gentlemen, after 24 hours of charging from USB, I now have about 24 seconds of battery life. Yay!

The cool part, however, is that I have a replacement battery, which I bought for my first Iriver H120 over a year ago, but was never used, since I broke that particular unit... or, at least, I thought I did. Now, after reading some posts on Misticriver, I'm not so sure that either one or both of my H120's are not recoverable. Of course, I can't verify anything until I can find a Torx T5 screwdriver, which I don't have. Furthermore, no one in this area seems to sell Torx screwdrivers quite that small, just 10, 15, 20 and larger.
Boring!
So, I have this lovely new internal battery that I can't use until I can acquire a screwdriver. Had I known this would happen a week ago, I could have ordered one from somewhere and been done with it. Of course, these things always find the worst possible times to happen. Oh well, no portable music playing thingies for me on this trip, I guess. Let's hope I can sleep on the plane. I should, theoretically, be able to do this, since I can sleep just about anywhere, including brick basement floors and kitchen tables, as I found out during the Nashville trip last year.

On the plus side, I have a new set of Sennheiser PX100 collapsible headphones, which should come in handy for various things. I broke my old ones in a bad accident with a crappy old sound card at fake job, which decided it wanted to send a loud DC pulse directly to the poor, defenseless diaphragms of my PX100's.
Last month, I bought two 8GB SD cards for the H4, so recording for long stretches or at 24/96 (should I need to do so for any reason) should not be a problem. Plus, the free 250GB Freecom ToughDrive I'm getting from freakyfwoof should insure plenty of storage for fun recording times.
Yes, folks, the Cad M179's and jecklin disk will make their first international trek across the Atlantic. I'm going all out with this one! More toilets, yeah! Even more reason to rebuild my website... but I'll work on that when I get back.

I have UK phone service, brought to me by Orange, and have setup VoIP routing so I can make calls inside the PBX, and thus, outside it as well, for only the cost of a local London landline call. While in a wifi coverage area, I can both make and take calls from my sell or home numbers while there, and, as soon as I change a few things, will have a forwarding system in place for when I can't get wifi reception. I'm still not sure what hotel we'll be staying in when not at Andre's place, or whether I'll have reliable net connectivity while in said unknown location.
Thus, although this is supposed to be a vacation, I can still be bothered by people from home without incurring lots of scary charges. Ain't technology great?

I've got streaming configurations for both the laptop and netbook for the Louis wedding, and for times where I am incredibly bored, such as, perhaps, waiting for connections. I'll be hanging around in Philadelphia with not much to do for about four hours, so I might just show up on TBRN while there. After all, none of us TBRN folks have streamed from an airport before, although this has been done by nick6489. So, while not a first, assuming there is enough bandwidth available on their network, I'll also take phone calls, making a variant on that.
Apparently, seather12 will be streaming at some point as well, when he makes it to Philly, although I'll be there longer, since he's coming from Las Vegas, and has a shorter connection.
Sure, it's something to do, after all.

Speaking of having something to do, this is the point of writing all this now. That, and it gives me an excuse to stay awake for at least a few more minutes. Lately, I've been going to sleep in the middle of the afternoon and waking up at around 10:00 PM, which really isn't a good idea. If I can just shift this whole thing by four or five hours, I'll be at just the right point to exist in BST, assuming jet lag doesn't do bad things to me like it did last time I went to London in 2004. Going from west to east was bad, but not much happened the other way around. That first day I got to Andre's Mum's flat was the only time I can ever remember sleeping for 18 hours, and I'd rather not do that again if you don't mind very much. Way to make a first impression, eh?

This up-coming week is going to be a mad one. Stay tuned to this blog, as well as my other outlets, for continuing coverage of this once-in-a-lifetime deal. Who knows? I may even set up a podcast, or something.

What I'm going to do now, however, is crash on the floor and temporarily die. I have things that must be done, but attempting them in my current state would be a really bad idea, thus, I won't bother. Good night, and pop off!