A photoblog and other things

I will say no more (for today) :-p

I did not expect this at all, but the launch viewing tickets arrived in the mail today. That’s fricken awesome.

After a long day sometimes one just wants to retire for the night and do absolutely nothing. Firstly though, one must find a car park. This was the only car park “vacant” near my apartment:

Seriously, who “parks” their mountain bike in a car park?

At any rate, I bought the perfect thing to take my mind off the real world on the weekend and take part in a virtual one. 100 big ones got me a Nintendo Gamecube, controller, memory card and 2 games (Metroid and Zelda). This should keep my mind off of trashing people’s mountain bikes, for a little while at least.

I was really, really looking forward to seeing the shuttle launch at Kennedy Space Centre this Wednesday. I was going to tie an Australia flag around my shoulders and shout out
“Go Andy! Go you good thing go!”… and yeah, he’d hear that from 6 miles away. However as things go it seems I’ll be observing the launch from somewhere else. Call it my stupid absent mindedness but the tickets I purchased way back when (beginning of April I think) were valid for that launch and the next rescheduled launch, if that happened. I know the launch has been rescheduled at least twice, but for some reason it never clicked with me I’d have to order more tickets. I think I just plain forgot at the time about the rescheduling terms.

Here is the part that bites. You don’t get refunded for tickets. Period. It’s sort of like paying $50 to go see a performer, the show gets cancelled, but they keep your money. I don’t know what to think of this – there is a pain in my head where I think of how I just lost $100 for the satisfaction of… nothing. Yeah, this was all in their terms and conditions that tickets were not refundable and I bought the tickets *knowing* that but not really *thinking* about it. I feel like I’ve just given away money to some guy who claims he’s selling Nikon D70s but is really based in Spain or somewhere else outside of the US and is trying to rip people off (I wonder if he did get any people’s money…).

I don’t really care about going to watch it offsite anymore because there are supposed to be other places to see the launch from. But you know, even an e-mail saying something like this would have been fantastic: “Your tickets for the original launch are now invalid. You can re-purchase tickets starting from such and such a date and time”. Perhaps some tickets will just magically appear in the mail for me in the next day. Yeah – pigs, flying, stuff.