70cities blog

Curry Hell man dies

Tragic news. I had the honour of working closely with Mr Latif back in the day when I was a jack-of-all-trades web monkey, and maintained the Rupali and Curry Hell websites. I can honestly say I've never met a man more dedicated to the twin pursuits of selling incredibly hot curry to pissed-up Geordies, and honest-to-goodness self-publicity.

A man so generous, he thought nothing of ordering me a free cab back to the office when a lunch-hour visit turned into a three-hour curry/booze fest - whereupon I fell asleep in the sofa in reception and got woken up by the marketing director of the coincidentally recently-deceased Pennine Windows, who was coming in expecting to update his web site.

He'll be sorely missed. Particularly by anyone who had a lamb phaal at his restaurant in recent days.

RIP Mr Latif. Off to his very own Curry Heaven, festooned with party hats and Cobra beer.

I barely ever play computer games. Consoles, whathaveyou - I've just never had much of an interest in any of it. Back in the 80's, when I was growing up and spent hours slaving over a hot ZX Spectrum, I was far more interested in learning how to write stuff and make it do interesting things than spending hours killing aliens or whathaveyou.

The games I liked then, and still do to this day, are the really simple platform/puzzle type ones. Lunar Jetman, Spellbound, Jet Set Willy, Technician Ted, the Dizzy games, Starquake. My later Atari ST, primarily a games machine much like the Amiga, spend most of its life playing simple platformers. When Driller came out and pioneered the immersive 3D worlds that everyone's used to now, I got bored pretty quickly. Later, when I had a PC, stuff like Rise of the Triads, and Sin gave way to pretty brain-dead stuff like Carmageddon. And even then only briefly. I get bored with games so easily.

In fact, in those rare times I find myself in a gamey mood, I don't reach for my non-existent PS2 or Wii and fire up World of Timewasting or whatever - I use a Spectrum emulator and play Starquake, as I have been for over 20 years (I've only finished it twice - I find the gameplay fun, not the end goal). I just don't get games, really. I just don't care.

Maybe it's the same reason I barely read any fiction or watch any films? Just writing that down makes me sound like some uncultured idiot, I know - but the truth is I get enough from current affairs, technology, comedy and music to keep me occupied for a lifetime and I sort of marvel at those who find the time to glue themselves to an Xbox 360 for hours on end or watch tons of films/boxsets. I can only conclude that I got short-changed somewhere along the line and everyone else in the world gets a thirty-hour day.

Happy new year! Just when I was finally getting into the swing of 2007, the damn thing goes and ends.

Highlights of 2007 included:

• Going to San Francisco and discovering Northern California
• Doing some interesting stuff at work after a period of uncertainty
• Snooker: seeing the Masters and the World Championships in Sheffield
• Gadgets: new Macbook in Feb, and iPod Touch in November
• Turning thirty (am fine with it now, in fact I really quite like it)
• Spending lots of time with M and P and other nice people
• Listening to the Beatles a lot

Lowlights included:

• Project getting canned
• Subsequent project floundering and getting canned
• Not seeing my friends from the North nearly enough
• Various worries, stresses and strains I couldn't do anything/much about
• Being afflicted with weird sinusy problems as well as having a really crap hayfever year

2008? Changes afoot... hopefully.