I = triumph

There was a disappointing lack of a drum roll. There were no masses waiting in hushed anticipation. There was no post-final interview with Ant and Dec, no follow ups on the talk show circuit and, crushingly, no thumbs up from Chuck Norris*. But all of these things are but follies, because I - living the work + no play = dull boy dream - have managed to complete a videogame for the first time in actual years.

Hey, Call of Duty 4! Not looking so tough now, are ya?

It's not been through lack of trying - I would have completed Halo if my iBook didn't start having seizures whenever more than, say, two enemies appeared on screen. KotOR would be in the books if the aforementioned iBook hadn't literally screamed when an entirely superfluous flying whale appeared on the Jedi Academy planet.

It's at that point that I realised that a three year-old iBook G4 probably wasn't the best choice as a gaming platform.

There are, of course, others.New Super Mario Brothers remains unfinished because I suck at Mario games, Phantom Hourglass would be seeing progress during my commute, if I didn't walk to work, Heavenly Sword would be done if there was actually a game I wanted to play in between the cutscenes.

So I managed to find the time, over the past week or so, to complete COD4's singleplayer (stop laughing at the back). It took me a while to reacquaint myself with a console FPS - after playing a lot of Fifa 08 and Okami and not a lot inbetween - but soon enough I was pop'n'shooting with the best of them. At which point I got executed.

And then killed in a nuclear explosion.

This was after completing the missions. What happens if you fail? You die? Where's my damn carrot?

What was genuinely weird about the experience was the vague guilt I felt when storming ahead of the rest of my squad into room full of enemies, even if it was what I was supposed to do. That, and spending three quarters of the game being called Soap by my CO.

But now it's over, and I am full of win. Just not online - I am truly horrific at multiplayer...

* What is it Mike Huckabee has that I don't, exactly?

NYC 07: The desperate* search for Havana Club

* Not so much desperate. More half-assed.

The history of Cuban rum is a long, impressive, convulated thing. This being the internet, though, I give you the long story short: Castro nationalizes rum production in Cuba; the Bacardi family leg it to Puerto Rico while Havana Club starts producing rum using the old Bacardi stills and facilities. Of couse, the US trade embargo on Cuba means that Havana Club is not available on American soil, so Bacardi took the opportunity to launch their very own Havana Club.

Following this ok?

The Bacardi Havana Club is not available in the UK, primarily because the Cuban Havana Club is, so I thought I'd make use of the couple of days I had in New York to find a bottle, just to see what it was like. After an exhaustive (again, nearer "when I didn't forget when passing one," than "exhaustive") search of Manhattan's liquor stores I had to admit defeat, safe in the knowledge that I had one last shot - duty free.

Or not. Guess I could pick up a litre bottle of Bacardi Limon, though. Or, in the country that's producing some of the more interesting gins on the global market, a bottle of Tanqueray Rangpur. I guess I'll have to settle for hoping that the Bacardi Havana Club tastes better that rum-flavoured vodka rather than knowing.

NYC 07

You should love New York. Every souvenir shop pushes one particular message: I (heart) NY, and when they say "I" they mean "you".

Therefore, you love New York.

They say it so much it must be true. In fact, everywhere you go in the city you get the reinforced message that this is The Greatest City In The World. The stores have the greatest deals, the restaurants have the greatest food, so on.

Whatever happened to "show, don't tell"?

I have to confess that I haven't had too many awe-inspiring moments over the past few days in New York. There are impressive things here, to be sure. There is a little rush of excitement the first time you see the Empire State Building towering above 5th Avenue, likewise the Brooklyn Bridge and Liberty Island in the distance. Times Square is remarkable in its neon tackiness. But these uniquely impressive spots are undermined by the ordinariness of the spaces between.

The overall effect is similar to looking at a Seurat painting - the closer you get, the less cohesive the whole appears. You start to see the disparate individual elements that make up the whole, and sat next to each other in close proximity they don't seem that impressive. Like Seurat's La Grande Jatte you marvel at the beauty of it from afar and at the achievement of creating that beauty from up close. The real New York is not just the New York of popular culture. It is both less than and more than that.

Getting touchy

I'm writing this on an iPod Touch for no reason other than that I can. It's a lovely device, but right now I can't see it as much more than a gadget. It isn't too useful to me outside of a wireless network except as a music player but as far as that goes, it's ticking almost all the right boxes. That said, you can really feel the potential of the hardware. This device is calling out for a port of the classic Lucasarts point-and-click games (Monkey Island et al) and some quality, native (not online, thanks) applications.

Muhahahaha. I have a desk now. So to work.

War Stories: Nor any drop to drink

Thursday afternoon, and someone has decided that the thing to do - right now - is dig a big hole in the floor beside the main bar. What's more, they've decided that once you've started going down there's only one way to go, and cut a water main in the process.

So, while four workmen and five bar staff try to stop the main floor flooding with mops, cardboard boxes and towels, one lucky guy gets to turn off the water supply to the building. Thing is, when you turn of the mains water supply, the sprinkler system sets off the fire alarm. Because the fire alarm has gone off - and this is not, funnily enough, a drill - we have to evacuate the building and wait for the fire brigade to arrive and check the building.

It all goes rather well, all things considered. The fire brigade have a look around, and they're pretty happy that nothing's on fire. So we start letting customers back in to the upstairs bar which is at least dry. On the downside, we still have one bar under an inch of water and no running water anywhere. All of this means we have no draught beers or mixer, and sooner or later the ice machines are going to start complaining. Because the water is off and the sprinkler system has triggered the fire alarm, the gas has shut off automatically and we have no food available, and a table of 25 booked in right about now.

Two and a half hours of bailing water later, we get the bar dry, the pipes fixed, the water back on and we reopen the main bar. Five hours after it all started, we've done four days work and we've still got a hole in the floor.

Spectacular.

War Stories: Fifteen minutes

Really, I'm not going to lie to you. I can't fight. Not in the fisticuffs sense of the word, or at least not well. But tonight - which up to a point had been pretty good, really quiet and on course for cleaning up and home within fifteen minutes of closing - was touch and go for a moment. I served a group of out-of-towners a couple of minutes before we shut the bar. Twenty minutes later they were moaning about having to rush their drinks (we give customers fifteen minutes grace to finish their drinks we close), so we get the manager out and he tells them it's over. Go home. And so it goes for a couple of minutes, we just want them to go so we can go home.

And then someone says something, someone hears something and all of a sudden there's standing up and shoulders being squared and just for a second there's the manager, me and one other guy on the bar and there's four older, slightly drunk but pretty hefty dudes and...

It's over. No drama. Well, no more drama. They shift out, grumbling about the level of customer care , and we all take a deep breath and thank whatever it is we pray to because we don't get paid enough to get hit because someone can't finish a pint in fifteen minutes.