I love optical illusions, and seeing the way the brain works (and in some cases doesn’t) on these things

But this particular one still makes my head hurt…

Great – it’s that time of year where the horseflies come out again, which means I get a couple of viciously nasty bug bites.

I don’t know what the hell is in a horsefly’s bite (injection, whatever) but my body reacts badly to it – not an allergic reaction, anaphylactic shock, or anything like that – but the site of the bite swells significantly. It also itches like an absolute motherfucker, which doesn’t help.

Generally the swelling stays for about 48-72 hours, and there’s nothing I’ve yet found that’ll do anything at all to it – piriton, witch hazel, cold compress, anti-histamines in general, all has no effect whatsoever. It’s incredibly annoying.

At the moment I’ve got two of these bites, which have lasted from Sunday. They should be easing off by now – or at least by the end of today – just in time to get some more this coming weekend, I’m sure.

All told it’s just another reason to get a bit more annoyed by summer.

There are times where I’m a real spanner – and it looks like last week was one of those times.

You see, ages back I booked myself for the @Media conference in London. And then forgot about it completely.

And it turns out it was last week – the Thursday and Friday, to be precise.  Which means that last week would’ve been made infinitely more complex than it was, what with the Cambridge interview and the entire travelling to see AC/DC – but it’s still a bummer.

It’s weird too, in that I haven’t heard anything about it this year – nothing I’ve noticed on Twitter or Facebook, and none of the developers and techies I know having gone to it. Compared to a couple of years ago, when I knew loads of people who went, that just seems pretty odd.

It’s a pain to have paid for the ticket and not gone – but well, my company had paid for the ticket rather than me personally (it’s a semantic point in many ways, I know) so it could be worse.

Blimey, Bernie Madoff has been given a jail term of 150 years for his fraudulent investor schemes etc.

That’s one hell of a sentence – the kind of jail time you can’t even really imagine.

In a direct contrast to Wembley, the O2 have recently made their parking even easier.

The last couple of times we’ve been organising to go to the O2, the parking booking has had to be done via Ticketmaster – and most of the time, it couldn’t be done online for some fuckforsaken reason, so you ended up having to call the tosspots.

Now, though, the O2 deals with booking parking on their own site through a simple two-page form. (There may be more pages if you’re doing multiple bookings, or your address is different to the cardholders, but it took me two pages) And that’s it. Confirmation comes through to the email address, and it’s all done. No fucking about with Ticketmaster’s horrific system, no “you’ve got two minutes to fill in this form”, no godawful captchas to try and interpret, just a simple form.

So my parking’s booked for seeing Nine Inch Nails/Jane’s Addiction in just over two week’s time.

Again, I’ll be knackered by the time I get home – but it’ll be worth it.

Other than the aforementioned parking nightmare at Wembley Stadium, the rest of the AC/DC gig on Friday was utterly fantastic.  Bearing in mind we were about as far as it’s possible to get from the stage…

The view from our seats

So AC/DC themselves were about 1cm high. There were videoscreens either side, which made the viewing experience something akin to watching on a small TV from across the room, but that’s still OK. After all, it’s the sound you’re going for, not the vision – and the sound was storming.  Mind you, some people were obviously expected to be just there for the beer…

Carlsberg trailer behind beer tent at floor level

The two-and-a-quarter hours of AC/DC just rocked the place. Interestingly, they only played about five tracks from the latest album, Black Ice, and the rest came from all over the last thirty-odd years. And all of it was ace. Several firm favourites got played, including Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Back in Black, Hells Bells and (of course) For Those About To Rock as a finale, along with cannon blasts.

It wasn’t a show in the same way as the one Pink did recently, but it was still a show – the lighting was spectacular (and improved through the night, as the sun went down) and everyone seemed to have a fantastic time. Personally I felt the ten-plus minutes of Angus’ guitar soloing was a move too far, and could’ve had a couple more tracks instead. But that’s just me.

The AC/DC lightshow

All told, a seriously good gig – I’d go and see them again no worries.