Well it seems I’ve had my head up my arse for the last week or so. Sometime I don’t feel like I want to post about every last detail of what I get up to or what I think about, because if I did it would be so boring even I wouldn’t read it back. Here’s an example of what’s been going through my mind this week.
Last Monday my brother’s friends, Bess and Lemmy, were featured in an episode of Wife Swap on television. If you don’t know, the premise behind Wife Swap is that they get two completely different families and, well, swap the wives over for two weeks. During the first week the wives have to live the lifestyle of their new family, and during the second week they turn the tables and try to impose some of their own rules and regulations. This is where the sparks usually fly. At the end of the fortnight, the families meet up to discuss what, if anything, they have learned. To make it more interesting, the programme-makers tend to choose families with vastly different attitudes and lifestyles, and usually choose a family who’s got it basically right to swap with a family that has got it drastically wrong.
Fortunately for Bess and Lemmy, they were the family that had got it basically right. They do what they want, they have lots of friends, the children are happy, sociable, and have enough freedom to express themselves. The other family, Cheryl and Sam, were…. different. Sam worked 80 hours a week, and was never there. The kids (twins aged 15) didn’t go to school, and hadn’t been for about two years, apparently. Cheryl took them out of school because they were being bullied, and had intended to home-school them. But (and there’s a big but here) Cheryl was addicted to cleaning the house. Fifteen hours a day she spent vacuuming, polishing, wiping, dusting, and insisting people took their shoes off before going into the living room. The kids were basically housebound, they didn’t have any friends or any sort of social life, and joined in the cleaning to give themselves something to do.
Now, it’s not easy to film two families for a fortnight each, come back with a month’s worth of footage, and then edit it down to one hour. A hell of a lot has to be left out, and some of what was left in was out of sequence, so they cut from a shot of people hanging around in the living room at 1am to a shot of the son in his room playing an electric guitar. This obviously gave the impression that he was playing at 1am, which would annoy the neighbours and only add fuel to the “bikers are scum” debate. Of course, he wasn’t playing at 1am, it was just the programme-makes trying to stir things up a bit. They also tried to entertain some debate by asking that Bess wore a “Just Fuck Right Off” tee-shirt when she first visited the other family.
But by the end of the programme Lemmy and the bikers had won Cheryl over. She spent a day doing Bess’s job teaching aqua-aerobics. She had to sit in the lounge watching the kids play video games while Lemmy prepared dinner. She felt bored and useless. At the end of the first week the Lemmy and the Black Knights took her out on a rally, got her to wear a leather jacket, ride on the back of Lemmy’s trike, have a few drinks, sleep in a tent and loosen up a little. She started to realise the error of her ways, and that the lifestyle she’d made for herself wasn’t what she wanted at all.
Bess was just as much out of place in Cheryl’s house. She wasn’t used to being housebound all the time, and after a few days was going stir crazy. When it came time to impose some of her own rules, she hid all the cleaning stuff and got the family out racing each other on mini-motorbikes. By the end of the fortnight both families had learned something. Cheryl had learned that there was more to life than cleaning, and Bess and Lemmy learned that they were perfectly happy all along. Although they did take one aspect of Cheryl’s lifestyle and incorporated it in their own – they bought a dining table and started to sit down together as a family to eat dinner. Although, as Lemmy said, they didn’t really need to sit round a table in order to communicate with their children.
According to my sister-in-law, who was present for the entire shoot, Channel 4 said that the programme had got 4m viewers, a record for the series. You can catch up on some of the debate by looking here, here , here (although Lemmy would like to point out that Cheryl is not, has bot been and never will be a member of the Black Knights!) and on the BikersWeb message board here.
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Ok, enough of that. What else has been happening? It’s all very geeky and technical I’m afraid, so if you want to switch off now you can. I found out on Wednesday about these people who are offering 24Mb broadand for £24 a month. That’s 12 times faster than my current conenction for a pound less. Definately definately worth looking in to. I’ve put my phone number into the enquiry screen and it says it should be switched on in my exchange in December. For an extra £4 a month you can have a static IP address, and they don’t even mind you running your own web server and email server from home. Now that appeals to the geek in me – I quite fancy the idea of building my own web server and hosting my site in my bedroom. Of course, if something goes wrong it’s down to me to fix it!
I think I’ll have another look at the Linux from Scratch (LFS) project – this project takes advantage that Linux is all open-source, you actually have the original program instructions for the software you’re running. LFS takes this to the ultimate level, that of building an entire operating system using only the original source code. But in order to build a piece of software, you need the software required to do the building, and in order to build that….. it’s a circular reference. To get round this, you either have to start with a running Linux system, which seems a bit daft since all you’re going to do is throw it away once you’ve used it to build your own, or you could use the LFS LiveCD, which is a bootable CD containing all the tools you’ll need. Simply get a blank PC, put the CD in, boot it up and away you go. I don’t have a blank PC here, so I’m using a virtual PC to play around with it.
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I went back to the gym on Friday night and spent an hour and a quarter there. Now my back is aching, which is good. I spent yesterday with my son, niece and nephew at my parents house, and gave my son his birthday present. It’s not his birthday until Monday, but I won’t be seeing him again until Tuesday evening. Anyway, his present was a Micro Scalextric Batman car racing set, which he loved to bits. He tried his best to get me to tell him what the present was before I actually gave it to him though – but this year I didn’t cave in! I took him into town in the afternoon to get him some new shoes (which came with a toy spaceship embedded in the heel of the shoe – what will they think of next?) and while we were out my mum and niece baked him a birthday cake. My son, being not at all typical, blew out the candles, ate the crust off his slice and then said he’d had enough….. what sort of child leaves a plateful of birthday cake? Ah well, I suppose he’ll be getting plenty more over the next few days.
My ex called me on Thursday and said that she was planning a small party for some friends, and could I contribute a little towards the cost of food and party-type-stuff. I didn’t mind this at all, even though it was over and above my normal weekly child maintenance payment. For all his birthdays up to now he’s had a big party at a Wacky Warehouse-type place, and it’s cost a small fortune. My half of the expenses last year was £150, which I gave to my ex in an envelope in cash together with that week’s regular payment. Guess what? She lost the envelope with all the money in it, and begged me to give her some extra to cover the loss. She was genuinely upset about the whole thing, and she said she’d cover half the loss if I covered the other half. So that party cost us both £225…. no wonder she’s keeping it more low-key this year!
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I’ve also been getting tempted to replace my PC monitor at home. I have a standard 17inch monitor, and it’s taking up quite a bit of space on my desk, so I’ve been looking into getting a flat screen unit. I’ve no idea if I will or not, but while doing some research into flat screens, I came across the acronym DLP. This stands for Digital Light Processing, and is used in some large-screen tv sets. It’s an incredible piece of technology, and you can find out how it works by clicking here.
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Ok, that’s enough drivel for now. I’ll come back when I have something more interesting to say. Or maybe not.