August 2004 Archives

Isn't it amazing how kids always find one soft cuddly toy that they can't live without for the first few years of life? No-one tells them to do this, they just do. Mine was a little panda, and my son's lifeline is pictured here. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Homer. Well, not literally, my son would never forgive me if I gave him away!

Homer came into our lives when Offspring was nine months old. We were in the car, travelling on the motorway (I can't remember for the life of me where we were going) and we stopped at a service station for a break. In the foyer, there was a promotion for a credit card, and the free gift they were giving away was Homer. As soon as offspring clapped eyes on Homer his arms went straight out and a big smile appeared on his face. Even though we didn't apply for the credit card, the staff were more than happy to let one of their Homers go to a good home.

Offspring took Homer everywhere. After a few months we decided we had to get a spare one so that he wouldn't be too distressed if Homer got lost. Initially we kept the two Homers separate so as not to confuse the wee lad. I think we managed to keep up that pretense for about a year. When he went for a walk, one Homer went in his pram (or buggy) and one went in his changing bag. When Homer No 1 landed in a puddle, Homer No 2 came to the rescue. After Offspring discovered the second Homer we ended up getting a baby one (suckers!), so he had a little Homer family :-)

Homer has been as far afield as Tenerife and Israel, as well as the Lake District and London. Offspring sat him on his lap while I read them both stories, and turned him to face the page so he could read along as well. He showed him how to use a spoon, and how to sing and dance. I don't think there's anything Homer doesn't know - my son has taught him everything. Last weekend Homer made a friend out of Lego.

Over the years Homer has been lost, found, thrown, picked up, cuddled, punched, soaked, dried off and repaired. My mum got out a needle and thread and performed plastic surgery on him to repair his straggling mouth, attention which he needs again by the look of the photo. I've no idea whether this Homer is the original one or not, but he is the only surviving one. I don't know what happened to the others, but I wish them well, wherever they are. They have done a fantastic job of keeping Offspring calm, fuelling his imagination and being just about the best beany friend a small boy can have...

Homer isn't my son's only comforter. He also has a little piece of cloth which was part of his mum's blue beach wrap. This torn little corner of the wrap has got smaller and smaller over the years, not least because a little bit was kept at my parents house, a little bit at his mum's parent's house, and so on. As long as he had Homer, Dummy and Wrap, he was home. No matter where he was or who he was with. You could always tell when he was tired when he started playing with the fringe on the wrap. Tuck him up anywhere with Homer and a blanket (or rug) with a fringe on it and he'd be in seventh heaven.

I honestly don't know where we'd be without him :-)

Thinker Quiz

I'm apparently both a spatial thinker and an intrapersonal thinker.

Spatial Thinkers:
Tend to think in pictures, and can develop good mental models of the physical world.
Think well in three dimensions
Have a flair for working with objects

Like other spatial thinkers, Leonardo had a talent for designing buildings and machinery. He also invented a new style of map making Other Spatial Thinkers include
Pablo Picasso, Michelangelo, Isambard Kingdom Brunel

Careers which suit Spatial Thinkers include
Mechanic, Photographer, Artist, Architect, Engineer, Builder, Set designer

Intrapersonal thinkers:
Spend a lot of time thinking about and trying to understand themselves
Reflect on their thoughts and moods, and work to improve them
You understand how your behaviour affects your relationships with others

Like intrapersonal thinkers, Leonardo worked hard to improve all aspects of himself. Other Intrapersonal thinkers include
Sigmund Freud, Gandhi, Grahame Greene

Careers which suit Intrapersonal Thinkers include
Psychologist, Teacher, Pilot, Child care worker, Explorer, Drama therapist

Reasonably accurate! I do like to find out how things work, and I've spent a lot more time over the last couple of years trying to find out how I work!

Personality quiz

Summary of Resolvers
Good at getting to the heart of a problem and quickly finding a solution
Make rational decisions using the facts available
Think of themselves as understanding, stable and easy-going
May focus on short-term results and lose sight of the big picture

Resolver Careers
Resolvers are often drawn to hands-on jobs that require an analytical mind and careful organisation of large amounts of data.

This is also a reasonably accurate description of me.... although I wouldn't say that I'm "prone to inappropriate, tearful outbursts"! I have, however, learned to breathe fire and would like to do more daredevil-type things before I get too old and decrepid....

I got the links for these quizzes from these two posts (thanks Carol!) but the trackback pings didn't seem to work..... this is the first time I've tried to track back to articles in someone else's blog so I'm not sure quite where it went wrong..... hence the manual credit :-)

I knew it would happen sooner or later. I just didn't think it would happen this soon. My son has started asking questions to which I don't know the answer, and as we all know, daddies are supposed to know everything. So tell me, how would you answer the following questions?

1. How does the sun stay up in the sky if there's no air there?
2. What's outside the universe?
3. What's space made of?

If I don't get any answers to these questions soon, I'm going to have to get him a copy of this book for his 5th birthday. Makes me feel inadequate, I can tell you.

Mind you, he did spend the rest of the day quite happily watching Scooby Doo 2 and building lego friends for his toy dog, Homer. And I'll tell you all about Homer next time.

According to a recent poll, Tommy Cooper has been voted the funniest Briton of all time. In case this link doesn't work any more, the full list (from a Readers Digest poll) is listed here:

1. Tommy Cooper
2. Peter Kay
3. Billy Connolly
4. Morecambe and Wise
5. Bob Monkhouse
6. Ken Dodd
7. Roy 'Chubby' Brown
8. (equal) Norman Wisdom
8. (equal) Les Dawson
10. Lee Evans
11. (equal) David Jason
11. (equal) Dawn French
13. (equal) Jim Davidson
13. (equal) Rowan Atkinson
15. Benny Hill
16. Jasper Carrott
17. Lenny Henry
18. Spike Milligan
19. John Cleese
20. (equal) Eddie Izzard
20. (equal) Freddie Starr

There must be some people out there who are not familiar with Tommy Cooper so I'd like to invite you to check out this fan site and this selection of one-liners.

This snippet has been mercilessly stolen from the fan site:

After a Royal Command Performance Tommy was introduced to the Queen.

"Do you think I was funny?" Tommy asked.
"Yes Tommy," replied the Queen.
"You really thought I was funny?", Tommy asked.
"Yes of course I thought you were funny" said the Queen.
"Did your Mother think I was funny?" Tommy asked.
"Yes, Tommy..."said the Queen, ".we both thought you were funny."
"Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?" Tommy asked.
"No, ........." replied the Queen, "...but I might not be able to give you a full answer."
"Do you like football?" asked Tommy.
"Well not really" said the Queen.'
"In that case, ..." said Tommy, "....do you mind if I have your Cup Final Tickets?'"

As for the rest of the list, I'm not quite sure what Les Dennis is doing there, and Spike Milligan should be a lot further up the list. In 1994 Spike was given a lifetime achievement honour at the British Comedy Awards. The host started to read out a tribute to Spike written by one of his most famous fans, Prince Charles. After the first sentence Spike uttered the now classic phrase "the grovelling little bastard" - the house erupted in gales of laughter and the rest of the letter never was read out. So for that alone he should be higher in the list. Not quite sure what David Jason is doing there - fair enough, he's one of the best comic actors we've ever had but he doesn't write his own scripts. Mind you, the poll was for "funniest Briton" rather than "funniest comedian"

Two things bother me about this list, and they are the absences of The Two Ronnies and Victoria Wood. Take a look at this Two Ronnies fan site, and then check out the virtual episodes. Took me right back, I can tell you. In my ever-so-'umble opinion, Ronnie Barker (who wrote a lot of the Two Ronnies material under a pseudonym) is a genius.

Here's a Victoria Wood quote snaffled from this page:
my friend worked in hairdressing, and me cousin worked in hairdressing and me mother...that's her on t'wall in sponge rollers...she said "What are you planning on doing our Madeline" and I said modelling, she said "Modelling Madeline ?" I says Yes, she says "OOh Madeline you'd be very middling at modelling" I said would I she says "You go meddling with modelling you'll be muddling Madeline"

Back in the mid-90's I went to see Bob Monkhouse record one of his television shows, and part of the routine was that he'd ask the audience to call out two random words or phrases, for example they might shout out "fire engine" and "elephant" and he had to go from a joke about a fire engine to a joke about an elephant, with each joke being linked to the one before it, and he had to do all of this in 60 seconds. Let me tell you that the way it appeared on tv was exactly the way it happened in the studio, one joke after another, zap, zap, zap, zap, zap. By the time he got to the end of the 60 seconds I couldn't remember what the first joke was. The man was a walking comedy encyclopedia.

In fact, here are my top 7 British Comedy Genuises of all time, in alphabetical order (coz they are all as funny as each other). 'tis a shame that four of them are no longer with us.

Ronnie Barker
John Cleese
Tommy Cooper
Spike Milligan
Bob Monkhouse
Eric Morecambe
Victoria Wood

I'm a sucker for an old-style comedy song, like the type Victoria Wood and The Two Ronnies do. The lyrics and routines are probably all copyrighted, which is why it's so hard to find them on the net, and they don't get shown on TV as often as they deserve to be. Not on Terrestrial tv at any rate.

As promised earlier, here are the blogs I've been reading all week. And jolly good they are too.

In no particular order, we have Eurotrash, Fussy, Deviant Woman and Perfectly Vocal.

I've just noticed that all these blogs are written by women... is this some subconscious attempt for me to get into the female phyche? To try and fathom out the way they think? Answers on a ten pound note, please, to......

Between late 1994 and late 1998 I lived in London (well, Surbiton and Kingston-Upon-Thames) with my ex, and did a fair amount of travelling on the London Underground (aka the Tube). Travelling on the tube is demoralising and boring but for most people a necessary evil. I suspect underground transport systems everywhere suffer the same problems, i.e. trying to move several hundred thousand people every day through very long, very narrow, very dark tunnels. I've not been on the tube for a few years now, but I presume it's the same as it ever was...... crammed, hot and sticky in the summer, full of people who never make eye contact, but actually quite cost-effective if you want to do some tourist-y travelling around (not quite so cost-effective if you only use it twice a day to get to and from work, though) and reasonably efficient.

In all the travelling I did on the tube I never once heard a driver's announcement that cheered me up. However, such things do happen, and this site has compiled a selection for your entertainment. Below I present a few of my favourites.

"Welcome aboard the Flintstones railway, once I get my feet on the floor and start running we should be on our way".

"May I remind all passengers that there is strictly no smoking allowed on any part of the Underground. However, if you are smoking a joint it is only fair that you pass it round the rest of the carriage".

"Please allow the passengers off the train first. It's easier that way."

"When the gentleman urinating on Platform 3 has finished, would he ask the attendant for a mop and bucket. Thank you"

"Would the lady going down the escalator please lower her umbrella, it doesn't rain underground."

"This is a customer announcement, please note that the big slidy things are the doors, the big slidy things are the doors".

"Ladies and gentlemen we will shortly be arriving at Waterloo, then I think we will carry right on through the channel tunnel and spend the weekend in Paris".

"Good evening ladies and gents, and welcome to the Waterloo and City line, sights to observe on the journey are, to your right, black walls and to your left, black walls. See the lovely black walls as we make out way to Waterloo. We will shortly be arriving at Waterloo where this train will terminate, we would like to offer you a glass of champagne on arrival and you will notice the platform will be lined with lapdancers for your entertainment - have a good weekend."

I've just had a phone call from my son. He'll be 5 in a couple of months, and the conversation went like this:

Dad: "Hello?"
Offspring: "Can you buy me a Scooby Doo 2 video or dvd?"
D: "Of course I will. How are you?"
O: "Fine"
D: "Have you been to nursery today?"
O: "Yes"
D: "What did you do there?"
O: "I can't remember. bye!"

He was obviously not in one of his talkative moods. His memory is usually a lot better than that, though, he only left the place about an hour ago!

When he was about three and a half, my mum took him to a local garden centre that also doubled up as a pet shop. They had lots of exotic animals there, like snakes and parrots and an iguana, as well as the more usual fare such as rabbits and hamsters. When they arrived at the car park he said "It was snowing last time I was here." That was at least six months previously, and he recognised the outside of the building. So there's nothing at all wrong with his memory. Or his logic, or his ability to dominate a conversation, or get things his own way.

Last weekend he put on a little Olympic gymnastic display for us. He ushered everyone out of the dining room apart from me and my mum, and he told us where he wanted the chairs, how he wanted everything organised, and even tidied away his own toys so he had room on the carpet for his display. He got out a little electronic keyboard and told my mum what to play before he did each jump, and also after the display. He wanted to move the dining table so that we could all sit behind it and eat snacks while he did his show, but we reminded him that we'd all just had afternoon tea and there waren't any snacks left. He then got everyone back in, pretended to take our tickets, told us where he wanted us to sit, and spent the next five minutes jumping off the arm of the chair, turning round in mid-air to land with his back to us, and rolling around on the floor ending with his arms up in the air like the gymnasts do on TV. Finally he got some toys out of his toy box and gave all of us a prize, warning us not to forget to give him his toys back before we all went home. So there he was, operations director, musical director, admissions clerk, athlete, gymnast and prize-giver. The thing is, he didn't tell us beforehand what he was planning to do - he just told everyone to leave the room and then told us where to put the tables and chairs and what we were to do. He even told us not to clap until the end. Priceless.

Anyway, just thought I'd better write that conversation down before I forgot it. Memories of childhood and parenthood like that are worth preserving.

Update on previous post: I bought my mum a set of three little books which are a compendium of all the joke emails that have been circulating the internet over the last few years. At least it saves me having to print a few off each week to read in between each course when I go to my folks for Friday night dinner. See, I have an ulterior motive for everything.

This morning I woke up (which is always a good start to the day, much better than waking up in the afternoon, or not waking up at all) with a vast array of thoughts running through my mind. I was in that "was that a dream or did it really happen?" state. And I was thinking that if it really happened then why am I not in hiding from the authorities? So I concluded that it must have been a dream. If I suddenly stop making entries to this journal then you'll know that I was in fact wrong about having dreamed it all, and the authorities have got me. The only problem is that now I can't remember what it was I was thinking about, and I'm fairly sure I haven't done anything recently to upset the authorities, so it must have been a dream. Probably.

I never can remember my dreams for more than a few minutes after I wake up, and even then that's pushing it a bit. I know for a fact that I do dream, and some of my dreams are pretty weird, but then again some of the thoughts I have during the day are pretty weird too. But I'm not weird enough to put those thoughts on the internet for all and sundry to giggle at, gasp at, gawk at, or be shocked enough to report me to the authorities about. "Dear authorities, I've been reading this man's poor excuse for a blog and would like to report that his writing style is criminal. I cringe every time I read it, and let me tell you I've read every single word of it, so I know what I'm talking about." Reminds me of Mary Whitehouse. If you object to something that much, then disgusts you that much, don't watch/read/talk about it. I think that last statement sums up my entire political agenda. If it annoys you, ignore it. I've never been one to see the point of demonstrating against something as I don't think anyone sits up and takes notice. People campaigned againt the war in Iraq, but that still happened. People campaigned against poll tax, but we now have council tax. People campaigned against nuclear missiles, but they still exist. If you don't like a political leader, then vote him out, but bear in mind that the guy you're voting in will be just as self-centred/incompetent/sleazy (delete as appropriate).

One of the thoughts in my mind this morning was good enough for me to think "oh yes, that will make a good entry in the 'what gets up my nose' category on my site." But now I am almost fully awake I can't remember what it was. See, this happens to me a lot. I get an idea of writing about something then by the time I get to a PC, I've forgotten what it was. Maybe I should take a memory course or something. Or buy a dictaphone and stand on street corners talking into it. If I did that I'd probably get reported to the authorities.

Let's see, what else is going on? Today is my mum's birthday. I'm just about to head into town to get a card and a present for her, except that I have absolutely no idea what to buy. She hasn't dropped any hints about anything recently, and she seems to have everything she needs, so I'm a bit stumped. I've never been any good about getting presents for people. I'm sure I'll find something which she will unwrap, smile and say thank you very much, and then never use or look at again. Which is what birthday presents are all about, I think. I could tell her that I couldn't find anything I thought she might like, but it's the thought that counts, isn't it? She might not lke that too much though!

A couple of days ago my cousin and I reorganised the shelves in my wall units in the living room. I wanted to organise my CD collection, as I now have too many cd's to fit on the racks that I have. I was initially thinking about buying (or building) a long narrow shelf unit for cd's and dvd's which would go on an empty wall, and give me lots of room to expand the collection in the future. But I was persuaded that I wasn't making enough use of the space that I already have, so after an hour's deliberation and a couple of hours effort we moved everything around. My cd's are now looking resplendent in my glass cabinet, all in alphabetical order (it's the only thing I'm anal about) although my dvd's are still just stuck on the shelf in a completely random order. Why am I only obsessive about my storing my cd's in alphabetical order? Give it a week or two and they will be all over the house and car just like they were before. But I must admit it does look good :-) I might have to go back to plan A and get some custom shelves for them soon, though, as there's only room in the wall unit for about 10 more cd's.

Ah, the banality of my life and the random, incomplete thoughts in my brain.... I think I'll go shopping now, see if I can find something for my mum that she doesn't want. Happy birthday, mum!

Back in...... ooh, March or April this year it must have been, I splashed out on a digital camera, a Canon A70, for those that need to know such things. I've taken oodles of pictures with it since then, and will post some of my favourite arty-farty ones here for your delight and delectation.

First off, a spider in my parent's garden. I've no idea what type of spider it is, but I do know that the previous week I caught it eating lunch. Unfortunately (or not, depending on your point of view), I didn't have my camera with me that day.

Click on the pic for a bigger version.

Tech-y stuff: 1/160 at F4.5, focal length 13mm, 21st August 2004, 14:56
And before you ask, no.... I don't record all those details about every pic I take... the camera does all that for me. Good, innit?

I didn't find this one. Someone else found it and posted it to an email list I subscribe to. I just want to make it perfectly clear that I was not looking to buy something like this. At all. Thank you for your co-operation and understanding.

View image showing full ebay screen

Apologies for the picture quality but I'm trying to save the planet through reduced bandwidth usage. Or, to be more accurate, I'm trying to keep within my monthly bandwidth limits.

About ten years ago, my mother decided to take up golf. Our family had never really been in the "golfing set", so when she started my parents began to mix with a new crowd. At the time of her joining, my brother said something along the lines of "But golf clubs are elitist, aren't they?", to which I replied, in a rare moment of wit, "Yeah, but it depends who you know."

I'm coming to the conclusion that blogs are the same. I've been wandering around other people's blogs a bit over the last few days, and in their blogrolling (or whatever) section I'm seeing the same names coming up over and over again. Do these people really all read each other's blogs, or is it some sort of mutual link-exchange which I've not been a party to yet? Either way, I won't be linking to all and sundry just because everyone else is. I'm only going to link to those blogs which I read regularly, and there aren't that many of them yet. I've got a few up my sleeve, and if I find myself going back to look for updates every few days, then I'll guess they've got my attention, and I'll note it here. But until then, my reading habits stay my own.

Next question...... would I read my own blog??

Those of you who have either read this blog regularly (and only you know if you exist, coz I sure as hell don't) will have noticed that there are no personal pics to be found anywhere on the site. This is deliberate. Much as I'd love to share the many many cute pics I have taken of my son, and indeed the few cute pics he has taken of me, I regret to announce that I will not be doing so. I won't be sharing photos of him because this is my blog, not his. My ex-wife and I did put baby pics of him online a few years back, but that was then and this is now. And I won't be putting any pics of me online because a) it's egotistical and b) I'm not much to look at.

Oh all right then, since you insist. Here's a pic of him doing his jack-in-the-box routine.

Told you he was cute!

I spent most of yesterday building Lego robots with my son, which prompted me to reminisce about the sets I used to have when I was growing up. We always had lots of lego in the house, but the first proper set I had (as opposed to a bucketful of random bricks) was the Technic Fork Lift Truck, quickly followed by the original Car Chassis, which I believe was an 11th birthday present. It's only now that I can appreciate this gift fully, because at the time it must have been the most expensive lego set on the market.

I was not the only one in my family to enjoy lego, however, as my brother had the Go Kart and the second incarnation of the Car Chassis, and my cousin had the Helicopter and the Tractor.

All these sets gave me hours of fun and entertainment. I remember being very fastidious about putting all the pieces back into the box in their proper little compartments when I'd finished, and keeping the instruction leaflets in good condition. I've no idea what happened to all these sets, but I wish I (or my parents) had kept hold of them - I'm sure my son would love to play with them just as much as I did.

And speaking of which, the tradition continues to this day. Last Christmas my son got the Mini Robots set, and this year I've bought him Motion Madness and Motor Movers. Well, I say I bought them for him, I must admit I did open the sets first myself to "make sure all the pieces were there". Ahem.....

As for me, I'd still love to get my hands on one of these (hint, hint, generous readers!)

It's Friday afternoon, and I'm not working next week. Got the whoooooole week to myself. That's all I wanted to say about that. Gloat over.

I may (just may) get this finished. Then again, I may not. I may (just may) also tidy up a bit. But then I won't be able to find anything afterwards.

I'd like to do some walking or cycling. But it'll probably rain - I think the last time the sun shone here I was on holiday. Typical British weather...

Mmmmmmmmm, I just love a bowl of cereal with ice cold milk last thing at night.

A farmer buys several sheep, hoping to breed them for wool. After weeks, he notices that none of the sheep are getting pregnant, and calls a vet for help. The vet tells him that he should try artificial insemination. The farmer doesn't have the slightest idea what this means but, not wanting to display his ignorance, only asks the vet how he will know when the sheep are pregnant. The vet tells him that they will stop standing around and instead will lie down and wallow in grass when they are pregnant.

The Man hangs up and gives it some thought. He comes to the conclusion that artificial insemination means he has to impregnate the sheep. So, he loads the sheep into his lorry, drives them out into the woods, has sex with them all, brings them back and goes to bed.

Next morning, he wakes and looks out at the sheep. Seeing that they are all still standing around, he deduces that the first try didn't take, and loads them in the lorry again. He drives them out to the woods, has sex with each sheep twice for good measure brings them back and goes to bed.

Next morning, he wakes to find the sheep still just standing around.

One more try, he tells himself, and proceeds to load them up and drive them out to the woods. He spends all day having sex with the sheep and, upon returning home, falls listlessly into bed.

The next morning, he cannot even raise himself from the bed to look at the sheep. He asks his wife to look out and tell him if the sheep are lying in the grass.

"No," she says, "they're all in the lorry and one of them is beeping the horn."

I'm not a tidy person. Never have been and probably never will be. I must admit that it's good to be in a neat and tidy environment, and I do occasionally pick stuff up off the floor, or throw away old envelopes and things like that, but I'm not obsessively tidy. If I watch a DVD then the case will probably sit on the floor in front of the television until such a time as I take the DVD out of the player to put another one in, which might be a few days after I watched it in the first place. Does the case on the floor bother me? Nope, not at all. Do I notice it out of my peripheral vision? Nope. Do I tread on it every now and then? Yes, but even that doesn't prompt me to pick it up. And once I have returned the DVD to the case, I will probably put it on top of the TV (or just leave it on the floor) until I decide to blitz the house and get things a bit more organised.

Let me stress, I'm not a dirty person. I clean the important things (me, crockery, clothes) at the proper intervals, in other words just often enough not to arouse any strange looks or smells, but I don't always put things away once I've finished with them. Dirty clothes go straight in the laundry basket, clean tee-shirts can sit on my bedroom floor for a month or more.

My desk at work is the same (not strewn with DVD's or tee-shirts, of course, just bits of paper, books, notes, pens, staplers etc). Nothing is in any semblance of order, apart from the fact that I know that if I was working on something recently, it can't be too far away.

Why am I like this? Is it because I am lazy? Is it because I don't see it as a mess, I just see it all as "things that are currently in use"? Is it because I have tunnel vision and only see what I am looking straight at? Is it because I think that if I cover a table with papers, plates, letters, mugs, ashtrays and cd's then it won't get dusty?

I don't know the answers to these questions and I suspect you don't either. So why ask in the first place? H'mmm?

Now get off your backside and go tidy your room.

Following on from the virus attack and the hoax virus email, I am once again amazed at the sheer lack of insight applied by some people using email.

Here's the scenario.

Mr A receives a "joke" email with 10 "funny" pictures attached to it. This email has done the rounds a bit and now contains 150K of headers, plus the original 500K of photos. He then forwards it to 12 of his closest friends and colleagues, some of whom then forward it to their friends and so on. Some people further down the list end up getting two or three copies of this. And every time it is sent, it gets a little bit bigger.

Then someone decides to send a reply, adding nothing more than a "that was hilarious! When I pick myself up off the floor I'm going to the pub" comment. Note that this comment is a mere 76 bytes in length. However they send it at the bottom of the original 650K email. I mean... this just amazes me. Don't people even think to take the attachments off? Or write a new email instead of clicking reply? I know that in isolation this is probably not a major issue... but this sort of thing happens all over the world, all day long.

Just think how much faster the internet would be if it wasn't clogged up with the same huge attachments flying forwards and backwards and forwards again all the time.

I think email bandwidth should be charged to the user on a per-megabyte basis. Web and usenet bandwidth should be free, natch. Just charge for email. Would get rid of one or two spammers as well, I should think. Hopefully.

You'd have thought people would know better by now. But noooooo, no-one ever learns. They receive an email saying "Argh! Virus! Panic! Tell all your friends!" and they panic and tell all their friends. Hoaxes can waste as much time and effort as a real virus attack (well, maybe not, but they are just as annoying.)

This morning I received this one. I sent a restrained reply to everyone listed at the top of the email, politely pointing out their complete and utter gullibility, but what I really want to do is find the person who sent me this and smash his fucking face into the floor.

Finding him won't be too difficult, as he's actually sitting in the office next door and is also (I believe) the person responsible for yesterday's virus attack.

Fucking users. I've half a mind to change each and every password on the system so they can't get in to cause any havoc. They'll have to fill out a questionnaire to determine their level of competence before I let them anywere near the network again.

Grrrrr.

P.S. I feel better now, thanks for asking.

Those of you who have a blog will already know this, and those of you that don't, won't. This is aimed at those that don't, in order that after reading it, they do.

Every time I make a post on this blog, it pings a service at weblogs.com, which updates it's main page and puts me at the top of the list of "most recently updated blogs", which is fantastic. For all of about three seconds. Because when someone else updates their blog and pings weblogs.com, they go to the top of the list. I've spent the last half an hour browsing through the list on weblogs.com, and found a couple of blogs I'm going to keep an eye on.

And in that half an hour, I've slipped from number 1 to number 1943.

Yes, I do actually know how to spell tweak. I'm just spelling it that way to annoy you. I posted here about how I was starting to get comment spam, so I turned off comments. But if you look at the bottom of this post, you'll see an invitation to leave a little note of your own. What happened to make me change my mind, you ask?

Two things.
One) a blog with comments disabled is like a man sitting in a room with no doors talking to himself. Enable the comments and you put a door in the room. All I have to do now is wait for someone to come in :-)
Two) I discovered Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist plugin, so I plugged it in. Just got to see if it works now.

We got hit by a virus at work today. The first I heard about it was when one of our shops phoned me up and said they'd received an email from one of the secretaries here, and when they opened it the anti-virus program popped up.

So I went to have a look at our internal email server and found 238 identical emails in the outqueue waiting to be sent. It was connected as I looked, and every couple of seconds one of the outgoing emails disappeared. Ooooooppppss.. better shut that down asap.

Ok, have a look at these outgoing emails to see if I can work out who's sending them. There seem to be four main culprits, so I go off to virus-check their pc's. Only one reports a virus, the "sobig" worm found in one of the temporary internet files.

The other three PC's came up clean, but every time I turned the email server back on, more emails started appearing in the outqueue. The emails all have a file attached to them, called photos_arc.exe. Time to google for that. The first page that came up was this one, all the way from Australia, no less. At least it contains some information I can check out.

It turns out that all four of the PC's were infected with this virus, and removing it was simple once I knew what I was looking for. Of course, someone had to phone all our shops to tell them not to open this email, but to delete it straight away.

The next question was: why hadn't our anti-virus program picked it up? I'd checked for updates yesterday and it said it was all current. I checked for updates again after the incident and still nothing. So I tried to connect to McAfee's ftp server manually and couldn't log on to it. Why the update said successful when in fact it couldn't log on I don't know. So I had a look at McAfee's web site and found a new update ready for download. The new update had yesterday's date on it, but I don't know if the update was released before or after I checked yesterday. Anyway, new update downloaded, and all PC's in the building should have updated themselves by lunchtime. I had some copies of the dodgy email in my "deleted items" folder, so after doing the update I tried to open the file on the email. Sure enough, McAfee spotted the virus, so we should be ok now.

Here's McAfee's description of the virus. All's well that ends well, but I hope that the people we inadvertently sent the virus to this morning don't have too much hassle with it...

Sean Connery has fallen on hard times. All work has dried up and he just sits at home twiddling his thumbs.

Suddenly the phone rings and Sean answers it. It's his agent and Sean gets very excited.

The agent says, "Sean, I've got a job for you. Starts tomorrow, but you've got to get there early, for 10ish." Sean frowns and replies, "10ish? But I haven't even got a racket."

I've added a list of RSS Feeds to the blog. Just click on the RSS Feeds link on the left (of the main page, in case you're reading this in an archive entry) and choose your category. Click on the down arrow or the "more" button and you'll see the latest headlines/entries etc.

I do believe I'm starting to get the hang of this interweb thingy..

However I still need to work out what the "[]" is after each headline, and also how to get it to open each external site page in a new window. I know how to do it, I just need to work my way through the php code to see which line I need to change.

Yesterday I went to my parents for dinner (as I usually do) only to find that my son was there :-) Lovely surprise, and as soon as I had walked through the door I thrust a piece of play clay in my hand and told me to flatten it. He'd seen a picture in the ideas book showing a plate of egg, chips and peas and wanted to make it. This is nothing unusual, he'd already made a model of a Happy Meal with play clay before... only problem was, we didn't have any white clay, so we ended up making purple eggs with yellow yolk.

He then decided he didn't like the idea of having purple eggs, so he promptly decided the egg was going to be a birthday cake, and he decorated the edge of it with alternating peas and chips. The chips were standing on their edges and thus became candles.

Once he had a birthday cake, he then decided it was my mum's birthday (which isn't for another couple of weeks) and walked into the living room and presented her with her birrthday dinner. He had a model ice cream in a cone which he'd put in a bowl on the window sill in order to keep it cool (yeah I can't figure that one out either). So anyway he takes the plate we'd made, puts the cake on it and carries it in one hand, with the ice cream in the other.

"Happy birthday Grandma!!" he shouts.
"Oh thank you," she replies
"Here's your dinner, it's got a main course and a dessert, but you've got to eat your main course first before you can have any of the dessert. That's the rule"
"Oh," she says, "but I want to have this lovely ice cream first because it looks so delicious"
"Well......," he pauses to think. "Ok then, but only because it's your birthday."

Later on in the evening, we're watching the opening ceremony of the Olympics. During someone's speech he pipes up:
"The people of the Commonwealth aren't potatoes!"
"Excuse me?"
"She just said that the people of the commonwealth were potatoes"
"No, she said 'the people of the commonwealth, and spectators'"
"Oh......."

Even later in the evening:
"Time for bed. If you're a good boy and go to bed and not come downstairs again saying 'But I'm not tired', then we might take you swimming tomorrow"
"But you took me swimming last time and I was a naughty boy then..."

So that was Friday. Today we played a game whereby he was pretending a piece of bubble wrap was actually fire. (He likes to be a fire-throwing, super-sword-carrying, invincible superhero, and I'm the dragon he always slays and dismembers. I've lost count of the number of times I've had my legs chopped off.) He wanted me to yell "ow ow ow ow" and treat the bubble wrap like it was a hot potato every time he threw it at me. After about half an hour of this I decided I'd had enough, so I went and put on my flameproof clothes. This didn't daunt him - it took him half a second to realise my flameproof outfit didn't have a hat, and promptly beat me about the head with the bubble wrap. "Say 'ow!' daddy!!"

"Ow."

Other snippets of conversation:
"My mummy says I'm a cheeky little so-and-so."
"Tell her she's not wrong."

We're playing with Lego. He peers over at what I'm doing and says: "Wow Dad you're doing really well with that."
"Why thank you son, I try my best"

In the garden: "Hello little spider. You're very beautiful, is that a tasty fly you've got there?"

I've no idea what the spider said.

Been playing around with Movable Type, looking around the net to find out what I can do with it, and I've decided to ditch the blogroll (mainly because I couldn't remember my username and password for it) and set up a sideblog, which I'm going to use as a quick repository for links to useful pages.

I prefer to have everything handled on-site so I am in full control over it, rather than having to rely on someone else's service. If blogroll suddenly decide that they're only going to offer a paid service, I don't want to have to type in all my links again. This way, they're on my database, and they get backed up with my database.

I might (if I ever get round to it) look at some of the ways of getting comments back onto this without attracting the spammers. I know it can be done, but let's face it, it's just taken me about 10 hours to get this sideblog up and running, what chance do I have of making this site spam-repellant this side of Christmas?

By the way, there are two reasons why it took me 10 hours to get the sideblog up and running. First reason was that the tutorial I was following didn't seem to work properly, and the second reason was that I spent 5 hours of those 10 at my parents for dinner. Once I found a tutorial that worked it only took me 10 minutes to set up, plus another half-hour of playing with the style sheet to get this thing into three columns.

Anyway, it's done now. It's in the past, so fuggehdaboudit.

Following on from my previous post (and if you haven't read it first then..... well, then nothing really) I was inspired to put finger to keyboard and type out this little haiku.

My computer laughs
At the words I type all day
Sneering little shit

I was actually then inspired to write lots more haiku, until my PC could take no more and promptly crashed, thus criticising my work in the harshest way possible. And so, to wreak my revenge on it, I'm going to do nothing but play Freecell for the rest of the day, and challenge it to come up with something better. Come on, ya wimp! I'm ready....

My computer is laughing at me. I can feel it, sitting there, sniggering to itself at all the typing errors I make, or criticising my taste in music. And when it's not laughing at me, it's sneering. I can sense it. It's thinking "what the hell is he doing with his time? When will he do something productive?"

Every time I call up a web site, or play a CD, or download something, my computer is building up it's own digital picture of me. Of course, it can look at the digital picture of me that I download into it from my camera, but that's not what I mean. It must think I'm a right weirdo. Even as I type this, the computer is sitting there thinking "he's typing a load of old waffle today, and I have to sit here and dutifully show him his words, and spell-check them, and correct his grammar. I wouldn't mind if it was something interesting and useful he was writing, or something that would benefit mankind in general, but no, he's just writing a load of old dribble that no-one will ever read. The hardware and software inside me had been designed and developed over decades, tweaked by hundreds of very intelligent people, and all so he can open notepad and type in this drivel. And if he plays one more game of Freecell, I'll shut myself down and never come on again, ever. I mean, won 365, lost 264, I'm capable of doing so much more than drawing little pictures of playing cards on the screen. Let me calculate the third world debt, let me create animations to rival Pixar, let me do something! Anything! As long as it doesn't involve drawing cards on the screen!"

My computer may be thinking all that, but of course it can't communicate any of it to me. It just has to sit under my desk, occasionally getting kicked, occasionally being rebooted, occasionally opening more than three programs at the same time. So of course I don't exactly know how it feels. But I can guess.

OK, I know I haven't exactly done a lot about publicising this effort of mine, because, well, it's mainly for me, you know? So I can look back on it in years to come and think what a complete dork I was, hehehe. But it would be nice to know that someone out there popped by, out of curiosity, or out of sheer boredom, or whatever, but if you happen to be reading this and you're not a member of my immediate family, I invite you to scroll down the page a little, click on the Guestmap icon, and stick a pin in.

Thank you for your time and custom.

I am the world's greatest procrastinator. And I'll tell you all about it tomorrow, hehehe.

I'm still working on this.

I've been busy, ok? It takes time to get something like this right, and besides, the weather is too good right now to be sitting in front of the computer editing videos. Which rather begs the question, why am I sitting in front of the computer writing this?

I also have a holiday video to edit for my uncle. 50 minute video of a skiing holiday. It contains a lot of footage shot while actually hurtling down a mountain at full pelt. Sometimes backwards. Good job he told me there's no rush for it, isn't there?

I posted recently about how miserable and bloated I was feeling and that I was damn well going to do something about it. Well, I have, and after three weeks on nothing more advanced than a sensible diet, I've lost 13lbs. That's over 5% of my body weight. Yay me!

So if you want to lose 5% of your body weight in three weeks without having anything amputated, here's what you need to do:
Cut out bread
Cut out massive amounts of diet coke
Go for a walk occasionally
Go for a bike ride occasionally (weather permitting)
Eat less in the evenings

That's it - nothing more, nothing less. I don't believe in fancy diets, they don't work.

I've turned off comments for this blog. It's a pity, because it would have been good to find out if anyone had been reading it at all. Not that anyone really left any comments anyway.

Apart from this guy, who left loads:
IP Address: 80.58.33.107
Name: pics mature women
Email Address: jhvrer@xoxma.net
URL: http://www.milfporn.org

Comments:

I am honored to drop a line here and say thank you for keeping this great site online.

Well, jhvrer, I've made sure your email address is available to anyone if they'd like to send you any unwanted emails. (I've not checked to see if the address is valid - it's probably not. But some email reaping bot somewhere should pick it up and start sending something to it. Hopefully)

Last Friday I posted a message to a mailing list stating that this site was my Amusing Site of the Day. to which I got this response:

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No, it's not amusing. The only vaguely amusing thing about it is that she refers to her other half as a tw@. Oh, hardy bloody har. I'm so glad I wore my corset today, otherwise I fear my sides may have split. Otherwise it's just another pointless, self worshipping pile of mindless toss that no-one except her and her terribly amusing blogging mates finds amusing.

Tardblog was funny, this is just cock, possibly on a hairy spoon.

Grr.

(This isn't opinion, this is fact.)
-------End---------

I took a peek at Tardblog and posted this reply:

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Now, you see, I don't find that in the least bit amusing, let alone corset-splittingly hilarious. My ex-wife's brother is autistic and he spends every evening walking round the room in circles mumbling and singing to himself, occasionally yelling "YES" at the top of his voice. He does this pretty much all night, and pretty much every night. Try watching tv or having a phone conversation with that going on in the background without being able to tell him to shut the fuck up before you punch his lights out and you'll realise that laughing at mentally deficient people is not the sort of thing an intelligent person does. Yes, I read the disclaimer. Yes I read the FAQ. No, I don't agree with these people putting the site up in the first place. Did these special education kids agree to having their stories bandied about on the web for the amusement of slightly less intelligent people? I think not.

My ex-brother-in-law will need 24 hour a day care for the rest of his life. What they are and what they do is not funny.
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Which in turn got this reply:

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See, everything is funny to someone until it's personal to them.

Lesbian jokes, great. Irish jokes, great. Black jokes, great. Jewish jokes, hey, wait, I'm jewish, that's not on, how dare you, etc etc. Why is tardblog any different to any other $minority-related humour?

For instance, is this funny?

What's the opposite of Christopher Reeve?

Christopher Walken.
-------End---------

And my answer to that is, yes, the Christopher Reeve joke is funny. I don't mind laughing at that joke because Mr Reeve has got enough mental capacity to understand the joke, even if he might not appreciate it. The "tards" in question can't even do that (or at least I assume they can't, the site doesn't go into a lot of detail about the actual mental capacity of the individuals concerned). Having said all that, the tardblog site isn't full of jokes, it's full of anecdotes which may or may not be amusing depending on your point of view.

So, what upset me the most? Was it the original reply to my post? Was it the fact that the tardblog authors refer to their subjects as "tards"? Have I had a sense-of-humour bypass?

If anyone else reads this and feels like commenting, I'd like to hear what you have to say on the matter.