April 2005 Archives

I had such high hopes for today. I was going to check out a couple of local gyms, help my cousin do some work around the house, maybe go out on the bike, you know, just the usual first-day-of-a-three-day-weekend chill-out stuff.

Well, that feeling of contentment lasted about two minutes. No sooner had I gotten out of bed (admittedly late in the morning, this was Saturday after all) than the phone rang. It was my ex, telling me where she was going to be at different times of the day so I could drop off the child support money at the right house. Then she hit me with this little bombshell. She doesn't want me buying my son presents every time I see him. Apart from the fact this isn't quite true, what's wrong with a father wanting to buy his son a toy?

Apparently it undermines her authority. I saw him on Wednesday and called in to the supermarket on the way home from work and bought him a little Lego car. It cost the same as one and a half McDonalds Happy Meals. She wasn't impressed. He'd been naughty ealier in the day with her mother, although he was good as gold with my mother in the afternoon and good as gold with me in the evening. But no-one told me he'd been naughty earlier. I have a message for my ex-wife here. I'm not psychic. If there's something I should know about his behaviour, please tell me about it. If there's something he needs more than a toy car, please tell me about it. I may only see him once or twice a month these days (her idea) so I'm not exactly "in the loop" any more. But I repeat: unless I'm told what's going on, how am I supposed to be any the wiser?

I was furious and very upset when I finished my first phone conversation with her this morning. She's not happy that I'm trying to reduce the amount of child support I'm paying because she wants too much from me (I'm already paying more than I have to by law, which I believe I've talked about in another post). Her argument is that if I can't afford the child support then I can't afford to buy him toys. We're talking about three lousy fucking pounds here. Once every fucking two months. Every time I see him he says "Have you got a present for me daddy?" and every time I say "no". Well, this time, I thought I'd say "yes" for a change. Just to show him that I do actually love him. And still it's wrong.

I give up. She'd rather I buy him a t-shirt or some pyjamas or something. What the hell is so wrong for a father to buy his son a toy once in a while? Can someone please explain this to me, because I can't figure it out at all.

Plan of action for the next week:
1. Apply to the Child Support Agency for a review of my payments. We've avoided getting them involved so far but, hey, I'll get my payments reduced and I'll probably end up spending the extra tenner on him anyway.
2. Call my ex every evening to find out what his behaviour has been like that day. After all, she phones me every time he's with me to find out if I've been feeding him nails or something.
3. Talk to her about our different parenting styles. She's very quick to punish, and punish rather hard I think (a television ban for a whole week for a five-year-old?) whereas I'm more prone to raise my voice once and then talk to him afterwards about his behaviour. Apparently he has two personalities - he's reasonably good when he's with me or my parents, and an absolute terror when he's with my ex or her parents. Maybe there's more to this than meets the eye.

Still, the three double-whiskies and the blast of very loud Metallica at 5pm helped calm me down. A bit. Because before then, I swear to god she was sapping my will to live.

What's your favourite obscure album? You know, the one you really like listening to but you think no-one else has ever even heard of apart from whoever made the album and whoever sold it to you in the first place.

Mine's Big Science by Laurie Anderson. This album is so different to everything else I have in my collection - I'm more of a metalhead usually. My tasted have broadened recently, I like everything from Metallica to Joni Mitchell these days, but Laurie Anderson is still very much apart from anything else I like.

What do other readers think?

I've just received an email with the subject "We haven't been introduced... :)" Ooh, I thought, someone out there wants to meet me. This could lead to love, marriage, eternal happiness, or at the very least a quick shag. I was just about to open the email when I noticed the name of the sender. It came from a Cannibalism H. Sybil.

Just think, I was very nearly, almost, but not quite, taken in by it then.

Handy hint: if you're planning on sending out a billion emails a month in the search for your life partner, or next meal, try to use a more inconspicuous name. There are millions to choose from, just look in the phone book.

Gah. 16stone 3lbs. All that walking and I still weigh 16 stone 3lbs. Maybe it's all the extra food I'm eating in between walks. You know, mid-morning snack, lunch, getting-home-from-work snack, dinner, midnight snack, that sort of thing.

Maybe I should get an aerobics dvd and start jumping around the living room on the days when I don't go for a walk. Maybe I should get my dumbells out of the cupboard and start lifting them again. Maybe this, maybe that. Who knows?

On the plus side, I may not be much lighter, but I feel a bit lighter (if that makes sense). My legs still ache a bit after the walk, and so they should, so maybe I've lost a bit of fat and put on a bit of leg muscle. Here's hoping!

Besides, in the first week of Celebrity Fat Club (yes, the height of intellectual British television!) the 30-stone Andy Fordham only lost half a pound. So there's hope for me yet (he says, deluding himself once again)

Following a comment by Annie on a previous post, I thought I'd say something about the metric system here in the UK. Basically, it's a mess. Back in the old days, when I was a mere babe in arms, we had a weird monetary system whereby there were 12 pence in a shilling and twenty shillings in a pound. A pound was therefore 244 pence. How people ever got the hang of this I will never know. In 1971 (I think) we went decimal, which made shopping a lot easier once everyone had gotten used to it.

Since then, the government (or Brussels) has been trying to make up go metric on everything else, with varying degrees of success. Petrol (gasoline) is now sold in litres, although everyone still talks about fuel economy in miles per gallon. Newspaper headlines scream about the four pound gallon, because everyone here can relate to that, even though fuel hasn't been sold by the gallon for years. Road signs on motorways advertise service stations with the phrase: "Services 10 miles. Fuel 89.9 per litre" (fuel is always hideously expensive on the motorways..... you'd think it would be cheaper, since the tankers are driving past there anyway).

Food is sold by the kilo, although everyone still asks for it by the pound. You go to the cheese counter and ask for a pound of cheddar, and the assistant will ask you if half a kilo is ok. Bottled drinks in supermarkets are sold in 75cl or 2l bottles, yet you go to a pub and wouldn't dream of asking for anything other than a pint. I'm not sure what measures are used for spirits, I usually just ask for a double (saves time!)

We measure distances in feet and inches, although in hardware shops timber is advertised in metric. You can see a board of MDF measured at 1220 by 607mm, which sounds odd until you realise that it's 4ft by 2ft (aka fourbetoo).

And the strangest thing about all this, is that everyone accepts it like it's the most normal thing in the world. We're a funny lot, us Brits.

We finally did it. My sister-in-law and I had tried walking up Pendle Hill before, on a very wet day last year, but we only made it round the foothills. Today, we had a determined effort to get to the top. Here's a potted photo-diary of the day. Click on each image for a larger one if you're so inclined.

An example of picture-postcard Britain.

If you look at the large version of this image you'll see a diagonal "scar" running up the side of the hill. This is the path to the top!

My sister-in-law and nephew at the base of the path. As you can see it's mainly a staircase of stone steps. Didn't make it any easier though! We ended up walking for 20 yards, stopping to get our breath back, walking another 20 or 30 yards, stopping again....... and while we were resting by the side of the path we were being overtaken by people with dogs, people with kids, people wearing work shoes, people not breaking sweat - it made us sick, sick I tell you!

Finally at the top! A well-earned lie down and a spot of lunch (not pictured). However when we stood up we nearly got blown over by the force of the wind up there!

The view from the top, looking down. It's a pity the view was a bit hazy, but whether I'm going to go back up there on a good day remains to be seen! While we were having our lunch we were passed by three men out jogging (to the top of that thing! Are they crazy?) and by a man carrying a three-foot long remote controlled model glider aircraft. It was all we could do to haul a few sandwiches and bottles of water up there!

Self portrait of a man sheltering from the wind.

We could have been on the surface of a different planet.

Portrait of the author in the middle of nowhere. This picture was taken before we got lost, as you can see, we're still following the path by the stream. A bit further on, we started asking people "Is this the way back to the village?" and were getting answers like "No, this is the way to the town. The village is way over yonder" and watching them point over our shoulders back the way we had come.

So a three-hour six-mile walk turned into a six-hour nine-mile walk. I must admit I was getting frustrated near the end, especially when I thought we were completely lost, but we made it back in the end. They've got some very steep roads up there in Lancashire. It's bad enough having to drive up them, let alone walk or (gasp) cycle.

I'm not doing that again in a hurry, although I guess I did manage to walk off last night's dinner. I think I'll stick to the flat from now on, though. Until the next time.

Telephone conversation with my sister-in-law this morning:

s-i-l: What are you up to?
me: Tidying the house
s-i-l: Have you got a mirror there?
me: Yes, why?
s-i-l: Go stand in front of it, stick out your tongue, and see if it's covered with green spots. You might need medical attention.

I know I'm not the tidiest person in the world, but at least I'm not likely to be visited by the Health and Safety Executive any time soon! Well, I hope not, anyway.

Also while we're on the subject of being cheeky, Old Horsetail Snake requested that I always post my weight in lbs, so that he's got a vague clue of what I'm talking about. That sounds like too much hard work for me, so intead I'll refer my esteemed and learned fellow blogger to this link right here.

It's 10:30 on a Friday night. Up and down the country people are enjoying a night on the town. Having a drink, having a laugh, spending time with their mates, out on the pull, drowning sorrows, telling stories, unwinding, snogging, picking up, dumping, queuing for clubs, waiting for cabs, getting into fights, getting arrested, going to the movies, going to restaurants, and generally having a good time.

And where am I? In my kitchen, wearing a dressing gown and rubber gloves, doing the washing up.

God I need a life!

If you can't find anything interesting to say, then don't say anything at all. That's why I've been quiet so far this week. Nothing much of note has happened to me, and nothing much of note has gone through my mind either. So this post will be a mish-mash of different things that have occurred to me in the last few days, forgive me if I flit from one topic to another without any coherence!

I was slightly angered by the announcement on the radio this morning wishing the Queen a happy birthday, and playing the national anthem just before the news. I don't pay much attention to the royal family, and they don't pay much attention to me. I like it that way. So I don't want to have details of their personal lives thrust into my earholes first thing in the morning, thank you very much. I don't know why we still have a royal family, I can't see the point of them at all. They don't seem to be "ambassadors for the country" any more, and don't have the same respect anywhere else in the world that they used to have. And to be perfectly honest I can't be arsed to think about why.

My sister-in-law has signed up for Weight Loss Resources. So far she's lost 12lbs and I'm tempted to sign up for this very impressive site myself. I might need some help and guidance along the way with my weight loss campaign. I've been weighing myself first thing in the morning all week, and my weight has fluctuated between 16st 2 and 16st 5.... now I know it's supposed to go up and down a little bit but it went down and then up again! I wasn't a happy bunny when I went to work this morning, I can tell you.

But what the heck, I walked a mile and a half on Tuesday night and over three and a half miles tonight, so I think I'll post a weekly weight update here instead of a daily one. Don't want to bore you all to death! I'm particularly impressed with the WLR food diary - you enter everything you eat and it tells you how many calories you've consumed, and you can also put in all the exercise you've done and it tells you how much chocolate you can treat yourself to. Actually it only does that if I convert the exercise calories to chocolate, but that's easily done :-)

I've been debating for a while about whether I should post about this. Mainly because if I don't keep it up you'd all moan at me about how I'm not keeping it up, haha.

Anyway, I've decided to bite the bullet and tell you that this morning I weighed 16st 4lbs (228lbs). I'm not going to give it to you in kilos, you can dig out your calculators and do it yourselves, you lazy swines. I've not been walking or cycling for a fortnight, but I have been trying to cut down on my calorie intake.

Instead of buying a full English breakfast or having a cheeseburger and chips for lunch, I've been buying a jacket potato with cottage cheese. And although I used to take a reasonably healthy packed lunch of hardboiled egg, potato salad, coleslaw, carrot, cucumber and a piece of cheese, I'm now taking a hardboiled egg, some carrot and an apple.

Of course the evening meals still need to be worked on....

A couple of weeks ago I weighed myself at 16st 9, but I can't remember if I was fully dressed and just testing the new scales at the time!

Anyway, if I do decide that my weight is coming down steadily, I'll get one of those corny trackers to put on the site so you can all see how 'm doing. No idea what my target weight will be, let's just say I want to feel more confident by getting thinner. If I do get a tracker I'll set the start weight at 228, so that's my official "I'm now on a diet" weight.

It's a perfect day for cycling or walking today, but I'm off to help my parents dig their garden instead, so that'll be today's exercise.

After nineteen days of continuous posting, I finally broke my streak by not posting anything yesterday. There's no excuse for it, and I'm not going to cheat my postdating this entry. So you can have a 1:30am post instead. What I was wondering is why the number of comments I'm getting increased to an almost half-decent level for a few days and then dropped off back to nothing.

Is it something to do with the site redesign?
Is it to do with the fact I took my RSS feed off and switched to Feedburner instead? (I put the old feed back, by the way. If you're subscribed to it please switch to the Feedburner one instead. Thank you for your continued custom.)
Am I not interesting any more?
Should I knock off the amateur politics?

These are questions to which I feel I must know the answer. Coz I must admit, it felt rather good knowing someone was reading this thing. Talk to me, someone!

Well, they've heard of me in New York, at least! Thanks Deni for brightening my day after a very long and busy day in the office, and also for taking one of my suggestions and not only using it, but mentioning my name as well....... I'm on top of the world now!

Let's say you own a railway network, and the trains that run on it. You decide to sell it to make some money. You sell the track to one company, and you sell the trains to lots of different companies to run their own services. The company that takes over the tracks sub-contracts the maintenance of those tracks to a third party. So far so governmental.

A few years later there is a derailment. An inquiry finds that some bolts were left by the side of the points. The inquiry shows that the maintenance company is not totally responsible for the crash because they were following maintenance procedures that were put into place before they were given the contract.

I'm sorry? Did I miss something here? Did it not occur to anyone to check what the procedures were, and that everyone understood the procedures completely. According to the BBC News website, "The Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB) said since the type of points was introduced in the 1980s, their maintenance was "not fully understood". " How can anyone introduce something onto a national rail network, and expect trains weighing several tons and travelling at high speeds, carring thousands of passengers per day, and not "fully understand" how to maintain it? This is just absolutely mind-boggling. Did they not think to find out how to maintain the points? Did it not occur to them to replace the points with something they could maintain? Or to find out who commissioned that type of installation in the first place and ask them how to maintain it? Did the bolts work their way loose or did the engineer(s) simply forget to replace them? Or did they finish the job, look down, and see a couple of nuts and bolts seemingly spare and think "ah fuck it. I've had enough for the day. Who's up for a pint?"

Someone somewhere is responsible for this. It may be the engineer who last maintained that set of points. It may be the foreman, or the site supervisor, or the area manager, or even the chairman of the board. Seven people lost their lives in that derailment, and a report stating that no "conclusive evidence of any one cause" is to blame for the crash is totally unacceptable. I find it unacceptable, I daren't even think what the families of the deceased must be thinking. No-one has categorically stated that it will never happen again. I get the impression they're saying it's "just one of those things" and "we're working on tightening our procedures". They should have started by tightening the nuts and bolts.

Here's my summary of the first few days electioneering by a bunch of self-centred businessmen fighting for their jobs under the guise of "making a better future for all of us". Yeah right.

Labour: We're going to do this, this and this.

Conservative: You can't afford to do that without raising taxes. We're going to do this, this and this instead. And besides, your policy on that is crap.

Labour: We inherited our policy on that from you in the first place. And you can't afford to do your stuff without raising taxes. Our way is the only true way.

Conservative: So howcome you said at the last election that you'd change that policy? You've not fulfilled your promises, mate. And our numbers do add up, we've had them marked by the teacher.

Liberal Democrat: We're going to tax the rich to pay for it all. But no-one cares about us because we're never going to get elected in a million years.

Conservative: Your immigration policy is useless. People are pouring into the country day and night and you can't seem to stop them.

Labour: That is so not true! And even if it is, prove it.

Conservative: We can't prove it. We can't find them because the borders are so under-staffed that you have to let them in, and after that they disappear in case we deport them again.

Labour: Ha!

Green Party: Let's stop building roads and plant more trees instead. The country may very well grind to a halt, but at least it will be pretty to look at.

Liberal Democrat: We'll get back to electioneering after a few days paternal leave.

It's all just so petty, isn't it? "Oh yes we will", "Oh no you won't", "He's behind you!"

I promised myself I'd try to take an interest in the election this time round. I'd try to make an informed decision and actually vote for someone I believed in, rather than either not bothering or putting down a random cross for one of the minor parties, which is what I've done in the past. But after listening to some news bulletins, and reading some newspaper articles, I'm still as stumped as ever. The problem is, of course, that running the country (any country) is such a complicated job, with so many different things going on, that it's impossible to distil the finances into straightforward simple figures that we can all understand, and it's also impossible to please all the people all the time.

Let's see if tonight's news will give me any more insight. Where's Screaming Lord Sutch when you need him? (Ok, I think he's dead, but surely there are other Monster Raving Loonies out there.)

I hope Dan doesn't mind if I take over here for a few minutes. He's busy doing whatever he does when he's not paying attention to me, so I don't think he'll mind. Hello. I'm Dan's blog, creatively entitled brain:download:complete. I've never had a chance to speak for myself before, so I'm going to make the most of it. I'm a bit nervous, so please bear with me.

[ stand up...... deep breath...... clear throat..... are we sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin...... ]

[ don't forget to smile.... ]

It's been a year since Dan started writing me and I must admit I thought I'd be a flash in the pan, a nine-day wonder. But lo and behold, here I am, 12 months, two hosts and a redesign later, bigger, better and stronger than ever before. I feel like I'm growing and getting a voice now. I feel like I'm getting ready to take on the world and put it in it's place. I'm getting ready to shout and scream and tell everyone "Here I am! Read me! And have fun while you're at it!!"

Dan doesn't consider himself to be much of a writer, or much of a raconteur, or photographer, or anything really. He just feels he stumbles through life one day at a time, not thinking too much about the outside world, too wrapped up in his own affairs to be bothered much with anything else. But he created me out of thin air, and has nurtured me until I'm the site you see before you today. And I'm going to nurture him as well. I'm going to help him find his own voice, to form his own opinions instead of just watching the news and thinking "bleah". It's going to be a long hard journey, but it'll be fun, you'll see.

It's taken a year but I'm just starting to make myself heard. Just watch out for the terrible two's.

[ wait for laughter and polite applause...... sit down and breathe a sigh of relief..... wait for heartbeat to return to normal ]

Dan?

[ taps on inside of monitor ]

Dan, are you there?

"H'mmm...... yes, what is it?"

Where's my birthday cake?

Here's a snippet of an email I got at work today. I've had to edit it down a bit, to protect the guilty, and I've replaced the edited bits with a description of what I've taken out in [square brackets]

Hi Daniel,

Please find attached the file: [ here he puts a file name, followed by some installation instructions ]

Any problems please don't hesitate to call me.

Cheers

Adam

>>> Simon
Adam

Just had a quick look at the above customer's files and think we may be able to get away with the following:

[ followed by the same file and installation instructions ]

----------------------------------------

Now, do you think Adam should have removed Simon's comments from the bottom of the email before forwarding it on to me (the customer in question).

We all know that support companies sometimes take an educated - or not-so-educated - guess at what the customer's problem might be, but it should be obvious to try and hide the fact that they're guessing from the customer!

The weekend passed with me completely ignoring the soap opera wedding, the pope's funeral, the royal soap opera wedding, and the Grand National. On Friday 13 million people sit down to watch two fictional characters in a famous northern-based soap opera get married for the second time. On Saturday less than half that number tune in to watch the future King get married for the second time. Proof, if any were needed, that most of us don't care about the Royal family any more. I can certainly live without them, and to be honest, I've never seen the point.

In fact, I can't see the point of "celebrity" at all. Gossip magazines outsell newspapers (let's face it, some so-called newspapers are nothing more than thinly disguised gossip mags) and people in pubs up and down the country are talking about Posh and Becks, Ken and Dierdre, who's in, who's out, who's had surgery, who's been doing drugs...... I mean, come on, what's the point? People should be interested in who they want to run the country and how they're going to go about it. They should be interested in the economy, pensions, British car manufacturers, the health service, taxation, and all the important things in life. There should be demonstrations in the street opposing this, that and everything else.

We need protest singers singing protest songs, we need confirmation that this country deserves to be called "Great" Britain, we need something other than fucking soap characters, sportsmen, actors and pop "stars" to give us something to think about.

Last week, the price of petrol hit a new high. The last time it went this high truck drivers barricaded the refineries and stopped petrol tankers getting out. Within a week the country started to grind to a halt - it was great. Public opinion boiling over into action. These days we all seem to be completely apathetic about everything. I'm not usually one to stand up and be counted, and it seems neither is anyone else. It's starting to annoy the hell out of me.

I thought the whole point of having a drive-thru at McDonald's was to make life quicker and easier for us mere mortals who have kids nagging you for a toy from 11am onwards. So at five past twelve I left the house to drive to McD's about a mile away. I didn't get back till twenty to one. I was waiting in the queue so long I decided to turn my engine off. So that's the last time I decide to "do it the quick way".

Just found this very informative article on how to stay safe while blogging about work, or how to set up a completely anonymous blog. Could be useful to some, I hope. (via kottke.org)

The week started manic, got a little quieter in the middle and ended on a manic note as well. I spent all morning connecting to each of our branches individually to pick up their orders as the email and ftp server were unavailable. They've been unavailable since lunchtime yesterday, something to do with someone wanting to change a block of IP addresses and everything behind that block of addresses falling off the edge of the internet. So at least it wasn't just us that was affected (and I wasn't responsible for it, hehehe) but I still have to pick up the pieces after the fact.

We get all the orders in by lunchtime. So next week we're going to move to a newer more robust more available more up to date more whizz bang fantastic ftp and email server. Which means I'm going to have to connect to all the branches all over again to change their connection settings. That gives me something to look forward to over the weekend, don't you think?

Last night my son advised me to "get rich" because then I'd be able to spend half my money buying new things to replace the old things which I've broken (!) and the other half buying him toys. I told him I was working on it.

When deleting 23,000 temporary work files from your computer, follow this procedure:

Click on the first file in the list to highlight it
Hold down shift and click on the last file in the list to highlight them all
Right-click with the mouse to show the pop-up menu
Make sure you choose "delete" from the pop-up menu, and not "create shortcut". Unless, of course, you want to go back to your PC half an hour later and find 46,000 files sitting there looking all innocent.

I think I'm getting on top of the comment and trackback spam that this site was generating. If you're running a Movable Type blog and are also getting inundated with spam, then these steps may very well help you as well. There's nothing new here, by the way, I just read some guides on how to combat comment spam and put some of the suggestions into place. And I'm here to tell you from first-hand experience that (so far, touch wood, not that I'm in the slightest bit superstitious) they seem to be working.

First off I installed the (almost ubiquitous) MT-Blacklist plugin from Jay Allen. I'd had this installed for a long time, when I was still running a MT2.xx installation. By the way, upgrading to MT3.1 is a breeze and definately worthwhile. There are lots of new features worth having.

Once I'd upgraded to 3.1, and also re-installed MT-Blacklist, I turned on comment moderation. This is a new feature in MT3, and allows me to approve a comment before it appears on the site. I was still getting emails asking me to despam comments, but at least the comments were "pending" and not "live".

I installed the mt-moderate plugin which allows moderation of trackback pings. I started getting emails asking me to approve spam trackbacks now. After a few weeks of putting up with this and eventually getting fed up with it, I read some guides and started getting a bit more aggressive.

I renamed the scripts that handle comments and trackbacks, which, to be honest, is the first thing I should have done. Any automated program looking for /cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi immediately hits a 404. This cut down greatly on the number of emails I was getting.

I then went a bit over the top and disabled trackbacks for the entire blog. This may have been a knee-jerk reaction.

Getting into the spirit of installing plugins and customising my MT installation, I had another look at the Movable Type plugins directory and found conversation killer, a plugin that runs once a day and closes comments on posts that are more than 10 days old (I can change this value in the plugin configuration). It can also close trackbacks on posts more than x days old as well.

Since I put these measures into place I haven't received a single email asking me to moderate a spam comment. All of the spam comments and trackbacks were to old posts anyway, so the two biggest upgrades I did was to install conversation killer and to rename the comment/trackback scripts. I've just had a look at the MT-Blacklist activity log, and it hasn't been troubled by a single duff comment all week. Which is how it should be.

So.... I've decided to risk taking off the comment moderation. I still get an email when someone posts a comment, but the comment appears on the site immediately. Comments are closed on posts more than 10 days old, and I think I'll turn trackbacks back on. And then wonder why no-one's tracking back to me.

Today: A politician decides that he and all his colleagues are going to spend the next month fighting for their jobs, and pretending that they care about the rest of us while they're at it. The rest of us watch with mild disinterest, and stay in bed on polling day, just to teach them a lesson.

Friday: Pope gets buried. The world stops to watch. Maybe he'll get resurrected on live television. That'll be worth a look.

Saturday: The most farcical Royal wedding in history takes place in a registry office. The world will probably stop to watch again, but I doubt there'll be anything worth looking at on this one.

Saturday (later): Horse Race. Not all of the horses will get out alive, and a lot of people will lose a lot of money.

Oh boy. The excitement is killing me. Anyone got a sandpit I can stick my head in?

Every so often I have a scan through the spam email folder at work, to make sure that the spam filter is doing its job properly and not marking stuff as spam that isn't really. I noticed a message in there today which looked a bit different to the others so I opened it for a closer look. What I read was the most irritating piece of tripe I've had the misfortune to cast my eyes over. I was going to post it here and disassemble it for you, but instead I'll direct you over here, where the email is presented in its entirety and then shot down in flames.

Well, if I thought April was going to be any quieter at the office than March was, then I was wrong. Today has been just as manic as the last couple of weeks, and the fact we had to re-enter all the details for the stocktake because I forgot to reset the figures on Friday didn't help. Today's also the day the new price manual comes into effect, so I've had to make sure that the computer data on all our branches is up to date.

Throw into the mix a bug in our new order entry system and a new branch opening up abroad (where I have to talk the local support guy through setting up a "clean" copy of the order entry system) and the hours have certainly flown by. Did I mention I'm the only person in the IT department at the moment? Fortunately everyone else has just left me to get on with it, but I still hope and prey that I've not made any silly mistakes anywhere along the line. Please let there be a light at the end of the tunnel.... please.

Today has to be my most disorganised day of the year so far. Yesterday my cousin and I started making her a kitchen cabinet out of old bits of contiboard and stuff we could find lying about. That all went ok, and today I went over to her flat to finish it off and actually put it on the wall.

Checklist:
Half-built cabinet
Toolbox
Cordless screwdriver
Hardboard for cabinet doors
Rawlplugs
Misc items for attaching shelf in the middle of the cabinet

So I got (what I thought was) all of this together, get it all in the car and drive to her flat. Current time: 10:30am. After a cup of tea and a bite to eat at hers I realised I'd left the hardboard, the rawlplugs and the bowl of misc items at home. I was convinced I'd put the rawlplugs in the toolbox, but couldn't see them there. So, back in the car and back home to get the missing items. Rawlplugs not on the lounge floor (while I'm working on a DIY project everything lives on the lounge floor so I know where it is). H'mmm, I thought to myself, maybe they were in the toolbox all along. Back to cousin's flat, only to discover that the plugs definately were not in the toolbox. Right, I said, I'm going back to my house to look for them and you're coming with me this time. So we both get in the car, drive back to my house, open the front door and see the rawlplugs sitting on the side table. Current time: 12 noon. Ever had one of those days where you're constantly wondering where the time goes? Well, this is where it goes.

We managed to get the job finished by 1:30pm. So that's three hours today and four and a half hours yesterday spent making this cabinet. I really really hope it stays on the wall and doesn't fall apart. I'd cry if it does.

So the day's going well. Sleep all morning, help my cousin make a kitchen cabinet from timber that was in my old bedroom in my parents house. Go for a bike ride in the late afternoon. Safari, sogoody. Then my ex-wife calls and ruins everything. I've had to cut the child maintenance back because I can't afford to give her what I've been giving her. I'm still giving what I legally have to give (i.e. if she gets the Child Support Agency on to me she's not going to get any extra) and she accuses me of having my priorities all wrong and not putting my son first. We both end up shouting at each other. I slam the phone down on her once and she slams the phone down on me once. Sometimes I feel like I can't win. When I tell her I can't afford to make any extra payments she proposes that I remortgage the house, or take out a loan. Yeah right. And how am I supposed to keep up the repayments, might I ask?

To be perfectly honest, this argument over money has made me feel suicidal in the past. Not very suicial, just a little bit. Just enough to start wondering what size hose will fit over the car's exhaust pipe, but not enough to find myself in a hardware shop looking at bits of hose. It's taken me the best part of the evening to even get into something remotely resembling an ok mood, just in time for bed. Bugger.

It's time to come clean. I've been thinking about this for a while now, should I tell, should I keep schtum, will people think less of me if I confess, will they think more of me if I confess, and so on and so forth ad infinitum. I've decided to do it. I can't take the pain and the guilt any more. It's just tearing me apart and I know I am a lesser human being for keeping this a secret. And what better way to blab about a secret than on the internet. I'm nearly ready to do it, I just need to psych myself up a little bit more. I fear I may alienate some readers when they find out what I have to say, but that's a price I'm prepared to pay.

Ok. Here goes.

Deep breath.

I cheat on my weblog. There. I've said it. It's out in the open now, floating around the ether and no longer weighing down my consciousness like a big lump of granite in my brain.

I feel better now. I can elaborate a bit more. You see, this blog is not all it seems. Each entry has a "posted on" date........ but the dates are all lies!! Almost nothing is written when the blog says it's written! Wow, this feels good, unburdening myself like this. I get the urge to write at the weirdest times of the day, usually when I should be fast asleep. I get ideas when I'm at work, and I mull them over in my head while driving home. But the last thing I want to do when I get home after spending all day staring at a computer screen is to stare at another one, so I go for a walk or a bike ride or raid the kitchen or whatever....... and by the time I get round to sitting here and actually writing out my words of wisdom, it's gone midnight. Sometimes it's even gone the next midnight.

I've been known to sit here and type out three or four entries in one go, and change the dates on them so they look like they're posted on separate days. I often change the time of a posting by an hour or two to "even out" the entries, and why I do it I don't even know.

I hope you can still love me despite the fact that I'm lying to you on an almost daily basis. Now, was this post written today, tomorrow or last week? Only I know, and to be honest, only I care.

Or: "Other People's Blogs I'm Reading At The Moment"

Brittney talks about agoraphobic toothpaste
Adrian talks about shafts
Monica talks about the joys of motherhood
Sore Eyes mentions an alarm clock I could really really do with
Gary ponders counting sheep

There are loads and loads more...... but I'm not very good at bookmarking interesting pages. Wish I had now.... this would have been a much more interesting post!