Stuff Archives

After saying I wasn't going to create more blogs about bike rides, here we are again. But the thing is, there's a clip that I thought warranted its own blog and I've not duplicated it in the video section, so I think this is valid. Anyway, so I was on my bike ride and a squirrel decide to run in front of me. I was pretty worried when it did that it was going to throw me off my bike or make me crash, particularly as I was at the fastest part of my journey. I was surprised that it literally had no effect whatsoever. Then again, being hit by a fat bastard on a handcycle at 30mph is probably going to instakill. I didn't go back to look at the carnage as that would have meant going back up the hill. The video plays at full speed and then back in slow motion. In slow motion you can see it come back to the left and go under the front wheel accompanied by a thud.



If you really want to see it, here's the full length video of the bike ride.

Pretty much the same loop as last time, but I decided to take a path behind the shops on the way back that I'd seen on the map. The path isn't very wide even though it's marked as a cycle path. There was one bit where the path drops into a gulley and I didn't realize how steep it was to get back out again. I've posted the clip of this bit below so you don't have to watch the full length video. I've watched the clip several times while editing and each time I watch it, I'm not sure if I'm going to make it or not. I think I do. If not, I'm not sure who's writing this blog. I really like the kind woman who offered to give me a push, but I'd pretty much made it up the hill by the time she came.

One thing that does occur to me after watching it back, there was a point where I was just going to back down the hill, turn around and go back, but looking at it, I'd have had the same problem going back as it looks like the hill is as steep on both sides of the stream. It took me a while to figure out that I was just going to have to crank a quarter turn at a time to make it up. I just couldn't get the crank over the top with enough force to make progress doing full rotations. Good job I have good brakes too in order to stop me sliding all the way back down the hill. I was also worried about the wheel spin I was getting too as it seemed that at some point I just wouldn't be able to make any progress. Still, where there's a will, there's his dad.



If you really want to see it, here's the full length video of the Clayton loop.

Decided to go out on a ride to celebrate William's birthday. Went for a relatively quick loop round downtown. The position of the camera isn't great and it's more like a shot of the back of my head. I wouldn't bother watching the video, but if you do, here are some useful timestamps:

• 3:44 Adjust leg and manage to throw foot into front wheel
• 5:39 Crutch flies out of it's holder and lands on road (sadly you don't see it happen)
• 13:44 First Big Skeleton (on left)
• 18:38 Two big skeletons (on the right)
• 18:52 - 19:30 Top Speed Run

If you really want to see it, here's the video of the Clayton loop.

My mouse mat:



I'm going to be honest, this means more if you've played Apex Legends.

... or so the joke goes. The punchline being why does he wear his pants on the outside, but that joke wouldn't work over here in America. Similarly, this is a message I got from Alexa.



Now, what you need to figure out is whether it's new underwear with little soldiers on them or underwear that drops right before I shit myself.

The ordeal of the week was to take the cats to the vet as noted in the vote question. The trip was actually pretty straight forward. I fed the cats in the morning and then gave them a cuddle. After that I rattled the treat box and walked into William's bedroom. The cats obediently followed me. I dropped a couple of treats on the floor, then as fast as I could, grabbed little girl and put her in her carrier and then grabbed him and put him in his. They were in their respective carriers before they knew what was going one.

Poor little girl was nervous as anything. He was making a racket, but I think most of that was because he didn't like the vehicle motion. In the vets itself, they tried to distract the cats with food. I told them that he was the definition of curiosity killed the cat and they'd have no problem, but she was the definition of scaredy cat and would not be distracted by food. I was right - they put the food on the end of a spatula. It looked like peanut butter and was intended for them to lick off. She sniffed it and ignore it. She then climbed out of the carrier and the vet said she wasn't that shy, but then all she tried to do was get into his carrier to be with him. When she couldn't get in, she just laid on top. They did their thing and then put her back. They opened his carrier and the head popped out to get all the fusses. He just purred away happily. They then gave him the treat to try and they now need a new spatula. I'm just glad the vet had moved her fingers away from food.

So, the next day (Thursday), I fed the cats in the morning and he disappeared. I looked for him and yeah ... he'd put himself in the carrier ready for another adventure.



I don't think there's going to be much trouble getting him to the vets, although they did warn me that he's going to be a very big cat. I figured that when he outgrows his carrier, rather than buy a new one, I'm just going to get a saddle. I can probably make a few bob selling rides to the local kids.

I didn't take any pictures at the start of the race because I think the cats were just chasing each other around the house. The beginning of the race was actually pretty good, particularly Piastri's move on Norris to take the lead. In the middle of the race, my cat just came and fell asleep on me, basically throwing his head back and just flopping.



He pretty much remained that way until the end of the race, but when the commentators started getting excited, he perked up and decided to watch the last few laps.



Not sure if he's a Ferrari fan or not. He hasn't told me if he was happy with the result, but congratulations to LeClerc and Ferrari for their win.

I saw this on the Beeb and my first reaction was that, while I'm no expert on naval vessels, this looks like it would be in trouble if it went under the water.

Now, I will admit that the article did go on to say that an aircraft carrier was also being sent, but the image and the title on their own are somewhat confusing.

1) I now have somewhere to put my wooden pants.
2) I think I'm getting close to figuring out where those splinters came from

Still working my way through setting things up in the new home, but we're starting to get there. The big TV is up, anyway!

No, this isn't the title of my autobiography, but it could be about someone. The other day, William was cooking soup for lunch and I asked him what was burning as I could smell something. Nothing, it's just something on the hob was the reply I got back as he stared at his phone. He managed to literally stand next to a pan of soup while it was melting the spoon that he was supposed to be stirring it with, but he didn't notice because he was texting someone on his phone.

The thing that's really daft is that he didn't tell me about it, he just put the spoon in the dishwasher as he didn't think I'd notice anything was wrong with it. I don't claim to be the most observant person in the world, but the pictures below show how difficult it would have been to not have noticed.

Nothing really special here as the gopro wasn't working, but I've just spent the last few hours messing around with the conversion for the trail so I'm going to keep it and post it. The only thing slightly noteworthy is the bloody big hill William got me to go up. It's a good job that bike's got good brakes as I had to stop several times and then restart. If the brakes had given way I'd have ended up at the bottom of the hill in a heap rather quickly. Now, that would probably be something worth seeing.

I love it when someone sets out to do something and they achieve it. I've been watching Itzu for the past month as he's pushed to get the #1 spot on the Clash of Clans leaderboard. There's still two hours to go, but he's got it, so I'm going to officially congratulate him. Like a German taking penalties, he's executed flawlessly this season. I know a lot of it came down to his base building versus the attacks, but still, you've got to maintain that consistency. I think Stars will still remain the person to beat given how dominant he usually is, but it's good to see that someone else can do it too!

This article caught my attention: Armed robbers' car stolen during Colorado heist, police say. I don't want to laugh at armed robbery, but somehow this seems to have some poetic justice. The armed robbers were apparently arrested while fleeing the scene on foot after their getaway car was stolen.

Well, since the east span of the Bay Bridge opened, I've wondered what it would be like to walk across it. I'd resigned myself to the fact that I'd never find out, but today I did it on a handcycle. It was quite a slog getting up and over, but not as hard as I thought it was going to be. It was easier than going over the freeway bridge or the incline behind Golden Gate Fields, but it lasted a lot longer. I seemed to manage to find a happy cadence that I could just plod along at and eventually made it over. Coming back! Coming back was a huge amount of fun. I really wish I could have got into a higher gear, but the bike I'm using is old and I can only get onto the two smaller sprockets and not onto the third larger one. It just meant that I was coasting and couldn't really do anything to affect my speed.

The other memorable moment was that I got confused with the road layout and stopped. William didn't. He went into the back of me and flew over his handlebars and ended up in the road. Unfortunately I turned to see him bounce along the road, but my eyes looking back see further than the camera. You can hear him clatter into me, you just don't get to see the carnage.

Video of the bike ride Long and boring video. The route is in the map below.

Had to laugh this week when I read an article on the BBC's website about a pop group, STAYC, that were playing in Texas and decided to wear tops to support the local Texas Rangers baseball team. Somehow there was a complete mix up and they ended up with tops for Rangers Football Club. I think the thing that I find really funny is that US team shirts don't have sponsorship on them and these two had tops with McEwan's lager on the front which would have totally confused everyone at the concert. I don't even know if you can get McEwan's in the US or if anyone would know what it is.



Link to BBC article

I'm getting more and more used to this handcycling malarky. Now getting a reasonable distance and today cycled from the BORP center to Marina Bay Park which is a round trip of just over 12.5 miles. It's a pretty easy ride, but there are two big uphills. The first is immediately to cross the freeway (which then also means it's the last thing on the way back) and then another to go around the back of Golden Gate Fields (the horse racing track). I decided to plop a GoPro on my head this time out. You need to be really bored to watch this given it's an hour and a half long as well as the fact that most of the video is just me grunting. The middle bit of the video is more interesting when you get away from the freeway and have views of San Francisco, but still, it's an hour and a half video of a bike ride. Possibly the most amusing thing is the acknowledgement of seeing a Womble. I would recommend that you download the video rather than playing it direct as I'm sure it's just going to constantly buffer if you try to stream.

Video of the bike ride if you're really sad. The route is in the map below.

Nothing really to this story, just some pictures and a video from the summer trip back to England. There was supposed to be two other videos, but William really didn't put any effort into taking them and, not surprisingly, they turned out terrible, so I haven't bothered keeping them.

A quick picture of Foxton Locks from a day trip. I believe it's still the most consecutive locks in the world. Unlikely to get beaten really as I don't think they're building that many canals and locks these days.

Quite pleased with this image as it was taken from a distance and through a window on my phone. None of which are recipes for a good photo. This is a green woodpecker that's very skittish. It's really hard to get close to this bird before it flies away and I managed to capture it. I did get one a few years ago, but only as it flew off.

The last is video of a shunt at Stibbington. I'd stopped by to look at the river Nene where I used to fish and they were moving some carriages about. The only amusing thing about the video is when the train driver sounded his horn, William jumped and I thought we were going to be one iPhone less than we started the trip with. Thankfully he held onto it and it didn't plunge into the murky depths of the river.

I decided to have a cup of coffee when I got home. All was good until I got up to put the cup back on the side and I kind of expected more resistance when I put the cup down and the handle came off in my hand. I think it's probably time I got a new set of cups, but I really like these as they've big.

I'll give Owen credit for the best response which is - good job you didn't have a wank instead of a cup of coffee. Sound advice!

Alright, so I've decided I'm too fat and it doesn't seem to be going away so I need to do something about it. I've been looking at handcycles as I want to do something outside so I can get some fresh air at the same time. I'm going to get one, but in the meantime, I found an amazing organization, the Bay Area Outreach and Recreation Program (BORP), that has a lot of bicycles, handcycles and many other contraptions that you can use. I took William along with me to film this amazing shot. I wanted him to use one of the recumbent cycles, but he wasn't allowed to try one as he doesn't have a disability. I wanted him to try a regular pedaling one versus the handcycle I was using. Anyway, this is going to take some getting used to. My arms might be strong, but I'm completely knackered after a relatively short ride of a couple of miles.

Track and short video are below. I did have to swap handcycles mid way through as the first one got a puncture and I didn't want to finish the journey on the rim.

They say it's the terrible twos, but it appears William has pushed it to the teenage years before he's deciding to argue everything with me. So, I sent the truck in for a service and they came up with some things that needed doing to it, one of which was worded something like fix the rear stop light. I called them to ask what that meant and if it was just that they were going to change the bulb and they said yes. They wanted $90 to change the bulb, so I told them I was good and I'd do it myself. When William woke, I told him the good news - that he was going to get a lesson in vehicle maintenance and that he needed to change the bulb and clean the battery (corroded terminals). I told him to watch a YouTube video on how to change the bulb so he would know what tools to take and how to do it. He said he'd figure it out. I told him he wouldn't be able to figure it out and that he needed to watch a video. There was back and forth and then he asked what bulb it was. I told him it was the brake light and he then asked whether it was the front or the rear.

So yeah! I also told him it would take about an hour as it was the center brake light and it was more awkward to get to. He said it wouldn't take longer than 30 minutes. Two hours into it, he gave up.

I told Paul about this and let him know I'd sent him to the auto parts store to buy a front brake light bulb. He suggested I send him out for some spirit level bubbles and tartan paint at the same time. I think that's awful - I'd never make him out to be stupid. After giving up, he complained the tools were wrong. I agreed and sent him to the store to get a left handed screwdriver instead.

In fairness, it was a pain to do. There are stupid long bolts that you need to take a nut off through a hole. The first thing I had to do was to buy a long socket to fit the nut. Then you need to work as if you're some kind of keyhole surgeon. It's like trying to take a nut off through a letterbox for some unknown reason. When you finally locate the nut and get it off, it shoots into the hole and is lost forever. So I had to buy replacement nuts which we lost as well (they weren't the right ones anyway), then had to go back to the dealership to get the actual nuts which we did successfully replace by using Vaseline in the socket to get the nut to stick in there so it didn't ping out and get lost again.

If we take my bill rate into account and the time I spent on it, let alone the time William spent, I think it cost somewhere in the region of $5,000 to change this bulb, but on the bright side, I saved $90 +tax.

Not intending to do a ton of these posts as they're pretty boring to say the least. Decided to take the scoot out round the neighborhood after falling off it twice this morning. Wanted to make sure it still worked fine and I wasn't going to continuously bounce on the floor every time I used it. Went for quite a long ride round the trails. Had to do a bit of street driving in Pleasant Hill to get back under the freeway which wasn't too bad. Pretty much nothing interesting happened, but I did have the camera on the right setting so it did do a full video which is crazy boring.

If you're really sad, here's the video of the Pleasant Hill loop.

... usually costs me money, but in this case I'm sadly referring to Leicester who's run in the premiere league has come to an end. Being a Leicester fan, we're typically used to the yoyo nature of going up and down. We have a cycle where we come up, have a bit of success, lose some players, go down, rebuild, then come back up again. I have to be honest, going to many matches through the Martin O'Neil years, I thought that was the best I would ever see. We came up, won a couple of League Cups, had some decent runs in the League and that's really all you can hope for. This most recent run completely surpassed that with the premier league win and the FA cup win. It's been a truly amazing ride, but sadly it's at an end and we have to look to the Championship next season. Also, sadly is that it has all happened while I've been in the States, so I didn't get to go to any of the games, but it's still been phenomenal, regardless.

One thing I do look at is some of the similarities. Back with O'Neil, we lucked out with Tony Cottee who was at the end of his years and was outstanding for us. This time it's been (and still is) Jamie Vardy who has just been incredible. Still think he should have been given a better shot at the England role, but that's a whole other story. In the previous run we lost the likes of Heskey to Liverpool and recently we lost Kante to Chelsea. Exactly what I said above, but there's no mistaking - Football is big business, it's all about the money and the results so you can make more money from your merchandise etc. The reality is that we don't have the resources of the major teams, so we're always going to struggle to compete at the highest level which, does make that premier league title even sweeter and even more unbelievable. It's sad to see us drop down. I don't know how many seasons Vardy has left in him, but we will rebuild and we will be back. We will find the talent to fight again.

Forever Foxes!

Being the hard core Heavy Metal and Punk fan that I am, it's not often that I branch out and go see other artists live, but one of those exceptions was to see Tina Turner on her 60th birthday tour at Wembley back in 2000. I just read the news about Tina's death at 83 and one thing I didn't realize is that this was her last tour of the UK and the subject of a documentary “One Last Time Live in Concert”. The thing is I would have gone to see her in July 2000 and then I moved to the States in January 2001 and the documentary wasn't released until later that year. I now feel compelled to watch the video to see if there's any footage of me on it which is highly unlikely given the concert was on the 15h and 16th of July with 80,000 fans there each day. Little old me was standing with my buddy Dave and his girlfriend Jana somewhere around the half way line I think. We'd have been drinking beer and I'm sure I had my back to that sound stand they have. I typically stand with my back to something so I can't get shoved in the back and fall over whether it be a pole or a sound stand or whatever happens to be there.

The concert was phenomenal and huge respect for Tina as an artist. I remember there being a flyover at one point - I'm going to say a Lancaster bomber with supporting Spitfires, but I could be wrong on that. I did a quick search and couldn't find it. Obviously remember all the songs, but the other thing was that my Tube broke down on the way home. I remember being relatively drunk by the end of it and was heading back on my own as was going in a different direction to Dave and Jana, but with 80,000 people there, in the same direction as many fans. The tube broke down and they had to put taxis on to ferry us home which, on the bright side, meant door to door service which is always appreciated after a few beers. I shared the taxi with 4 other people and just remember how happy everyone was and that nobody cared that we were waiting around for probably hours for a taxi. People just singing and talking about how good the show was. I can't remember what day I was there, whether it was the Saturday or the Sunday, but hey, I was there.

Tina RIP

Took the scooter out for another blast around the neighborhood. This time I added a GoPro for no reason whatsoever. It's actually positioned really well, but the bad news is that it was on time-lapse mode rather than video. Apparently if you hold the record button down too long it goes into time-lapse. It doesn't matter too much as I was going to speed up the video and cut out the boring bits ... which in this case is pretty much all of it, but there were a couple of things I was going to slow down. The biggest thing I'm noticing on the scooter is how badly positioned the buttons are to cross the road. They posts they are on are on the up bits of the pavement, so if you line up to be able to push the button, you're not lined up with the ramp bit that you need to drive down. Invariably this results in the need to move back and forth to line up properly. That's not a big deal unless the lights change right away as in that case, the bloody thing's beeping at you to cross the road and you're shuffling back and forth. The other thing again is how wobbly the sidewalk is when you go over someone's drive. They all seem to be badly angled and you end up having to lean away from the road a lot for fear of being tipped into the middle of it. There was also a bit of sidewalk that just ended abruptly with a wall and there was no off ramp so I had to reverse up the hill. I didn't carry on as there wasn't a sidewalk, but then when I cut down the next street, the same thing happened and I just thought bugger it and drove down the road.

If you're really sad, here's the video of the Larkey Park loop.

Lines form on my face and my hands
Lines form on the left and right
I'm in the middle, the middle of life
I'm a boy and I'm a man

I'm eighteen and I like it

I have not, however, realized that I'm no longer 18. When I was 18, I bounced when I fell over. Nothing mattered and nothing's fragile. Unfortunately at 53, things start to hurt and ache a little more. Saturday evening, my wrist started to ache. Quite badly. Later, the right side of my neck went crazy stiff and then all the muscles across my right shoulder and down my right arm started to ache. What had caused this, I hear you say? Was it the three and a half hours spent fitting the tonneau cover on the truck? The cover that came with easy and simple 15 minute instructions. I think it took 15 minutes to figure out what we were supposed to do and then it got worse having to wrench things in place and having to file down the brackets that didn't fit and then needing a hammer to get them in place. The cover is now on, but it ain't coming off again. Actually, it will, but the brackets will be kind of hard to get off. Anyway, no, that wasn't the cause of my pain.

Having taken longer than expected to fit the cover, I decided not go to go out on Saturday. The plan was to take the scooter out to another of my old birding sites. As it was later and traffic builds up, we decided to do that on Sunday and leave earlier. Now, the scooter goes 12 mph which is not as fast as someone can sprint, but it would be hard for someone to hold up that pace when running for a long while. William decided to race me across the garage which was kind of fun. The only thing to note is that the brakes aren't great, but no incidents. Now, when I got out of the elevator, I thought it would be fun to race back to the apartment which is essentially down one corridor, then round the corner and down another corner. That corner is sort of two 45 degree turns versus on 90 degree turn - just the configuration of the building. I figured I could make the corner at 12 mph. I know the scooter isn't very stable, but I thought if I leaned, I could take the racing line and all would be well. Problem #1 came as I got closer to the corner and realized that if I leaned and took the racing line, I would have cracked my skull on the inside wall. So I didn't lean into the corner. Yeah, so as I turned the corner, the scooter tipped over and I didn't have the ability to brake. Now, here's where I wish William was videoing it as neither of us know how I actually made the corner. What I did was punched out at the wall I was heading into, hitting it with the palm of my hand, narrowly missing someone's door. That dropped me back onto all four wheels, but then it tipped again, so I repeated the process and somehow got round the corner without crashing. No idea if anyone was in either of the apartments, but nobody came out to see what was going on. There was definitely a dog in one of them as it wasn't best pleased with the loud bangs. I'm actually surprised I didn't punch through the wall. I guess the outer walls of the apartments are stronger than I thought.

Nothing hurt at the time. It wasn't until later in the evening that it started to take effect. I'm sure your thinking that was stupid. Maybe, but you've got to try these things. What was more stupid was trying it again the following day after we'd been out. Now, in fairness, I only hit the corner in second gear, so 7.5 mph instead of 12 mph. I also took the wet weather line rather than the racing line which allowed me to start wide and gave me room to lean in without cracking my skull on the inside wall. William did shout at me that I was an idiot and that I wouldn't make it, but he was wrong. I did make it. Huh! Today's generation too worried about things. Sometimes you just gotta try it out, even if you're an old fart.

Went out for a scoot on my scoot. The intent was to see if I could do a birding lap of Heather Farm, but it's really hard right now as everything sprouting and it's quite difficult to see through the foliage. In the end it just ended up being a quick blast which was still worthwhile as I wanted to see if the front right had indeed blown out or whether it was just low. It seemed fine. The scooter is quite unstable if you're going at full pelt when on pavements that aren't even (which is most of them). It's also particularly fun going up and down dips where driveways are. Wont be long before we have a major crash. Here's the Starbucks to Heather Farm run:

I came across this when I was perusing YouTube - basically, while I was going for a poo and was just looking at stuff as one does. I would say that this fits with this website given that it's completely pointless, but it's absolutely amazing. I'm really impressed with what they've created here - The Floppotron.

I saw an article the other day about Marston's selling off a bunch of pubs including The Crooked House in Dudley. It reminded me of a College outing we had to the pub to see it. The building started to sink until it was propped up, but it's left a rather interesting result. As you can see from the picture everything's skew-whiff. Can't imagine trying to get a door to fit the hole - certainly not going to come from the standard size isle.

The most interesting thing was that the bar was supposed to cause an optical illusion that a coin would appear to roll up hill on it. I have to be honest, we tried and it rolled the way I expected it too, but that could just be that I'm skew-whiff which compensated for the skew-wiffedness of the building to even it out.

I seem to remember it being kind of a spit and sawdust pub, but my memory might be wrong on that. It does look like they've done it up since I went which would have been somewhere around 1991 at a guess. But that's the problem - great attraction to see once, which we did. Something to do in your late teens / early twenties, but not something to keep doing (at least from the distance we were from the pub anyway, which I just mapped to be 70 miles which is a long way to go for a pint).

That is the question, or so Shakespeare would have us believe. Some among us may think it's what do you get if you multiply nine by six. Anyway, I digress. We're continuing the discussion on emojis being top of mind after converting the site to accommodate them in all postings. Did you know there is a committee that approves all emojis?

Yes, it's the Unicode Consortium. Honestly, what they do is pretty important as they set standards for what characters use each unicode code (probably just unicode rather than unicode code). Basically each "character" is now stored as a block with a number that corresponds to a character. It's not like ASCII that ran out after 128 characters was then extended to double it to a whopping 256 characters. Unicode takes it to just over 1.1 million characters. They didn't fuck about this time. Now, they have to accommodate all the languages that use symbols, but they still have space to spare, so they've started putting emojis in there. This is how you can have an Apple device or an Android or Windows browser or ... [you get the drift, anything] interpret a code and display the intended emoji. Because there's a standard. There may be a slight variation on how each platform displays it, but a smiley face will be a smiley face, a race car will be a race car etc.

But how cool is that? They approve new emojis on an annual basis. I honestly hadn't thought about it before now. When I retire, I know what job I'm going after. Can you imagine the conversation though as I really don't think any of mine would get approved. Clearly we'd need a pair of breasts - how else do you emoji that things have gone tits up. We'd also need to build on the original set of emojis and have a smiley face with a penis on it's forehead - obviously to use when pointing out someone is a dickhead. I can see that these would be considered offensive, but be honest - they'd get a lot of use wouldn't they?

Happy Birthday to me,
Happy Birthday to me,
Happy Birthday .....

.... how old?

No, not that. Be serious now, I've updated my website, not changed the laws of nature, physics and anything else you can think of. No, I've been tidying up the site and after eight years, I've finally closed the 2015 NASCAR Race Game and can officially declare Owen as the winner knocking me off my perch of winning five competitions.

So let's hear it for Owen and eight grueling years of effort. Slogging away day after day to finally bring home the W. Yay for Owen!!!

Anyone poking around the website will see that a new competition has been created in the Race Game for the 2023 Forumla 1 season. The competition is open to register and is ready to go. More information will be provided as we get nearer to the start of the season. The question that remains is - can Owen go back to back?

Over the holidays, Ken Block died from a snowmobile accident. I've featured one of his videos on this website being the Gymkhana in San Francisco. I've watched a lot of his videos whether it be the gymkhanas or the drag races and have huge respect for his talent. Recently, it's been his daughter that's been driving the Hoonicorn and I hope she continues to do so. So sad for her to lose her father.

Crazy that he died from a snowmobile accident given all the things he's done, but, then again .... I guess some would say it's crazy this idiot broke his neck on a trampoline with all the crazy stuff he used to do. I guess it catches you when you least expect it.

You've got to think Saint Peter's going to be standing there watching Ken drift sideways through the Pearly Gates! RIP Ken.

Sadly had a few nights in hospital the other week. Nothing too serious, but definitely something I'd like to avoid. That said, there were several times I managed to amuse myself. I even made a video of my experience using the shower in my room.

Full HD Video (Right click and save as)

Just got my second jab, so I'm now fully vaccinated. I can no longer get aids which is nice. Might have been better to be protected against covid though.

I don't want anyone to think that just because we've moved from full on player v player (pvp) gaming in Apex that we've become soft. We've remained dedicated to being hardcore gamers bringing the fight to anyone that wants it. We are true Klingons at heart relishing in the battle. Drinking hard and singing songs of our glory. We've moved to Destiny 2, but are still pushing the boundaries of all things manly when it comes to gaming. Only the strong can survive. Only the mighty can join us:

Full HD Video (Right click and save as)

In the midst of all this chaos caused by COVID-19 a bond was formed. No, stronger than a bond. A loyalty, a trust, an understanding .... a unit. Forged as one, a team of geriatric gamers took on the millennial kids of today and triumphed. The old bulls walked down the hill and had their feast of all the heffers. The likes of which have never been seen before. Well maybe once if the know the quote below:

“In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them....maybe you can hire The A-Team.”

The statistics are terrible, but the tag line if the banner is all that matters. Luke, Paul and I hid our way to victory. My aim was absolutely terrible at the end, but it wasn't helped with the ping spamming to tell me where the target was or the constant cries of “get him Jamie, he's here, get him, get him ...”

I even went as far as to record a clip of the win which, honestly, highlights exactly how bad we are. There was only one person left against the three of us. I have no idea what Paul did, he just seemed to die. Luke was trying to creep in and walked straight at him seeming to face tank his shots. I crept round to get an angle and whiffed every shot in my first mag. I got lucky that I could use my ability to run off then use a battery on gold shields.

Full HD Video (Right click and save as)

Just to prove that my aim isn't completely terrible, here's a couple of other wins - the first one I had and one that happened just after Paul and Luke left. Both of these with random strangers that weren't yelling in my ear.

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Full HD Video (Right click and save as)

I had to register a number for my car this weekend. Obviously I went with 42 and I ordered some magnetic numbers to put on my car. The other organization I go with provides numbers. Anyway, my numbers have arrived and I now have the fastest fridge in Walnut Creek.

OK, so I got this message in the picture below, that I jokingly attributed to Russian hackers trying to adjust the vote after I exposed them.

This issue by itself isn't that big of a deal as I have rather a lot of spare disks lying around. Long story, but right now I feel I could back up Amazon Web Services, Azure and Google Cloud combined if needed. The problem was that when I booted into the computer it was running crazy slow. The disk that was compromised was the one that this EBR website is running on and that my TV records to. A while back I'd got a message that the C drive was out of space and moved the large stuff off. (The website takes up about 300GB of space because there are some very large video and music files sitting at the back of it).

A quick look showed that the C drive only had 3k of space left. Now there's no way that I'd created another 300GB of files as I don't use that computer. There aren't many directories on the C drive, so I looked at the properties of each of them, added up the disk space use and it came to something like 300-400GB. Problem as the disk drive is 1TB. Where's the other 600GB or so not being reported.

Quick search of the old world wide web and there's a gazillion articles telling you your hard disk is broken, run chkdsk. Or that you've got a virus, buy this software and the world will be a happy place. So I ran chkdsk ... nothing. Booted computer in safe mode and ran virus checker .... nothing. Finally found some website suggesting that it might be Windows Modules Installer service that is used by the system to compress log files.

Well, turns out that the culprit was indeed Bill Gates himself. Apparently this is a known issue that Microsoft haven't bothered to fix. I'm guessing it doesn't affect too many people or they just take their computer to the computer shop to be fixed and get charged a lot of money by someone who just has to do the following:

1. Stop Windows Modules Installer. Goto services (type in services.msc), find it in the list and stop it.
2. Use explorer to goto C:/windows/logs/cbs and either delete or move the files out of that folder (if you feel you might need them ... unlikely)
3. Use explorer to got C:/windows/temp and delete cab* which are the temporary log files that were created and never deleted.

So, here's the thing. When you click on c:/windows/temp for the first time, it asks you if you want to allow access to the directory. Until that point, it appears it's not included the contents of that directory when you look at the properties of c:/windows, hence the total storage taken by the sub directories not equaling the total being shown on the properties of the C drive.

Now, here's the staggering thing. I deleted almost 800GB of cab* temp files. Explorer wouldn't load the directory, so I just used DOS to go there. I did run a directory listing first ... mistake ... there was about 40,000 files in there and that took forever to run. I ended up just typing del cab* and getting rid of everything that way. Seems to have worked and we're back in business!

Alright, so I decided to give the truck a chance to see what it can do to make a change from taking the car out. Thought I'd try a bit of off roading. Now, the fires have closed most places either because of what's going on or the danger of starting a fire. Other places warned of there being too many people at Thanksgiving and that they would turn folks away. So, I searched and found some sites that do off road trails. Now, first thing I'm going to say is that these sites are totally full of misinformation. It's actually crazy how bad the information is. Right, so let's start at the beginning. Figured I'd head south to Monterrey area and stay there. Worst case scenario I could take William to the Acquarium. There were two trails listed. First was designated as easy. Second as moderate. The easy one had a lot of conflicting information including that the trail was on private land. The second one seemed more legit so headed there. Nope - it's private land. Was supposed to be a loop trail from highway 1 up into the mountains and back round again. We started at the northern most part and you can't drive anywhere on it given the gate and warning signs. Then headed to the southern part of it and first found the road Nacimiento-Fergusson Road. This is a fairly normal small road that's paved. There are a few rock falls on it, but nothing to worry about. There was a review that someone had posted of having done the drive in a car. Well, they may have done that part of the drive in a car, but not the trail. The target is the coast ridge road which, as the name suggests, is a trail that runs the ridge of the mountain. We headed north to start with which is where the trail sites say to drive and you can get 5-10 miles up it and then you reach a trail head for hiking. The trail head is blocked with posts to prevent vehicles from going further. Someone had noted this in their review, but I hadn't read that one. Anyway, that's a fun drive into the mountain with great scenery, but you kind of feel annoyed that it's a there and back as opposed to driving a loop. Once back to the Nacimiento-Fergusson Road, decided to try the South Coast Ridge Road (as opposed to North). This works great and the map below shows a loop that works (obviously completing the loop on highway 1. Highlighted is just the off road bit.



Couple of additional notes. There's a bit that looks like it cuts through from the Coast Ridge Road to Plaskett. It does, but it goes through private land and you will hit a gate and have to reverse up and turn around. Interestingly, at time of writing, the white squarish bits inside the green of the forest represent the private land and you can see where you get stopped. It's annoyingly for just a small bit, but I guess they don't want folks driving through.

I wish I'd taken photos as the views are great, albeit that we were in clouds for a lot of it, but we also had some amazing views. The issue was really not knowing where I was going and if we could get out at the other end, it seemed to make sense to just press forward.

I didn't track where we went, but looking at the map, it seems like the North Coast Road goes higher to about 3900 ft at the furthest point you can drive. The South Coast Road seems to go to 3200 feet in places and it looks like you're generally going up and down 500 feet as you drive along. The drive itself isn't that difficult. There's a couple of spots where you need the four wheel drive and ground clearance to get over rocks, but the majority of it is relatively easy going.

Interesting sign as you get onto the road telling you that you need 4WD and a note that AWD is not 4WD. Would be interesting to see someone go up in their car. As I said, you'd actually get up most places, but you'd end up beached in others.

There is little, if no, political bias on this site and there is no intention to change that. I do, however, fully support Net Neutrality and respect all the companies that have come together today to protest against internet control.


Net Neutrality isn't just a US problem. If control of the internet is given to companies in the US, others will follow. “Title II” of the Communications Act provides legal foundation for net neutrality. Without it, Internet Service Providers will be able to block, charge or slow down sites that you visit. The internet exists to allow freedom of speech and expression. The internet should be somewhere you go to find and see what you want. Not what a company wants you to see!

Battle For The Net

So I took the plunge and went to Disneyland for the Thanksgiving holiday with William. I have to be honest, I was a bit worried that I wouldn't like it. I mean, I'm kind of done with all the roller coasters having ridden them in my youth. I was worried that the crowds would annoy me ... and they did, but it wasn't too bad that it ruined the holiday.

I only took 3 photos during the trip. I've still not turned into one of the sad muppets that needs to document their life on facebook or other social media. That's probably a rant for another day about the shit that people post online. Anyway, I hired myself a scooter so that I could get round the park and that was definitely the right decision. I probably would have been able to walk from one side to the other, but that would have taken all day and William employed the scatter method to his ride selection. Rather than doing what most people do and going to one of the areas in the park, going on the rides you want and move along, we just went back and forth all over the place.

Alright, so first question - what's better than California Screamin'? California Screamin' in the rain!


So this was on the last day. We knew it was going to rain. I'd been sensible enough to look at the forecast before we went on the trip and brought rain coats with us. Initially it was forecast to rain around 11:00, but that slipped on the day to around 3:00 in the afternoon. I can't actually remember what time it decided to rain, but we'd just split from Mike, Sue, Michaela and Johnny to have another go on the big roller coaster. They were a little more timid with their rides. It started to rain while we were in the queue for the ride and by the time we got on it, the heavens opened. We were either the last car or the last but one before they shut the ride down. I said to William that we got to do something not many people will ever do as it doesn't rain there very often and the ride shuts down when it does, but we rode California Screamin' in the rain. The girls behind us seemed to be enjoying it as well.

Talking of rain though, something I'd not really thought about, but when it rains, you generally just wear a jacket and that keeps you mostly dry. When you're on a mobility scooter, couple of things. First, if you left it to get on a ride, you had to sit in a puddle when you came back as water had collected on the seat. Second, that seating position that you ride the scooter leaves the bottom half of your body exposed. That, plus the fact that when you rode the damn thing the wheels were flicking up water into your genitals, I think I got the wettest I've ever got. I had to get my suitcase and change my jeans in the toilet at the hotel before we headed out.

OK, so thinking about it, the massive 3 photos I took were all taken on the last day. This photo was taken a little early (yes, the weather changed that quickly) in the queue for cars. Somewhat amused by the Butte Gas, obviously pronouncing it Butt Gas which I'm sure is the intention.


That was by far the longest queue we went in. The ride had broken down the previous day when we had an early pass into that park, so we had to queue with the rest of them when it finally opened. All the fast passes were gone more or less as soon as the ride re-opened.

Finally, the last ride of the trip. Yes, we were already soaked, so it made sense to finish with Splash Mountain.

The global phenomenon that is EastBayRag has become some big, surpassing Microsoft, Google and Apple combined that it's time to start its own Police Department. As crazy as it seems that something that started as one man's dreams has become so big and so popular that it needs its own law enforcement, but that's just the way it is.

What more proof can you need of such expansion than the arrival of the police barriers. The barriers that will be used to barrier off anything that needs barriering off.

EastBayRag has started counting down! A timer has appeared on the home page. What's that all about then? Who knows? But maybe, just maybe it's something important. One thing's for sure - you've got a long time to figure it out as it's quite a long countdown.

It never ceases to amaze me how inefficient government agencies are and their complete disregard for money. It doesn't really matter which country you're in, it's the same the world over. Complete bureaucratic bullshit!

OK, so this particular issue that's got me riled relates to the UK government. To be specific Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs (HMRC). I received an email from HMRC telling me that there was a message for me on my online account. I had signed up for the green option, so would no longer get letters in the mail (something I've done with pretty much everything I can). OK, so go to the website and try to log on. Interesting, they've implemented secondary security where it sends a code to the mobile phone you have on file. Click the button, wait and ....... nothing happens.

OK, so what do you do now? Well, click the help link and it tells you to call the help desk and if you provide them with your social security number and the phone number on file, they will get you access. I tried to call the help desk and got the message “we are unable to help you at this time ... click”. Not even a queue, just straight disconnected.

Not to be deterred by a failure through the second avenue, I thought I'd try a third and sent them an email asking how I was to access the account given that I was not being sent an authorization code and when I called the help desk, nobody answered and it just disconnected. The email came back saying I needed to phone the help desk and have my National Security number with me to validate my identity. So basically some intern didn't bother to read the actual message and just cut and paste the default message. So no help there!

I tried to call a few more times and still no queue, too busy.

I'm not entirely sure why, but I tried to log in again and it sent me a code. Great! Party Time! No. I entered the code and then a message comes up "Unable to validate your identity". Please contact the help desk. Are you fucking serious?

I finally got through to the help desk today some weeks later. The IT help desk said there's nothing they can do about my issue, it's a new system they don't control and they don't know why the website is telling people to contact the help desk. They told me to call the tax office and ask them what to do as they could access my messages and let me know if there was anything critical.

I called the tax office and they said they were unable to help me and I needed to contact the IT help desk. For fucks sake! Talk about the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. The woman on this help desk at the tax office said she was cross with the woman on the other help desk for passing me off to them. She also said that because I lived overseas I couldn't file my taxes online. I pointed out that I'd been filing my taxes online since the option had been available and that the IRS mandates that I do them online being an overseas taxpayer. This seemed confusing to her, but after she researched it, she did indeed note that I had managed to process my tax return online. Unfortunately, however, she is not able to help me and has told me to call the IT help desk again.

I can only imagine the billions of pounds the government has spent on this online processing in order to have something setup that doesn't work. And the amount of money they are paying for people to sit on help desks and provide absolutely no support whatsoever.

As it stands, I have HMRC sending me urgent messages to an inbox I can't access and mandating that I complete my tax returns online on a system I can't log onto. You would have thought they'd do everything they could to take money from me to pay the morons they employ!

The season is over and I still can't believe it. Not only did Leicester win the Premier League, but they absolutely dominated it. It's crazy to think that we had a chance of winning, but winning by 10 points is ridiculous. If the odds on us winning the title were 5000/1, can you imagine what the odds would have been on us winning by 10 points.



Nope .... it's not a fantasy. I keep looking and yes, we did indeed win the league!

Well, I'm still in shock at seeing something I never thought I'd see in my life - my beloved Leicester City winning the Premier League. It's crazy to think that any team has been able to take on the might of the big clubs, but the fact that it's Leicester makes it all the more special.



So much has already been written or said about this feat, that I'm really not going to be able to add anything. Last season was our first season after returning to the Premier League and we were firmly rooted to the bottom until an amazing end of season rally that saw us safe. Starting this season with odds of 5,000 to 1. The cost of our squad being around £22M compared to someone like Manchester City at £280M. The amazing story of Jamie Vardy playing for Fleetwood in the non-league a couple of years ago and now looking like he could take the golden boot. Crazy to think that it would even be conceivable that we could win. Well, ha ha, I guess 5,000 to 1 inconceivable.

I have to be honest, my reaction was to spend most of Monday crying after I watched Chelsea hold Spurs to a draw that finally gave us the title. Disbelief and joy .... at least I was working from home. Working may be a stretch if I'm being honest, but hey .... this isn't likely to happen again (maybe famous last words).

The interesting thing is that there's been talk on the Premier League coverage here in the States about Hollywood spending time with Leicester to make a film about the Leicester story. Not sure how true that is and I've not heard anyone say exactly which studio it is that's interested, but presumably it will be made into a film at some point. Kind of like Cool Runnings or Eddie the Eagle except with the underdog actually winning.

What I find interesting is the concept of American studios trying to figure out how to make the best film about Leicester's triumph. You just know that some producer's going to be looking for ways to embellish it even further beyond the amazing story that it is. I look back to films like Robin Hood where they conveniently relocated Sherwood Forrest in relation to Nottingham and just wonder if someone's going to be asking questions like “has Leicester City always played in Leicester?” which, at first glance seems like a daft question, but given American sporting teams just pick up and move States, it's the sort of thing I can imagine them asking. “Well, I was thinking that if we based Leicester in London, we can make this great local rivalry with Tottenham and Chelsea. Maybe have them all located close to each other. It'll make it so much better as we can show Chelsea helping their friends ...” I don't know. Maybe I'm still drunk on the euphoria, but I'm sure that there will be considerable poetic license throughout the film. But I already know I'm going to be buying the box set, so I guess it's just a matter of waiting.

I suffered yet another suitcase failure on my travels. This trip to Seattle. Just to digress for a minute, I had lunch with colleague at this vogue restaurant and the waitress was very pretty in that very noticeable way ... skirt just a little too short, top see through and unbuttoned just a button too far and, let me say, with a large chest. She was very attentive to us and kept passing by our table to lean over an pour water. I guess it's not too difficult to pick out the two guys on expenses that can be worked for a bigger tip, lol.

Anyway, back to the story which is irrelevant, but another colleague offered to stop by and pick up some Duck Tape that I could use to fix my suitcase. Well, I don't blame him for this, but when he saw the Union Jack Duck Tape, he obviously bought it for me as shown below.



Well, the question that sticks in my head is what the hell would you use this tape for anyway? Is America planning to deck the country out in Union Jack Duck Tape in celebration of the Queen's 90th birthday?

Who knows? But I don't seem to have another use for it.

It's been debated for a long time that playing video games to excess can cause someone to lose the ability to tell between the game and reality. Those that propose this as being a big problem generally point to the violence in games and that it can cause people to want to do nasty things to other people including killing them. An alternative analogy is that playing driving games can cause someone to be reckless when driving in the real world. Even is not leading to accidents or worse, there are cases of those where playing games has cost them in the real world ... of note is the former Liverpool David James who had an addiction to PlayStation games.

So where is all this leading? Well, as most people know I've been playing Clash of Clans for quite a long time and, more recently, Clash Royale. Both of these games are heavily monetized by the maker SuperCell. In both games you spend real money to buy gems that you can then spend in game to progress faster. Without going into the mechanics of each game, Clash Royale allows you to use your gems to open chests and get cards faster as shown in the picture below.



So how can a simple tablet game affect you in reality?

Well first, I need to explain that this is purely an accident. I was at the NASCAR race in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago with Owen and obviously it was so fascinating that neither of us could take our eyes off the track for a single moment. I really don't know how this happened, but I must have slipped, accidentally zoomed with my camera and hit the continuous shot button as I seem to have a whole series of photos not related to the race. Now clearly I would have deleted these photos immediately, but I couldn't help looking at this one ....



.... and thinking .... how many gems would it take to open that super magical chest?

For the fifth year running, I give you the best, the amazing, the brilliant ..... and still undefeated champion .... me!

This was by far and away the closest competition ever. Owen actually tried so I had some competition and, going into the last week, I was trailing by one point. But as with Owen's beloved Liverpool, we have to bring out the word “choke”. Two weeks ago, Owen had built up a 57 point lead and looked like a dead cert to win the competition, but poor performances in the last two weeks let it all slip. The leaderboard shows that I finally came through to win by 19 points.

Let's see what next year brings. I suppose the first question's going to be whether or not anyone else plays with me or if I'm going to be doing it alone. I don't much like this new format for the championship, but I have to admit that it made for an interesting last race of the season. I was supporting Harvick for the final, so a big shout out to him and congratulations on the championship.

This was supposed to be an entry in the photos section, but I only seem to have come away with two pictures. Probably enough to at least capture the essence of what was going on. So, whilst we were back in England, my parent booked William into a Karting session at Ancaster. I have to say that I was really impressed with the facility as it catered for a lot more than Karting - quad bikes and paintball to name a couple of other things.

Anyway, this was William's first go at proper karting. He was quite nervous in the first session, but seemed to get the hang of it quite quick for the second session.

I've just received a blast email to everyone in our office “will the woman who left her ring in the ladies bathroom see Caroline to get it back.”

Perhaps she wiped a bit hard and it fell off.

Well, it's Thanksgiving once again. A time to spend with your family and be thankful for all kinds of stuff. Sadly my family was taken from me by a tragic genetic accident ... but now is not the time to be dwell on that and miserable. Oh no, it's time to celebrate.

Not wanting to be a party pooper and not participate in the Thanksgiving festivities I've decided to go all out. I understand that it's traditional to have turkey with all the trimmings, so I've just got back from Target with my festive fare pictured below.



Now, I'm a bit worried that I'm not going to get the most out of Thanksgiving, so I've decided to come up with a strict schedule so that I don't lose any minute of the day. It has to be planned right down to the last detail in order to make sure that nothing goes wrong with the preparations and execution of the perfect dinner. Gordon Ramsey eat your heart out!

OK - here's my thought.

8:00 am ... ish ... maybe 9, maybe 10, who knows. Depends on what time the cat decides to wake me up. For argument's sake, let's go with 8:00. OK, so 8:00am get woken up by cat wanting breakfast.

8:01 am - get out of bed and go for a piss.

8:05 am - head downstairs in underpants and T-shirt.

8:06 am - feed cat.

8:07 am - realize it's Thanksgiving and time to celebrate. Start day with a Fosters aperitif and toast the day.

8:10 am - open second Fosters aperitif.

8:12 am - realize that at this pace we'll be drunk beyond recognition by lunchtime and will make a mess of the turkey dinner.

8:15 am - open third Fosters aperitif with a vow that this is the last one to go down without some kind of break, but secretly realize they're going down very smoothly.

8:30 am - sit on sofa and contemplate life, decide what activities to do during the day and scratch testicles.

9:30 am - wonder where the last hour went and why there are now five empty bottles on the side. I'm sure I made a vow of some description ... but as my ex-wife made clear, vows are optional and not to be taken seriously ...!

9:35 am - have I really been scratching my testicles for over an hour? I should probably get a shower.

9:40 am - turn on TV ... just watch a quick 30 minute program before getting a shower.

10:30 am - decide there's nothing on TV ... what, seriously? Another hour has gone! If I don't start doing something, the day will be gone. Really! How many bottles are on the side? There were only five a minute ago. OK - there's definitely only one thing to do ... stop counting the bottles.

10:35 am - turn on Xbox - surely there's a bunch of other sad muppets with nothing else to do. Yep .... millions!

12:30 pm - seriously, playing games is for losers ... how long have I been at it? Two hours ... not too bad. Shit, I need to upgrade something on my Clash of Clans account ... turn on iPad.

1:30 pm - OK, probably time to get something to eat - let's start the turkey preparation. Time for a quick drink first. WTF! Where have all the Fosters gone. I'm sure I bought more than that. OK, well it's time for the lunch anyway, so let's have Heineken to start, followed by a Heineken main course and perhaps a Newcastle desert.

2:00 pm - why am I sat in front of my computer trawling the internet for porn?

2:15 pm - what have they been feeding their dicks?

2:16 pm - that's not going to fit in there .... guess I'm wrong!

2:30 pm - OK - this is boring now .... should I have a wank (masturbate for you Americans)? Maybe I could do that and then have a shower.

2:35 pm - decide a wank's too much effort, turn on the TV again.

3:00 pm - desert - let's crack open that Newkie Brown! So ... why is it the Toon Army again? Away the lads! Why isn't there any proper football on the TV?

4:00 pm - meeow .... time to feed the cat again.

5:00 pm - guess there's still nothing on TV then ... there's no way it's got this late and I've not even got dressed yet. Well, no point being extravagant now, might as well defer that task until tomorrow.

6:00 pm - didn't I say I was going to turn off the TV? Hold on a minute, I still haven't eaten yet. I think there's a bag of crisps somewhere and some cheese ... oh and I've got a jar of peperoncini's somewhere. Right now there's nothing in the world that I want more than a peperoncini .... or five .... or maybe ten .... WTF, it's Thanksgiving I'm going to have as many as I want!

7:00 pm - this has been a really productive day! I've achieved everything I set out to do. Seriously, I've not wasted a day at all. Everything I've done has been really focused and has been driving to a solution and the world is really great and I love everybody and it's all fantastic .....

7:15 pm - I'm back in front of my computer. I still don't understand how that fit in there .... should I feel sorry for the woman or the donkey? In fairness, they both look really happy.

7:30 pm - well I'm too drunk now to have a wank so I'd better just chill out ... I know, let's listen to some music.

8:30 pm - decide that we need to listen to specific music to fit mood .... something melancholic but uplifting at the same time ... OK .... got it!

9:00 pm - time to turn up the volume as this song really hits the mark ... but what about the neighbors? I'm not going to be living here in a couple of weeks, so it's not my problem.

10:30 pm - time to watch a film ... turn on some sci-fi film of one description or other.

12:30 am - time for more music ....

2:30 am - I don't think another beer would be wise at this time ..... bed!

It's funny .... I'm so looking forward to this. There are going to be millions of Americans getting into meaningless arguments with their relatives and visiting people they really don't want to. The only thing I'm really confused about is why did I buy the Turkey dinner as I don't see it getting eaten at any point during the day. Maybe I'm wrong ... maybe I should video the turkey dinner.

And by giant coc, I am indeed referring to my giant/healer raid on Clash of Clans. Not entirely sure why I did this, but I created a video of one of my coc raids and posted it on YouTube. Think it was just one of those moments where it seemed like it's a good idea. It's actually more difficult than it seems to talk through the video and I do make a couple of interesting mistakes that I'll analyze and try to work on (in my real life) ... or as I go about my business (so to speak).

One thing I will say is to make sure you watch the video on high quality 360p as otherwise it's a bit blocky.

OK, so this may be one of those things where you needed to be there and the video below is not the best I have to be honest, but here's the story. I was over in the north bay at my Irish friends for their daughter's birthday. Now. Well, anyone who's been to Ireland will know that there's a law that all TVs must be kept on at all times. The times I've been over there with my dad and we've gone into a bar and the first thing they've done is apologized for the TV not being on and turned it on immediately. Which is unusual as my dad would prefer the TV not be on in the bar. Anyway, my friends being true Irish conform to the law and do indeed have their TV on at all times. Well at least until this muppet went over there with his new phone. After losing my phone in a lake when I was back in the UK, I replaced it with a new one that comes with a built in programmable IR. So, I programmed it to their TV and Satellite system. Then proceeded to turn the TV off round about every 10 minutes.

So, the guy who's house it is, isn't the most technical person in the world when it comes to TVs, computers and the like. However, the person that setup his TV was there as well. I still can't figure out how they didn't manage to find out that it was me that was turning the TV on and off, but they didn't. It was sort of one of those jokes that once I started, I couldn't get out of. At one point it got quite heated between the person who setup the TV and the owner as they were accusing him of now know what he was doing. In the middle of the evening, they decided to try and fix the TV. The video below is a short video of them trying to fix it, but it's a little dark I'll admit. They had a torch out trying to see what was at the back, fiddled with all the settings then completely unplugged everything and reset all the systems including re-tuning the Satellite system in an attempt to find out why it kept going off.



I did eventually tell them it was me, but that was at 1:30 in the morning when everyone had left. Thankfully everyone was too tired to thump me at the time so I managed to survive.

First thing is to congratulate Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus on their sixth NASCAR title. There's absolutely no question that these guys are the team to beat and it looks likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future. Next would be to congratulate me on winning my NASCAR fantasy competition yet again. This year was even more impressive as it appears that I was the only one playing. Several others picked teams at the beginning of the season, but I was the only one who stayed on top of it and changed drivers throughout. That said, I didn't actually win very easily. Owen made some inspired picks that really panned out for him. Kurt Busch in the 78 Furniture Row car was definitely a highlight of the season managing to make the chase, but unfortunately didn't win a race. Another drive who failed to win a race was my very own Juan Pablo Montoya who exits NASCAR and returns to Indy Car next year. This does put me in a predicament of having to pick a new driver to support. I have to be honest, this is something I'm struggling with as I tend to be very loyal, so whoever I pick will likely get my support until they exit the sport. Do I go for one of the existing drivers or pick one of the upcoming stars? We will have to wait and see.

So, in this wonderful digital age, the school disseminates information via email to the parents. Now, I will be the first to admit that I'm probably not the model parent when it comes to reading what's going on at school. I tend to take the quick glance, see if anyone got shot and if not, delete it as it's probably not that important.

Well, I received an email a couple of weeks back saying to sign up for important text messages. I have to say I was a little skeptical as most people's definition of important is probably not the same as mine. Unless it needs to be sown back on, it's probably not that critical. However, I overcame my fear of being bombarded by pointless text messages and signed up. And I have to say I was wrong as it went about two weeks before I got a text and I didn't get spammed with messages about little Johnny successfully wiping his bottom before pulling up his trousers and pants ... admittedly a skill I still struggle with today.

And last night it came ... the first important text message. What was this oh so important message. I actually have no idea. I got a text message to let me know to check my email for important information that had been sent out.

I have to wonder how much money the school spent on putting in this text message relay system. And even more wonder at the genius that came up with this system of emailing me to alert me to texts that alert me to emails. Well, I'm going to boycott the next bake sale if that's how they're going to spend my money is all I can say.

Following the last article I posted on not playing with your ring, I was in a meeting the other day talking about general tactics on how to approach a client. It was suggested that “we should go helmet to helmet with them”. I'm hoping this is an American Football term and simply translates as going head to head with them. However, it was all I could do to hold in the urge to shout “not bloody likely!”

So, I was on this this leadership training course and they were giving advice on how to do effective presentations. All the good stuff around eye contact, hand gestures and all of that. Been there, seen it, done it, but always good to get a refresher every now and then. They also covered the what not to do, wringing or clasping hands, staring at hands etc. etc. Well, there are some things that just don't translate too well. The one piece of advice that caught my attention and I don't think I've heard before ....

“Don't play with your ring.”

I'm sure I was the only person in the room who started to chuckle to themselves, followed immediately by the though “but what if it's really itchy?” Sensing that this question would not be appreciated by either the group or the trainer, I decided to keep it to myself, but I did start to think about whether this advice should be adhered to the letter or if there were areas of grey. Clearly, the hand down the back of the trousers with deep scratch followed by a sniff ... probably a no and you'd probably lose your audience. But what about when you stand up and your underwear's trapped wedgie style in your crack. Is it OK to do a quick pluck?

Again, fearing that this question would not be valued by my colleagues, I decided to keep it to myself as one of those paradigms to ponder every now and then.

I met up with someone in the morning for a coffee and on the way back into the office there was a homeless person who had climbed up a pole and was holding a no entry sign to ransom. I actually video'd about 25 minutes. I've cut it down to 5 minutes, but it's still probably a bit long. After you've seen the beginning, it's kind of repetitive, although the end does show a friend of the person up the pole losing it.

Take a look if you're bored, but the summary is that guy goes up a pole. I hung around for 3 police cars, 2 fire engines and 1 ambulance ... along with the workers that were doing whatever work was being done to the utilities ... so quite a lot of people ... standing around watching someone up a pole about 7ft off the ground. There were several cries of “tazer his ass” from the crowd that gathered, like me, to video the event ... presumably hopeful that something grim would happen and you'd be the one to catch it on camera. Nothing happened whilst I was there except the street got closed to cars. I'm guessing the assessment was that this guy didn't represent a threat to the public so rather than bring him down and clear up the scene, it was left for him to either come down or fall down (I don't know which as I'd gone).

Can't help thinking ... how much tax do I pay and how much is an ounce of lead? Welcome to San Francisco!

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!!! How to make a fart hurt someone.

So, anyway, I was at work right and I went up to a female that I work with and they'd quite clearly farted just before I rolled up. Well, either that or they'd shit themselves, but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt here. Anyway, as painful as it was for me to stand in the stench zone, it was quite clear that she needed to drop another one .... so I stood talking to her. Even to the extent of walking two steps away three times and then turning back round to add something to the conversation.

There was something satanical about watching how contorted her face kept going as the pocket of air was trying to force its way out. Along with how tightly someone could cross their legs.

I have to admit that when I finally left I was rather disappointed that I didn't hear the biggest trouser rip behind me as the air once again filled with fug.

So, today was William's first day out fishing and I'm really impressed that he managed to keep his attention for most of the time we were there (a total of about 6 hours). Well, attention for most of the time except for the part where he fell in, but at least it was a warm day. Although falling in was caused with trying to sneak round the other side of the reeds to fire maggots at my float with the “slingshot”. Oh well, still was a good day and here are the pictures to prove it along with my mate Mat and his kid JJ.

I just spent somewhere in the region of $8m on a new camera and some lenses. I was in the process of setting it up and trying to figure out how it worked and in walked my son from swimming and then proceeded to strip. Here's the first picture with my new camera.

As most people will have read, I've posted a few vote questions about Fish-O-Mania a few weeks back. More along the lines of the fact that I was thinking about trying to enter next year. Hopefully ... I have it recorded so can watch it when I come back to the UK in a couple of weeks, but knowing my old fellow's technical abilities, I'm sure something will have gone wrong and I'll have 6 hours of Coronation Street instead.

Anyway, that's not the reason for this post. I've been following a Dan Blackwell online. I try to watch a few YouTube videos during the week so I can learn different methods and maximize the time I get on the bank when I come back home and get the chance to go out. I started watching videos of Steve Ringer, Tommy Pickering and Bob Nudd as well as many others that have some great stuff out there where you can learn so much. I came across a video by Dan and have to say when I started to watch it, I nearly turned it off thinking “what's this kid going to tell me.” I ended up watching the video and thought “hold on a minute, this kid knows his stuff and the video's pretty well put together.” I watched a few of his videos and have now watched all of them I'm sure. They're published under minnowmaster209 and well worth watching.

As much as I was hoping to watch the Fish-O-Mania competition when I came back home without knowing the results, I saw a post from Dan that he'd won the junior competition. Really need to take my hat off to this kid for doing such a great job of the fishing videos and working to get this thoroughly deserved win. Also think his dad (or whoever shoots the videos) needs a big shout out for the patience and doing a great job of that.

Here's the short video of Dan picking up his trophy:



Probably not the most interesting video, so here's on of him catching carp on the pole and feeder. If you're interested in that sort of thing.

So .... a few weeks back, William came home with a school project to grow a sunflower. In the typical interest of a child, his attention lasted about a day and half before he got completely bored with it, however, Karen picked this up as a mission. I'd like to say this was to be her crowning glory to prove that she could indeed look after flowers.

Now, I will admit that my talents in this area are severely limited, but I do have 100% record with flowers. I've never tried to grow any and therefore have never failed. Simples!

Anyway, there were two of these sunflowers and they seemed to be doing really well. One of them had grown quite thick and had several flowers. The second one had grown taller and was looking like it was just about to flower. I can't remember exactly when I last saw them, but I thought all was well as I headed to Seattle on Monday.

I came back from Seattle late Wednesday afternoon and when I went into the kitchen, was quite surprised as to what had happened to these monuments of Karen's horticultural abilities. Clearly what happened is my fault. I know that, but I'm really not sure what I did to them and haven't asked as am not really sure I want to find out. I'm still maintaining plausible deniability on account of the fact that I was in a different State. And no, not just a state of denial, but physically in a different State.

The first image shows the two plants together and then the next two images are close ups of the one that had started to bloom.


My best guess on this one is that the plan changed from becoming a gardener into focusing more on expression art. I believe this now to be some kind of post modern representation of our marriage. I'm not sure it really needs any further commentary.

As for the second one ....


The mind boggles a bit here. I do know that I may have upset her a little in the week as we are finalizing a point in the divorce, but I didn't think it was that bad. When I look at the poor plant, it seems as if she went outside and bit its head off in some crazed Alan Titchmarsh meets Ozzy Osbourne kind of way.

I'm sure there's another explanation, but I kind of like mine. Visions of Karen losing her mind and running down the street believing that she's chasing Triffids and biting the heads off the neighbors plants.

It's hard to believe that you can say something without realizing what it is you're saying, but this is an actual broadcast from KTVU Fox 2 in San Francisco reporting on the Asiana plane crash.



Apparently they called the NTSB to confirm the names and these were confirmed by a summer intern working there. But still .... seriously!

If you missed it, the names are:

• Captain Sum Ting Wong
• Wi To Lo
• Ho Le Fuk
• Bang Ding Ow

*************

So, I've updated the link as these videos keep getting taken down from YouTube ... not surprisingly. The bullet list above at least gives you the context of what happened. Go to YouTube and search for KTVU Asiana if you want to find it. Seems as soon as they take one copy down another 10 go up. This one may stay given it's from another TV show.

I'm not 100% sure I heard this right so this may need some follow up. I took three flights this week with an airline I don't normally use. (All three flights were delayed .... go figure why I don't normally use them). Anyway, on the last flight I was actually awake for the safety briefing. I normally fall asleep as soon as I get on the plane. Anyway this airline's instructions to inflate the life vest were “put finger in ring and pull towards front.” I'm pretty sure I got this right as it normally says to pull the tab sharply downwards. Never anything about a ring or pulling towards the front.

The trouble is I spent the rest of the flight trying to figure out who's ring you're supposed to put your finger into. Does one put one's finger in one's own ring or do you share the love? It did occur to me that perhaps the adopted crash position held the answer to the question and you were supposed to poke the person in front of you like some weird kind of conga line. Thankfully we didn't crash so it didn't matter.

As many of you that read this site know, I've got myself a van so that I can go fishing back in the UK. Now it's painted up, I'm ready to go!

Can you spot the punchline coming

So I was on a trip this week where I had to fly out to Houston on Wednesday for a meeting there on Thursday before heading back to Portland before going home. Well, the first leg of the journey, I ended up on a flight sat next to a guy that flew all over the country judging dairy cows.

Telegraphing the punchline

I have to say, he was quite interesting to talk to. Certainly different from the normal silence or someone in a similar consulting position as yourself. Anyway, he had to do some work, so he pulled up pictures of cows on his laptop and was walking through them. Each time one of the flight attendants walked up the isle, he would show them funny pictures to make them laugh - some of them were quite funny - I should have probably got them mailed to me, but there you go.

And here it is

Given that he was showing photos, I showed him a picture of Karen .... apparently she would have placed fourth!

Ever since I started fishing I’ve had my sights set on hitting the magic ton (100lb of fish in a day). It used to be that I thought I was going to do it in Ireland. There are many an angling tale of people tonning up on the Emerald Isle .... but most of them are fabrications of the truth. The best I achieved was 56lb, but also had another day of 50lb. I’ve actually done that back in England in a few places here and there. That said, I’ve not really thought about it in a while, just go out and try to catch what I can and see where it goes.

I had a reasonable start to the holiday, catching a few fish at the local lakes. The best being a 10lb mirror carp from Fulbeck. We were staying away at Westwood Lakes in Boston for the weekend. I fished on Friday afternoon and had what I believed to be about 90lb of fish until I snapped my landing net handle bringing in a 12lb ghost carp. (No harm done to the fish – it came in safe and sound, but it did mean more kit). I fished a match on Saturday and didn’t do that great (40lb which is normally a good day, but nowhere near what I needed). On the Sunday, the lake was almost full, but I got back on the peg I fished the first day. Spent the whole day working the nearside margins on both sides of me. Fished a pole with 12 elastic – 8lb main to a 7lb. My conservative estimate is that I did 137lb of fish, but it may have been over 150lb. I weighed the heavier fish as I caught them and then applied an average to what was left. Here's the breakdown of the 60 fish:

Barbel (22)
(Average 2.5lb - fish from 0.75 to 5lb)
20 x 2.5 = 50lb
 1 x   8 =  8lb
 1 x  10 = 10lb

Bream (10)
(Average 3lb - fish from 2lb to 4lb)
 8 x   3 = 24lb
 2 x   7 = 14lb

Carp (6)
(Average 2lb - fish from 0.25lb to 4lb)
 3 x   2 =  6lb
 1 x   5 =  5lb (Ghost)
 1 x   5 =  5lb (Common)
 1 x   5 =  5lb (Mirror)

Tench (1)
 1 x   5 =  5lb

Roach and Skimmers (21)
(Average 0.25lb - fish from 2oz to 1lb)
21 x .25 =  5lb (rounded down)

Total
60 fish for 137lb

The stand outs in that lot are obviously the two big barbel and the bream, although I'm rather pleased with the lonely tench. Just something about them I like even if they do cover your line in slime. Also interesting that the carp family paid a visit as I seemed to manage to get quite a variety in. The tally of fish was actually kept by my mum who sat and read a book whilst my dad and brother played golf. Pretty good day in all.

There were a couple of noteworthy's from the previous session, namely a 7lb barbel and a 12lb ghost carp. (I did actually catch a 7lb barbel in the match as well - seemed they liked me).

And just to finish up, the mirror carp from Fulbeck.

I've been pondering the decision as to whether to buy a GoPro or not and have finally succumbed to their mass marketing and got one. It arrived a couple of days ago and I thought I'd try it out yesterday. If anyone doesn't know, a GoPro is a very small video camera that is used to record high speed sports. They come in waterproof containers so they can do surf boarding, wind surfing, mountain biking ... you get the picture. They're often used in cars or on motorbikes which is why you get to see all those crash videos on YouTube. I bought mine for a multitude of reasons, not least of which is fishing, particularly given the small size etc.

Anyway, so I figured I'd give it a spin as I was working down in San Jose so used a suction cup to mount it to my car. Figure out the suction cup doesn't work on the dash, but great on the winDSCreen. Remembered to go into the setup and change the camera to operate upside down and away you go. Now, these are small functional cameras build with size and portability in mind, so the camera itself doesn't come with a screen. You can connect with a mobile phone (which I did) that will show you what the camera sees and you can turn it on off and change settings etc.

Off I popped down San Jose and was quite surprised as to how much was going on around me. I had a random driver holding his dog out the window with sunglasses on, a car come screaming by me closely followed by one belonging to the California Highway Patrol. The patrol car won ... something about flashing lights must make the car go faster ....

On the way back, changed battery and set off again. Very boring drive back, nothing happened, but you can't win them all.

Suffice it to say that when I pulled the files off the camera I found an excellent video of the drive back, but only a photograph of my garage door before leaving. Somehow I had taken a picture on the way down instead of starting the video and ended up missing anything of any interest whatsoever.

Better luck next time ... assuming I don't just put it in a drawer and end up not using it. Time will tell.

So, I find myself alone with William as Karen is traveling for work and I thought I'd try my hand at shopping at the supermarket. Now, I've done this before several times and I do remember strange things happening. Memories of gibbering in the corner due to not understanding some seemingly unwritten rules on how to shop and what to do with trolley etc.

This time was no exception.

I will actually say that the whole shopping experience went quite smoothly, but then again, I only got 5 items. So I went to pay. First thing I noticed is that there aren't any people on the checkout. I knew this existed in the express lane, but not in the others. Even though I only had 5 items I decided to go to a full lane as I had a trolley. Beeped everything through, paid for it fine, bagged it and popped it back into the trolley and off I went.

I noticed this odd rustling behind me as I made my way to the car. What appears to have happened is that I had bagged my goods and not fully detached the bag from the others and had created a plastic bag chain sort of thing. Ever seen those picture of women that have toilet paper stuck down their nickers and have left a trail behind them. Well, kind of the same thing.

Looking on the bright side, we now have a lot of bin/trash liners.

I'm really not one for politics, but I can't help reading all the news around Baroness Thatcher. It seems there's a big split between those who admired her and those that couldn't wait to celebrate her death. One thing's for sure, she's struck an emotional chord with many people who will remember her long after her death.

At the end of the day, that's probably the biggest tribute to a politician as it means they made a difference and I don't think anyone would disagree with that. I'm not sure who it was that first said when they were asked if it worried them the number of people that booed them, responded, the only thing I worry about is hearing silence. It's certainly something that applies to Kyle Busch ..."you know who I am".

I bet this is the only article that mentions Margaret Thatcher and Kyle Busch together!

I will say that I thought the interview with Tony Blair that I heard on the radio was incredibly good at giving praise to someone who, from a political standpoint, has a number of opposing views. My position, if anyone really cares, is that I think she made an overall positive difference even if I didn't agree with everything she did. That said, I generally don't agree with everything any politician does.

The one thing I will say is that I'm in complete awe as to what she achieved. There's a lot written about her humble upbringing as the daughter of a Graham shopkeeper and how she made it to the top of, what was then, a mama world. To become one of the most powerful political figures in the world. I have to admire her success.

R.I.P.

I'll be honest straight off the bat and say that I first saw this video on Tosh.O, but I found myself going back to it because there are just so many things in the video that make me laugh. Including the song itself that I oddly found myself humming away. You can play the game of how many things can you see that are just plain wrong, but you get to a very high number very quickly and you're best just giving up on that one.

(Original video removed due to account suspension)

I will admit that I'm somewhat disappointed though. I do a lot of traveling to Texas and I could have swung by. Where was my invite for the party?

If you're interested the song is “Quack Like a Duck” by “GOAT and your Mom” But I don't think we'll be seeing it top the charts anytime soon.

Not sure whether this whole thing is scripted, but I still found it funny.

Going to be honest, I've often wondered what it must be like to be one of the top drivers on the road knowing that you could put anyone into the wall with minimal damage to your own car. Must be tempting every time you get cut up on the freeway.

When two things you love come together, what can go wrong? Famous last words I'm sure, but we will reserve judgement for a couple of months as in May, Iron Maiden are to release a beer. Sad as it is, I'll have to buy a couple of crates just to see what it tastes like ... let's face it, it's going to take a couple of crates to decide if it's good or not. I imagine it's going to come at a premium price as well, but what do you expect these days?

Iron Maiden's Trooper Beer.

I figured I'd try out my new art talents - bit of sketching mixed with some water color work. Did a quick one of William playing on the xBox.


There may have been a slight trick to this ... but that's for me to know!

This blog was very close to being called “Mr O's lucky escape” as I toyed with the idea of bringing my new shorts to Vegas, but elected not to. So, for the first time in 27 years I bestowed my legs upon the world. One of the things that makes me laugh is that I actually worried about what color socks to wear. And even tried on both white and black before electing to chose black. The fact that I look like a complete tool regardless of the socks is completely irrelevant, but it felt like that might be the icing on the cake sort of things, so I tried on both pairs and solicited William's feedback. He did find it rather amusing that I was wearing shorts as he'd never seen me wear them before.

The reason I elected not to call it Mr O's lucky escape is because I did wear a bum bag (a.k.a. fanny pack) around Vegas. Basically I've come to terms with the fact that I'm going to look like a cock regardless of what I wear, so it really doesn't matter.

The pictures were taken with a 10 second timer and yes, I was trying to find an appropriate pose. Thought it might add to the knob factor ... but not the Sainsbury knob cheese that Owen found.

It's one thing to lose your AAA credit rating, but seriously, have things got so bad that you'll eat anything?

Trust Mr O to find this wonderful picture.

Today's biology lesson is about testicles. Quite amazing things really, but I've been focused on their ability to self regulate their temperature. Everybody knows the old excuse about coming out of cold water making everything shrink and that's because they try to crawl back into your stomach where it's nice and warm so they can keep at their optimal temperature. It's like the old testes have a draw sting similar to the one you have with window blinds to lift them up and down, they pull them up to get back into the stomach. However, it's the opposite that I've been focused on this last week.

I've had a pretty gnarly fever of over a hundred for a few days due to an infection (that thankfully appears to be gone now). If the old testes have a draw sting that they use to pull themselves up into the stomach, mine have let it out to hang out with my knees for a while due to the temperature I've been running. It's like their down there just chilling out, sunglasses on, sipping a cocktail from a coconut and relaxing in a big old wrinkly hammock.

It's almost freaky though as you kind of have your regular hang level and when you see it somewhat different, it catches you off guard a bit. I found myself automatically cupping them and sort of thinking “hey buddies, you guys OK hanging out all the way down there? .... don't want you to snap nothing or anything like that.” Obviously that's not going to happen, but the thought does occur.

Anyway, as I said, everything back to the same old same old and probably a bit of TMI, but hey!

Trying to get back into the habit of writing a bit more of what's going on, particularly when it's interesting ... well, maybe slightly interesting as a passing remark. I was up in Chicago at the beginning of this week and it just seems that every time I go there something happens - had to fly back and go straight into hospital just over a year ago. Last time I went I was diverted to Des Moines and when I finally got in, I only lasted a day before I had to fly out again (was supposed to be there for a week) due to a need at a client.

This time the being there went without a hitch, it was the leaving. My flight took off, then started shaking a bit and the captain made an announcement that the landing gear was stuck down and that we had to return to Chicago as opposed to carrying on to Dallas. Presumably we made an emergency landing as we were greeted by the fire trucks and ambulances that chased us to the end of the runway until we confirmed that we were OK. Now, I don't profess to being an aeronautical engineer by any stretch of the imagination, but I do know that of the two positions landing gear can get stuck in, down is definitely the one I prefer to hear about. The landing was fine .... which you can probably guess as I'd probably not be writing this otherwise.

Anyway, trundled off to the second plane. Next thing there's an announcement that there's a mechanical issue on that. Off to another gate for a third plane that did eventually get us to Dallas. Well, half of us - not sure what happened to the others - either frightened off or they got another flight. Minor problem though as I only got to my hotel at 2:00am and had to be up at 5:30 to go to a client and deliver a presentation. And not just any presentation, a sales presentation to a new client. Thankfully that went fine thanks to an excellent team, so off to return as had to get back to the Bay Area.

We drove to Dallas Love Field to drop off one of the guys who was also heading out, then went to lunch and then to DFW to drop me off. I have no idea why, but I checked my phone when I was curbside to look at the flight information. I really don't know why I did this, but it turned out I was booked to head back to San Francisco which is fine except for the fact that my car was in Oakland as that's where I'd left from. A call to my trusty assistant who admitted a boo boo, discussed a couple of options and decided to get a flight into Oakland .... from Dallas Love Field. Drove back over to that airport and tried to check in and the machine was having none of it. Back on the phone with my assistant how had now got me on the right flight, but the wrong day. Another quick change later and I'm on the right flight.

Everything from here went smooth. I did fall asleep waiting for my plane and woke up as they were boarding, so there was a close call there I suppose, but all was good.

It's interesting .... I've always been Mr Skeptical, particularly when it comes to urban myths or legends, stories that seem just a little bit too unbelievable. Notable ones where when we used to go fishing over in Ireland, there were rumors that folks from Germany were stealing pike to smuggle back and eat. Similarly, there are stories of the people from Eastern Europe that have come to England taking carp from the fisheries to eat. I've always taken these with a pinch of salt.

However .... the most ridiculous story of similar theme was when I first came to the States. There was actually a news item from a concerned group of one description or other over the safety of mustangs. The wild horses that is, not the cars. The news article commented that people from the UK were coming to the States and killing horses to take back to England and eat. I can't remember if it was claimed it was a delicacy or not, but I scoffed at such a thought .... for one thing, I could possibly see that you could get a pike into a cooler to smuggle back, but I wasn't quite getting my head around how you would get a dead horse onto a plane. Suddenly I feel stupid for not giving the report more credibility given the amount of horse meat that seems to be being sold in the UK as beef right now.

Perhaps I need to be a bit more like my brother who believes every story he's told.

I would say Vegas or bust, but I'm going with Mr O .... or the Big OC as he was advertising himself as at the darts. Tickets are booked to the 2013 NASCAR race, so we're about all set to head out there give or take the minor details of flights and hotels, but that's something we can address in a couple of weeks.

I've just created the framework for this year's race game and you can now register for 2013 NASCAR season. A more formal notification will come out when the drivers have been named so you can create your team and do your picks for the first race at the same time.

Believe it or not, this is a video to promote DC shoes even though the shoes only get about 10 seconds of air time. I'm also not 100% behind the logic of using car being driven to advertise shoes, but this is one amazing video so who cares? The first part of this video from the Bay Bridge to just before he circles the cable cars is my commute into work. Clearly he chose to shoot this whilst I was on vacation otherwise you'd have seen me sneak by on the inside on the freeway off ramp. Seriously ... well, a little bit more seriously, I've looked at that off ramp and wondered if you could take a car sideways all the way around it - it almost seems built for it. Clearly the answer is yes although I shan't be trying it anytime soon.

Gotta give a lot of credit for having Travis on the bike, but hats off to Ken for some pretty stylish driving.

Somewhat late in posting this completely irrelevant post, but it's sort of a continuation of my luck with taxi drivers. During my last visit to Houston, I ended up in a taxi back to the airport which was sort of interesting. It kind of started when I noticed the TV in the cab and asked what it was for. Not a flat screen display, a full 14 inch tube type TV. Initially I was told this was to play videos for the passengers.

Time passed and I ended up getting the life story of the driver that seemed to be full of ups and downs. To keep a long story somewhat short, he'd split up from his wife and seemed to be trying to get me to agree with him that it was all her fault ... yep ... and then you get halfway to the airport and you realize that the TV is in the cab because that's where the driver is living ... hmmm. Next we find that he thinks he's a music star and has created a CD with the song “ain't no drama with President Barrack O'Bama”. But oh no. Just creating it isn't enough when you've got a captive audience. How joyed I was to listen to this track that may or may not have had more lyrics in it, but all I can remember is a continuous repeat of the title.

So, you're in a cab with a homeless guy, completely down on his luck. He then started to ask me how I ended up needing walking sticks and then says “whenever I think I've got it bad, I see someone like you and realize it could be worse ...”

Way to make me feel on top of the world.

So, I'm heading off to Laguna Seca Raceway this weekend as I've been invited down to watch a friend of a friend race ... not that I really need much of an excuse. Anyway, did a quick search on Google maps and found the directions somewhat interesting towards the end. I'm rather looking forward to this drive.


Yes, I did re-run the map and start from a generic place rather than my home address.

I was rather hoping for a different symbol on the right to represent the corkscrew.

I find myself back in Tombstone some three years or so since we visited on the road trip. This time I'm with the wife and my little partner pictured below.
The age old question of why Doc Holiday's girl was known as Big Nose Kate springs to mind. On the stage coach tour, they gave us the now common answer that it wasn't because she had a big nose, but was in fact due to her sticking her nose into everyone else's business.

The working theory that we have is somewhat different and, as I understand it, stems from hours of drinking research in The Stag. We now believe that she was called Big Nose Kate ... because her name was Kate.

Oddly no Americans seem to find this funny.

Today, everything aligns and the answer to all of the above is indeed 42.

I believe the answer to the answer (42) is that it is the age when the number of birthday cards/wishes you get from corporations exceeds the number you get from friends.

So many thanks to all the airline, credit card, insurance, pizza, coffee .... companies for all the birthday wishes and offers. Particularly those enticing me to go into debt on my birthday - nice thought with those special low interest rates.

To my friend s  - cheers mate. See ya soon.

There comes a time when we need to sit down and talk about fannies. And that time is now. I think you've been with us long enough that we can have a good open and honest chat. The first thing about fannies is that the differ considerably depending on which side of the pond you reside. One could indeed say that the difference is a front or rear perspective on an opening. Well, it's not the opening that we're interested in today, more the valley. And the larger question of what does one do when they find themselves in Fanny Valley?

I have absolutely no idea what the answer to this question is, but I do find myself well and truly in Fanny Valley. Let me explain. I've just signed up for this wonderful service provided by Google where you can look at stats about your website. It's predominantly focused on helping you manage your site and to enable you to improve it in search ratings and the like, so of relatively no use to me for this site as I have absolutely no concern about what are the key words that give the most hits for this site as I'm not trying to generate any revenue from it. Very helpful from a management perspective as it tells you things like if there are broken links and which pages those links are coming from. Even though I'm not trying to generate any revenue, I still want the site to work.

OK .... so where on earth am I going and what does this have to do with fannies or fanny valley's. Well, the one thing the tool does is to tell you where your site is linked from and for some absolutely unknown reason to me I have a page linked from WikiWorldBook under “Fanny Valley”. Don't believe me? Here's the link. You have to look carefully as it's a bird picture they've linked.

The one thing that keeps coming to mind is whether or not this is a place in Wales.

It's been a while since I've posted any of my wisdom about traveling to any random stranger out there that happens across this blog. Mainly because I've not been too well, so went through a bit of a period with no travel. Also, I'll caveat that there aren't actually any pearls of wisdom here, just stories.

So, the first story is from last year when I was traveling back from one of the cities I've been going to a lot. Before I get to the story, I need to fill you in on a conversation that a team I was working on had a few years back that can be best described as “you know you're too fat when ...” There was much discussion and I have to admit that I'm in danger of moving into this category, but the main theme was around the belt extensions you get on a plane - the gist being that if you need to ask for one, it's probably about time to look at some diet options. Anyway, I think I can go one better. Not sure if everyone knows, but if you touch the sides of the metal detector when you walk through, you set it off. Well, the woman in front of me waddled through and set off the metal detector as she bounced off the sides of it. The security person informed her that she couldn't touch the sides and she summarily “backed up”, turned sideways and attempted to maneuver through that way. No joy, still touch the sides. I'm therefore going with the quote as being “you know you're too fat when you can't get through the airport security metal detector without setting it off”.

What happens next is that you get the wand and pat down instead. Wouldn't you have just died laughing if the person coming over to do the check said “looks like we're going to have to put in for overtime to do this one”. But they didn't .... sadly.

Onto the next. I've noticed that taxi drivers have no clue where they're going these days and rely solely on GPS. I'm in Houston right now and the taxi I just got, the guy just passed me his GPS system and grunted “address”. I told him I didn't know how to use his system as I really couldn't be bothered to figure it out, so he pulled over to read the address I'd got for the hotel as he couldn't understand it by me saying. He still failed to get the address into the system as he couldn't spell “Houston”. I suggested he move to Seattle where the ability to spell Houston wouldn't be so much of an issue.

OK, last one and this isn't related to travel except that I came across it whilst at the airport. I was looking through some apps on ye olde download store and came across an app for children that had really poor ratings. The app was to teach kids the alphabet sort of thing and the significant number of bad ratings were due to the fact that it claimed E is for Fire Truck. I haven't seen the app and may give the benefit of doubt to the programmer coming from a country where a Fire Truck is referred to as an Engine. I don't know if they spell out the word or not (clearly I didn't opt to download it). I did quite like the fact that one person had posted that when their son asked why is it E for Fire Truck, he replied it's E for Elephant, but the elephant took too long to get here and was overtaken by the Fire Truck.

Another week of seeing more doctors which meant another week of filling out forms for doctors. I know most of these have been done before and I'm pretty sure the secretaries were not very impressed with my creativity, but I did manage to make myself chuckle. Sorry for the bad picture, it's a photograph from part of my form.

I have an app on my phone that allows me to tune in to any internet broadcast radio ... pretty common, there are several around. I bought a cable to connect my phone to the car speakers so I could listen to it on the way to the airport. Thought I'd listen to a bit of Radio 5 from the BBC - maybe catch up on some sports. The first thing that's interesting is that I can't play music from my phone through the bluetooth connection to the speakers - something about the bluetooth only being rated for calls and not stereo sound. Quick fix for a couple of bucks is a cable that goes from the phone headset socket to the stereo auxiliary input socket. Bob's your uncle.

Alright, so we're all wired up. Kick off the app and open Radio 5 ... only to find that they were broadcasting American Football from the NFL. I wouldn't have had any interest in listening to it anyway, but the ironic thing is that it's blocked from being broadcast in America. I know it's all due to franchise rights and all that, but it makes me laugh to think that Americans block the broadcast of American Football.

So I listened to Radio 4 Extra instead and was very pleasantly surprised to listen to an episode of “Take it From Here” about “The Scarlet Pimple” that was originally broadcast around 1956. And I have to say - extremely funny!

So, the NASCAR season is over for another year and yet again I reign victorious! After a somewhat edgy start, I don't think it was really in doubt as I picked my way through the winners in the 2011 NASCAR Race Competition.

I will again congratulate Tony Stewart on his fantastic run in the chase and his victory in the actual championship. It is interesting to note that he won five races this season, all of which were in the chase, and I was the only one who picked him to win a race all year ... thankfully on one of the races he won. And I only picked him to win once. Although most people gave up on this fantasy game, I do think it is slightly interesting as I don't think anyone really thought Smoke was going to do it until he crossed the finish line at Homestead. I think this is probably true of a lot of fans as you kind of were waiting for something to happen to him. Edwards was always going to be the pace setter and has to be disappointed with ending up second ... on the tie breaker. I have him with an average finishing position of less than 10 (9.31 to be exact) for the entire season which is amazing consistency ... but ... it's about the wins and at the end of the day, that's what Tony had.

And now back to me. Actually, I can't say I picked the most winners this season as that honor belongs to Karen. I think I just ended up with less crash and burn picks.

Now for next season - the computer is going to get an upgrade. Rather than randomly picking from the entire list of entrants, the computer is going to employ a lot more logic in its picks and promises to be a more formidable opponent.

Guess it's Thanksgiving, then Christmas, then time to plan the Phoenix and Vegas races.

So, I just landed in Burbank and was supposed to be picking up a car because I have to scoot round SoCal tomorrow. Starting in Passedina and ending up in Orange County. It's been a long time since I've rented a car as I've either been in taxis or been with someone else who's got a car. In fact, it's probably been five years or so.

Anyway, got to the rental car desk and was providing my details. They said that they saw I was going to be dropping the car off in Orange County and I said yes ... as well as the car having hand controls. On account of the fact that I need hand controls on a car to drive it.

Oh!

What do you mean Oh?

To keep a long story short, they didn't think they'd been notified, then they went into the record and said that the hand controls had been put into the remarks field and not the comments field. The remarks field doesn't print out on the site when they are prepping the cars blah blah blah.

Interestingly, I'm thinking - why is this my problem - the booking was made correctly, it's an internal error. Then I looked around and realized I was stuck at the airport with no car, so it probably was my problem. Anyway, I've made it to the hotel as they kindly drove me here. We're going to play a game of tag tomorrow. They're going to try and get a car ready in the morning and then bring it to me. I told them I have a 7.30 meeting so need the car by 7.00 and found out that was not possible. I've managed to get someone who I'm working with to pick me up from the hotel and take me to the first client I'm at. I've also reached out to someone else to see if they can come and get me and take me to the second client I need to get to for lunch about an hour and a half away. The rental car company are going to call me on my mobile when they are ready so they can find out where I am and deliver the car to me. Why do I get the feeling that they'll end up driving it to Orange County and handing it back in for me? It'll be amusing if that happens and I get billed for it.

So .... I got a note the other day from my cable TV service provider telling me that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was doing their first ever test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) on November 9th at 2.00 Eastern. Basically, there's a hooked up system where FEMA can send a message out over the TV and Radio stations if they ever need to let the population know there's an emergency.

Now, before we get into it, I will say that this system is extremely valuable as it is used regionally for alerts such as bad weather or, I do remember once, hearing an alert put out with the make, color and license plate of a car that had been used to kidnap a child.

But that said, an alert going out on TV and Radio ..... seriously? As opposed to sending out network wide text messages on the mobile phone networks and/or a system wide message on Twitter and Facebook. We have a TV, but we don't watch it. We record all the shows we like and play them back so we can skip through all the commercials. We only ever listen to the radio on the drive into work, so it's pretty unlikely that I'd get this emergency message if it were put out there and I'm pretty sure there's many people in similar situations. I'm just thinking that a nationwide emergency alert would need to be pretty serious and I'd have thought you'd want it to get to as many people as possible.

Follow that up with the fact that they are putting a lot of effort into telling people this test is coming as there are communications problems with the equipment in place. The hope is that they can change the message in most cases to say something like “this is a test” but in other cases, they aren't able to make the change and it will say “this is an emergency”. Ah ha! In order to combat this, they can overlay the visual message with sound and those people that see the emergency message will hear someone saying this is a test ..... but what about the deaf and hard of hearing? Well, they're hoping that people in the communities will tell them this test is going to happen and that they shouldn't worry ...... but they are working on updating the communications equipment.

Back to my earlier point of using modern communications means to get the message out. I would think the message would spread quicker if it were posted on the social media sites. In fact, you could argue that there's already been a test of the EAS when the Phillies fans heard about the death of Osama Bin Laden during the Phillies-Mets game and started chanting “U.S.A! U.S.A!” whilst holding up their phones with the news on them. I could suggest that FEMA put together a video of a cat singing about the emergency and posting it on YouTube as that would likely go viral faster than the news would spread through TV.

I was filling my car up with petrol the other day and noticed the Google Camera Car pass by. I just looked on the Google Maps Street View and found myself filling up at the local Chevron station. I'm somewhat obscured by the post, but there aren't many people with Challengers filling up at that station and it's obviously me.

Here's the link, but I'm not sure how long I'll be on there as I'm sure they're constantly updating the site. Google Rag

And here are some screenshots for when the actual images online of me go.

This was a video played on a course I just attended. I found it very interesting so thought I'd share. Would probably have rather seen the facts in the middle be about facebook as opposed to myspace, but I guess the video got outdated by the time it was released.

(Unfortunately the video is no longer available https://youtu.be/4TKbIidbyhk)

Interesting the things you come across when you end up randomly browsing the Internet. I was doing a quick search to see how many birding species there are in the UK on the basis that I thought it would be similar to the US. But I was wrong. There are apparently over 10,000 species in the world. Nearly 1,000 in North America and about 550 in the UK. These number vary a bit depending on which site you go to which is why I've been a little vague in the numbers. Anyway, one of the sites referenced a “Sammy the Black Winged Stilt” which apparently lived at Titchwell from 1995 for some period of time .... then further down the list, someone mentioned that there was a YouTube tribute to Sammy .... and one thing leads to the other and next thing you know you're watching some random video .... so I thought I'd share.

.... Oh! I had toast for breakfast this morning.

(Unfortunately the video is no longer available https://youtu.be/OSpy9TnTftw)

Yet again, I appear to have been caught out by the old “more than one airport in a city” gag. This time the honor belongs to Chicago, last time it was Houston. Now, I've just arrived and that means that I did indeed go to the right airport on the basis that the plane took me there. The problem is that I arranged to meet a colleague here to travel to the hotel together, but he went to a different airport. In fairness, I figured out on the flight over that there were two airports and I did a search when I landed to see that there were no direct flights from San Jose to Chicago Midway which likely meant he was going to the other airport. I think he also figured it out too and there was no harm done, it just seems that I've fallen foul of this a couple of times now.

OK, moving on, one thing that amused me was that there was an announcement for a “Richard Balless” to report to customer service. And I always thought a dick and balls came together.

I suppose this was bound to happen sooner or later given the amount of traveling I've been doing recently ..... And in the interest of public service, here are the tips from me lessons learned.

1. If you're going to a city with more than one airport, take note of which one you're flying from. Arguing with a ticketing agent (or ticketing machine as it is these days) doesn't get you anywhere and they won't produce a plane just for you if you are at the wrong airport. At least the good news is that I didn't have time to check in online, otherwise I'd have probably queued at security before I'd realized I was in the wrong place.

2. Taxi drivers can be incentivized to get you to your destination in time. Even after you've been told you can't make it. About $20 does the trick.

3. Make sure you really want to be in a taxi with an incentivized driver. Be prepared for lots of horn sounding and creative use of pavements/sidewalks etc. On the bright side, this can help with a fear of flying. You'll be so scared from the drive that the thought of the plane crashing is actually rather relaxing.

I have to say, this was the closest I've been to missing a plane and still catching it, which was good as it was the last flight out and I would have been stranded for the night. I've missed a couple in the past, but have always managed to hop on the next one.

I'm feeling a little bit upset with Microsoft right now. The computer I use at home for the TV, this webserver and my home email server was running Vista and I upgraded it to Windows 7 in order to accommodate a new TV tuner that required the updated operating system.

I bought the upgrade and performed the install a few months back and everything was fine and dandy.

Then ... the hard disk crashed. No idea what happened to it, but it wont read and I (still) can't seem to mount it (computer won't boot when it's attached). Annoying, but these things happen. So, I switched some drives around and then re-installed the operating system.

Now here's the kicker. I used the Windows 7 upgrade disk to install the operating system given that this is what I need on the machine. No problems with the install, loaded perfectly without any issues.

And everybody lived happily ever after .... at least for 30 days anyway.

A message pops up on the screen telling me I don't have a valid license for the operating system. I enter the license and it tells me it's an upgrade license and not a clean install license. OK - makes sense, but I can enter the Vista key and then the W7 key .... hmmm, no way to do this, so phone the help desk.

The help desk was incredibly unhelpful, although I'm not necessarily going to blame the individual I was talking to as they're working within the bounds they're told to. The result was to tell me that I have to install Vista first and then install the upgrade on top as I only have an upgrade license. Now, the fun part is that I'd thrown away the Vista recovery disks thinking I'd no longer need them. I explained this to the person I was talking to and they told me I had to go back to the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and get the Vista disks from them.

I will give credit where credit's due - HP provided me with excellent service for the machine and sent me the recovery disks and we're now up and running fine (after re-installing Vista and then upgrading to W7 - what a memorable weekend that was).

Microsoft .... not so much. I find it hard to believe that I couldn't validate my license keys and get something that would work for the machine. There's no piracy going on here - I'm trying to use a product that I have a valid license for and I have to go through this ridiculous procedure of re-installing one operating system and then upgrading the next.

I've got quite a number of Microsoft products form Operating Systems to XBoxes. I keep getting told to look at Linux and the Playstation. Maybe it's time to listen.

Wow!! I've just caught up with the Premier League results and I have to say I'm somewhat shocked. That was a real trousers and pants down, let's get out the paddle and administer a thorough spanking. Man United 8 Arsenal 2. I haven't seen any interviews, but my guess is the only thing Wenger could say is “please sir, may I have another.”

I know there have been some big results like Spurs 9-1 thrashing of Wigan, but that's Wigan and they don't have the resources of Arsenal. Also, full credit to Wigan for taking the thrashing and then bouncing back - at least not letting it destroy the team. Being a Leicester fan, you have to take your beatings every now and then. They're going to happen - just move on and focus on the games you can win. But this is Arsenal. A team that's used to sending the message, not receiving it.

Based on the little I see, it seems as if Arsene's plan is to sign younger and lesser known players as opposed to Chelsea and Manchester City that seem to want to compete over who can spend the most money. Maybe I can get William signed up to play for them next week .... he couldn't do any worse.

Why am I sat at the airport (Phoenix) listening to some muppet give directions on how to get to the gate? Literally, this guy's on a phone talking to someone else describing the walk down the concourse and what bars/restaurants the gate is near. Next he says “I'll stand in the concourse and maybe you'll be able to see me”

We're at gate A5!

It's easily identified. It's got an f'ing great sign above marked A5. It's between gates A3 and A7, opposite A6. Obviously the gate designation system the airport came up with is not adequate enough. Gates can only be identified by a frantically waiving muppet in the middle of the concourse.

Maybe I'm just a bit stressed. Maybe it's a good job I'm going on holiday this week .... provided I can find the gate to that plane.

I've been traveling round the country staying in a different hotel more or less every day. Last night I got in from Dinner, took the elevator up to my floor and stood there staring as I couldn't remember which room I was in. I'm actually quite impressed I remembered the floor. Anyway I thought there must be some top tips to learn from this traveling and I thought ... ah yes, there's a good one from that morning that resulted in a nasty mishap. Today's traveler's tip is:

Don't leave you hemorrhoid cream next to your toothbrush at night.

On the positive side, I did have minty fresh farts all day long.

And here was me thinking that EastBayRag was my only claim to fame. I was doing some research on places to go for a trip in the UK and what birding opportunities there were and came across this excellent site:

Fatbirder

I feel that it was written with myself in mind.

It's very sad, but we're now starting to recognize a number of people at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. We seem to be becoming part of the furniture. We were, however, very pleased to see that Uncle Jesse once again made it out to the races.

As most people know, I've traveled to Phoenix to watch the NASCAR race there before heading off to Vegas to do the same next weekend. At the Nationwide race on Saturday, Mr O and I made new friends.

Buzz and his mate.

Buzz and his mate came from Bristol Tennessee and were very proud of it. Buzz took my phone number so he could send me a picture of the bus he and his mate were traveling round in. Interestingly, when I stored the number, it automatically filed it under “work number” which I think might be a stretch. It seems that they are traveling round the West Coast in a big red bus supporting Montoya. They had confessed to squatting in the seats they were occupying and I think it's safe to say this isn't part of a corporate entertaining package.

After getting acquainted with Buzz and his buddy, we agreed to look out for them in Vegas. His friend had suggested that Buzz send a photo of Sandy to us in order to convince us to look out for them. This photo promised quite a lot as Sandy, apparently, was “happy to get her tits out.” Interestingly, on further reflection (and confirming that we did indeed like tits), the friend suggested that Buzz not send a photo of Sandy, but in fact to send a picture of Anita on account of the fact that “she's got bigger tits!”

I can't do the accent in a blog post and I've only just scratched the surface of the intense, deep and meaningful conversation that we struck up with our new soul mates. I do hope we bump into them at Vegas as it would be good to continue the discussion. To be honest, it'd be quite nice to see Sandy and/or Anita, but I'm not sure Karen would be too happy about that. I'm not sure why she'd be jealous though as I'm sure she's got more teeth than the pair of them.

On a semi serious note, it would be good to bump into them again. We have a picture of the big red bus (just in case the description wasn't enough).

So it seems as if Halo has once again taken over a significant portion of my life. I have to be honest that they've done a really good job with Reach and made the multiplayer very exciting given how much you can customize it. Anyway, was poking around on one site or other and came across this video that I have to say is pretty well put together and you have to respect the talent with the sniper.



I'm also fascinated by the end and the badges that they created. Extermination has to be the hardest award to get (kill all four openents yourself within 4 seconds so they have none on the field and you get an overkill award). Has to be the hardest ..... or is it?

Well, I don't get any marks for style and there's a lot of luck, particularly with the player who came up the stairs and walked into my grenade, but here you go.



I call this:

“Anything you can do, I can do .... well, with a lot of luck!”

“Bring on the teenagers, there's still life in this old dog yet!”

“Getting the lead back in style”

I need to start by congratulating Jimmie Johnson, Chad Knaus and the 48 Lowes team for winning their fifth NASCAR championship title in a row. We've run the NASCAR race game for 10 weeks through the chase and it's pretty obvious that it's almost impossible to predict the winner each week. In fact, the most anyone got right in any one week was two correct picks. I did manage to pick 8 of the top 10 in one week with all of my 10 picks being inside the top 12 which was pretty good, but on the whole, most picks only resulted in about 6 of the top ten with many people regularly having picks finishing worse than 30th. I mention this because it goes to show how tight the competition is. This isn't one of those competitions where the same person/team wins week on week which makes Jimmie Johnson's achievement even more unbelievable. A lot can be said about the fact that the team is stable with Chad Knaus and the Lowes sponsorship having been there throughout these championships, but is it really that stable? The entire pit crew was swapped out during the Texas race. I think you've just got to look at the talent for what it is.

So, to the race game. Congratulations to me for finishing on top of the 2010 NASCAR Chase Race leader board. For those of you who weren't playing, the note I sent out had words in it to the effect of me having invented a game that nobody else is interested in and I've won, now declaring myself the world champion. It would appear that my integration into American society is all but complete.

I'm happy to take any criticism around the fact that I picked the same drivers as Owen in the last week to make sure I won. Playing the player and not the game maybe, but it got the results. I did actually write down what I would have picked and it would have made little difference. I would have scored 40 points instead of 10 which would have still meant I won the overall competition, but wouldn't have won the last week regardless. Anyway, I have to get off to party with the San Francisco Giants as world champions!

Apologies for the dark photo, but it was taken at night with a cell phone. The name of this place did cause my mind to wander somewhat. I'm thinking of applying for a job there.

Just to let you know that amongst the re-vamping of the website, I've put up three new videos. You can get to these from the video home page to watch or to download these in full resolution. The three videos are

• William riding his bike
• William using the drinking fountain in the park
• Squirrel on the slinky on my feeder

Enjoy!

It's been a long time since I've added anything to the blog site, so I figured I'd jot down some tips that I've got for picking the selections in the Race Game. Before you read on, however, I guess the big question is whether or not you'd want to follow my advice. Well, I'll leave that one up to you.

I guess we should start at the basics. If you have no idea what you're doing, then you should probably take a quick look at the standings in the Sprint Cup and at least make sure your picks are from the top 25 or so. There are exceptions to this rule, the first being road courses and the second being super speedways. Road courses we can ignore as there aren't any in the 10 chase races. There's one race at Talledega in the chase that's a super speedway and you can still apply these rules - basically a lot of cars wreck in the big races and there's an element of luck about which drivers are left running at the end of the race. The top 27 drivers with the car number they are typically associated with as of writing this are as follows:

Pn	Car#	Driver
1	11	Denny Hamlin
2	29	Kevin Harvick
3	18	Kyle Busch
4	24	Jeff Gordon
5	2	Kurt Busch
6	48	Jimmie Johnson
7	99	Carl Edwards
8	16	Greg Biffle
9	31	Jeff Burton
10	14	Tony Stewart
11	17	Matt Kenseth
12	33	Clint Bowyer
13	39	Ryan Newman
14	1	Jamie McMurray
15	00	David Reutiman
16	42	Juan Montoya
17	5	Mark Martin
18	88	Dale Earnhardt Jr
19	9	Kasey Kahne
20	56	Martin Truex Jr
21	43	AJ Almendinger
22	20	Joey Logano
23	98	Paul Menard
24	6	David Ragan
25	47	Marcos Ambrose
26	12	Brad Keselowski
27	77	Sam Hornish Jr

The second tip is that the race selection isn't locked until just before the race starts. That means you can go to Nascar's website and see how the drivers did in practice and qualifying.

The third is to look at your chase drivers. The top 12 in the list above are the chase contenders. These got there because they've had a good season. Generally one or two of them fall behind, but more often than not you see about 6-8 of the chase drivers finishing in the top 10. It's worth making sure you've at least some of them in there.

If you want to get technical, you can look at track type and distance and match up to the drivers form. Carl Edwards earned the nickname “Concrete Carl” because of his success on concrete tracks. Kyle Busch always seens to run well on the short tracks. Jimmie Johnson is generally there or there abouts on the mile and a half tracks. Although Dale Earnhardt Jr doesn't seem to be as successful as his fans want him to be, he's always a good choice on the super speedways.

Last would be to look at the potential spoilers. Spoilers are the non chase drivers that finish in the top 10. Given that the top 12 drivers are fighting for points, if a non-chase driver finishes ahead of them, then it takes more points away from that chase driver. And there's nothing more that the non chase drivers like than to steal a win and prove a point - they've got to finish the season with something.

A couple of top picks in spoilers are both the Earnhardt Ganassi drivers - Jamie McMurray and Juan Pablo Montoya. Both have won races this year, but both have struggled with consistency - too many DNFs left them wanting for the chase, but they continue to finish well if they make it to the end of the race. Kasey Kahne's probably another one you'd put in that bucket too.

Newman, Truex, Reutimann, Martin and Allmendinger are also good calls. I probably wouldn't go much beyond that for these races, but that's just my thoughts.

I don't know why, but I keep going back to this video, so I thought I'd post it. I think they've really captured the “Rob Green incident” really well.

Karen was out getting her hair cut, so dad was on party duty. Took William to one of his friend's birthday parties - they arranged a trip round a fire station which was pretty cool - don't all kids love fire engines? Then off to the park. I'm reasonably impressed with this picture as it's snapped from my mobile phone.

The other think that was cool was that one of the fireman asked me if he could look round my car whilst the kids looked round the engine. Just boys and toys!

And I thought it was just me. My car has the latest “voice recognition” technology, but it doesn't seem to understand me. I figured it was my accent and that it only understands American. Karen can vouch for the fact that I end up shouting at my car when I need it to do something. I find it rather ironic that it's a “safety feature”. I actually find that when I try and use the voice commands, I end up taking my eyes off the road more to look at the console in the hope that it's going to put something on the screen that hints to it understanding something of what I've asked. In the good old days, you want to call someone, you pick up your phone, dial the number and you're done. In the name of safety, we have a procrastinated process of screeming names at the voice recognition trying different accents to get it to try and understand us.

So, after that quick rant. If I've got problems..... these guys don't stand a chance:

Been a long time since I've posted a blog, I felt I'd share a quick experience with everyone. Hopefully most people will have noticed that it was Easter last weekend. As is the tradition on this day, at least in the US anyway, all the kids go and do an egg hunt.

Stupidly I agreed to go along to the local one that William was participating in. I guess there's a first .... and last for everything. So we trundled up to the location of the egg hunt. Found a parking space and proceeded to make our way into the park. Karen then figured out we were late, which was news to me as I hadn't been aware of a time we were walking towards, so she ran off with William to get him setup. I lost sight of them and proceeded up the hill to the milling crowd on the assumption that this was where the action would take place. My instincts were correct - this was indeed the right location and I was soon reunited with wife and child. My job was to man the camera and take pictures of the little one as he foraged for eggs in the designated area.

The designated area was a rectangle marked with yellow tape. Several next to each other in order to separate the kids. Apparently there were instructions surrounding the event - only kids in the designated area and a six egg maximum. Well, the whistle went and all the parents dived in. Rule number one out the window. In fact, it was too hectic that I didn't even get a photo off. Shortly, William came back as he couldn't find anymore eggs and Karen went in with him and that's when I took this first picture:

So the above is after it had started to calm down. Now, we only found out the rules after the event had completed. Upon returning, I asked William to walk back in and then come back towards me so I could take a picture and you will notice that his “haul” is a little over the six egg limit.

Interestingly, all the above actually took less time to take place than it did to write this article. All the fun was to happen next - bouncy castles, kids playing, parents talking to each other and all that good stuff. Well, so I'm told. I told Karen she could stay as long as she wanted which, surprisingly was about an hour and a half. I went back to my car, switched on the radio and fell asleep listening to it.

Next year, I'm working on cutting out the middle man and simply staying in bed.

I guess I'm about a week or so late posting this, but have had other things to do. Well, if you call playing video games and generally worrying about work given the economy, other things. So, Mr O and myself went to watch a couple of NASCAR races at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana and Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Very exciting for me given that I’m following Juan Pablo Montoya and got to watch his car blow up in Fontana and see his team mate take him out in Vegas…. Hmmmm. Also, can anyone say “five in a row”? Jimmie Johnson managed to win both the Sprint cup races we saw and looks like he’s going to be in the running for another title.

Alright, enough of the sports report and now onto more irrelevant things. It’s difficult to miss the fact that Danica Patrick has entered stock car racing. She’s doing about 12 races in the Nationwide series and I think going full time next season – we’ll have to wait and see. It was pretty apparent that there was a lot of interest in her at the race track. The longest lines were at the #7 Go Daddy stall and there were a lot of people talking about her. She’s a pretty good drive as we’ve seen in Indy Car, but I wouldn’t say out of the ordinary. I was trying to figure out whether the interest in her was because she’s a woman or because she’s an attractive woman and that many people were hoping that they would get lucky if they ever met her. Based on this last premise, I was rather pleased to snap the shot below. Kevin Harvick had just passed Danica to put her a lap down. I was rather pleased with myself for this one as it’s a picture of Danica in the lucky dog position – one I’m sure that many have dreamt about. Now the best thing about this picture is that if you look carefully, you can see a bit of Busch too. (Oh but for school boy humor).

All that pales in comparison, however, if you do an actual search on pictures of Danica. Below is one such example that I found which, is far better to look at than my blurred picture and a couple of double entendres.

Oh well, continuing the theme of irrelevant, I did snap another picture that lends itself to the caption competition. It’s been almost three years since I’ve posted a picture there, so I’m quite pleased I got one. Feel free to take a look and add a caption to the Caption Competition Picture #3.

Last, I’m sure there are thousands of people out there waiting for the photos to be posted. I’ve sort of processed most of them, but lethargy got in the way so you’ll have to wait another week before you get to see these.

Seems a few people I've spoken to haven't seen this, so I figured I'd post it. A fine showing from the British Bobsled team even if I say so myself.

Congratulations have to be given to Jimmie Johnson for winning his fourth consecutive NASCAR championship. Obviously Jimmie's been on the edge of his nerves since his bad luck at Texas - not necessarily worried about whether he was going to bounce back and win his fourth championship, but rather worrying about whether or not he will get recognition from EastBayRag.

Clearly achieving something that has never been done before in the history of your sport is good, but until it's been ratified here, does it really mean anything? Being serious for a minute, however, I am actually pleased for Jimmie, Chad and the 48 Lowes team. Given how close the competition is, this is a very big achievement.

I almost missed this one if it wasn't for hearing a ticket offer on The Bone (local radio station) going into work one morning. Chickenfoot were playing at the Greek Theater in Berkeley (or Bezerkeley as the band were trying to get the place renamed). Chickenfoot's a new band of old heroes - Sammy Hagar, Joe Satriani, Michael Anthony and Chad Smith - all of whom have had distinguished careers on their own. I've heard their music and I really like, so it seemed like a good concert to go to. Found out that one of the guys at work was going, so he decided to sell his ticket and get two more and we went together (well, sat together anyway, we traveled separately).

Interestingly, his single ticket was further back from the stage. Not sure if we just timed it right when there had been some returns, however, we ended up with a couple of seats in row 6 - can't complain at that. In fact, the only thing I can complain about was the walk from where I parked my car - traffic was horrific getting to the venue due to its location in Berkeley and when I got there was told the disabled parking was full and so was the nearest car park. I was somewhat lucky that a space opened up on the street so I only had 4 blocks to hobble instead of 6 from the next nearest parking lot.

Enough grumbling, the show was fantastic. Mark who I was with commented that there wasn't a wasted note in the entire evening and I have to agree with him - it was really impressive. There were a couple of things that really made if for me - the first was that the band themselves were clearly having a lot of fun, Hagar commented a couple of times that he felt like he was the luckiest man alive to be doing what he was doing and there was no reason to doubt him. There was a fantastic dialogue between Sammy and Chad throughout the show with input from Mike. Joe didn't say much, but he doesn't have to - when you can play the guitar that well, you really don't need to say anything.

The second thing was that I've had a desire to catch a drumstick thrown into the crowd ever since I went to my first concert some 27+ years ago (Iron Maiden on March 5th 1982 at Leicester De Montfort Hall, although technically the first band I ever saw would have been The Rods as they were the support at this show). Well, 27 years later and a seat in row 6 and I got lucky enough to catch one of the (many) drumstick's Chad tossed into the crowd. I have to add the “many” comment as Chad did indeed generously impart many drumsticks which did increase my chances of getting one. Never-the-less, it was a clean take (all those year's playing as a goalkeeper not wasted) and given that I only have one free hand, that was pretty cool as there were many fumbles with all the other sticks that were being contested followed by a scramble on the floor to find it.

The only thing I disagreed with during the evening was in the middle of the set when I felt compelled to scream “42 Montoya” at the top of my voice. I doubt he heard me, but Sammy started it when he dedicated the song “Turnin' Left” to “the driver of the number 48 .... Jimmie Johnson.” The song itself makes me laugh as it has a chorus of “we go round in circles” which seems more than appropriate. Don't know if Sammy would have had the chance to see the qualifying results, but Jimmie did make the pole for this weekend's race at the Monster Mile (Dover). And I certainly wouldn't be someone to bet against Jimmie achieving what is now being called “The Chase 4 History”, however, my man Montoya is alongside Jimmie for the start of the race and you know he's going to take the race to Jimmie. Guess we'll see tomorrow who wins on the day, but I suspect we won't know the Champion until we close the season at Homestead, particularly given the number of drivers that have a realistic chance of claiming the title.

I feel moved to report the story that I'm sure everyone has already heard about which is that of the police hunt in Papua New Guineau for the sex cult leader. Apparently the leader of a sex cult promised local villagers a bumper banana crop if they had sex in public. The cult leader avoided capture by using two of his wives as shields before making his escape.

I've searched the web, but can't find any pictures. What I really want to know though is whether he disappeared into the bush?

My latest attempt to get some of the stimulus money has failed! I learned yesterday that the government was doing this cash for clunkers program where they would give you between $3,500 and $4,500 for your old car so you could part exchange if for a new economic vehicle (over 22 mile per gallon - US gallons before you start wondering why the number is low).

I thought this made sense and it was something that I should look into given that the affectionately termed “pile of crap” that I'm driving around in is falling to bits. Well, turns out that my heap of junk doesn't qualify as a clunker. Apparently it should perform at 19 mpg and a qualifying clunker needs to be below 18 mpg. I feel that there should be some kind of appeal process where I can get my turd mobile means tested. One look at it and anyone in their right mind would class it as a clunker, but no.

I guess there's truth in the saying “should have bought a V8” for more reasons than just the power.

A week ago I went to see Whitesnake and Judas Priest in concert. (Either the penny's dropped now or it's not going to).

Get a real job
Anyone ever talk to you about a career when you were at school? I know that's all out the catflap now with Gen Y and the Millennials, but there was some sense of needing to figure out what you wanted to do in your career when I was at school. Far be it for anyone to suggest that you do something flippant like join a rock and roll band. Interesting then that some of these bands have been performing for circa 40 years. It would be interesting to see what the current generation thinks about the fact that these guys have been around doing their stuff for that long ..... particularly in the current economy now the fear has been put into this generation that it is not the employer that is privileged to have them on board, the privileged is for one to have a job.

British Steel
My next interesting contemplation is the fact that Judas Priest fly the banner of “British Steel” based off the heavy metal term. Now, I lived in Sheffield for a few years which is (or was) the home of the British Steel industry. That industry is long gone and I do wonder whether the UK has made more money exporting heavy metal, particularly with groups that led the charge in the 80's NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal). As sad as it may seem, this may actually be true.

The Rebel
Now, during the concert I thought it would be good to stand. Unfortunately, we were at the front of the seating bit and the folks behind us didn't want to. It's hard to explain the layout, but we were the second row of the back bit of seating. I was on the end of the row and next to me was a gap then a 3 to 4 foot high concrete wall for the steps that lead down to the lower level. Being considerate, I got up and walked over to the concrete wall so I could stand and not block anyone's view. Unfortunately, jobsworth didn't see it that way and came over to me to get me to stand in front of my seat. I tried to point out to him the error of his ways, but he was having none of it. There may have been a time in my life that I would have pressed this issue further, but on reflection I guess I'm really just a 40 odd year old chartered account from Leicester ... and not a hard man of rock living life on the edge without a care ..... I returned to my seat quietly and sat down.

Hobo
I lied at the beginning, I'll give one more hint to make the penny drop. I don't understand what's wrong with the word “hobo”? One of Whitesnake's biggest hits “Here I go again” contains the line “like a hobo I was born to walk alone”. My guess is that somewhere along the line, somebody thought this line was either being misheard or that people didn't know what a hobo was and the line was changed to “like a drifter I was born to walk alone”

There's been several posts on this site as to my creativity (or lack thereof) around setting up bird feeders, most recently in the bird feeder antics article that features a video of my spinning feeder. A really bad thumbnail of that picture shows how it startedbut I strongly suggest watching the video if you have the time.

So, in that last article I pointed out that it was likely that the spinning feeder solution would not work for long and I was correct. It spun and fell off. Time to create the pulley system. I don't have any video or pictures of the initial pulley system that was put into place unfortunately. That said, it worked extremely well.

Not being satisfied with a working feeder, I decided to make some modifications to it. You will already note the slinky that's around the pole. This is to stop squirrels climbing the pole and getting to the bird food. Believe it or not, this works extremely well and is very funny to watch (shame I never have my video recorder when it happens). The squirrel climbs to the slinky, pauses to try and figure it out, then proceeds only to be lowered slowly to the ground. Alright, squirrels sorted, it was time to take on the jays. We have both scrub and Stellar's jays in the garden that seem to hog the feeders. They have access to the big feeder, but I wanted to make this one exclusive for the little birds, so I came up with the idea of encasing the feeder in chicken wire. I created a prototype and it worked, so I decided to go into production and create a case.

Works great, until one day I was looking outside the office window and saw ....Sorry about the angle as the picture seems to highlight the bushes, but if you look closely you will see that there's something missing. Yep, my contraption had collapsed under its own weight.

Refusing to be deterred, I've decided that it only needs stronger rope to hold it up. I've therefore strung it up. Next problem was the feeder looked like it was going to drop through the bottom of the chicken wire, so I've strung up the feeder inside the case that is stung up to the pulley (i.e. the feeder house is now suspended inside the cage. I haven't taken another picture of this yet).

My guess is that the pole will snap next with all the weight on it, but we will have to wait and see ...

Well, it's finally come to it. I had to go to my first concert on my own yesterday as I couldn't find anyone to come with me. Now, I have to admit that the reason I was going was to see Slayer that, even for some metal fans, may be a little heavy. That said it was a festival (Mayhem Festival) with Marilyn Manson, Slayer, Killswitch Engage and Bullet for my Valentine on the main stage and Trivium, Cannibal Corpse, Job For a Cowboy, God Forbid, Behemoth, All that Remains, The Black Dahlia Murder and Whitechapel also performing. Surely everyone could find someone in that list that they have on top of their minds to go and see. And if that wasn't enough, there was the Metal Mulisha freestyle motorcross team performing stunts .... how could you say no? (I may have the lineup slightly wrong as I have to admit I was a little late getting to the event so only really caught Trivium and the guys on the main stage).

I'm probably biased, but I thought it was a fantastic event. Was really impressed with the bands I saw. The only slight nag I have is that I would have liked to see Slayer perform last rather than Manson but that's probably because I'm more of a Slayer fan although some of it is down to the fact that it's not going to get any louder or faster than Slayer, so it does seem a little like it's a wind down at the end.

Anyway, the place was packed, but not with people I know. “Billy no mates” rides again! Does this mean I'm forever condemned to be the last of the headbangers or is there hope out there? I think this will be the subject of this week's vote. I guess I'm happy regardless .... so long as I can reign in blood.

This is something I meant to write weeks ago. Totally forgot about it, but then saw it again on the Premiere League season review. During the game near the end of the season between Liverpool and West Bromwich Albion, the commentator made the following comment about The Baggies - “They're playing Russian Roulette ...” - Liverpool then scored and the commentator added - “... and they've just shot themselves in the foot.”

Given the alternative, I think I'd happily take one in the foot.

As we head into a long weekend here in the good old US of A, I found myself home early on the Friday putting up another bird feeder. Seemed like a golden opportunity to get out the video camera and create another masterpiece.

Look for the “Bird Feeder” video options on the Other Videos Page.

The big question is how long it will last before it breaks? You know it's going to. The next question is whether I should create a pulley system for the next generation bird feeder? This seems to be the more sustainable solution. Finally, bonus points if you can name the theme tune.

No sooner had I written the previous article about my camera being cool, as it offered the potential of exploding batteries, than I turned on my xBox 360 to find that it had broken. Nothing so dramatic as blowing up, but it put three of the red lights on the front of the console which, after much googling, turns out to be a general hardware error. I can bore you with details about how to get the xBox to show you sub error codes, but you can find that elsewhere if that's your cup of tea. What is relevant here is the fact that this display of three red lights is knows and “the three red rings of death” which sounds to me like some homosexual Russian roulette game.

Still, far be it from me to turn down a challenge, so I decided to probe the three red rings of death further. Soon to learn that you can abbreviate this to rrod (red rings of death). OK, so I'm on top of the lingo, but what about the actual problem? Some further googling identifies a large number of potential fixes from wrapping your xBox in towels in order to over heat it to microwaving it. I actually think all fixes are valid as it seems that the problem is due to M$ using cheap parts in the xBox that last about long enough to see you through the warranty period. It appears the chip design and the way the heat sinks are attached are not the best and cause the motherboard to warp. I suspect the towel or microwave trick work as they temporarily bend the board back - don't know as I didn't try either of them.

Instead, I went with a solution provided by P!nk Thr3@t from i-hacked.com/360fix. Far more fun as this involves dismantling your xBox and changing parts out (well connections rather than parts). Also, the name of the game is to be left with spare parts that you take out of the 360 - now how many times have you taken something to bits, put it back together and had bits left over?

I have to admit that I was a little skeptical, however, I guess if I were to do a video, my name would be “f@t 0ld Bl0k3” which probably doesn't have the same punch as P!nk Thr3@t - maybe 30 years ago ....

Here's my series of pictures until I got bored and stopped taking any:


In case you're wondering though, it did work. Or so far so good anyway, my 360 is back up and running.

I decided to take the plunge and buy myself a new camera. I know the economy's not doing too well and there's a lot of uncertainty out there, but here's the deal - applied to the government for some bail out money, paid myself an obnoxiously large bonus and still had enough to buy the camera. Just doing my bit to make the world a better place :)

Anyway, what's cool is that I read the manual and in it there was a note for the remote control - "warning - battery may explode if abused." How cool is that?

I spent an hour or so yesterday calling it names and telling it that it would never amount to much, but nothing's happened so far. I intend to subject it to a lot more abuse over the weekend and we'll see what happens.

Wow - what an exhausting week. Really busy at work, not going to bore you with the details of that, but one thought that keeps crossing my mind is that the effect of this economy is to take the same amount of work and give it to fewer people. Anyway, before I get dangerously close to talking about something important, time to get back to the inane.

First, was on a call at home in the evening and whilst pacing around, I looked out the window and saw what I thought was a male downy woodpecker doing what woodpecker's do - pecking wood. It was climbing up one of the pine trees merrily woodpeckering away.

On closer inspection, it seems that this is actually a red-breasted sapsucker. The photo above is a bit blurry as the light was fading, but at least I now have a photo of him.

Next was a quick visit to the hospital again. Yep - couldn't quite make it a quarter without popping back in for a visit. Not a recurring problem - this visit was for a new and exciting problem. I've heard a few people say that a boil on the bum is one of the most painful things you can have. I don't know whether or not that's the case as I seem to have got something like that on my inner thigh rather than my bum. Bloody painful though, but appears to be healing so I won't dwell on that.

Right, next to the little one - he's been poorly. Some kind of bug I think. The only real knock on effect to me is occasionally waking up in the night and having to say “Karen - I think you need to go see if William's OK again.”

Then there's the birding society that I joined to see if I could find where interesting birds are. Managed to get a tip on a tufted duck that we were able to get out and see this Saturday.

Now, the interesting challenge is trying to find a single bird in a huge lake with absolutely thousands of ducks on it. Thankfully, it was more or less the first bird I saw as I walked to the lake (I'd started walking down whilst Karen got William out of the car). I caught site of it just before it went out of view under the near bank. Karen's approach was more interesting and that was the process of elimination. All I could here as she approached was “is that it? No. Is that it? No. Is that it? No .... ” seemingly answering her own questions. My fallback approach, had we failed to find tufty, was to look for the other people with binoculars and camera's at the lake (rather than the local residents) and see where they were looking. If you are interested you can see more pictures of this and other birds from this visit to Lake Merritt.

A busy week, but what has all this got to do with the title? Well, one of the birding messages came through with a link in it to someone's site. Being the nosey kind of person that I am I decided to go check it out. I was pretty impressed with some of the stuff that this guy's done and put together. See what you think voicewhiz. If you're a Simpson's fan like myself, I'm sure you've made the connection to the title. (Either that or I'm just way off base again).

Probably not that interesting to many of you out there, but there's a couple of things I've caught on TV that have reminded me about a couple of things from the road trip. The first was an episode of King of the Hill where Buck Strickland was being inducted into the Hall of Flame at a convention in Memphis. Long story shot, Buck meets up with his illegitimate son and they hit the town. Buck turns to his son and says “lets go out and get some women ... what's the bad area of Memphis called again?” His son looks at him quizzically and replies “Memphis.”

The next was an episode of Knight Rider. No, I've not gone retro on you - there's a new series of Knight Rider which, as I understand it, is not yet available in the UK. I think it's great - it's one of those things that's so bad it's good. It's also very Simpson like in its references to other shows. This latest episode had Billy dress up in a military uniform to pull a scam to free Michael and also ended with him getting a date with the pretty girl. Sound familiar? Well, the military character is introduced as Lieutenant Benedict and later in the episode, we find that his name is Templeton Benedict. Maybe it's just me, but you have to give credit for that.

I was debating whether or not to write this article under the Road Trip section as technically I'm on the trip now. I decided against that as I've got some thoughts as to how I'm going to organize my share of those blogs which you will see in due course. So, “The Knowledge”, for those of you that don't know, is what a London Taxi driver has to pass in order to get a license to serve in the City. Basically, you need to memorize the streets of London, so when someone gets into your cab you can take them to their destination - pretty complicated given the intricacies of London's road network. But it's achievable as there are many taxis working in London.

Now, I don't expect everybody to know everything, but I do kind of expect a taxi driver to have some sense of direction and have roughly an idea of where they're going. Not so in Florida. My faithful cabbie happily picked me up from the airport - I told him the name and location of my hotel and he drove off. As we're driving, he then tells me that he didn't know where the hotel was so I read out the address. Still no joy. He asked me if I had the phone number to call the hotel and get directions - seriously! Thankfully I have GPS on my phone, so I put in the hotel address and successfully navigated him to my destination. What we'd have done if I hadn't got GPS I don't know - I'd probably still be wandering round the suburbs of Orlando.

So I paid the driver when we got to the hotel and he had the cheek to ask me for a tip. “Yeah - buy a GPS .....tw*t”

I doubt it's escaped the notice of anybody in the world that the US has a new president. All eyes are on President Obama to see what changes he's going to bring about. And I think we're all hoping that these changes will help turn the economy around.

OK, so with Obama coming in, it's time to say goodbye to George W. I think The Sun newspaper ran an article “So Long George, Thanks For All The Laughs” and it does seem that, if nothing else, President Bush provided a lot of materials for the comedians. Well, with Bush leaving office, I have to give full marks to Veet for running a “Goodbye Bush” advertising campaign starting on the day of inauguration.

A friend of mine shot me a picture of a page from the Daily Telegraph in the UK showing the ad. I particularly like the placement of this, just under an Obama article.

Daily Telegraph Goodbye Bush. (Scroll to the bottom of the page).

So, for most of you that have been following the vote questions each week, you will know that we're going ahead with the cross country road trip. We'll be in Florida for the Daytona 500, then heading back across to Vegas for the Shelby 427. White trash or what!?!

Anyway, the listbelow outlines our currently proposed route stops. I'd be more than happy to hear from anyone who has any thoughts or comments. Any ideas of things to see on the way that we've not got mapped out.

Key
A - Daytona Beach
B - Kennedy Space Center
C - Atlanta
D - Graceland
E - Bald Knob
F - Springfield
G - Cawker City (World's largest ball of twine)
H - Lebanon (mid point of the US from New York to San Francisco)
I - Kinsley (mid point of the 48 states)
J - Roswell
K - Four Corners (only place in the US where four states touch each other)
L - Grand Canyon
M - Hoover Dam
N - Las Vegas

So, we find ourselves in 2009 with a whole year of excitement watching the economy collapse ahead of us. Guess it's time to start blogging again to at least shed some light on things that have interested me. The first of the year is a big shout out to Curt, a friend of mine, and the Drunken Clams, the band that he plays in. I went to see them play for the first time on Wednesday at Grant and Green in San Francisco. Now, even though I freely admit that I have less musical talent than the Spice Girls and therefore my opinion may not be worth too much, I have to say that I was pretty impressed with the band. Even considering the fact that Luis, the lead singer was suffering from an awful cold, it was still a good show - even if it was to watch Luis drink shots of Tabasco sauce in an attempt to ease his throat. Anyway, I'm looking forward to the next gig to hear the band in full form. Couple of quick links if anyone's interested:

http://www.drunkenclams.org/ [edit - link no longer exists]
Drunken Clams on Facebook

Interesting tactics being deployed here to score a goal from a free kick. Simply get three of your team members to run forward and moon the keeper. Very debatable as to whether this would be considered “gentlemanly conduct”, but it worked.

I feel I need to explain how I came across this before I dive into the details as I don't want anyone to think that I was looking for anything related. So, I was on the photography challenge website that I look at to get ideas for photos and see what some of the other folks have done. There was a link to a forum thread on Halloween that someone had just posted to so I thought I'd have a read. Anyway, this one person had posted a picture of his dog that he'd dressed up as a bee (as he didn't have any kids - apparently he and his wife dress their dog up instead). A few posts later and someone had commented on the picture saying that there was a site dedicated to people who like to dress their dogs up as bees. Yep - apparently this is something that many people like to do. If you don't believe me, take a look Beedogs.

After being in the States now for over seven years, I've finally had my UK music collection shipped over. Anybody who knows me understands how near and dear my music is to me, so I'm one happy little puppy at the minute. In a complete blast, I've ripped all the CDs as they really don't take very long to do. I've purchased a record player (turntable) that I've connected up to my sound card and am slowly working my way through the vinyl. As the music gets processed, you'll see it appear on the Ragbox if you're interested in hunting for it, but my guess is that you're probably not.

It is very interesting taking a trip down memory lane. The one thing that seems to be sticking out to me is how truly awful the “B” side of singles really are. The Bone frequently does a “B” side request show, but they just use the phrase in the context of old classic songs that you haven't heard in a while. Not to mean the complete and utter garbage that some bands came up with that ended up on the back of their main hits. I sort of have this picture of the band in the recording studio working on a new album and one of the members is real stuck on a song. The producer clearly hears it for what it is and is desperately trying to think of a way to stop the band insisting on it being included on the new album. Everyone's agreed on what the main single is going to be and the producer turns round and says “ I've had a great idea - I know what will make that single really fly - if we put this song on the back of it. If we leave it off the album then people will have to buy the single to hear it.” And the drunk/stoned baned look round and go “Yeah!”

That said, there are some gems out there. I've very biased when it comes to Iron Maiden as I think they're the best band ever and I really like listening to some of their “B” sides where they've covered other songs.

The other thing that made me laugh is looking at some of the albums and knowing what I went through when I bought them. There's the obvious heavy metal band striking a pose to look hard (normally with the photographer lying on the ground looking up at the band to make them appear bigger than normal) which, at the time, I thought looked cool. But the one that cracks me up the most is back to the “B” side discussion, but this time on albums. Now, I do really like some of Hawkwind's songs, but I do remember picking up a record and thinking they've made a mistake as they're only listing one song for the “B” side. Then realizing that they haven't made a mistake and that there is a 30+ minute song. Now the first time I came across this I thought that the song must be good if the band put that much effort into it. Hmmm. You get home to find something that doesn't really make much sense and you realize it's the band doing one of their “experimental” songs (a.k.a. getting stoned and playing the notes that seem to match the colors that the band is seeing). Once bitten, twice shy as the saying goes. Not so. Trouble is that the next time you come across it, you know it's going to be painful, but if you want the songs that are on the “A” side you're going to have to buy the album anyway. Or buy the singles, but that just cost more money.

I suspect there may be more to come on this topic as I unearth many more gems. I estimate that it's going to take about a year to work through all the vinyl and convert to digital. I'm in no rush, so this seems like a nice hobby to have bubbling away in the background.

Well, it's been really quite for a few weeks, so what have I been up to. Nothing much really, sad to say, however, September is somewhat of a milestone month for me. September the 11th is the date that I quit smoking. No connection to the tragic events of 9/11, it just happened to be that day that I put my last cigarette out. This year was my second year without smoking, so still fairly recent, but appears to be on track.

This month is also the six month marker since anyone has looked up, probed or otherwise shoved an implement up my arse.

Now, whilst the former landmark of giving up smoking would seem like the bigger achievement, I can tell you that I'm much more grateful for the second. I'm not saying that things are perfect in the internal plumbing department, but there hasn't been anything serious that would warrant another trip to the hospital and provide cause for someone to go poking around again. (Although I'm in there every week for a problem with my leg, but that's pretty boring stuff).

Anyway, this is something I feel I need to celebrate. I doubt (and hope) that nobody else out there has cause to celebrate the same thing, but as the month draws to a close and you find yourself in a bar - feel free to raise a glass to the health of my bottom. Just don't push it up there.

Time for another blast from the past as I went to see the Metal Masters concert last Sunday. Judas Priest, Heaven And Hell (a.k.a. Black Sabbath with Dio), Motorhead and Testament made the line up. Testament being the mere babies amongst the acts having only been around for 25 years where the others have well over 30 years under their belts. Great concert, but something does seem ironic to hear Ronnie James Dio singing “Die Young” even though it sounded good. Rather than look like a complete idiot with my DSLR camera I decided to join the younger generation and try and take some pics with my mobile phone. I did actually get one shot off where you can see what the intended subject was rather than a blur. The image, I'm sure you'll figure out, is of the Motorhead set.
The only annoying thing about the evening was the bloke that sat next to me. He insisted on talking to me and telling me lots of irrelevant facts. The trouble was, they were all wrong. I decided not to correct him as he was about 6'6" and had hands the size of dustbin lids - I was quite happy with my seat near the front and one punch from them and I'd have been in the back row. So, he started going on about Birmingham being the best place in England. Yeah, I know what you're thinking and this isn't even one of the things I was going to correct him on. Anyway, the reason for this liking of Birmingham was his belief that most of the best heavy metal bands have come from there and he started to name them with Judus Priest then Black Sabbath. OK - I'm with you so far, not a problem. But, the next band he names was Def Leppard. Hmmm - Sheffield must have moved since I was last there. Well, not the worst thing anyone could have said and I wouldn't expect his UK geography to be great. Then the bombshell. Now, when I came home and told Karen the story, I said - “you'll never guess what band he said next” and, of all the bands in all of history, she got it right. Have you guessed it? He said “The Beatles!”

At that point, being quiet is probably the best course of action. So, onto annoying point #2. During the shows he seemed intent on “doing the horns” but rather than simply putting his arms in the air and pointing the horns towards the band, he was doing some kind of swirly motion dance thing that he seemed really proud of (perhaps he'd been practicing in front of the mirror). Unfortunately this dance thing frequently resulted in hands appearing before my face doing strange things.

Oh dear. Last, but not least, was the fact that his air guitar was a little too big for the space we were occupying between the seats and I got hit with it several times. Another kind of irony there that I felt like I'd been beaten up with an air guitar. Wouldn't have thought that possible ....

Still, I did actually really enjoy the concert.

Sadly it has been brought to my attention that, since taking on semi-retirement, one of my parents has taken to “beering it up.” It appears that the call of the pint has become too much and they spend a lot of their time seeking one out. Pictured below at recent family get together (wedding I think - I wasn't invited, but that's another topic), the offending parent can be seen “sneaking in a quick one” leaving the other to follow round finding something else to do (appears to be photography).
When asked about the problem, we unfortunately mentioned the term “bag lady” and got the reply “Bag lady. I'll give you bag lady. When I ran a charity shop I used to sort through a hundred bags every day. And that was in the morning before my first cup of tea or any of the help had arrived.” Clearly knowing that we'd said something wrong, we decided to tread lightly, but were then growled at with something that sounded like “geroffmeangingbaskets”

Those who know me will be aware that I have a deep rooted background in fashion. Once upon a time I was part of the design team for my father's empire designing high quality fashion items such as acrylic cardigans. You hear about all the cut throat activities around the catwalks of London, Paris and Milan, but let me tell you, designing for the blue rinse posse of Skeggy is just as hard.

So, what's all this got to do with the price of cheese. Well, I remember many years ago as a lad, we'd sit there and people watch (as everyone does from time-to-time) commenting on what people wear. Many a time would we say of folk older than ourselves “at what point did you think you would look good in that?”

Which leads me to the big question of “at what point did you think it would be OK, let alone look good wearing a cowboy hat?”

Well folks, the answer to that one is 38 years, 5 months and 18 days. I can't really say when the transformation occurred. What I can say is that I was innocently in a hardware store buying some drill bits and they had some cowboy hats on a rack. I picked one up and tried it on, then put it back. Strange that somewhere in the back of my mind was this nagging thought that I bet I look good in that. So I searched for a proper shop - yep, I used and Internet search engine to find my local cowboy hat and went out and bought one. And sadly, yes, I'm wearing it most of the time I got out (with the exception of for work).

The big plus side is that William really likes it. Also strange to think that he likes it now, but wait until those teenage years when he's embarrassed to be seen with me and will just hate me for everything I wear, let alone the hat. Can't wait - it's going to be so much fun, especially as I've saved a bunch of compromising photos from his childhood that I will put up on a projector when he brings his first girlfriend home. (We have a lot of out of work therapists around here so I'm sure I'll get a good deal). Anyway, here are a couple of images of Billy the Kid in my cowboy hat.

Couple of things to note. First is that the hat doesn't look big on him (little fathead). Second, Mum, I wasn't joking when I said we'd got some pretty good cactus plants.

There's not a lot to say other than congratulations to Michael Phelps for a feat that may not be beaten for a very, very long time (if at all). Amazing to think that he's won more gold medals than some countries will.

After everything that's been going on with me I can probably be forgiven for asking myself the question “am I dead yet?“ (the title of a song by GBH) particularly when I woke one morning this week with several vultures circling overhead.
Turns out that one of the deer featured in the Bar-B-Que article I wrote a couple of weeks ago has died in the garden. It's actually in the open part of the garden, not the bit that's fenced off. Very difficult to tell what happened - it may have been hit by a car and then crawled down to the bottom of our garden where it died. Anyway, I thought about taking a photo of it, but thought that too grim. The photo below was a great idea, but it didn't come out very well. It's of the two turkey vultures in the photo above sitting on a branch above half a dozen wild turkeys. You're kind of going to have to take my word for it as you can't really see either the vultures or the turkeys very clearly. If it came out well, I was going to put it up on the caption competition page with something like “Mother: I've told you not to play with your food. Child: It wasn't me - it just got up and walked off.”
Anyway, even though I didn't get the photo of the turkey vultures above the turkeys to come out, I did spot my little offspring on the sofa in my office when I grabbed the camera and here's what came out with a one off shot:

Many times over the last few weeks I've challenged Karen over the ability to picture things dimensionally. A good example of this has been when we've been cabling the house and I've said that all you need to do is drill through this wall and it comes out in the garage and then you just run the cable down and through the wall into the crawl space here ... and she's kind of looking at me with a blank stare of “if you say so.”

So why is it that when I just went to Home Depot to buy some piping to use as an umbrella stand (long story - I've mounted a pipe on the railings of the balcony so that we can put an umbrella in it to keep off the evening sun so we can eat outside) ... so why was it that when I bought the piping that comes in 10 foot lengths did I get to my car before I figured out that it wouldn't fit inside. To give me a little credit, I have a convertible and I'd thought that I'd just take the roof down and have it hanging out a little - I just hadn't realized how much. Thankfully nobody had a camera (that I'm aware of) and I just went back into the store to get the pipe cut in half.

About the only thing more embarrassing would have been to be walking down the street and to look up, at all things, at a Macy's sign such that I walked into and tripped over a fire hydrant. But that would never happen ... would it?

Spam, spam, spam, spam ....

As well as being a cool song and sketch for Monty Python, it's also the name given to unwanted mail - particularly electronic mail. I'm not telling you anything you didn't know.

When I was in hospital my doctor emailed me and it got blocked by my spam filter. Ever since then I've gone into my “spam box” to check that other important mail is not being filtered out.

I do find it interesting how some of these mail messages are being titled. I commented somewhere about getting a message to “increase the size of my banana” which was one that caught my attention. And I have to say with my lack of musical talent, I have no idea why I'm receiving a bunch of emails offering me a bigger organ. I dread to think what noise I'd make if I was let loose with one.

Anyway, sticking with the same theme, I had a bout of emails with the title “update your penis” like it's some sort of software. Maybe even a piece of hardware that's now due for a firmware update which, if you read in all the puns, is probably what they're getting at. But it did get me to thinking what if you could just update your penis? Would you see someone in the toilets taking a quick glance to the side and exclaiming “oh my god! You've got the new penis 2.0”. The person with the update being really happy that somebody noticed but not really wanting to let on - “err, yes”. Then you'd get into some surreal conversation around “well, how's it working for you? I'm thinking of getting one myself.”

Then I thought - that's probably why someone invented spam filters - to stop me having stupid thoughts.

I posted some pictures last week of some of the visitors to the garden. Well, we've had three deer (mother and two babies) decide to pop round and eat some of the plants and trees in the garden.And the number of wild turkeys have increased to about 15.So don't be surprised if you stop round and get offered venison or a turkey burger.

As I've moved into the new house I've started to do some DIY jobs in order to get things sort of looking how I want them. Basically an excuse to play with power tools. Probably not the most sensible thing given I'm on blood thinners, but it's boys with toys and you just can't suppress that urge.

Now, most people probably grew up with their fathers passing on the philosophy that if you're going to buy a tool, spend the money and buy a decent tool that will last you a life time. Well, me being me, I've completely ignored that advice and gone with the theory that a) I'm really not going to be doing much DIY and b) so long as the person who I pay to come out and fix the mistakes I make has the decent tools that's all that matters. Just so you can get a sense of the quality of products I'm buying, I bought a jigsaw for $15 the other week. Mr O asked whether it as a 700 piece floor jigsaw, but, joking aside, a jigsaw puzzle would cost a lot more that $15.

Anyway, armed with my new jigsaw I set about cutting back a cabinet to fit a new TV that I'd bought. This lasted all of two minutes until I realized that I couldn't fit the jigsaw in to cut round the bit I wanted, so I ended up using a sawzall which is even less refined than a jigsaw. Good job I didn't want an even line - I'm sure that would have been easy to do. I've gone for a more wibbly-wobbly look so that it looks a little more creative.

The other thing I've done is Cat-6'd the house so that I can channel TV through the house over a computer network. Very clever setup, I've got two networks - the primary takes the main computing so this server, work computer and Karen's computer to the Internet (and the phone as we use VOIP). There's then a secondary network for the TV to keep the streaming separate from the Internet Traffic. I've got two digital TV feeds into a computer (with the new ATI TV wonder digital decoders so that you can get premium channels) through Windows Media Center (by far the best thing Microsoft has produced). This computer is hooked up to the main TV and then I've got two linksys media center extenders and an XBox 360 feeding another three TVs. One of the connections is wireless and, for the most part, seems to stream HD OK. Really just means I can use a computer as a DVR and feed TV, music etc. through to any room in the house. (With the ability to change channel in any room of the house and not having to buy a digital decoder for every room). With the house being on the side of a hill, this kind of made it easy to do the cabling as you can stand up in the crawl space under the house. Below is a quick picture of the cat-6 between the two routers and a printer.As it happens, he is the sixth cat I've had although technically he's the seventh I've been around as my folks had a cat when I was born (many, many years ago).

So, what's gone on since the site was last up? Well, one of the things that's happened is that it's now against the law to talk on your mobile phone in California. Something that's been against the law in the UK for many years ... apparently as nobody really seems to take it seriously.

Well, it's caused a little stir over here as some people are complaining that it targets only one specific distraction. Some people have also made the point that it's OK to use a computer to send an email, but not to talk on a mobile. That said, I doubt there's really that many people on the roads checking email otherwise they may have targeted this.

Anyway, not one to want to break the law, I've thought I'd give a go at shifting things around. It's not illegal to eat in your car so I thought why not get all my calls done, then take lunch whilst I'm driving - should still be able to get the same efficiencies. Obviously it needed to be something simple, so I thought a sandwich would fit the bill. Nice thought, but I cut myself twice whilst trying to cut the baguette, got butter smeared all over the passenger seat when I had to slam the breaks on as I nearly ran a red light and lost a piece of cheese somewhere behind the seat as I was trying to grate it. And if you think that's bad, you don't want to know how much mess just having a drink caused. Freshly squeezed orange juice maybe good for you, but it's a nightmare to keep the squeezer steady whilst you're driving.

The housing woes seem to continue. I suppose woes is too strong a word as it's really not that bad. Our buy seems to be fairly straight forward - we got ready to go on that a while back - sorted the mortgage out and removed all the contingencies etc. etc. Really just waiting for the cash from our sale to seal the deal and move in.

The sale of this house has been problematic in the sense that our buyers struggled to get a loan (apparently due to the banks imposing more restrictions post the sub prime collapse, but I'm not really in a position to comment as we didn't see this ourselves) and then there seems to have been some confusion over the actual close date. We'd been working off the one in the contract which strangely is the right one. Anyway, it seems as if it's all worked out. The close date on the contract should be tomorrow on Monday and it looks like everything's going to work out on that date. So really it's getting exciting.

We were over to sign our documents on Saturday and decided to go out for one of our walks. For anyone interested, I'm using the Bay Area Hiker website to find these trails. It's a great site that gives you details on what to expect. So, why was I surprised when I ended up absolutely knackered after walking a trail for 1.7 miles with a 500ft elevation change? I don't think I actually realized what I was embarking on until it was too late.

The trail was at the Huckleberry Botanic Regional Preserve and is really nice. It's a path about a foot wide wandering through the thick wooded area of a hillside. Great trail to walk and we heard lots of birds, but unfortunately you couldn't really get any clear pictures as they were just jumping from branch to branch inside the trees. In fact I only managed to capture two birds.

Interestingly though, the first one is a Spotted Towhee - something I've not seen before. The second is an American Tobin which is very common.

OK - so any of you that have been following all the entries on this site, the photos as well as the blogs, will know that I've taken to hobbling off on walks and taking photos of animals (birds really). I like being outside and the photography gives me a bit of a challenge as well as a reason so it works quite well. I seem to have become interested in it since Karen and I went on safari last year.

Anyway, the avid reader will know that I wandered round a some ponds at a sewage plant. As I noted in the text above the photos it was actually a really nice place and definately one of the best when it came to wildlife. Still, if you looked at the photos you may wonder why I took a picture of the warning sign letting you know that “ponds contain waste water effluent.”

Well, it was for this article. Personally I think the sign should simply say “beware floaters” as it hits home a little better. You do have to look at the water carefully to see if the shadows under the water are carp or someone's second hand steak with a side of sweetcorn, but that's not the point of this article either. It is to tell you of the words I've been teaching my little boy. Examples of words I've used are:

• log
• skid mark
• dump
• trump

You get the idea. That said, I've typically been using these in their true sense of their intended meaning, but in that double entendre type of way, so, for example, whilst watching the auto racing on the TV I may comment that a car left behind a rather large skid mark when it crashed. William then picks up the word so when he plays with his cars he crashes them round the floor and says that they left a large skid mark. The joy then comes when Karen's not in the room as I can then look at him and tell him that he needs to tell his mother what happened. Next thing, he runs off to tell his mum “I've just left a big skid mark on the floor” to which I can't stop laughing and Karen gets really annoyed.

There is a rumor that one day I will grow up, but in the meantime - beware floaters.

But it's even further to get your car serviced!

I was randomly clicking away and found myself on the Nascar.com website looking at the standings after Kyle Busch came second in the Craftsman Truck series at the start of his "triple header" weekend where he races in three states in three days. I think it says he'll cover about 800 miles between races as he attempts to do this. (And I hope he does and continues to get good results).

Anyway, whilst watching the various NASCAR races, the commentators, from time-to-time, plug the fact that you can go onto the website and search for NASCAR approved services - such as getting your car serviced. So I saw the link for this and thought I'd take a look to see what local garages have signed up. Well, local is probably not a good word to describe it. The closest fuel / auto service to me is a mere 2,241.95 miles away in Washington. Seems that Sunoco (the official race fuel of NASCAR) are the only approved fuel / auto service vendors of NASCAR and they are only on the East Coast.

I think I'm supposed to service the car every 5,000 miles, so it's good to know that when I got back from this service I would have an entire 8 miles to enjoy before having to do it again. It also made me wonder whether this would be a more difficult challenge for Kyle Busch - to get my car serviced.

Iron Maiden that is, although I doubt anyone who knows me would think that I was a maiden of any other description. The first concert I went to was Iron Maiden in 1982 to see them on the Number of the Beast tour at Leicester's DeMontfort Hall. My mother was kind enough to take me and one of my friends as we were only wee nippers at the time. Rather fitting that the row in front of us at the concert last Wednesday was occupied by a mother and two young kids (possibly one or both being her sons).

The interesting thing though was the fact that the tour was called “Somewhere Back In time” which featured songs of the past - most of Maiden's greats from the '80s. So what's interesting is that the kids in front of us would not have been born when any of the songs were written. What's pleasing is that a new generation is getting to hear and like the music for the first time ... whilst us old folks rock on in the background.

I have to say, this was an absolutely fantastic gig. I've never been to a bad Iron Maiden gig, but this one was really well put together with a great stage set and accompanying pyrotechnics. And what's more, they played Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner - a song I didn't expect to hear, but was extremely pleased that I did.

It's going to be difficult to tell exactly when this website started as there were bits that were done to prepare and get something going, but today marks the one year anniversary of the domain registration. So I guess today is as good a day as any to celebrate the the fact that this wondrous site has been up and running for a year.

It's quite amazing when you think about it - a whole year without producing anything of any use or interest whatsoever. That's quite difficult to achieve when you think about it. You'd think that from time to time you would accidentally produce something of value.

Many thanks to Mr O for his continued support and completely irrelevant contributions. Unfortunately there is an illness with one of Mr O's family members so we wish him and his family all the best.

Finally, thanks to all of you out there that continue to read and contribute to this site. Here's to both of you. Actually, I'm getting really excited as my mum has decided to take a computer course which means that my audience may go up by 1 (or 50%).

I just got an email from my beloved Leicester City to see if I wanted to take advantage of an early bird discount and buy a season ticket for next year. Hmmm - let me think about that and get back to you.

I just landed at Houston IAH and as I was walking through I saw a sign for the “pet relief area.” The sign (which I should have snapped a photo of with my mobile) had a picture of a dog on it. If it were me, I'd have added the Mr Whippy steaming pile at the back of the dog so that it would be clear what kind of relief was going to be afforded to your pet, but that's just me. Also, my mind did wander briefly to wonder how many pets they actually catered for and whether there had ever been any problems with someone going there with a strange animal. But again, that's just me and it was only a brief thought.

We are in the middle of a mini heatwave here in the Bay Area. Since Wednesday it's been so hot here. Even in the City which is normally a little cooler than the surrounding areas. Hard to explain what this is like for those of you back home in the UK. Basically, each day there's this big fiery ball that rises in the sky called the Sun. This puts out a lot of light and heat. Try and imagine the UK, but a lot brighter, warmer and no rain. Yeah - told you it was difficult, but if you close your eyes and try really hard you might get the picture.

I've had many comments about the posts I made describing the things that were going on whilst I was ill. Generally along the lines of the fact that they were funny and I should keep them up. Kind of got mixed feelings about that as I'm pleased that people found them fun to read, but I'd rather miss out on the whole being ill thing that led to them being created in the first place.

I do, however, feel rather boring at the minute as I've just slipped back into the drudgery of the rat race and am merrily running around on my wheel. The biggest thing being that we are currently in the process of moving house, but there's nothing funny to write about that - the whole thing is rather annoying and really just leads to a lot of time being spent worrying about what could go wrong. Very unproductive, but I don't seem to be able to stop myself doing it.

So back to the illness. Well, I had to go into hospital this morning to inject myself again. They wanted to watch me do it without any guidance to make sure I was OK doing it. Everything went well and I've now graduated from the jab class and have been let back into the big wide world free to prick myself whenever I choose to do so.

Other than that, fairly boring - but I could do with a bit of boring for a while.

This site was named EastBayRag for a number of reasons:

• One of my nicknames is Rag
• Rag is another name for newspaper
• SFRag was already taken as a URL
• We intended to move to the East Bay

Well, it looks like we are finally going to be moving to the East Bay. We have sold our house in the City and have had an offer accepted on a house on the East Bay. To protect the innocent, I've changed the names slightly (but only slightly). We are selling our house to two gentlemen “friends” Well Hung and Two Stroke. We are buying the house from Mr & Mrs Hairy Mary.

It's interesting going through this process in a different country as it's totally different from the UK. The house buying process in the US is much simpler and much quicker than the UK. Basically, each transaction is separate and you don't really get into chains. Also, solicitors aren't involved as it's a pretty standard contract, so once you've made an offer and it's accepted, you're pretty much done barring anything coming up in any of the inspection reports.

What this does mean is that it's almost impossible to organize a move on the same day - i.e. to have the people complete on your house on the same day that you complete on the one you're moving to. What's more, the county we are moving to has made it illegal to do same day title transfers so we wouldn't be able to do this anyway. Apparently the reason for this is so that chains don't fall through and you're guaranteed to sell your house on the intended day. So, we are trying to time it so that we complete on the sale of our house four days before we complete the purchase of the next one. We've put a rent back clause into the contract of the sale of our house so that we can rent it back (at an extortionate amount I might add) for up to four weeks. All going well, we would exercise four days of this and everything will happen as planned.

So what can go wrong? Well, I guess worst case is if Well Hung and Two Stroke fall through for some reason like not being able to get financing. We have a backup offer on the house, but if that fell through as well, we would end up with two houses and two mortgages as we would still be obligated to purchase the one we are buying. The other scenario is that something goes wrong for us and we can't complete with the Hairy Mary's then we would be without a home. The thought of living with Karen, William and two cats in a cardboard box under the freeway doesn't appeal to me very much.

Still, they say that moving is one of the most stressful things ..... hmmm, now to do this week's vote.

The Owl and The Fox didn't go to sea in a beautiful pea green boat. Instead, the owls came down the M1 from Sheffield to Leicester in order to administer a severe beating to the foxes.

I will be gracious enough to say congratulations to my Sheffield Wednesday friends. It looks like it's going down to the wire this year. Good luck next week - maybe we can both stay up, but I'm not holding my breath.

I heard this on the radio this morning. Apparently this is from a training video or people that make training videos on how to speak English from Japanese. The idea being that they act out a situation and then go through repetition in song to force the learning.

It seems as if they put this together specifically for me. All I need to do is reverse engineer it so I can learn the phrase if I'm ever in Japan. See what you think.

(Video has been removed from YouTube due to a copyright claim https://youtu.be/miSADG9yihM)

Seems that an ex-pat Brit pub in Azerbaijan is creating a concern for the locals. The pub is named “The Camel's Toe” and apparently the locals have just found out that this has a double meaning. According to the today.az that is carrying the official word, that double meaning is “clear visible presence of a woman's vulva, as a result of wearing overly tight pants.” Part of the concern is that the Brits were pulling the wool over the eyes of the locals by using British slang.

I'm trying to figure out how they get the translation from British slang. First, there's the use of the word pants which, unless they mean underwear, would be American and not British. But most of all I'm trying to picture the origin of the term - a couple of brickies working on a site and some bird walks by wearing trousers that fit too tight and you can make out her nether region. Did the conversation really go - first brickie “look - there's clear visible presence of a woman's vulva, as a result of wearing overly tight pants.” Second brickie replies “you're right, but that'll never catch on. Say, it looks like a camel's toe - lets call it that.” I think the translation may need a little work.

I guess I can't leave this without saying that the pub is known for the camel toe liquor. But that's only because I'm sad.

Interestingly not an article about me or my health for a change, although I'm doing well - two weeks out of hospital with no complaints so far, thanks for asking. This is two articles I got from my local radio station 107.7 The Bone.

Tax Relief
April 15th is the tax filing deadline in the US and there's always talk about the stress around tax season. Which begs the question, if there's a season, when can I shoot tax inspectors? But I digress. NaughtyAmerica.com decided that it would be good to provide “tax relief” by allowing six porn films to be available for free download.

Now, I can't tell you whether these are any good or not as I've not watched any of them. What I can tell you is that I didn't see a link to the downloads from the home page of the site, but in the interest of providing a service to anyone who may want to take advantage of this offer, here's the url to the download page Naughty America 2008 Tax Releif. I don't know how long this site will stay active for, so you may want to go there now if this interests you.

Eau De Toilette Relief
Unfortunately this video has been removed from YouTube otherwise I would post a link. So, a couple of doctors in the Philippines filmed a surgery and then posted it to YouTube. The video showed them laughing and joking all the way through the operation and they are now the subject of an investigation. Quite right you may think - last thing I'd want is to see my operation on YouTube with a couple of surgeons laughing at me. Well, maybe, but would you expect to end up in hospital because you had a perfume / deodorant canister stuck up your arse?

Apparently this man offended his boyfriend by commenting on the size of his manhood. The boyfriend got upset and decided to shove the canister up the man's arse and it wouldn't come out so they ended up in hospital. The doctors then removed the item, but decided to have a laugh in the process. OK, so they probably shouldn't have recorded it and stuck it on YouTube, but I can't blame them for wanting to have a laugh. Also, don't you think the boyfriend that rammed the thing there in the first place should take some of the blame?

There's no good start to a week when you're at work and it doesn't get any better when you find out that one of your good friends died at the weekend. Casey was someone that worked at one of my clients that was a friend as well as someone I worked with. We worked very closely together on a large project that was fairly intense at times, but it ended up being successful.

After completing his role on the project where we worked together, he left to do a two year stint in Angola. He moved house to South Africa as a base for where to spend his time when he was not in Angola (the position is 28 days on, 28 days off). Tragically, he died in a boating accident in South Africa this weekend.

One of my best memories was when he left the San Francisco Bay Area. A bunch of us met up at the Exchange for drinks after work around 5:30 / 6:00. By and large it was one of those events where people stop by to say their goodbye's and then disappear. I was there from the start and, not surprisingly, was there at the end. The bar shut at 10:00, but the two of us decided that we wanted to get some more to drink so went up to the Holding Company. We weren't in the best of states when we got there and it didn't really get any better. The only thing is that we were in a slightly better state than the local nutters. We ended up getting into a conversation with these two guys who thought it was amazing that I was from England and Casey was heading off to Angola. So much so that one of them started writing poetry about it on the back of a napkin. I know it's San Francisco, but they weren't trying to chat us up, they were just genuinely weird. Anyway, probably hard to explain, but it was a great night and we ended up leaving the Holding Company at 2:00am when it closed. This was a Thursday night - Casey had finished, but I had to work on Friday and it was a killer. I've commented many times that I'm too old for this and it's probably true .... But a good laugh all the same.

Many more memories of similar good times and I hope that these continue for Casey in whatever the afterlife holds. I'll break my no alcohol stretch tonight to have a drink to him.

Cheers and RIP!

(http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24095067/ [edit - link expired])

I think it was Jasper Carrot that did a sketch back in the 80's about being concerned of people that take instructions literally. This was tied to the advent of the gel stick deodorants that you took the lid off and applied instead of using an aerosol. As the gel wore down, you simply push the stick up from the bottom (nowadays they tend to have a knob on the bottom to screw ... oh err!).

Anyway, these early gel sticks came with the instructions "remove lid and push up bottom". Mr Carrott duly pointed out that taking these instructions literally may not lead the correct application of the deodorant.

Anyway, I'm beginning to think that these instructions are specifically designed for me. I'm now wondering whether there's anything that I shouldn't be pushing up my bottom. After having had many, many things poked up there and a lot of stuff coming out all too quickly, seems that this has taken its toll on the old ring piece and we've popped a hemorrhoid or two. So, was in the hospital today to start the new wonder cure (rat dna stuff) which I've had and they said they'd give me something for hemorrhoids. The product is aptly named “anusol” as that's exactly where you need to put it - up your anusol. Seems the cure for having things poked up and out of your bum is to poke more things up there.

The instructions tell me to pop in one of these suppositories at bed time. One hopes that there isn't anything expected to come out after insertion as I normally plan to sleep after going to bed. I also keep reading the instructions and linking it to mouth wash or something and expect to see it say - pop one in at bed time and wake up with minty fresh breath. Somehow I don't think this is going to happen, but it would be interesting if I started doing minty fresh farts.

Everyone hate going to the dentist for when they do the cleaning? Well, seems I've found a little way to subdue the vigorous advances of the enthusiastic dentist / hygienist. Tell them you're on blood thinners and that if they cut you, you won't stop bleeding. Maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed that I avoided those painful moments when they catch the gums from time-to-time whilst doing the cleaning.

Good news, although I worry about speaking too soon, but I've been dodgy tummy free for over a week now. No diarrhea and no accidents (always a big plus). Seems to be thanks to coming off one of the drugs I was on it looks like they were causing the latest problems - appears I suffer side effects from Mercaptopurine (6-MP) which I think means I'm allergic to it. Anyway, it obviously wasn't doing me any good so I'm not taking it anymore.

I've been out of hospital since late Tuesday afternoon and I kind of have this “on parole” feeling as am wondering when the next thing will go wrong. I start the biologic (rat dna stuff that I talked about in an earlier blog) treatment of Humira next week so I guess there's always the potential that I'm going to get some weird and wonderful side effects from that. Hopefully not, but my run of luck has not been too good as of late. Also keep wondering how critical it is as I seem to be doing quite well on very limited medication at the minute - at least it's worked for a week anyway.

Was nice to Robert Kubica put the BMW Sauber on pole for the first time. And to be the first Pole to get a Formula 1 pole position. Also did well to keep it up there and finish third. Nobody really had anything to challenge Ferrari this weekend and probably a weekend that McLaren will want to forget.

Well, lets see what the week brings. I'm hoping that it will be very boring and not a lot will happen. Maybe a little excitement on Wednesday for my mum as it's her birthday.

Didn't take me long to get round to writing the follow up to the Smokin' Aces article that I promised in the prior blog (Backside of Me). Basically I'm really, really bored. Although I have my computer in the hospital, I can't hit the wireless network and am only able to use my PDA as a modem. Which means I can get online, but can't watch films or do anything that is going to require a lot of bandwidth. But at least I can get some crap written.

And talking of crap, that's what this is all about, so you have been warned! You might not want to read this whilst eating your breakfast (if at all).

So, in the Smokin' Aces article I referred to having a good week being one where I didn't take a dump in my pants. Well, I successfully avoided that, but I can't say that everything went where it was intended. So here's the log of my accidental logs.

First, you need to understand that I was admitted with serious dehydration because I couldn't keep anything down, not even water. Any of you out there that think you've had diarrhea, believe me, there is a whole new level to it that you're unaware of. Something that not even the hottest vindaloo can prepare you for. So they put you on IV fluids to re-hydrate you which is great until you start crapping that out as soon as it goes into you - yep, couldn't even keep down IV fluids either. Well, that right there would be a problem and is why I got admitted as they try to pump the fluids in faster than they were coming out. And believe me, they were coming out fast.

And the diarrhea itself is more like projectile vomit in that it is a violent jet/spray. Then the best of it is that I get between 0 and 3 seconds notice that it's coming - so you can kind of see that this is going to lead to an accident. I explain this to retain some credibility.

Accident #1

In ER I'd been flushed with 3 litres of fluid and had rung the call bell to get the IV disconnected. Nobody came before I needed a poo. Tried to get the IV pole into the bog with me and got sort of stuck in the doorway ... cramp, splat ... pool on the floor. Karen's in the room with me and is killing herself laughing saying “thank god we got to hospital otherwise I'd have to clean that up.”

A nurse comes and, you know you get those people that try to finish your sentences for you, well she was one of them. I tried to say “I called the bell to get my IV disconnected, but unfortunately I needed the bathroom in between and didn't quite make it and have had an accident on the floor.” I tried about four times whilst she kept interrupting and saying something about the IV so finally I just looked her in the eye and said “I've shit on the bathroom floor as well.” This was actually quite amusing as you got to see her face for those few seconds before what I'd said finally sunk in.

Accident #2

Moved to my first room ... a shared one!! Nice for the other person you would have thought. Actually, he had a sinus problem amongst other things which probably helped sharing a room with the turd meister. Now, this one isn't that funny, well not for me as I was seriously, seriously ill at this point. My fever had shot 103 and I was vomiting as well. So I started to poop on my commode, finished and was sat on the side of the bed. Thought I was going to vomit and was stood with my head facing into the bowl. My stomach cramped and all hell broke loose, only not out the front end. What I should have probably done is just stayed where I was and deal with the mess, but my natural instinct was to spin round as fast as I could and sit on the commode. Now think about it. You've added centrifugal force to the mix and the angle you pass through as you sit. This resulted in me created a six foot radius fall out zone that included bits up a wall and under the dividing curtain towards my room mate's bed. Needless to say, I got my own room some 30 minutes after that, so I know what to do next time I end up in the same situation.

Lets sidebar for two seconds on said room mate before you feel sorry for him. He was totally weird. He only spoke in one or two word sentences that he repeated multiple times. Every time a nurse came in he shouted “hey, hey, hey, he” until they looked at him then he'd just say “married, married, married ...” in some vein attempt to try and chat them up. That said, I did find him really funny in the morning when the lab came to draw blood. Most of the time nobody could understand what he was saying. Lab person shows up and says “I'm here to collect your blood” to which he replied “vampire, vampire, vampire bat, vampire bat”

Accident #3, 4 and 5 (aka the nurse that was in the wrong place at the wrong time)

There's only actually one accident here, but the sequence of events is so funny it's untrue. It started with me going for the anal scoping which you need to be prepped for with the go lightly. Well, I couldn't take the go lightly as I was vomiting so they decided to go with a series of enemas. Yep, even though I'm not holding anything down, they want to make sure there's nothing up there. (Another quick fact you need to understand - each nursing shift you get a qualified nurse and a care partner assigned to you). So the nurse tells me to lay on my left side whilst she administers the enema ... standing behind me :) ... I told her that I would poop it out almost immediately and she didn't believe me ... what can I say? No, I didn't get her. What happened was she injected the stuff, as predicted, it started to come straight out. I jumped up to sit on the commode, but she'd moved some stuff which caught on my IV line so I ended up with my arm behind my back on the commode not fully understanding how, but looking down at another soiled floor. The nurse did the brave thing and left the room and got the care partner to come in and clean up.

Fresh and clean. Was going about doing whatever I was doing, probably watching something on TV. Needed to go for another poo so sat on commode and did business, wiped and got back into bed. Pressed call button for someone to come and empty (I'll explain this process later). Next I heard a bang, looked round and the pan had fallen out of the bottom of the commode splashing poo everywhere. Yep, same care partner to the rescue and she wasn't happy as it was right at the end of her shift. On this note, I had a dodgy commode which they later changed after me pointing out multiple times that the bowls didn't fit inside the frame properly.

Ah ha, I hear you say. I thought it was accidents 3, 4 and 5 with the same person, but you've only mentioned two. Yes, you are correct, number 5 was at the beginning of her next shift. So, I had one of these real emergency less than a second notice ones. Jumped out of bed, grabbed the lid of the commode and flicked it up, only it didn't go all the way up and came back down again, so I was sat on the plastic covering and poo'd on that doing a speed boat impression. Actually got quite a good rooster tail going.

Thinking about it, given that I had five days of going at least every three hours, I don't think I did too bad.

So for the last explanation. There is a bathroom in the room, but I can't use it as they either need to collect my offerings for tests or to measure how much there is which is why I have to ring the bell for someone to come and take it away. Don't ask me. But the more interesting thing is that when they are collecting a sample you get a “hat” that fits on the bowl. To the front to collect a woman's urine and to the back for the stool sample.

If you have to provide a sample as an out patient, they give you a kit to collect it in that includes the hat and some pots etc. Now the best bit is that one of the samples has to be frozen immediately so you poop in the pot, put the pot in a sealed bag, put the sealed bag in another sealed bag with ice in it and put that in the freezer.

Just thought you'd like to know. Not sure why this comes to mind now, but next time you're round, you must try my new hot dogs. If you're really lucky I may have some Cumberland sausages in too!

So, after posting the Smokin' Aces blog last week that indicated everything was going well, it went backwards rather quickly. At 12:30 that night everything went south and in a big way. Vomit, Diarrhea and a fever. Nice - symptoms now worse than when I went in the first time.

Tried to ride it out, but ultimately ended up back in ER on Tuesday morning and being admitted to hospital later that day which is where I am now. I am debating whether or not to post a follow up article to Smokin' Aces as this week was not a “good week” as defined by that article. The article would be funny, but embarrassing - so I probably should post it.

Anyway, this is a weak follow up to the Inside of Me article. Now, I'm really upset that there's no way to get a video of this, but I had yet another probing only this time it wasn't going quite as deep so I had the option to stay awake for the procedure which I did so I could watch. Once you get past the sick worrying bit that you're actually looking inside yourself, it's so cool.

So it's a fibre optic camera. First thing is that it's on before it gets inside so you see it approach you from the back. Now, we've all tried to look at our bums in the mirror, but let me tell you, seeing it how others would see it is kind of very strange. I haven't really spent a lot of time thinking about what my bum looks like, but I didn't realize how hairy it is. Anyway, moving on (or should I say probing further?) we enter the forbidden zone (albeit not that forbidden at the minute).

Most of what you see is pretty much what you've seen on TV as the probe moves along tubes. What's really cool is when they do a biopsy. As I said, you need to divorce yourself from the fact that it's yourself that you're looking at and then you can appreciate it otherwise you're going to think you can feel it. So, this little thing shoots out and opens up. Exactly like the jaws of alien. It then closes and bites off a little piece before retracting and sending the sample back to the doctor.

As I said, probably a lot better if they could have video'd it and then you'd see what I mean, but it's totally cool.

Seems that the posting of the “Inside of Me” video got a lot of attention last week resulting in a couple of emails requesting more. Well, I've not had the chance to get out and create something new, but I do have some old material that I've now loaded onto the site. Before creating this site, I made up a couple of DVDs that I sent back to the folks. These mainly consisted of shots of William, but there was also a couple of other stupid things that I decided to do and put on there.

So, what's worth watching. If you're not a family member, the clips in the Other Videos are going to be of more interest. In my opinion, the best by far is still the first one I ever did - Kitty Poos - and I would definitely say this is a must see. Next on the list I'd put Rag Band with Cat Trick close behind it. San Francisco Animated Slideshow is worth it if you're bored and want to see an animated slideshow. Animated just means that the pictures move around in addition to transitioning between each slide. There's some fairly cool effects if you're interested.

Onto the Family Videos which are more interesting if you're related, but most of it are just pictures of William in various slideshows. Top of the list here would be the Wedding video as the running theme through it is quite funny. The problem is that the editing (I admit) is really bad - I left too much in there where nothing really happens, and the video itself is really bad - mainly shots of people legs. If you can put up with that and want to download overnight (yep - the fact that I left too much in has created a huge file which I can't edit anymore as I don't have the source) then this may be worth a watch. The rest of the stuff here is three different slideshows with essentially the same material and some video clips that have been added together. The most interesting slideshow is the Morphing Slideshow of William's First Year so would recommend that if you want to see some cool effects. Then maybe the Video Clips from William's First Year if you want to see something different.

Unlike the “Inside of Me” video that you really need to download the MPEG as you need the definition and size to see the detail, you can get away with the WMV version of these ones, although I'd probably tell you to download the MPEG of “Kitty Poos” because it's quite good and is probably worth the additional wait. Therefore suggest the MPEG for that one and then the WMV for the others. If there's one of the others that you really, really like, you could go back and get the MPEG later.

Have fun and let me know what you think.

I should have probably title this article “things that you take for granted” but wanted to give a quick shout out to Ace Freeley (of Kiss fame) for putting on a great show last night at the Regency in San Francisco. (And I definitely don't want anyone to get confused with the waste of time film Smokin' Aces which at best ... actually it didn't have a best - sending the DVD back was the best thing about it.)

So what the hell am I going on about. Well, got back from the show last night and Karen asked whether I had a good time and I said “yes - show was good, had a good laugh with my mate and didn't shit myself.”

Hmmm - interesting. Now, I'm sure everyone would agree that if you went for dump without removing your clothes, it's probably not going to rank as the best day of your life. And would probably rank as one of the worst and most embarrassing. That said, I also think most people don't really consider the fact that they avoided an “accident” as being a particularly memorable thing and something that contributes to it being a “good day.” But it seems that this now takes up a fair amount of my attention. There seems to be a level of comfort in knowing where the nearest bog is - well, I suppose not just knowing as if it's an hour and a half away, that's probably not that comforting, I guess knowing where it is and that you would be able to make it should the need arise. And there in lies another challenge. Not being the most mobile of people, the proximity of said bog needs to be fairly close in order to provide the necessary level of comfort.

One hopes that this concern wanes as I get better, but in the meantime, here's looking to having a “good week.”

Was back in the hospital on Tuesday to get a blood test to see if they've got the dosage of my pills right, so not for any kind of emergency or significant test. This kind of allowed me to look around for the first time without being too focused on the reason for my visit. It was interesting to see the programs that the health facility is running to help people avoid being hospitalized - healthy living and all that. Also, running seminars on how to deal with various types of illness.

The poster that caught my eye was the ldquo;Reminder for the upcoming Living with Alzheimer's seminar.” Made me wonder how many times they post the reminder and also got to wondering what the attendance rate was as a percentage of people that signed up.

Another weekend and, unfortunately, another setback as some of my symptoms return. Thankfully nothing serious enough to warrant another trip to the hospital, but enough to remind me that it's not over yet. Anyway, pretty much meant that I've been housebound instead of being able to go out house hunting which we'd got all booked up. What that has done is given me some extra time and I've been able to put the video together of the images that were taken of me whilst in hospital.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it), there are no images from any of the “rectal probes” that were performed. All that's left are some CT scans and a couple of X-Rays. I've tried to make the video as interesting as I can, but I don't think it gets there (even with the Simpsons take off at the beginning). Also, if you want to watch it and see the detail, you probably need to download the MPEG (.MPG) version as the WMV files are not full screen. I suppose you could watch online and then decide if you can be bothered to download.

So, if you really have nothing to do, go to the Other Videos Home Page and select your viewing choice of the “Inside of Me” video.

Good news. They finally ran a test on me that showed something working properly. Seems I'm processing stuff right and the Crohns isn't as bad as first thought. This means that I don't get the biologics treatment with the rat DNA in favor of Mercaptopurine (6-MP to its friends) tablets. Trouble is, there's a big “Don't Take With Alcohol” warning on the bottle and I'm supposed to be on these for life. Me sees another conflict here that will need to be resolved one way or another. I'm hoping it's because alcohol does the same thing as the 6-MP and that I can just take alcohol after I'm off the blood thinners. No?? Well, it's a thought.

Thursday saw another trip to the emergency room (ER). Nothing to worry about, wasn't too serious - in fact, it was quite convenient - I'd been to a client in the morning to give a presentation that went well, then returned home. Picked up some things on the way back and got in around 1:00. Karen had been to the zoo with William and they got back at 2:00. At about 2:15 I got the symptoms (bleeding) that they told me I need to head off to the ER for. Even though I wasn't happy about it, I felt fine. So much so that Karen had a slow puncture in her car and we decided to take it and pump it up on the way. She then dropped me off at the ER, went to get the tire fixed, did some shopping, dropped the shopping off at home, then came to pick me up. Timed to perfection as they were just releasing me (although they offered to let me stay overnight) when she got there. But not before yet another doctor got the chance to have a quick poke up my arse. I tell you, there's now a sweepstake in the San Francisco medical community as to who's going to be next. Bonus points awarded for the most inventive device.

Anyway, the ironies. I got to thinking about with what seems to be happening to me. First, what brought me to ER - the Crohns makes me susceptible to bleeding, but I have a blood clot that puts me on blood thinners that makes me even more susceptible to bleeding. Hence the need to monitor the thinners on a regular basis.

I've already mentioned that I have both constipation and diarrhea at the same time which is an enigma all by itself. Although many have said that I don't know whether I'm coming or going. Then there's the Crohns and the C-diff infection - I can't start the long-term treatment for the Crohns until I've finished taking the antibiotics for the infection (which I finished on Friday so can start on the next thing on Monday). And now for one that keeps rattling round my head - the treatment for the Crohns is going to be biologic so getting injected with some stuff that's made up of both human and rodent dna. For those who are smart enough, they will have figured out that the irony here lies with the blood thinners (warfarin). For those who haven't got there yet, warfarin is used as rat poison, so it seems like I'm going to be putting something into me then killing it.

On another note, the biologics have a few potential side effects (and no, growing a tail and squeaking is not one of them) that are a little worrying, but my biggest fear is getting home one day and looking across the room to see the cat sit up with a glint in his eye then having him chase me round the house.

Another fear is that this treatment involves injections and they kind of want me to inject myself which I'm trying to get my head around. I know that millions of diabetics do it everyday, so I'm sure I'll get there. They did suggest one option though and that was to teach Karen to do it. We both agreed that probably wouldn't be a good idea - not because she wouldn't be capable, more that I'd probably wouldn't be a very good patient for her. Still, not wanting her to feel left out, they gave me some suppositories for the constipation and I've told her she can help me with those if she wants.

The last thought before I post is an old saying when I was younger to “make sure you always have on clean underwear as you never know when you're going to end up in hospital.” In my case I can't help think that this is tempting fate and maybe I shouldn't change my underwear for the next few weeks.

OK. Now I'm back home it's time to catch up on some stuff, but first things first, lets give the run down on what happened.

Saturday 16th Feb
Went to hospital ER with chronic diarrhea and fever circa 7:00pm. Was already being treated as an outpatient, but rather than getting better, symptoms got worse. Fortunately (or unfortunately) the results of previous tests were through and I was told I had Crohn's disease. Had series of tests from CT scans to EKGs in order to determine whether I had an infection in order to start the treatment for Crohn's. Oh yeah - and something shoved up my bum so they could take a look round. I think the concept is similar to those boats with glass bottoms, but the view's probably not as nice.

Sunday 17th Feb
At 5:00am completed tests from previous evening. Everything looked OK - good to go with starting Crohn's treatment. Anticipated stay in hospital 3 days.

Monday 18th Feb
Everything still looks good, but Gastroenterologist wants to perform a colonoscopy. Yep, more things to push up the back door. And this after I'd already had a flexible sigmoidoscopy as an outpatient. I suppose I only have myself to blame as I did choose to live in San Francisco so what did I really expect?

Tuesday 19th Feb
Now, in order to do the colonoscopy they have to clear you out. And when I say clear you out, they really mean it. You have to drink 4 liters of this stuff called "go lightly" which makes you do anything but go lightly, I can tell you that for nothing. So, here's the first contradiction - although I had diarrhea, I was also constipated. Go Figure. The way it works is that the block is higher up so that was preventing anything from coming through, but when it let go, it let go. Anyway, I took all this stuff on Monday night and it didn't clear everything so the colonoscopy was postponed for another day.

Wednesday 20th Feb
After another evening of drinking go lightly - yep, I had to go through it all again, they finally got round to pushing the biggest thing they could find up my ring and indeed confirmed that I had Crohn's. Fortunately I was put out for this procedure, but when I came round I had some difficulty breathing (odd!!)

Was allowed to eat after the procedure, so went back to eating. Felt fine in the afternoon, but early evening felt really bad. The poor nurse that came in to draw some blood for one of the many blood tests they do daily was greeted by me sat on the side of the bed holding the commode advising that this was probably not the best time to try and stick a needle in me. She went to get the nurse that was assigned to me and when she walked in I "popped" as they described it in the Matrix. Now for the crowning glory. No sooner had I vomited than I needed to poop - the old coming out of both ends trick. So, dropped the underwear and spun round (all very delicately as I was hooked up to an IV) sat down and let everything flow so to speak. Next thing I've got one nurse injecting morphine into one arm and another taking my blood pressure on the other arm. I have to say, even for me, that's a first.

Thursday 21st Feb
Woke up not feeling too great (unsurprisingly), but all that I had to do was go for a series of x-rays on my small intestine an then would be let go. Trouble was, kept feeling worse. Went for the x-rays - and not just your run of the mill x-ray, this is a time delay series after you drink barium so they can see it go through your body. Whole thing from start to finish took about 4 hours. You get an x-ray every 30 minutes to an hour but can go back to your room to watch TV in between.

After final series of x-rays got back to my room and they were concerned that my legs had swelled up and was still having difficulty breathing. Additionally, they thought that they had seen fluid round my lungs from the x-rays. Great news - apparently there are only 3 things that can cause this - heart, liver and kidneys and they had done every test on my liver and kidneys and they were fine. They suspected a blood clot. In turn, I informed the doctor that if I hadn't been admitted with diarrhea, that would be another symptom he could add that to the list. Was sent for another CT scan that confirmed not only blood clot, but one in my chest (aka pulmonary embolism).

Thursday 22nd Feb
Started on heparin to thin blood and address clot. Now for a little something for you to try back at home. Don't worry, it won't hurt. They moved the IV from one hand to the other. No big deal, but it's interesting what you use each hand for. Your little challenge is the next time you go for a poo, try and wipe only using one hand (being the one you don't normally use). It's possible, but it feels really weird. But, the diarrhea gave me lots of chances to practice this. Although I was fearful that I'd look down and see clean toilet paper in one hand and something else in the other hand, thankfully that didn't happen.

Friday 23rd Feb and Saturday 24th Feb
Not much change as was just responding to the Heparin. The big news though was that they had managed to get a better sample from me when doing the colonoscopy and subsequently found an infection (Clostridium Difficile or "C Diff" to its friends). I think this was found on Thursday, but it didn't seem like a big deal compared to everything else that was going on. So, treatment stopped for the Crohn's to fix the C Diff first.

Monday 25th Feb
Happy birthday to me (or what's left of me at this point). Actually, by now had turned the corner and was starting to feel much better. Downside being that I'm in hospital, it's my birthday and I was supposed to be on holiday. Still, mustn't grumble.

Tuesday 26th Feb
Everything as good as can be expected. Need to complete the injection stuff, but should be released tomorrow.

Wednesday 27th Feb
Given the all clear and discharged. Well, when I say all clear, I have a ton of pills, so if you hear a rattle, it's probably me walking up the corridor. I still need to get a lot of treatment sorted out, but I'm not critical anymore. Which is a good thing.

And there you have it.

Good News!!! I'm going to be discharged from hospital tomorrow morning. Obviously with having had something that's put strain on my heart I asked the doctor whether I'd be OK for sex. He said yes, so I told him there's a nice little Italian restaurant nearby that maybe we could go to first.

What could be more fun than spending your birthday in hospital hooked up to an IV? Presumably nothing as that's what I'm doing. So, to my loyal fan base that's been wondering where my blogs have gone, now you know.

Normal service should be resumed shortly as I expect to get out of here in a couple of days. I have a backlog of stuff to put on the open forum blogs which I will get to and also want to do an article titled "up my arse and beyond" that gives a guided tour of my body as per the scans that I've had whilst I've been in hospital. Unfortunately there's no footage from the rectal probe which is a shame as I'd quite like to have had a look at that. There are some good x-rays and CT scans though.

Wow! My inbox has been inundated with one email asking about the Fan Fare of Daytona. Actually, it was to explain the Budweiser shoot out, but I feel the entire thing needs some explanation, so here it is.

In typical American style, somebody obviously thought about - “how can we prolong the event and get more money from the punters?” And here's what they came up with. Ordinarily, a NASCAR race has 43 competitors. To keep it simple, the top 35 in the standings pre-qualify and the next fastest 8 get in. What this means is that all the drivers not in the top 35 come to each track with a car setup purely for qualifying and tend to qualify at the top of the heap, but then go slowly backwards during the race as their cars aren't setup for the long haul of say a 500 mile race. The order the drivers start in is the order they qualify in.

Not so for Daytona. That would be far too easy. So, the top 35 in points from last season automatically qualify. Qualifying is then held and this determines another 2 drives that get into the race (35 + 2 = 37). It's actually 3 that qualify, but we'll come back to that. The field in its entirety is then split in half - odd numbers and even numbers. Each half then enters what's called a “duel”. Two more cars qualify from each duel (37 + 2 + 2 = 41). The next spot goes to a former (Sprint) Cup Champion if there is one in the pack who has not yet qualified. Any remainder is filled up with the next fasted qualifiers. (As I said earlier, the third place in qualifying gets in on the basis that there would always at least one more spot to fill, but the third place in qualifying may also get in via the duels thus pushing the next people to get into the race from further down the qualifying list).

As for the starting positions for the race, only the top two positions from the qualifying session are locked in. The remaining positions are determined by the duels to create forced racing in each of the 150 mile duels (one duel filling the odd numbered spots and the other the even numbers). Otherwise, presumably the previously qualified drivers would drive one lap and then pull into the pits. This means that you could be unlucky enough to qualify third, but have a bad duel and end up starting 43rd.

All very well, but what does this have to do with the Shootout? Nothing really, other than to give you an idea of what's going on. The Shootout is a special event race. Not really sure what purpose it has other than to get the season started. Now, bearing in mind all the rigmarole above for the Daytona 500 qualifying, what is the Shootout? The Shootout is a race for all of the previous season's pole sitters (those people who started the race first by qualifying first). Oh no, if this is a race for the best qualifiers, how complicated have they made the qualifying for this race? Any idea? No, well, believe it or not, there is no qualifying, it's done on a random draw.

And America wonders why nobody else follows its sports.

As Daytona week kicks off with all the fan fare that accompanies the Daytona 500 we bring you the top story so far. Most people are reporting on the alleged “punch up” between Tony Stewart and Kurt Busch. Certainly a news worthy discussion, but not what we feel is truly reportable. Instead, we focus our attention on the effects of the big last season news - that of Dale Earnhardt Jr. moving from Dale Earnhardt Inc. to Hendrick Motorsport.

This has caused a lot of concern with fans, in particular the problem that he was going to lose his number 8 car and Budweiser sponsorship. Why would this be of such a concern to his loyalist fans? Apparently it's because they're worried about how they're going to have to change their tatoos! (Seriously - they even covered this on the tv.) So Dale has managed to secure the 88 car and has written the eights the same way as they were written on the 8 car. This is to help the troubled fans and allow them the option of just adding an 8 to their previous tatoo.

What consideration! Actually, most people interviewed (yep they interviewed people on this) said they were just going to take the opportunity to get another tatoo done and not bother changing the old one.



Seems that I've picked an appropriate sport to follow. Although my die hardness ends with wearing a baseball cap.

So the news story from the US is that United are going to start charging $25 per additional bag. The news from France, however, is that flight attendants are stripping for the pilots. Probably a fair reflection on the difference in service.

The video of the strip tease can be found on The Sun's website. The think I like best about the article is the fact that it isn't possible to squeeze in another pun. Starting with the title across the picture “ hello ... this is your captain tweaking” to the old favorite of finding somewhere to abuse the term “joystick”

Saturday morning and time to head out to go house hunting. But not any ordinary Saturday morning to go out for a drive. No, brother Hog ordered himself a car public address system that you connect up and it plays noises (like the noise of a cow) so that you can surprise unsuspecting people. Or so it says on the box. This product is, apparently only available in the US and will only ship to a US address so my brother had it shipped to me and I can then arrange to pass it on to him in the UK - either on my next trip home or by mailing it.

Obviously I couldn't resist the urge to test out this ingenious invention. So I thought, why not video it, so I did. You too can see how amazing this product isn't by clicking on the “Hog Horn” link from the Other Videos page.

Things to look out for:

• Between the break when I connect it up, I'd practiced using it. Note William's expression when I flash to him
• On the animal noises, it seems like those that we actually take a guess at (chicken and pig) are actually wrong.
• Is it me, or is the car's indicator the loudest thing on the video?

Now, what you don't see is that after I turned the camera off, there was actually someone at the side of the road. I hit him with the duck noise and he totally didn't hear it.

Now, now, the other bit that you didn't see was the effort that went into putting this together. We head off on our journey and the windscreen wipers on Karen's car were just leaving a smeary mess on the winDSCreen. I couldn't see a thing out of my side. Karen claimed she could see out of hers, but appeared to be peering between the streaks akin to looking out of a pillbox. I seriously thought this gadget was going to work, so I made her drive back to the car parts shop. I bought two new winDSCreen wipers and stood in the rain for about 30 minutes getting soaked trying to figure out how to fit them. It really wasn't worth it.

Now, now, now, did you know that there is a left and right winDSCreen wiper. No? Well, nor did I. I guess I had a 50% chance of getting it right when I put them on, but odds like that never seem to work out. I believe Murphy's Law intervenes somewhere along the line to considerably reduce the odds below 50% which is why I fitted the new wipers the wrong way round. You can't actually tell from the video as most of the video is just a shot of the speaker on my knee. We drove round for about 4 hours before I realized that I was looking through a brand new widescreen TV and Karen was again peering though the old 14" black and white. I guess I could see so that's all that matters really.

Press release:

“EastBayRag, the Bay Area company headquartered in San Francisco, announces that it is going to cut 1,000 jobs throughout it's global operations. The company is feeling the pressure of all the other software companies being bought for obscene amounts. In an effort to realize the EBR Business Plan, and to entice even higher bids (hopefully up to $44.6 billion), the company has decided to take the drastic measures.”

I mean, come on Microsoft - $44.6 billion for Yahoo! I only want $10 million. It's a drop in the ocean and look what you get. So Yahoo's got a bigger customer base, more intellectual capital and a couple more assets, EastBayRag has a logo with a bloke fishing on it. And one that I ripped off from some clipart somewhere. What more could you want?

Following the theme of the previous article of random irrelevant facts, here's one for you. If you go to Google and type in EastBayRag, it will find this site and display entries to hit the relevant page. If you go to Yahoo and try the same it will not find anything and will ask you if you meant to try something different. Now, if you look at the IP address that this website is on and lookup the owner, you will find it belongs to Yahoo. Although I host this site myself, Yahoo is my ISP and they are the ones providing connectivity to the Internet. It seems that Yahoo's search engine doesn't look at what's going on under its own nose. (I'll leave you to deduce the rest for yourself).

Is it just me or do I have a right to question the units of measurement used on the news this morning? They were discussing the fact that January has had a significant amount of rainfall. And I quote, the amount of rainfall was “eight and thirty nine hundredths of an inch.” It was even written as 8.39"

Last time I checked, inches were typically broken into sixteenths or multiples thereof so you could go to 1/32 or 1/64 etc. I don't recall ever hearing an imperial measurement having a metric (or decimal I suppose) end to it.

Maybe the US is not content with just altering the rules around language to make it more phonetic (as opposed to correct [he hypocritically says typing and spelling in English US]) that they decided to bastardize (noting the spelling with a “zee”) the measurement system.

(And I know the measurement systems aren't the same in the sense that things like the fact that a US pint is different from a UK pint, but at least there's a reason for that. That reason being that the UK changed its system to imperial in 1824 which is post some irrelevant July 4th date so America didn't adopt it. If you really want to get you head in a spin, America uses English Units. English units are outlawed in the UK by the 1824 Weights and Measurements Act, so the UK uses imperial, a.k.a. British Imperial System. I guess the US is more traditional than the UK).

Congratulations to Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates for winning the Daytona 24hr race for the third year in a row. Second year in a row for Scott Pruett and Juan Pablo Montoya at the wheel. (Not at the same time, obviously, otherwise it would have been a little crowded in the drivers seat). And first time for Dario Franchitti and Memo Rojas who were the other two drivers to take the wheel for stints.

In other news, beware the little people. Whilst most people are focused on the recession, The Sun ran an article this week about gangs in Sweeden putting dwarves into bags and putting them on buses. Whilst in transit, the dwarves would crawl out of their hiding place and loot the belongings of other passengers. Full story Cops Hunt Dwarf Thieves

“A view or outlook” normally associated with something of beauty or worth looking at. Bought a new computer at the weekend for Karen as I seem to be taking up the others so she needed something to use. It came with Windows Vista on it. Turned the computer on and it spent several hours unpacking itself (metaphorically speaking as I mean unpacking of files, not unpacking itself from the box - that would be pretty cool if it did that) then it spent the next two days patching itself which resulted in it not being able to run the pre-packages software that came with it.

Seriously! Now when you boot the computer it tells you that it has compatibility issues with the webroot (anti-spyware) software that came with it. There's a button to click to fix - click it and it goes off to the internet, spends a couple of minutes searching, then tells you it can't fix it but you'll be notified when a fix is available. In the meantime contact the application vendor. You go to webroot's website and it tells you that the Windows Vista upgrades are causing problems with their software but they are “aggressively” working with Microsoft to fix the issue and as a workaround, you should consider uninstalling the Vista upgrades.

And that's progress!!

(Yes, I know all you Mac fans are laughing, but you really don't know what you're missing. Where's the fun in having a product that works as you expect it to?)

After doing some general housekeeping to tidy up some bits and pieces that I've been meaning to do for a while, I got to thinking about changing the intro to the site. It used to start by quoting the opening line from the WASP song Electric Circus - welcome, I bid you welcome, to life inside the electric circus - and I thought probably about time for a change. So I moved the intro text off the home page and created a page that gave an overview of the genesis of this site.

Whilst doing it, I got to thinking “what do I want to get out of this?” so I wrote a business plan to define my long term strategic objectives. It took me a long while to put this together, factoring in global economic conditions (strength of dollar, price of oil etc.), looking at my career plans and growth opportunities on my current career path, performing a SWOT analysis layered onto PEST analysis multiplied by Porter's Five Forces. Finally, considering Maslow's hierarchy of needs to establish my desired end state and help determine what I would need to climb to that level of the pyramid.

Anyway, the business plan is linked from the genesis page, but to save you from searching, you can access it from the link below:

EBR Business Plan

2008 certainly seems to be the year of the tit so far. As many of you avid readers may know, I've developed an interest in photography. You may not, however, be aware that my folks put nuts out in their garden for the local birds. What that means is that this Christmas holiday presented itself with the opportunity to take a few photos of the birds in my parents garden. And, as the title suggests, the most common was the tit. First off, there's the common pair of tits (Great and Blue). These are your bankers, those that you can gaurantee to see on any day. “The pair that keeps popping out.”

Now, ordinarily, most people would leave it at that. And I have to admit, at first, that's all I thought was there. Now I think the problem is that typically you get into the “can't see the tits for the bush” syndrome. Basically, getting caught by the other features and not staying focused on the tits. But if you look carefully, there's always another pair lurking in the background. In this case the Coal and Long-Tailed Tits as shown below.

Well, there you have it ..... “ddddrrrrrrr” ..... What was that? ..... “ddddrrrrrrr” ..... There it goes again. Surely it can't be? But yes, it's obvious really. With all these tits about, there was sure to be a large woody somewhere wasn't there. And in this case a pair of Greater Spotted Woodpeckers. Woody's pictured with their nuts below.

I was watching “How William Shatner Changed the World” the other day. Hold on a minute, did I just say that out loud. Ooops! Looks like I did and what's worse, I seem to have written it down. Still, I suppose most people know I'm a geek by now, but if there was any doubt left in your mind, I think I've just killed it.

Anyway, the program was talking about things like the flip phones in use today being designed by Star Trek fans, then moving onto things like whether or not the warp drive concept would be possible (which, apparently some people think it could be). Finally it got onto the transporter system which unfortunately isn't going to be possible given the amoung of energy it would require to work - clearly they haven't seen &ldquoThe Fly” - and the person talking on this section commented on the fact that it would be very desireable as he did a lot of flying and really didn't like it.

I too feel that I'm in the same position. I know all the statistics are there around safety, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. I think it's the not being in control bit that bothers me. On my flight over here, we encountered some turbulence whilst flying over the States that made me really want someone to press ahead with the invention of the transporter.

One other random fact, we arrived in the UK too early as we had favorable tail winds. Too early as Heathrow doesn't open until 6:00 am. Odd as I thought it was a 24 hour airport, but apparently not!

Yet again, Mr O met up with Karen and myself to do the local bumpkin quiz. This time, however, it was the big annual Cricket Club quiz which we've never won before. There were about 20 teams that entered the quiz and we came out victorious even though we were one of the few teams that only had three members.

Well, according to everybody else in the pub we may as well have only had one member - Mr O. After we won (on a tie break question as we had drawn with one of the other teams) everybody came over and congratulated Mr O on his win. Nobody gave Karen or myself any credit for our involvement in this (supposed) team victory.

As I felt the need to point out later, it was very much a team effort. Mr O did actually get the answers to all the questions, which probably warrants most of the credit, however, Karen wrote all the answers on the answer sheet and I sat there making fart noises to put off the other teams.

My Christmas present this year was a "Dr Fart." Said items is a keyring thing with six buttons on it that you can press to emit different sounds of flatulence. I've been kept continuously amused with it for two days now, so it was money well spent. The only complaint I have is that it's not loud enough. What that meant is that I needed to time the trumping noises with when it was quiet. Sort of going for the "OK, Question one [slight pause] thbbrrrtttt" Anyway, you get the picture (talking of which, there's a picture below of my wonderful present) and I don't feel that my skill or contribution to the team effort was truly recognized, so I'm going to take the opportunity here to congratulate myself!

In the words of Noddy Holder “so here it is ...” and I'd like to add “so bloody well shut up and enjoy it!” Time to eat turkey, drink beer and have fun!

I was trying to think of an apt meaning for MUNI, but I couldn't quite finish it off. Well, I'll say I gave it all of five minutes and got bored so thought I'd just get on and write the article anyway.

So, we had the British American Christmas Lunch this week. A jolly good affair and a decent piss up even if I say so myself. Being the safe accountant type person that I am, I left the car at home and decided to get public transport so I could have a few beers. It seems that every time I do this I run into some sort of problem or another.

It was an awful day, so it was bad enough walking to the MUNI stop, but I didn't realize how bad until I heard this massive crack and when I looked back saw half of a tree that I'd just walked under come crashing down where I'd been walking. OK, could have been worse. Best get a drink to calm the nerves :)

Onto the train to get said drink and we must of managed ... oh ... at least three blocks before we had to stop because the train in front had broken down. What happened next was really weird. They decided to hook up our train with the train in front and drive it as a four carriage instead of two carriage. Makes sense, but they didn't let us off before they decided to hook up the trains. Then, after about 20 minutes of connecting, we got going and the train just went straight up 20 blocks or so without stopping. Now, didn't bother me as I was heading into town, but there were quite a few people jumping up and trying to get the driver to stop by pulling the bell. The driver of our train had already told us that he was no longer in control of the vehicle (it was being run from the front) and the fact that some people were continuing to pull on the stop cord seemed to enrage one of the other passengers. I was hopeful of a fight, but it didn't happen. Instead, we carried on a bit further, decoupled, went a few more blocks, broke down again and then had to walk four blocks into West Portal where, fortunately there is a larger selection of trains going into town.

Had a great time at the event and time to go home. Surely the MUNI would be nice to me at least once. Wrong! After waiting for a very long time (I think an hour - it was at least 30 minutes as I started timing it after a while) I gave up waiting for an L train as it didn't seem like one was going to come. It seemed like it was just a lady with a child and myself sitting there waiting as people came in and went out on other trains. Thinking back now, it kind of makes sense as we would be the only two people not wanting to (or capable of) walk far so we were waiting. As noted, eventually I gave up and decided to take the N to Sunset, then get the 29 bus across. All in all it took me over 2 hours to do a journey that should be about 30 minutes.

And a thank you to the owner of the house with the big bush at the junction of the N and 29. After eleventeen beers it was muck needed.

When I got home from the Christmas party last weekend I noticed a film on TV called Mr Skeffington. Not really being in a fit state to watch it then, I decided to watch it tonight. Why, you may ask? Well, Skeffington is the name of the village that I come from (circa 40 houses and 100 people), so I thought I'd take a look at the film to see if I could draw any comparisons. Here's a brief overveiw:

Skeffington has an obsession for Fanny. Skeffington marries Fanny and Trippy gets upset. Trippy goes to Europe and dies in the war. Fanny blames Skeffington and divorces him so Skeffington goes to Europe with their daughter (another Fanny!) Little Fanny, as she becomes known, travels back to the States to see mother Fanny. Mother Fanny realizes she is old and no longer wanted by men and gets upset. Skeffington comes home after he's been tortured by the Nazis resulting in him being blind. Fanny is happy as this means Skeffington can't see how old she is so she takes him back and they live happily ever after (which is not very long as they're both old now).

I'll let you figure out the similarities. In the meantime I'm going to flick through the channels to see if there's anything worth watching yet.

Massive congratulations to Matt and Olivia for getting married last Saturday. Looks like it went really well and the reception looked fantastic. Wishing you all the best from the other side of the Atlantic.

Why is it that people feel the need to have inane conversations on their mobile phones. Some people just can't seem to go five minutes without telling their other half what they're doing and that they love them.

Or to argue about something as appeared to be the case today. This lady was strolling out by where I work and what I got from the conversation was “yeah ... huh ... yeah ... ok ... bye ... yes I love you.” All I can say is that what I was looking at was not a face that was conveying love. Far from it. I don't know what this chap had done, but I'm pretty sure he was going to pay for it when his beloved got home.

And then there's those people that phone up to say that they'll be home in five minutes. Is your other half so predisposed to surprises that they couldn't deal with you just turning up at home after a day at work without being announced?

Well, not me. I called on the way home and my message was as follows - “Am on my way home, have been stuck in traffic. I've got a bit of a turtle's head poking through so I'm coming in hot. Clear out an LZ and make a path to the bog!” Essential information that I felt needed to be conveyed.

Now, I know what you're thinking - “I really didn't need to know that.” Some of you may even be thinking that I've painted a really bad image that you would rather not have had. Possibly thinking that you couldn't think of anything worse. Well, you're nearly right. What you really don't need to know is that now I'm back home, I'm sat comfortably and through the joys of wireless internet have just enough time to post this article!

One of the things I've been up to is sorting out the racing for the beginning of next season. Mr O and I have a little trip planned - we're going to the NASCAR race in Fontana (just east of LA) the last weekend in February, then driving over to Vegas to spend the week there and then go to the race in Vegas.

Sounds like a plan to me.

One thing I did realize is that I forgot to do the vote analysis this week. This problem has now been corrected.

So, no entries last week. I'd love to say it's because it was a quiet week, but unfortunately it's the opposite. That thing called work came up and got in the way again. Well that and the fact that I was working on creating an interface between this site and Adobe Photoshop which I've created a forum on if you're interested.

I'm still testing the interface and there's been some other activities that I'll blog about a bit later. In the meantime I'll leave you with my biggest current thought that I can't get out of my head and that's whether or not Research In Motion would ever team with Apple Computers to merge the Blackberry and iPhone. And if they did, would they call the resulting product “The Blackberry and Apple Crumble”?

Karen went out the other day and told William that we were going on a plane soon and that he'd get to see Nanny, Granddad and Auntie Alison. When we went out this morning I told William to hurry up as we were going out and he asked if we were going to get on a plane to see Nanny, Granddad and Auntie Alison. I said not yet, but when we did he'd also get to see Ivan again. He then looked at me rather quizzically and said “Noddy Car.”

I laughed as I thought it sweet that he remembered. The thing that's been bugging me all day though is that I can't remember William seeing the Lotus.

After a few weeks of being without a PDA, I've got myself a new one - a Blackberry 8310 (aka the Curve). There were a few teething problems after the firm got hold of it and destroyed it, but after a second attempt it appears to be working as intended and I'm quite impressed with it.

I've decided to do some little hikes at the weekend to do some photographing as I quite like this taking pictures thing. Anyway, went out this weekend and it was a complete waste of time in that the fog didn't allow you to see more than 20ft in front. As I was walking round I thought about the fact that this new device has GPS on it and so I downloaded a map application and started playing with it. It had the option to do a local search and I thought “what would I really like now?” So I typed in “beer” and it gave me a list of the nearest places that sold beer and asked me if I wanted directions from where I was to any of these. Wow! It actually needed a little refinement as most of the listings under beer were for shops that sold alcohol, but if you put in “bar”, Bob's your uncle!

Congratulations to Jimmy Johnson, Chad Knaus and the Lowe's/Kobalt Chevrolet team for their NASCAR Nextel Cup Series title. A great season for Hendrick Motorsport taking first and second place with Jeff Gordon - they've been dominant all season and put up a great fight against each other at the end.

Obviously Jimmy owes it all to Mr O and myself as I really thing the turning point in this season was when he took the win at Las Vegas which was the first NASCAR race we went to see. Jimmy pictured below doing his celebration at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Looking forward to next season. Plans are to start with both Fontana and Las Vegas at the end of February / beginning of March.

There was much laughter coming from the office next to me. The team had been performing a review that require tests to be executed and were going through the review comments from the boss on their work. Thankfully they didn't take the comments literally as they had been instructed to “remove these testes!” Now I know we push people pretty hard, but this is probably going a little too far for the cause.

At a party the other weekend, my mate looked round and his kid was trying to unbutton his mum's shirt and he laughs, saying “like father like son going straight for the booby.” I looked round to see William stuffing his third slice of pizza down his face whilst reaching for some cake. Unfortunately I had to agree with the “like father like son” comment. In my defense / experience though, the booby will always be there, but you need to get to the buffet first before all the best bits get taken.

Yep - I've been playing Halo 3. The long awaited sequel to the amazingly named Halo 2 which, in turn was the long awaited sequel to the (you're never going to guess this) original game Halo. So, there hasn't been any confusion around what the game is a sequel to - I think most of the gamers have figured this out. Cool.

The game is what you would expect - brilliant. I've completed it on the most difficult level, Legendary, which took a little bit of work, but not too much. That said, the best part of the game is the online bit. I've just started playing a bit, but not as much as I'd have liked given some work commitments. Still, I've had a few goes at it.

Anyway, the only purpose of writing this blog (as you'll find much better reviews elsewhere on the web) is that I've figured out that you can take screenshots and download them. So here are a few:

This article is a tad late as it relates to an event last Friday, but as happens every now and then, that work stuff has gotten in the way of what's really important. Anyway, went to my first ice hockey game - San Jose Sharks versus LA Kings.

First off, I have to say that I quite liked the game. Unlike the more traditional baseball and American football, this was fast moving and interesting. At least for the first period anyway as unfortunately the Sharks were terrible going down 5-1 which really meant that the second and third periods were very one sided.

Some interesting things though. When there's a break in the play, the TV coverage cuts to commercials. The game doesn't restart until they get the go ahead from the network to make sure that the viewers don't miss anything. Initially this seemed like a really strange concept until my mate who I went with pointed out that it's not like the blatant advertising in the UK where our teams had sold out and put the sponsorship across the front of their jerseys. And I do remember when advertising on shirts first came into soccer and there was the discussion on which teams were selling out and I guess we've just gotten used to it now. I hadn't really thought about it, but other people think it's sacrilegious to desecrate the team jersey.

The next thing (and I'm told this is relevant to Sharks fans only) is that the crowd seemed to be needed to be told what to do. The display boards frequently came up with instructions like "make some noise" and really bad chants like "beat LA". OK so maybe "Blue Army" isn't the most inventive, but we did have a lot of very creative songs as well like "When You're Smiling". Just to sidetrack for a second - I just searched to see if anyone had put these songs up on the web and yep there's a great website ForFoxSake and the songs are on there so now you can see how bad the songs are.

Finally, whenever the Sharks had a "Power Play" which, contrary to what I thought is not when a player runs over a flashing power up and then starts running twice as fast as the other players for 30 seconds, is actually when the opposing team goes a player down after they've committed a foul and been sent to the sin bin. Anyway, at this point the fans are instructed to make this weird motioning with the hands - I guess to look like a shark chomping on something, but it's unfortunately the action I've taught William that you do for a crocodile. Regardless, it looks like some demented version of the Birdie Song.

Don't get me wrong though. I did enjoy it.

A Happy Halloween to all of you! So, what was the most scary thing that happened to you? .... What's that? ..... Oh! That's nothing ..... I had a prostrate exam.

Straight Up!

I suppose if you're going to have one Halloween is as good a day as any to have one. Long story short, we've just changed medical plans and I had to go in and register and do the physical etc. If you're not from the US this won't make sense to you. I haven't figured out the medical system here and I don't really think anyone else has. The essence is you pay money and belong to a group that will treat you. But back to the story at hand I went in to meet my doctor, went through the usual stuff and blah, blah, broken neck, blah, blah, higher risk of etc. etc. and then I get asked, "when was the last time you had a rectal exam?"

I was kind of expecting the question and unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it), I haven't had one in a long time. "Well, we should really do one".

At which point I laughed. Not really a lot else I could think of doing and said "I thought you were going to say that. I'd rather not, but if you think I need one then OK". Now, to his credit he said "I'll tell you the truth, when I woke up this morning, this wasn't at the top of my list of things I wanted to do, but yes, we should do the exam".

A quick drop of the trousers, application of the old KY and wham, bam thank you exam.

Then a little surreality. "Did that feel uncomfortable?" My look must have given away the fact I was thinking - you just had your finger up my arse, I'd say that was pretty uncomfortable. So he added "I don't mean the fact that I had my finger up your bum, was there anything else?" To which I replied "if you were doing something else, I was unaware of it because I was somewhat focused on the fact that you had your finger up my bum." Which resulted in further clarification of "no, not any other sensation, but did you feel anything other than my finger like any other irritation".

The answer to that was no and thankfully everything was OK. All the bits that were supposed to be up there were there or whatever it was he was looking for. Although I was tempted to say - I'm struggling to think of anything more irritating than have a bloke poke his finger up my arse, but that wouldn't have been constructive.

So, I at least take comfort in the fact that I keep seeing all these flyers promoting regular prostrate exams as part of good health and the fact that I won't need another one for a while.

Just a couple of days after writing the article that the fun had been taken out of Halloween as it was now a glorified costume party rather than a celebration of the undead, news comes out of New Jersey of a 24 year old man that was caught having sex with a 92 year old woman. And yep, you guessed it - she was also dead!

According to the news articles, Anthony Merino, a lab technician (in the morgue) at Holy Name Hospital was caught in said necrophiliac act by a security guard. Apparently a spokesman for the police said “When you think you've heard and seen it all, something like this happens.” Well, I'm glad you don't come across this every day is all I can say.

Article on ABC News if you are interested.

I knew him well. 'Tis with sorrow that I look back and remember the days when Halloween had something to do with the undead. Time was when you tried to dress up as the most frightening thing you could think of and then try to scare someone. Now it seems that it's just a big commercial fancy dress party.

William had picked himself out a fireman's outfit for Halloween and Karen wanted to go to the zoo to take some photos of him. They had a pumpkin patch and the idea was that it would make for a better picture than just in the front room. And it appears that everybody else in San Francisco had the same idea, so the zoo was filled with many a family and their little darlings dressed as Spiderman, Teletubbies, Fairies ... well, basically anything you can think of except for anything traditional. Nevermind, the kids seemed to love it, including William and I suppose that's all that matters.

P.S. William's the one in the fireman's uniform. Not sure who the witch is! (Maybe I'm wrong, maybe somepeople did get dressed up to frighten other people. Maybe I'll just lie down on the couch to save the hassle of being sent there later).

Link to more photos of William and his shiny helmet.

We've all heard the stupid saying around not "assume" anything as it makes an "ass" out of "u" and "me", but my assumption only really made me look stupid and not anybody else. Quite mundane really, the indicator/turn light on Karen's car had gone on the back of the car. She got a new bulb but couldn't undo the wing nuts in the boot/trunk so asked me to do it. I assumed that chaning the bulb would be the same as it has been on any car I've had in the UK, that you just open a flap and take the old bulb out and replace with the new. I thought it odd that it wasn't just a little door and that there were wing nuts in the first place.

After a failed first attempt that resulted in fetching a pair of plyers, I got the wing nuts off. Based on my assumption above I tried to pull away the plastic housing in the boot/trunk only to find that it was further fixed with a couple of screws. Frustrated and thinking I needed to go back in to fetch a screwdriver, I gave the housing a quick hit. At which point the back light unit shot out. (Kind of like that "Only Fools and Horses" episode when they take the chandelier down to clean it, but on a much smaller scale).

Whether it's just this car or a US thing, it seems that rather than having a simple flap to open to change a bulb, you have to unscrew the back light unit held in with three wing nuts and take the unit out to replace the bulb. Still, I think there was only half the street watching me make a complete hash of doing something so simple as changing a light bulb!

.... such that I am forced to go to a two year old's birthday party? I suppose it has to happen, kind of every year really. Well, not a two year old's birthday as next year it'll be a three year old's birthday party, but each year I'm guessing that we're going to have a party. At least I've got 12 months to prepare for the next one. It really does seem kind of strange that parents would want to hold such an event - between the kids screeming, grabbing toys and shouting “mine” then pushing the other kids away, running away so the parents had to chase them, streaming snot down the front of their faces and pooping themselves it was .... actually there wasn't anything else, that was it.

I'm sure most people who have a kid will say it's great and convince themselves they had a good time. Sadly I missed the denial injections when William was born and am stuck with reality. Which is why I grabbed a couple of mates and headed off out to the pub.

There are some photos of the birthday party if you are interested, but I will say now that they are not the best pictures I've ever taken. There are some better photos of William playing with his toys that I took today. If you're really up for it, however, there are some videos of William at his birthday and opening his presents. I'm quite pleased with the video of the birthday as I think it highlights the screeming and running away, albeit the running away is me to the pub.

First, congratulations to South Africa. Second, contratulations to Kimi Räikkönen. Third, wooden spoons to all of Her Majesty's loyal subjects.

Lets start with the rugby. I have to be honest and say that I really didn't think we were going to get to the final, particularly after the thrashing that South Africa gave us in the group game. We should take credit for the significant improvement we showed and for the wins over Australia and France. South Africa have played consistently well throughout the competition and are worthy champions. Yes, we can keep looking back and saying “what if” the try had been given. It would have made it a different game. Well, it wasn't given and we have to live with it, so lets congratulate South Africa and give ourselves a little pat on the back for at least making the final.



Next it's the Formula 1 Grand Prix. All the jokes I've had over the week on the New Zealand rugby team choking that I haven't had time to publish, I can just change the name and substitute in Lewis Hamilton. Again, it's his rookie year so he should take some credit for having got into a position to win the championship, but we have to worry as he had two bites at the cherry and failed. Lewis obviously has considerable talent and I just hope these last two races don't impact his career. Most drivers start in the lower teams and work their way up after they've gained some experience in order that they don't make the rookie mistakes Lewis made. So, he needs to put it behind him and move on. One person that doesn't let emotion get in the way is Kimi “Ice Man” Räikkönen. I'm really happy that he's won the championship. Kimi is a great driver and has struggled with some of the worst luck I've seen. Well, all the stars seemed to align for him today as he picked up the win (courtesy of Felipe Massa) and the championship.

First, a massive congratulations to England for battling away to earn a place in the final of the Webb Ellis Trophy (a.k.a. Rugby World Cup). This was a fantastic achievement for a team that's not really played that well for quite a while, including a crushing defeat by South Africa in the group stages of this competition.

Trying to watch rugby in the US is like trying to find a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. The only option you have is pay per view. Fortunately I was in Africa and the UK for the group games so I got to watch those fine, but find myself shelling out $25 for each of the remaining games (the England ones anyway - I'm not paying to see the others).

After the match, I was obviously ecstatic and was really looking forward to the post match interviews, but I didn't make it that far. I have no idea where the feed was coming from or who selected the commentators, but we ended up with a Paddy and an Aussie. The after match analysis consisted of two whining idiots that seemed to be very bitter. The Irish guy kept going on about the fact that Ireland have beaten England over the last four years so if we will the World Cup we should give it to Ireland. The Aussie said that England had cheated through the whole tournament to get where they were. After about 10 minutes of this mindless conversation (seemingly independent conversation) one of them said something about the fact that they should say something positive about England as they'd won and the other said no, they couldn't think of anything.

Now, I freely admit it wasn't the most interesting game I've ever watched. It's the semi final of the World Cup between two rival nations - it's not going to be a spectacular event, it's going to be a hard fought battle. I also admit that England did well to hold the French off and slow the game down sufficiently so that we could win further taking the sparkle and creativity out of the game. But, we went in with a plan, executed it perfectly and won the game - against the host nation. There were a lot of things you could have commented on that England did right to win the game.

After the comment about not being able to think about anything positive to say I turned the TV off as I was in too good a mood to listen to a couple of miserable whining gits. It seems odd that you would want to work in commentary if it's going to upset you that much.

Still, we're in the final. It's going to be an incredibly difficult game as we have to play South Africa again. On current form, you have to fancy South Africa, but lets hope we learnt something from that defeat earlier on and maybe, just maybe we can spring a big surprise.

Well, it's been a few days now since “the event”. Everything seems to be back to normal now so I think I can safely write this article and maybe it will help some of you out there. As with most of you, I've read all the articles on disaster recovery and the need to have an adequate plan, but do you ever really think it's going to happen to you? I certainly didn't. But at least I had a plan (well sort of).

So, as most of you know, I've been traveling and that’s where this story starts. I returned to the US on October 29th all well and good. Actually, better than all well and good as Karen and William were spending another 10 days in the UK which meant I had some peace and quiet and could spend some quality time with my cats. Karen had done her best to prepare for my being alone and had gotten in enough microwave meals to last me until she returned and all of that good stuff. Except for one thing. An underestimation of the increased beer intake that comes with being alone.

In hindsight it’s obvious that this would have been an oversight and I should have known that Karen would not have a true appreciation for the beer intake before she came along, so I totally accept full responsibility for this.

As you can see, that’s bad, but would you really call it a disaster – probably not yet. Now lets add in that it’s Friday night when you open the last beer in the fridge, realize that there are no more and the shops are shut. Yes, it’s panic time. Then ….. it dawns on you that the rugby is on at 6:00 the following morning and you’re not going to have any beers to drink during the match. You really are left with no choice but to declare a disaster.

I’m sure I’m going to get asked, looking back, what went through my mind? What was I actually thinking at the point I realized there would be no beer in the house when the match was on. To be honest, I’ve heard the saying “it was enough to make a grown man cry” and I have to say I was pretty close to being reduced to tears. It was like my whole life’s drinking flashed before my eyes – which, lets face it didn’t take very long as typically you don’t remember much from the nights you’ve been drinking, so thankfully that didn’t get in the way of rational thought. Then the training kicked in. I just thought to myself “you’ve planned for this. You hoped it would never happen, but now it has you need to deal with it.”

I had heard that the stuff in those tall bottles contained something that could be drunk as a substitute for beer, but had never tried it. Now was the time. Weirdest thing though, the bottle was bloody difficult to get into as someone had stuck a cork thing in the neck. I tried poking it out with a knife, but that was just taking too long and didn’t seem to be getting me anywhere. I thought about just breaking the top off the bottle but was worried about the mess. In the end I just pushed the cork type thing into the bottle. It worked – out came something red.

Well, it wasn’t pretty and I’m not sure I want to do it again, but a couple of pints of something called something like “Cabinet Servinyon” and then some white stuff called something like “Servinyon Blonk” managed to get me through the match until the pub opened later on.

I feel luck to have survived this disaster and can only hope if doesn’t happen to you. But you need to ask yourself “are you prepared?”

... oh it goes on and on and on ....
... and it goes on .. and on .. and on ..

it's Heaven and Hell

They'll tell you black when it's really red
I think you should have stayed in bed
'Cus the words you're singing to this song
Are being made up as you go along

It's Heaven and Hell
Fool, fool!

Well, the trip to Concord to see Heaven & Hell (Black Sabbath with Ronnie James Dio), Alice Cooper and Queensryche unfortunately wasn't the best. I picked Mike up as I wasn't going to be drinking and headed off to pick up Curt, but unfortunately was unaware that it was the Folsom Street Parade.

The Folsom Street Parade is one of the gay, lesbian, transexual etc. etc. dealies that goes on. Basically where blokes walk round wearing very little leather - the “assless chaps” being one of the favored items of clothing. Now, to sidetrack for a second, this to me is not really playing hard to get is it. You're kind of putting it out there on display. Now if only I could get straight women to do the same for straight men ..... Not going to happen is it?

So, back to the story, I'm sat in traffic as they block the roads off for this event with the choice of either staring at the back of the car in front or the back of some bloke showing his arse. Well, I'm now very familiar with what the Chevy Impala looks like from behind.

Finally, we get to the event in time to see the last song that Queensryche played. Which happened to be the only bank Mike was going for. I couldn't say anything, but this happened the last time he went to a gig in San Jose when he got there late and missed the first band (in that case Whitesnake).

Next was Alice Cooper and I have to say totally fantastic. Thankfully this was the one I was really interested in seeing - I've seen Sabbath and Dio many times before. Cooper put on a fantastic show including a medley that started with Welcome to My Nightmare where these strange creatures came on (one of which was a woman), then went into Only Women Bleed where Cooper had a mock fight to beat up the woman, turning into Dead Babies as the woman came back on with a pram from which Cooper pulled out a baby and drove a stake through its heart before being grabbed, put into a straight jacket and then hanged to go off with the band singing I Love the Dead. I'm sure I'm missing another song in there somewhere, but you get the idea. A fantastic rendition of Halo of Flies and Schools Out, finishing with Elected. And don't you just love the bit in the middle:

San Francisco's got problems
Hell, California's got problems
And you know what?
I don't care!

Sadly the night didn't end there. Heaven and Hell came on. To give credit, Tony Iomi, Geezer Butler and Vinnie Vincent were great. Dio really wasn't on top of his game though. Some of the first songs were alright - I got into Children of the Sea, but it seemed to be a really short set of about 45 minutes into which they put about 20 minutes worth of solos in Heaven and Hell. And when Dio came back after the solos he seemed to be singing different lyrics to those which I know. I had the same problem with quite a few songs. I thought it was me at first as I hadn't heard some of the songs for a long time, but it wasn't. Several people said the same thing.

Anyway, it was still worth it - if not just to see Alice.

Well, it's the last full day in the UK before heading back over the pond. It's a lovely British summer day - overcast, grey and drizzling. Unfortunately the sun only shines two days in England each year and we missed both of them. Nevermind, we still managed to get out and about. I've created two more sets of photos:

• A day out at Belton House where we took photos of William playing in the grounds of the stately home.
• Some pictures of houses in and around the village where my parents live. The sun was actually shining on one of the days, but it later apologized and went back in to give way for more drizzle. Didn't get as many photos as I wanted given the poor weather and poor light which also means that some of these are not that interesting. There's also a photo of my parents house in there.

I suppose I better finish by saying that we won the bumpkin quiz last night. As much as I'd like to take credit for this victory, I feel that this needs to go to my co-auther, the mysterious “Mr O.”

My first chance to try out macro photography. This is apparently quite hard and, after my first feeble attempt, I have to agree. A rather large spider was to be my subject. The problem is that this was on my bed at my parents house and Karen doesn't much like spiders. Between the screeming and me fumbling around, my subject didn't stay still for very long and with those legs seemed more than capable of scooting away pretty quickly. Anyway, this is the same photo, just zoomed in a little bit more on the second one.

It's not too bad, but I haven't really got it all in focus. You can see its hairy legs though which is quite cool.

Back in the UK and what could better than a trip to the local steam railway to take the little one on train journey? So off we went for a visit to the Nene Valley Railway to see Thomas the Tank Engine (as, along with many of the other steam railway's, they have one).

Well, it was a great day out, but poor old Thomas was being serviced, so we only got to see him from the back.

For more photos, click here.

Now, where did I leave you? Oh yes, in a hotel room in Kenya. Well, to cut a long story short I made it to Johannesburg and out onto the holiday. Didn't have internet connection (nor did I really want one) so haven't updated any blogs since then.

All I can say is that I had the best holiday ever. I still can't believe the variety of animals we saw and some of the photos I managed to take. Massive thanks to Kenton for recommending this place. Rather than bore you with the details here, I kept a little log of what went on and have posted it with the pictures. Click here to see the pictures and notes from the safari.

I'm currently back home at the in-laws and have just picked up the little one. It's great to see him again and I can play with him whilst uploading the photos to the site.

Next stop is my parents ...... Lets have a quick look at the agenda ....... yep, it's back to beer and rugby (seems to be a running theme here). If memory serves, tomorrow is England against Samoa. Hopefully we will put on a better show than we did against South Africa, but I'm not holding my breath. Instead I shall hold a pint!

Well, this was going to be a very funny entry based on the witty title I’ve come up with, however things have gone (how we say in the trade) “tits up” since I last wrote. My journey back to Johannesburg is through Nairobi, hence the idea behind the title, however, I was never intending to enter Kenya as I only had a two hour transfer window. That was until my flight leaving Lagos was delayed by three hours.

So I’m in Nairobi for “wan” day as there are no other flights today. I’m on a 7:30am flight tomorrow morning that gets into Johannesburg at 10:40 which is going to make it difficult to connect to my 10:30 flight to the safari. I asked if they had a faster plane, but they really didn’t get the joke. I have to be honest, I felt sorry for the folks on the Kenya Air missed flights desk. The queue was about an hour long when I get there. The staff were great, I have to say, pity they have to do the job they are there for. It would seem more efficient to run the planes on time.

Anyway, all is well as I’ve spoken to the people running the little puddle jumper in the morning and there’s another one that leaves about 1:30. Barring another three hour delay, we should be in time to catch that one.

Now, one thing I need to do is map out this journey when I get back. I’ll try and do some whizzy thing where the plane flies over the map to show the route as it’s not exactly logical. If you were going to do this trip, you wouldn’t do it the way I’ve done it. Even I can see that now, so I’ll know better next time. I’ve not just done a loop round Africa, I’ve done an up/down then loop. By the time I get back I will have done 11 flights. At least the next trip will be on air miles.

Hopefully I’ll get to take a photo of something interesting in Kenya. In the meantime, they’ve put me up in this really trendy hotel, but rather than take an interesting photo, I thought I’d take on of the light / phone ensemble. (As I don’t think I’ve taken a photo of a light before).

Stunning isn’t it!

I have four and a half hours before I get picked up for my flight in the morning. I’ve ordered a pizza in my room which will hopefully be here soon so I can decide whether to go to sleep or not (which, given that I want an hour in the morning to grab a shower and all that seems like it’s hardly worth it).

Fingers crossed for tomorrow – or later today really.

Not an article about that fine, upstanding, young man of the Bash Street Kids, but rather an analysis of electrical sockets.

But first, lets start with last night. Went to a fantastic (local??) Lebanese restaurant - good food, great time. Now, I know there are those amongst you who think/know that good wine is wasted on me. Well, let me assure you, you have nothing to worry about here. We had what I was assured was the “good stuff” which normally bothers me because I'm really not that much of a connosseur. Not knowing much about wines, I can't really describe it properlly, but let me say that the first taste in your mouth was unbelievably fruity - like a very suggary Ribena. Then the back taste on your throte was like sulphuric acid .... no, maybe more like diesel. Honestly, I only managed two bottles of the stuff before having to go back onto the beers.

Thinking about it this morning, I think “good stuff” probably relates to its paint stripping qualities. My guess is that if you threw this stuff on the wall it would spread, soaking everything and turning it a bright red before abruptly turning black and making the paint peel right off.

Now to the plug. First, this gives me another opportunity to add to my collection of very boring photos that you can double click if you really want to see a bigger image (which I do think I'm getting rather good at):

So, what this arrangement is showing (from my hotel room) is that the plug socket is a UK socket, there is an adapter and on the bottom left the plug for the TV. Well, the adapter fits into the wall OK. The TV plug looks like it fits into the bottom holes of the adapter and, indeed it does, but the diameter of the plug is about half the diameter of the hole it fits into, so it keeps falling out and you have to wiggle it to get the TV to come on.

On a side note, you may also see that the top hole of the adapter is there for the three pin UK socket. But wait, it's an adapter to get to a UK socket! Yep, this ingeniously designed adapter allows you to convert a UK socket into a UK socket.

And the fun doesn't stop there. Yesterday morning I couldn't get my shower to work. There's actually two in the room, one in the bath and a separate shower so I just used the one in the bath. Being the good person I am, I notified reception so they sent someone up to fix it. Anyway, turns out there are three levers and I hadn't been pulling them in the right order. You have to pull the bottom lever up first, then pull the middle lever out towards you and then pull out the shower handle and turn to the desired temperature.

And then there's the bathroom light switch. Whilst being shown around my room upon arrival, I was informed that the bathroom light had to remain on as they had wired the air conditioning into the light switch - so, if you turn off the light, you also turn off the air conditioning. The porter was kind enough to point out the work around which is to close the bathroom door and, being the helpful chap he was, he demonstrated this for me (just in case I hadn't activated a door mechanism before. Mind you, I couldn't figure out the shower, so I suppose it's fair to wonder whether I'm capable of closing a door).

I really wish I was staying longer here as it's so much fun. You discover new things all the time, it's great.

Well, time to go do some work and then to watch the rugby with the English and South African expats. Should be a laugh.

First, there's a couple of very tired gerbils somewhere after running on a little wheel to power my less than 1mbs internet connection so I could upload these three files. Not really sure what's going on as the connection has a habit of breaking, so I've been submitting each file and keeping my fingers crossed that the connection will last the upload.

Anyway, technical difficulties aside, I had this morning to look round before doing some work. I went to Lekki market which is basically a load of shacks at the roadside interconnected by little alleyways. I don't think the images below really do it justice and they certainly don't capture the number of people running around (all of whom seemed to be rather camera shy).

First thing is that when you get there, all of a sudden hundreds of kids appear from nowhere and start running alongside the car. When the car stops and you get out, you're mobbed like a pop star. A rather daunting experience I have to say. The kids seem to enter into a competition to see who can accompany you around the market to carry your stuff for you. Thankfully I was being shown around by a US expat who just said to shoo them away and proceeded to literally walk through them waving his arms in the air shouting “shoo.” After a couple of minutes they got bored and disappeared. Anyway, the market was really nice and I ended up with a couple of wood carvings (hippo pictured below) and a couple of paintings.

I've been asked a couple of times “is it safe?” to which I wittily reply “it's safe and zipped away in my trousers, but thanks for asking.” (And that probably explains why I didn't try and be a professional commedian). On a serious note though, safety is a concern, but when I think that this time last year my trip was to Asia instead of Africa and I was in Indonesia I feel very lucky given the earthquakes that have hit.

Anyway, time to go out for dinner and beers.

There's my next idea for a film (obviously following the snakes on a plane theme), but first lets start with the journey to Nigeria.

From Cape Town to Lagos, you need to connect in Johannesburg. Seems fairly straight forward you would think. Well, first problem was that I got stuck in loop in the domestic terminal and only after walking a full circuit of the airport did I realize that the sign saying “all departures” really meant all domestic departures. In fairness, it should have been obvious as they do color code the airplane symbols - yellow for domestic and green for internation. Stupidly I was just reading the words though and hadn't stopped to work out their code.

OK - after walking what seemed to be miles, mainly because it was hot I ended up in a building site which was, in fact, the international terminal. Bit of development going on. After stepping past people that were working - well, supposed to be working, but they seemed more occupied with watching all the people trying step over their equipment that doing any work - we got to the check in desk.

Already checked in, so zipped past that bit and onto security. Straight through there. The metal detector beeped as I walked through, but nobody seemed to be worried about that so I just picked up my stuff and carried on to passport control. This is where things went (to use a technical term) tits up! The passport controller shook my passport trying to get something out of it, then turned to me and said “I can't find your residency card” so I appologized and handed him my green card. It was confusing me as to why a) he needed to see it and b) how he knew I was not a UK resident; but not worth the arguing so I gave it to him. “Not that, your South African residency card” he replied. Becoming more confused I told him that I was not a resident of South Africa. Apparently, according to this chap, you need a visa to get into South Africa - I think it's one of those things that they give you, then they take back when you leave. Well, I didn't know that and was not given one when I entered the country. This seemed to be my fault - he kept telling me I should have asked for one and that I was in the country illegally.

Next, I did one of those things where you think you're going to help yourself and you're actually making it worse. I told him (which is all true) that I had been pulled out of the queue on entry, on account of the fact that I'm disabled and sent to a separate line with the residents and maybe nobody had told the person on that line what the procedures were. I then produced my customs entry form and told him that nobody seemed to want to collect this from me. (This is one of those forms that you need to declare stuff on when entering the country). When I produced the form, he just looked at me and said “you're here illegally and I need to take you to the office to sort this out.”

Not good at the best of times, but, as I pointed out to him, I only had 10 minutes before my plane started to board. Obviously then next thing he saw fit to do was to start explaning things to me in a language other than English - maybe Afrikaans, I don't know, but I didn't understand it.

So, we march off across the airport to “the office” when he just turns round and walks back telling me to carry on. I said I didn't know where the office was and this seemed to annoy him further as I just got a barrage of non English back at me. Anyway, he wandered back to log off from his terminal, came back and picked me up, took me to the office. After being asked a bunch of the same questions by more people, particularly the “why didn't you get a visa when you came into the country?” which after telling them that they didn't give me one, they created one for me, gave it to me, then took it back.

Hopefully this hasn't put me on some watch list or anything as I have to go back in a couple of days.

Anyway, hurried along to the plane. The sign said it was boarding, but the sign just comes up with that based on the time - nothing to do with whether or not the plane is actually boarding. Talked to the person on the desk to be informed that the plane was delayed on account of the fact that they had parked it on top of a bees nest and the bees had come out and onto the plane. This is an airport where you walk onto the tarmac and climb the stairs to get onto the plane - not one that you walk across a jetty from the terminal.

Thankfully that was the last bit of fun. After that it was plane sailing and I'm now here in Nigeria. Just about to head off out.

I’ve now been off the fags for a year! Wow, seems like only yesterday when I would be sneaking out from work to have a long hard suck on a fag. But no more. No longer will I be going in and out of the back door to partake in this pleasure. Never again will I long for a butt in my hand. My mouth is now a no fag zone!

I do miss them though, even after a year. Shows how addictive smoking really is.

..... go to the pub.


Poor weather again, so no mountain trip on the last day. Few pints made up for it though.

For those of you that have been reading these blogs over the last few days, I'm sure you're wondering whether or not I've got to the top of Table Mountain. Well, as reported below, the first day was rained/clouded out so we headed out on the beers. Sunday was much the same as Saturday - low cloud and more beers. This morning, however, bright sunshine and not a cloud in the sky! I noticed whilst putting my shirt on to go to work. Bugger!

Well, I've been emailing an old friend of mine, Jackie, who I used to work with back in the London days as she's also coming over here to South Africa on safari and spending some time in Cape Town. Anyway, she suggested that I should duck out from work whilst the weather's good (particularly as it's supposed to be cloudy again tomorrow) to take get up the mountain and see the view.

I thought about it for about .... oooh ..... lets say about 15 seconds and thought why not. My last meeting of the day was a 2:00 to 3:00 and that would give me plenty of time. So, I arranged for one of my colleagues here in South Africa to take me back to the hotel so I could dump my computer and then drop me off at the cable car to go up the mountain. He agreed and dropped me off. We had a quick chat and I thanked him for his hospitality etc. etc. and he left pointing me in the direction of the ticket desk.

There's normally a queue for tickets (apparently), however there wasn't when I got there. Great! But I couldn't figure out how to get into the line as all the entrances seemed to be blocked off. I then looked at all the ticket windows and they said closed. Finally, someone appeared and told me the cable car was closed due to technical difficulties.

I have one last chance tomorrow, depending on the weather, but I'm not holding my breath on this one. Seems I may have to visit the top of the mountain on my next visit.

Below is a picture taken from the foot of the mountain where the cable car leaves from. (I should have probably taken one of the closed ticket desks as that would have been more appropriate, but I didn't think of it at the time).


You will notice how my crap camera has managed to take a perfect photo of the trees in the foreground and leave the whole of Cape Town out of focus. Pretty impressive if you ask me. I don't have my proper camera here until next week (as didn't want to risk taking it to Nigeria) and don't have any photo editing software on my work computer, so this is the best I can do.

Pretty poor really, but given the run of bad luck I'm having with this mountain, it's about par for the course.

On the table this morning were two choices:

• Go sight seeing up the top of Table-Top Mountian
• Watch the rugby and drink beer

Well, it seems the gods have chosen for me. Unlike the photo snapped below that shows Cape Town bathed in sunlight, today is overcast and raining. I got up at 6:00 to play tourist. Had breakfast and went to book my trip only to be told “sorry sir, the weather is too bad, you must watch the rugby and drink beer.”

I've been fighting it. I even went down to the waterfront and wandered around. I have two really bad photos to show for it (I really need to throw this camera away - it's 6 years old and has all but had it. At least my proper one will be with me for the safari). The first is of some “witty” signposts and the second is of the Clock Tower. If you look at the sky you can see it clouding over - not quite raining when I took these but only by about an hour.


I guess the signposts are supposed to tell you how far it is if the crow flies. Well, all I can say is that the crow would be bloody knackered as the plane wouldn't even go that far given I needed to transfer in Frankfurt. So I doubt a crow would be able to make it. The other thing I've not quite figured out is why you would put a signpost up for crows as, to my knowledge, they can't read. Still, gives the idiots something to photograph as I clearly demonstrate.

Oh well, about an hour and half to kick-off. Best head back down to that Sports Bar I spotted earlier.

So, a quick 11 hours and 40 minutes later and I'm in Cape Town. I've had a quick look round and can't see any superheros though. Mind you, I didn't see any frankfurters in Frankfurt either.

Very tired and not much to say at the minute. Snapped this quick picture from the balcony of the hotel before I got some sleep. Me thinks that would be Table Top Mountain (I'm quick like that).

I'm going to see about taking a trip up there tomorrow, so, if you're lucky, I'll have the reverse picture of this one.

So first stop is Frankfurt. We got in early so I have an extra 30 minutes to wander round the airport looking for things to do, so if anyone wants a sausage, just give me a shout.

Whilst you’re thinking about that, lets rewind for a second. San Francisco airport – ended up having a long conversation with the lady at the check in desk as she was asking me about Africa and telling me that she wanted to go. Coincidentally, as if by magic, she managed to find her way over to the gate to ticket me onto the plane and have another chat. Now, my guess is that this was coincidence, or maybe even normal with the cut backs on staff, but I like to think she was following me. Never hurts to flatter yourself, that’s what I say.

Onto Frankfurt and first impression is strange as it doesn’t seem to have an efficient feel about it. There’s a lot of people wandering round trying to figure out what they are doing. Given that we are in Germany, it’s my guess that it’s the people that are wrong and not the airport. And how correct that statement is – there a lot of old fashioned boards around listing departing flights, so bearing in mind I came in through the back door (connecting flight) and am trying to find out where to transfer rather than coming in through the front door and have someone tell me the gate, obvious thing is to look at one of these boards to figure out where my next flight is leaving from. Well, given the number of flights that leave Frankfurt, the list is pretty long and the boards only cover those leaving in the next hour which, when you think about it, doesn’t make sense as if you’re in the wrong place, you’ve likely missed your flight by now or are going to have the sprint of your life to get from one side of the airport to the other.

So, where’s all the help? Ah! There are these stations marked “information” that have touch screen terminals that you can use to find out where your flight is going to be leaving from. See, knew there would be an explanation.

Only think is, I hadn’t figured this out before deciding to find a Lufthansa desk to ask where my flight would be leaving from. Little sidetrack – my tickets are marked as being booked through Lufthansa, but none of my flights are actually with Lufthansa. The two today are United Airlines from San Francisco to Frankfurt and South African Airways from Frankfurt to Cape Town. Just to make it confusing. Still the Lufthansa person was extremely helpful, insisting on writing the gate number on my ticket. Brilliant, that way I wouldn’t forget to go to the wrong gate as he’d got the wrong one. Fortunately, in the meantime, I’d noticed the “information” stations and decided to play on one. Well, that and the fact that I decided to get a drink in the club lounge.

I note that airlines are now starting to have two lounges – first class and business class. Presumably business class has now turned into common class as there are too many people flying it. The one thing I did note is that the Lufthansa first class lounge in Frankfurt (and maybe for other locations as well) is called the “Senator Lounge.” I wonder if they practice foot tapping in there?

Well, thanks for everything - I'm off!

Not quite disappearing for ever, but I'm going on a trip to South Africa, Nigeria and the UK. Basically means that the entries over the next few weeks may be quite sporadic and may also have a little bit of an African theme to them.

I'm going to try and set vote questions each week, but they may get set a little earlier on some weeks in order that I can make sure the entries are there before the automated email goes out on Monday morning. If, however, I miss the time window, then you will just see the previous weeks question. Sorry, but be safe in the knowledge that I don't care as I will be on holiday.

Right, time to do some last minute packing before 22 hours of flying which I'm not looking forward to. My guess is that by the end of it I will have seen every movie that's out there at the minute.

Had the opportunity to go to one of my friends houses in the North Bay, place called San Anselmo, for a bar-b-que this long weekend. Had a great time, but more importantly it gives me the opportunity to follow up on the aerial photographs bad pun with the following image:

Oh what fun you can have with Photoshop and a couple of hours!

Back to the bar-b-que, it was great as the hosts have this cute dog, Winston. All the kids loved running round playing with him. So did William until the food came out. I'm still trying to figure out which one managed to scavenge the most food, but they seemed to be making a competition over it.

I only had a really old camera with me, so most of the photos didn't come out, but you can see from the shot below that William and Winston are clearly going head to head for Karen's attention to see who can get the next morsel to be offered.

Those of you that know me and have seen the long list of cars that I've let fall to bits on me may be surprised at the title. Don't be, this probably isn't going to result in the most productive automobile maintenance tips.

But first, let me start by saying that I have washed my car this year.

Actually, that's not strictly speaking true. I was rear ended earlier this year and when they repaired the car, they cleaned it as well. Bargain.

In fairness, there's probably another element that needs to be stated here. I got rear ended a couple of years ago. The person who rear ended me didn't want to claim through their insurance so they gave me cash. I decided there were better things to spend the cash on than repairing the car and thought there was a fair chance someone would hit me again. And I was right, so I made a couple of bucks by hanging on in there.

On that note, it's also worth pointing out that I think the lack of money spent on car care far outweighs the additional depreciation. So driving a rust bucket's not too bad.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah! The current jalopy popped one of its warning lights on - “Service Engine Soon.” One quick look at the mileage and it seems we'd done something like 89,790. An odd number, but I figured that I'd tripped some internal clock thing that tells the car to put the light on for the 90,000 mile service.

It's actually quite disconcerting driving round with a warning light on. It got to the point where I was seriously considering buying some black duct tape to put over the light so it wouldn't bother me. Again, being too lazy to go out and buy the duct tape, I applied the “hang on in there” principle. Turns out this was again the right thing to do! The light has now gone out. We're up to 93,000 miles now. I don't know whether I went past the clock trip switch or if the bulb's blown, but the net result is the same - I'm no longer disconcerted about driving round with a warning light on.

Clearly everything's OK as there's no warning light on. And to think - some day, someone out there will buy this well looked after car!

This comes with so many possible titles:

"Who says you can't have brains and beauty?"
"The state of education"

....

I'm sure most of you have seen this. For those of you that haven't, this is South Carolina's answer to a question on "Miss Teen USA"

Enjoy!

Since the inception of this wondrous site, my colleague and author of the OBlogs has pointed out that there is a photo missing from one of the photo sets. I'm happy to report that this problem has finally been rectified.

Unfortunately this is another example of two nations divided by a common language. Sadly this joke will be somewhat lost on those that dwell in the larger of the two land masses on each side of the pond.

Really that means that 50% of the people reading this site won't understand the joke. The other 50% will understand it, but not find it funny.

That's what I like about this job. It's like a broken pencil, completely pointless.

I think it's time to go get something to eat before I think of something else totally unfunny!

Went to Seattle on Monday for a meeting. Was supposed to have stayed the night, which would have been great as the weather was fantastic, but had to get back to the Bay Area for work.

Slightly annoying in itself, but not compared to the annoyance of being subjected to idiot queue jumpers at the airport. Particularly after running a vote on the subject of airport queue jumpers. Haven't these people read this website? Don't they know it's now punishable by death? Guess not. Actually, the worst part of it was that the ticket collecting people didn't do anything about it, so this bunch of about 6 people just stood in the line (between the ropes) and blocked anyone else from getting through anyway. They need to start arming these people with chainsaws so they can cut up these people on the spot. No trial - there's no need.

Amazing how you can make it to the airport, yet not be able to read or count to know when your section is being called.

Now where did I leave my valium .....

I'm really gutted that the photos I took of this didn't come out. Anyway, I was following a car up the freeway that had the license plate CUTNDRY. I'm guessing this belonged to a hairdresser or barber. I'm just hoping that they never transpose any letters when writing it down.

A huge week in sports this week in the US. Yep - seems everyone has been glued to the TV/radio waiting for the big event to happen. I am of course talking about David Beckham's ankle and whether or not he's actually going to play any football in the US. Somewhat reminiscent of the Lineker Japan days with his poorly toe.

In other sports news apparently some guy has broken a record in the inter galactic universe championship of rounders. (AKA the world series of baseball). This is one of the most confusing things to have watched. About a year ago, all the discussion was that Barry Bonds (the guy who's hit the ball a long way to get this record) should be thrown out of the sport for steroid use. That said, I found out yesterday that these are only allegations and that Bonds has not actually admitted to taking illegal substances. Anyway, most people seemed to want him gone, but then when he got close to this record it seemed like everyone wanted him to break the record. I certainly did as every time you turned on the TV they were going on about whether or not it was going to happen today. Now that he's broken it, there seems to be a lot of talk about whether or not it should be valid if performance enhancing drugs were used.

In order to clear up this confusion, see the picture below:



This is a picture of Wall Street in New York. Bonds are traded there.

Police following up on the horrific murders in Maryland caught a lucky break after circulating photos of the suspect. Taffy Nojob from Tinnysomething in Wales saw the picture and saw right through the disguise. Taffy was interviewed, but nobody could understand him. Best we know is that he mumbled something about a sheep and then said "that's Hog dressed as a woman".

Regardless, this was enough for police to make some further inquiries. Hearing about the reported "cheeseburger elbow" (see article below under "Serious Family Illness") police soon figured out it was a rouse to hide the truth. Even though Hog is partial to a cheeseburger or 10, it seems that the repetitive strain injury was caused by repeated bludgeoning.



If you're interested in the actual article that accompanies this picture see this site

So, have any of you folks managed to get your hands on one of the new iPhones yet? I got my first look at one on Friday night. I was having drinks with one of my teams at work and the husband of one of my colleagues had one.

I have to say I was very impressed. It's missing a few things functionality wise, but that's a bit like saying a Ferrari is no good off road. So what, if you look that cool, you're not going to worry about the things it won't do. I'm not sure that my son agreed with this review, however. He was being extremely well behaved until his picture was taken with said phone. I also like the title that this photo was sent to me with - "like father, like son!" (William had come along for the food, not the drinks in case you are wondering. Although, that said, he tried to steel my beer several times).

On a side note, our firm issued an Alcohol Policy today. I'm told it's purely coincidental that it follows our drinks on Friday night.

My brother was up visiting our parents this weekend. Whilst there it seems he took ill. Apparently his arm became very swollen, so he was taken to the emergency room. He was diagnosed with repetitive strain injury (RSI) - seems he has cheeseburger elbow!

Hog - you're getting old. You need to slow down. Maybe take on a salad every now and then.

An odd little town in the UK. Interesting service providers based on the photo below:

So, I was sent these pictures with the following text:

In a zoo in California , a mother tiger gave birth to a rare set of triplet tiger cubs. Unfortunately, due to complications in the pregnancy, the cubs were born prematurely and due to their tiny size, they died shortly after birth.

The mother tiger after recovering from the delivery, suddenly started to decline in health,
although physically she was fine. The veterinarians felt that the loss of her litter had caused
the tigress to fall into a depression. The doctors decided that if the tigress could surrogate
another mother's cubs, perhaps she would improve.

After checking with many other zoos across the country, the depressing news was that there
were no tiger cubs of the right age to introduce to the mourning mother. The veterinarians
decided to try something that had never been tried in a zoo environment. Sometimes a mother
of one species will take on the care of a different species. The only orphans" that could be
found quickly, were a litter of weanling pigs. The zoo keepers and vets wrapped the piglets in
tiger skin and placed the babies around the mother tiger. Would they become cubs or pork chops?

Take a look...you won't believe your eyes!!



Seems great at face value doesn't it. Well, would you really say "a zoo in California" without being specific? Probably not. Also, as I live in California, this would be all over the local news if it were true.

That said, if you are happy with the story above and want to live in happy land, then read no further.

A little research shows that this is not even in the US and looks to be from somewhere in Asia. Potentially tied to "Tiger baiting" where tigers are starved and then introduced to various animals for the sake of gambling. Participants have the ability to bet on which animal they think is going to last the longest before they are devoured by the tiger. The photos taken above are apparently legitimate and were a test to see if they could confuse the tiger into leaving the piglets alone for a longer period by wrapping them in the skins of dead tiger cubs. (The tiger cubs having been killed earlier by being introduced to a different tiger family). The purpose of which is to simply extend the amount of betting that can take place.

The email story above the pictures was made up as a joke to see if people would look at sick photos and think they are cute.

Actually, I just made all that up (the bit about the tiger baiting), but you were falling for it weren't you - see you can be manipulated into thinking anything. (Hog - there is no water powered car!) Best we can tell is that these photos were from Sriracha Tiger Zoo just outside of Bangkok in Thailand. The zoo has some kind of circus/carnival thing and these photos were taken at that. They were picked up by someone who decided to make up the story about the zoo in California to see how much spam they could create on the basis that the pictures were cute.

Apparently this story [in today's morning news] was about a manhunt for a home invasion incident that started in Newark and spread to San Leandro. Obviously a very disturbing event for all those involved that doesn't paint a very pretty picture.

I, on the other hand, heard the title on the radio and had somewhat different images come to mind.

Well, the outbound flight from San Francisco to Houston wasn't much fun given that I had to get up at 3:15 am to get to the airport. Used to be a time when I saw 3:15 when it came around rather than getting up to meet it, but those days are all but gone except for special occasions.

Three and a half hours on the plane - what is there to look forward to? Some kids movie or a cut up episode of a not very funny American sitcom? No thank you. It's the Sky Mall magazine! I have to be honest, I try and do anything to resist the urge to look at it, but at some point during the flight I will pick it up and read through. It kills me as I always think "there's no way I'd buy this crap" but always end up thinking "that'd be quite cool." So what's on my list:

- A remote control R2D2 because it would be cool.
- A hot dog toaster because it's called a "hot diggity dogger" and I think it would be so funny to tell people that my "hot diggity dogger" came in the mail or see how many conversation I can bring it up in. (I'm probably going to find that everybody already has one).
- An ice cream making machine because it's ice cream and Mr Whippy doesn't come round these parts.

That said, the best item on the list (and I need to say added recently - yep, I travel enough to have memorized the Sky Mall catalog and now look forward to changes) was a lightening detector. Bear with me on this. This device will apparently detect if lightning is coming, around 40 miles away if I remember correctly, in order that you can get to safety! Don't we have a saying about things that are rare and not going to happen that goes something like "that's about as likely as being struck by lightening"? So it makes perfect sense to come up with a device that warns you of this unlikely event. (Just in case the loud thunder noise didn't give away the fact that there's lightening in the area anyway).

Wouldn't you have liked to have been round the table when someone came up with that idea? Actually, I'd rather have been round the table when the marketing group came up with the idea of selling it on an airplane. Is it likely that someone who's paranoid enough to buy a lightening detector because they think they may get struck by lightening is going to get onto a plane?

I'll leave you with that thought whilst I go and order my hot diggity dogger!

Sprint, one of the US wireless network service providers, today announced that they were cutting contracts with 1,000 odd of their customers who have excessively used the support desk. At first this seems very alarming, however, when you get into it, these people have been calling the help desk between 40 to 50 times a month on a regular basis.

Obviously we don't want companies just deciding who they are going to allow to be their customers on an ad hoc basis, but if the facts provided about excessive usage are true then I'm all for it as these Muppets are just increasing the cost for the rest of us. Don't they have any friends?

I don't know about you guys, but we argue in our house every time we need to call customer service about anything. It usually goes something like "it's your turn because I did it last time" You've got to be really desperate to want to talk to the support desk more than you need to.

No, this isn't an article about that “special place” that you don't get to visit very often after marriage and kids. This is about Houston. That place that you do get to visit on a regular basis after marriage and kids.

Why on earth does anyone choose to live here? It's so muggy. And I'm told it's not that bad at the minute, it will get worse in August. I'm glad I'm only here for a couple of days as the heat and humidity oppressive. I have nothing against Houston - as a city, it's fine. It's just the weather.

Anyway, don't ask how, but whilst here in Houston I came across this YouTube post that I couldn't stop laughing at and I think actually fits the title “Wet and Warm” very well.

As Independence Day draws to a close, time to contemplate being American. Which I'm not, but my son is, so it's probably quite wonderful at the minute as he seems fascinated by any tiny little thing.

I think the best thing I've heard of late was on the local news. San Francisco is hosting the Major League Baseball (MLB) All Stars game. Which, most people are getting very excited about. Wereas I am probably more worried about how much extra traffic it's going to cause. (No, that's not true - it's still a sport, so I will be compelled to watch it). Anyway, back to the American thing, the news presented quoted:


Still, when you name your biggest domestic competition the World Series, what should I expect?

Then again, if I didn't like it here, I wouldn't be here. So it's time to head out and watch some fireworks go bang.

Where do you start? There are some days that are good and then there are some days that are great. Then every now and then one of those days turns up that you won't forget for as long as you live. Maybe not quite as significant as February 27, 2000 watching Matt Elliot put the winner past Tranmere, but June 24, 2007 saw Juan Pablo Montoya take his first victory in NASCAR.

One of the most exciting races I've seen (and probably because the person I was following won), but it really did seem like a great race. JP started a poor 32nd on the grid, but made a great start. Each lap he seemed to gain a place. However, Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon were making a charge from the back. Circa lap 30 saw Johnson and Montoya enter probably the best battle of the race. For several laps they traded places and all the time it was painful to watch as clearly they would have been better just working together to move up positions (but, at the end of the day, it's a race so what do you expect?)

Finally pit stops split Johnson and Montoya leaving Montoya open to run his own race. Credit to Tony Stewart and Jeff Gordon being the only other two drivers to pass Montoya. Gordon's seemed to be tied in to pit rotations, but Stewart's was clearly in open race. (What does Stewart need to do to win a race this season? At one point he was leading this race by a mile and clearly was the best driver on the track given clean air).

Montoya's victory has to be attributed to a great pit stop call that brought him in on the earliest lap possible to give him enough fuel to run to the end of the race. After his last pit, he exited near the front, chasing car after car and ultimately chasing down Harvick then McMurray to take the lead

After gaining the lead it was plain sailing all the way to the checkered flag. One parade lap, then the most feeble burn out as Montoya's car ran out of fuel. Having been to a lot of football games and watched the clock tick down as Leicester cling on for a victory, I'm no stranger to the last minute nail biter. That said, the last 10 laps of this race seemed to take an age and all the time I was wondering whether the 42 car had enough petrol in the tank to see it through. Fortunately enough to cross the finish line and briefly do this:

So, gorgeous weather, an afternoon drinking beer and watching your chosen driver take his first NASCAR win. Does life get any better?

Congratulations again to Juan Pablo and the Texaco/Havoline team.

For more NASCAR photos of this and other races, see the NASCAR photo page.

Between the final practice for the Nextel Cup and the Blue Lizard 200 race the message board popped up the message:

"Whad'up Cletus and Jeb? Welcome to NASCAR."

There are many questions that pop into mind here. I'll keep mine simle with "how can someone called Cletus have not been to NASCAR?"

Congragulations to David Gilliland for winning the NASCAR Grand National Division, West Series race at Infineon yesterday (aka Blue Lizard 200).


To be honest the biggest challange for Gilliland was to not run into the back of the pace truck. The race had its moments, but was somewhat marred by the number of laps under caution, particularly when there didn't seem to be that many incidents. Gilliland took first place from PJ Jones followed by Boris Said who also put in good performances.

Special mention should go to Jason Bowles in the 22 car that had one of those days where everything was going wrong. Also Carlos Contreras in the 12 car. Although neither Rick or Eric finished in the top 10, it was not for lack of trying. Both these drivers made the race exciting making several excellent passing moves in front of us on turn 7, like the one pictured below.