OBlog Archives

Listening to the radio last night there was this guy on who'd just written a book about the pointless arguments he has with his girlfriend. Well rather than buying the book, read his website.

Trust me, you'll recognise at least 90% of the scenarios.

Pointless Arguments

Enjoy

This was a good week if you were following bizarre national celebratory days.

Not only is it national hot dog month, Monday was "take your pants for a walk day", Tuesday was "national chocolate day", yesterday was "national cheesecake day" and today is "national orgasm day", I suppose it only goes to reason after the previous days. You would have thought that tomorrow is "national fall asleep avoiding the wet patch day", but no, it's "national raspberry cream pie day", go figure.

I can't wait for October which is "national pizza month" and "sarcastic month", that'll be productive.

If you'd been down the pub with me about 6 months ago you would have witnessed one of my trademark rants against social networking internet sites such as Facebook, Bebo, MySpace etc. I just didn't see the point, in fact I thought the term social networking was an oxymoron.

Six months later and my position has changed. I'm no longer sitting in the pub. Cheap gags aside I now kind of see the point. I got persuaded to sign up by an ex-colleague who I'd met at a testing conference. She said that she'd managed to catch up with quite a few old friends and colleagues through the site.

So with this information, I took the bold step and signed up and within a week I had over 20 "friends". Admittedly they were all people I work with and see on a daily basis, but you get the point. I then did a bit of digging and found a load of ex-colleagues and got in touch.

This weekend was the culmination of those efforts when a group of 15 adults and 20 kids all got together at a bbq, all people who I'd worked with in testing over the last ten years (the adults, not the kids). A good old catch was had by all and plans for a follow-up were made. I guess it goes to prove that the sites work. I'm now going to find some even older work colleagues from my previous role, wish me luck.

Happy networking.

Firstly let me officially welcome the Rag to it's new home, let's hope for bigger and better things in the future including the 10th person to sign up for the newsletter.

So, onto my story. It was during a rare spare 5 minutes at work when I got the chance to read the computing magazine I subscribe to. It was a story about how political correctness has been taken to a new level of stupidity.

The airport at St Marys on the Isles of Scilly needs a new air traffic controller so they have put out a job advert. One of the key attributes of the role is 20-20 vision, however they have made a Braille version of the job spec and application form available due to local laws around not being able to discrimate against visually challenged individuals.

What do they expect, the guide dog to bark when the planes get too close, or piss on it's owners left leg for left and right leg for right? It's mad, some people are just not suitable for some jobs. I know I'll never be a 100m runner but I don't expect to be asked.

Plane-crazy

I'm not sure if this is going to turn into a Seinfeld-esque bit, but what's the deal with milk these days?

When I was a kid, milk came in a bottle and it was left on your doorstep early in the morning and your only problem was keeping the tits off it. Plus milk was milk, you didn't get the choice of different types of milk, it was milk straight from the cow rushed past your face, i.e. pasteurised (past your eyes - oh forget it). If you were lucky you got gold top as a treat, but normally you got standard milk.

With the onset of global warming and the never ending march of the supermarket we stopped getting milk delivered and sold our soul to Tesco. It was amazing you went into the milk "aisle" and you had the choice of three different kinds of milk (ignoring the flavoured milk options), normal full fat, semi-skimmed and skimmed. As time went on, other kinds of milk like organic, goat’s milk and milk of magnesia appeared on the shelves.

However, I was in the supermarket the other day and a new kind of milk had appeared 1% fat milk. I hadn't realised that there was a gap in the market, with full fat being 4%, semi-skimmed at 2% and skimmed at 0.1%. 1% fat was the obvious choice, but where does it stop, 0.5%, 3%, 2.6565645%? I guess they'll only stop when the rub out of colours for the labels.

What I want to know is where they keep the fields of low fat grass they are feeding the cows on to make this new kind of milk.



Right I'm off to find some 1% fat cookies to go with my new milk, happy drinking.

When I say Monday I mean bank holiday Monday, when I say night, I mean afternoon, when I say football, I mean English football (soccer) just.

In UK there's a tradition of crap movies on TV, this particular bank holiday that movie was Escape to Victory (E2V), a film loosely based around football, although it does star Sly Stallone. In fact E2V is the answer to a bit of pub trivia, as in "In which team did Pele play alongside Ossie Ardeles, John Wark and Russell Osman?", but again, most of those names will mean nothing to our American readers apart from why is a guy who advertises Viagra playing football?

So the alternative to E2V was the Women's FA Cup final on the BBC, now having been to a women's soccer game, I decided that quality of the football in E2V was going to be much better, Stallone included.

I'd been to see a Women's international game at the Sixfields stadium in Northampton a few years ago. Jon and I have a habit of finding cheap alternative sports, and this was cheap, a whopping great £3 ($5 as it was). It was England versus Denmark in a friendly. Jon and I certainly felt out-numbered in the crowd by the amount of women, in fact I think the line I used was that there were more dykes there than in Holland. Ok cheap line, but an easy one to make. So the quality of the football on display wasn't that great, the skill was there, but it just wasn't fast enough, to be honest the best part of the game was watching the Danish subs warming up at the side of the pitch directly in front of us.

So back to Monday afternoon, knowing how bad women's football is as a watch it had to be E2V. That said, I did miss one of the best passages of commentary on live football on the BBC in ages. Apparently the male commentator turned to his female co-commentator/pundit and said "I understand that one of Leeds players is nicknamed Munch, why is that?" After a few moments of awkward silence and stifled giggles, he swiftly moved on and changed the subject. A definite case of foot in mouth, or should that be rug in mouth?

I was flicking through the BBC sport pages when I found the link to this video.



(Video on flash - no longer supported)

Taken from the Reuters website it shows the German chair racing championships.

It tickled me as it reminded me of what we used to get up to when we worked night shift. We set the lap record of 43.4 secs for a lap around the office pushing yourself backwards on your office chair. It wasn't that dangerous unless you hit the edge of a cabinet and sent yourself flying into a set of wastepaper bins. Oh those were the days.

It was something that Jon said to me after he'd been looking after my house whilst away on holiday. He said the only things that came through my letter box were pizza menus, free newspapers and charity clothing collection bags.

I'm not sure if you get the equivalent thing in the States, but basically they're plastic bags that you are expected to fill with unwanted old clothes that then get picked up dodgy guys in a white van and allegedly taken to the charity shop of the particular charity written on the bag.

Anyway, I’ve worked out that my house is where all of these bags go to die, either that or there’s an awful lot of charities out there desperate for stinky old clothes. I’ve had four different bags through the door this week, on top of the six I’d had last week. Who has that many unwanted items of clothing? Surely it would make more sense, and be more environmentally friendly, if all the charities got together, sent out the one bag and shared the proceeds. Then if you wanted to support an individual charity you could take the stuff to that shop, if you just want to get rid of old clothes, just dump them in the one bag.

At least with all of these bags, it gives me somewhere to store the pizza leaflets and free newspapers.

Of course whilst I was enjoying myself watching all of the motorsport today, one of my best mates, Jon, was putting himself through 4 hours of torture.

I'd had a bit of a dilemma, trying to work out whether I should have gone down to London to watch and support Jon in the marathon, or whether to take up the offer of the free ticket to the BTCC. I decided, possibly a little selfishly, to go to the motor racing.

Anyway, when I got home I checked Jon's details and he finished in 3 hrs 57 mins, 10679th overall and has raised nearly £4,000 ($8000) for his charities. So well done Jon.

I did send him a text to congratulate him, and his response was two words.....

"Never Again".

I'm sure you'll all join me in congratulating him on his effort.

Today I spent a few hours at Rockingham (Rockingham, Corby, Northamptonshire, England, not Rockingham North Carolina) watching the British Touring Car Championship (BTCC) racing.

I guess the BTCC is the closest equivalent to NASCAR we have in the UK now that ASCAR is all but defunct. ASCAR cars were the equivalent of the NASCAR east or west series cars, but the problem being that we only have the one oval circuit suitable for the cars at Rockingham and we only get the one weekend that stays dry, usually the one the racing isn't on, so it didn't really take off. Even at it's height the grids only had 25 cars, which compared to the 43 you get in NASCAR, seems quite pathetic.

BTCC cars are stock saloons with some minor modifications, but have much smaller engines and are designed to run on what the Americans call road courses. That's the big difference between American petrolheads and the rest of the world, in America the oval rules, over here it just doesn't seem to work. Personally, I enjoy both, and can see the positives and negatives in both forms.

The other big difference between the two forms is that NASCAR events run for 300-500 miles and you get the one 4 hour race on race day, whereas the BTCC race day has a number of much shorter races. On the Sunday there are 3 50km (32 miles) races in the BTCC championship, interspersed with a mixture of single make saloon races and single formula open top races, all about the same distance, all lasting about 30 minutes per race.

Anyway, I managed to get a free ticket to this weekend's event from an ex-colleague, Martin. He is one of the happy band of volunteer marshals that make motorsport possible in this country, so am doubly grateful that he's prepared to give up his weekend for the benefit of petrol heads like me.

I timed my arrival just perfectly, the first race of the day had just finished, which were the Porsches, whilst although sound exotic are the most dull race on the card. I checked in with Martin the marshal to see which post he was on and made my way to my seat. Rockingham has a main covered grandstand on the start/finish straight that overlooks the entire oval and infield circuit, so I made my way up to the top and found a seat in time for the Clio cup.

The first three races pass off relatively uneventfully although the rain shower towards the end of the first BTCC race did make for a few spins and slides. So at lunch I agree to meet up with Martin and make my way to the infield paddock. We catch up and chat about the morning's racing, but he had to dash back to his post as he has to be back 10 minutes before the next race cars form on the grid. The next race is the second of the BTCC races, which had some good close racing and some excellent examples of car control but no major accidents.

At this point I check the program of events and realise that there's a two hour gap before the next race that I wanted to see, and seeing that the weather was closing in again I decided to go home and watch the last race at home on TV in the warm and the dry. The bonus being that I got to see the last half an hour of the Liverpool football game as well. However, watching on TV the Clio race provided a pretty spectacular crash and the last BTCC event was held in a torrential down pour, which always makes for fun racing.

I have also watched the coverage of the NASCAR night race from Arizona from yesterday, it was nice to see Dario Franchitti qualify, shame his race pace still isn't quite there. Good finish to the race though, with Johnson just managing to keep enough fuel in the car to make it to the end.

All in all a complete petrol head day. Makes up for the rained off event in California in February.