Oblog Archives

Picture taken from an edition of the South African Auto Trader magazine, speaks for itself.

One of the advantages of working in an IT department is that sometimes an absolute gem comes along.

Below is the exact e-mail sent to all IT staff worldwide in the organisation.

'To: IT All (Global)
Subject: .


Hello

Our printer,fax and copyer is keeps on printing.
I can.t stop him.
As long there is paper in it, it prints.
The number of the copyer is 15737
I can.t print any reports or make any copys.
'

Me thinks he'd been smoking something.

It's been a strange week, nothing much happened in itself, just a week of strange observances.

It is worth noting that we did get booed again in the pub quiz this week for alleged cheating. Ok so the barman comes rushing over to give us one of the answers, shame we already knew and that the whole pub noticed this act, it was so bad a substitute question had to be found, which we got right aswell.

Also, our webwaster, sorry typo there, webmaster asked me if I fancied a short trip to Brazil in October to watch the last F1 Grand Prix of the season. I had to decline this offer, but it does give you an insight into the thinking of "Rag". Talking of rag, we get rag reports at work, and although admittedly they are from an all female team, it is a red, amber, green report, not an indication of their moods swings.

So, back to the observances..

I was in the supermarket the other lunch time and I spotted an old dear pushing a supermarket trolley, not strange in itself. However, she had somehow managed to collect one of those "slippery when wet" signs that are bright yellow and stand a couple of feet tall, onto the front of her trolley. She was completely oblivious of the fact and I followed her for about a minute pushing this thing on the front of the trolley. I got bored, but I've no idea how long it was before she or someone else noticed. (told you my life was dull if that made into my highlights of the week).

On Saturday evening I was flicking around the channels for something to watch, anything but Dance X or X Factor (X meaning [swear filter off] fucking shit [swear filter on]) and I came across something on Eurosport. Eurosport is notorious for it's wacky sports coverage such as tractor pulling, beach rugby, table football etc., so I shouldn't have been too surprised. What I found was ski-jumping, which is not that extraordinary until you remember it's August. It must be from Australia or South Africa I thought to myself, but then the commentator said welcome back to Poland. Yes Poland, it turns out that the height of sophistication on a warm summers evening in Poland is to hold a dry ski slope ski-jumping competition. To add to the drama one of the competitors had been disqualified for wearing the wrong kind of suit, I switched over before finding out that he was wearing a wet-suit instead of the regulation dinner jacket.

On a similar sporting theme, I was watching the coverage of the world athletics from Osaka the other night. It was the heats of the men's 3,000m steeplechase. For those of you that are not familiar with the steeplechase it's like a normal 3,000m race except they put obstacles in your way, a barrier of 91.4 cm tall, the same as the hurdle in the hurdles events, but far more solid, i.e. it's going nowhere if you hit. To add to this fun, they throw in a water jump just to spice things up. So, back to the first heat, they just gone through the water jump and were heading for the last jump on the first lap when the runners bunched up on the approach and one of the athletes clipped the heals of Austrian Guenther Weidlinger and he sent sprawling towards the barriers and he hits his chin square on to the top of the barrier and collapses in a heap. This causes two guys behind him to stumble and they end up somersaulting over the barrier and onto of the Austrian. The TV coverage switches back to the race leaders and then a few seconds later you see a whole bunch of Japanese guys running across the track with a stretcher and poor old Guenther spark out with blood pouring from his mouth. Whilst they are attending to him, the race continues and a minute later the field are heading for the same barrier where this guy is still out cold on the edge of the track, which s not a good place to be when there are 12 men wearing running spikes are about to jump at you. Fortunately one of the stewards realises this and stands in front of the barrier frantically waving his arms encouraging the runners to move to the outside portion of the jump to avoid landing on poor old Guenther's head. He was on the track for three laps before they moved him and was out for 30 minutes, but apparently he is fine now.

(Video is blocked for sharing, but can be viewed here https://youtu.be/g_s6ahuPCwQ)

It's been a great weekend for sport, so I'll leave you to it whilst I get to the cricket on this bank holiday Monday. Until the next time, remember your car keys are on the table next to the door.

The good news is that I didn't get mugged or burgled last night. The bad news is that my activities didn't go un-noticed. On my way back from the ATM the Cambridgeshire Constabulary decided to pull me over for driving too confidently.

I suppose I should take it as a compliment and be pleased that the police are doing their job. I can see their point of view, an Impreza being driven at the speed limit at 2:15 am is an unusual sight, so I guessed they had to stop me.

It all passed off peacefully and I made it home safely.

Best leave you to it, I'm getting prepared for a big afternoon of football.

Ok, some of you may know what I do for a living, but sometimes it does take a turn out of the ordinary. One of the products the organisation I work for offers is a pre-paid debit card, basically it's a debit card that you can pre-load with a set amount of money. Part of what I do is when we are issuing a new type of card, I have to test that it works at shops and ATMs before they are sold to the general public.

Well today, I've had to test whether one of our cards works on online gambling and bingo websites as we've had some questions from customers who have encountered problems. That may sound fun, but after you've entered the same details on the 13th website in a row, it gets a bit tedious.

To add to that joy, and as an open invitation to burglars and muggers, I also have to conduct some testing at 2am tonight/tomorrow morning as a change is being implemented and I have to make sure it works before any of our customers encounter problems.

So if I make it back alive from the dangerous streets of Peterborough tonight, I'll let you know how I got on.

Until then, 22, all the twos, two muggers following you. Happy bingoing.

Before I start on the actual post I want a quick rant about Microsoft. A quirk of embedding a YouTube video onto this page you have to replace double quotes with a single straight quote mark, however if you try and use word to search and replace doubles for singles, no matter how you do it, word always sticks in curly quotes, meaning I have to replace each one manually. Rant over.

Back to the post. Over in the UK there are Sony Bravia Advertisements which are very clever one of which is set in San Francisco.



Now those who know me well know my penchant for a good parody, so here's Tango's parody of the Ad, brilliant.


For those cynics out there who think that original Sony Ad was all computer graphics, you were wrong. Here's the making of video.

Apologies to all the Oblogs fan(s) for the lack of entries but it proves my original fear when first asked to write a blog, my life is indeed as dull as ditchwater and nothing really happens, anyone can see, nothing really happens, nothing really happens to me.

However was chatting to a friend and they pointed me to a video on You tube of prisoners dancing to Michael Jacksons thriller. Amusing.



It's amazing what you can find on there. See my next post for more, see you there.

No it's not a drug reference, but a television programme.

Very much like London buses, my posts come in two's (very much like scoring with twins) [bad pun, I know]

So what about top gear, well a while back they did a fantastic one-off special where the flew to Miami and rather than hiring a car they had to spend US$1,000 on a car drive it New Orleans and then sell it again.

(One of the cars purchased and what they'd written on the side before driving throug Alabama, not a smart move.)

When this was first shown on the BBC it was a one hour show, last night it was shown on a commercial channel in a one hour slot. The problem being that it was cut to shreds, and although you don't expect a plot in a factual show, there was a story which was lost due to cuts including some of the funniest bits and other bits making later commentary make no sense whatsoever. If commercial TV has to show 1hr shows from the BBC please have the decency to put into a bigger slot (ooer sounds a bit rude).

Which reminds me, my DVD of Filthy, Rich and Catflap arrived at the weekend, it being the follow-up to the Young Ones. I remember watching the Young Ones and the many repeats, but don't remember FR&C being repeated so decided to buy the DVD to see what all the fuss was about. I hadn't realised that it had so many up and coming stars in it, there were early appearances from Harry Enfield, Chris Barrie and David Baddiel to name a few. Still have a few episodes to watch, but it's easy to see where Bottom evolved from.

Oh well back to the carry on film on UK Gold.

So on Friday night I went to Newmarket racecourse for an evening of racing and music. Of the 7 races I managed to win on 5 of them, which is nice.

The only problem is that I can't remember who played the music, it's a sin really as they're always on my mind at the moment. I can't help being boring, but I have minimal interests.

Newmarket is a strange place, it's where the streets have no name. That said, the racecourse on a warm summer evening is great, loads of totty, lots of west end girls. Left to my own devices I'd rather go shopping.

Hopefully that's enough clues, but if not, here's a picture for you.

It must be the same across the UK. Normally I quiz with the "country bumpkins" as our webmaster so kindly refers to them, even composing question on occasion, in fact those found on this very site are compiled by my good self.

Anyway, this week I was due to miss this week's "bumpkin" quiz to visit an old school friend and join his quiz team, however that fell through at the last minute so one of the guys at work asked me to join his quiz team.

It seems as if in his local pub there's a team that seem to win most weeks called the quizzington bears that have about 15 people in it and they are most hated team in the pub. This week our team decided to take the piss and call ourselves the gummington bears, which in itself seemed to upset them, however when they only tied for 2nd and our team won overall, the looks shot our way were priceless. We even had other teams in the pub thanking us for beating them. Ironically a couple of the questions asked were one's I'd asked the week before in the bumpkin quiz.

The moral of the story is if you want to win a pub quiz, ask me to join your team, either that or attend enough quizzes so as you know the answer to every question.