Stuff Archives

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.