Stuff Archives

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]
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