Month: January 2006

If you’re out in the sticks and unable to get broadband your only real solution has been satellite broadband. Well, it was. Customers of Aramiska had a bit of a surprise customer care message today. Instead of the usual notifications of “10 minutes possible downtime during upgrade” was this rather starling announcement, which wasn’t even published on their front page.… Read more →

I noticed a sign in a local shop yesterday. It was from The Home Office, who are basically a big group of government people who tell you what you should and shouldn’t be doing. Oh, sorry.. they actually state that their job is to… “make a difference in the real world, helping build a society in which people are safer… Read more →

Now that (hopefully) the Crazy Frog epidemic is over and we’re left with hideously bad rip-offs of catchphrases and comedy shows by two-bit impressionists, it’s with a clear conscience that I post this spoof of “the frog”. It’s actually Jeb from the guys at weakendproductions.co.uk who say of the video… “Consider it an ‘homage’, or we could just be taking… Read more →

Guys! Check out my new flat-screen TV ! It only cost 50 quid! Read more →

I love Road Wars – it’s a TV show that’s shown at random intervals across Sky One / Sky Two / Sky Three and features some excellent UK Police chases. You can find a full description about it here at Wikipedia.org. Usually it’s from Slough or somewhere in Thames Valley and features traffic police like “Pat and Carl” chasing some… Read more →

I drove into work this morning listening to tubby boy on the radio. Amongst news that mobile phones don’t melt your brain (although the long-term effects are still unknown), was an interesting piece about the huge 85 million rollover on the Euromillions jackpot. What interested me was the news that sales are going through the roof just because the jackpot… Read more →

I tend to drift off into my own little world while I drive. I had to go up the “Toilet Toll” this morning. It’s known as the M6 Toll of course, but I live about a mile away from T6 and although I don’t really need to use it, it can be a life-saver to get me to work on… Read more →

Woohoo! I’m not quite sure what happened there, but it’s very welcome indeed ! :) Read more →

Last weekend we went to the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham. I was quite impressed with the place actually, except you will end up going slightly mad after about 3 hours. Every single shop is a Jewellery shop, so you walk from one window, to another and another – all crammed with sparkling great diamonds which wouldn’t look out of place… Read more →

I’ve taken to reading this blog from Jason Calacanis. It’s all about him and Engadget.com / Weblogsinc.com etc. His most recent blog post mentions the problems he was having with uptime on Engadget.com. “We’ve had two long, frustrating years of servers going down.” ..he says. Now let’s start from the top – I’ve had a rough week myself but I’ve… Read more →

I doubt there’s many people out there who haven’t heard of the “419 Scam”. In fact, there’s even people who have set up websites about it to turn the tables on these scammers. Check out 419Eater.com for an example. Anyhow, one day I was going through my usual load of mail, complete with Viagra, Get-rich-quick schemes and 419-scams a-go-go. I… Read more →

Every morning I have to get up at about 7.30 to go to work. It’s dark, cold and wet. I go outside and spend time de-icing the car, then even more time battling huge 4×4 vehicles doing the half-mile school run. The winter isn’t fun – especially when we’ve had to put our regular winter holiday on ice (geddit?) to… Read more →

Britain is apparently in the “grip of a massive alcohol problem” according to this news story You can see whether you’ve got any of these problems on the horizon by filling in The Suns’ very detailed and highly scientific survey here. Apparently more than a quarter of adults in the UK are “hooked on drink” and 22,000 are killed directly… Read more →

England, my England. I like living and working here. It’s my home. As with any country it has it’s good and bad points. Sometimes the bad points seem to get on top of us, so a new project funded by Department for Culture, Media and Sport, is setting out to identify English icons. I guess they’re trying to boost English… Read more →

Gahh! I hate toolbars. Sure, some people use them for the pop-up blocking facilities and other get used to them for their daily browsing. I’ve seen people endlessly typing in web addresses in the Google Toolbar, thinking that it is the address bar. If you ask them to enter a web address they’ll invariably enter the middle-part of the address,… Read more →

I have to be honest here. Let’s all just sit down for a minute. I’m a little scared. It’s not often I look at “the stats”. Provided the guys who’ve got my server don’t fly over demanding cash I’m not that fussed about traffic, provided it’s going “up” and not “down”. Today I decided to take a glimpse. In November… Read more →

This week started off well. Although now it seems to have started tumbling into the infinitely busy mess that it always is. I’m having one of those moments where you actually start reading emails that say…. “Greeting and blessing on to you sorry for contacting you in such i surprising manner,I am Mobutu Lucky ,my father own’s a Gold and… Read more →

This week started off well. Although now it seems to have started tumbling into the infinitely busy mess that it always is. I’m having one of those moments where you actually start reading emails that say…. “Greeting and blessing on to you sorry for contacting you in such i surprising manner,I am Mobutu Lucky ,my father own’s a Gold and… Read more →