Cup Of Coffee

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 →

The Boxing Day sales continue to drag on. Christmas Day itself is used by the shops purely as a massive advertising opportunity for getting their Boxing Day sales noticed… “Sale starts 9AM Boxing Day! HURRY HURRY!” … What ? You want me to get up at early on Boxing Day, after I’ve consumed enough red wine and turkey to keep… Read more →

I’m sorry, but am I the only one who’s a bit narked by this ? Why are people here in the UK telling me to “have a good holiday” or to “meet on Holiday Tuesday” ? I only say because on the BBC Weather news tonight they said, “…and Holiday Tuesday will be much the same weather…” … Didn’t we… Read more →

We had some Carol Singers around last night. Well, I say “Carol Singers”. They weren’t actually singing any Christmas Carols. We heard a banging at the door and a dreadful rendition of “Feed The World” by Band Aid.. “Feeeeddd thaaaa weeeerlllldd! Let them knawww it’s Chrissssmus toime!” ..and that was it. They just repeated it about 6 times. Bird went… Read more →

I went into Sainsburys last night. They had signs up everwhere saying, “Try Something New Today”. So I did. I f**ked off to Morrisons instead. :) Christmas is always the time of year when you run low on cash, so I decided to call my bank to arrange to see my Pensions account manager. I needed to see the pensions… Read more →

Today we finished putting the Christmas lights up. As you can see our house is now decorated with quite a few twinkly lights. Getting up the ladder and hanging those ones off the guttering wasn’t too great, especially when my fingers started turning a strange shade of blue but hey, it looks great now. :) When I’d finished we watched… Read more →

I’ve already told you about our Saturday morning adventure in Brownhills, so I thought I’d tell you about what we did in the afternoon too. I was going to put this all in one blog but to be honest there’s just too much material. We popped into Walsall after visiting Brownhills Market and decided to go to Debenhams for a… Read more →

We’ve had an interesting weekend so far. On Saturday we popped into what can only be described as “dodgy central”, ahhh yes – Brownhills Market. It’s like a hundred Derek Trotters have descended on the place. It’s full of counterfeit stuff from DVDs, electricals, clothing, shoes, out-of-date sweets and cheap make up. You’ll also find stuff to help you smoke… Read more →

Today I had to nip into Morrisons to get the photos from the throw-away camera we took to the Christmas party. Most of the shots didn’t come out as either the “photographer” was too drunk or didn’t press the flash button. However, I’ve managed to find a picture of myself holding some beer and wearing a santa hat (right). What… Read more →

Some plank with far too much time on their hands has written in to the BBC about something Jeremy Clarkson did a few weeks back on the Top Gear programme he presents. Whilst talking about the new Mini – which has been redesigned by the German owners with an “estate” look to it, he gave the Heil Hitler salute on… Read more →

An interesting Sky News item caught my eye today. It’s a rare moment when Mr George Bush, lets his guard down a bit more.. than.. err. usual.. (I’ll try not to roll out the large amount of “Bushisms”). Anyway, I haven’t heard him speak since he said, “ Read more →

An interesting Sky News item caught my eye today. It’s a rare moment when Mr George Bush, lets his guard down a bit more.. than.. err. usual.. (I’ll try not to roll out the large amount of “Bushisms”). Anyway, I haven’t heard him speak since he said, “ Read more →

I’ve just stumbled across this site, which seeks to educate motorway users into being better drivers. As a heavy motorway user myself I pretty much agree with everything on the site, although I have to confess that a lot of “reps” tend to be the better drivers as they usually get out of the way of trucks pulling out from… Read more →

More news on the Channel 4 “Space Cadets” show from Jon, who emailed in after spotting my previous blog about it. We’ve already shown that two of the “regular cadets” (Keri and Ryan) are in fact actors. Here’s our evidence. However, there are other cadets – they’re supposedly “regular people” too, but now we have more details that they’re not… Read more →