For some reason I seem to have gone up a gear in the amount of comment spam I’m getting. On the bright side, half the time I don’t remember the post title that the spam is referring to, so I go and have a look. I’m getting randomly transported back to Scuba diving in california, the Australian desert, etc. etc… It’ll almost be a shame to see the comments end when I install the antispam plugin… almost…
I used to be in a band. We were good. I don’t brag about it much but I’m not too shy when asked about it. When people ask “what sort of band” I usually say “song-y girly pop, like the beatles or something”.
Well, now I have the new fangled diddicle telly, and hence “e4 music” and “HITS”, I discovered something this lunchtime that can now shorten my answer.
We were McFly.
I’m not convinced that is a good thing.
I upgraded wordpress and found a technically brilliant but fundamentally flawed theme designer online. Technically brilliant because you get to pick a colour and it practically forces you to make a coordinated colour scheme, then lets you almost instantly apply the scheme to your wordpress site. Flawed because you don’t get (a) to choose fonts or (b) to preview your theme before you use it…
Once again it’s been a while since I blogged. The reasons for this are twofold.
One, that I now have actual work to do at work, which is bloody great! I’ve been here something like 3 and a half years, having joined to get into embedded software engineering, but as I’d had experience in other things I ended up doing a bit of PeeCee software then a whole lot of tech authoring, then everybody already had the interesting engineering work so I was pinged from pillar to post doing testing, review, snore snore… Finally, I have been getting some work done on the actual products, and have been putting things out into the world with my name on them. This is great, but it means that nowadays it really makes a difference if I slack off, coupled with the fact I’m feeling more pride in my work than before it means I don’t have a lots of time off-task to be philosophizing about how much better the world could be.
The other fold is that I have in fact had plenty to get off my chest, but since it’s largely concerned with women, many of whom are still alive, that stuff’s probably best put under some sort of 50 year rule or something. Suffice it to say, life is not dull at the moment. I just hope I don’t miss it while I’m making other plans…
After months of not really getting a grip on anything much, I found that my mind settled whilst in Sweden so that I could go to bed at 22:30, three and a half hours earlier than I generally do at home, sleep like a baby (only without all the crying and pooing oneself), and wake, raring to go (subject to getting a dose of coffee) at 7:00 the next day. I attributed this to fresh air, exercise, and diet.
Since getting back to blighty, I’ve crept back to 01:00 bedtimes, and lack of being able to put my weight behind the jobs I have to do. Last night I decided I’d had it with rubbish food and take-aways, and bought a cabbage, some minced beef and some white potatoes. Chucking in some onion, black pepper, breadcrumbs and egg I came up with meatballs, mash, and boiled cabbage, and it was gorgeous!
I’m convinced there’s a direct and near-immediate link between nutrition levels and feelings of contentment. When you allow yourself to become deficient in something your body needs, or you take an excess of something your body needs to be rid of, it tries to signal this but our skills at reading our own tummies are not sophisticated enough to let us understand the problem. As a result we might get generaly feelings of discontent, worries of inferiority, whatever.
Jamie Oliver has been figureheading work by Jeanette Orrey who has documented the decline of school dinners, and links have been shown between poor diet and ADHD. This morning they were talking about Ritalin on the T.V. someone from Dundee university was concerned that we weren’t giving our kids enough of it. “We would expect roughly 30 in 1000 children to be given drugs. Instead the figure is only 1 in 6 or 1 in 7.” I don’t think we need to pay attention to anything else he said in THAT interview. He sounds like he needs to take something to improve his concentration.
Rather than stirring more mood-altering chemicals into the melting -pots of our young children’s bodies, can’t we just keep an emergency supply of potatoes nearby? Seriously. We’ve had at least 40 million years to get used to eating things that we’ve picked off a tree or pulled out of the ground, and less than two generations to acclimatise to the new, semi-toxic food environment.
Last night we were round Suzanne’s place, intending to eat Pizza and watch a mindless cartoon, this being a formula tried and tested with the shrekathon we held a few weeks back, which actually involved curry. Suzanne’s place is roughly here and the curry house is roughly here. It took them many attempts to find the place, but it was an enjoyable comedy moment.
This time, we decided to try Pizza Hut, though Emmy asserted that Pizza Hut delivery were a bit rubbish and didn’t tend to deliver. Of course it was obvious she was completely barking, or at least thinking of the two Pizza Huts in town that actually don’t deliver, so I phone the Hull Road Pizza Hut Delivery, tell them where we are, and ask if they deliver there. The answer is no, try the Acomb branch.
I rinse and repeat with the Acomb branch, and they say no, they don’t deliver to here, try the Hull Road branch. I replied that no, the Hull Road branch were equally lazy and I would have to go to a better pizza delivery service.
We went to Dominos who, after something like 70 minutes and a few trips to the wrong street, eventually delivered us pizza and coke, one slightly warmer than the other. It was delivered by a highly apologetic eastern european bloke and because I am a coward I just paid him in full.
Incredible. Suzanne’s place is about half a mile from the very centre of York, and you can’t get pizza delivered!
Having googled for the local Pizza hut, it seems “Free delivery within 3 miles” is offered, and mapquest puts it at 1.5 miles remote. Somebody’s taking the Pizza.
What that funny pricing scheme says to me is:
1) people can afford £3500 for a new car
2) the car companies can’t afford to sell a car for £3500
3) The scheme amounts to buying a car for £3500 then sponsoring the company’s development of future models
What this really means to me is that, actually, we have enough cars. Cars do everything we actually need them to do. All that manufacturers can do is add “aspirational value” and use the iPod effect to hike prices. But people can’t actually afford the higher prices so, hey, let’s make up a number with the same number of digits and give them a big ZERO percent APR on it…
I wonder how much better off the environment would be if cars were only replaced when they wore out…
The new citroen C4 is “alive with technology” and costs £9,995. You get 0% APR if you pay a 35% deposit. That’s £3,500, I thought. I’d spend that on a car if it was special but you’d have a job convincing me about forking over the remaining £6,495. I paid £500 for the cinq. let’s see what I’d be prepared to pay for the extra features.
- A handbrake that actually releases when you release the handle: £250
- Five-door hatchback rather than three: £200
- Distinctive Body Style: uh, you’re ok thanks
- Fixed centre boss on the steering wheel: quite cool, £20
- See-through facia-top display: uh you’re ok thanks
- Built-in aroma diffuser: Cool! I’d pay £15 for one of those!
- Ample soundproofing: £50
- Sensodrive sequential-shift semi-auto transmission: I’d pay £25 to try it out but I really don’t mind wangling the clutch and stick. It gives me something to do.
- Boomerang Headlight Design: £0
- Panoramic Sunroof: £0
- Damped, push-open drawers: £20
- Lane Departure Warning System: I use my EYES
- alloy wheels: £200
Oh look, all the other features are extra anyway. So I would pay £1280 for a car that does everything I think I need. Allowing for the fact I’m a miser and a grumpy one at that, we’ll allow it to be doubled to the £3500 deposit.
I’m rambling. I did have a point but frankly I’m too pooped to make it now.
This is not about the ashes (well done boys!) but about another news story I heard in the car yesterday: In the thick of the breakdown of New Orleans society, a small enclave of 40 (I heard 70 on the radio) people moved into the Ramada Hotel to shelter first from the hurricane, then from the floods, then from the violence.
Story here: Houston Chronicle Article
The point of it was it took a Brit to say “Stick together and we’ll get through this”. That gave me the most patriotic feeling I’ve ever had about this country.
As a footnote: if you read the article, notice how white people “commandeer” vehicles from the public library, whereas black people “loot” toilet rolls from supermarkets.