Mon - July 4, 2005
My eyes deceived me
I must say the first time that I read this I did a double take. First time around I
thought that they were reviving That's Life
.Over to you
Cyril.More good news here as well. kids need to be inspired to pick
up a book or three.
Posted: 07:56 PM
There can be only one...
... or possibly two...maybe three...could be
four...or perhaps five
Don't they ever
learn?
Posted: 07:49 PM
Sat
- July 2, 2005
He big in nothing, important in good elephant
Posted: 11:15 AM
Wed - June 29, 2005
And would you like fries with that?
Yesterday I was thirsty and decided to visit the
drive through window of A Well Known Fast-Food Franchise, hereafter known as
AWKFFF. The following is a summary of the conversation that went
on...
AWKFFF - Can I take your order
please
Me - Just a black coffee
please
AWKFFF - Can I take your
order
Me - Just a black coffee
please
AWKFFF - And would you like anything
else with that?
Me - No, just a black coffee
please
AWKFFF - mumbles.... umber
two
So I drive round to window number
two. Why do they never use window number
one?
AWKFFF - Was that the black
coffee?
(there were no other cars in the
vicinity at all, nobody in front, nobody
behind)
Me -
yes
AWKFFF - Would you like milk, cream or
sugar with that?
Me - No, JUST a black
coffee
At which point she hands me the
cup of coffee, which by now is attached to some papier mache egg-box thing. I
can't get the cup out of the thing as I reach out of the window so I have to
take the whole contraption.
When I park
up and extracate my coffee I notice that both the cup and the lid have a warning
on them that the contents will be hot, so I should hope, but that the stud which
should be pressed down to say that the coffee is indeed a black coffee has not
been depressed.
It is the only thing
that isn't depressed.
Sad isn't it that
the staff at AWKFFF are so drilled to up-sell every order that they cannot
actually process what I have said and adjust their up-sells to match, we have to
warn people that their coffee will be hot but we can't give people the useful
information as to which coffee is black or
not.
Can I have a happy hat and four
gold stars on my name-badge yet?
Posted: 11:09 PM
Wed - July 7, 2004
Three legs are better than two...
Well
I'm back in the country. Unfortunately there was no net access in the hotel on
the island and I don't have GPRS roaming (or so it seems) so I have spent the
past couple of days cut off from my world. A lovely sunny time it was and a
number of very useful contacts made. Hopefully they all pan out and we get a
good deal of business from them.
The
hotel was basic but adequate, apart from the fact that somebody's bedroom door
overlooked my toilet and there wasn't any obscure glass in the window. The place
was a real rabbit warren, up and down sets of stairs trying to find my room. But
still, it was a pleasant break from the regular stuff. Back to more of the same
tomorrow I guess.
Posted: 08:02 PM Read More
Mon - July 5, 2004
Shower Curtains
There are very few things in this world that I can
say that I absolutely loathe.
Cheap
plastic shower curtains are one of
them.
I have stayed in a lot of hotel
rooms over the years and tonight I find myself in yet another. The room was
promoted as having been newly refurbished to the chain's latest standards.
Unfortunately this does not also apply to the bath. One of these days someone is
going to make the accountant that decides to only spend tuppence three farthings
on the shower actually attempt to use one. It is a basic physics principle that
when you put one of these hideous things inside the bath and then turn on the
shower the air pressure over the bath will lower and consequently the curtain
will be pulled into the bath and towards the occupant of the shower. Add to this
the really cheap and nasty material that it is made of and the curtain then
attempts to adhere itself to you.
No
matter how much you fight it and try to beat the shower curtain away it chases
after you, remorselessly trying to become your second
skin.
When I installed a shower over the
bath a year ago I bought a proper glass shower screen. There was no way that I
was going to impose a shower curtain on anybody that chose to get wet and naked
in my bathroom. This must have cost me all of £25, if you factor in how
many rooms there are in this hotel, and the entire chain, the cost of a simple
screen like that when bought in bulk would probably be close to single figures,
and installation was a total breeze. Even if you allow for an occupancy rate of
about 30% you could recoup the cost of installation in a little over a year by
charging about an extra £2 per room per night, probably even less. I for
one would be perfectly willing to pay an extra couple of quid a night to avoid
feeling that clammy hand on my backside whilst I'm trying to
shower.
There is a little note attached
to the bath reminding me to be careful when taking a shower and to avoid
slipping. Unlike other hotels they haven't provided me with one of those suction
mounted shower mats so whilst trying to avoid the embrace of the ever loving
shower curtain I managed to slip and slide all over the place, nearly doing
myself a mischief.
One final thing....
the person who installed the shower head must have been a munchkin. It was fixed
to the wall at a height somewhat level with my throat and only pointed
downwards. Try to wash your hair and either you have to lean forwards and get
water up your nose or you turn away from the shower head, squat down and
promptly get the mixer tap up your
rectum.
Tomorrow I get on the plane and
it is another hotel in the evening. Hopefully the hotel in Douglas is designed
taking extra limbs into account. Should be interesting.
Posted: 10:33 PM Read More
Before I forget...
The photo that I posted yesterday was taken back in
late 2002 when I was in Washington DC for the first time. Yep, that is the
Whitehouse in the background not St Paul's
Posted: 10:32 PM Read More
Sun - July 4, 2004
ID4
To
all my American friends (and I have a good few) a Happy Independence
Day.
So you are celebrating being free
of us, sometimes I wonder if it ought to be us celebrating being free of you.
After all the Pilgrim Fathers were a bunch of religious prudes and you don't
seem to be doing a great deal of good for the world right now. Don't get me
wrong, I have a few good and right (as in correct) minded friends but too many
of you are insular and care only about yourselves. After all having a World
Series in which nobody else competes does just smack of isolationism. Odd that
Iraq got partial sovereignty back two days early, I half expected Bush to hold
it over so that both countries could celebrate their "Independence"
together.
Hey ho and on with the next
year.
Posted: 06:01 PM Read More
Sun - June 27, 2004
Football, what football?
yeah
so I dressed up, see what good it
did.
Darn, I need to loose some
weight
Posted: 01:08 AM
Sat
- March 20, 2004
Our friend in the Tardis...
The BBC have today announced that Christopher Eccleston will be
playing The Doctor in the new 13 part series due to air in early 2005. The
Eighth Doctor books will be rolled into the BBC's Previous Doctor range but no
news yet on where this will leave Richard E. Grant's version of the Ninth Doctor
or if there will be a Ninth Doctor range of
books.Saturdays will be looking like
Saturdays used to be thanks to Lorraine Heggessey, controller of BBC1. Dr Who
will be back, Brucie has a new show, there will be a variety show with Johnny
Vaughan and Denise Van Outen. Plus the afore mentioned return of The Two
Ronnies. Who knows, there might even be pepper pots too.
Posted: 02:02 PM Read More
Sun - February 15, 2004
This sure don't feel like Kansas no more....
So, within a short period of time the "re-imagined"
Battlestar Galactica gets the green-light and
Angel gets
cancelled.There is something
very wrong in the world. Something very
wrong.If it carries on like this we will
find a Labour government pushing up university fees, clamping down on free
movement within the EU, introducing identity cards and the Tories backing
same-sex marriage. Hmmmm......At least
Dr Who and The Two Ronnies are coming back, so the world
will not feel completely unreal.
Posted: 09:29 PM Read More
Fri - January 16, 2004
One down....... 108 to go
We haven't seen a day like this for about five
years. The BBC have recovered another "lost" Dr Who episode. Unlike previous
finds this one was not recovered from a dusty church hall or a TV station in
some far flung corner of the ex-empire but turned up in the hands of a former
BBC employee near Leeds, my midweek home. Darn, I was so close to
it.The 12 episode Daleks' Masterplan now
has three episodes that survived the BBC's junking of the black and white master
tapes in the 1970s.More here
Posted: 09:20 PM Read More
Sat
- January 3, 2004
Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, oh yes!
Posted: 12:32 AM
Mon - December
8, 2003
A new epoch...
I went hunting for the definition of an epoch
today. I know that it can be defined as a precise amount of time as well as all
it's other uses. I have found that it is a division of a geological period but
that source told me neither how long a period is or what division of it an epoch
is <sigh>.I did, however find this
which raised a smile:Epoch
n. [Unix: prob. from astronomical timekeeping]
The time and date corresponding to 0 in an operating system's clock and
timestamp values. Under most Unix versions the epoch is 00:00:00 GMT, January 1,
1970; under VMS, it's 00:00:00 of November 17, 1858 (base date of the U.S. Naval
Observatory's ephemerides); on a Macintosh, it's the midnight beginning January
1 1904. System time is measured in seconds or ticks past the epoch. Weird problems may ensue
when the clock wraps around (see wrap around), which is not necessarily a rare
event; on systems counting 10 ticks per second, a signed 32-bit count of ticks
is good only for 6.8 years.The
1-tick-per-second clock of Unix is good only until January 18, 2038, assuming at
least some software continues to consider it signed and that word lengths don't
increase by then. See also wall time. Microsoft Windows, on the other hand,
has an epoch problem every 49.7 days - but this is seldom noticed as Windows is
almost incapable of staying up continuously for that long.
Posted: 09:54 PM Read More
Fri - September 26, 2003
Diddly dum, de diddly dum, de diddly dum, de dum de diddly,
whoohoo-oo
He's back, and it's about
time.........againWe've been here before
and it was a false dawn that time. The BBC have finally announced that Dr Who is
to return to TV. OK, so we don't get to see it until 2005 but Russell T Davies
is behind it and he is not only a huge fan but wrote Damaged Goods and Dark
Season ."Oh
marvellous, I'm a Cliché" - Marcie
HatterThere are many that I would have
been happy to see the Good Doctor working for, Mark
Gatiss, Kevin Davies and Bill Baggs
amongst them but Russell T Davies would certainly be up there with them. We can
all hope that he manages to involve some of the other major faces in the
industry who are huge fans and have worked to keep the show going but my guess
is that there will be a lot of new people making their mark as
well.
Posted: 10:41 PM Read More
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 08:19 PM
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