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Sunday 30th August

22:00

One Poetry Challenge I'm bound to win

So I think that it's about time I knuckled down to write some more. And to that end I have set myself the task of writing one poem a day during the month of September. Of course, I'm using the term 'poetry' in it's loosest sense - it's more like light verse or doggerel really. Obviously this is going to be a bit of a challenge as I can't find inspiration to update this site every day, so finding poetic inspiration will be doubly difficult. Anyway, possibly at the risk of making things even more difficult for myself, I'm open to suggestions for subject-cum-themes from you, gentle reader. Of course anything along the lines of "Government as an oligarchical hegemony" or "Superstring theory in quantum mechanics" will be ignored, thank you. Anyway, I usually log on first thing in the morning, so you never know - make a witty suggestion in the morning and I might just be able to come up with something before the end of the day.

Anyway, I've put the link to Poetry Challenge (as I've decided to call it) at the top of the links on your left, so it's easy to find. You can check there every day to see what I've written, but there'll also be a small announcement on the site when I update every day, as well as all the usual shite that I like to blather on about. I'll probably archive the poems off at the end off each week, depending on the file size, but if I do, I'll let you know where to find the old stuff. Helpful, aren't I?

Finally, to get us in the mood, I've added two fairly recent efforts to Poetry Corner - 'My Dead Canadian Girlfriend' (short version) and 'One Summer on Sunday'. Enjoy. Or don't.

Go on, stick your oar in:

Thursday 28th August

17:10

Music Special

Loathe as I am to agree with Chris Moyles, I do have to concur that Scooter "tribute band" Moped are very funny. A bit of a one-trick pony perhaps, but one trick that's done well. Check out their website (click on the cuppa when you get there). Then download either Clokchs or Imagine, which are the two best tracks IMHO. You can give the others a spin if you want (Sweet Child O Mine is pretty funny too) but I think you'll have got the joke by then.

And here's one of the guilty men behind Moped - Diffusion. This site features his "day job", so to speak, which appears to consist mainly of cutting up samples from popular television and welding them to dance beats and breaks. Now where can I get a job like that? Anyway, there's enough stuff here to keep you amused for a while - The Sweeney remix and Bargain Hunt Booty get the "Free Time Thumbs Up", in particular. And the serious stuff, the actual proper remixes, are pretty good too. Plus, he wins extra Fat Fakir bonus points by generously telling everyone else how they can do it too. Nice one. I'm off to download AcidXpress and spend the next few days mixing my old Hi-De-Hi! samples with some funky dance beats.

And finally, if it's vocal cut-ups that you're after, or indeed musical manipulations of any sort, you could do far worse than check out the sound page of the Evolution Control Committee. Home of the infamous Rocked by Rape Dan Rather cut-up, of course, alongside the patriot-baiting Bush Speech (corrected) and the spoof moon landing recording. Check it out, but don't blame me if some of this isn't work safe. Incidentally, does anyone know what chest size 4XL US is equivalent to, only there some ECC workshirts in that size on cdstreet.com for only 13 bucks and I'd be very tempted if I knew they'd fit me. Come on Eels, you've got one - what size is yours? And the shirt?

Go on, stick your oar in:

Sunday 24th August

23:30

Knock up your women and children?

As you all know, I'm now attending a Job Club. Well, how much confidence would you have in an organisation that can't even manage to send you what you ask for? I only ask because Personnel Evaluation Consultants, who run my Job Club (and several others in the South Yorkshire Area), are currently looking for staff and I rang them up to ask for an application form. Well, they've managed to send me a letter and all the job descriptions, but have forgotten to enclose the relevant form. Nice one. I could put it down as a "Friday Afternoon Foul-Up" I suppose, but it doesn't inspire confidence in their organisation. Anyway, I'll ring them up on Tuesday and get them to send me the form, then go to the Job Club on Wednesday or Thursday and ask them to help me fill in the form. With all their experience of what the job entails they should be able to help me put in the right sort of stuff. Sorted. Ah, I'm already looking forward to it being my turn to shout "Okey-cokey, pig-in-a-pokey! Good Morning Jobseekers!"

And is it just me or does that Linda Barker look a bit "Sally-staring-eyes-breadknife" in those Currys adverts? I certainly wouldn't want to wake up in the morning to find her wielding those scissors at the end of my bed. I'd be checking to see if I still had the same number of body parts as when I went to sleep....

Go on, stick your oar in:

Wednesday 20th August

16:30

The sound of one hand tapping....

Long-time sufferers, er sorry, surfers of this particular spot on the Interweb will know of my inexplicable fondness for the output of V/VM. Well, I'm mentioning them again because I have uncovered two more tracks on their site that you simply must listen to. First up, their super-slo-mo version of Chris De Burgh's Lady In Red can be downloaded from here. I have mentioned it before, but it is simply awesome. And secondly, thanks to a bit of copyright theft (how unusual) you can download a version of the old Chas'n'Dave hit Snooker Loopy. However, it's a version by Dutch (I think) band De Strangers and sung entirely in foreign. Anyway, go here and download 'Snooker Loopy (Original Mix)' for some surreal laughs. Incidentally, if you want to sing along to this you can get the lyrics here. Enjoy.

A while back I was moaning about not being able to automatically spellcheck my files before uploading them. Well, I've since discovered that I can do that, and a whole lot more, using Adobe GoLive. Hurrah! On the other hand, it also indents all my code and leaves it looking a bit of a horrid mess. I realise that this doesn't actually affect anything, but I like my source code the way I wrote it, thank you very much. I've had to spend some time removing the extra tabs that GoLive inserted. Still, at least t automatically closed all those paragraph tags for me....

Go on, stick your oar in:

Friday 15th August

23:30

I started something I couldn't finish

Last week doxdesk picked up a parasite on my PC, this week my anti-virus discovered a Trojan. And my PC has crashed more times in the last fornight than it has in the last two years. I'm beginning to regret updating my versions of Explorer and Outlook Express. (Although I really ought to get round to updating my RealPlayer...) It can't really be a coincidence, can it? Plus the fact that Windows Critical Update informed me of at least one new download or patch every day last week. I'm starting to feel like that old Greek hero, er, Shushyface, or whatever he was called, who was destined to forever have to roll a giant ball up a hill only to have it roll back down again when he reached the top. Sisyphus, that was the geezer. I am forever doomed to be applying patches and downloads to my MS software only to discover virus infections or security breaches every time I think I've finished. Still, at least my creaky old Windows 98 installation isn't vulnerable to this MSBlast infection. Yet.

My ex-cow-orker, Lisa has linked to a story on The Register about "blog noise" on Google. This is basically, people complaining because of the way that blogs can skew Google search results and return too many "useless and irrelevant" sites. "Oh, Google just turns up too many blogs when I want proper information." Well, refine your search, set Google to display more results per page, look at a website's URL before you click through, and stop whining. Anyway, to me this seems akin to asking the librarian to index the library and then blaming the index for the contents of the library. You know, you can apply a little common sense and filter the information yourself by not clicking on the links to blogs! It seems to me, that in this Now! Age, people aren't prepared to actually put a bit of effort in and expect a bit of software to do it all for them. When I was a student and searching the library for relevant information for my dissertation (The development of shelterdecks on British trawlers under 10m in length since 1970, if you must know) my library search returned something like 37 pages of relevant books and I had to wade through that lot. If only I hadn't given up on page 4........Anyway, over on Lisa's site I suggested we should make every third Friday of the month International Blog Noise Day and that every blog should devote itself to one particular topic, just to firk around with Google a bit more. My initial suggestion was "blog noise", but that's so yesterday and besides Lisa trumped it (so to speak) with Lapdance Island. Ooh, it's like Heaven and Hell combined! And yes, I've got my application in.

Go on stick your oar:

Monday 11th August

21:30

Definitely Sinister

I give you fair warning that Wednesday is International Left-Handers Day. Yeah, I know that just about every cause has a "Day" now (although White Lightning doesn't, but then every day is a White Lightning day for me now....) but as one of the 13% of the population who is sinistrally gifted, this is one I'm putting my not inconsiderable weight behind. So on Wednesday, I'll be joining in by doing everything left-handed. So, no change there. Oh wait, I play my guitar right-handed, so I can't do that on Wednesday. Hhm, perhaps I can "designate my personal space as a LEFTY zone" Ah, I've already done that too. Oh well perhaps I'll spend the day listening only to songs by left-handed musicians. So, that's a day of Mozart, Beethoven, Prokofiev, Britten, Rachmaninoff, Glenn Gould, Hendrix, Bowie, Dick Dale, Kurt Cobain, Michael Stipe, Isaac Hayes, and, er, Sir Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Mark Knopfler, Phil Collins and Billy Ray Cyrus. On second thoughts, perhaps not. And that list started so promisingly.... Anyway, why not celebrate Left-Handed Day by sending one whole English pound to your favourite left-handed blog writer? And if you can send me a pound too, that'd be great.

I have finally managed to work out how to download pictures from my digital camera to my PC, but only after I managed to lose yet another set of pictures - this time from my weekend visit to see my younger sister. The weather was lovely (apart from the storm we passed through round Stoke-on-Trent on the way there) and I thought I got some decent pictures of my nephews playing in the garden. However, looking at this picture of a Hibiscus and this one of a mystery plant that my mother is growing (anyone know what it might be?), I suspect that the pictures might not have been all that good. To be fair, I knew the picture quality wouldn't be all that good - I only paid £30 of the camera and it's the size of a matchbox. And I have managed to download photos from it in the past and they were OK at best, but I never intended to use them on the Interweb. Ah well, I suppose I'll just have to splash out on a decent camera when I finally get a few quid together. Or perhaps I should just set up a begging site at www.buymeadigitalcamera.com (and yes, that domain name is still available).

Just how much would you trust an Internet address that you saw graffitied on the side of au underpass? I ask because on my travels from Conisbrough to Nantwich on Sunday, I saw www.wincashprizes.com scrawled on just such an underpass on the way through Stoke. Part of me reckons that it's got to be a scam, designed to draw in the unwary, and yet part of me thinks it might be worth checking out. Anyway, I did a bit of research and the domain has been registered by Network Solutions and there's just a holding page there at the moment. Still, I don't think I'll ever be checking back to find out when the page has been updated.

Yes, you can have free legal advice for just the price of a phone call!*

Well, that's bound to be the pitch if ICSTIS get their way. There'll be a rush of lawyers and accountants out to offer you their services "free" over the phone. But if you do the maths, a maximum charge of £75 works out at about 15 minutes. Now, how quickly do you think these people will work out that the best approach is to cap the length of the phone call at 15 minutes, and then recommend a "proper professional consultation with one of our recommended advisers" at whatever extravagant rate they charge these days. Mind you, at four calls an hour, and £75 per call, that's a healthy £300, and even if you allow for costs, that's a nice little earner. Perhaps I ought to get into the legal advice business once I've run my digital camera scam.

*_{Calls charged at £5 per min. Maximum call charge £75. Maximum call length 15mins. Other charges may apply if calling from a mobile phone or callbox.}

Go on, stick your oar in:

Friday 8th August

13:40

Why do you whisper, green grass?

Sad to see that one of Britain's greatest comedians came to the end of the road last week. I refer, of course, not to Bob Hope but to Don Estelle. Little Don, who recently appeared as a zookeeper in The League of Gentlemen, was better known for his portrayal of Gunner "Lofty" Sugden in the long-running hit series It Aint Half Hot Mum, but he made his first TV appearance as an extra, playing darts in the Rovers Return on Coronation Street. Anyway, Don himself has a website, but it hasn't been updated since June 2000, and sadly won't be in the future. There is something profoundly poignant in listening to his personal introduction though. You can also listen to samples of him singing and reading extracts from his autobiography (not both at the same time, obviously). And if you're interested in his 1975 hit "Whispering Grass" you can download a scratchy version of it in Real Player format from this site.

I shouldn't laugh I suppose, but this local news story had me sniggering like a schoolboy. It is, sadly, a serious story about the theft of road signs ruined by both the name of the road and the unfortunately-named pensioner quoted in the article. Just try not to think of the phrase "I saw Arthur Laycock up Butt Hole Road".....

I don't suppose this will ever be a plausible excuse to use in the world of computing but you could always give it a try, I suppose. I'd certainly be on the lookout for any network administrators who suddenly started wearing big, flappy trousers. "Yeah, I'm sorry the system crashed, but my trousers accidentally caught on the reset button and I fell over...." Or maybe not. Worth bearing in mind though, I think.

I spent yesterday afternoon in the delightful surroundings of Brodsworth Hall. Which was a very pleasant contrast to the wasted morning at the Job Club - they've retyped my CV for me ("to give it a bit more white space") and it now contains half a dozen spelling mistakes..... Anyway, Brodsworth Hall is a splendid Victorian manor house, which has some fabulous gardens. Of which I took a few pictures. Admittedly mainly close-ups of some of the more interesting specimens, but pictures nonetheless. I was somewhat relieved to get home without my digital camera resetting itself and was looking forward to downloading a few here for your delectation and delight. Sadly, the program I was using to download the pictures to my PC crashed in the middle of the download, and crashed my PC completely, thus consigning my pictures to the ether. It's a curse, I tells ya! So, no happy pictures of my day out. Still, it was a nice afternoon out and the gardens are rather impressive, especially the fern dell. If you're ever in the area, you should check it out.

Go on, stick your oar in:

Monday 4th August

23:15

Lying on your bed reading Beanos

One my ex-co-workers, Jack, has included this interesting link on his site to an Estate Agent who are, apparently, flogging off some of the MoD's unwanted nuclear bunkers. Sadly, these are all merely small emergency shelters rather than the huge underground bunkers of popular film. But it did cause me to recall Cheshire's own "secret bunker" at Hack Green, just outside Nantwich. Just about everyone over the age of about twenty-five in Nantwich and the surrounding area must have been down to look at or even trespass on this supposedly secret site at one time or another and CND used to target it at least once every six months. Now it's a tourist attraction. And yes, it is even signposted "Secret Bunker". Ah well, at least I'm not likely to be arrested next time I'm in the vicinity. Or does the statute of limitations not apply when it comes to Crown property?

I'm sure there's a lesson to be learned here. I noticed on Saturday that my PC processor was running really slowly when it was cnnected to the Internet and that the lovely red light on the front that indicates the disk is being read was almost permanently on. I ran System Monitor and it was showing that processor usage was running 100%. Well, that was definitely not right. I checked my firewall and that wasn't showing any unexpected programs connecting to the Internet. So, I disconnected and ran my anti-virus program but that didn't show up any signs of infection either. Curious. Mind you, I didn't pay for either my firewall (ZoneAlarm - highly recommended) or anti-virus (AVG Free - not so recommended). Anyway, in a moment of inspiration, I re-connected to the Interweb and surfed on in (via Google) to doxdesk's parasite page which immediately detected that I had a dodgy ActiveX control installed. The sort of ActiveX control that allows remote access to your PC, in fact. Anyway I followed the instructions to remove it and order was restored to PC. Phew! Hopefully I haven't lost any critical data - I don't store passwords or financial info on my PC - but only time will tell. I've updated my browser and beefed up my security a bit since then, so hopefully I won't get caught again. Touch wood.

Finally, whilst it's nice to be recognised for the excellence or otherwise of past achievements, I don't think that anything on this site can be what anyone looking at ISAs Today is really after, could it? Maybe - I was Number 15 (with a bullet!) on their list of Procurement Officers web pages. Do you think I should tell them?

Go on, stick your oar in:

Friday 1st August

23:20

Definitely not celebrating 'Yorkshire Day'

You sports fans and seekers of trivia may remember that at the end of the last football season, Doncaster Rovers chairman John Ryan, turned out as a substitute in their last game of the regular season. I mention this because I went to see his team play top Scottish team Livingston in a pre-season friendly on Tuesday night. I wouldn't have gone normally, but my cousin Robert, who was the fourth official for the evening, invited me (and my dad). So I got in free, had free drinks and nosh in the VIP Lounge and a seat in the Director's box. Sadly, Rovers couldn't oblige with a win - going down 4-2 in an entertaining game which featured a very dubious penalty decision in Livingston's favour. The result was not entirely surprising as Livingston are in the Scottish Premier Division and Doncaster have just been promoted back in to Third Division of the Football League after an absence of about five years. On the basis of their performance on Tuesday, I'd say that Rovers are good enough to stay in the Third Division, but not quite good enough to be challenging for promotion. And that's about all the forecasting I'll be doing this season, apart from making the fairly safe prediction that Liverpool will finish above Leeds again. Ah, the fatfakir - sees all, knows nowt.

Culinary Journeys, part II - having braved the Indian-style kebab pizza (see below), I'm journeying further into the world of crap food this week and have already tried out Pataks Filled Nan Bread. (Unfortunately, the Pataks website is a bit flaky and uses frames, so if you want to see what I'm on about you'll have to go to the product index page and select the product from there.) These were nice, if a bit on the small side, but suffered the same fate as any other bread/pastry thing reheated in the microwave in that it went a bit dry on the edges and soggy in the middle. And the filling dropped out of the side. I've only seen these on sale in farmfoods so far, at £1 for a box of two, which seems like good value to me, but if anyone's seen them elsewhere at any other price I'd like to know. Overall - nice as an occasional alternative to a sandwich, but not the sort of thing you could eat at your desk.

Anyway, I've bought some other strange/shite food, so look out for more news from the freezer cabinets of doom (aka farmfoods) soon.

Go on, stick your oar in: