watch tHe skies

I can’t believe that Big Brother is back on telly. It is a mind-numbingly irritating programme and yet somehow we ended up watching it last night, finding ourselves fascinated by the twist.

This time, Big Brother is a different celebrity each day, and each one can do anything they like to the housemates, presumably short of violating their human rights. And it is this potential for extreme exploitation that makes the show interesting.

After all, what is Jimmy Carr going to do to them? Matt Lucas was very entertaining as he forced the Chairman of the Scottish Youth Parliament to act like a complete nutcase all evening.

Personally I would recreate the Stanford Prison Experiment and see what happens. Or perhaps the Stanley Milgram experiments regarding obedience. Or maybe persuade them that an end of days scenario has occurred and everything has gone offline and they can’t get out.

Which, apart from me not being a Celebrity, is another reason why they won’t let me be Big Brother.

Ooh they should get Derren Brown to do it.

Well it’s been a while since I’ve posted on the blog. And that’s a combination of being mad busy at work (new job) and mad busy at home (active baby), coupled with holidays, weekends away, weddings and all sorts of other stuff.

And so I think in the short term the blog is going to be a little quieter than you are used to. I don’t have as much time to ponder and postulate at the moment!

This weekend I got to fulfil one of my ambitions and that was to do some Rally driving. For my birthday, Jenny bought me a half day session at Prestwold Hall, north of Loughborough. Here they have an old airfield where you can drive, amongst others, Ferraris, Aston Martins, Lamborghinis and an assortment of rally cars.

So it was an early start on saturday morning to pile up the M1 to the venue, don my crash helmet and see what they had to offer. (more…)

So following my initial smugness on the finding a fiver situation, I watched many many people suffering in countries less fortunate than ours on Comic Relief, and Jenny and I decided to donate our fiver, plus a bunch of other fivers, to helping other people.

Go on, help them raise as much as possible…

Aaah so relaxing, a week of peaceful relaxation with Ben and Jenny, long walks, a bit of sport and a few glasses of wine and my map of the world slips back in to alignment.

So I return to work to find that my boss hasn’t done any of the stuff I asked him to, and he’s bounced it all back to me plus some extra stuff that he forgot to do in the meantime. Oh well.

So off I go to get my passport renewed - not due until July but I need to go out to DC in April and US immigration won’t let you in without 6 months or more on your passport. So the UK passport service lets you fill in the renewal online and they send you a preprinted form to post back to them. So I opt to take it to the post office to use their expedited service, only to find that they won’t accept preprinted forms - if I want to use the expedited service I need to write it all out by hand - bureaucracy gone mad I tell you.

Then I get home to find that Amazon marketplace has been forgetting to email me about sales (I shift no longer required gadgetry and musicry on amazon) for the last month, meaning I have a bunch of dissatisfied customers to deal with - ok so most have spent like 3pounds on a CD single but I do pride myself on good customer service and this narks me.

Aah well that’s all my groans and moans off my chest so the blog can return to its happy normal self. Lots of stuff to talk about this week, including gadgetry and what happened to Apple TV, Borat, Lost and a lovely new article for www.onekindact.com. I’ve also renewed this site for another year so you’ll be pleased to know you have another 12 months of dirge to look forward to. So it’s good to be back, I’ve missed you!

It ends with a smile…

After a long day yesterday travelling to and from the big smoke, I had a couple of glasses of red wine last night, and as a result I feel very groggy today. There was a time when I could have several pints in the evening and still be in fifth gear for work the next day. Not any more, I wonder if I am developing an allergy to alcohol…?

So as a result, today’s post is a little disjointed and takes the form of a set of unconnected ramblings and thoughts that I’ve had over the last few days.

First class highest risk?
So my trip to London yesterday was made more comfortable by going first class. To be honest I usually go first class - the seats are considerably more comfortable, you are guaranteed one with a table, the first class lounge has free coffee, papers and a TV, and actually it’s not that much more expensive than going cattle, and no screaming kids.

It did occur to me that first class is at the front of the train, as indeed it is on aeroplanes too. So it seems that in the event of a crash, first class bites it first? Perhaps those that have paid more should be at the back of the plane (or the middle of a train as you are just as likely to be smashed in to as you are to smash in to someone). After all that extra cash should pay for the extra chance of survival don’t you think? Perhaps the first class carriage should be made from Black Box material for extra safety.

Apple sanctuary
I nipped in to the Apple shop on Regents Street to worship at the shrine of iPod, and I just wonder why it is that the place is full of people on their Macs? After all they don’t surve coffee or even have tables to sit at, so why not head to Starbucks and get yourself a macchiato?

I’ve not been in the Apple shop for a while and I must say I was blown away by the sheer volume of iPod gadgets and widgets available now. Some of the speaker docks that Altec Lansing are doing are fantastic, though none of them seem to cater for us people who sanely keep their ipods in protective skins.

I notice that they have done away with the lecture area and replaced it with an “iPod bar”, to help people too dim to work out how “menu - play - pause - skip” works. Blimey, how exactly did we invent dna fingerprinting?

Stealth price rises
And on the subject of Starbucks, when did it become acceptable to charge £3.50 for a coffee? sure I like Starbucks - the ambience, the paninis, the fact that they sell Innocent Smoothies, but you can now only get 3 coffees for the price of a CD? Surely very odd. Oh and why do people think that buying a “skinny” bun makes any difference to their waistline when there’s about 500 calories in a large hot chocolate with whipped cream?

Spooks’ doors
My trip to London yesterday involved a meeting with government types in their building. We had to go through rotating secure doors like in Spooks, which made my day. I wonder if you can get UPVC versions for home?

That will do for now. Maybe more later once I have had a cup of tea and maybe a sleep in the toilet cubicles…

I don’t make a habit of watching GMTv however this morning I caught five minutes where they were talking about press intrusion. Apparently the Sun newspaper and other members of its horrid little gang have agreed not to publish photos of Prince William’s girlfriend, the comely Kate Middleton. This comes after uproar (presumably in the papers, probably the Daily Mail) about press intrusion in to her life.

At the same time they were running footage of the poor girl walking down the street with cameras shoved inches from her face, flash guns going off repeatedly in her eyes. Nasty. And yet the paper said that although the photos won’t be published in the press here, the photographers will still pursue her in exactly the same manner because the demand for photos overseas makes it big business.

So I was just wondering exactly how Kate Middleton benefits from the papers not publishing photos? And how paparazzi behaviour isn’t classed as stalking and therefore against the law. If it’s legal to hound and stalk someone with a camera then it should be legal to shoot paparazzi with a gun. At least that would make it a fair fight.

Perhaps the Royal family should insist, if it can’t be controlled, that any unofficial photograph of the Royal Family and those linked, is taxed, and that the tax goes to a charity. At least someone then benefits other than the fat bloke who has been hiding in a bush all day with a telephoto lens.

The other thing that irks me is how does this stuff constitute being news? Somebody getting a parking ticket isn’t news. This is moron fodder, a distraction from actual news like people starving to death, being firebombed, flooding, global warming, terrorism, extinction etc etc - none of this crap actually matters, and all it does is divert our attention from the real news - the real issues that we as a planet should be concerning ourselves with.

Sigh. Rant over.

My humorous christmas post didn’t die, it just curled up in a cardboard box for the holiday. Fortunately I’ve unearthed it and, using the time machine I have invented using only a rubber band, two coat hangers and a jar of marmalade, I have travelled back to Christmas Eve and posted said post. You can find it here, though to be honest in the cold light of the first few days of 2007, it actually isn’t that funny.

Still, as I often say in meetings, you don’t pay me to be funny so consider it a bonus when I am. Ironically, that doesn’t get a laugh either.

Well it couldn’t last forever (but what if it could?), so I’m back at work today after a lengthy holiday of festive fun and new years sales. I’ve also got to spend lots of time with Ben and realised how hard it is being home with a baby all day. You see Jen took my time off as time off for herself and has taken the opportunity to refresh her wardrobe now she is back to her pre-pregnancy days and once again looking fitter than a butcher’s dog on steroids. That’s not to say she didn’t look gorgeous during and after pregnancy, it’s just that it’s nice to see her in figure hugging jumpers again. Oh I digress, it wasn’t my intention to make an adult-only post!

So I’ll be back to posting here again as I’m back at work and therefore need a vent for my non work-related ideas. Fortunately my voice recorder has come in very handy for that and I have a stack of ideas waiting for conversion in to semi-structured ramblings. Can ramblings be semi-structured? Hmm I’m not sure (But what if they could? What happens when you semi-structure your ramblings?)

And for those of you that noticed my meta-model musings lightly concealed by bracketry, you likely gather correctly that my next NLP practitioner module is this weekend, something for me to look forward to and for Jen to dread as it means I’ll be practicing on her again.

Happy New Year to one and all, and an especially warm welcome to you.