Nice little gizmo.

create your own visited countries map or vertaling Duits Nederlands

I met up with a few of my former Netscalibur colleagues today.

Dan Daemonn and I agreed to meet up in Canary Wharf. We had lunch at the Gourmet Pizza Company with incredibly slow service, and starters and main courses all turning up at the same time.

After that we retired to a coffee shop (no way we were going to spend any more time waiting for a coffee at Gourmet Pizza Company). While we were there, Daemonn mentioned that Danny had been getting mail bounced from my server and at that exact moment, I spotted Danny walking past the window. We hauled him in and had a bit of a chat.

Of the four of us, only Daemonn is working at the moment, and he’s only doing a couple of days per week. Dan has been away in Japan to visit his in-laws, and is looking at doing some bits and pieces with Cobalt servers Danny is applying for jobs, and I’m ummm… idling.

It was great to catch up with the others, and have a gossip about what’s been going on. Everyone seemed much happier than when they were working (no great surprise, I suppose). It also made a change for me to get out of the house, and we’ll probably be meeting up again in the next couple of weeks.

For a few years now we’ve been using some of the online grocery stores offered by supermarkets. Not having a car means that it’s a major hassle to get all the shopping home, so the delivery services looked really useful, especially for heavy items.

We’ve tried Tesco Sainsbury and more recently Ocado the online service of Waitrose. We may have also used the Iceland online system, but they’ve dropped their service now.

Of those services, we’ve been using the Tesco service the longest, but now use it very rarely, if at all. Sainsbury has also recently fallen from favour too. Why have we stopped using them? Because they suck , big time.
Continue reading Online Groceries: Great & Sucky →

Headed off for a spur-of-the-moment day out in Brighton yesterday. We didn’t have any particular plans, though we did want to pop into Jeremy Hoye to get our wedding rings re-polished. When we got there, their workshop was closed for the day so we had to skip that.

We wandered around Brighton for a little while, and then headed off to Kemp Town on a wild goose chase, looking for a running shop that Vic thought was over there (but had omitted to bring the name or address). After walking for a while, we gave up and headed down to Brighton seafront to watch the sun go down. By now we were starting to feel the cold and headed to Sidewinder for a drink. After a couple of pints of strong cider and a very good meal, we headed back home.

No, not a blog entry about Britney Spears.
Grimsby Town responded to me wishing them good luck against Port Vale by losing 5-1 They lost two players last week, but signed another on loan. They really need to sort things out as they’re yoyoing between good results against very good teams, and terrible results against mediocre/bad ones. I guess what they could really do with is something like the reported half a million quid that Fatboy Slim paid for a share in Brighton & Hove Albion.

Women’s football (or soccer for those of a US persuasion): Always struggling to get away from sterotypes, prejudice and pre-conceptions, and then Sepp Blatter, the head of the world football organisation, FIFA comes out and says Let the women play in more feminine clothes like they do in volleyball. “They could, for example, have tighter shorts. I’m sure that really helps!

On a footballing theme, some of you may know that I still follow Grimsby Town (The Mariners), as they’re my home town team. They’re having a bit of a rough season, following relegation from Division One last season. The excellent Cod Almighty site has a very entertaining diary of the trials and tribulations of the team and their fans. They also produce much-needed ‘Grimsby Is Not In Yorkshire’ t-shirts .

Here’s hoping Town do well against Port Vale today.

Reading ScaryDuck memories of 2000AD got me thinking back to the comics I used to read when I was a boy. The two that I remember most clearly are Warlord and Action.

Warlord was published in 1974 (when I was 7 years old) and was a war comic for boys, featuring Lord Peter Flint, codename Warlord. It was definitely the comic you had to read if you were a boy in those days. Somehow, I don’t think a comic consisting solely of war stories would be allowed now. There were free gifts attached to the cover, though all I can remember about those is codebooks for sending secret messages. Jim Wilkinson, Andrew Payling and I were all members of the Fireball Club, a “secret agent” club that was run through Warlord comic.

Action came out in 1976 and was much more controversial. It had ultra-violent stories like Hookjaw, about a shark with a harpoon sticking through its jaw, and Deathgame 1999, which was about a rollerball-like game. These were obviously influenced by the films “Jaws”, “Deathrace 2000” and “Rollerball”, which were in the cinemas around that time, but which young boys would be unable to see due to their “X” rating. Hookjaw was printed with blood shown in red ink, which made it even more exciting (and gory). Fabulous! Action got into trouble with WH Smith and Menzies later in 1976, due to the violence in the stories and was banned/suspended for 6 weeks, returning with much less violence. I think I lost interest at that point.

Reading up on these comics on the net, it would seem that Action was the predecessor for 2000AD with many of the same editors, writers and artists. I wasn’t fanatical about 2000AD, but enjoyed some of the stories. 2000AD is now owned by Rebellion a UK computer games company.

So far today I have achieved the following:-

• Got out of bed
• Dressed
• Read my email
• Read a bunch of web sites
• Had the shopping delivered
• Unpacked the shopping

Now some of you might say that’s really only 4 things, but when you have done as little as I have today you have to pad things out, okay?

Shopping was a bit of a disaster as Vic had ordered it and Sainsbury, in their time-honoured fashion, decided that they’d make a few substitutions to make our lives more interesting. So, instead of a bottle of plain olive oil and a bottle of flax oil (no, I have no idea what that’s for… oiling flaxes, possibly?!), we received two bottles of Extra Virgin olive oil.. one organic, one full of bad chemicals (I presume, it didn’t say organic anyway). Now this is a bad thing . I wouldn’t know why, but someone tells me that we need several types of olive oil. When I lived alone here, I managed to survive for at least 5 years with no olive oil at all, let alone 3 different types. Still, lovely Vic does make exceedingly good food.

Todays task is to remove the bathroom sealant from the bath edge and replace it with new stuff. The old one, put on two years ago by some builders appears to have been infested with a mold which makes it all go black and grim.

Oh, just remembered something else I’ve done. I scanned an article from the May 1982 edition of The Face. That’ll be appearing on a site near you later in the week.

To the bathroom, slacker…

Vic and I went to Taunton for the weekend, to attend Vic’s friend Lisa’s 30th birthday party. That all went well, despite the weather being occasionally grim. We had a good time, with a nice walk on Saturday afternon to the local pub, the Hatch Inn in Hatch Beauchamp. The pub stayed open on Saturday afternoon because there were so many people from the party there.
Two of the guests at the party were Nigel Skinner and Heather Green . Nigel is a painter, Heather is a sculptor, and examples of their work can be found on their website.