foreverblueskies.com

OK folks, quiz time.

Becky’s just gone and bought something and I’ll give you a clue… it’s green.

Uncategorized

I got tagged by Annie a couple of posts ago, so here’s the crack…

Take your Birthday in the format DD Month and look it up in Wikipedia. Then post 3 events, 2 birthdays, 1 death and 1 holiday.

Here goes…

3 Events

1752 – The British Empire adopts the Gregorian calendar, skipping eleven days (the previous day was September 2).

A fitting selection as this is a chronological entry and I’m a Brit. Plus where did those eleven days go? Did people miss a birthday that year?

1814 – Francis Scott Key writes The Star-Spangled Banner.

A little tribute to my American friends

1959 – The Soviet probe Luna 2 crashes onto the Moon, becoming the first man-made object to reach it.

Now that’s just cool. Nothing crafted by the hand of man had touched that place before. Neat. And Kruschev had the cheek to commerate the landing by giving a gift to Eisenhower. LOL

2 Births

1849 – Ivan Pavlov, Russian scientist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (d. 1936)

Best known for his experiments in conditioning… remember Pavlov’s dog?

1910 – Jack Hawkins, British actor (d. 1973)

As a child raised on War films I remember him well for his part in the film The Cruel Sea.

1 Death

1982 – Princess Grace of Monaco, American actress (b. 1929)

I didn’t know that and I didn’t remember it either, I was probably more interested in playing D&D at the time…

1 Holiday

In ancient Greece, the first day of the Eleusinian Mysteries, during which the sacred objects were brought from Eleusis to Athens.

Being of no fixed belief I sided with the polytheist ancients on this selection.

Now if you wanna have a go just do it and I shall be picking on some unsuspecting souls in a short while… OK… My BBFK is first on the list, followed by Mummy/Crit and er… I know, Brom man. Oh sod it, I’ll pick on Rebekah too.

Uncategorized

Although I’m employed in the web industry I’ve always said the Internet is the biggest waste of time ever… social book-marking, blogging, youtube, myspace, blah blah blah.

And, despite being a self-confessed nerd and my girlfriend being the good Dr BBFK PhD, you come across stuff like this in the world…

Scientists perfect Bacon Butty

Which starts with these opening paragraphs…

“Scientists have created a mathematical formula of how to make the perfect bacon butty.

Experts at Leeds University discovered the secret to the ideal sandwich lay in how crispy and crunchy rashers were.”

Scientists? Experts? What a waste of braincells…

“Four researchers at the Department of Food Science spent more than 1,000 hours testing 700 variations on the traditional bacon sandwich.”

Cure for Cancer? Eradicate Aids? Fight Malaria? No, they dream up a formula for the “perfect” bacon sandwich. What use is that in the world?

Get a life you tossers!

Uncategorized

…not to work out of this office when I used to work remotely for 4 years!

1. Want to start working at 8am ‘cos you’ve got a flash of inspiration? Well, that’s tough, ‘cos you have to start at 9am, so you’d better start getting ready now
2. I have to religiously and securely pack up and move my:
1. Laptop
2. Power pack
3. Mouse
4. PDA
3. It takes 40 minutes to drive 5 miles.
4. Sometimes it takes an hour to drive 5 miles.
5. That drive, obviously, pisses me off and it’s no good coming into work pissed off because you got stuck behind a
   1. Crap cyclist
   2. Learner Driver
   3. Dust Cart
   4. Doddering Old Age Pensioner
   5. Nobody in particular

6. Having to drop littl’un off at school I don’t start work until, on average, quarter past 9 each day. I enjoy taking her in to school, but having to do the 5 mile “commute” afterwards is just a suck.
7. Having a 40 minutes lunch in my contract means that the 20 minutes I lose every morning leaves me with a 20-minute lunch, sometimes a 10 minute lunch, sometimes no lunch at all.
8. What a complete waste of time it is sitting in traffic for 40 minutes. If it weren’t the morning rush hour, it would be a 10-minute drive!
9. What a complete waste of fuel. And money.
10. Driving when you don’t have to is a completely unenvironmentally friendly thing to have to do.
11. Once I get to the office I have to unpack and plug in all the stuff from 2)
12. My chair sucks. It’s one of those “subordinate worker’s chairs” where at home I have a swivelling, armed, high-backed reclining “I am comfortable all day ” chair.
13. In the office, there is very little natural light from a tiny window.
14. I don’t get to sit anywhere near that window, the one source of light.
15. The office is small, claustrophobic, boring, has magnolia walls, no plants, no pictures, (not even those motivational posters) and it smells a bit musty.
16. Got itchy feet? Got an idea? Need to pace about? Not in here, you don’t, it’s far too bloody small, and the rest of the building is boring and there’s no place to go and socialise with the other drones.
17. I have to share the bathroom here with people who have worse toilet manners than myself.
18. There is a computer in this office that was bought and set-up for me and yet I hardly ever use it, except for email and a bit of surfing.
19. If the justification of me being in the office is that my company bought me an expensive computer then that’s complete waste of time too.
20. This is an IT company on an Industrial estate and the pollution in the air around here is not what you’d expect from working with computers everyday – the waft of diesel from the industrial estate and aviation fuel drifting down the breeze from the nearby airfield.
21. Health & Safety regulations state that because I work with a Visual Display Unit (3 of them in fact) I am required to take 5 minutes away from the screen every hour. Being a web designer stuck on a boring industrial estate there’s really not that much to do other than stay locked onto that screen…
22. I can do exactly the same job from home only more efficiently, more productively, with more motivation, I spend less money, I waste less fuel, I pollute less.
23. I join the rat race in their drive home at 5:30pm and it takes another 30 minutes to drive the 5 miles home… By which time I have driven a daily total of 10 miles (a 20 minute total journey in non rush hour) and wasted between 1hr 10 minutes and 1hr 30 mins.

On the other hand…

1. I do only do 8 hour days because I’m so desperate to get out of here… no more 10,12, 16 and 20 hour days like I used to do under my own steam.
2. I’m a five minute walk from the fantastic Farnborough town Centre [sic]
3. I’m a minute walk from my local friendly MOT centre, where I took the Flying Brick in today. I do that once a year, so that’s a massive advantage.
4. There are people in these offices I talk to occasionally…
5. I took a cool picture from here once…

Uncategorized

Becky, my clutzy Yankee doodle girlfriend, just skied down the stairs in her slippers which flipped off her feet and ended up on the hall table. Had she ended up in a pile at the foot of the stairs, like she did a couple of months ago, things might not have been so funny

Strangely enough, and some years ago now, an old friend, drunk and hosting a party at his house, donned his skis and skied down his staircase. After being picked up off the floor at the bottom of the staircase he was carted away to hospital only to return with his leg in plaster

Which all leads nicely onto this…

“Man Skis Down Escalator at Angel Tube Station, London”

Apparently the cops were not amused either.

Uncategorized

I was so busy getting littl’un out the door this morning, digging in my pockets to find enough change for her school dinners and ushering her out the front door and into the car to get to school on time, that I completely forgot my own dinner money.

I have a 20 pence coin and a bass pick in my pocket… not quite enough legal tender there to liberate the 11 o’clock snack wagon of a salami roll, let alone a packet of crisps!

So a quick bit of IM’ing on Skype and BBFK and before you can say “Robert’s your auntie’s live-in lover” there was a hand-delivered package of hot bacon salad rolls, a blueberry yogurt, a “toffee temptation” dessert and some fruit

Now that’s what I call a top bird. Thanks darlin’

Uncategorized

So Becky says, about an hour before she’s due to go out…

“I’ve been invited to a party tonight. Guess who by?”

I guessed straight away. And then I asked “Ann Summers party?”

“Yeah!” said Becky “How did you know?”

Well, what sort of party does a mother in this town go to at short notice on a Tuesday night?

I laughed and made quips about sex toys and the like. Becky shot me this look… So I let out one more belly laugh and responded

“No, it’s like a Tupper party, you know… kitchenware and all that. So please, no more containers, we’ve got too many already. We do need a garlic press and a serving spoon though.”

I dropped her off with a 20 quid note in her hand… I wonder what she’ll come back with? LOL

Uncategorized

…an innocent quote from my American Mrs about French food…

You see, we were in the city of Chelmsford in Essex the other day. It’s about 100 miles away from Farnborough; up the M3 and ’round the M25, through the Dartford Tunnel and along the A12.

We went for two reasons:

1) It was a rainy Saturday so I offered to take Becky shopping there and
2) It was my old home town for 7 years, or most of my childhood.

Actually, the excuse to reminisce was reason number 1 therefore an entirely selfish decision, but she fell for the lure of shopping so I got some brownie points for that.

So we took a quick tour to see the houses where I used to live, the places where I used to go to school, the barber shop on Springfield Road, the newsagent’s no more, the pubs now restaurants, seeing what has changed and how much.

Then we went shopping. Chelmsford city centre is still very much the same with the 500 year old Cathedral not far from the 1970s Market, great Victorian buildings amongst crap ’60s concrete. And yet some old names are long gone… no more Co-Op, no more Bolingbroke & Wenley, no more toyshop selling blister pack Citadel miniatures…

But they have completely pedestrianised the High Street where cars and buses once choked the old streets. There was a merry-go-round, a stall selling local sausages and a Frenchman making fresh crépes filled with maltesers, crépes with chocolate & banana, crépes avec sucre et citron… and this is where Becky’s America meets France in England grasp of multi-culturalism excelled, she said…

“I’d love to have a crépe on the sidewalk in Paris”

I’m sure you would dear, I’m sure you would…

Uncategorized

…Is “very likely” to have been caused by humans…

…says the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in the second-hand news I have once again extracted from the BBC this week.

No, you don’t say…!?! And all along I thought it was the fucking squirrels…

If I’d paid more attention at school then I’d be able to make such profound, astounding & astute observations too…

*shakes head*

Uncategorized

I just laughed my arse off at Bill Gates on the BBC website today in the story entitled “Microsoft starts Vista hard sell“

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, speaking at the global launch of Vista at the British Library in London, said: “We have worked hard to build a new software platform.”

Yes, I’m sure you have, Bill, just in the same way that President Bush & his regime worked hard to bring Democracy to Iraq. But I digress…

This is the real gem…

“We are so excited to see what people are going to do with it.”

Yeah, Bill, check this out…

ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING

Hahahaha.

Look, mate, it’s just another bloody Microsoft Obfuscating System and I’ll only buy it if I absolutely bloody well have to, but seeing as XP aint broke I aint gonna fix it. Besides, I quite fancy a Gnome or KDE for my unix desktop, maybe even one of them Mac things…

Anyway Bill, you’re already the world’s richest man, so why bother trying to flog 4 home versions? You’ll only confuse people and make yourself even richer…

Me? Bitter? Twisted? Yes, yes and Yes!

Uncategorized