Writing ... or Just Practicing?

I reckon that, last week, I broke a World record. I managed to cycle through 38 TV channels in turn that were all showing commercials. OK, so I was in a hotel in the U.S. and maybe that's to be expected. And some of the commercials are more interesting than the programs. Of course, it's probably the same here in England now that we have "digital choice", but I just don't notice 'cos we let Media Center record anything we want to watch and then skip over the commercials. Mind you, we need some serious practice to make commercials that are as blatantly misleading as those I've been watching. Read More...

I watched a program on TV the other night about how your body clock works. It seems that when you are young, your body clock is "offset late" so you are useless in the mornings and tend to be a bit of a night owl. I guess this is useful so you can go to those all-night parties and clubs. When you get old your body clock is "offset early", so you have to go to bed at 6:30 PM and get up in time to watch breakfast TV and those weird quiz shows that nobody has heard of. I suppose this means that there are only a couple of weeks around the age of 35 when your life is actually aligned with the world around you. That's going to be my excuse in future, anyway. Read More...

I suspect that there is a crisis at our local council offices at the moment. They've obviously run out of things to waste taxpayer's money on, so they decided to publish a ten page full-color pamphlet containing really useful information about our local community. On page three, it says that - in case we hadn't noticed - work is underway on the open-cast coal mine just across the fields from where I live. Really? I would never have guessed that the brand new railway, dozens of huge trucks, and a hole half a mile wide and a hundred feet deep were connected with that. Read More...

I'm starting to worry that I can’t cope with the frantic releases of operating system versions. I just got settled with a couple of Vista machines and, more recently, two Server 2008 boxes, and now I'm being pushed to "dogfood" Windows 7. I wonder if I should install it on the machine I use for all my important work, or on the laptop I depend on when travelling. I know I tend to be somewhat conservative in terms of upgrading to the latest cool software, but neither of these options seems like a really good idea with a beta operating system. Read More...