Author Archives: Alan

I had one of those ‘random things from school popping into my head’ moments again today. Being firmly of the Google generation I duly searched for it, partly to see if it is something I imagined – to validate my strange mind, and of course to see if anybody else out in Internet Land had remembered more of it than me.

We’re back at Primary school time, so mid-to-late 80’s, and it was one of those strange music-book-story type things.  I seem to recall it being about a catalogue in which you could order pretty much anything you could possibly want.  Pretty much the only thing I could recall in any detail were the words (and tune) to part of a song: “It’s easy as falling off a log, when you order from the giant ginormous catalogue.”

All Google really unearthed were a couple random Facebook groups such as this one and this one.  Given the myriad of randomly and wonderfully obscure information on the Internet I can’t believe there’s nothing more than that.  Can anyone remember any more? I’m wondering if any Google hits that find this page might reunite me with somebody who can remember what the hell I’m talking about in more detail.

While I’ve been pondering this I can remember another musical type thing that we endured at school.  It involved some kind of song-writing competition in which there was a hero and a villain – the villain realised he wasn’t very talented so arranged to copy the hero’s song to cheat and win.  The hero gets wind of this, and creates a dirgey tuneless song to trick him – whilst of course secretly having a real song in reserve.

The only real detail I can remember are the lyrics to the ‘fake’ song, although I may have some details wrong… it goes something like this: “The blackbird sings a tuneful song, with turns and trills so fine, such skill has he, such majesty, but it’s not as good as mine. La la la la la, La la la la la, no it’s not as good as mine.”

The only potential reference Google could find for this was this Tweet. One solitary Tweet.  On the whole Internet – and hardly conclusively about the song I’m thinking about.  After all, the blackbird does sing a tuneful song.

Does anybody else retain these meaningless trinkets of memory to the extent I do?  I often think when I’m at work struggling to remember what I was working on a few weeks ago when somebody has a follow-up query that if I could somehow empty my cache of these silly recollections it might give me a more efficient mind.

It would be a shame to lose silly recollections though, wouldn’t it?  I think on reflection even if that was an option I would keep them.  I would love to hear from anybody who stumbles upon this post through searching for either of the song lyric fragments above, though!

For a fair while now we’ve been using a Cisco Linksys WRT160N router – a fairly bog standard wireless router that connects to our Cable connection and spreads out the interweb via both ethernet ports and of course wirelessly.  You can probably get them dirt cheap now, although when I bought it it was reasonably new and shiny!

I’m not right sure whether or not it has always done it, or whether it’s a recent phenomena now we have more-things-than-ever hooked up to it by hook or crook (at last count two phones, three laptops, one desktop, one Wii, one XBox 360, one PS3, one Blu-ray player, one Television and one NAT.  I think that’s it.  Rarely all at the same time too, I might add!

Anyway, for whatever reason the router required rebooting to restore connectivity.  It seemed to have topped out at twice a day this occurred – annoying when you may be downloading a big torrent or hoping to use AudioGalaxy to access your music library when at work or out and about, I’m sure you’ll agree!

I investigated new official firmware releases – I was already up to date, and eventually happened upon this alternative firmware (having done something similar with the NAT which was playing up before).  Not only has this added all manner of geekish functionality that I don’t fully understand, more importantly it has delivered a much more stable router that has been up for nearly three days and counting…

So, if you’re having difficulty with  your router I can recommend DD-WRT if you’re feeling suitably confident in fiddling around with things at a fairly fundamental level.  It’s a shame the router doesn’t have more space to install a few more things on it – but never mind!  At least the internet connection in the house stays up now!

Not the most illuminating or fascinating of stories – the main reason for writing it was because I only pieced together the solution from numerous different sources, so should someone else out there with the same router as me be suffering the same fate, they may well – thanks to Google – stumble across this solution!

The only teeny issue is that since the change an amber warning light is now illuminated on the router, but this is down to the rogue firmware not quite properly talking to the hardware on this small instance.  It’s a small price to pay!

Unfortunately you can’t, with any good conscience, review a Derren Brown show as such – because it’s packed full of things I could spoil by doing so, which would be rather unfair to performer and readers as-yet-to-see-the-show alike.  Not that my site gets that much traffic, but well, you know what I mean.

Rich and Em kindly bought Cat and I tickets for Derren’s ‘Svengali’ tour this weekend at Liverpool.  Unfortunately Cat was poorly, so sensibly opted to stay at home whilst the rest of us set off early in the morning due to some diversions – because Rich and Em had to meet up with their wedding venue, which is kinda en route, we found ourselves with a whole day to kill before the gig.

We decided to visit The Monkey Forest near Stoke, which was ace – it’s quite easy to describe really, a woodland enclosure full of monkeys.  Barbary Macaques to be precise, and they were great fun – watching the baby monkeys playing in particular was hilarious.  I don’t think it that you could make a full day out at the place, but £7 for an hour or two’s monkey magic is well worth it.

Onward we headed to the North West and went to Ikea to get some tealight holders for the impending wedding, and took the chance of course to grab some meatballs – nom!  On the trip we managed to offer Cat’s ticket to Mark, who lives in Manchester, so we arranged to meet him in Liverpool in time to watch England stroll past Wales.

So we watched the match in the Walkabout in Scouseville on one of the best definition big screens I’ve ever seen.  To say it was a walk in the park for England is an understatement – game over after 15 minutes or so, and barely a sweat broken.  Despite not really being into international football to any great degree it’s nice to watch on occasion.

For some reason Torres doesn't seem popular!

After further mooching around – a Subway, a quick drink in a really dodgy pub near the theatre (that stank of piss, and was tastelessly bedecked in Liverpool FC memorabilia – I suppose that’s an occupational hazard in Liverpool itself though!) it was time to take to the theatre itself.

The show was at once excellent, enthralling, stimulating and entertaining – I won’t spoil any content, but Derren Brown never disappoints.  I think, on balance, I liked his last show Enigma better – but this was plenty beguiling and confounding enough.  And a little sinister.  Also hilarious, because Mark was singled out quite early in the show and as a result revealed an ingenius story about himself (after being warned about surreptitious camera use and threatened with being asked to leave!)

I didn’t manage to grab a frisbee, again – indeed, only one came up to the circle where we were sitting.  Never mind!  It was still tremendous show, and well worth missing out on more direct involvement because of Mark’s revelations – which admittedly was trumped somewhat later, all I can say about that is ‘Hammer Time!’

Then it was for poor Rich to finish off a very long day with a nightime drive back to Nottingham.  All in all, a long but thoroughly entertaining day.  Not looking forward to being back at work in the morning…!

After my last couple of celeb and action-fuelled blog posts there’s not much of excitement to follow them up really – aside from the annual work Christmas fancy dress party that took place last week.  As ever, the team threw themselves into their ideas and some of the costumes were frankly stunning.  Lots of photos on Facebook to showcase this!

Myself and Matt bedecked ourselves in zebra-print suits and hats and home-made beards along with expertly-crafted-by-Matt furry guitars and finished off with a pair of sunglasses apiece to strut our stuff as Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill of ZZ Top fame.  Whilst at the time of donning them we were feeling rather smug at our excellence in fancy dressing, I must say that I would suggest we were trumped by a number of our colleagues’ efforts!

A jolly fun evening was had by all – very little by way of drama, and t’was preceded by an afternoon of ten-pin bowling action for the newly purchased ‘department champion’ trophy – to say I can recall going bowling for about 14 odd years I was quite pleased with getting through to the final, where I was defeated by our inaugural team champion Neil – with an impressive score, albeit perhaps more applicable to darts, of 180.

Of course, where there’s a Christmas party, sure as eggs is eggs there’s a Christmas Day to follow – I’ve prepared pretty well this year so I’ve been sorted for gifts for some time.  Which leaves the weather as the only real talking point.  I don’t like to be held back by nature so haven’t really let the smattering of snow we’ve endured prevent me getting to where I need to be.

Unfortunately the football world seems to have succumbed to over-reaction as does the rest of the nation – so Forest have already had two games called off, mercifully last weekends game vs Palace went ahead and saw the Reds stroll to an easy win.  Whether our Boxing Day trip to Middlesbrough (which I wasn’t planning on attending) goes ahead remains to be seen..

So yeah, aside from that – seasons greetings and all that guff… to be honest, I’m slightly more looking forward to Forest’s reacquaintance with local rivals Derby County on the 29th…

It’s been fairly eventful of late – since I last wrote about didgeridooing I’ve also taken part in a charity footy match which was great fun, and gave me a chance to play alongside my boyhood hero – Steve Hodge.  My mate Neil at the BBC did the legwork in organising the event, venue and some celebrity players and asked me to rustle up a team from Boots to face them.  It was a great evening.

There were blushes for yours truly though – early in the game Hodgey went down like a cheap whore in the penalty area and the referee awarded a spot kick.  Lurking at centreback he shouted back “Skipper! You have it…” at me.  Gulp.  I duly listened to my team-mates shouting “Smash it!” behind me and did just that… against the crossbar – d’oh!

The game ultimately ended 5-5, thanks to a controversial last minute penalty where Pudsey Bear took a tumble in the penalty area giving the BBC a penalty to finish the game off and share the spoils.  I really enjoyable day – not least thanks to the ex pros Steve Hodge, Lawrie Dudfield, Michael Johnson and Nigel ‘the elbows’ Jemson.  Not to mention our managers Kenny Burns and Steve Sutton.

Following that up for Children in Need itself our team at work actually threw themselves into the event much more so than in the past (thanks largely to Kate) and raised a fair chunk of cash with a couple of stalls at our head office.  The usual all night stint in the call centre gave me my annual dose of feeling great about humanity and meant it didn’t feel too bad about the early start the day after to travel to Cardiff to see Forest actually win away!

However, more eventful potentially is today’s shenanigans – Jimmy and I hotfooted it to Birmingham this morning to audition for Total Wipeout and made it through all the stages today so are both eagerly awaiting contact from the production company organising it, in less happy news Matt – who was on the afternoon audition session – didn’t get through, so then there were two.  Gutted for him.

Within a couple of weeks we should find out whether or not we’ve made the final final shortlist – from which they’ll select the 160 lucky people to take part in the show being filmed in January and February.  To say that it’s potentially unfeasibly exciting is understating it – it would be awesome!

Aside from Matt’s unlucky news, the day was further marred by arriving home to find we had a dead dove in the garden.  Perched on one of the seed feeders that Cat keeps well stocked for our garden-based feathered friends, the cold weather had obviously proven too much for it to cope with.  So a quick bit of digging and it was at least laid to rest with some degree of dignity.  Poor bugger.

To end on a happier note: BRING ON THOSE BIG RED BALLS!!!