Author Archives: Alan

A day of small but varied occurences today…

• Thanks to my research and Cat’s slender fingers the MX-5 can now happily play music from a wired-in iPod and stream via bluetooth (and do hands free).  Very trouble free aside from the fiddly small space in which to fit the plugs in.  I do miss the awesome functionality of the stereo from ‘the nail’, but I didn’t want to rip out the factory stereo.
• New entertainment options in place, a trip to the O2 shop in Beeston saw me acquire an adaptor to convert my iPhone’s microsim to a normal sized sim card.  Cat had posted my iPhone to the insurance company in the morning, so I bought the cheapest pay as you go phone they stock – a £12 Samsung GT-E108oi.  Wow, it’s basic!
• Some observations about this dramatically backward step in mobile telephony:
• It doesn’t have predictive text – making writing text messages a real chore, and quite frustrating for anyone in my proximity due to the clicky horrible buttons
• It doesn’t have any internet or email functionality. None. It certainly doesn’t have apps like Tapatalk or Forumrunner (or Facebook or Twitter)
• I couldn’t import any contacts into it from my backups – so I had to type them in, with the horrible clunky buttons.  I hadn’t missed that process.
• It’s tiny!
• It doesn’t play any music or multimedia, has no camera.  It only has one game on it.
• The battery lasts for ages.
• I can’t wait to not have to use it any more!!
• People were right when they suggested that I perhaps had a warped opinion of how important an iPhone is to life and living life – clearly I had under-estimated the pivotal nature of this magical device!!!
• I’ve been harrassed by a Welsh gardener who seemed to really want to cut down our Leyandii for £90.  So much so he sent a minion to ask Cat after I’d said no, and I bumped into him again in the local Sainsbury’s where me mentioned it again!

Look, I admire your entrepreneurial spirit, but begone – confounded Welshman!  Never darken my lawns again!

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…