Best £30 I ever spent

That was the price of the ticket for tonight’s Faithless gig. A paltry £30. Well, £29 actually. And I bought it over t’internet at practically the last minute.

I am so glad that I did. Thanks to the new Windows Live Messenger. It integrates Facebook and stuff into MSN. I was sitting working at the computer on Monday and it popped up with all the latest stuff it thought I’d be interested in. And I was. Want to see photos of the latest Faithless gig, it said. I did; indeed I did! Oh, and do you want to know where they are playing next? That would be helpful.

Well, only bloody Manchester! And on Saturday. Count me in.

The support act was Example. Meh! Good for a warm up; he got people in the right mood. But as support acts go, not as good as Goldfrapp (supported Duran Duran) but better than Orson (can’t remember who they supported).

I was looking forward to Faithless with a slight menace of trepidation. I was thinking that they were going to be amazing; but what if I was disappointed?

I was not. They were truly brilliant. And then some. Salva Mea was my favourite. It was arranged like I’d not heard it before. Cherie and I boogied all the way through.

Thanks for a terrific night. I think that could be the single best gig I’ve ever been to. And I’ve been to a few.

Genius.

The rain in Spain

On holiday. Again.

Spain this time; Majorca actually.

And it's raining. Proper pouring down. And a bit cold.

Going to make a fancy Mexican feast this evening. We bought some yellow and red coloured chilli peppers from a road side vendor. I tried one and it blew my head off!


- Posted from my iPhone

Location:Av de Caló Petit,Felanitx,Spain

Hair cut

Sitting waiting for a haircut. In a good mood. Yay!

Got to mow the lawn today. Want to like a hole in the head.

Attacked by a huge spider this morning. It had teeth and it sat there snarling at me from a pair of shorts that I'd brought in from the washing line.

Luckily, I chucked it out of an open window.

This morning, we had fun imaging how ridiculous a bishop race would be. They have to run in full regalia. Maybe even jump fences like the grand national. Bishop racing, it's the future.

- Posted from my iPhone

Location:St Peter St,Darwen,United Kingdom

Back in the UK

You know what it's like. You arrive back at stupid o'clock. Go to sleep. Wake and try to unpack. Find a toothbrush amongst heaps of toiletries and clean your teeth. Go to work. Come home. Think about the futility of existance. Wish you were still in the sun. Go to sleep.

The cycle continues.

It's Thursday now. Where did this week go. I'm already looking forward to the next holiday.

Which, incidentally, is in two weeks! In Majorca!

Woot!!

Barcelona, Birds and Birthdays

Barcelona. What a bleedin nightmare. It was hard work and really stressful. The stress started on the night before when we planned the route. We decided to go the quick way which would shave about an hour from the journey time but take us through a gorge.

This bothered Cherie’s mum. A lot.

As it happened, the gorge was really beautiful and must have been a huge and dangerous endeavour to construct the road.

We got to Barcelona and it took an awful lot longer than anticipated. Plus we were late setting off. Once there, we could not park. Cherie was navigator and had thus far done a terrific job as usual. The top box was still on the car and every car park had limited height clearance. Cherie became so stressed that her lefts and rights became ups and arounds and eventually she was so upset she could not function.

We ended up having to stop temporarily, dump the people and bags, remove the top box, shove it in the car and use an underground car park.

We viewed the unfinished Gaudi Cathedral and set off to visit the Gaudi park. After 30 minutes of walking (luckily it was not too hot) we had only covered about a quarter of the route and so we decided to head back and have some food. On the way to the restaurant it rained heavily. We ate and the food was good.

Driving home, we avoided the gorge in the dark. A silent lightening storm lit the sky spectacularly and continued for hours.

When home, we were greeted by a tiny bird fluttering around the inside of the fireplace. We opened the glass door and tried to catch it. It eventually flew off into the night after managing to cause chaos and break a couple of glasses and cups.

It's William's birthday this weekend. He wants to go to a water park. You know, slides and queues. The nearest one is in Perpignan.
 
More driving then.

Arrivals and Departures

Good and bad today. Gran and Charlotte are here but Amelia has left us.

Amelia decided with a flourish of tears that she needed to go back to her mum in Provence. This caused all kinds of problems and changes of plan. It made me very sad that she felt that she couldn’t stay.

We agreed with her mum and her friend Phil that we would both come half way and meet in the middle at the station in Montpellier at ten.

We had to be up at 6:30 and on the road by 7. We arrived in plenty of time and Amelia went with her mum and Phil.

Our thoughts then turned to Gran and Charlotte who were flying in to Carcassonne for 11:55am. We were back on the road by 10:30 with an estimated arrival time at the airport of 12:30.

We made great time on the way back, leaving the motorway at the Carcassonne exit at 12:10. Whilst navigating the city on the way to the airport, the phone rang – they had arrived a little early.

We picked them up and went shopping in the Geant at Carcassonne. We had no bags, so the car and roof box were filled with groceries.

We were home by 3pm.

It’s now 6pm and we’ve been out in the sun for the remainder of the day. It is a hot one. We’re having chicken for tea. Yum.

Holiday! Yay!

It’s now 10am Sunday morning.

We arrived in Bugarach yesterday at about 6:30pm. It’s beautiful. I’ll be posting pictures.

The little village is nestled amongst green velvety mountains at the bottom of a huge outcrop of rock called the “Pic”. It took us absolutely ages to get here on a single track road winding through Stella Artois villages.

The fete is on and the tiny town is buzzing with people in high spirits. I was rugby tackled on the way from the house back to the car whilst unloading. The guy came back later and invited us all to go for an aperitif with the locals.

There are only a few streets; maybe three or four. The town square is a stone’s throw from the front door (no, literally – about 20 metres). The locals use the ludicrously narrow walled corridor at the front as the main street. They passed the kitchen window in droves as we prepared our evening meal.

We had had to park the car some way from the house due to the busy street. We then laboriously transported the luggage and supplies up the steep hill from the main road up to the town.

We needed to find the house owner’s friends; they found us going through our paperwork and looking lost. Our brains were totally jangled after the journey. I was spaced out and Cherie seemed a bit panicky. They introduced themselves, and we introduced the adults in the party. Cherie said, “These are the children. They don’t have names. They might have in an hour.”

The house affords inspiring vistas of the mountains. I am sitting on our spacious bedroom balcony looking out over the hills whilst I write this, with the cloud shrouded Pic looming mysteriously to my left.

With a cup of coffee of course.

The weather is not great. It is quite cold and very cloudy. I think it must have rained during the night as the outdoor furniture is sprinkled ominously. I hope it will improve today.

We slept surprisingly well last night and were awoken at about eight by the sound of a cockerel or two. William and I used binoculars to see if we could see the wild boar we’d been told about whilst we had breakfast. (Lion bar cereal – it’s the future).

The fete was in full swing last night. A band was started up just after we’d dragged our sleepy selves to bed. The volume on their instruments went up to 11 ;-). Usually, I would have been pacing around the bedroom shaking my fist and shouting, “Shut up, you bloody blooders!”. But I did not. The quality of the music was top class. I was really impressed. They did “Love Shack” live far better than the B52s! The female lead singer had such a terrific voice. Their numbers were mostly English songs with a few American ones and the odd Euro trash that I’d never heard of. They even did a number by Chumbawumba, one of the local bands from where we’re from in the UK. In fact, we’ve been to see Chumbawumba this year performing the music and comedy lyrics for a play about the industrial revolution.

One thing, we have no internet. We have a mobile phone signal but only GPRS data – which is pants. So I can’t post this blog until I reach civilisation.

I’m hopeful about the weather. The clouds are thinning, the sky is getting blue and who knows, the sun might make an appearance.

Sunny, with a chance of grins

Stretches arms and yawns leisurely.

Imagine me doing that. The yawning and stretching. But imagine it happening somewhere sunny and hot with the pleasant relaxing sounds of wittle birdies tweeting their happy songs of blissful summer. Got the image? Hold it in your mind's eye for a moment and drink in the fresh air and feel the hot glow of the sun on your face.

Ok. Now forget all that and return to reality. Because even though we're here in the south of France it's cold and windy. WTF I hear you cry! Cos I did! Maybe its just early, but it pretty chilly and the mistral is blowing stuff all around.

I'm sitting here at the table in the garden of the lovely grande maison in Lapalud, near Orange. The sounds of the water lapping in the swimming pool have a calming effect boosted by the whisper of the breeze in the trees.

Amelia and William are up early, it's about 8:05. Cherie is kind of up but doing her best not to be. When I asked her if she'd had a good sleep, she replied, "Still having it."

Music to my ears! Amelia has just asked me if I'd like a coffee. Does the pope shit in the woods? Wait, I think I mixed a metaphor.

I'm just feeling a bit negative. We have a lot to do, little time and its not as sunny as I expected; but it's the first proper day dans la sud de la France and I'm with my kids who I have not seen for weeks.

Lovin it.

Arrived 24 hours early

Wow. What a journey. Simples said the ad. The travelling was so quick we cancelled the hotel room in Dijon and sailed on down to William and Amelia's house in Provence.

Terriffic. We arrived at 19:20.

The worst part was trying to cancel the hotel room. The phone would not get through, the mobile website refused to accept the booking and the staff at Accor Hotels were unhelpful.

We ended up having to contact Cherie's sister in Wales and get her to do it over the Internet from her computer. Rubbish!


- Posted from my iPhone

Location:Lapalud,France

Ferry terminal

Well, we arrived at the ferry terminal for our 9:20 sailing to Calais. Weather has been miserable. Filled the car again ready for France. Put the crappy plastic headlight converters on as per the instructions. They seem to have no effect to me. Still, at least we're legal.

Signing off!


- Posted from my iPhone

Location:Jubilee Way,Dover,United Kingdom

Holiday driving

Norton Canes. M6 toll road. Costa Coffee. Two americanos About time.

I like driving holidays. I really do. It's stressful, but the feeling of freedom is worth it.

We are going to Bugarach in the south of France. The long way via Provence to pick up Amelia and William.

Love it. We set of at one and the ferry is at 9:20 from Dover.

Keep you posted.


- Posted from my iPhone

Location:Cannock,United Kingdom

Walkies!

I've just tried a bit of a techno experiment. I took the dog for a walk and tried a bit of mobile blogging. It was fine, but I decided it would be better from an actual computer. I even tried a new iPhone dictation app with moderate success. But, here I am back at home, with a laptop on my, well, lap.

Not really that much to say really except to shout "holiday" overexcitedly. That's right, I'm off on my jolly 'olidays in 6 more getups. Yay!

Tomorrow I've got a couple of holiday related jobs to do with Nat. We're going to clean the car inside and out, put some air in the tyres, check the oil, put lots of fuel in and plan the packing. Nancy and Maya are coming up tomorrow and we'll be picking them up from Preston station.

Also, it's my mum's birthday. Happy birthday to you, ma! We're going to have a bit of a party in the evening.

Gareth is meant to be coming on Sunday. That'll be good; I'venot seen him in ages.

Time travel, fire and a broken bicycle.

Yeah. Odd title, isn't it.

But it kind of sums up my day. Well, the salient points anyway. The cream of the tomato soup that was the last 15 hours or so. Except for the bit about time travel. I didn't actually do any time travel today. If I could have done that, then I would have sorted out all the other things that happened today by shifting back a few hours and just trying again. Obviously whilst dodging my prior self to avoid any gnarly paradoxes.

No there was no time travel. But there was a film about time travel. It had been on TV over the weekend and I recorded it. It had that guy of off the IT Crowd. It was quite a good film. It was kind of like an old fashioned British farce but based around the problems caused by temporal paradoxes.

Anyway, I'll skim through the earlier parts of today. Got up. Ate stuff. Cycled to work (quite surprisingly sunny today). Worked on a modem dialling program so that it can call using multiple modems at the same time with each portion hosted in its own AppDomain using Windows telephony API at the application scope to give resource sharing. Debugged (failed to finish). Came home. Ate more stuff (really tasty stuff, thanks Cherie).

Glad that's out of my system. Now, onto the good stuff (*rubs hands together excitedly*).

Where to start? The broken bicycle. Yes, that's a good place to begin. I think you'll like this.

You know when you had that problem with that thing you bought? You know, that thing? You had to take it back. After you complained, it took them ages to sort it and then it was still wrong? You know the one. It always seems to happen to you, doesn't it?

Well, it doesn't just happen to you.

Oh no.

It happens to everyone. It's ubiquitous. The whole world seems to be populated with a subculture of a certain type of person who like to go to work to mess things up and make life harder for the rest of us. I could rant about my recent experience with BT. I won't. I'll save that particular shining jewel in the crown of British idiocy for another blog post. That shit pile deserves an epic. In fact, I think that one needs to be a video on YouTube. Only that way will you get the full effect of the rage in my head gradually building and turning my face redder until it looked like my brain might spontaneously erupt like Mount St. Helens.

Calm down, Ash. Breath deeply. Calm, calm. Think happy thoughts. Breath sloooowly. 1, 2, 3, 4; feeling calmer. Happy thoughts. Better.

Right, Halfords you b*stards. You're getting the brain drained all over you. Yep, and its all sloppy. Like brain custard. Yeah. See how you like it.

At the end of June, I bought Cherie a new bike so she could cycle to work. I already had a bike from Halfords, and its been great. It was a little pricey mind. Everyone said, "don't go to Halfords", and "Halfords bikes are crap. Get a proper one". But I didn't listen.

We saw an offer at Halfords on a ladies bike. It was only in stock at Preston. I booked it, turned up and ch-ching, it was mine. Well, Cherie's. This is Wednesday.

Cherie used it on Thursday and the left pedal and crank fell off. Ok, no problem. These things happen. We took it back. The guy had a bit of a giggle. Oh the pedal fell off! While she was riding it! I bet she looked a bit silly riding with one pedal. Ha ha ha. He he he.

Shut up and fix the bike. He did.

The bike was not used until the following week when, guess what, the pedal came off again. The bike went back. This time, they took it more seriously. It would be a while, they said, whilst they sent away for some new parts. We'd have to leave it with them.

We heard nothing for two weeks. Finally, they phoned us on Saturday. Yay! Bike is fixed! Happy days!

Monday. Pedal fell off. Again. Bike taken to shop. We wrapped it around the smug guy's head. Sorry, no we didn't. That must have been a dream.

You see, he said to us. "Blimey, this crank has had a lot of wear". We replied, "That's a new part you've just supposedly fitted". He said, "I've never heard of thread lock not working". We replied, "It's your lucky day then, you've seen it now". He said, "Don't worry, I know what the problem is. I can fix it". We replied, "You've had it for two weeks, why didn't you know how to fix it then?". Not happy.

Money back. Bish bosh. Off to a proper shop.

What? The fire? Oh yes, there was a fire. Thanks for reminding me.

I took the dog out for a walk and ended up in the middle of a scene from London's Burning. A brisk walk down to Foxhill Bank and, hang on, what's all this smoke. Yep, some kids (I reckon) had set fire to a fence or something. I stood and watched for a while with the locals who were standing at their front doors and pointing. The blues and twos showed up. It was pretty cool.

On the way back I bumped into my next door neighbour. Hi Pete! Turns out, he'd seen the smoke and had come for a nosey. We get talking. He says to me, "Still doing your blog, I love things like that". OMG, he reads my brain drain. He's probably reading this right now!

Brilliant! My blog's an iPhenom!

The case of the missing E111s

I've found our E111s. Eeek. They've been lost for years. Literally years.

We recently had to get some replacements, but I found the originals. As we're going on holiday soon, I have started to get one or two things ready. Today I printed out the travel documents which arrived electronically as a backup. But I needed to put them somewhere safe so I had a hunt around.

I tend to keep important travel documents together in a special wallet during the trip. Its handy because you can hide the lot away for security, yet all the documents are together and easy to find in a hurry. I have a few different ones; some big some smaller. I located one of these document wallets in an old drawer. It was still full of the stuff from our trip to St Aygulf in August 2008.

Memories came flooding back as I emptied the contents. I sat on the bed reminiscing. One of the pieces of paper was much stiffer and thicker than it should have been. I turned it over, and there stuck to the back were the missing E111 cards. They had some kind of gel like glue on them which had kept them attached to this piece of paper and hence hidden from sight when we had previously looked for them.

Mystery solved. But now we've got double the number of cards!

Today I managed to get my PIC circuit working. I made a little traffic light from a bunch of LEDs and a simple program. Sweet! I want to make a propeller clock. Need something to spin around first. I blew my 16F627 up with a faulty crystal oscillator circuit (I got my micros and picos mixed up) so now I am using a 16F84A.

Had a good day at work. We got a letter of thanks from a customer. It seldom happens, but when it does, it makes it all worthwhile. We also managed to bring a bunch of other things to a close (well, mostly). I cycled there and back today. That was hard work I have to say and this morning my gears started playing up. Need to sort that out tomorrow with a bit of magic lubricant.

Cherie is out with the Buddhists tonight. Have fun chanting.

Something odd happened today. Weird by my standards. It was certainly outside of the realm of what you would consider the normal, physical world. If you've got time, I'll tell you about it.

It's about a dream. A few years ago, I had a very vivid dream about going on holiday. I was driving in a car full of children with my wife. It was the outbound journey and we were generally very happy and excited about the trip. We were in the area of  South-Western France towards Spain. It was twilight.

We came across this huge bridge. When we were on it, it almost felt like we were flying over the clouds. It was somehow futuristic like a space bridge from the Jetsons. It was like nothing I'd seen before.

As I mentioned, we are off on our holidays soon. We will be staying near to Carcasonne in the south of France. This is, of course, in the south west, quite near Spain. I showed someone a map of the area at work today. He told me we will be near 'that bridge; you know, the longest one in the world'. I looked it up, and it's true. In Millau, there is a huge bridge. It's the longest in the world and it is very high above the surrounding countryside. There's even a photo on the internet of the bridge looming out of a sea clouds below it.

I used Google street view and looked at the road over the bridge. I can tell you, it is the one from my dream, the only difference is that we would only be driving over it on the way back, not the way there.

It was very strange. I'm looking forward to travelling over it now.

I'm off to bed then. It was good to talk to you. G'night.

Saturday

Had a hair cut. He's given me a 'dog whisperer'. My head looks like a fat Ceasar Milian. (Not sure if that's his name). Anyhoo, it's Sarurday. Went into the car park with the roof box on. Again! When will I learn.

Think we need to get some shopping today. So there next.

Weekends are awesome, and today we have nice weather too!

Gonna get them feet up. Might buy some electronic components today to make some home grown pic recipes.

Life is good. Fingers crossed it stays that way.

Hope you all have a great Saturday. Bye!


- Posted from my iPhone

Location:A674,Darwen,United Kingdom

Inception. Watch it!

Went to the movies last night to see Inception. As promised, here's a review. Sorry it's slightly delayed.

It's awesome. A truly great film. I have not seen such an original scifi in ages. But it is so much more. Psychological, artistic. Amazing zero G fight scenes. The trailers are good, but they really don't do it justice. Mesmerising. You can tell Nolan takes inspiration from Hitchcock; there are the longest suspense sequences you'll ever see!

Hang on... There's a floating spider. No really. It's getting closer. Not in the movie! God, pay attention! No, here, right now as I type this blog. I need to go get the little Hoover thing. I'm in the hot tub you see.

Got him.

Just having a quick dip whilst downloading an amine movie to watch later. Also, IT Crowd later. Series 4. So far, so not as good as series 3. Think it's getting stale.

Still, one or two classic Moss moments.

Another show I've unexpectedly found I like is BBC3's Mongrels. When I saw the adverts and trailers I thought, comedy puppets for adults, looks dross. It's not. It's really funny and it goes slightly further over the edge than other shows because the main characters are animals paralleling humans in controversial situations. It tackles subjects which are almost but not quite the same as things we would consider taboo. Making them dogs and pigeons means they can get away with it. Genius.

I've had a good day today. Worked bloody hard. From home. Omg how much more work did I get done than I would have had if I'd been in the office.

Managed to plan, prepare, document, respond to emails, deal with CRM issues, do expenses and do some remote debugging by proxy.

I would never have managed all that had I not had undisturbed peace and quiet.

And when work was over (4ish), I cleaned the hot tub, made tea and played Blur with Nat.

He he he. I'm just giggling. It sounds bubbly when you fart in the tub. He he he.

Well, I imagine my movie has downloaded by now. 'Ghost in the Shell'. Never seen it and it's meant to be good.

I'll just finish my wine and then go and watch it.

- Posted from my iPhone

Location:Orchard Dr,Accrington,United Kingdom

Brillsville

Today's been a great day. Super, smashing, great! Good news and good times!

Wanna share? Listen up...

Awake bright and early and completely headache free. A nice bit of brekkie including a warm, fresh Tesco croissant and a cuppa (usually already off to work by this time). Set off and arrived in plenty of time. Checked up on the stuff from that awful demo yesterday; confirmed that the PC was at fault. We managed to get it all working first time on another PC. Did some debugging (successfully). The team worked hard to take us a step closer to finishing our Silverlight database dashboard; I wrote a killer LINQ procedure which was cracking. We solved customer issues, training issues and site installation issues.

We were on fire!

But the really great news came in a text at about 11am. My wonderful wife had sent a text to inform me that her job which had been in the balance due to budget cuts was now safe and guaranteed for three years! Brilliant! We'd been a bit worried about that.

I bought some Reims champagne for her to take into work for everyone, but she wants to have it at home with me. I'm not arguing; it's Mumm.

So a terrific day. I'm really pleased!

She's hosting a Buddhist meeting downstairs right now, so I'm relegated to the bedroom with my PC until it's over. I think the central tenets of Buddhism are truly the way we should all live our lives, but I can't be doing with all the chanting. I'm a firm atheist and as Buddhism is more of a philosophy than a religion it fits in with my beliefs. The two complement each other; mostly. You do get the odd person who likes to believe in the more esoteric, spiritual and mystical aspects of a new or exotic religion, and this too makes me run a mile when there's a meeting due. However, most of the people I have met since Cherie has become a Buddhist have been honestly great folk. I am honoured they are under my roof tonight.

I like to show how honoured I am by buggering off into the bedroom by myself. That sounded sarcastic but I mean it. I just let them get on with it without going in and arguing with everyone.

So I'm going to wait now until they are all done. And then she can pop the cork and we'll have some bubbly.

A good day. Maybe there's something in this Buddhism.

Aren't demonstrations brilliant

No. No they are not. Not when they don't go as expected.

Let me tell you about the one that didn't go as expected today. In fact, it came right back and bit me on the ass. It was a demonstration to train others how to set up a web based system. There were two of us showing it to about 5 others. I had done the software and configuration and the other guy had sorted the IT infrastructure and hardware. We had tested all elements of it beforehand successfully. I sat back and watched the first part of the session and took over half way through.

Literally, the second half failed on the first click. Any application that I started crashed immediately. I got more and more red faced with each failure dialog box. What could be wrong? We gave up at about 4pm and I looked into the issue.

Hours later, at 7:15pm to be precise, I found that the problem was not with the software at all. It was the PC that we were running it on which had somehow developed a problem with the .Net 2.0 runtime. I located a patch from a Microsoft post for that exact specific error code. When I installed it, Windows refused to install it.

Ah, good times.

Time dilation effect

Is it still Monday? It seems like today has been some kind of temporal torture device. It just doesn’t end. But paradoxically, there’s also not enough time. I went to work this morning with a plan for all the things I was going to get done, and I managed to finish the day with more stuff to do than when I started. Go figure!

We didn’t end up going to the cinema tonight, primarily because my head still feels like there is a washing machine inside of it. At least I don’t feel like throwing up anymore. That little surprise crept up on me around about eleven o’clock this morning. I was going to leave work at midday to go home to hide my head in the folds of the duvet, but I stuck it out. I ended up debugging someone else’s flaky code (shouts “Junior!” and shakes fist like an angry stooge from a 1970s sitcom). The debugging went well I’m pleased to say (thanks, Tezza).

So rather than do the movie thing, I have been trying out C++ for a PIC. Yes, I know it’s sad. But this is what you have to do when you are managing a team of multi-skilled professionals. BTW, if you’re considering C++ for a PIC, I’d think again unless you have bags of code and memory space. The compiler eats bytes like I eat Tangfastics.

Mmmmm….Tangfastics….

It was fun though, once I figured out the slightly non-standard syntax. And my program worked first time once I got it to build, which is often the case with well structured C++.

Remember the word thing from yesterday? Making 'Blogger's Block' an 'iPhenom'? Well get a load of this! I've seen the term used on someone else's blog today. No, really! Yes, way! It won't be long now and we'll all be saying it. And you can blame me. Mwah ha-ha ha-ha!

Ouch. Note to self: doing an evil laugh with a headache makes you feel like you've been belted on the temple with a hammer. Must remember that for when I execute my plan for world domination. Or keep some pain killers close at hand.

Anyway, it's off to bed soon. I'll take some paracetamol first. That should take the brain pain down a few notches from the level of napalm attack on a Vietnamese jungle to that of a rather slow hamster running in a squeaky wheel.

The Boomtown Rats were right

I hate Mondays too. Especially when I have a headache; and its a killer one. I can't drain too much of my brain this morning, I'm afraid. It would hurt us both.

As I promised, I'm going to start the tour of the ashbrain today, but it'll have to be quick due to the banging agony. So its more of a brain drain pain.

And it's raining again. In summer! Sorry, not summer, the monsoon season. Enough moans, let's look on the bright side.

Cherie's back from London. Oh, did I not mention? Yes, my lovely wife was visiting her friend Nancy and her daughter Maya this weekend. She brought back a chameleon.

Like you do.

 I think we may go to the cinema tonight to watch Inception. I'll let you know my opinion tomorrow. On the subject of cinema, Nat and I saw Predators on Saturday. I think it rates a big fat 'Meh'.

Anyway, enough of my Monday morning moaning. We'll talk later when I'm smiling.

You have to start somewhere

OMG a blank page. First blog, what to write. Panic. Writer's block. Blogger's block. I think I've just invented a new term; 'Blogger's Block'. Do you think it'll catch on?

Well let's find out. Everyone who reads this has to use it at least twice a day in general conversation. No, three times, I'm indecisive. Pass it on as a meme; a zeitgeist. Who knows, it could become an internet phenomenon. An 'iPhenom'. See there goes another one! iPhenom. Kind of like an anagram of iPhone. With an extra letter. That's me, always thinking ;-)

Looking back over what I've just written, I don't suppose it's the best way to begin a new life of daily regular diary-like blog entries. But this is my brain drain and I suppose it does what it says on the tin. Yes, I know, my brain's a scary place at first and you probably need to get used to all the places you'll find there. Over the course of this blog, I intend to take you on a guided tour of all of the ashbrain's nooks and crannies; the winding paths and staircases that make up the complex landscape of my thoughts.

Today is Sunday and it's very peaceful. In fact, rather lazily, I'm still in bed. In my defence, I did get up, have breakfast, sort the dog, feed the cats and make an all important espresso. But it's such a miserable day (grey, overcast and likely to rain oppressively) that I thought I'd spurn physical reality and retreat into the virtual, electronic one which is building itself around us and entwining its networked roots of modems, firewalls, screens and keyboards through our daily lives to feed off the raw ones and zeroes of our digitised thoughts. See, that could be another iPhenom.

Hence this blog.

Yesterday, I did a lot. Today I plan not to. I do have to take Nat to his girlfriend's for 2pm. But nothing else. I might do some programming work on my new PIC experiment board which I finally got working yesterday. Yes, that's right! Between dodging patchy rain so that I could mow the lawn, shopping (left the roof box on the car and went into the muli-storey car park - again), paying bills, tidying up, researching programming tips & tricks, explaining to an eager teen what I understand about modern ideas of gravitation in super-symmetric, string theory based quantum and cosmological theoretical models, eating take-out, going to the movies and doing the washing I managed to find the fault on my circuit board, fix it, research the C libraries for that model of microprocessor and create a little firmware program that lights LEDs when you press little switches! Whoa! And you know what, now that I've written that, it does not sound anything like as awesome as it felt at the time. That might not end up being an iPhenom. But it seemed so at that time.

Anyway, I think I'd better stop wittering on now, I'm sure you've seen enough of the ashbrain for one day. But before I go, don't forget about the word thing. You know, mention 'Blogger's Block' at least twice, no three times, a day for the next week or so. And throw in 'iPhenom' too for larks. I'm getting all excited about the potential that sometime in the future there'll be someone on TV using these terms.

That would be awesome.