David’s Blog

Yes, it’s time for a ‘bitch about the weather’ post.

There’s been plenty of fog around lately, what with the cold weather and all. Most times it’s been a real pea-souper, and visibility has been bad. At times, the fog will clear for a while, but then it comes back with a vengeance.

On my commute to and from work, I pass over the top of the hills bordering our town, so I dip in and out of the fog, and weather in general on the journey. It’s not unusual to drive along the bottom of the hills in horrendously thick fog, to climb to the top of the hill and suddenly pop out into clear skies and brilliant sunshine.

This fog has been different though. The other night, I drove home and dipped in and out of fog in some wierd places. I was sitting in traffic, and observed that on one side of the road there was thick fog, whilst on the other - nothing! I drove around a roundabout at the end of the road which had fog billowing accross one side, and absolutely NOTHING on the other. It was like some sort of wierd smoke, with a life of it’s own. I’m expecting to get turned inside out if I come into contact with it. So far I’ve been OK though.

There’s supposed to be snow on the way. My Konfabulator weather widget tells me that on Thursday we can expect rain, on Friday, snow and on Saturday, rain again. That means roads full of dirty slush, and lots of black ice, or the roads will be turned into skating rinks all over. I think I might start driving a gritter lorry for a few weeks.

It would seem that the spammers have found a new method for spamming:

Yes, cartoon spam! The image is a link to a website presumeably selling some ‘wonder’ potion to help bulk you up. Most spam makes me wonder what sort of people actually ever click the links, seeing as most of it is a jumble of random words with a link in the middle somwhere, and they usually point to something very odd anyway. Its nothing new to have a large image in a spam email - they can be embedded, and a lot of spam filters don’t seem to flag them as well as others. Even so, this one still made me smile a bit.

I wandered into town today for something to do, and ended up slightly bemused as to how busy the town was. As I got further in, I realised it was the massive queues to the recently opened Santa’s Grotto. I was later told that Santa actually ‘arrived’ today, so it kind of explained the fact it was so busy.

Still, its only just over 4 weeks to Christmas!

If you hadn’t noticed, it’s getting colder lately, and I had to scrape ice off the car this morning. So there I was, scraping away quite happily. I’d gotten most the way around the car and started doing one of the rear windows. Unlike a lot of people, I actually do scrape everything - all windows, lights and mirrors. I heard of somebody who apprently scraped a tiny little circle to see out of, and drove away like that.

Anyway, back to the point. I was scraping away quite merrily, and noticed the scraper was looking a little mis-shapen. It’s one of those Scraper/Squeegee/sponge affairs. I pushed it back into shape and carried on, when all of a sudden, the whole thing just disintegrated in my hand and fell to the floor. I was left holding the handle. I just stood there and laughed. I ended up scraping the car with another useless scraper I’ve got - I’d probably have done better by using a stone, but still.

So I took myself out to Wilkos today and bought a new scraper - 79p. It better be good!

Well, as is oft the way with computery things, for some reason one of the plugins I use (Structured Blogging) decided to turn up its toes and kill the admin interface. The plugin enabled me to insert review-style posts, in a nicely laid out fasion. I’m not entirely sure why it did break, other than I added the GoogleAdwords to the site, but I think it was doing that before I did it.

I’ll put it down to ‘I dunno’ I think!

I’ve been using MSN Messenger for about five years or more now. In that time I’ve accumulated a LOT of contacts, a good proportion of which I don’t know who they are anymore. MSN Messenger, unlike other Instant Messengers, allows you to change your ‘name’ - the little display name you are shown online as, and is placed next to your messages. I can’t help but feel that some people are now abusing it slightly.

I’m quite simple in my approach, calling myself ‘Dave’. Most people I regularly talk to use similar names. The annoying ones are people who change their name to some witty quip every five minutes. When these people sign in, you have no idea who it is until you click them and see the email address (even then its not immediately obvious though). Then there’s the others, who adorn their names will an all manner of odd characters (often from high up in the keymaps) and using the MSN emoticons to pack out the name. All very pretty, but not very functional. The latest versions of Messenger have included a little tag line, where you can put such rubbish, but those that do use it have additional twaddle in theirs. Mine usually has my current song from iTunes. Its nice, because its triggered a few conversations in the past.

OK, done whining now.

Yesterday lunchtime, I cut up a nice big onion. My left hand has smelled of onion ever since! I’ve washed my hands countless times since, with various different soaps, and sat in the bath for about 20 minutes yesterday, and it STILL SMELLS! I’m amazed at the staying power of onion smells. I think it might be a wise move for some R&D types to work out why, then develop a deodorant or perfume - one spray lasts all day!

OK, nobody steal my idea!

Tomorrow is the 5th of November - to us Brits, its an important day. The basic idea behind it is that on the 5th of November 1605, a group of extremist Catholics conspired to blow up the Houses of Parliament on the opening day of Parliament whilst the King, Charles I, was in attendance. The coup was thwarted when one Guy Fawkes, the explosives expert, was found in the cellars of Parliament, and arrested. The failure of the group is ‘celebrated’ by setting fire to things (oh the irony) and setting off countless fireworks.

So here we are, and it sounds like we’re in Baghdad outside! There’s rockets crashing and banging about, and being a Friday, world plus wife is setting off fireworks tonight. Personally, I’m no fan of the things - I see them as a waste of money, seeing as how they simply go ‘Wheeee… bang!’ and light up the sky a bit. I can think of far more productive things to do or buy with my money, but that’s just me.

This year we’ve not had quite the same level of idiocy it would seem though. Ordinarily the news is full of chavvy kids blowing themselves up, but I’ve not seen any yet. A good thing, but I personally feel fireworks should only be available to people with a licence. Explosive devices are not toys, and yet we can buy what amount to miniature bombs in major supermarkets! It amazes me that it’s possible, but there we go. It might change one day, but I doubt it.

In other news, I’m suffered from a blocked ear, so I’m hearing in mono at the moment. I’ve got some stuff for it, so that should sort it out. My desk-rearranging efforts seem OK so far. I’m getting used to it now, so we’ll see how it goes. Oh, and not long ’til Christmas now!