Probably too true

I was reminded of a theory that was put forward at church once for why so many church members seem to be addicted to chocolate.

in one word it's down to stress.

The theory went that as Church members we don't have most of the other ways of the world as it were to relieve stress. We don't smoke, we don't go out for a beer at the end of the day, we don't have tea or coffee and a lot of people don't drink coke.

So what does that leave us?

Yes, chocolate...

That's assuming your not one of the people who don't go by the reason that we don't drink tea or coffee because of the caffene, then I guess your really left with nothing and need to go and invest in a stress ball :-)

Later folks

Not your usual formation flypast

In and out

Grumpy and I noticed when we were out and about today what seems to be the latest "in thing" among ( and I hesitate to use the term as it will make me seem really old) the youth hanging around town in groups.

And what is this latest in thing? The latest must have that all youths must get to be in with the in crowd? Hoodies? Hat's? Leather jackets? Nope, nope and nope again.

No, the latest in thing seems to scooters. And in case you were wondering, I don't mean the motorised kind that you see a lot in italy. No I mean the kind you ride on with one foot, holding the handles and pushing along with your other foot.

Which looks a little stupid if I'm honest as there's just something you loose in the terms of coolness using a scooter say compared to using something like a skateboard or even a bike.

But then again I suppose when I was that age, the "in things" probably looked just as stupid.

What we really found amusing was after seeing a large gang of kids riding around on their scooters in the car park of the supermarket, on our way out we saw a family with a little girl with her own scooter which was bright pink with yellow sunflowers on. I could just imagine the "cool kids" faces as the little girl rode past.

anyway,

Later folks

It's only time

Thanks to a rather major accident on the nearby motorway which shut it, a rather large traffic jam built up alongside the aiport rather quickly with traffic queuing both ways the full length of the airport and then some.

And as I'm sure you'll know airports are big places so, that was a heck of a lot of cars. Of course the only thing that made this huge traffic jam even more entertaining was that it occured at the end of the day at the height of rush hour!

Fortunatly for me, I was only stuck in traffic for twenty minutes before I could get to place where I could cut across country and get back to geektown, which although annoying wasn't the end of world.

Some other members of my team weren't so lucky and it took them nearly two hours to get home!

See another great example of why facebook is useful as without it, I wouldn't have know that until Monday. Wait that's not useful................ :-)

In fact come to think of it, I wonder what would have happened if facebook rather then wilkipedia had gone dark for one day. Would western civilisation had been able to survive? How would we have know if our friends had liked their lunch ? Or had been woken up early? Think of the fake non existant cakes and the electronic fake farmers crops that would have gone unharvested!

anyway,

Later folks

Forget the Monkey it's now a evil Bunny

One of the girls at work likes to decorate her desk and some of the others as well using stuffed toys. She has recently added a new toy to one of the bank of desks, which was a stuffed rabbit.

So far, so good, so cute, etc, etc.

But well the cute bunny has started taking on a rather creepy aspect, as throughout the day one of the ears started to bend over, the head started to tilt to one side, we noticed that due to the fur one of the eyes seemed bigger then the other and slowly but surely one of the arms started to raise as if it were pointing, ala evil monkey from Family guy.

At first it was funny, but it slowly started to get even very creepy, especially when you felt it was actually looking at you. Which meant the bunny spent all day being turned round and round on the spot.

It actually ended the day sitting in one of the empty desks with a headset on looking at a computer screeb, I'm no sure who put it there mind you.

At least I hope somebody put it there otherwise it's just got even more creepy.

Later folks

Time, time and more time

Well with the broadband back up to full capacity we have discovered a small downside to now having such fast connection speeds.

We can now play the games on facebook.

And play them we have been.

Which has been tremendous fun but has been best summed up by Grumpy as being a tremendous waste of time.... just before he spent a hour playing a game introduced to him by Tap Dance mind you.

I've found some of the news coverage about Mitt romney tremdously amusing at the moment, as you can tell that most people are trying to stay away from making points about the church with such obivous effort that it's blindinly obivous thats what their doing. And even when they have mentioned the church it's been very funny as they've usually tried to make huge stories out of nothing. For example one news story mentioned that he had given millions to church. Well my immediate thought was, hmm successful multi-millionaire businessman so that would be tithing wouldn't it? And of course with the publication of his tax records thats obivously what it was but do you think they made a news story of that. Ohhh no..... course not.

anyway,

Later folks

Lets hope it does not come in threes

okay so 2012 might not be proving to be the most awe inspiring, luck filled year ever so far at least it's going better for me then some others.

Long term readers might remeber me mentioning a few days ago that one of my friends at work had a unforunate experience of the dangers of taking the short cut from the 1st floor to the ground floor of her house. Well her luck isn't improving as she had a rather unfortunate encounter at work when she returned after recovering from her last fall, with a bunch of wiring.

Which has started a debate as to whether or not she might be urgent need of a stunt double, because if she proves the old adage that things come in threes, she might not survive a 3rd "fall".

And said discussion also proved that working in customer service can lead to you having a very dark and twisted sense of humour :-)

later folks

Bowing to the inevitable

Well after trying to get the internet connect working again upstairs and failing totally, we've now had to accept the inevitable and move the computer downstairs and set it up in a corner of the living room

So we've now got our full broadband capacity back, but it's going to make things a bit interested when somebody wants to use the TV and someone else wants to use the computer at the same time.

But as always c'est la vie :-)

And lets not forget Owen who is now totally confused and wondering why not only is the computer downstairs but why it's on a table this time and not on the floor like last time.

With the moving of the computer it looks like the office is going to be turned into a hobby room, which should be a rather interesting idea.

If we can decide what's going to be in there mind you. We've moved plenty of stuff out already included the old filing cabinet ( which was almost as big as me) which is now waiting on the front lawn to be collected by soem scrap metal merchants and is no doubt confusing the neighbours.

Well it shouldn't be anymore confusing mind you then when we had a toilet out there.

Anyway,

Later folks

Broadly speaking

Okay so we kinda have the broadband problem sorted out.

Kinda.

It seems that it's the wiring to the upstairs connection that has kinda gone gagga on us at the moment which means we can less then a meg speed when it's connected upstairs but it still seems to be fine on the downstairs connection.

Which is kind of a issue when the office and computer desk is upstairs.

D'oh!!!

I think we're going to have to do some creative thinking to sort this one out. Well that or get a cable repair guy in. I guess it will probably fall to whichever options cheaper :-)

Well it's wednesday tomorrow, always the hardest day of the week ( well asides from Monday mornings of course). Now a lot of people seem to call the day "hump day" but as it turns out noit many people in our office did as one member of my team found out as he loudly told everybody that tomorrow was hump day to there confusion.

Of course loudly stating at the top of his voice " It's hump day tomorrow" when there had been no conversation leading up to that declaration or what he was talking about probably didn't help the confusion in the slightest.

anyway,

Later folks

It really is a quite stupid saying when you think about it

Today's quote of the day came from physics from his rather good talk about the book of mormon

" I wasn't born into the church like most people, I was born into a hospital instead"

Which if you think about it, highlights just what a strange saying " I was born into the church" is.

The computer is still set up in the lounge which is still confusing the heck out of Owen as he can't quite figure out why I'm sitting on the floor with him.

Still it's a minor problem and at least my weekend is going a lot better then one of my friends who learned at the cost of severe brusing, a badly sprained wrist and a long trip to A&E that having pJ bottoms that are a bit too long only lead to taking a short cut between the 1st floor and ground floor of her house without using the stiars.

I was also watching transformers 3 again on DVD and realised something about the lead characters parents being a little bit harsh on him. Because they spend a large amount of the movie critising him for not having a job, but they never mention the fact that he has saved the whole human race twice!

Also in the news today there's a little bit of a design flaw in the navys new fighters that they are supposed ot be buying for the new aircraft carriers. Basically the hook that catches the wire that stops the aircraft is too close to the wheels so it can't catch the wire. Which in a aircraft supposed to land on a airfield not a big design flaw, but on one supposed to be landing on a aircraft carrier a rather large problem.

Later folks

It's all a bit confusing for little dogs

Whilst I'm typing this Owen is currently sitting across on the other side of the lounge watching me with what can only be called a rather confused expression on his face. Mainly because rather then sitting at the desk, I'm now in the lounge sitting on the floor whilst I type this.

And for all his intelligence I don't think Owen can figure out why the heck is going on.

In case you were wondering this repostioning isn't due to any major redecoration plans here at geektower, it was due to our broadband connection going every so slightly wrong. In fact it was providing less speed then our old dial up used to provide. The IT boffins at our ISP needed us to plug the computer into our main phone socket which was downstairs in the lounge, and seeing we didn't have cable long enough we had to move it. Plus it has to stay in place until Monday as they need to get a lot of data.

Which provided it's only problems as we haven't really moved the computer since we put it in place several years ago to say some of the cables were tangled would be a understatement.

In fact we found a couple of cables that I'm still not100% sure what they were for.

Guess we used to use them for something, as to what? Well the computer working fine enough without them so I guess they can't be important.

Fingers crossed, touch wood etc, etc.

Anyway,

Asides from the moving and subsquent rather baffled dog it's been rather a normal saturday. Except it has been rather cold all day.

Winter has finally, finally arrived.

Later folks

Three words any geek would long to hear

Doom, doom, doom........ or maybe not

Fridays are usually quite bad at work.

At least for the first part of the day when the " Eeek it's not here yet and Iw ant to go home early today" factor kicks in.

So of course with it being Friday the 13th we were expecting the worst. You have customer service meeting the stereotypical most bad luck filled day in a year. And what did we get? Doom, doom and more doom??

Well no.

It was actually a quiet day. A nervously quiet day for a Friday as a matter of fact which did make us wonder if something extra bad was creeping up on us. There were even a few jokes about that russian space probe falling through the roof.

Which apparently though is somethign we don't have tow rry about as russian scientists and engineers have ensured people it will crash into the indian ocean and it's fuel will have burnt up on re-entry.

I've said it before however and I'll say it again. This is only a reassuring until you remember these are the same scientists and engineers who were sure that thing would be on it's way to Mars by now.

So might now want to put away the hard hats just yet.

Later folks

A perfect storm

Okay, so new year and already one resolution to try and blog every day is wel land truly broken.

But c'est la vie I guess.

But hte main reason for no blog post yesterday was that I was doing a fair amount of overtime and after nearly ten hours in front of a computer by the time I got home and sat down to do a blog post the words just didn't come at all.

The long day hadn't been helped by the huge traffic jam I was caught in on the way to work. I'll freely admit that one thing I don't miss from going into Nottingham ( asides from having to fill the car up every week) is the rather nasty traffic jams which could extend a 25 minute trip all the way to a hour and 45 minutes.

Traffic jams to my current job are extremely few and far between. Yesterday's traffic jam was without a doubt the worst I had ever seen with traffic queuing the full length of the airport. And what had caused this backlog? Well it was a perfect storm of blocked roads as it were because not only were two main a-roads the site of accidents, the motorway had accidents in both directions and then another main road was blocked by a bunch of protestors.

Chaos ensured.

And there was a fair few people who were very late to work. but they didn't mind as in those situations if lots of people are late then everybody dodges getting a "black mark" for being late.

Anyway,

Later folks

Not a good start

You have to wonder sometimes when you get up if certain things that happen could actually be signs for how the day is going to go. For example burning your toast, treading on something on the floor, walking into a door frame whilst half asleep.

Or it my case noticing when I got to work that the last three digits on my speedo were 666.

Mind you I've not been having the best of time for the past couple of days as I've been struck by a rather nasty bug good and proper, so not only is my cold back, I've got a cold, a cough, a sore chest or at lets not forget that I've seriously lost my voice and what I had remaining was could be described as "seriously husky".

But it's all right, it's not like I have a job where I have to speak practically all day.

Oh wait............

Suffice to say I've been tanking up on as much lemsip as I can take and keeping my fingers cross that I can shake this as quickly as possible.

anyway,

Later folks

For the paranoid who thought they were afraid of everything

It may be a new year but somethings never change.

Yes the media is sitll chock full of rather depressing stories. If it's not about depressing violence, it's about things blowing up. And if the stories aren't anout things blowing up, their usually about some Celebrity who has been seen going to the shops.

Wow, a celebrity going to the shops, are they trying tell us that their as human as the rest of us?

And lets not forget about the stories about what ever thing is rather bad for us this week, which was actually good for us two weeks ago and will probably be good for us again three weeks from now.

Of course if you were to take attention of every single news story out there, you would come to the conclusion that it would be better to stay at home and never leave the house.

But even that comes with it's own dangers as apparently there is a new piece of nasty software doing the roungs which can effect you if you bank online as not only does it nick your account details it then "adjusts" things you can't see that any money is being taken from your account.

So there you have it, you can't even trust your own computer that much anymore. Maybe we should all just hide under our beds and hope the world goes away.

Because then we would be safe in our own homes.

But wait don't most accidents happen in the home?????

argghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!

Someones being a busy bee

Wind turbines, the way to a future of bright, green renewable energy (apparently but lets not get into that argument). Dependent on the wind to generate power you would have thought that all the wind we were getting right now would be good.

But you would have thought not, as apparently there's too much wind. I kid you not.

In fact there's so much additional wind several turbines have developed a rather nasty problem.

They keep blowing up.

Of course if irony wasn't busy enough playing with the wind he also decided to pay me a visit as Grumpy happened to mention last night that at least my cold hadn't developed into a cough and sore throat.

Can you guess what happened when I woke up this morning children????

Yes, I now have a sore throat and a cough, but I've approaching this illness in a typical manly way.

And by that I mean, spent a fair part of the day feeling pitifully sorry for myself :-)

anyway,

Later folks

At least it has a sense of humour

Well I was woken up in the early hours of this morning by the weather. And not just a little amount of weather, no we're talking about little amount of weathers big brother who tends to use rather a lot of steroids.

We're talking howling wind, lashing rain, the whole nine yards.

And of course multiple attempts to get back to sleep were defeated after the weather kept waking me up again!

Of course the weather then proceeded to demonstrate a sense of humour because as soon as my alarm went off to tell me it was time to get up the weather promptly started to die down!

Grrrhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.............

Not that the weather was behaving for the rest of the day mind you as there were several rather large and intense rain showers which I didn't mind.

Until I got home this evening and suddenly noticed a large damp patch and water mark on the ceiling in the corner of the room which just about gave me a heart attack! Grumpy and I thought that there was a whole in the roof, maybe some tiles had come loose etc, all sorts of horrible scenarios basically.

Tap Dance actually found the answer which was that a seal had come loose around the overflow pipe from the water tank in the loft. One quick visit fro ma handyman up the road and it's fixed ( well for now at least he's coming back to do a more permanant fix tomorrow).

So somewhat ironically then in the worse rain storms we've had for sometime around geektown the only leak we get is from inside the house.

C'est la vie I guess.

Later folks

Not so Synchronised

Well overselling by one or two tickets to any event can certainly be embrassing. Overselling by 10,000 tickets would certainly register as a big "oops" in anyone's book.

But unfortunatly that's one "oops" the London olympics have managed to do when they've oversold 10,000 tickets to the Synchronised swimming.

I bet the organising commitee are hoping that's the only big oops that coems their way.

Anyway, the year is rolling on in that dreary it's the first week of January, your next pay day is soooo far away and your nice pretty christmas decorations have to come down kind of way

Plus if that's not depressing enough we're going to be subjected to a veritable barrage of reality shows on the tv. Not only is Dancing on ice starting, celebrity big brother is back ( why, why have we not suffered enough?), there's cowboy builders, the worlds meanest trucker and lets not forget "celebrity wedding planner", who will feature Jedward.

Yes Jedwood/Jeward/doesn't make them any less annoying however you spell it are back on the screen.

Just when you thought it was safe to turn on the telly again..........

Later Folks

Hell and High water

Okay, so after a prolonged period of dry and warm weather, somebody, somewhere seemed to flip a switch today and what could best be described as typical english weather came back with gusto.

And by Gusto, I mean there was a whole lot of it.

Fortunatly I missed the worse of it, even if I did have to endure the car rocking too and from like a fan and a metalica concert on the way into work.

Unfortunatly one of the girls from our team didn't miss the worst of it when she got off the bus ( regular not our minibus) and got caught in a rather large downpour between the bus stop and the building front door which might have only been a couple of hundred feet at worst.

Actually calling it a downpour would be a gross diservice to the sheer force of it and likewise saying she looked like a drowned rat would also be a understatement.

Drowned rats are usually much drier.

Luckly she saw the funny side as she wasn't bothered about getting wet, she was more bothered about the amount of time she had spent drying her hair this morning which she felt had rather gone to waste.

It was also a rather busy day as we had a lot of work to do, what with the christmas holidays and all. Or to put it another way we all had more then four times the usual amount of work in our queues.

Which kept us our of trouble if nothing else.

Later folks.

Ashes, ashes we all fall down

If grumpy and I being under the weather was not enough, Owen has also become ill as well. But we're not sure if this is down to him picking something up as it were or if he has finally come across something that doesn't agree with him once he's eaten it.

And knowing Owen it's much more likely to be the former rather then the latter.

Anyhow, tomorrow not only is it back to work time, it's also back to work in uniform time. Which is going to be very weird after a whole month of dress down.

But still that's likely to be the least of our problems as not only are we going to be back to work, everyone else will be as well which menas one thing and one thing only.

Lots and lots of phone calls.

It's going to be a interesting day that's for sure.

But that's tomorrow, I still have the rest of today to enjoy and I'm going to do it the same way I've spent the rest of the day.

Kicking back and doing as little as possible.


Later folks

Start as you mean to go on

Well today hasn't been the all singing all dancing start to the new year that would have made things perfect.

Mainly as I have a cold, a bad one.

And I'm not the only one. Grumpy is also suffering with a even worse cold and cough to boot.

I'll admit that it's not quite at the stage of full blown man flu but with two men in the house, both suffering from colds the level of self pity and general feeling sorry for ourselves is possibily reaching dangerously high heights :-)

Still at least my sense of time is slowly getting back on track as with the christmas holidays, new years and the days in work, then off work and then working christmas eve I really wasn't sure if I was coming or going.

I also have a new camera bag as my steadily growing collection of lenses made my old bag was now full. This is my third bag since August, but seeing as now the next "stage of lenses" as it were start in the 300 to 400 poind range it should last me quite some time.

It also didn't really "cost" me anything as I used a voucher I had for christmas plus some money I won in a christmas raffle at work, so bonus.

The new series of sherlock holmes started tonight and was very good. I loved the way the cliffhanger was resolved from the first series. I thought it was very good and also very funny as most peoples guesses didn't even come close.

I will leave you with a thought to ponder
" Is it even possible to get life insurance anymore or if you live on Albert square or coronation street?"

Later folks