For those who went before us

This isnt for a friend, in the way that an author will deciate a book, for example, I have just started with another Clarkson book, this one Born to be Riled, whatever Riled is... which is deadicated to, me i guess, well not quite me, its deadicated to everyone who reads it, it says deadicated to you, the readers.

You know who you are, partly because I fear you might be the only person to read my blog (mebbe I can put an RSS to it, and then subscribe the whole world to it MWHAHAHAHA), but beacasue I think you are the only person who has got the address for it.

Through choice i dont remember much before urm 15-osh apart from the various hospital trips and brooken bones. However the only thing that I do remember is my Grandad :D He died 12 years ago this year, and im only 21, (22 this yr) so I was 10 at the time. However I remember things more about him then other people, i guess i was closer to him then i care to accept :$.

Things like going fishing, he was a fresh water fisherman, and got me hooked (appologies for the pun) on fishing, and to this day I have his fishing equiptment in the garage, and every year i vowel to go fishing, but sadly it hasnt happened yet. Allthough with my new perhaps annual trip to "the island" (isle of mann) fishing will become a more common occurance.
The other thing that I remember is the blackberrys, not my technological advancement that will give me exchange emails from work on my mobile, even when I am in the middle of Sainsburys, (as Hobzy proved while testing the new iPaq from HP the other month) but picking the berries, blackberrys. Parking in the middle of the road on the cross hatchings because we spotted a bush or two with blackberries ripening on them in late septmeber when they came down for one of their visits which happened each year.

To matters at hand, after refusing to strike when Ford went ono strike (i dont know why, why that is that they were striking, not why he refused to strike with them) he worked for the concil as a gritter man. He would be up on these cold mornings that we are faced with at the moment and be out spreading grit on the roads so that we would all be able to make it to work or school or wherever our destinations would be in the mornings. One of those people who kept the nation moving, before the Labour Party came into power and brought the transport system to a standstill! ( His Tony-ness wont be reading this so i dont mind saying that even the Lib Dems, or Green Party would have the transport system working better, partly because Green would have us all walking and cycling to whereever it was that we wanted to get to)

Tonight whilst at the bank I saw one of the "gritters" and it reminded me, that while i was cursing the british weather because it was cold, (why have I got the window open at 2 in the morning, while there is another deep frost growing on the car, ahh yes because the heating is on FULL) it reminded me that while I was unhappy with the weather if he was still alive he would probably be out there driving his gritter and making sure the roads were safe for me to drive on, well perhaps not, but a few yrs ago he would have been.

I guess its perspective-ative, as although i wont admit it i feel that perhaps i lost someone yesterday but in a different way, supposidly a "good" way but i dissagree, have done for years and will do forever, and I dont care how they feel, but for my friend, you must remember that we are here and sorta know whats going on, n though we dont necessarily understand how you feel at the moment we are here to help, and you need to talk to the person(s) that you care about the most, as its times like these when you know who they are.

Ive babbled enough for now, n im appologising if ive upset but i was told to blog last nite and i didnt have anything to wirte, but today i felt the need. All that is left is for my picture, for all the people who are out ther making the roads good for the drive to work...

...

Keep safe

Mr Jezza Clarkson
In the media you hear politicians saying children should read more and spend less time on their Playstations, and 360's. Well Ive grown up with the consoles and DVD's (it started with VHS (I sadly cant remember BetaMax vs. VHS, but I will remember HD-DVD or Blu-ray :D)) I spent many hours in the garden, with a football, or a cricket ball in the spring and summer, but with the winter months and less time, the DVD player has gotten more and more use. (Its only just had to have the laser replaced as the discs were playing poorly) Where’s this going, yes books, everyone has said to me for many years that I should read, I’ve always thought, why read a story when I can watch a DVD of the book. School English lessons with shakespeare (no capital s for I don’t think he deserves one) and then the class reading of a story that takes 2 months to read, because you can only read 5 pages at a time because you have to talk over every page as you read it.
All of this lead to reading not being enjoyable or interesting, and then none of it made sense, well half of it didn’t, so we watch the back then, Video of the book, and suddenly all is clear. So for a long time I didn’t do reading, but a few autobiographies' later and I had enjoyed reading a book. I’ve decided that its non-fictional (the ones that aren't made up I like). For Christmas I got The World According to Clarkson, it arrived a little late; presumably Mr Postman was a little late, along with Mr Amazon. It was brilliant, blog-esq entries made up of his Sunday Times columns. Consecutive nights, reading until 4 or 5 am, and I read the book in a few days (again an unheard of), but just to add the amazement of the people at home, I even went out and brought the next book in the series of the World According to Jezza, I can count on one hand the number of books that I've brought out of choice, and man with two missing figures could do it on one hand too! Nearly every chapter had a chuckle, and many had full blown laughter, the part of the book that has stuck with me the most, and explains the cover to the book is when Mr Jeremy "Top Gear" Clarkson shot David Beckham.

Chapter name:- A Murderous Fox Has Made Me Shoot David Beckham

Jezza has a nice big house, and is now keeping some livestock in his garden, and sadly to the children’s horror he was awoken with the body of a dead Chicken, Mr Michael Owen, and he had been decapitated. So after a few minutes more of blame being put upon "His Tonyness" Jezza has spent £350 on a house for the chickens and fencing etcetera. However Mr Campbell is the next to go, and with this in mind night vision goggles are brought, however; "Unfortunately they were made in Russia, which is another way of saying: 'made badly by someone who's drunk' so they don’t work very well'" "At close range they’re fine, but anything more than three or four inches everything’s just a blur. Certainly if this is the best Russia can come up with now, we really didn’t have anything to worry about in the Cold War. Its tanks would have ended up in Turkey after its air force had spent the night bombing the Irish Sea"

"However if you concentrate hard you can just tell what’s an organic life form and what’s a stone mushroom. And so, as the last vestiges of sunlight faded from the western horizon and the sky went black, I was to be found at my bedroom window with a 12-bore Barretta at my side. Mr Foxy-Woxy was going to die."
"By one in the morning I'd nearly polished off a bottle of Brouilly and it was becoming increasingly hard to figure out what was what in the green world in infrared. There was a glow in the garden where before all had been dark. I made a mental, if slightly drunken, calculation about where this was in relation to various trees, before putting the night-vision goggles down, picking up the piece and firing. Next morning my wife was distressed to find that her Scott’s of Stow chair had been blown to smithereens. And I’m afraid she could not be persuaded that through the night-vision goggles it had looked like a fox. "Maybe through beer goggles" she said.
So the next night I was forced to stake out the garden, sober. This meant I was still awake and alert at three when I noticed movement by the cage. I raised the gun and once again the serenity of the still night air was shattered as the weapon spat a hail of lead.
Over breakfast the next day there was a scream from down the garden. 'You f****** idiot. You've shot David Beckham''. And I had.

So now I've been banned from late-night sentry duty and I'm stuck. I can't put poison down because the dogs will eat it. And I cant use the dogs to get the fox because Mr Blair will be angry. What's more I can't simply let nature take its course, because then all my hens will be killed and we'll end up eating supermarket eggs and dying of salmonella, listeria or whatever it is they say will kill us this week" Even funnier when read with the whole entry, rather then my digest, but I hope that's made you giggle. Seeing as I have brought the next one, and I'm reliably informed that there is something similar that’s been written by an ambulance driver, I feel that I should go and read some more of part two, before looking for the third book. It’s a miracle, it could be Valentines Day and I will have read three, count them, one, two, three books!!!!
Quotations taken from The world According to Clarkson Vol 1, written by Mr Clarkson, published by the nice people at Puffin

A Manly illness
As you should be aware I’m a bloke, and we don’t do being ill very well. A slight cough or snuffle, and we are at deaths door. Its fact! For the last two weeks I have been at said door, and I’m pleased to say I’ve come back from it, well almost all the way. What started out as a runny nose turned into a blocked nose, turned into a sore throat, turned into a dry cough, and then a productive cough, and now I have a cough.

I don’t mind that, I can put up with a cough, just apologies to those around who happen to hear me coughing, as I’m sure it does get annoying. However about a week and a half ago when I had the runny nose, I was most annoyed. It always, and i mean always gets worse at night and laying down its like a tap. Nee Niagara falls, and inevitably awake until the small hours and then miracles happen and one falls asleep.

With colds, and excessive nostril blowing comes a sore nose and upper lip. Tissue companies have cottoned onto this and a few years back they brought out their new tissue. Lets face it, a tissue is a tissue, its for wiping and blowing ones nose on. Even though, you can now get double ply, triple ply extra strength squared triple ply, and then it happened. The Tissue with the balm, Kleenex (tm) Balsam tissue.

As we can see on the right, there is a nice little nose, for "imagery" purposes, and there is even the silver "lining of protection" that their protective balsam offers. WHO? oh who finds that the top of their nose hurts and the skin on the top of their nose is sore when they have a cold? I certainly don’t, yes the little line goes down the under our manikins nose, but the majority of the "protection" is sitting above the nose.

Maybe its me, but I think that there is a nice little hole in the tissued product range for these companies to make a better solution to this problem, which inevitably will be found, and these will look like the regular tissue off the toilet roll, which to some people just isn’t what is used for a nose. And yes, im sure that when these come out I will bash them too, and then be hailing this product as the "tissue for the common cold" and asking why we need a new product for colds, but until that day happens, I’m sticking with good old toilet roll.

• Its cheaper
• It comes in a longer packet
• Its more versatile
• and finally it isn’t trying to persuade me that its done something to make me feel better when quite frankly I feel like crap!

Passwords

Passwords are a simple idea, with which comes mass security which is rather an essential online. Its not like i can walk up to the front of my blog and put the door key in and hey presto, the little bit of metal from my pocket has logged me into the blog and i can write away. No i need a password, and this means remembering it surly not a big thing to do. However when you start to think about it, we have lots of these little simple things to remember, as most of you know I work in IT, (for those of you who didnt know, you now do, and sadly yes that makes me a bit of a geek, and im proud of it too) So i have the password for my email, the password for msn, the password for works username, various other work passwords, then the pin code to my mobile, the pin to my bank account...thats over 6 passwords, then there are all the different websites that we use, amazon, play, misco, dabs, mycomputerbits and so on, so we must be nearing 15. And now thanks to my taking up of a new years resolution to blogging, i have another, that makes 7.

I have logged in twice to my blog this year to post, once yesterday, with the debacle that was making a post and loosing it ... twice because i had the audacity to want to spell check it, and yes im fully aware that I have properly spelt audacity wrong! Both times I have had to use the “forgot my password” feature for it, as i had lost the ability to log in. Yesterday I was using the wrong password, today the wrong bloody username.

So what is the solution to this, one password for everything, well that’s just plain bonkers, if someone should get you password that’s everything amiss. Drop your phone and you have a phone bill for a gay porn chat line in Thailand (thank god for PAYG). Someone has already though logged into your emails and send that picture you forgot to delete to the world, your msn contacts have all been deleted and you money taken from the bank.
So whats my solution, well i could keep resetting the password for the blog for a week until i remember both the username and the password. Thats too simple though, I have just committed the cardinal sin. The biggy, I have written the username down in the name of the favourite’s link that I have made for my blog for quick access. So anyone able to get into my pc, only needs to see the favourites for my username, and then they have only got to get the password and they will be laughing.
Highly insecure, but I dint give a piddle, Im not going to ask for my password to be reset every day, Blogger will think im silly.


......


Ranting over, I will get back to what I was trying to say yesterday, My Blog as you can see was made in late May 2006, and then wasn’t written in, it has (had) become one of the many blogs that aren’t updated. While reading an article on the Beeb about blogging in mid December, :$ ok late December, I didn’t return to work until the 23rd after a rather painful knee injury obtained while playing badminton, in June, I was signed off for two months after getting to the point that I couldn’t bend my leg to get into the car. Back to the point. I read an article on the Beeb saying that next year, which is now this year, there would be approx 100,000,000 new blogs made, yet there was already 200 million, so twice as many blogs which are no longer updated. This was one of them! (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6178611.stm) for those of you interested, here is said article.

That said I have started to update my blog, and will continue to do so. After telling a friend of the above saga they said that they had started to do a similar thing but in a diary, (which I am now thinking is a much better idea, I bet she didn’t have to spend thirty minutes trying to open the bloody first few pages!) Passwords...tshhh. So it was decided that at the end of the year we would get together have a few drinks and have a laugh over what is being written, however I get the feeling that they have the upper hand, mine is findable, and hers isn’t :@.


(HAHAHAHHA it did it again, some ietag.dll message popped up, i figured it wanted to install a feature for adding tags to the blog so I can search for individual posts. It gave me the do you want to navigate away from this page message, quick copy and paste and I have saved the above, thats it, no more trusting blogger, write in word, copy to blog, publish. Job done.)