Beat The Traffic

So...several times a day for the last few weeks a Chinook has flown over the flat making trips between the naval base and the maritime HQ on the seafront. The journey by road is illustrated here. I do hope the Navy's need to make this journey in a twin rotor, 200mph, 32 million pound helicopter is justified.

See What You Can't Do

So...i just checked my O2 bill online. I have never seen anything so complicated. There were numbers EVERYWHERE! The links made little sense and i found myself going round in circles. If this is deliberate in an effort to make us pay the extra 99p for Itemised billing then it's almost working.

O2 aren't completely useless - they provide you with a formula for calculating how many text messages had the letter 'e' in the body, but I'm still just left daydreaming of the good old days at Orange where i dialed 150 and was politely told how many minutes i had left this month.

The "Vista Trap"

So...a few reports i've read in the last few weeks have really got me rather annoyed at the response to Microsoft's latest operating system, 'Vista'. see here and here for example.
Basically these people are either trying to upgrade to Vista from Windows XP without performing a complete format and installation or they don't have satisfactory hardware to run it and they're not having much luck.
The guy in the first article pissed me off, mainly because most of his problems were related to incompatibility between his peripherals and Vista. It's all very well upgrading then discovering that half your kit won't work, but the same amount of work carried out before you did the upgrade would have led to an obvious conclusion that your hardware WAS NOT SUPPORTED!
One thing Vista is not is a poor-man's operating system. You've either already spent the money on a decent specification computer or you're going to have to and if you don't then keep your mouth shut when you find out that nothing works. 3rd party component Support for Vista exists and is exactly where it should be - in the new products. It makes little sense to invest heavily in Vista support for ancient products when you can lower the price of new products and encourage users to upgrade hardware with their new operating system.
If you can't afford to upgrade your hardware, DON'T BUY VISTA! There's no point. you won't gain anything except the enhanced ability to moan and complain because your PC now behaves tortoise-like.

Consider buying a 10 bedroom mansion and putting your old flat furniture in it. Clearly your furniture is under-specified and what's the point in having 10 bedrooms when you live alone? Sure, you can have some awesome parties but most of the time it's just not necessary and you'll soon realise that your old flat was perfectly sufficient.

Je Suis Had a Beaucoup de Good Times on NYE

So...as the title suggests i was given the opportunity over New Years to demonstrate some real language skills to the population of Grenoble. We went to see Janey in Grenoble on New Year's Eve, which was really cool. Did lots of sitting drinking coffee, eating Giraffe (kind of) and traveling in Gondolas (see facebook for pictures).

Anyway who would have thought that such a good weekend would end in tragedy...and by tragedy i mean total embarrassment...

On leaving France i had my boarding card inspected one final time before leaving the gate. The guy checked it and advised me to enjoy my flight, to which i replied with thanks, turned round and walked face first into a window.

The door was of course just to the left of me, but i managed to miss it completely. I was one of the first to board, so you can just imagine the 300 odd people standing behind me sniggering away. It kept me amused for most of the flight once the pain had worn off :(

Thievery Pays

So...some guys are stripping out the shop beneath us and there's a skip outside our place. Just before Christmas i randomly pulled some BT telephone exchange electrical thing from the rubble, put it in my room and went home.

Anyway i just got back to Portsmouth and i Googled this thing. Turns out they sell brand new for £800 and 2nd hand on Ebay for £300!

It's not stealing: firstly it was in their skip, and secondly they woke me up at 8am every morning for a week with a hammer drill. Quids in.

You Can Do It

So...I went B&Q today. Couldn't find what i was looking for so i asked the first assistant i could find that was wearing an orange B&Q apron with their name on. The story picks up at Aisle 19 in-store...

"Excuse Me, where can i find White Spirit?"
"Sorry don't ask me, I'm just an actor working on a film in here"

Probably makes it to my all-time top-10 of randomness.
Needless to say i found the White Spirit alone.

FaceBook

So...i did it. Today i gave in to peer pressure and left my principles behind to join Facebook.

I'm not a fan of this kind of thing. I would never consider MySpace, Wayn or anything similar, but most of my mates seem to be on Facebook, and i do love going with the flow.

Having said that i cant see I'll ever visit the site again now I'm a member, but it might just stop all those invitations arriving in my mailbox.

So my FaceBook Id is....ah screw it i don't care. Just phone me instead.