Well there was more fun on Saturday in the grand-parential home. Uncle managed to get the 7inch lcd tv I had brought him working by hooking it to a 5ft long tv ariel which used to be on the roof, and he threw on top of the hedge for the purposes of the experiment. He reckoned all you'd need is a pole up your back with the ariel bolted to it to make the rig fully portable. I didn't argue with him.

Then we all trawled over to PC World and described the symptoms we'd seen screwing my PSU into his machine, and the lady reckoned the motherboard was knackered and advised us not to waste cash on a third PSU. Thus, I am now going to have to take Uncles h/d back home with me and see if I have any geeky mates with a desktop they are willing to hook the thing into temporarily (unlikely but worth a shot). Meanwhile, he'll have to shift central command to my old laptop and that means installing cakewalk and all the various wha wha pedals and amps and scanners and things but he reckons he's up for that so I can just leave him to it. Talked him through use of all the periferals, set up the internet, and then wrapped up with a demo of my ferrari laptop with suitable ooh's and aah's and uncle nodding and smiling knowing in 5yrs all that will be his (albeit without instruction books). By this time it was 10pm and all involved parties had to go to bed with a paracetamol. I reckon by the time of my next visit, Uncle will be telling me how to operate things (or at least...take them apart and bolt them onto other things).

Thought: at big all-star gala events such as Oscars and things, I wonder if all the rely famous women still have to queue for the toilet like us plebs do? Can you imagine a line with Cameron Diaz, Lucy Lu, Catherine Zeta Jones etc all looking faintly impatient and tapping their feet?

I think they must do, as these Galas are held at ordinary public venues with the same facilities and normal people use (and have to queue for). if any people tune into this Blog, I would appreciate and answer to this conundrum.

Things always get a bit abstract whenever there is a conjunction of my family members. This weekend it was practically the full compliment aka mad Uncle, Granny, Mum, Selwyn (stepdad), Me and my recently departed Grandad's lingering presence. I arrived about 2pm and swept into the house with a 'ta-dar!' (much to the surprise of Uncle's mate Derek who had popped round for a chat) and then enlisted Mum and Seggs to haul in and lay out the vast array of free computer bits I had brought for my Uncle, a haul so large that he actually visibly reeled and had to go and have a lie down and a paracetamol afterwards. We now have a new saying round our house - whenever I pull out a new gizmo, someone turns to my Uncle and says '...and in 5 years from now, this'll be yours'. That said, I think he's getting a little sick of never getting instructions with my gifts. The £40 computer I gave him last year that started it all had nothing and he had to work it all out himself, and this latest batch of stuff incl old laptop, webcam, diggie camera, old desktop, mini lcd tv, midi keyboard etc also have absolutely no instructions or any clues how to operate them. Personally, I think it toughens him up, sort of the geek equivelant of bootcamp. Uncle, however, is telling me that whenever I get a new gizmo I should immediately put the instruction manuals in an envelope and send them to him, so he can store them for 5 yrs until I finally passthe related gizmo on to him. He reckons it would give him time to read the manual thoroughly and familiarise himself with the gizmo, perhaps even build a little prototype so he's totally ready for when I come to offload the gizmo on to him.

For the first hour or so we sat around chatting. I got given a bit of left over dinner and everyone tried to give Derek all Grandad's old caps and ties. We considered the concept of bowls (as Grandad's were up for sale) i.e. how one procures them, can one hire them, and whether or not there is a market for a dialup Bowls Hire service e.g there you are, you find yourself at a bowls club and you haven't any bowls. What do you do? Dial 084522BOWLS telling them where you are, and they send a van round in under 60mins with a set of bowls appropriate for your size and bowls club. Could either be a annual subscription or a one off callout fee. Reckon there's a market there.

Anyway, we also tried to give Derek all Grandad's old jackets and it appears he had jackets for everything. Gardening jackets, bowling jackets, walking jackets...Mum pointed out that it was a very efficient system because you always knew what he was about to do by what he was wearing and e.g to not speak to him if he had his tv watching jacket on or say hello if he had his chatting jacket on. We reckoned the world would be a much simpler place if everyone else had a similar system.

After Derek went home, Uncle and I got down to business getting the backs off his current pc and the one I had brought with me with the aim of repairing his (for it had very recently died) and canibalising mine for bits. Very soon the entire back bedroom was littered with cases, hardrives, floppies etc, and we had pcs lying on their sides booting up with bits dangling out of them and cables spewed everywhere. Uncle even painted himself into a corner, trapping himself into a small crevice by a vast and insurmountable heap of hardware. I dubbed this The Geeking Hole, a small space in a large spread of computer bits that provides just enough room for a geek to sit and work in while they repair their pc. We failed to get either pc working though sadly, just the wrong combination of components, we'll have to suffer a trip to Politically Correct World tomorrow for a new power supply.

Then, just to round off the evening, we nipped up the road and gate crashed someone's wedding. There is a big old Hall at the back of my Grandparent's place, and when it does weddings they send a note round to all the neighbours saying there will be fireworks, that they apologise for the noise, and of course that the residents are cordially invited to come to the Hall and attend the display if they so wish. Usually noone is cheap enough to take anyone up on the offer but we thought 'sod it', walked up the road, and stood conspicuously in the shadows behind the wedding party in our old jeans and scuffed jackets, looking faintly threatening, and watched the fireworks for free. I was all for trying to blag free champagne and/or wandering up to the groom and either kissing him unexpectedly or slapping him and then running away sobbing, but noone would let me. My family are no fun sometimes.

We're all now sloping off to bed. Tmoz the chief aim is to get Uncle's desktop working and/or get the laptop I have given him hooked up t'internet plus give him a crash course in Looking Things Up. Then, having sown the seeds, I shall go home and wait, let him play around, and see if I can't get him hooked on surfing and email.

Anyhows, time for bed. Gnight.

Mon - Frantically busy at work

Tue - Car broken into, my wonderful TomTom that is customised to speak like John Cleese cruelly robbed. Much running around repairing car and replacing goods.

Weds - Frantically busy at work

Thus - offsite, hobnobbing with suppliers and pretending I am important (+ stealing branded company mugs from said supplier office)

Fri -  driving across the country with a car laden with old computer parts, with a view to offloading said parts on my Uncle who has recently passed into the second phase of geek enlightenment (1st phase of geek enlightenment:- you get given a second hand computer and teach yourself how to operate it from scratch without manuals, quickly self teaching yourself how to operate complex computer programs and recover from crashes + hack programs and install periferals using instinct and wit alone. 2nd phase of geek enlightenment:- said computer breaks, and you learn how to unscrew it, disassemble it, and unplug/replace your first component parts such as harddrive/motherboard/graphics card etc without freaking or losing any precious data). I need to shift him to 3rd phase of geek enlightement though (Firewalls, Antivirus programs, LAN parties, ways of registering for things and not giving your real email, recover from virii in an almost perfunctorary way, buy things off ebay and not get ripped off, have an email account and not getting spam, know all the extended search facilities for Google and maintain a blog without making a prat of yourself by telling the world all your innermost secrets). This may take more than a weekend but I have high hopes for him. Also, I now have proof that my own geek SuperPowers are indeed inherited and that I wasn't actually found in a field like my Mum used to tell me I was. Now if I can just channel my Uncle's abilities into building a high powered laser, world domination will be assured....

Mhuh hah hah hah etc

A weird one this - basically a large field in front of the house had filled completely full of water, and it was now about neck deep and it was swirling round and round, a pale navy colour, very distinctive and unusual. As I stood and watched it with friends, suddenly heads started to appear in the water, they weren't screaming just going round and round, and then I saw four or five long horn cows, also a suspicious navy/brown colour swirling round and round.

I didn't stay and watch too long though. My dream segued into a horror movie where the hero is wandering around a spooky house and then gets turned into a mouse (albeit a walking talking only a bit like Stuart Little). Hero keeps wandering about, and out leaps a cat and I scream 'it's a 'cat surprise'' (which is a movie term for a false alarm in a horror movie designed to make you jump when you are waiting for the monster, so dubbed after the cat in 'Alien' that leaps out on at least two ocassions when the audience was expecting the alien to leap out, and does usually manage to startle you). I yelled out Cat Surprise and then realised the hero was a mouse and laughed my head off as the cat ate the mouse in one gulp and thought 'Very clever plot twist'.

Then I woke up. Reckon the source of these two segments is a. I went to see Anthony Gormleys thing on Crosby Beach at the w/e and there we all these calm figures standing waist deep in swirling brown/blue water (not sure about the cows though) b. Watched a couple of very naff horror movies and must have been studying the formula accidentally.

Well a couple of days ago I was staying in a £170 a room Hotel next to Tower Bridge overlooking the Thames and hobnobbing with high flying business types. Today I turned Chav - I wandered round Woolworths in Stockport then had a McDonalds 'Big Tasty' and came home to play shoot-em ups and mooch around in my £10 Tescos brand jogging bottoms and Nike t-shirt. Feel much better now. I tell ya, having to wear a suit upsets my whole psychological balance and it often takes days to return to normal again, I still don't feel quite right even now.

FYI The Big Tasty is indeed bigger and tastier than your average McDonald's burger, though this shouldn't set your expectations particularly high if you've had a Big Mac recently...At least its got it out of my system now though.

Hmm. Sign on London railway 'I spat on a DLR member of staff and didn't think anything of it...then three days later I was arrested'. It then goes on to warn the reader that there are saliva test kits on every train and your spit could be compared to a national database to help identify you.

How often have you ever spat at railway staff? How often have you seen anyone else spit at railway staff. Do you know any railway staff who come home from a hard days work and ring out their uniform complaining that there was a lot of spitters on the train today.

Funny old business, must be a London thing.

Schmoozing done
I made sure I visited the stall of every major competitor to my product and announce loudly what I did, which may be the Expo equivelant of a sharp unexpected slap in the face. Had to speak to a guy for 30mins in order to get a free mini rugby ball (only to have a fellow colleague boast that he blagged his free ball in under 30 sec). Also got some free chewing gum, only to meet a guy on the train back who'd won an orange smartphone in a draw and blagged so much useful looking stationary he could barely walk...so I'm clearly not very good at this. Did manage to blag a free lunch on someone else's expense account tho, and learnt that the card being used to pay for the meal had once been cloned somewhere in London and used to buy £3,500 of ladies underwear and £40 of petrol. We mulled over that one for some time.

Am now back at t'hotel waiting for all my work collegues to coalesce into a single functioning unit again so we can acquire some food. Maybe time for a nap...oop now here's the first text now...

Am at a business Expo in London today. I'm in a big posh hotel where, if I open my window and lean out I can spit on boats moored in the wharf (and almost see Tower Bridge). I ambled in on the train and then was catapulted headfirst into the tiny world of smartphones, where everywhere I turned there was someone I either knew, worked with, or really should be avoiding.

Bumped into one guy I knew who was looking for a stall that was giving away pens, because he had forgot his. I pointed out a stall that was giving away stickers to bling up your phone and mints, and he misheard and thought I said mince which prompted a whole dicussion on novel give-aways for expo stalls. We were both in agreement that a stall giving away free mince at an Expo would work for us, though his vote was for cooked mince while I more fancied raw mince in little branded containers. I'm going to suggest to my company that next year we offer a range of promotional raw sausages and chops on our smartphone stall to attract the punters and see how well it goes down.

Anyway, that's enough stalling at the coffee shop, time to go back into the warzone and start schmoozing again (deep breath)

I dreamt that a new type of car engine had been invented that ran on water. We were only looking at a prototype scale model.

I filled it up with water, and it did indeed metabolise the water and power the car across the room. But it also completely made the engine disappear as well. So i had to build another one.

(I woke up instead)

Further to my musings on the global fatwave, it seems that the phenomenon of the Male Fat Day seems to be more widespread than previously thought.

Limited experimentation has been conducted to test the theory that it may be tide related by having a male subject standing watching the tide go out, checking to see if they feel fat, then watching the tide go in and checking if they feel any fatter. These results were inconclusive however, due to contamination of the test results by a large gammon steak - work ongoing in this field.

Now, said male subject is logging their Fat Days to see if any pattern emerges e.g. to see if there is any correlation to cycles of the moon, ambient temperature, sun spots, magnetic fields etc (and NB I have included a moon monitor on my website to help these experiments). If you would like to participate in this groundbreaking field of research, please contact me and we can start collating results. Oooh I can almost feel a PhD coming on, it's going to be interesting getting funding for this though...

This is a rip off of an advert on one of the Sky channels at the moment but....what is the difference between fluff and dust? No, seriously...what defines fluff versus dust - it's texture isn't it? But what about dust bunnies, are they a sort of 'missing link' between dust and fluff - duff or flust as it were. I assume fluff is mainly a cloth based thing, but can you get fluff made of anything else? Dust is particulate but at what point does it become so grainy it becomes grit, or so fibrous that it becomes something else...

These things bother me you see...

I've been staring hard at this site for a while and I really can't work out if its real or not.

http://www.rescuerick.com/

Make sure you read the blokes blog as well...

Do NOT pick your nose immediately after eating wasabi coated beans. Always remember to wash your hands first.

Quite a quick one this, but basically my Mum was staying over, it was raining and I get the impression that because the weather was so crap, we had decided not to bother going to Cropredy this year (not that my Mum ever goes anyway). But either way, on the morning of the festival she looked out of the window and starts insisting that I pack and we set off. I'm now in a massive tiz because the festival takes a lot of prep and I hadn't done any owing to not thinking I was going (plus all Mum was taking was a handbag) and I had to ring my mate and warn him we were going anyway to see if he wanted to come.

Segue now to the field. It appears I now own a spectacularly large tent, the sort that is normally used for cafes or bars, and I've got it all kitted out with rugs and proper beds and sofas and throws and things. No sign of my friend by Mum is there, she steps in in her purple poncho after having a look around and I'm still in bed and thinking about a shower in my full sized shower unit at the other corner of the tent.

It turns out I like this tent so much that I'm going to stay forever, so when everyone else leaves I'm left on my own in my tent in the middle of a field and the farmer has to mow round me, but I don't care.

And then I woke up.

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Eggy Bread

Ingredients:

Eggs
Bread
(optionally: Ketcup, Brown sauce, + any spices lying around)

Preparation:

Warning! This is advanced level cooking - it can take up to 15 minutes to prepare and also requires that you use a proper stove and not a microwave! This meal is worth saving for a special occasion and when you have time to spend on cooking e.g. a Sunday dinner or leisurely Saturday lunch.

Place a frying pan on the hob, tip a tablespoon of oil in and set the ring to high. Leaving the pan to heat, take three eggs, crack them up into a bowl and whip them up quickly with a fork (optionally at this point if you are the sort that has lots of spices lying rotting in our cupboard, consider adding a dash of cinamon, paprika, chilli powder or onion powder to the eggs - otherwise don't worry, it'll taste fine). Then slice three slices of bread.

Once the oil on the pan is smoking and there is a faint fug of smoke in the air, dip a slice of bread into the eggs until both sides are covered then slap into the pan and stand back because there will be lots of sissling (this isn't a recipe to cook whilst naked). Flip over every 10 secs or so until both sides are golden brown then scoop out and put on a plate. Cover one side of the bread lightly with red/brown sauce.

Then dip and fry the next slice of bread. Carefully lay the second slice of bread on the first over the first, then add more sauce to the top of the second slice. Repeat with the third slice. Then, if there is any egg left, tip this in the pan and swirl it round until it is complete cooked, and scoop out on the top of the stack of bread.

Eat however you can (it can be messy)

Variations on the eggy bread theme:

An obvious addition is bacon. This of course is extra effort though you can now get microwavable bacon that only takes a couple of minutes, so feasibly you can have this going in the microwave whilst you are preparing the bread and not spend any extra time cooking. The same goes for sausages.

If you want to dine on Eggy Bread and still get your allocation of vegetables - microwave some fresh peas (and/or leeks, onions, cabbage) for 2 minutes whilst preparing the stack, and sprinkle a few peas in between each slice.

For a sweet touch - replace sauce with honey/maple syrup or/golden syrup and dust each piece with cinamon. In America they call this 'French Toast' but goodness knows why.

Supernoodle Sandwich Recipe

Ingredients

Two slices of thickly cut bread
1 packet of supernoodles (barbeque chicken or beef is best)
5g butter or margarine
300ml boiling water

Instructions:

Boil the water. Open the super noodles packet and place it in a shallow tupperware container. Then add the water, sprinkle the flavour powder lightly on top, and place in the microwave on the 'High' setting for 6 minutes stirring frequently. Meanwhile, thickly cut two slices of bread and butter on one side only. When the supernoodles are ready, drain any excess fluid then carefully pour the noodles onto the buttered side of one of the slices of bread. Place the other slice of bread on top (butter side in). Do not attempt to cut, but instead pick whole sandwich up in both hands carefully to eat. Serve with a garnish of crips or brown sauce to taste. Suitable for breakfast, lunch or with chicken breast and white wine for a full evening meal.

Preparation Time:- 7 minutes
Washing up required:- 1 tupperware container, a fork, a knife (though you can use the fork to butter the bread) and a plate

Copyright Elly 'Jelly' Kelly 2006 (Inventor)

Residents of a quiet Norwich road were startled to find that someone had Sellotaped digestive biscuits to their front doors - as well as on cars, garden walls, lamp posts and signs up their street. "It's a complete mystery. There seems to be quite a few packets worth and someone's obviously gone to a lot of trouble to do it," said Trinity Street dweller Patrick Davies.

Found in the Oct 19th 1999 Guardian News.