» My computer gave away my secrets

Just tried it on my wife's computer
Google autocomplete:

hitler
nazi marching
air raid
blitzkrieg
infantry german
nazi rally
wehrmacht infantry
wehrmacht rally








If she wasn't a history teacher I'd get quite worried
(Fri 10th Feb 2006, 17:45, More)

» Ignored Advice

Don't buy a wooden boat
"Buy" isn't quite the word. It was free. Free boat! How could anyone resist? The fact it had been sunk at the bottom of the Basingstoke Canal for 10 years was a minor detail.

Strangely, not everyone quite had our eye for a bargain. My boss at the time, vastly more experienced in all things boaty than I was, said it'd be a bottomless pit of money, time, and effort. Pah, said I and the couple of mates who'd chipped in to pay for it to be towed halfway across Britain so we could fix it, industrial-size bilge pump running all the time. We knew it'd take six months of solid work and some cash.

But we were ready for it. This is a historic 70-year old boat we were saving. This is Important Work and our priceless heritage yadda yadda would be better for our effort.

It's now even more of a historic boat. It's now a historic 83-year old boat. Because that six-month schedule was set 13 years ago and the ----ing boat has only just, this week, gone back in the water with a fully mended hull. After a significant five-figure spend, and countless lost weekends spent arm-deep in horseshit. Yes, that's how you fix wooden boats. You mix horseshit with boiling hot tar to produce a noxious substance known as chalico. I am, sadly, not making that up.

Still, we now have a floating boat. All we need to do now is build a cabin and install an engine.

*weeps*
(Thu 15th Nov 2012, 17:02, More)

» Customers from Hell

Wrong number
About 10 years ago, when I was a lowly assistant editor on a lowly magazine about MIDI keyboards and stuff, an old bloke phoned up to complain that we had printed the wrong number for the magazine in our 'flannel panel'.

"I've been trying to get through to you for hours," he barked. "Your phone number is wrong in the magazine."

Are you sure about that, sir? We haven't had any other complaints.

"Well that's probably because no-one can get through to you. The number doesn't have enough digits. Even BT said it wouldn't work."

(Oh, hang on, this will be some bloke who's got an old copy of the magazine, one from before PhONEday - for the scamps, that was when they changed all the area codes from 0663 to 01663 etc. )

Ah, ok, sir, all the phone numbers have changed recently, you need to add a 1 after the...

"NO I KNOW THAT. There still aren't enough numbers in it. I had to phone Directory Enquiries to get your number. Cost me good money that did."

Okaaaay. (Am a bit stumped now.) Sorry, sir, could you tell me which number you're calling?

"It's 0792 2675. And the lady from BT said that's NEVER been a valid number. If you can't get your own number right, how can I trust anything else in your magazine?"

(Complete befuddlement followed by penny dropping about five seconds later.)

Ah, ok, sir, I see what you've done there. You're actually calling our ISSN - the serial number for the magazine. You can tell it's the ISSN because it says ISSN next to it. The telephone number is the one three rows above with the word "Telephone" next to it.

Apologies for length of number.
(Thu 4th Sep 2008, 17:42, More)

» Mix Tapes

Put your hands in the air for the church organ massive
I've only made one in the last ten years. It lives in the car and it's actually a CD (natch). It is played very rarely.

Its sole purpose is so that, when I'm sitting in a traffic jam and a chav in a Corsa draws up alongside with doof-doof-doof-doof coming out of the speakers, I can ram it in the CD player, roll down the windows and roof on my slightly effeminate Citroen convertible (a C3 Pluriel, essentially a 2CV for the 21st century), and put the volume up to maximum.

- Transports de Joie - Messiaen (iTunes linky). Very very heavy music indeed. Very very heavy church organ music, that is.
- Myddyfycys yn Bob Man - MC Mabon (iTunes linky). Happy bouncy Welsh-language rap randomly interpersed with the words "myddyfycys" (not quite pronounced as it looks) and "you son of a bitch".
- Martyn Bennett (mp3 clip). Banging techno. On bagpipes.

There's a bit of the really obscene pre-signing Goldie Lookin Chain on there too, "It's Grim Up North" by the KLF, a lot more organ music, and so on.

What usually happens that the chav puts their windows up - mission accomplished - and mouths the word "weirdo". I can cope with that.

Acknowledgement - I got the idea from a friend who, fed up of seeing chavs drive round and round Cambridge Market Place circa 1992 with doof-doof-doof blaring out, got a tape of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, loaded it into his rather battered old Metro and started doing the same. Very slowly.
(Sun 10th Feb 2008, 18:15, More)

» Best Graffiti Ever

By the Stroudwater Canal, Stroud


I just like it.
(Fri 4th May 2007, 9:24, More)