pmsumner

You know things are bad when you've started on the port.
I stopped in at Tesco Express today to pick up something for tea, and couldn't resist the bottles of Cobra. Put them in the freezer to cool down 'cuz it's so warm out here even the fridge isn't cold enough.

Mr SkyContractorMan is coming tomorrow and charging me £35 to do nothing but plug the sky box into a wall socket, and plug in the cable to the wall/box. I can't understand why Sky don't do this themselves, considering this is a much easier install than any other job they'll have. Hmm. I guess it's only money, eh? Worth it for the Simpsons extravaganza and getting the music channels back for late night Janey laughing :)

Tomorrow night is Race Night for the Methodists of Jane's mum's church. Yes I know, Methodists gambling? And drinking? What?! *raises hands in an "I don't know" stylee* Could be interesting.

Going to watch A History of Violence on Sky Box Office.

At the PC, and heard the Jose Gonzalez - Heartbeats song on telly and immediately thought to myself "mmm, pretty advert - pretty and expensive telly". Didn't turn around at all, concentrating on spodding. My thoughts went something like "I wonder how Sony would take to someone making a pisstake version of that advert?" and went to search YouTube for anything. Then I turned around and saw apples and oranges and watermelons and various fruits flying down a terraced street!!!!!

*roflmao*

I must have psychic abilities :) I hope someone managed to record it and pops it on the web soon.

[Edit: Found it.]

Sky is cancelled. Well, not actually cancelled but suspended for the grand total of £0.75/mo, and I can go back onto the same package I'm on now if needs be at the end of the 3 months, or cancel the package completely.

Gorillaz live in Manchester is on E4. Am watching, but only because I want to record it and then stop the recorder and set it to go for "A for Andromeda" on BBC Four later. I've heard so much about it and it looks like a good remake/reinterpretation.

Went to see "The Big White" with Robin Williams/Holly Hunter/Tim Blake Nelson/Giovanni Ribisi (who I now recognise as Phoebe's brother in Friends). It's a dark dark comedy in the same vein as Fargo, very funny indeed.

I believe it's nearly time for bed.

And found 'The Great Big British Quiz' again, this time on Channel 199. I had a shot on the website and got through first time! Then got selected to be on air first time. I hadn't even looked at the puzzle - didn't expect to get through! Think I might even have given the same answer as last time, though can't remember. Oops.

I looked at it, and realised suddenly that it was the same puzzle I was talking about in this post here. So that's 9 days later, and they've still got the same puzzle going. 9 days, and they're on about 16 hours a day. Taking... I don't know... at the moment they've got about a caller a minute on, and that's just the ones that get through. At a pound a call - assuming 1 in 20 get on air (probably grossly overestimating, probably a lower ratio people get through to the studio), that's £20 a minute, £1200 an hour.

In the course of this puzzle - 144 hours, that's £172,800. The prize is £30,000.
Even assuming that they get half the cost of the phone call from the telcos, they are really raking it in.

( The puzzle )

I got my moment of fame on 'The Great Big British Quiz' (Sky Channel whatever), and got the answer spectacularly wrong. Damn their quizzes which could have any one of ten different answers depending how you read it. Thanks be for a route of entry which doesn't cost anything.

The phrase "add the numbers" doesn't actually say anything meaningful. Yes I know that's the point but still, for the chance of winning £29,000 I wasn't going to not look stupid.

I wonder how much they pay these presenters? Must be far too much for what they do.

I have an LG RH7500. It's one of these (link). Bought from Currys the other day. Seemes to do everything I expected - records on a 80Gb hard disk, records to every format of DVD known to, or cared about by me, fits in reasonably well with the sky box. The biggest issue is that now my automatic 4:3 / 16:9 switching that they Sky box normally does, doesn't work, and needs to be done manually.

I like it. The UI's a little slow, perhaps. Takes it a few seconds at times to respond to a keypress on the remote, but once used to it, it works very well. Timeslip is available and very useful. Timed recordings are neat - I wish there was some way to integrate it better with the Sky box but that's just wishful thinking :)

It was a tossup between this one, and a Lite-On which was about £40 cheaper but was ugly as sin. This isn't exactly pretty, but the other was grim.

I've just been reading lots of reviews on the products I hummed and hawwed over, and out of them all, this one has the most positive reviews around. Even a firmware update available. It won't affect my usage of it, probably, but if you're going to do these things you may as well do it properly, eh? :)

I really think this is clever. Extremely clever. First time I've seen it.
http://www.honda.co.uk/civic/ - click on "Watch Civic".

Honda's ad agency are astonishingly good at what they do :)

Enjoying The Ferocious Mister Fixit on BBC3. It's just a business guy who is going into ailing businesses and talking to them about how to solve their problems. It's simple stuff, but obviously the people running these businesses don't have a clue about how to manage.

Thursday evening, straight from work to Jane's.
Sleep and food, were the order of the evening. Jane feeling rough so not much excitement.
Friday - Oswestry in the morning for new shoes and a haircut with a slightly odd barber. Shrewsbury in the afternoon for lunch with Jane who finished work early, then shopping. Quite a nice time, not anywhere near as busy as I expected. Friday evening involved nothing much other than hugs and TV.
Saturday was rather mad, including Becky, David, Dawn, family, running round staying in, running round going out, going to the pub and drinking rather too much.
Today has been presents, breakfast, driving, work.

Work was crap. It started off promisingly with Helen being honorary mum and provided _loads_ of food and pressies, mini remote control cars, gliders, loads of cool stuff. As the day went on it became harder and harder to maintain the positivity. But hey, eh. *shrugs*

I upgraded my Sky package before going away, to the Sky World deal, but only because they were offering it at half price for 3 months. Thought it would be cool to have the movies and sports - if I planned it right I should have the sports for the Superbowl.

[Written at 4pm, forgot to post it...]
One Man and His Dog - hosted by Ben Fogle! I recognise her too, but can't remember her name.

I can't believe this is still on.

I did good today. I spent £15 on bets and won back £25 on top of my stake. Nice. My horse came in 2nd in the 3rd - should have gone each way instead of a win :) I haven't done the last store I was going to, might head out about half past and make the purchase. It needs to be returned too and I hate doing that. It almost screams out "hey, look at me - I'm assessing you"...
[End]

In the end I cancelled it. I just couldn't face doing it.
This evening has been present wrapping. The problem I came up to face was that after I'd wrapped everything, I forgot which parcel was which. Argle! Silly me. After much shaking and rattling, I managed to identify each present and it's intended recipient. Shame really because some people might enjoy the presents intended for the others ;)

Just for the record, I didn't watch ANY of Strictly Come Dancing or X-Factor. I would like to claim to have had better things to do but no - I just refused.

Looking forward to a reply from Paul @ Audible tomorrow.

Have decided to leave letter from North Wales Police until late in the month, 28 days is allowed to return the NIP and then after that they need to process it, and send me their response. Presumably I'll be offered a fine & points, and a further 14 or 28 days to pay up - by then I should find I'll have been paid for all this month's MSing work :) Shame really, as this means I'll have done a whole load of work for nothing. What a waste of my time & money, the police's time and money. Why the hell are they spending their time doing me for going 8mph over the limit rather than chasing real (& dangerous) criminals?