I'm a real blogger now

Just had to delete my first comment spam, so I think that qualifies as having arrived!

Woo. Yay!

Also in large amounts of pain. Starter motor on my car is faulty. I have the "fix it" kit, to er, fix it. Land rover have made it so it's easier to remove the engine than to remove the starter motor. So ended up taking the motor apart while it's still fitted to the car, which means lots of stretching and jamming your hands in small places where you can't see or really reach that well. But at least it now starts. Double woo!

Additional

After 4 hours & 52 minutes I have been knocked out in 27th place.

This means:
a) $33 scoop ticket won
b) I'm bloody knackered as it's daft am.
c) Not doing that again.

Gambling bad kids!

Tubetastic Thursday: You can come if you want to

Greetings pop pickers!

We interrupt this broadcast to bring you the following (almost) exciting information:

It's 2:28 am... 1843 players entered the blogger poker tournament that started, oh, 3 1/2 hours a-bloody-go.

And I'm still playing...
And just like the cute children on daytime tv, I'm now guaranteed a prize. Currently 38 out of 109 left so I've at least won a $11 scoop entry whatever that is.

Hang on a minute... $11, that's about 5 quid. For 3 1/2 hours? Does not compute. Could be worth it if I win the bloody thing, but somehow I doubt it.

Back to our regular programming.

I bring to you:
The carousels - you can come if you want to.


Now no doubt someone is screaming argh no! not more doo wop, make it stop!

But this is of the excellent. Excellent I tell you. I can listen to this a bajillion times, and every time is electricity running down my spine.

Ok, some will say she screams like she's killing cats, but they are also full of the wrong.

There are a few more sides from the carousels out there, and while they're fairly ok, this is definitely their triumph.

The dead man's hand holds Aces and Eights

Ok, so Wild Bill Hickok was playing 5 card draw when killed with that hand.

I however, am a) still alive and b) was playing pot limit omaha.

I also lost out in the below pimped blogger poker tournament. Top 153 get the prizes, and I came 203 out of 1600 entrants. Not too shoddy, given I'm not a huge omaha fan. And there's still tournaments to play the rest of the week for no cost.

So as the lottery used to say before they got banned for false advertising "It could be you".

Schemes and dreams

Hard as it may be to believe, I went to University and survived to get a (poor) degree. This is all ancient history (1996) and is filed on my flickr as "I had a life too once".

I forgot about it, until last week. Found one of the blokes on facebook. Oh, you're successful and have wife, child, house on the hill. I'm not... That was fun. Then another ex Beng bloke contacts me.. wife, 2 x child, house on hill, more success.

(I should perhaps at this point make clear I wish no ill, and am not bothered by their success... I assume they've earned it and thus deserve it. I haven't, and don't.)

At points in the past various peeps have said "we should have a reunion", but nothing has come of it. However, this time I think it could work, and nobody will have to get nailed to anything in pursuit of it. After all, everybody is starting to put their lives on t'interweb.

Without doing much searching emails are exchanged between six of us. Discounting foreign students, those known to have left the country since, those who didn't socialise during the course (I'm thinking of you Gailasuarus), this gives seven more potentially to find. One more can probably be discounted ('cos she's a lady and we're smelly blokes), and a further one (black ball from everyone so far). So that's five to find.

So on Saturday I set off to meet a small group of localish plotters. One wasn't coming out to play, so it was Zulf and Dara and moi. Despite my natural apprehension, we had a really nice time and came up with some perhaps viable strategies for finding the missing people. I'd like to say we haven't changed in what? 14 years, but it would be a lie. I've got fat and mental. Zulf's stopped drinking and Dara appears to be a straight and honest geezer. God have we gone downhill.

There is one slight snag, should we pull it off. What do you do to celebrate this reunion?

Now you could say go to the pub.. but people are older, with house on the hill etc, and it's not much of a draw to get people to come many miles.

Possible thoughts so far include:

Meal out somewhere.... followed by pub.
Blokey things... paintball, go karts etc. followed by pub.
Fly to somewhere cheap and cultural. Ignore the culture and go to the pub.

Any ideas from the blogosphere are most welcome?

Plz to note that we be blokes. Smelly older blokes. You don't get many lady engineers, so it has to be something where when we get there they don't think we're a stag party and throw us out. Attempting to appear sophisticated is also out (we're engineers).

Tubetastic Thursday: Russian roulette

Before I get to the usual Thursday guff, I must say woo! yay! to Facebook.

Yes, I'm still sceptical to it's uses (eg tried the poker, and you can buy fake chips that have no value with real money? How whack is that!), but on the other hand have caught up with a few peeps I've not seen in years. We even be thinking of having a class of '96 meet up. Well, the survivors who are local anyways.

A chance to find out who's gone bald, got kids, and to prove that none of us can dance still... Just as long as Phil is still frying chickens at Alton towers so I'm not totally last in the life success stakes.....

Tubetastic thursday.
I bring to you: Rihanna - russian roulette.


Ok, so I swore back in the day I'd never forgive her for the bloody umbrella song where it rained in real life for a billion days. As soon is it finally dropped off radio play out came the sun. But this be a catchy sort of tune. In fact at times it verges on earworm.

Other factettes n observations:

Uk radio play of this song cuts the final gunshot. Why, I don't know.

You have a 1 in 6 chance of taking a bullet in 'Nam if you try this at home kids. Which works out at about 50:50 if you have four goes and give the gun a spin each time. Plz to not check the statistics of this empirically.

Derrin Brown did a russian roulette based tv stunt thing. Yes, I was hoping it would go a soupcon wrong. I don't want him dead, but would settle for maimed enough that he no longer gets on tv. Which is rather odd as I don't watch tv anyways.

Rihanna is rather good at doing the wearing minimalistic clothing thing.

The following public service announcement

is brought to you in part by Slim Shady our evil overlords.

Announcement begins:

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker! Bloggers can register for to play for free in the WBCOOP, if you don’t have a PokerStars account you can get your Poker Download here.

Registration code: 904446

Announcement ends...
There, I've admitted I'm a bad gambler. No doubt I'll be punished for it one day.

Tubetastic Thursday: Weekend!

They say when God closes a door he opens a window. I haven't a clue what use that actually is, unless you're a cat and like jumping thru windows?

I'm going to have a moan. I shall do it now:
My ISP have force migrated my email to google. They pimp it as being, no lie "New and shiny". That's the exact words used.

It is a load of shash. "You don't have to do anything, except wait for the shiny". it says. Oh yeah?

So.... now you can't send hardly any mail attachments. Ah.. that's useful.
And
You can only download mail once. So check mail on your phone, and then you can't get it on your pooter as well. Not like people use multiple devices these days is it? And it's Shiny! Woo! Arse!

Moan ends.

****************

I am now going to attempt an experiment. See if I can alienate approximately half the population, and attract the rest.

I bring to you:
Scooter - Weekend!



Just in case you haven't worked out the attraction it is thus: Bossoms.

There are actually several versions of this video, with varying levels of Bossoms. I have one on my pooter that is really quite overflowing, so they have also added snow to make it more arty. Snow = art, not porn if you didn't know.

Pointless additional fact for those not interested in Bossoms:
"Respect to the men in the ice cream van" refers of course to the KLF.

Fixed.. and broken

Yesterday, after only a five week wait I finally had my nanocom delivered. This be a magic box to remove the three amigos from my landrover.

Slight snag... it no work until you register it with the nice people in Italy. Who ignore your registration attempts as they're no doubt doing more exciting things like spend my money.

But today I finally got it registered, and blam! Amigos be gone. So I hope you enjoyed the snow, as now I have a working 4x4 there won't be any more.

Of course, as I've fixed something that's wrong, something else in my life must be broken. It's the turn of email. The muppets at virgin have "migrated" to shiny new google powered email. That's dead wonderful*.

Shame it turns out you only get one chance to read your mail, so if you read it on your phone that's the only copy, despite having "leave messages on server" turned on. Getting nowhere fast with support who appear to be going down the path that the solution is to read on the phone, then forward it back to yourself?

And relax.

*complete and utter shash.

99.... 100

This be post 100. Rather surprising considering I wasn't expecting to get to 10.

Sadly I've been thinking for about a week now, must have something exciting for post 100.. what's happening today? Oh. snow. cold. wet. bored.

Nothing has changed , so methinks post 100 is "still alive, plz to standby".

To prove sanity, I give you:
James last - This is my song



What do you mean insanity more like? My collection of singing potatoes tell me I'm totally sane.

New year. Old Idiot.

Or idiot girl fails to learn.

A test:
You have a (one) crusty bread roll, and you want to cut it in half. Do you

a) place on a bread board, and keeping your fingers out of the way of the knife carefully cut thru it?
or
b) Hold it in your right hand. Take your sharpest knife and hack at it brutally with your left hand?

Need a clue? Idiot Girl selected option b).

This may be why we got a phone call saying there is a cut of unknown depth on my finger that is redecorating my kitchen in a fetching shade of red and please fetch a bandage ~thud~

(~thud~ be where she passes out on the floor).
We arrive to find said thudee being ignored by the dog, so so much for all that lassie comes to the rescue shash.

Sadly no photos as I got the evil eye when I got my phone out, despite pretending it was just in case I had to call 999, and the thought of getting a quick pic to blog about didn't even begin to Cross my mind, honest. ~cough~

Say goodbye to 2009

and hello to 2010.

Yes, the year number has changed, but the quality crap blogging you've come to expect is still the same.

I've just been stood outside at minus 2 degrees, while detritus from other people's fireworks falls around me. That would have made a good new year, clonk, ow!

I wish you all the best of luck for 2010 (the year we make contact?)

I will not be making any resolutions, wishes, predictions as I don't do that sort of thing any more due to being completely shit at it.