A Snapshot of Smoking?

Hi All...

News just in.....Smoking is bad for you!
Shock horror! I've never heard that before!

Over here in the UK the powers that be (whoever they are) have decided to put pictures on all cigarette/cigar/tobacco packets, in order that we can see the damage for ourselves.
Every time we take out our packet of whatever, we will see these images, we are supposed to think "Oh crap, if I smoke this stuff I'll end up looking like this"

OK, I can see their point. Alan Johnson told the BBC
"We do think it will help the number of people, who want to give up to smoking - the vast majority of smokers want to give up - and this will give them an extra push,"

That's fine, I can cope with that, but what I want is equality!
I want to see pictures of pissed people on bottles of beer/wine/spirits. Why not? It's along a similar vein?

If you drink your liver will look like this...If you drink you will look like this....If you drink tizer, your urine will look like this...

I think this is fair. What about other things, like fast food? If we're gonna go putting pictures of the results of over-indulgence on products, why not pictures of fat bastards on Macdonalds wrappers? Why not pictures of Alice Cooper or the band KISS or even Barbara Cartland on make-up products?

Personally, I don't smoke that much, outside, no kids around, and I have accepted that it's not the healthiest thing in the world, and I'm not proud of it. It's just something I do. I don't want to see autopsy pictures while I'm doing it.

Thanks for reading!

Biscuit? Yeah, why not?

Hi all,

I am not fat. I am one of these annoying gits who can eat just about any amount of anything greasy and stay thin. My partner says this is particularly annoying, as she has to "watch what she eats"

What she doesn't know is that I also have to watch what I eat...and to be honest, seeing the eighth big mac enter my body is not necessarily a pleasant thing to see.
And this brings me neatly on to biscuits...

I am to biscuit barrels, as Harold Shipman was to old peoples homes. I eat a *large* amount of biscuits. It's not their fault that I enjoy their sugary goodness. I have often found myself munching my way through 2 packets of bourbons, or their albino cousin the custard cream.
I do not mourn for them, that would be silly. But I am trying to rid the world of biscuits, as a one man army. I am attempting biscuit-icide on my own.

If any of you have been down to a supermarket and there are no biscuits, you know who to blame. I once went off them for a week and ASDA had to drop their profit declaration to their share holders.

I'm off now to Tesco's where they pride themselves on their biscuit selection boxes.

Thanks for reading!

Too bored being bored?

Hi all,

How insane is this for a situation? I can be sat down on a comfy sofa, without the TV on, without a book or music, or a computer, or any form of "entertainment" whatsoever and not be...bored.

I will sit there, just being...well just being. And it's great. One of life's little luxuries.
But if someone gives me a mind-numbing task I have this absolute overwhelming feeling of boredom. This is odd. I have been given something to do and I am bored, even though I have less boring times sitting doing absolutely nothing but breathing.

I am not sure if this is just me or not. Maybe the problem is that the task itself is seemingly endless. It is not a case of boredom as such but just that it is a lack of motivation. Maybe I cannot be motivated to reach the end of this seemingly endless task, and I am therefore bored with it. When I am sat, just existing, in the nice "Trev-shaped" dent in my sofa I know that it won't be for long so I just make the most of it.

So my solution to this is to do my "boring" tasks in bite size lumps in between "day-dreams". Unfortunately my job doesn't allow this, so I have come up with an interesting way to accomplish both. I day-dream all the time, while I do my task, and I am very happy with the situation. Although occasionally it is unnerving seeing valkyries riding dragons across my monitor, while I am trying to enter SAN information from a site...again.

Please feel free to try my solution yourself at work, or home or where-ever. Anywhere you do a boring job, try to day dream while you do it, you'll find the day passes quicker.

Please don't do this when you are driving. An excuse of "Sorry officer, I didn't see the old bloke walking across the road because a giant hamster was barbecuing a chicken that looked like David Beckham was blocking my view" will probably not work.

Thanks for reading!

BANKERS!!!!

Hi, all!

World banking this time. What a palaver! I just want to put money in, and then when I get to a hole in the wall at 3am I want to be able to get out a tenner for a god awful kebab and some soggy chips covered in grease.

Now the whole point about a bank is that loads of people put money in, as long as you all promise not to take all your money out at the same time. When this happens its called a "run". The bank cannot physically hold all that cash, most of it doesn't actually exist, and some of it has gone on wages for the staff and investments to pay the bonuses at Christmas.

What happens then? Well stock prices in the bank start falling, more people withdraw their money, which the bank has to honour, and the stocks fall faster. Two things happen then, one the bank (and its debt) is bought by a bigger bank, or the bank closes its doors for good.
See Northern Rock, this was bought by the UK Government, with our money. We bought the bank with our own money, so we could have our own money back.

This time it was different, this time it was loans. You take a loan out for say 10000 at 10% the bank gives it to you. The bank then says that it has 11000, because that is the amount that you'd pay back. so it can now loan 11000 to someone else.
This can happen forever. But! What if interest rates or cost of living goes up (see Bank of England and oil pricing in the UK) People can no longer afford to pay back the loans, the Banks no longer have the cash, and you get freefall.

The worrying thing is, in order to get out of this hole where we have 2 or 3 major banks crashing out, the UK Government suspended competition law, so the other bigger banks could buy the smaller ones out, to stop this problem. Who caused the issue in the first place? The banks!

I am no expert (as you can see), and this is only very lightly described as I can't be fagged to find sources and whatnot, but we all need to keep an eye on which bank is buying what so we know who's in charge.

Thanks for reading!

Pandora, next generation of handheld?

Hi, quick one...
I have been following this for quite a while now, its a handheld games console called the Pandora.

Find it here http://openpandora.org/
Absolutley amazing specs, completely open source and relatively cheap for such a powerful machine. I suggest hitting http://www.youtube.com/ for videos of what this thing can do.

Pre-ordering starts 30th Sept, with shipping dates in November. There are only 3000 units in the first batch so get going!

In UK money it's near as makes no difference £200, so if you are thinking about getting an EEEpc or an AA1 or whatever, please check this thing out first. I'd even suggest checking it out before considering a low-end, entry level, laptop.

For the geeks amoung us, there is also a "motherboard" type effort that has the same chipset and what-not called the BeagleBoard (go here... http://beagleboard.org/). Cost is $150. So that's about £85 now I guess. I'm not going to check. But if you can imagine, one of these beagleboards, an 8.5" lcd screen, a cheap small usb keyboard, small mouse and a USB dongle and wireless dongle, you can make your own. It'll come to about the same. But you can really geek out and say you built your own, and you'll get that warm fuzzy feeling inside.

Thanks for reading!

First Post, F1, and why suits shouldn't make decisions.

First of all, hello and welcome to my blog. If you are reading this then it means that not only do you have a grasp of English, but you also have far too much time on your hands.

In my early days, I used to watch F1 with a sense of awe, I remember the days when Michael Schumacher drove a Benneton, and how excited I was when he managed to win against the odds. But now fast forward to today...

The race last week, Hamilton cut the chicane, allowed Raikkonen through then retook him later on. I have been reading in messageboards, fan forums and all sorts, about the decision to penalise Hamilton with a 25 second penalty after the race was completed.
25 seconds! The decision for the time was the length of time it would take someone to do a drive through penalty, that being the normal way of resolving these things while on the track.
Maclaren asked the race director (Charlie Whiting) if Hamilton had done enough after cutting the corner, allowing Raikkonen through, and Charlie said in his opinion he had. The RACE DIRECTOR said that he had. But apparently Charlie knows nothing.

The race progressed Raikonnen crashed out anyway, and Hamilton went through to win. Whoopee I thought. Until the next day when I heard news that some bunch of idiots had penalised him for the manouver. Why couldn't they have said this at the time? The problem could have been fixed straight away! "Sorry Maclaren, Hamilton needs to let him through again or get a drive through"

But they decided to hold the decision till after the race, the people who made the decision were not even present at the race, and apparently have no grasp for the mentality behind the drivers.

I admit my first reaction to the 'incident' was to say "Give him room Hamilton!" so in my mind he did deserve a penalty. But for Maclaren to not be able to check this at the time beggers belief. Here is my solution, get the suits down at the track, let them make a decision straight away, and once the winner crosses the line, that's it. Race over.
If the people making the decisions are not at the track then quite frankly any decision made by them after the race is bunk.

Thank you for reading!