Posts from 2008

The gift that simply keeps on giving.

• '914 scam' - if you don't know the correct name, you may already be doomed to failure.
• 'reasons for isolation' - spending too much time on the Internet searching for 'reasons for isolation'.
• "craig gordon" "ian curtis" - odd combination of a dead pop star and a living Sunderland goalkeeper.
• 'my wife's shapely legs' - yeah right. Take those stockings off. Now.
• "("current vacancy" or vacancies or opportunity or careers or "working with" or "working for") and ("oracle dba" or oracle dba )and london" - with such a superlative grasp of search term syntax and semantics, you would simply be wasted as an Oracle DBA.
• 'dead bodies in the floor boards' - stop it. You are worrying me with the use of 'in' as opposed to 'under'.
• 'how to become a virgin again' - Please sit down. Have a drink. I have some bad news for you.
• 'ian curtis hanged ice block' - Look I've already told you twice This is an urban myth.
• 'make friends under 14 to 16' - try Facebook or Beebo. Just don't get caught.
• 'oracle killed siebel' - Mr. Ellison with the lead piping in the library.
• 'selling strategy of siebel system anatomy' - yet another reason I don't work in sales.
• 'the most important decision of my entire life' - undoubtedly left disappointed at my lack of insight.
• 'urinal pulled his zipper down' - yet another reason I always favour a private cubicle.
• 'why durex gossamer withdrawn' - apparently on the advice of the Pope.

Last night, I flew home to London from Hamburg, near Germany. The flight was punctual and uneventful enough apart from the fact I was sitting next to a blind man.

When the seat belts sign extinguished, he got his laptop out, booted up and started typing into a completely black screen. So, I assumed he must be blind and using a braille keyboard.

However, this gentleman wasn't blind. He had been reading 'High Life' while we taxied onto the runway. Oh and he also had a complimentary copy of the Financial Times.

There was only one conclusion - this was a security measure to stop inquisitive neighbours peeping at his screen and reading confidential documents and email correspondence.

This could only mean one thing - the gentleman worked for a Government agency, probably MI6 or was the CEO of a FTSE100 company.

Although it killed my last three cats, two hamsters and seventeen tropical fish, curiosity got the better of me and I painstakingly reverse engineered all of my neighbour's typing by analysing his actual keystrokes in real-time.

Here is the exclusive transcript...

To: Sebastian Browning (VP marketing) Cc: UK Marketing Subject: logistics for Partner Golf day

Due to the current 'difficult and challenging times', the Partner Golf day at The Old Course, St Andrews has been cancelled. However, as I know a lot of you had customers booked and after my pledge to do 'anything it takes', I am delighted to tell you an alternative, lower cost venue has been found.

We will now meet at Solihull municipal Crazy Golf course at 2pm on Friday 28 November. Looking forward to meeting you and your customers. Alan will send handicaps and pairings out next week.

There now followed a 5 minute lull - no typing - just a frenzy of trackerball activity punctuated by various muttered expletives. The most likely cause was the poor individual trying to resize a picture within a Microsoft Word document. Then back to the 782 messages lying in 'Inbox'.

To: Bernard Barnstormworth (Director Fins) Subject: status on Megabank opportunity

Megabank is dead. The client was expecting to be hosted at The Emirates to see Arsenal versus Manchester United followed by dinner at The Ivy. What they got was a mini-bus to Leyton Orient against Hartlepool and some cockles and mussels at half-time. The CEO just called me to say the deal is off.

Another pause for thought to consume a cheese sandwich and a glass of water.

To: Hannah Brown (IT security) Subject: privacy and security

Hannah - As per your recent memo, my two hard disks are now fully encrypted and I have affixed the privacy screen overlay to my laptop. I must say it is absolutely fantastic to be able to work without idiots gawping at my screen, trying to read my email and watching me visit those dodgy Web sites.

PS. Please can you order me a new 4GB USB memory stick ? I can't find it anywhere. Must have lost it in Hamburg.

For reasons that are too long and tedious to recount here, I have had cause to rebuild my Lenovo T61 laptop many times over the last month, using a bewildering range of operating systems, Linux distributions, live CDs and dual boot configurations.

During this time, gparted and an external USB 500GB disk drive have become very close and reliable friends. In fact, I have only lost data once and, inevitably, that was due to my own stupidity.

Here are the invaluable Firefox plugins that I always install first:

• DownloadThemAll! - download manager featuring multi-threaded, lightning fast, resumable downloads.
• is.gd - URL shortener.
• Diigo - Great bookmarking service.
• Google Notebook - Useful for random thoughts, reminders, lists of people who have crossed you, transient bookmarks and, well, notes.
• Firebug - HTML and CSS diagnostics

Rejoice ! After 18 months, Rupert and Richard have ended their standoff and the Sky channels will be returning to Virgin Media.

Now, I wonder if some kind soul could fill me in on the last 18 months of 'Lost'.

Occasionally, I commute into London on South West Trains. I normally listen to music or podcasts during the half hour commute into Waterloo.

Whenever I buy a ticket at the station, I always pause the music and remove my earphones. This is for two reasons:

1. I need to be able to communicate with the person to purchase my ticket.
2. People behind me in the queue may not want to hear 'Serve the Servants' by Nirvana.

Last Monday morning, I joined a short queue to buy my Travelcard and removed my earphones as usual.

The lady immediately in front of me was talking on a mobile phone and moved forward to the ticket booth. Much to my surprise, she continued her obviously unimportant conversation with a friend while conducting the entire transaction.

'Yeah so then we went on to the Slug - weekly Travelcard, zones 1-5 - No, no, he wasn't there - he was drinking in Putney with his mates...'

'£41.40 please.'

'...but we met them later - Sorry - what did you say - someone just interrupted me - Anyway, what about tonight ?

'Please can you enter your PIN ?'

'Sorry - she just interrupted me again - What ? - there you go - Yeah - well I'll get back about half-six - then we can go for a drink and then get - sorry what - oh my ticket.'

I then approached the ticket desk, waited for the young lady to move out of earshot and said:

'Honestly, I can't believe what she just did. I think that is incredibly rude and disrespectful.'

The lady smiled ruefully: 'Yes. We used to have a polite notice but most people simply ignored it.'

So, if and when Jonathan Beckett secures the domain name 'ignorati.com', I'll be an avid reader.

Surrey Traffic Police should run a recruitment campaign with the tagline

Join Surrey Traffic Police and see the world.

This would appeal to young men who fancy the glamour and travel traditionally associated with the Armed Forces but are slightly wary of losing their lives in Iraq or Afghanistan.

In August, I hired a car mid-way through my holiday in Venice to drive to the foot of the Dolomite mountains and also took the opportunity to visit Lake Garda.

So that explains why, on the hot, sunny, blissfully lazy afternoon of Sunday 10th August, I was driving slowly through the lovely small Italian town of Spresiano.

To save money and increase fuel economy, the Brightside family were crammed in to a rather underpowered Fiat Panda as we explored churches and Italian villages using the delightfully, quiet country roads.

Imagine my surprise, as I left the sleepy town heading for Treviso, I was flagged over by two Carabinieri (not Italian police - Carabinieri) who were obviously not merely equipped with radar guns but real guns.

The official approached my window and made a polite request in rapid-fire Italian. I looked blank and replied 'Sorry - Inglese - do you want to see my driving licence and documents ?' He looked perplexed and a little disappointed: 'Oh so you are English, yes ?. What are you doing here ?'

'We're on holiday and hired a car to come to see your beautiful mountains and Lake Garda'. I pointed at my family who were listening to iPods, reviewing sunburn and consulting the map studiously in an effort to reinforce my argument.

I got out of the car and opened the boot to locate the hire car documents and dig out my driving licence. A pile of wet towels, a rucksack, some beach shells and a large bottle of Fanta Orange fell out. The military official looked dismissively at me.

'So - why are you having a pink driving licence ?'

A multitude of witty answers immediately sprang to mind but I contented myself with 'Well - that's what the English Government gave me.'

His colleague, irritated and curious about the delay on a routine traffic stop, wandered over and the mood lightened. 'Oh you are coming from London. I have been to London in 2005 - do you know Li-ches-ter Square ?' followed by 'I have always wanted to visit Ed-een-burro'.

Finally, their checks complete, I was free to continue my journey. I summoned up the courage and whispered: 'Excuse me but was I travelling too fast ?'.

The two Carabinieri looked at each other and said 'Oh no - no problem - it is just a routine stop. This is normal in Italia.'

And then, in a scene reminiscent of the Great Escape where Gordon Jackson has his papers checked by the Gestapo and the German officer quietly says 'Good Luck' as he goes to board the bus to which Jackson replies 'Thanks', the Italian policeman muttered 'See you in London'.

This closing comment perplexed me and I assumed I had misheard the Italian accent. That was until today when I received another letter from my friends at Surrey Traffic Police. The letter formally notified me that, on 23 October 2008, 3 further points have now been cleared from my driving licence (leaving an outstanding total of just 3).

Chillingly, the official letter closed with:

PS. Hope you all enjoyed your holiday in Venice

Although I will always associate Paul Ince with the phrase big time Charlie, I do think the Blackburn manager talks a lot of sense.

In particular, I think he was correct in his assessment of Celtic's display at Old Trafford on Wednesday night in the Champions League. Apart from a few early promising moments, I think the gulf between the two sides was embarrassing.

In fact, when I first tuned in to watch the game, initially I thought I had got the dates mixed up and I was watching United playing Norwich City in the Carling Cup.

18 months ago, I reviewed the online editions of the leading UK newspapers and the various syndication options.

At that time, all the newspapers only offered partial text feeds which, in my opinion, is understandable but unsatisfactory.

So I was pleasantly surprised to read in ReadWriteWeb that The Guardian has broken ranks and now offers full text RSS feeds. It will be interesting to see whether this increases subscribers for The Guardian and whether the competition will be persuaded to follow suit.

During a ritual purge of Inbox, I just discovered the following email

Years ago, in a different life. I worked as an Oracle DBA for a dot com in deepest Clapham.

For reasons that now escape me, the CEO managed to get a discounted rate so we could all lie in complete darkness in a flotation chamber listening to whale music with joss sticks burning.

Performance was pretty bad and the backups never got done but we were all completely relaxed about it.

From the desk of Mr. Ashley. Good day. Private message to you.

I know you dont mind me contacting you by this means since we have not met before this time. My name is Lord King Glorious Michael Haway the Lads' Ashley.

Recently, my Uncle's (Sir Robert Robson of Gateshead) will was read and to our joy and relief, he has kept the sum of $8 milion USD in trust for the upkeep of the beloved Newcastle Footballing Club.

With divine intervention, we have already secured the assistance of the Cockney Mafia and I humbly seek your financial aid to restore Newcastle Barcodes FC to their rightful place (in the Championship).

However, you must act fast to take advantage of this opportunity. In the last week, we have already hired a leading, proven, experienced, respected manager to lead the team. His name is Joseph ('Kinnell') Kinnear and he has already made great strides in making friends with the local news media in order to obtain additional funding.

Newcastle Footballing Club already has some world class international footballing stars who are household names (in Geordie households) - England centre-forward Saint Michael Owen of Chester, Clown Prince Danny Guthrie and undoubtedly you will have a poster of your countryman, Shola Amoeba, on your bedroom wall.

Newcastle Racing Club Santander are a massive football club - in fact, every single English person who lives in Newcastle will tell you that Nudecastle are a sleeping giant. Newcastle play in a superb stadium - St Jimmy Five Bellies Park - which has an unbelievable capacity of 55,000 people. Once, back in 1996, when we were chasing the Premiership title, under the majestic leadership of the Messiah King Kevin of Scunthorpe, we even managed to fill it for the visit of Manchester United.

Please wire $24.6 million dollars immediately into account 7649820 - sort code 23-65-91 and we will proceed with Phase 2. This will require the appointment of a fifth interim manager - the self-appointed Royal Holiness Alan Shearer of Durham - to lift the club from the relegation places and a subsequent under the counter payment to hire the chosen one - a man appointed by God and equipped to save Newcastle - his name is the Special One and will be joining us in June 2009 once the Cockney Mafia has completed dealings with their Italian counterparts.

This will be a joint venture arrangement that will demand the utmost trust and sincerity which you will benefit immensely from this project, as I will rely on you for it's success. Please do indicate your willingness to assist me through my email 'nonalcoholicpintinsixseconds@hotmail.com'

Thanks once again for your kindness may God guide and reward you in all your endeavours as you make me realise my last dreams and wishes.

May you be blessed - Michael J. Ashley.