April 4 - Easter Sunday, Deb Parents, New PC doesn’t Work, Coffee!!!, Work, Doctor Who,Eugene Terreblanche, Baja Earthquake, Korean Couple, Gaming Additiction, X-Box, Ash's Bad Tummy, Windows Phone 7and iPad Again!

Home this A.M. in time to see the kids search the garden for the eggs left by the Easter Bunny (there’s something seriously amiss in Deb’s head) in addition to the ones it left in the house (definitely seriously amiss). No photos, unfortunately, as I was in the process of updating the Nokia OVI Store client just as they decided to descent the stairs. After they’d done their locus impressions they returned inside to stuff their faces full of chocolate, I wondered why it was that neither of them wanted breakfast?
Deb, Nat and Han were off to see Deb’s parents in Redditch today whilst I was going to try to get some sleep in bed. My knee, in particular, is acutely painful when I lie down and because of this, when I’m off work, I’ve been trying to get to sleep perched semi-upright on the settee rather than in bed.
I stayed up until about 11:45 until my eyelids were drooping and I could hardly stay awake; then armed with a very hot hot-water bottle I went to bed. I had mixed success; I certainly kept dropping off, evidenced by the fact that I never heard a podcast to its end, but kept waking up whenever I turned over. At one point exhaustion must have got the better of me because I slept and had the weirdest of dreams; can’t remember the details other than it involve going to a very mad party with people I haven’t seen in years.
Deb and the kids returned at some point late in the afternoon, this semi woke me from the aforementioned dream (which I then couldn’t get back into) but I don’t know exactly when. Nat came into the bedroom around 5:45 and told me it was time to get up. Had 3 BLT bagels for tea, they’d eaten at Alf and Doreens earlier, watched Click (BBC News channel) which I’d taped earlier and then tried to set up Deb’s Dad’s “old” PC which he’d given to us.
Not sure what was going on with the PC, set everything up and windows XP loaded but each time it did immediately thereafter the monitor announced that it was going to sleep. Struggled with the problem, applying all my sophisticated PC knowhow,

 until about 8:30 then dashed upstairs to get washed and dressed for work.
Deb made my flask of coffee but failed to wait for the froth to dissipated so when I opened it at work it was only ¾ full!!!!!

Got to work for 8:00, we had a team brief 9:30 - 10:30 and I took over on EA at 10:31. Quite night, lots of help from Ash during first slightly manic hour but after that only had a few emergency jobs to issue.
I'm presently typing this so I suppose I should change the tense but as I do this already, frequently and unintentionally I think I'll leave well alone unless that is, once more, I've already done so.

Well, I’ve still got a little over five hundred words to write if I want to hit the thousand tonight so what to write, what indeed? Lets have a look at what’s in the news, other than the iPad that is (yah… you got another mention Apple baby!).

Well first the good news, the new series of Doctor Who has got off to a flying start with an average viewing figure of 8 million which represents a 36.9% audience share. The new series looks as if it’s going to be a stonker if the preview at the end of episode one is to believed! His new assistant is a stunner, even if she is another ginger chum, and the new Tardis (Dildo shaped going up and downy bit and all – look closely, right at the end of the episode) is fantastic also.


And for even more good news:

Well, well, well, it couldn’t happen to a nicer neo-fascist racist; white supremacist Eugene Terreblanche, god bless his little cotton socks, was murdered today by two of his black workers in a dispute over wages. An advocate of white supremacy since 1973 and, himself, a former failed murder (having been convicted of attempting to murder a black farm worker in 2001) there seems to be a delicious irony to the way in which his eventual demise came about. If he's just kept talking then evenually he might have "Boered" them to death...Boom Boom!! Of course, on the downside, there is the chance that this incident could inflame racial tension in South Africa, a tension that already simmers beneath the surface of S.A. society, once more and lead to further and escalating violence. It wouldn’t take too much to put S.A. on a course toward eventual Zimbabwefication, after all, President Jacob Zuma is not a man known for his good judgement and he could easily turn out to be another Robert Mugabe, albeit a not so clever one! Apparently 3000 white farmers have been murdered since the end of apartheid in 1994. This is definitely one too watch; especially with the Football World Cup being held there this summer!

In other news, it’s just come over the headline printer on the BBC website, that there’s been a 7.2 magnitude earthquake on the Mexican peninsula of Baja California, this morning, which has killed at least one person and that has caused tremors which were felt as far away as Nevada. I would imagine, this coming morning, that there will be a lot of Californians’ holding their collective breaths! Scientist have been saying for awhile that the San Andreas Fault is overdue for a big seismic shift and this quake could be the harbinger of that very shift; on the other hand, I suppose, it’s equally likely that this could be just what was needed to relieve the tension…who knows? There’s one thing, if the BIG one does happen, it’ll put the Californian deficit into perspective and the rest of us into what would probably be the biggest recession the World has ever known. In the  words of the immoral Bard (Chubby Brown) " we'd be up Shititty Creek without a Frickitty Paddle"*. People forget that the World’s Fifth Biggest Economy in built on top of one of the World’s most unstable fault lines. It’s a disaster waiting to happen is what it is I tells you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Deb says I'm over reacting to be concerned that Nat is spending so much time either on his X-Box or PC gaming; I think it's worth considering the following story before concurring with her conclusion - A South Korean couple have gone on trial charged with allowing their baby daughter to starve to death while they played an online computer game. My concern is that video games are addictive; only a year or so ago a young man in Korea died after indulging in a virtually non-stop 50+ hour gaming binge. If given the opportunity Nat would go online the moment he woke and stay on line until he went to bed, if he went to bed! One of the reasons I don't try the X-Box myself is that I could easily see myself doing the same thing. It's many the time that I've sat down at the PC only to get up a few minutes later to discover that hours have passed; you lose, absolutely, any sense that time is passing!


Poor old Ash is suffering dreadfully tonight from a bad stomach, the poor guy's just gone out for a walk to see if that will relieve the discomfort... fingers crossed. He's heading home early at 6:15 which means I'll finish up his work alongside my own which is no great problem. It'll fill the remaining time before the end of the shift.


News just in, Microsoft Rebrands Windows Phone 7 Series, thank the lord for that, as a name it was too much of a mouthful for even the late legendry Linda Lovelace to swallow; hence forth Windows Phone 7 Series will simply be known as Windows Phone &, actually it’ll be known as Windows Phone 7, Windows Phone & was a typo. All this talk reminds me, apparently Apple have launched something called the "iPad"? How quickly we forget!


* So far as I'm aware Roy "Chubby" Brown has never said any such thing. I just made it up cos I felt like it.
What a pain another sixteen words and I would have made it to thirteen hundred in total.
Whoops, it appears that I just did!