June 2006 Archives

I haven't really mentioned this here, but Elly & I are currently going through the process known quaintly as IVF in our efforts to become parents. It's a pretty bewildering procedure what with the need to inject her in the stomach/leg etc twice a day while trying to work out how the hell we pay for everything - would you believe it's around £4000 a shot ...

However, with a week to go before the egg transfer (this is a bloke's blog so no gory details) and after two scans it looks like everything is going OK and I can confidently say I've now seen parts of my missus that very people ever have - mainly kidneys and internal yucky bits thanks to a "medical probe" that I'm sure I've seen for sale in Anne Summers for £25.

Ah well, roll on next week when we actually go through the "procedure" and hopefully we join the ranks of the totally knackered, slightly gray, utterly harassed looking folks who refer to themselves as parents :)

It seems US judge Donald Thompson is in a spot of bother after he was caught red-handed using a penis pump behind his judgly desk during court proceedings (details of the sometimes hilarious proceedings here).

As a former journalist who spent a lot of time in court during worktime I can admit to fiddling with many things during boring cases - my PDA, filofax (remember those?), the odd book etc but never fiddling with myself, besides if I had done, I wouldn't have had a free hand to take notes !!

I love summer, mostly, apart from those filthy, creepy evil flying things which seem drawn to me whereever I am. The worst of the lot are those bloody Daddy Long Legs things which are obviously agents of Satan determined to turn my life into a living hell.

There's only one answer and that's the battery-operated fly swat we bought from Maplin last year. Oh yes, it's devilish in the extreme and produces a damn great spark when one of nature's devils flies straight into it - muwahahahaha (etc etc).

As daft as it sounds, bugs and things with tiny jaws are always a problem for me - wherever I go I seem to get the crap bitten out of me. The other year we went to visit friends in the US and I got bitten by chiggers which left their mark for SIX weeks. In Jamaica, an island which is sprayed to keep the bug population down, I went for a midnight stroll on the beach and when I got back to the hotel I had bites so bad it looked like the measles.

If only someone would invent the equivalent of an elephant gun for bugs - then I'd be a very happy man ...

Apparently, hip-hop "star" Jay-Z has banned Cristal champagne from his night clubs after a brand executive for the over-priced French piss water said the association with hip-hop generated "unwelcome attention".Being a free thinker, Jay-Z immediately branded the comment racist and told the world he would no longer drink the expensive fizzy wine, preferring instead to go with Krug or Dom Perignon.

Something just came to mind:

Just because you drink expensive fluids it doesn't mean you're successful. Prostitutes drink the fluids of some people who have loads of money and it doesn't make them media stars now does it?

Call me old-fashioned, but in an age when video games are blamed for all the ills in the world, am I the only one to wonder why people arrested for violent crime in the US NEVER tell the authorities "I did it because I heard it in a hip-hop song which was all about gunning people down, drug dealing and prostitution." Odd that isn't it...

So, today - France - again !!!!The England team managed a lacklustre 2-0 win over Trinidad - 80 minutes of mostly boredom and 10 minutes where the team actually looked like they could play - normally I'm not a footballing bloke but it's the World Cup so I thought I'd get in the spirit of things !

Otherwise, life has been pretty quiet. I'm still travelling over most of Europe for work - Germany last week for three days, France this week for two (currently in an hotel somewhere in Paris!)

Hopefully the next week will be a little quieter with some actual time at home - travelling is all well and good but I love my memory-foam mattress and would really like to see my wife in more than just a photo!!!!

As it's now 1.40am I suppose I should go to bed - another day of French commerce looms large ...

England, it seems, has gone World Cup mad and a knock-on effect is that people are flying the flag of St George - huzzah!In the US, France or Germany, flying the national flag is seem as a good thing, only in Britain is it seem as a problem...

The Deputy Chief Constable of North Wales Police, Clive Wolfedale said flying the flag could antagonise Welsh soccer fans and "incessant" flag-waving in Wales could lead to racism and violence.

The simple answer is footy fans, don't go to Wales, not because of the flag situation, but because it's a shithole and filled with tossers like Clive Wolfdale.

Yakki-dah my arse, Roooooooooney etc etc

There must be something in the air ... for the 100000000th time I've decided to ditch Windoze and move over to Linux. I've waited a couple of weeks for SuSE to release v10.1 of their usually excellent product, but sadly despite four seperate attempts on two different machines it wouldn't install, just bitched about files missing from the distribution.

Anyways .. a very good mate of mine has been raving on about Ubuntu for months so, as Dapper Drake (v6.06) was officially released yesterday I thought I'd give it a go, and my immediate reaction was WOW.

This is the first Linux distribution which installed cleanly, first-time and with NO PROBLEMS WHATSOEVER!!! Even my whizzy new MIMO wireless card installed invisibly and it only took five minutes of searching to work out how to get both monitors on my dual-head setup to play nicely. I am truly stunned.

So, it's goodbye SuSE and hello Ubuntu - next step is to get compiz working and impress the wife with some high quality alpha-blended desktop shenanigans ... (like THAT will ever happen !!!).

Btw, in case anyone noticed, I haven't posted for ages, this is due to a newjob that's had me in four European countries in less than three weeks - and I'm bound for Germany again next week ... all good fun though :)